The Veil Of Years - Isle Beyond Time Part 15

Part Three - Dawn

Pierette's Journal

I can safely conclude that the shadowy apparitions that have disgusted, distressed, and even terrified me are not unrelated to the answer I seek. They are palpable expressions of the principle of the Law of the Conservation of Good and Evil. I am forced to conclude that the balance they seek to restore with their westward migration is the one that Minho's spell upset.

That they are so evident in Armorica, but not in Provence, suggests that there is still time to accomplish my task, because the disturbance of balance they embody is still localized. Further, the shadows are by definition Otherworldly, and can perhaps best be described not as objects but as bare phenomena: voids in the veil between the worlds. But it is a terrifying Otherworld those tiny portals open upon: that realm of greasy blackness and crimson light might well be what Christian visionaries see, that they call h.e.l.l. It is frightening to consider that the nearer I approach Minho's private vision of heaven, the deeper must I plunge through its opposite to get there.

I have surmised another phenomenon, not directly observable: just as the world, perhaps the universe, expands as man seeks its limits, so the past becomes more remote-and the future also-as scholars contemplate the infinite. Snorri and Brendan's voyages implied the former, and it is rea.s.suring to believe that explorers will never run out of new places to discover, and ibn Saul will never lack for new mysteries to debunk and destroy. It is also rea.s.suring to consider that the very nature of the Black Time may be to recede, not to arrive.

If my hypothesis is correct, then the original end points, the original break in the Wheel of Time, are no longer the ends of it, for new eras and eons are being formed in future and past alike. Thus the proximate cause of the break-the terrible, destructive spell gone awry that caused it-will not be found at the beginning, but somewhere along the way; not at the end, but centuries, even millennia before those ever-receding moments.

Chapter 24 - The Long.

Voyage Ends Ibn Saul and Lovi departed at the peak of the tide, without additional parting words except conventional well wishes. Even when their vessel went hull-down in the distance, Pierrette lingered on the wharf as the water slowly receded, wet and dark.

When the tide went out, the foot of the stone wharf ab.u.t.ted an expanse of shiny, dark mud. Pierrette scooped a handful of sediment and kneaded it, squeezing it between her fingers until it had the consistency of potter's clay, then pressed it flat on a worn stone bollard. Brushing drying flakes from her hand, she worked two fingers into the neck of her pouch, and pulled forth the little gold cylinder. She set it at the leftmost edge of the flattened sediment, pressed it firmly in place, and then rolled it across the smooth surface. As it moved from left to right its impressed patterns remained in the soft material. First appeared the octopus, its tentacles now stretching leftward, two of them splayed upward, one down, and the rest reaching out toward two hitherto unnoticed dolphins now leaping from a wavy sea.

Pierrette rolled the seal until the pattern began to repeat itself, then replaced the glittering bauble in her pouch. She pondered what lay before her: Minho's engraved invitation to her, and her alone. A larger dolphin, with a star for its eye, lay left of the other two, and above them. A line traced between the three would form half a right angle with the bottom of the impression. Several other scattered stars completed the image of the telltale constellation that she recognized.

At the base of the image was a wavy line broken by upward-pointing teeth, and on the flattened top of the central tooth was a tiny rectangle, faced with three not-quite-semicylindrical marks, and surmounted by a large star. To Pierrette, the shape of those marks resembled the black-and-vermilion columns of the entrance to Anselm's keep-and the columns of Minho's palace.

Across the top of the impressed image were ten raised half-circles that she interpreted, knowing theengraver's intent, as waning moons. There before her was not just a picture, but a map, a simple star chart, and a rudimentary calendar. Tonight, she knew, was not only the tenth half-moon, but the autumnal equinox as well. Had Minho foreseen even that?

There before her was the route she must take to meet her dream lover in the real world, to step from a boat onto the solid ground of . . . the Fortunate Isles.

She sc.r.a.ped the mud from the worn stone, kneaded it into a ball, and then tossed it onto the tidal flat, where it immediately merged with the silt, the stranded seaweed, and the scattering of empty mussel sh.e.l.ls.

Boats were plentiful in Gesocribate. Refugees-villagers and fishermen from the length of the coast beyond the gullet-had trickled in over several years, fleeing Viking raids on vulnerable coastal villages.

For most of them, the craft they had arrived in were not necessities of their livelihood thereafter.

Pierrette bought one such idle craft for two silver denarii. Perhaps, she suspected, she only bought the right to provision it and sail it away, because the master of the little wooden wharf where it was tied alongside many others was clearly not a boatman himself, and she doubted he had clear t.i.tle to any of them. He asked a high price for a gilded galley of six oars that leaned on keel and rotted bilge ash.o.r.e, and placed low values on workaday vessels in the water, half sunken, sloshing with green duckweed.

Those craft, their seams swollen tight, were better off than the pretty, rich man's toy ash.o.r.e, whose planks had wracked and spread in dry air and sunlight.

Bailed dry, her boat stayed dry. She provisioned it with four kegs of water, a tight cedar box that held her few possessions, a dense, dry wheel of cheese, several flat salted fish, and a sack of crisp, unleavened black wheat biscuits. She wedged a clay pot of honey and a little cask of fresh cider by the boat's stem.

The boat's woolen spritsail, rolled on its yard, was striped with black mold and could not be trusted. She negotiated for a better one-as it happened, a bright red sail from the seam-sprung galley. Dry air, unkind to watercraft, was friendlier to cloth.

She paid the innkeeper's son to care for Gustave. "My little boat is no place for a donkey," she whispered to the beast, stroking his nose. "The boy has promised to give you a handful of grain every day, as well as your fodder. You would be wise not to kick or bite him." Gustave snorted his disdain.

When Pierrette approached her boat, there was her beast, his tether bitten through and dragging on the wharf. "Oh, no! Did the boy say something about 'work' to you? A small boat is no place for a donkey."

The stableboy arrived, panting. Gustave glanced at him, and stepped nimbly into the boat, and planted all four hooves against the spread of the bow planks, as if pegged and joined in place as firmly as the timbers.

Pierrette sighed, and proffered the boy a coin. "How soon can you bring the fodder and grain you sold me to the dock? Clearly, he intends to go with me." The boy eyed her as skeptically as Gustave might have, had the situation been reversed. "An hour," he said.

Pierrette pushed away from the dock at dawn, two days after her companions had departed from the main wharf. Would their paths ever cross again? The sunny streets of Ma.s.salia, the great market above the Roman dec.u.ma.n.u.s, and the little tavern opposite ibn Saul's doorway might as well have been inanother world entirely. Another . . . an other . . . an Otherworld. The last thing Pierrette had seen, as she rowed out of the sh.o.r.e's wind shadow, was a cl.u.s.ter of dark, formless shapes huddling at the end of the dock, as if yearning to follow her. . . .

She searched her craft from stem to sternpost for the slightest hint of an unnatural shadow lurking behind keg, crate, or coil of line, remembering her guide on Sena, crumpling in a rattle of dry bones. She did not wish to be responsible for transporting such a thing to Minho's fair land, where everything evil or even unsightly had been banished on that long-ago day when he had wrested his kingdom from the world of time's pa.s.sage.

She sailed outward beyond the gullet into a sea unmarked by other sails. On long, time-consuming tacks against the westerly wind (now shifting northerly as winter approached apace), she had many uneventful hours to ponder. She was now sure that for the small evils wending ever westward, Sena had been only a stepping-stone on the way to their true destination, the focus of their yearning. If she drew lines on a map, westward from the Liger's mouth, southwestward from Gesocribate, they would converge precisely at the patch of sea where she and her companions aboardSh.o.r.e Bird had seen unmoving clouds hovering about the peak of an unseen island, which was surely a ring of black volcanic crags . . . The shadows'

destination, one and all, the focus of their mindless craving, was the Fortunate Isles.

She now understood what her true mission was to be. The G.o.ddessMa was mistaken-for Minho's kingdom to recede into the mists of unprovable legend was no solution. Moridunnon's master, the Eater of G.o.ds, was also in error, whether he wanted Pierrette to succeed or fail. In one sense, if she did asMa wished, there would be no counterbalance to his growing power, no single realm where evil did not exist.

He would consume ever more of what remained, and the Black Time would come, when at last he was sated. But in another sense, his dominion would remain forever incomplete.

Minho, also, was a victim of flawed reasoning . . . but she did not dare to dwell on that. When at last she confronted him in the flesh, would the love he professed for her be strong enough to overwhelm the disastrous news she would bring him?

Pierrette leaned against the mast of her little boat. The steering oar was lashed in place, and she had nothing to do. A firm, steady breeze filled the little crimson sail, and she squinted past it, into the newly risen sun. Her last tack had been a long one, heeled over hard, sailing much closer to the wind's eye than a square-sailed craft could have done. Now she approached the stationary wisps of feathery cloud from the west, propelled not just by wind, but by rolling swells as high as her vessel's stubby mast, swells that first lifted her craft's stern, then raised the entire vessel enough so she could see for many miles. Several times, at the glossy crests of such waves, she believed she had seen a dark speck-a peak, jutting above the horizon?-at the base of those trailing clouds.

At last, finally, Pierrette was alone. Was she lonely? Many times, she had been lonely, even in crowded cities and marketplaces. She had not been close to Gregorius, and Lovi's a.s.sumptions and expectations had been an insurmountable barrier between them, but she thought with affection upon ibn Saul, and she missed the steady, quiet companionship of Yan Oors. Her mentor Anselm was a thousand miles away.

Yes, she was alone, but she did not think she was really lonely.

Besides, there were distinct advantages to being alone. Grasping a wooden water cup firmly, she reached over the lee rail and filled it with salt water. She murmured soft words, an ancient spell from one of Anselm's books, then raised the cup to her lips; the water tasted as pure and sweet as if she had dipped it fresh from the Mother's own sacred spring. She would not have dared utter those words (orafterward, sip that water) in the presence of others, except perhaps Yan Oors or the sprite Guihen. But then, they were themselves magical beings and ordinary folk did not even see them unless they wished to be seen.

Alone, she was free to behave as she wished. Alone, there was no one to doubt her magic. Of course, that was a double-edged sword: without impartial observers, how could she say that what she did, and the results of the spells she uttered, were not simply illusion or even delusion? Alone, she existed entirely in a subjective universe where whatever she chose to believe was not liable to contradiction. When the tall, rolling swells lifted her small boat high, she could now distinctly see the black, jagged cliffs that rose from their encompa.s.sing bank of concealing fog. Had there been others present, would they have seen them also? Would she herself have seen them? Who could say? Gustave could not speak, and at any rate showed no interest in scenery. His feed was stowed beneath the sternmost thwart, and he remained in the bow. His eyes, consequently, were most frequently fixed aftwards.

Pierrette saw them, however, and she knew what they were: fragments of the ancient caldera, the barrier islands that sheltered the inner bays, harbors, and wharves of the Fortunate Isles. As those black cliffs rose higher and higher before her, she adjusted the steering oar and let the sheet out just a trifle, because the gentle breeze that bore her forward had swung entirely aft. Even when her vessel nosed into the obscuring fog and she could not see to steer, she was confident that her boat would make no leeway, and would reemerge unharmed by rocks, reefs, or shoals.

And so it was. In the s.p.a.ce of a single breath, her boat's prow slid out of the fog in the middle of a broad channel between cliffs so high and steep they seemed to lean inward, as if the strip of sky visible above was narrower than the channel through which she glided, below. Hardly any sunlight penetrated that gouge in the monstrous crater's rim, but ahead it sparkled on the water and illuminated warm, green tree-clad slopes, brown, fresh-turned fields, springtime-green ones whose crops were just pushing up from below, and others where golden-yellow grain waved in a mellow breeze, mature and ready to harvest. Now she was sure-only in the Fortunate Isles were crops planted year round, with seedlings, fruiting stalks, and stubble abiding in adjacent fields.

Now ahead, lesser craters' rims were broken in places by channels that led further inward, toward the very center of the Fortunate Isles. Despite the craggy terrain on all sides, the breeze that filled her sail remained exactly aft, and she made no leeway to one side or the other. She adjusted the steering oar again, to bring her bow directly in line with one of those channels. On either side, the cliffs fell away, and she could see great waterways that diminished with distance and their own curvature. Those, she knew, were the concentric circular waterways of which Plato had written, in the land that he had named Atlantis. The Atlantis of legend was many times the extent of the Fortunate Isles-because the unit of measure in Plato's time, thestadion , could be either one eighth of a mile or a multiple of that, and deciding which measurement to use was a matter of context. Writing of such a fantastic, marvelous land, Plato, and later his readers, of course, a.s.sumed the larger, more fantastic, more marvelous measure.

But even one hundredth the size of legendary Atlantis, this place was fantastic enough. Buildings of white and golden stone dotted the slopes that ran down to the waterfront, where broad wharves stood clean-swept and empty; once, many centuries ago, those wharves would have bustled with carts, wagons, and laboring stevedores, because the kings of this land had controlled all the commerce on the Mediterranean Sea, and all ships docked here, for their cargoes to be inspected and taxed.

Here and there, dark upon the water, Pierrette saw fishing boats, oared, without sails. The appearance of anything larger, she knew, would have been a rare and momentous event on these quiet waters, for that was the way Minho, ruler of these Isles, wished it to be. Had he not wished her to be here, she was sure the friendly breeze that bore her inward would instead have beaten against her boat's prow anddriven her back, the fog that wreathed the outer beaches would have obscured every channel, and she would have run up on jagged rocks, or would have found herself, confused, back at sea and heading away from the Fortunate Isles.

Here she was-and it was real, not a dream, not a vision. The cliffs were solid black stone, the trees at their feet were genuine, and their leaves shimmered in the palpable breeze that pushed also against her sail. She was here, and the long voyage she had-really-begun as a small child in Citharista, when first she dreamed of the sorcerer-king with the golden bull's-head helm, was soon to end. . . .

Chapter 25 - An.

Inauspicious Welcome She heard the singing before she rounded the last headland. A hundred voices, or two, or three, floated across the water and reverberated from the black cliffs above. There! Trickles of smoke rose from braziers atop fat columns, at the end of a projecting wharf. Even from her distance, Pierrette could see the undulating movement of a white-clad crowd that covered the wharf and the sh.o.r.e beyond. She could smell the smoke.

An important ceremonial occasion was in process-from her many visions, she knew that white, Egyptian-style garments were worn on formal occasions and in the presence of the islands' king. She deftly adjusted her steering oar, let out the sheet, and altered course toward another wharf; it would not do to sail disruptively into the middle of some solemn ritual.

High above the main wharf, at the end of what appeared to be a processional road flanked by more gleaming green stone columns, stood the portico of Minho's palace. A chill ran up her ribs and down her spine: it was real-vermilion-and-black pillars, and beyond it, the windowed, multistory edifice itself.

She edged up against the mossy stone wharf and, slacking her sail, leaped ash.o.r.e with a line in hand.

Methodically, with the force of long habit, she secured the bow and stern to stone bollards. Only then did she pause to look around.

What now? Closer than ever before to her goal, the site of her childhood fantasies, she had never felt farther away. There was a road at the foot of the wharf that surely connected with the site of the white-clad gathering, but how could she tread it? Was she to shoulder her way through the crowd, or find someone in charge and demand to be taken to the palace? She glanced down at her frayed tunic and cracked leatherbracae -the gulf between this moment and her vision of herself on a gold-and-ivory throne had never seemed vaster. If only she could justbe there, and not have toget there. If only she could float down into the palace on a cloud or on seagull's wings and transform herself in a poof of vapor into a visiting princess clad in silk and fine wool . . .

A clatter of unshod hooves on stone paving shattered her fantasy. Gustave! "Come back!" she called after the beast, who was already at the landward end of the pier. Gustave ignored her and edged into the brush with fresh, green leaves already dangling from between his mobile lips. Ah, well. He would not stray far. She could retrieve him later. Now, she had to make the best of her inauspicious arrival. Climbing back aboard, she cracked open her small trunk, from which wafted the aroma of cedar.

Careful not to let its contents drag in the boat's sloppy bilge, she shook out tightly folded blue cloth: a long, sleeveless dress. It was wrinkled, of course, but it was fine wool and would soon smooth in this sweet, moist air. With an armful of clothing, she returned to the wharf, and quickly slipped out of her tunic and into the soft blue dress.

She cinched her waist with a tan leather belt set with round goldphalerae . Two gold fibulae connected by a fine-wrought chain secured her soft Gallicsagus , a white wool cloak with a hood. When Pierrette admired the fibulae from the side, they were rampant stags with coral antlers. When she viewed them from a different angle, they were gnomish faces with inlaid coral hair-shifting, curvilinear patterns difficult to focus on. She looked for Gustave, but the donkey had retreated into the brush. Just as well. No one would try to steal him.

From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimmer of white beyond the tamarisk brush along the road linking the many wharves. Someone was coming her way. She hefted her leather pouch. It would hardly compliment her nice clothes, and there was little likelihood that she would need flints to light a fire, or coins. She emptied its contents on a flat-topped stone bollard, and quickly sorted out coins, flints, and oddments from her travels-including the gold cylinder seal. She no longer needed that; its purpose had been served, getting her here. The remainder of the contents she returned to the pouch, which she hanged around her neck and tucked beneath the bloused front of her dress. She reached back to unbind her long, black hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Now she felt like a woman, if not like visiting royalty.

At first she thought the figure limping hurriedly toward her was an old woman with long gray hair straggling almost to her waist, but the harsh voice demonstrated otherwise. "Why did you do this?" the ugly little man snapped. "You've ruined everything! I told the king you'd be nothing but trouble, and now you've proven that-trouble for me! I now look a fool in people's eyes."

"I . . . what are you talking about?" Pierrette spoke in the staccato syllables of the Minoans' Asian language. "I only just arrived. I have done nothing at all."

"This is the wrong wharf! You should not be here."

"I'm sorry. Are you the harbormaster? Just direct me to the proper landing, and I'll move my boat there."

"Harbormaster indeed! I am Hatiphas, chief adviser to immortal Minho, and keeper of the palace."

"Adviser to Minho? Where is he? I must see him." Hearing her dream lover's name uttered, for the first time, by living human lips, made her heart pound with excitement.

"Why didn't you land over there?" Hatiphas snarled. His eyes were huge and dark, entirely ringed with kohl. His nose was sharp as a knife blade, and his teeth were gapped and stained. Pierrette immediately disliked him.

"There? Where all those people are gathered? Why would I do that? I didn't want to disrupt the ceremony or celebration."

"The celebration is for you, you fool! The king is there, expecting you! Everyone has waited all day, since first your sail was seen beyond the sea-gates! But now you've ruined everything!"

"For . . . for me? Why would anyone go to all that effort for me?" "Hasn't he mooned and moaned about you for thousands of years? Haven't I had to listen? How could he not know?"

"I haven't lived eighteen years, let alone thousands."

"Didn't he meet you once, in a painted cave at Sormiou, and didn't you hunt a deer together? Wasn't he with you on the Plain of Stones, where the druid Cunotar sought your destruction, and didn't he save your miserable life? Didn't you cuddle with him beside the hot, fuming pools at Entremont, in the Roman camp? Have you forgotten all that?"

"You must be mad. That wasn't Minho." Pierrette's mind raced. She had hunted with the golden Aam in an ancient time when elephants and rhinoceri-the fabled unicorns-grazed on the green hills near Ma.s.salia, millennia before the city arose. But Aam had been tall and yellow-haired, and Minho was dark.

And on the Plain of Stones, her almost-lover had been Alkides, a Greek trader in cattle, and their meeting had transpired seven hundred years before the Christian era began, when the great cities of Gaul were but villages, and Roma was a collection of mud hovels on two of its seven hills. At Entremont, she had dallied with the Roman consul Calvinus, and had supped with the historian Polybius, but Minho? No.

Hatiphas was wrong. She shook her head.

"You little idiot! It was the spellMondradd in Mon ! Did you think you could use it to part the Veil of Years, to voyage through the Otherworld to those long-past times, without its echoes being felt the world around? Of course Minho was there, gazing from behind the eyes of your stone-age hunter, touching you with the calloused hands of that uncouth Greek cowhand, and growing hot and faint when you shamelessly pressed your b.r.e.a.s.t.s against that Roman's hairy chest! Bah! And didn't I have to endure his tantrums every time, when he begged you to come to him, and you slipped away instead?"

Minho! He had been there, riding as an unnoticed pa.s.senger in the minds of the men she had loved. That revelation did not please her as once it might have. Instead, she felt violated, as if the urchin Cletus had spied on her while she bathed, or as if she had startled a stranger prowling in her bedroom. And that was the third-or the fourth-time this mean-spirited little man had called her fool, or idiot . . .

"What are you doing?" Hatiphas snarled as she untied the springline that secured her boat.

"I'm leaving. You were to welcome me-with great ceremony, I surmise-and you've done nothing but insult me, and . . ."

"No! Please stay. Minho will . . ."

"Will have your head on a platter? Will have you horsewhipped? I shouldn't doubt it."

With visible effort, Hatiphas quelled his warring emotions-his exasperation with her and his anger at her insults to him. "Please. Allow me to escort you. My master eagerly awaits . . ."

"It is there a back way in? I don't want to push through a crowd of strangers."

"But . . . yes. There is a path up the mountainside. I will take you that way." Pierrette knew that she had won this encounter, but she also understood, from the majordomo'ssullen glare, that she had made an enemy of him, and that the sweet, placid Fortunate Isles of her visions were indeed a fantasy that did not exist in this, the real world. Considering the circ.u.mstances, Gustave would have to fend for himself awhile.

Chapter 26 - The.

Sorcerer-King The path Hatiphas chose proceeded by lengths of short, almost imperceptible slopes interrupted by polished malachite-and-jasper stairways. Each path was smoothly graveled with blue stones too tiny and angular to turn an ankle. Flowering thyme and blue bugleweed clumped beside the path, but no single weed or plant had the effrontery to push up between the stones.

The green-and-russet stairs gleamed, scuff-free and unswayed by wear. Even the occasional scattering of leaves fallen from nearby trees gave the impression of deliberate floral arrangements, compositions that elevated the mason's craft and the sweeper's lapses to an air of studied disarray.

As they ascended-and the alternations of stair and easy path precluded even the thought of breathlessness-Pierrette observed that the fruiting bushes and trees nestling in mossy pockets amid the rocks were themselves elements in the artist's composition, drawing the eye from azure stones to cerulean blossoms to the celestine arch of a clear, cloudless sky. Those were exactly complemented by the ocher and vermilion of pine bark, intensified by the umber of oak branches, brightened by a hundred shades of green-malachite stair treads, the springtime hue of young maple leaves, the silvery verdigris of olives, the deep, relaxing shade of broadleaf oaks.

Now this, she reflected, was her vision of the Isles-every element as if designed by a sensitive G.o.ddess to please the eye and mind from every aspect or vantage. Even the white palace walls and the bronze gate-cast in a single mold, lovingly burnished-were foreshadowed by shifting vegetal hues as white alyssum and brazen-flowered spurge appeared first intermittently, then predominantly, then in entirety, as the walker progressed. Reaching the palace wall and postern, Pierrette perceived them as floating effortlessly over a billowy sea of white blossoms. The path was now dazzling white marble, and beyond and above the palace roofs, select c.u.mulus clouds puffed up in studied repet.i.tion of the themes and colors expressed in the blooms below.