Old skinny fingers stirred the dark water of the mossy pool. Old eyes peered into the dancing, sparkling ripples at a scene from the Christians' Hell: towers of iron loomed above a dead sea, their tops blazing with oily, stinking light. Strung like unseemly garlands from one shadowy edifice to another, fading only with distance, were harsh, unblinking stars.
Black smoke billowed like a greasy cremation, staining the slate-gray sky. No sun cast shadows upon the lifeless land.
"The Black Time comes," the hag intoned, and then: "From least beginnings forward creeps the dark, and reaches backward from the world's demise; the Wheel of Time is broken—naught forfends." She spat upon the water, and the ugly vision faded. Again, the sacred pool was clear and cold, fresh from the depths of the earth.
Stark hills protected the moist, green sanctuary on three sides, so the drying winds slipped by overhead. Such places were rare in Provence, where tiny-leaved scrub oaks, gnarled olives, and coastal pines prevailed. They were magical places, providing what the broader land did not: sweet water and shady refuge.
The goddess Ma arose gracefully, for all her great age, and brushed dry beech leaves from her patched homespun skirt. She paced impatiently from mossy boulder to great gray-trunked beech, from rough-barked maple to lissome sapling, covering in half an hour the length and breadth of her holy grove. "Where is that girl?"
The old woman paced and muttered. Even when a slight, dark-haired girl ascended the steep path from the abandoned Roman fountain, Ma's complaints did not lessen; the girl Pierrette was not really there—not yet.
Ma watched her settle in a soft hollow upholstered with crinkly leaves, beneath a sapling no thicker than her slender calf. Yan Oors, an aging Celtic demigod, had planted the tree, when Pierrette was only five. Yan believed the tree was the girl's mother, magically transformed by a spell gone awry.
Pierrette crumbled blue-and-yellow flowers in her palm, then picked a small red-brown mushroom. She ate flowers and fungus at once, grimaced, then washed the bitter taste away with a cupped handful of springwater. She lay down, closing her eyes, waiting for sensation to fade from her hands and feet: waiting to fly . . .
On magpie's wings she fluttered down among the branches, beneath the speckling leaf shadows, and alit beside the old woman. Her iridescent green, black, and white feathers blurred, and became a black wool skirt, a white chemise, and a watery green silk sash. Now a clear jewel veined with red and blue, a Gaulish priestess's "serpent's egg," hung from a string at her waist, glowing with ruddy, internal light, like embers or the eye of a demon.
"Where have you been?" snapped Ma. "I have a task for you."
Goddesses' wishes and human ones seldom jibed, and Pierrette had no reason to welcome such words. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a sudden chill.
"You won't like it at all," Ma said, confirming the girl's silent unease.
"Show me," Pierrette said. "Let me make up my own mind."
The goddess knelt by the pool's edge, and Pierrette lowered herself to the mossy verge. Ma roiled the water, and again an image formed beneath the ripples . . .
Like soaring gulls, goddess and girl hovered high above the black, jutting crags of an island, a truncated volcanic cone awash in waves. It was a great ring many miles in extent, and leaden swells broke against it. Lashing winds swept away a froth of white spume.
"Follow me," Ma commanded in a gull's shrill voice. She tilted her wings and dropped swiftly toward the scarps and across . . . into a world unsuspected from outside. Ring after ring of concentric islands lay within a serene, deep blue lagoon, remnants of eruptions and explosions millennia past. Verdant forests clothed the inner slopes of the immense caldera. A patchwork of green, gold, and russet fields covered the islands like the plaid of a fine Gaulish cloak. Houses of imported marble lay scattered like handsful of dice across cultivated land and pasture, linked by the threads of roads and lanes.
Pierrette knew where she was—the kingdom known as the Fortunate Isles, pulled from the realm of time's passage by the sorcerer-king Minho more than two thousand years before, when the empire of the Cretan Bull was buried in flaming ash and flowing lava.
Her hard-working seagull's heart lightened. Ma's task could not be too terrible: Minho was handsome and charming. Though she had never seen him in the flesh, she was in love with him. "Marry me!" he had begged her twice before. "Rule with me, and never grow old." She remembered herself seated on a throne next to Minho's own. She was laughing, calling upon Taranis, god of thunderstorms, to roil the waters of Minho's placid sea, commanding winds to shake his pear and olive trees, which bore fruit regardless of season. From her fingertips sparked lightning bolts that rose to dance among the swelling clouds . . . She had been only five, when she had that vision. It had not really happened—yet.
At fourteen, testing her expanding skill at magic, she visited Minho again, arriving on a vessel made of clouds, clothing herself in mist and vapor, moonbeams and the green and gold of spring irises. That time, she begged the king to free her mentor, the mage Anselm, from the spell that held him trapped in his keep atop the cliffs of the Eagle's beak. Again, Minho had offered her his kingdom, and again, she refused—but his stolen kiss had remained on her virgin lips. Too distraught to recreate her vehicle from the clouds and mists, she had fled on familiar magpie's wings.
Now, eager to see Minho again, she swept over the central island, a flat-topped cone, toward the swelling black-and-vermilion columns of his palace.
"Wait!" screeched Ma, winging in front of her. "Don't alert the king of our presence."
"But I want to see him . . ."
"You will. But he must not see you. I brought you here to refresh your memory, not to make sheep's eyes with him. Come. We'll land on the parapet of the inner courtyard."
Puzzled and disappointed, Pierrette acquiesced. They glided down on silent wings, onto the painted tiles. Below, a fountain bubbled and splashed, its ripples blurring the shapes on the pool's bottom—sleek dolphins and sinuous octopi portrayed in obsidian, jasper, and cobalt glass.
She had glimpsed a crowd in the outer court, colorfully dressed merchants, plain farmers, and white-robed temple acolytes all kneeling, their foreheads against the smooth cobbled pavement. Before them stood a man with the head of a great horned bull. Its eyes were rubies set in ivory, the horns leafed in gold, and from its nostrils gushed the smoke of sweet incense. Minos-tauros. The Bull of Minos, the high priest.
Now the taurine man emerged in the smaller, more intimate courtyard, letting the bronze door swing shut behind him. He tossed his white robe aside with a relieved sigh, and lifted the hollow horned head from his shoulders.
Minho. His hair was glossy black, oiled and curled in the Cretan style of an ancient age. He was clad only in a black kilt, cut longer in back than in front. When he stretched, athlete's muscles rippled beneath bronzed skin. He eased himself onto a heap of cushions set beside the splashing water, his forehead beaded with sweat from the heat inside the bull's-head mask. He wiped droplets from his raptorial nose, and let tired eyelids droop over dark, warm, penetrating eyes.
Pierrette's seagull heart altered its rhythm. An anxious rustle of Ma's feathers warned her not to reveal herself.
"Come," said the goddess. She leaped into the air and coasted away from the wall, so the sound of flapping wings would not disturb the king's slumber.
Pierrette opened deep blue, altogether-human eyes, and saw the cool shadows of beech branches reflected in the sacred pool.
"Will you remember everything you have seen?" asked the goddess, again a crone in worn, frayed wool.
"How could I forget?"
"People remember what they think serves them, and forget the rest. You must remember, because your task is to find that place, and that man."
"I can find him anytime. We've just been there."
"That was a vision. Here you are flesh—human, not an ephemeral gull. You must go there not on magical wings, but on your own feet. You must find the Theran king, and then . . ."
"I don't know how to reach the Fortunate Isles, except through the Otherworld, where we are now. Where we always meet."
"You may seek them however you wish—but when you set foot on Minho's soil, it must be in the real world, and you in the flesh. That is your task. Find the Isles and their king, and then . . ."
"Yes? And then?"
"Then," said the goddess, "you must destroy his kingdom, and he must die."