Ibn Saul had hired a galley—a long, low vessel with twelve oars, a triangular sail, and Moorish lines. Its shallow draft would allow it to stay close to shore, and to navigate the silty Fossae Marianae, the Roman canal to Arelate, that bypassed the lagoons of Rhodanus's delta.
Pierrette was content to sit far forward with her donkey, away from the sour, sweaty aroma of the rowers and the clack of the episkopo's little drum, keeping time. The long, sandy coast was low and undistinguished, and the monotony gave her mind free rein for pondering. After nine hours at sea, the long sandspit at Rhodanus's greater mouth was off the port side, the creamy rocks of the Estaque mountains far aft; she was bored, and the sun's glare, low over the bow, made looking ahead painful.
She turned around, and settled against the rail. What was Lovi doing? Just ahead of the mast, he had slipped out of his long-sleeved Frankish shirt, and was lying down on the deck. How strange. As if there wasn't enough heat and sunlight, without deliberately exposing oneself to it. And his skin was so pale. Pretty, though. Creamy, with tinges of gold and pink. Most skin was olive-toned, or dark and leathery from the fierce Mediterranean sun. Lovi's looked soft as a baby's, and the fine curls of hair on his chest were yellow-gold. Pierrette's fingers tingled, almost as if she had uttered her small fire-making spell—but the golden tendrils she imagined her fingers running through were not flames.
She shook her head to clear it of such imagery. Sorcery—so Ma insisted—required she remain virgin, and those were not a virgin's thoughts. Unfortunately for her composure, she was not as innocent as virginity might imply.
Her mind ranged northward, beyond the low coast, gray with tamarisk and sand willows. There lay the Crau plain, the Plain of Stones. There, in a long-ago age, born hence by the great, dangerous spell called Mondradd in Mon, she had made love with the Greek explorer Alkides. There, she had learned that what the gods commanded and what they intended were not always the same. "Virgin" meant many things, but what it came down to, parsed and analyzed to the final degree, was one single forbidden act. And even that was not universally true. For want of clear evidence otherwise, every girl who had not borne a child was considered a virgin.
Again, she shook her head, almost sending her leather hat flying. That would not do! Such thoughts about the lovely blond boy were dangerous. She did not intend to endure the discomforts of tight-bound hair and breasts, the heavy chafing of men's clothing, only to give herself away with hot-eyed glances. Already, Lovi was looking her way, as if he had sensed her intensity.
He sat up abruptly, an arm across his chest like a girl startled while bathing. Quickly, he turned away from her gaze, and pulled his tunic over his head. His skin, she saw, had turned quite pink, not entirely from sunburn. She barely suppressed a low chuckle. Poor Lovi. What horrible things he thought about her—about Piers.
Shortly later, the galley glided up against a stone wharf, having attained the Fossae Marianae in near-record time. Galleys were not subject to the vagaries of wind, and did not tack back and forth like sailing craft. The sun had not quite set, and they had been at sea less than twelve hours.
That night they slept at an inn—Lovi and ibn Saul in a wide bed, and Piers, pleading a touch of claustrophobia after the open sea, on the stone balcony. Only when the others were long asleep did she feel a calloused hand on her shoulder. "Yan Oors! Where were you? How did you get here?" she whispered.
"I rowed," he said, a grin crinkling his dark face. "It wasn't much fun."
"But how?"
"Last night I followed the scholar to the docks, and listened while he haggled with the galley's master. Then I followed a crewman home, and when he drifted off to sleep . . ."
"Then what?"
"He dreamed dark creatures of the deep, tugging on his oar, pulling him overboard. What a wondrous dream he had, called to account before the king of the watery realm, who had octopus arms, and fish swimming in and out of his nostrils!"
"You're cruel! That poor man! What then?"
"This morning his bench was empty. I sat down in his place, and took his oar. The master even paid me. See?" The tiny silver bit was dwarfed in his huge hand. "He says he'll exchange this for a shiny obol if I stay on as far as Arelate, at the end of the canal."
"Where did you learn to row, to keep time with the others?"
"I don't remember. Perhaps I sailed with the Venetii, buying tin from the Cassiterides, or maybe I guided Pytheas the Massilian there, hundreds of years ago. It's all very vague to me now." His deep voice was tinged with regret.
"I'm sorry. But you're here. You remembered enough, and you're here now. I'm glad for that."
"Me too, little witch. And so are my bears." He gestured over the stone balustrade. Did the shadows conceal ghostly ursine shapes? Was that flicker of greenish light an eye—a bear's eye—or only a cat stalking small prey?
Enormous salt pans crowded the approach to the canal—dikes separating shallow ponds where seawater evaporated. Many ponds were blood-red with tiny salt-loving organisms. The galley progressed up the weedy waterway under oars: why should its master pay good coin to rent oxen who could not walk as fast as his crew could row—and the only crewman who was getting paid extra for this leg of the journey was the craggy fellow at the third starboard oar.
Even now that Pierrette knew Yan Oors was aboard, she could not distinguish him from the other broad backs on the benches, without going aft to look in every face on her return to the bow. She chafed at the tedium of this phase of the voyage. On her left, never far from the canal, were the weedy, shifting channels of the river, the vast reed sea of the Camargue, and on her right just beyond the towpath was the Plain of Stones, just as flat, radiating heat.
Bored, she wished Lovi would repeat his odd pastime. Ibn Saul had explained that northerners who never got enough sun in their native lands often did that, and called it "sunbathing." At least, the scholar had commented, Lovi had sense to limit his exposure to the hours before dusk, when the sun was not too fierce. "I've seen northern galley slaves burn and blister so badly they died," he said, "and after all the effort I've spent training that boy . . ."
Cattle grazed a broad expanse of open ground from the rude stone wharf to the monstrous structure that towered over even the broken Roman aqueduct. "What is that?" asked Pierrette.
Lovi smiled condescendingly. "That," he said, "is the town of Arles, once called Arelate. What did you think it was?"
"I know what it was," she snapped. "It was a Roman arena, before all the arches were blocked up with stones and mortar, and those four square towers were built. If that is the city of Arelate, I am ashamed how far we descendants of Roma have fallen."
"Don't be too critical," said ibn Saul. "This city has been ill used by just about everyone—the Visigoths were not so very bad, but the Moors breached the old walls, and burned most everything outside of them. When the Franks took the city back, they burned most of what was inside the walls. Now the survivors live in the only completely defensible place left. There are probably two hundred houses inside the amphitheater, and two churches that I know of. I think it would take a bigger and better army than Franks, Moors, or Burgundians could produce to overwhelm it without a long siege."
"I want to go inside," said Pierrette. The theater in Massalia was a brothel, while this was a town. Whatever ambiance, whatever tenuous connection with the Roman past might have existed in Massalia's stone warren, the misery, greed, and passions of the present overwhelmed them. Pierrette thought it might be the same here, but such monuments of the past sometimes provided glimpses of what had once been, as if the Veil of Years were worn thin there.
"Are you sure? It's crowded, dark, and dangerous. I have sent a boy from the wharf to announce me to Arrianus, a bishop, who is reputed to be of a scholarly bent. Otherwise I would not go in myself."
They entered the fortified town through the west gate, a Roman portal now surrounded by one of those ugly foursquare towers. Flaring torches illuminated patches of smoke-stained wall, and Pierrette had the impression of vast, dark spaces beyond. This had once been the outer concourse of the amphitheater. She tried to imagine it with graceful arches open to the sunlight, clean-swept and crowded with Romans in togas, with red-and-bronze-clad soldiers managing the traffic—but the exercise was doomed to fail, because everything was too dark, too ugly, and once beyond the gate itself, the air was still and foul, the Roman tile flooring lost beneath the humped fill and rubble of centuries, and the once-noble corridor was crowded with mostly roofless enclosures, which she realized were dwellings.
"This way," said ibn Saul, working his way leftward, pushing through a clot of dull-clad denizens of this awful place, who had gathered beneath a guttering torch. They ascended a worn stone stairway, Roman stone that emerged from Visigothic, Saracen, and Frankish dirt as if pushing up through it. Pierrette followed, lured by the faintest glimmer of clear natural light from an archway ahead.
That light came cascading down a stairway, which they ascended. At the top was another arcade, just as crowded as the one below, but some of its inward-facing arches were still open. Pierrette drew a welcome breath of air that did not taste as if it had already passed in and out of hundreds of pairs of lungs. From below, smoke trickled upward from a hundred hearths: the entire floor of the amphitheater was crowded with stone, timber, and plaster houses, amid a maze of tiny streets hardly wide enough for two skinny people to pass.
To her relief, the scholar led her upward, not down into that chaos. She suddenly appreciated poor run-down Citharista. It had not known prosperity since Rome fell, and though half its ancient buildings had collapsed and not been rebuilt, at least its streets were still Roman-wide, and its Roman cobbles were still unburied. But Arelate had remained a prosperous town, a hub for northbound travelers, the seat of an archbishop and a Burgundian kinglet (who wisely spent his days elsewhere, traveling about his realm).
The bishop's house, and his church, were built atop the uppermost tier of stone seats, their leveled floors cannibalized from the Roman stone of the uppermost arcade. A cool, moist breeze eddied through the anteroom. The bishop himself ushered them into a white-plastered hall with scenes from the lives of saints, and a long table set with silver candlesticks, goblets, and a tall pitcher bedewed with moisture. "Please sit," he urged. "I've recently read your treatise on the progress of Mother Church among the savage Wends," he said to ibn Saul, ignoring Pierrette entirely. "I must hear all about your voyage among them."
Pierrette sat quietly, and both men forgot that the boy Piers was even there. Although four goblets had been set out, Bishop Arrianus poured wine only for himself and the scholar, and Pierrette was not so thirsty she was willing to disturb either of them.
Ibn Saul obviously wanted to speak of his present voyage northward, but the bishop had interests of his own. "You wrote that the entire mission among the Wends is comprised of men of the ordo vagorum, itinerant priests unaccountable to authority higher than their own questionable consciences. Is it entirely so? We have nothing but trouble from such wanderers in these parts. They come, drink our sacramental wine to quench unquenchable thirsts, regale us with tales that are surely lies, and then most quickly heed some inner call that leads them onto the roads again, when the novelty of their welcome wears off, and the topic of labor and toil arises. In fact we have one such here now, a self-proclaimed Father Gregorius, who claims to have voyaged with the Norsemen who infest the lands above Armorica."
Ibn Saul snatched at that straw. "Ah! Armorica! How opportune it is that you should speak of it. I have long suspected that those hairy Viking barbarians—more savage, some say, even than Wends—must know the place we seek . . ." He described the rumors and tales of a mysterious pagan kingdom, a relic of ancient days, that was reputed to lie somewhere in those very waters the Norsemen claimed as their private sea. "Is this Gregorius nearby? I would like to question him . . ."
"Better still—as his welcome here has worn thin, and his tales have grown stale, I'll provide him with whatever impetus he needs to move on, and a letter—to whom it may concern—that I will give not to him, but to you. If he serves you well in your quest, you may choose to pass it on to him—I'll tell him that. He won't refuse to accompany you as a guide and perhaps as a . . . spiritual counselor." He said that with raised eyebrows as if someone with the odd name of Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul might not welcome such a one, but the scholar smiled and nodded. "If he is truly 'Father' Gregorius, he will know the sacraments, will he not? I hope that is so, not only for myself, but for my Frankish apprentice, Lovi, who is most devout, and whose moods become quite black when he is denied confession, when we voyage far from Christian lands."
"Lovi? That is Louis in our local patois. Is he perhaps related to the Frankish kings?"
"You mean the descendants of Chlodowechus, called Clovis? I doubt it."
"As do I. But isn't it strange how such an odd and savage name, Chlodowechus, that sounds like someone choking, can be transmuted by time and Christian influence into the mellifluous 'Lovi' or 'Louis?' "
At that moment Pierrette, though she had no wine to choke on, made a sound that sounded very much like "Chlodowechus." The bishop then noticed her presence. "Here, boy. I've forgotten you. Have some wine. Are you ill?"
"I'm sorry, Episkopos Arrianus," ibn Saul interjected. "This is Piers, who is, though young, a scholar in his own right, who has read many ancient works not only in Latin, but in Greek and Hebrew, and in the dead tongue of the Phoenicians as well. I am thinking he choked not on an absence of wine, but on something you may have said. Piers? Is that so?"
Pierrette nodded. "When you spoke of the transmutation of 'Chlodowechus' to 'Clovis' to 'Louis,' and attributed the improvement in the sound of it to the blessing of the Church, I was reminded of my own observations of how Christianity has claimed much else that was pagan, and made it its own. I was further reminded of Saint Augustine's own advice, in that regard, and that of the Holy Father Gregorius, whose ideas paralleled his."
The bishop was wholly captivated now—and Pierrette had shaped her words just so that her own pagan estate would not likely come up. She had never lied outright even to devout Christians, and did not want to. "Yes?" said Bishop Arrianus, leaning forward until his prominent nose almost rested on the gleaming rim of his goblet.
"It is not enough to say that Christianity mellows what was once pagan," Pierrette said. "It is closer to truth to say that the very realities of the pagan world have been reshaped by it. Christian influence reaches not only forward into lands where no vagrant priest has trod, and into a future no one has visited—it reaches back through time itself, and changes pagan gods into Christian saints."
"How can that be? You speak rhetorically, of course—nothing can change the past. What has been written cannot be erased."
"Is that so? When Pope Gregory suggested that the wood from holy pagan oaks be hewn and split, and Christian shrines built where they stood, and when pagan folks had no choice but to come and worship before a cross made from that once-holy tree, didn't Gaulish Esus, the carpenter-god, become Jesus, still a carpenter, still a god?"
"But no! You tread on fearsome ground, boy! There is no connection between the one Jesus and the other!" The pronunciation of the two names was so very similar—"Ay-soos" and "Hay-soos," that the bishop had missed Pierrette's slight aspiration of the one name and not the other. "I have never even heard of a Gaulish 'Jesus.' "
"That is exactly my point," Pierrette said firmly. She leaned back and took a leisurely sip of wine. "You must accept my assurance that the Celtic 'Esus' once existed—at least in the minds of his worshippers—because the texts in which his name is written are not here, and I cannot show them to you. Accept that, and the rest becomes evident: Esus once was, but is no longer. Jesus once was not, but now is. The very past in which pagan Esus existed is no longer: now the roots of the Christian tree are deeper in the heart of this land than were those of the pagans, and Esus, in truth, never was."
"You play with the meanings of words!" Arrianus spat. "You flirt with terrible heresy!"
"Where is the heresy? I have said that—in this world we live in—there is and was only one Jesus, ever."
"But you just said there was once another . . ."
"The very fact of his existence has been erased, not just memory of him. He does not exist, and because of the strength of the Church, he never did. And he is not the only one! Shall I name other names?"
"I am afraid to ask them."
Pierrette's dark eyes held the bishop's with their intensity. "In the north, in Armorica, Britannia, and Hibernia, there was once a goddess whose name has changed just as Chlodowechus's has. She was the Mother Goddess, whose flesh was the soil itself, whose bones were the rocks beneath it, and whose flowing breasts were the sacred pools and springs that well hot and cold from dark, buried places. Do you know her name?"
The cleric could not look away. He wanted to. He wanted to flee from this terrible boy who knew of such things—but he was in his own house, that shared a common wall with his church, which was consecrated ground. He could not flee.
"Her name was Brigantu. That was the name of a tribe as well, a warlike tribe whose name comes down to us as 'brigand.' Today the goddess does not exist—but my friend Ferdiad, an Irish singer and teller of tales, whose people have been Christian for many centuries, says that Saint Bridget is the patron saint of his land—and has always been so. . . . If you need still another name, to be convinced, there is Mary Magdalen, patron saint of this land . . ."
"Stop! Please! No more! Magister ibn Saul, who is this frightening child you have brought here? I am afraid for my very soul, here in my own home."
"Then you should be grateful. When we fear for our souls or our mortal bodies, we consider our actions carefully. And I have listened to what Piers has said. As I understand it, he claims that the strength of the Church is such that when a pagan deity falls before it, there can be no true apostasy. As a priest of God you should rejoice."
"No apostasy? But there is. Everywhere, in the villages, in the countryside, folk fall into error so easily, and throw offerings into pools and springs, or holes in the ground."
"No true apostasy, I said—for if the deities they importune do not exist, and indeed never did exist—then where do their prayers go? Who is there to hear them, but the One God?"
Bishop Arrianus nodded grudging agreement, then turned the conversation in a direction more immediately useful to the scholar—the state of the countryside of the Rhodanus Valley, and the portage road to the headwaters of the Liger. The bishop gave them names of churchmen they could call on for hospitality on their way, and promised to have a packet of letters, in the morning, for them to deliver for him. Still uneasy with the boy Piers's revelations, he was quite obviously happy to have an excuse, the letters, to bid them farewell.
"Shall we sleep on the boat?" ibn Saul asked, wrinkling his great nose as they descended into the darkness of the erstwhile amphitheater. "I can't imagine any inn here that would smell better than the garbage in the canal."
With several hours of daylight left, ibn Saul arranged for the galley to be towed to the river itself—the canal ended at Arelate—and they spent the night moored offshore, free from the stinks of the town and the risk of sneak thieves in the night.
"Isn't the next town Tarascon?" asked Pierrette when they were under way in the early hours, with the bishop's letters and the hedge-priest Father Gregorius aboard. Ibn Saul nodded.
Then Father Gregorius spoke (he had until then been sullenly resentful about his premature ejection from the comforts of the bishop's house, and about ibn Saul's jovial refusal to part with the letter of recommendation at their very first port of call). "Of course we will be stopping there, won't we?" he asked.
"I hadn't planned to," said the scholar. "According to the galleymaster's calculation, it may be less than a full day's row, against this sluggish current. We may be well beyond Tarascon by nightfall. Why?"
"Tarascon is a very holy place," said the priest, avoiding the scholar's eye. His gaze slid away upstream like a slippery fish. "Saint Martha lived there, and slayed a ferocious river monster, a great beast called a 'Tarasque.' "
Pierrette laughed out loud, and Gregorius turned angry eyes upon her. "You don't believe it?"
"Of course I do," she replied. "I know better than anyone that the stories of the saints here in Provence are true. I myself saw them where they came ashore, in the little town that grew up on that spot. I have been in the church there, built over the graves of Mary Salome and Mary Jacoba, sisters of the mother of Jesus. I was only laughing because Magister ibn Saul, the bishop Arrianus, and I, had quite a discussion of names and tales, and how they change."
"You are mocking me," said Gregorius. "The saints came many hundreds of years ago, and you are still a boy."
"I don't mean that I was there then," Pierrette replied, "or not exactly. Indeed I saw the Saints—all eight of them: Mary Magdalen, her sister Martha, their brother Lazarus, Cedonius who was blind and was healed by Jesus, Saint Maximinus, Sainte Sarah, whom some say was the elder Marys' Egyptian servant—but I saw them in a vision granted me by a very holy old woman. And another time, I spoke with one of the two old sisters, and with Sarah, in their cottage on the very spot where the church stands today."
"Oh," said Gregorius flatly. "Visions."
"You don't believe in visions, Father? Then what of burning bushes, and blinding lights on the road to Damascus, and . . ."
"I didn't say that!" Only now did he realize what a formidable opponent the slender boy in the conical leather hat could be. Did he perhaps fear that he might be unmasked as a fraud? But no rule stated that a vagabond priest had to be educated, though many, the bishop might have said, were far too erudite for their own—and the Church's—good.
"Tell us why you laughed," said ibn Saul. "What about Tarascon, or river monsters, bears on our own conversation with the bishop?"
"To answer that, I must tell not one, but three tales, and it is almost noon. Let us eat, and then nap through the heat of the day, and I'll tell the first of them tonight, around the evening fire, when we have moored the galley.
Pierrette napped, as did ibn Saul, but Gregorius did not, nor Lovi. The priest recited poetry in fine, classical Latin, and the apprentice was obviously enraptured. From what Pierrette heard, they were not stolid Christian verse, but romantic tales of faraway places, of adventures, treasure-seekers, and seventh sons. Were they the same tales with which he had captivated the bishop's clerks and scribes?
As luck and River Rhodanus's currents would have it, they had not reached Tarascon by the time the sun dropped below the trees on the river's west bank. They drew up along a sandy spit downstream of a summer island—so called because it did not exist in winter or spring, when the water was high. Though no trees grew on it, several dead ones had snagged on its upstream end, and there was plenty of wood for a cheerful fire, where crew and passengers alike settled when their stomachs were full.