Below lay Citharista, once a Roman port. Now, centuries after Rome's fall, it was a crumbling fishing village. On the far side jutted Eagle Cape, three rounded scarps that, from the sea, resembled a raptor's head. High atop the crest, the walls of the so-called "Saracen fort" were silhouetted against the bright, blue afternoon sky. Saracens had not built the fort; the magus Anselm had lived there since Caligula's reign.
Pierrette had no eye for scenery. Kill Minho? The vision of herself on a throne beside the king had sustained her since her lonely, half-orphaned childhood. When she learned everything about magic, when the threat of the Black Time was ended, she would wed the handsome king. Kill him? She could sooner slay her toothless father. And the goddess had given her no idea how she was to accomplish the task, anyway. How was she, hardly out of childhood, a sorceress more at home with theory (after eons of study, of course) than with the actual practices of spells, to kill so mighty a sorceror? Angrily, she spat strong words . . . and a brushy oak beside the path shrivelled, and dropped its leaves, all brown and dry where a moment before they had been green. Then, relenting, she uttered a softer spell, but did not wait to see its results. Had anyone been following her, a few hundred paces or so behind, they might have seen the first tiny green buds appear above the scars where leaf stems had been. Or maybe not. What people saw wasn't always real, despite their eyes, and what they didn't see was sometimes no less an illusion.
Pierrette stumbled past the overgrown Roman fountain, through rocky pastures, and out into the valley, passing ancient olive trees without seeing them, without waving at the men and women in the fields or nodding to the soldier standing watch at Citharista's rotting gate.
She passed her father's house, and only drew herself up sharply in front of the wine shop. Two finely saddled horses were hitched there, and two laden mules. What rich strangers had arrived? She caught a glimpse of a blond head of hair: a tall Frankish boy was checking one mule's lashings. It was the scholar ibn Saul's apprentice, Lovi.
Pierrette backed away. The mysterious ibn Saul, who voyaged extensively and wrote of his travels, was drinking wine with Anselm and her father, Gilles. Neither the scholar nor his apprentice had seen Pierrette except disguised as a boy; even now, almost sixteen, she could still pass for a boy of twelve. Perhaps a small spell made people look less closely than otherwise.
She slipped away to her father's house, where she kept odds and ends of clothing. She did not want to reveal her true self to them. Once Lovi, though believing her male, had been attracted to her, and had distanced himself from his uncomfortable desires by accusing her of being Anselm's catamite, not his apprentice. That rankled still, and it was all the same to her if Lovi were to continue to suffer the barbs both of desire and of confusion about his own nature.
The back room of the small, two-room dwelling was windowless and dark. Pierrette could have lit the lamp—a wick of twisted lint in a shallow bowl of oil—with a flick of her fingers. Her firelighting spell was the first she had ever learned, and she didn't even have to murmur the proper incantation for it to work. But magic, even small magic, was unreliable. The thrust of her studies with Anselm had been to codify the complex rules that underlay its unpredictability. What she now knew was that a spell written in one era, in one language, might have different results in other times and tongues. She had learned that ranges of high hills, rivers, and even great stone roads separate the realms of different magics. No spells worked at all in the highest places, or afloat—except on the open sea—or on a Roman road. But in the Camargue, the delta of River Rhodanus, a magical place where dry land graded imperceptibly into a sea of reeds and then open water, where the water was neither entirely fresh nor salt, and ocean creatures rubbed shoulders with upland fish from the streams, her small firemaking spell had once started a conflagration.
Spells, like geometric theorems, owed their utility to the validity of their axioms—those unprovable, irreducible assumptions that underlay them. When people's beliefs changed, so did those assumptions, and so did spells' results. Pierrette no longer uttered such dangerous words casually. She took the time instead to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom. . . .
When she stepped from the house, it was as a shabby boy with dirty bare toes, worn bracae—short trousers—and tunic, and a conical leather hat. The hat concealed long, black hair bound in a tight bun. Townsfolk who passed glanced at Piers with only ordinary interest.
At the tavern, that changed. Lovi was seated with the three older men, a disparate grouping. His eyes bored into her. He was, thought Piers, quite attractive. Perhaps her opinion showed, for his scowl deepened.
Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul was tall, and as skinny as a post. Gold threads gleamed at the hem and sleeves of his tunic, watery silk lined his dark travelling cloak, and his hair was concealed within a tightly wound cloth fixed with an emerald-encrusted fibula. His beard was curled and oiled.
Gilles, Pierrette's father, back from a morning at sea, wore only a ragged kilt, and reeked of fish, salt, and seaweed. His few teeth were yellowed or brown.
Anselm's white hair and bushy beard, threaded with black, were only slightly darker than his robe, a shapeless drape worn in the Roman style long out of fashion.
Gilles addressed his child appropriately: "I was looking for you, Piers. You weren't in the olive grove."
"I was out walking," she replied noncommittally. It would not do for ibn Saul to hear of the sacred pool: he would want to see it, and then perhaps to write of what he saw—what he did not see. He would not write of the goddess, or of visions in the water, but only of moss, trees, and cool air, and if he wrote it, there would be no more goddess, and no more visions, for the written words of a disbeliever were a spell of their own, that destroyed magic before the ink dried on the page.
"I'm glad you're here, boy," said Anselm, seamlessly continuing Gilles's deception. "My friend Muhammad has a proposition that might interest you." His voice was easy, but Pierrette read tension in the lines around his eyes.
"I am planning an expedition in search of a land unvisited for centuries," the scholar said. "Anselm claims you have read every history written, and might know where I should begin. The place consists of islands, and your father assures me that you're handy aboard a boat. Will you accompany me?" As always, ibn Saul treated her as a colleague, an equal, and not an unbearded boy—much to Lovi's discontent.
Anselm's unease made her cautious. "I'm interested enough to listen," she said. "Does this place have a name?"
"The Hibernian Brendan called it 'The Fortunate Isles.' "
Pierrette paled. Minho's kingdom. First Ma, now the geographer. Could that be coincidence? Twice before, she had felt compelled to follow a course of action when events pushed her from behind and pulled her ahead, giving her no choice. Each time, she had resisted, but in the end had done what was required of her when things went from irritating to unpleasant to intolerable.
If she helped ibn Saul to find the Fortunate Isles, Minho would be ill served: he would be forever wrapped in the geographer's scroll. Did the goddess mean for her to "kill" the sorcerer-king by exposing him to the unbeliever's eyes?
She must be cautious, and not reveal anything. "Aren't they near the mouth of the River Baetis, where Tartessos stood before it sank into the morass?"
"They were once there," said ibn Saul. "They were also among the southern Kyklades in an earlier age still—and they disappeared in the great upheaval that destroyed the Sea People, the Atalantans ruled by Minos the Bull."
"I've heard of that," Pierrette said, searching for neutral ground. "The Hebrews recorded the islands' convulsion as a pillar of fire by night, and smoke by day. But volcanoes are natural events, even ones that blanket whole kingdoms in ash. I wouldn't have thought you interested in chasing disappearing islands."
"The plagues that preceded your pillars of smoke and fire were real enough, as was the recession of the sea, and its resurgence in a great wave that destroyed Pharaoh's army. The walls of cities still stand beneath the sea off Crete, and on the island's other side, the wharves are miles inland. The whole island tilted. The Greek Theseus was only able to conquer Knossos and slay the bull-king because there was nothing left with which to defend the kingdom. All was buried in ash. Those things are real."
"Of course they are," she agreed, "but they can be explained as natural results of a great cataclysm. Nothing in the histories indicates that the so-called 'Fortunate Isles' still exist, or that Brendan was not mistaken."
"There are too many tales," countered ibn Saul. "The Isles were seen near Tartessos, beyond the Pillars of Herakles, and at the mouth of the Gold River in furthest Africa. Each time and place, the lands nearby flourished, and great civilizations arose there. There must be some truth to the tales. I intend to find out what it is."
Pierrette made a skeptical moue. "And where are those civilizations today? Gone, destroyed and forgotten. And if the islands can move from one sea to another, how do you propose to find them? Where are they now?"
"You can help answer that."
"Master, have you gone mad? Ibn Saul is the last person in the world you want to find your homeland!" Pierrette and Anselm were alone on the steep trail to his keep, even now looming up at the top of the crumbling red marl scarp called the Eagle's Beak. Dry but salty sea breezes swept the sweat from their brows as soon as it formed, and caused the graceful umbrella pines shadowing the path to sigh and rustle.
"He's my friend! He'll help me to go home at last."
"He'll destroy your 'home' as if it never existed—in truth, it will never have existed."
Anselm claimed to have come from the Fortunate Isles at Minho's bidding, his task to subvert the nascent Christian faith by suborning its leaders. Now, hundreds of years later, his failure was obvious: churches stood in every town, shrines at every crossroad, and the old gods and goddesses were only worshipped by a secretive few. But Anselm's magic had kept him alive, and he had taught Pierrette what he knew.
If ibn Saul destroyed Minho's kingdom with his skepticism, then the destruction of Thera—Atalanta—would indeed have been only a volcanic explosion, and Anselm would never have existed. Then what of his apprentice? Would she be a village girl without gift or talent, pregnant with her second or third child?
The goddess's motivation became clear: if Minho died before the scholar could translate the wonders of his magical kingdom into something prosaic and ordinary, his legend and magic would live on. Ibn Saul could not find what no longer existed—but which had existed. That was why she had to kill the king.
"Oh, come!" said her master. "Things can't be that bad."
"You're probably right," she lied.