While Lovi and ibn Saul enjoyed the late afternoon and evening in Citharista, Pierrette buried herself among Anselm's scrolls. She was not concerned that the scholar would grow impatient waiting for her answer, because the sun that painted the blue tiles of her master's library stood always at high noon. Within the influence of the sorcerer's magic, time lay bound, always the same clear, early spring day on which the spell had first been cast, centuries before. She could study books, maps, and scrolls for a year or a decade between ibn Saul's one sip of wine and the next. The spell was a trivial application of the greater one that Minho used to keep his island kingdom forever peaceful and green, and himself eternally young and virile.
Anselm, less skilled than his erstwhile master, could not maintain the appearance of black-haired youth, even here within his keep, unless he concentrated on it. But he did not grow older here, nor did she, and, if she stayed here for a decade, she would not have to take up the goddess's burden, because outside not a single hour would pass. But that only put the day of reckoning off. It solved nothing. Kill Minho? She might prefer to die herself.
Pierrette was not looking for clues to the present location of the mysterious island kingdom. She knew where it had been last year, and she doubted Minho had moved it since . . .
Tracing a route on the map unrolled on her table, she envisioned herself cushioned upon a westward-drifting cloud, observing vast forests passing by below. The river Sequana was a thread of silver. Soon flat, forested land gave way to the rough, dark hills of Armorica, where a Celtic Breton king still ruled and hairy Vikings howled at the borders. Ahead, great Ocean was a vast plate of tarnished silver.
Not for the first time, Pierrette wondered what lay on its far side. The world was known to be a great sphere, and Eratosthenes of Cyrene had calculated that its circumference was six times the breadth of the known world, from Hibernia to the Indus. Were there whole continents to be discovered beyond the horizon?
The edge of the land was beneath her finger now—spines of brown, barren rock reaching like two westward-groping fingers. Between were the wave-washed ruins of a city. In a century or two, they would be gone, pounded to sand by the heaving, frothing surf, the racing tides.
Pierrette shook her head to clear it. Had she slept, or merely daydreamed? Her head had been resting on the map, and there, beneath her finger, was the city whose ruins she had seen: Ys, the northernmost outpost of Phoenicia, abandoned when Carthage's empire fell to Scipio Africanus—the latest of those great civilizations now turned to dust.
Her fingers traced a westward course from Ys across the Bay of Trespasses, past the terrible tidal race that had claimed a thousand ships. There, beyond the tip of land's extended finger, was Sena, the island of the dead. There druidae had borne the bodies of heroes, and there nine Gallicenae, sacred virgins, once sang over long rows of druids' graves.
Did the maidens still sing? The druids were long gone; they had trusted their religion and philosophy only to the memories of men, knowing full well the dangers of writing them down. It took nineteen years to memorize even the basics, and when the druids had been hunted first by Caesar's Romans, then by Christians, there had been no time to learn. Now the last graduates of the druidic schools were dead.
Perhaps the Gallicenae were gone, and Sena was uninhabited even by ghosts. Or else they lingered like poor Yan Oors, John of the Bears, his ferocious companions faded to shadows with glowing eyes, his staff—iron forged from a fallen star—now dull and rusty.
Her finger continued westward to the very edge of the parchment, and then beyond. "There," Pierrette whispered. "There, beyond the edge . . . the Fortunate Isles."
Did she want to find the Fortunate Isles, in person? That was like asking if she wanted to marry a handsome man, to be rich and powerful, sit on an ivory throne and use the great forces of nature as toys, to amuse herself. Hadn't she wanted that all along? Wasn't that the culmination of all her years of study in this timeless place—to learn the postulates and theorems of magic, the knowledge that would make her a true sorceress? And wasn't Minho the last of the ancient sorcerers, the world-shapers, who remembered what magic had once been, and what it might—again—become?
Ma had to be wrong—there had to be another way to preserve the legend of the Fortunate Isles. Only half in this universe, and half in another, could not Minho just complete the separation—if his kingdom existed entirely in that other world, it would disappear from this one. Wouldn't that encompass its "destruction" in every sense that mattered?
But, she mused uncomfortably, if she were queen of such a kingdom, she would not be able to come back here, would she? She would have to give up everything. Minho's library would surely be better than Anselm's, and would have ancient sources from the dawn of time, books that had been burned at Alexandria and were now lost. But it would not have . . . Anselm. And it would not be a short hour's walk from sunny Citharista's docks, where her father's fishing boat waited, or from the ancient olive grove where she had spent so many seasons with Gilles and her sister Marie, pruning and harvesting . . .
She was suddenly overwhelmed with visions of all that she would lose if she took that course. Never to visit Marie in her peaceful convent in Massalia, a short day's sail to the west? Never again to lie dozing in the dappled sunlight, the cool, moist shadows of the sacred grove? Never to visit again the sprite Guihen in the high woods, or ponder the contorted white stones of the hill country that people said were the bleached bones of dragons slain long ago?
There had to be another way—a way to save Minho's kingdom, to fulfill her vision, and yet not to have to give up everything else. But to find out, she had to do as Ma commanded—go there, in this world, not in vision alone. And that would not be easy. Armorica was far away, and she did not think she could get there alone. That meant ibn Saul, and Lovi—but the risk to Minho and his kingdom was great, if she acquiesced to that. She wasn't ready to say "yes" to the scholar. Not yet.
When villagers came to beg infusions, concoctions, or magical aid from the magus Anselm, they rang the small silver bell in the niche by the portal. Then the mage or his apprentice came down the long stairway and let them in. Villagers did not knock. Above all, they did not beat upon the door, as with a great hammer, until the walls within seemed to tremble, and dust motes danced in time with the blows.
"Yan Oors!" she exclaimed as the door swung open. The gaunt face was like old leather, riven with crevices that held every shadow. His clothing was black and dirty brown: a wooly tunic and a kilt overlain with pteruges, brass-trimmed leather straps like Roman soldiers had once worn. His hands and feet were gnarly as old cypress roots, and thick with black hair. His teeth were very big, very yellow, with gaps between them.
How far the ancient ones had fallen! Once Yan had been a brave boy who had slain giants and dragons, and had married a grateful chatelaine, becoming himself a king—or so the tales said. Once, long before that, Gauls had called him "Father of Animals," and had worshipped him as a forest god—or so said Ma, the goddess. But his last worshippers were long dead and he clung to existence only by virtue of the beliefs of ignorant villagers who feared the thumping of his iron staff in the night. Yan Oors had been around since she was a tiny child, chiding her when she was stubborn, comforting her when she was sad or afraid. He, too, was of this universe—at least most of the time—and would be lost to her if . . .
"Hello, little witch," he rumbled. "Are you going to let me in?"
"Why . . . of course. But you've never come inside before. What has changed?"
"Nothing has. And that is why I'm here. You have maps, don't you? I need to see them."
"Maps? What are you looking for—and why?"
"You once brought me back from the brink of dissolution, and you taught me to stalk the night, to make frightening noises with my staff, and to moan like a fantôme, a Gaulish ghost. People heard me—and they believed, and because of that I still live. But my bears are still wraiths without substance. Nothing I have done has changed that. I want to go back where I first found them, long ago, and catch two newborn cubs of their lineage, for their souls to inhabit."
"Will that work?"
"If the cubs are young enough—before their mother licks them, and their proper souls come. And if a sorceress is there to murmur just the right words, at the right moment."
"A sorceress? You want me to go with you?" He nodded gravely. She said neither yes nor no. "Come in." She led him up the dark stairway, to a landing where a great door stood ajar. The library. The walls were lined with books, scrolls, codices, and stacks of papyrus, vellum, even the new "paper" made with lint. "There are many maps here," she said. "How will you know where to start looking?"
"Here," said Yan Oors. She turned. He was not looking at the shelves, but at the table—at the map she had left there. His big finger traced a path down the river Liger to its mouth, then north past a big island, to a cape that jutted westward into the endless sea. "That is where my bears come from," he said. "That is where we'll go." And there, off the end of that point, lay Sena Island, the isle of the dead, and beyond that, hidden behind veils of fog, mist, and confusion also lay . . . the Fortunate Isles.
"As long as you're here," Anselm remarked to Yan Oors, "I could use your strong back."
Yan was indeed very strong. He wielded his iron staff (forged in the heat of the Mother's breath from metal fallen from the sky) as if it were a splinter of pine. "What is it this time? Have you found a fulcrum on which I can place my staff, to move the earth itself?" That was an old joke between old friends.
"Hmmph. You may not be far off. Perhaps the earth has moved. Help me hoist my pendulum, and we shall see. The new rope it is suspended from has stretched." Yan and Pierrette followed him down several flights of stairs. At the bottom of the many-storied stairwell was a bed of sand edged with black stone. At dead center was a great stone ball, once suspended from a beam far above, but now resting in the sand.
"Why did you lead me down here, Mage?" asked Yan. "I'm not going to lift that stone while you retie the rope, and the mechanism to tighten it is way up there."
"Oh, yes—silly of me. Well, let's go up, then."
At the top of the stairwell a great, round oak beam rested in hornbeam cradles. Pierrette surveyed the beam, the holes around its circumference where it projected beyond the cradles, and the notches where counterweighted bronze dogs lodged, keeping the rope that wound around the beam from unwinding. The holes looked exactly sized to fit the diameter of Yan Oors' iron staff—but that was surely a coincidence.
Yan, when so instructed, stuck one end of the staff in a hole, so it rested at an angle more than halfway to the vertical, and then put his weight on the opposite end. The beam turned, the dogs clacked into new notches, and the rope tightened. "Good!" said Anselm. "Now again." Yan Oors repositioned his staff, and pulled, grunting. That time, the beam turned more slowly, and the bronze dogs clacked only thrice. "Not far enough," the mage said. "The pendulum must rise clear of the sand."
"Are you sure you've calculated everything correctly?" asked the gaunt man. "Have you allowed for the weight of the stone and the length of the lever?"
"The beam's radius is one span," Anselm mused, "and the exposed portion of your staff, plus one radius, is . . ." His hand fluttered along the staff, measuring increments the distance between his outstretched little finger and his thumb . . . "Eight spans, or a little more. I'm sure the stone is no heavier than eight of you."
"There is only one of me," said Yan Oors.
"Yes, but . . ."
"Yan," said Pierrette, "put all your weight on your staff, then I'll put my foot in your scabbard-sling and add my weight to yours. If that doesn't work, we must find a longer lever." That is what they did.
"The stone is free!" exclaimed the mage. "Now, I must see if my suspicions are correct—if some fundamental constant is not."
"Is not what?" asked Yan.
"Is not constant, of course. If it has—as I suspect—changed, then it cannot be, can it? By definition, 'constant' means . . ."
"I know what it means. But just what inconstant constant are you speaking of?"
"I'll show you." He scurried down the stairs, his sandals clattering on the worn stone treads. Not for the first time, Pierrette wondered how they could be worn, in a place where people did not age, where the sun never rose or set, but was always at high noon. For that matter, if time were a "constant," why had the rope stretched, and not retained its "youthful" tension? But that was only one of many unanswered questions that had waited a long time, and would have to wait longer. She followed Yan Oors down, at his leisurely pace.
When they arrived, Anselm had raked the sand smooth, and had stretched several strings across it, secured to little wooden pegs stuck in holes in the basin's perimeter. Referring frequently to a scroll stretched out on the floor, he made marks in the sand where the cords intersected. This process took an hour—if there had been hours, within his ensorcelled keep. If there is no time, Pierrette mused, then how can I be bored by its slow passage? But at last, Anselm removed the strings.
"This is the Saxon Island, once Britannia," he said, pointing, "and here is Hibernia, there Armorica. See?" Pierrette saw, and wondered at the coincidence—that Anselm had duplicated a portion of the same map, there in the sand, that she and Yan Oors had pored over in the library.
"There"—he stuck a peg in the sand—"is the great stone circle in Saxon-land, and there"—another peg—"the lesser one. Here are similar stone rings in Hibernia, and here, another one in Armorica. Now observe." He pulled the pendulum to the edge of the stone bed. It made a mark, a line, as it moved. Pierrette deduced that there was a stylus of sorts at the bottom of it. "Smooth that out," Anselm commanded. "Careful! Don't erase anything else."
Pierrette watched Anselm align the center of the pendulum with the mark inscribed on one of the perimeter stones. For the first time she noticed several other marks that she had taken to be merely scratches. Anselm released the pendulum. "Now we wait," he said, "while it draws its patterns. Let's go on the terrace and sip wine. Is there any of that chewy bread left, Pierrette?"
The terrace was on the keep's roof, a story above the mechanism that raised the pendulum. From that height, she paused to watch the stylus drawing its curved lines in the sand.
Much later, well fed on bread, olives, and delicious fatty sausages spiced with pepper and thyme, they again descended. The pendulum, slowed by the stylus dragging in the sand, now hung motionless near the center of the bed. "See!" exclaimed Anselm. "It is not exactly over the center, as it should be. And the lines it has scribed are awry!"
"How can you tell?" growled Yan Oors. "It's only a pretty pattern in the sand."
"Once some of these lines would have intersected where I stuck those pegs in the sand. Now they are all shifted westward, and the pendulum has stopped somewhere at sea, south of the Saxon land, not over the great stone circle. And here"—he indicated a line of pegs trending north and south, on the Armorican shore—"there are great lines of stones that once matched perfectly with lines of power in the earth, but now do not."
"What lines of power are those?" asked Yan.
"The lines the pendulum has drawn—or rather, the lines in the earth that the pendulum's lines represent, on the map in the sand." There ensued a discussion of mystical lines that bound the entire earth in a web of immaterial forces, lines whose intersections marked places of great power. "They are like fulcrum points," Anselm said, "where the effect of even the weakest spell is magnified manyfold."
Pierrette had never dreamed that the fluctuating nature of magic could be as symmetrical and elegant as those lines in the sand and their intersections. But something about them did not make sense to her. "I have often watched my serpent's egg sway on its chain, and it has never described such patterns. It only swings back and forth."
"Your bauble is not heavy enough," explained the mage, "and its chain is not long enough, and besides, you did not swing it here, inside my keep, where time marches to a different pace. Outside, a similar pendulum would take a full year to come to rest, and the pattern it drew would be entirely different."
Pierrette's head swirled. A year? And here, what? Two hours? A few thousand heartbeats. But though her beating heart marked time here, as it did outside, it measured nothing relevant, because outside not a single heartbeat would have occurred. No mind could encompass the contradictions. But then, if everything made complete sense, and could be explained, there could be no magic, and the dead world of the Black Time, shown to her in the reflections of the goddess's pool, would come to be. That brought her back to a new dilemma: one strong intersection of many lines in the sand was right where the pendulum had come to rest—offshore of the last point of land, beyond Sena, where lay . . . the Fortunate Isles.
First Ma, then ibn Saul, then Yan Oors—and now this. It could not be coincidence. She was not going to be able to avoid the trap. She must go there. But kill Minho? Kill the one she was promised to? No goddesses, scholars, or scary old ghosts with iron staffs could make her do that. There had to be another way.
"So all of those alignments of great stones once marked such lines of power in the earth?" asked Pierrette, after Yan Oors had departed. "And the stone circles were where several lines intersected?"
"That is how it used to be. Where possible, roads followed the lines, and even minor crossroads were concentrations of magic—expressed, of course, as shrines to this god or that." Pierrette reflected that all roads, all crossroads, had magical influence, but that a road built of stone slabs, like the Roman ones, nullified spells instead. There were obviously two separate principles at work: a trail made by human feet, that followed the course of a mysterious line of power, partook of that influence, but a road expressly constructed according to the lay of the land was subject to a different rule. She called that rule the "Law of Locks," though it applied as well to water wheels, windmills—that is, to any complex fabrication of human hands, including roads. Near such constructions, no magic worked at all.
So what did this shifting of lines mean? Was the magical nature of the entire earth rebelling against the imposition of stone roads, of mills, of doors with locks, of man-made and mechanical contrivances?
The Black Time—or so she had long suspected—was in part the result of such building: wherever the land was bound in such a reticulation of artifices, no magic worked. When men built roads, mills, canals, and cities, they augmented the natural barriers to magic, like rivers and watershed ridges, a restrictive network like the cords that bound a bale of wool.
Of course, the Black Time's coming was not driven by a single cause. When scholars like the voyager ibn Saul wrote down their prosaic "explanations" of why ancient rites and spells seemed to work, their writings, published and copied and distributed widely, were also counterspells, and destroyed a little more of the magic that had once been.
The great religions had similar effect: when the priests first named ancient gods evil, that created an anti-god they called Satan, who drew sustenance from ancient, banished spirits. Named as evil, Moloch was eaten, and Satan acquired his fiery breath; he ingested Pan and the satyrs, and his feet became cloven hooves, his legs covered in shaggy fur. When the priests named snake-legged Taranis Satan's avatar, the Devil grew a serpent's tail; when the horned Father of Animals was eaten, Satan assumed his horns.
When at last all the gods and spirits were named Evil and were consumed, then would Satan stand alone and complete. When all the magics were bound in a net of stone roads, every waterfall enslaved in a mill-race to labor turning a great wheel, every spell "explained" in a scholar's rational counterspell, then would the Black Time indeed loom near.
Even common folk contributed their share: when a child died, and bereaved parents no longer railed at unkind fate, at the will of the sometimes-cruel gods, but called it Evil, then Satan claimed the death, and all such deaths, for himself. Where would it end? Would the Black Time only arrive when house fires, backaches, and children's sneezes and sniffles were no longer merely devastating, uncomfortable, or inconvenient, but . . . Evil? Pierrette forced herself not to think of that. Her concern was—or should be—more immediate: "Can we transpose the new lines your pendulum has drawn onto a tracing of this map? It might be useful, on my coming journey."
"Oh—then you are going?"
"Do I really have any choice?"
Pierrette traced the original map onto thin-scraped vellum, carefully labeling features of terrain, rivers, and towns. Then, again using strings stretched between the marked points on the sand basin's rim, she transferred the curving, intersecting lines in the sand onto her chart.
"Look at that!" exclaimed Anselm when he examined her work. "See those four lines that intersect just below the mountainous spine of the land of Armorica? How strange. An old friend used to live near there. I wonder if he still does?"
"Master, you haven't left the vicinity of your keep in seven or eight centuries. Your friend is surely long gone."
"Oh no—Moridunnon was a sorcerer of no mean skill. I once believed him an old god in mortal garb, so clever was he. Besides, whenever he fell asleep, he did not wake for years, even decades—and while he slept, he did not age. Will you stop there, and see him? I'll write a letter of introduction and . . ."
"Master ibn Saul has planned a more southerly itinerary for us, I think. We will follow River Rhodanus, then cross to the headwaters of the Liger, and thence downstream to the sea, where we will take ship to search for . . . your homeland."
"Surely a little excursion will not delay you much. And see? Not far from the mouth of the Liger, an earth-line marks the way. You'll have no trouble following it. I'll square it with the scholar."
"You'll do your old friend—Moridunnon?—no favor, introducing him to the skeptical ibn Saul."
"Then you go, while he makes arrangements for a ship. You'll have a week or so."
"Write the letter to Moridunnon, master. If I can deliver it, I will."
"Oh—there's something else. For you. Now where did I put it?"
"For me? What is it?"
"Your mother left it for you—or, rather, she gave it to you, when you were little, and you brought it here . . ."
"I did? I don't remember."
"Of course not. I put a spell on it. Ah! Here it is!" He pulled a tiny object from between several scrolls. "Your mother's pouch."
Suddenly, Pierrette did remember. She remembered a winding line of torches on the long trail from Citharista to the Eagle's Beak, and the terrible humming notes, sounding to a child like a dragon on the prowl, that was the Christian chant of Elen's pursuers. Elen: Pierrette's mother, a simple masc, a country-bred witch of the old Ligurian blood. She was the gens' scapegoat for a failed harvest, a drought . . . for whatever sins festered in them, which they would not acknowledge.
She remembered Elen shedding the spell she had hidden behind until Pierrette and Marie appeared on the trail ahead of the mob, and she remembered being taken in her mother's arms for a brief, desperate moment. "Go now!" Elen had commanded them, handing Pierrette a little leather pouch. It held something small, hard, and heavy. "Go to Anselm's keep. There, that way!" Those were the last words Pierrette's mother ever said to her.
A shadow hovered in front of Pierrette's face. She took the pouch from Anselm. Her eyes were blurred with the tears she had never before shed. Marie had wept when it was clear that their mother was gone, but not Pierrette. Little Pierrette instead made a secret vow, that she would learn all that her mother knew, and more. She would be not just a masc, but a sorceress—and then, she would have her revenge on the murderers. Only after that would she weep.
Now she understood that she would never fulfill that vow. The townspeople had created their own revenge: they walked always in the shadow of their guilt, dreading the day they would die, for Father Otho had not absolved them from their great sin. Would he do so if on their deathbeds they asked? Who knew? No, she desired no revenge, and now, remembering, she allowed the tears to course down her cheeks.
She tugged at the leather drawstring. A seam broke, and a single dark object fell in her lap. It was a ring. Her mother's ring. She held up her left hand and spread her fingers, blinking away tears, gauging where to put the ring . . .
"No! Look at it but, don't put it on!" said Anselm with great urgency. She looked. It was dark, heavy, and . . . and cold. An iron ring? There was no rust, but it could be no other metal. Now that her eyes were clear, she saw the pattern cast into it—the entwined loops and whorls of a Gallic knot, like a cord that had no beginning or end. A knot that could not be unraveled.
"What am I supposed to do with it?" she asked.
"You're a sorceress. You tell me. I just thought now was a good time for you to have it, since you're going away." He cleared his throat noisily, to conceal his sudden emotion. "I'm going to take a nap on the terrace. Don't forget to copy those maps, before you go. You may need them. Take a handful of gold coins from the jar in the anteroom. Fill your pouch. And don't go without saying good-bye." He departed abruptly, stumbling on the door sill because his own eyes were far from clear.