The Veil Of Years - Isle Beyond Time Part 8

Shortly thereafter, the terrain became rougher, their trail not much more difficult, but narrower as it threaded between black, craggy outcrops. Gregorius moved ahead of her. Pierrette had much to think about, and was glad to be alone. Her contemplated "solution" to the problem of Lovi was a simple one: she would reveal herself as a woman, not a boy, and Lovi would know that his infatuation was baseless, its object unattainable. But she did not want to do that yet-and not until she herself was well on the way to the Fortunate Isles, alone, prepared to throw ibn Saul off her trail, or more likely her wake.

The matter for contemplation was the small, evil shadows, and their unexplained migrations. Was it a coincidence that the lines of power within the earth, like the one whose course they now traced, had also shifted westward? She thought of the shadows as the lingering aftermath of all ugly events-spilled blood and death, pain trans.m.u.ted by spells like the village priest's, and occasions perhaps less trivial, and more.

Had the displacement of the entire earth-pattern caused them to uproot themselves and to migrate west in search of some new balance of good and evil?

But if that trend were as she feared, with more things being defined as evil and fewer as good, then there could be no new balance, for the scales would hold evil's rock in one pan, and goodness's pebble in the other. In that case, were the small evils only tumbling effortlessly down some unseen slope toward a great gathering of unthinkable horror-and were she and her companions rushing w.i.l.l.y-nilly into its midst?

The lure of Minho's sunny kingdom warred in her heart with that ugly speculation, and her conflict was made worse by the commission the G.o.ddess had given her: to destroy the sorcerer-king, and thus his kingdom.

Chapter 16 - Moridunnon.

As the day wore on, Pierrette and Gustave found themselves well out ahead of the others, and when she came upon a tiny meadow sheltered by sun-warmed boulders, with a lightning-felled tree that promised dry wood for a cheery fire, she stopped and gathered branches, then knelt to light the smallest ones. She laid her pouch, with her flints for firemaking, on a flat stone. She would not use them.

She had not dared employ her firemaking spell when the others were near, being unsure how it might manifest itself, but now was the perfect chance. She needed to know if the last time had been a fluke of some local magic, or something entirely more sinister. Bending low, with her arm outstretched toward the tinder and twigs, she subvocalized the words. . . .

At first she thought the spell had not worked at all. No sparks flew from her fingertip to the charred linentinder. No small flames licked the heaped twigs and shavings. No trickle of smoke arose. Her shadow fell across only the inert makings of an unlit fire. Her shadow . . . Pierrette jerked upright: her shadow, where no shadow should have fallen. The sun was low and west, not overhead.

She did not dare turn and look for the source of the light that fell on her back and shoulders. The edge of her shadow was haloed with dull crimson as if it smoldered like tinder, but without smoke. Slowly, cautiously, she arose. . . .

The greasy red glow was not sunlight from the west. It emanated from all the places no sunlight fell: from the dark clefts of the dead tree, from the shadowy patch where a boulder's east face masked the feathery gra.s.s, from every lightless cranny that ordinarily went unnoticed, because eyes slid over such darknesses, where there was nothing for them to see.

But now there was . . . something. The b.l.o.o.d.y light emanated from everything that was unlit, and cast shadows of its own making, shadows of shadows that everywhere smoldered at the edges, a hideous, heatless glow. And someone was watching her! She could feel it. Her eyes darted this way and that . . . and then fixed upon her pouch. Its drawstring was loose, and there, on the flat rock, lay her serpent's egg-and Cunotar.

"What is this place?" She heard his harsh voice in her head, not with her ears. "This is not our sunny land, girl." How odd-he sounded almost . . . afraid?

"I should think you'd feel right at home. Shall I break my egg, and let you loose here?" Of course she would not do that. Cunotar was not only a druid and a sorcerer, but a warrior of renown, and at the moment of his confinement, he still had his sword . . .

"Thank you, but no. I am free of the Nameless One in here. I do not wish to enter his service again. But if you're not careful . . . he'll have you instead."

Despite her terror, Pierrette was still capable of speech. "I am amazed. Didn't he eat your soul, and aren't you his slave?"

"My soul is my own, and I prefer it that way. Besides, have you forgotten? I received my death wound, thanks to you. Out there, I would again bleed, and would die. Even this limited kind of life is better than death-for now."

"Only for now? Is there anything at all you'd deem worth dying for? I can't imagine what it would be."

"Nor I; but should it come to me, you'll be the first to know. Now put me back in your pouch before . . . someone . . . discovers me. This ugly light . . ."

Pierrette did as he asked. She pulled the drawstring tight, but still the sick, red light persisted. Wherever it fell on her, Pierrette felt dirty. Her skin looked gray and drained, every pore a pock of corruption, every downy hair a moldy tendril crawling with unseen lice. She did not dare breathe, for fear of sucking in something unspeakable. . . .

"Ah! There you are!" Ibn Saul's voice washed over her like a cleansing breeze. "What a lovely spot.

Shelter, firewood, and soft gra.s.s for our bedding." The unnatural shadows shredded and dissipated with the clean, cold force of his scholarly disbelief in such things. Suddenly the little meadow was again awash in ordinary sunlight, and Pierrette's usual shadow stretched eastward across the wavy gra.s.s. "Did you lose your flint, boy?" asked the scholar. "I see you've laid tinder."

"I . . . I had a cramp in my calf, so I stood to relieve it. I'll light the fire now." Pierrette reached for her pouch, and the flint she kept there that she would use now, and from now on, to light fires. She squatted, turning so ibn Saul would not see her bleak expression. Now she knew. Indeed the nature of this dark, forested land was qualitatively different. If the tiny fire-spell evoked such horridness, then what of her other spells, so laboriously learned? If she whispered words to give her soul magpie's wings, would she flutter instead on black, leathery appendages, chittering and squeaking between tiny sharp teeth, her face become not a graceful beak but wrinkled and flat, her eyes filled with the red glow of smoldering evil?

She hardly dared contemplate what might result from a greater spell, likeMondradd in Mon , which thinned the veil between this world and another-because what other world would there be? Would she find herself plunging headlong into the Christians' h.e.l.l, or into the Black Time itself? Would she wrench the world itself out of its proper course, shredding the lines of power that bound it as a maddened porpoise shredded a fishing net?

But then, what of Cunotar? Were his words true? Was he indeed free of the Eater of G.o.ds (and of mortal souls, also) within the refuge of her egg? Was he thus a free agent? Then at least something good had come from her foolish attempt to use magic in this forbidding land. He had certainly sounded less hateful and bitter than ever before.

She struck sparks into the charred cloth, and blew on the tiny red pinhole of combustion that formed, then fed hair-fine shavings to it . . . and the flame that sprang up was yellow and fresh, the puff of smoke white and clean. Once several split twigs as thick as her thumb were burning cheerily, she laid dry branches atop them, carefully, so they did not crush out the flames or smother them. Then she stood, but there was no liveliness to her motion. Her shoulders sagged like a crone's, and she felt old, as if there was no life ahead of her, only the shadowy blackness, the red funeral pyre, the gray ashes, forever.

If she had been able to choose her own path, at that moment, she would have turned back. What use, after all, was a sorceress who dared not utter a spell? What use was a terrified girl who must cleave by the scholar, because his obliviousness to the things she feared was her only protection against them?

"We must be almost upon Moridunnon's stronghold, now," said ibn Saul, while packing his instruments following his daily sightings the following noonday.

"Well then," said Lovi, disgustedly, "where is it?"

They had combed the countryside for any sign of habitation. Ibn Saul sent each of them up separate hills to search for telltale columns of smoke, whether from a palace or a village, for a glimpse of any man-made construction, whether a shining roof of golden tiles or the mossy terra-cotta of a half-collapsed Roman villa. No one had seen a trickle of smoke or as much as a patch of yellow thatch protruding from the endless expanse of greenery.

"I don't understand," said the scholar. "My calculations indicate it should be right here." He stamped his foot for emphasis, or as if the earth itself were stubbornly to blame, concealing Moridunnon's residence behind some copse, crag, or bank of fog, like that which now began to condense about them. "Exactly right here," he said, and Pierrette reflected that his calculations had been remarkably accurate, but not . . . quite . . . precise enough. Her own, made after sightings from three separate hilltops, with the advantage of her map that showed the exact intersection of the earth-line they had followed with another that trended east and west, placed the exact spot a few hundred paces to the west. . . . She could barely see the slope of the hill, now, the curiously round, steep hill overgrown with tall, ancient oaks and gnarly beeches whose roots penetrated to a depth that only hundreds upon hundreds of years of growth could explain.

While the others made camp and sought dry wood for a fire-not a hopeful task, in this moist forest-she slipped away and began to climb that slope, soon emerging above the blanket of fog that thickened below. This was the place-this mound, where the two lines of power intersected. This was the palace of the mage Moridunnon. Only there was no palace, just great old trees.

If she had dared, Pierrette might have whispered a spell to clear away illusions and thus verify what she believed, that even now, Moridunnon or one of his unseen minions was watching her, waiting to see what she was going to do. But she did nothing, except to brush some small creature's droppings from a fallen log, and to sit upon it. She would not speak magical words here, in this terrible land, where even the most innocent spells evoked sickly shadows of shadows, edged in greasy red flame. Eventually, she was sure, someone . . . something . . . would tire of her sitting on its roof, as it were, and might invite her inside.

Dusk was still hours away. Here, above the damp and chill of the foggy forest, she was quite comfortable. Perhaps-as she realized later-too comfortable, because before too long, her eyelids began to droop, and . . .

She sprang to her feet. What had she heard? Was it a m.u.f.fled thump, and a wordless expostulation, as if someone had tripped on a root? Was it the jingling of tiny bells? Below and all around, the fog lay undisturbed, except-there! A deer! It was a deer, come to browse above the fog, its antlers shiny even in the dull light of the sunless day. But no deer's horns would gleam so, this time of year. They would be no more than little nubbins covered in velvety skin.

It was no deer. It was not Cernunnos, the horned G.o.d either, but a man, an old man, dressed in skins and tatters, wearing atop his head a wooly cap from which protruded a pair of lopsided branching horns.

His yellow-gray hair and beard were a tangle of burrs, seeds, and twigs. A young pigeon hawk, a merlin, perched on his shoulder.

Pierrette giggled. She could not help it. The old fellow was standing on one leg like a stork, with one arm outstretched, and one eye tightly shut. He teetered there, just at the edge of the fog, only kept upright by means of a staff whose upper end branched and rebranched, a staff that jangled with the tinny notes of little bells, attached like flowers at the end of each bare twig.

"Oh, stop that!" she said, unthinkingly waving a hand to brush away the spell he was casting at her, the keo-dru-videcta , the magic fog. "You can't get rid of me that easily." Only then did she realize she had indeed countered magic with magic-without unseemly result. "Are you Moridunnon?"

"Am I great? Am I strong?" He looked down at himself in deprecation. He was skinny and ragged.

"Are youmor'h ? Are youdunnos ?" she threw his own back at him.Mor'h-i-dunnos meant "great and strong."

"Is this place a fortress by the sea?" he asked. "Mor" could also mean "sea," and a "dunnum" was a fortress.

"Put your foot down, and open your other eye," Pierrette demanded. "Perhaps you will see for yourselfand stop asking silly questions. You are Moridunnon, the great sorcerer, and I am sitting on the roof of your palace-or perhaps on a terrace. I cannot tell, for all these trees."

"Moridunnon," he said, rolling the syllables around in his mouth as if they were acorns. "Moridunnon.

Hereabouts, they call me 'Myrddin,' and they have forgotten what my name means. Who are you, girl, that you remember?"

Pierrette was momentarily taken aback-she was, as always, dressed as a boy. The old man's sight was not, then, as weak as his beady little eyes pretended. It was better than Lovi's, Gregorius's, or the observant ibn Saul's.

"I am Pierrette of Citharista, apprentice to Ansulim of the Fortunate Isles." She used Anselm's Minoan name, not the one people at home knew him by.

"Ansulim? Anselm? But that was years ago! Ages ago. Surely he has had the grace to grow old and die, by now?"

"You haven't. Why should he?"

"Indeed? Anselm lives? How remarkable. Come! I must hear more of this. Come."

"Where?" Pierrette looked around. The woods were as old and as thick as ever.

"Here!" She peered where he tapped his jingling staff, between great twisted roots, and saw a dark opening lined with mossy rocks. "We'll use the back door."

"Down there? It looks dark and wet."

"Do you believe everything you see? Apprentice, indeed! Hasn't Anselm taught you anything?"

Stung by his scorn, she lowered herself into the hole in the ground. Probing with her feet, she discerned what felt like a step, then another. It was a stairway. The hole became a tunnel, a corridor leading downward. She heard the old man's tread behind her, and was-slightly-rea.s.sured. But then she heard what he was mumbling, and the blood in her veins turned to ice. . . .

"Mondradd in Mon," he intoned. "Borabd ora perdo." The ancient words flowed, never repeating themselves, yet always almost the same.

"No!" she exclaimed. "You mustn't say that! It's dangerous here, where . . ."

"Where what? How else can I invite you in, if I don't open the door? What's wrong with you, anyway?"

He proceeded to utter the rest of the spell. "Merdrabd or vern," he croaked, "Arfaht ara camdo." A door indeed opened, a door to . . . the Otherworld. It was a portal that had never twice opened, for Pierrette, into the same place, or even the same time. What would it open upon now?

She had no choice. She stepped ahead, and heard his footsteps, sounding much firmer now, behind her.

Ahead, a rectangular line of warm, yellow light limned what she believed was a door. "Don't just stand there," Moridunnon rumbled. "Push it open." A chill coursed up her spine, then down her ribs. That was not the voice of a crotchety old man. She felt herself pushed from behind, and the door swung easily, silently aside when she lurched against it.

* * *The light of a thousand sweet wax candles washed over her, from every side, and from above, where clear, crystalline gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s hung from gold-and-electrum chandeliers, magnifying each candle's light twofold. Rich paneling of polished yew rose from a floor of white marble veined with gold, and overhead, beyond the dazzle, she discerned a tracery of dark, carved beams. The air was thick with the aroma of beeswax and honey, with just a trace of something richer . . . "Ah, yes!" said Moridunnon, sniffing.

"Dinner. Come. A cup of chill Etruscan wine on the balcony, first, though. This way."

She stared at him. Moridunnon was no longer old. He was . . . ageless. His hair was not dirty gray, but purest white, combed loosely back, and held there by a gold chaplet with little branching horns of silver.

His rags and skins were now a soft, thick cloak, a Celtic weave of crisscrossed maroon and black, with a collar of fur like the mane of a Roman lion, but white as ermine. His beard was neat and short, his mustaches trimmed above his lip, his eyebrows no longer bushy but arched, the left one slightly pointed as he raised it, as if asking her approval of what she saw. His young pigeon hawk spread its wings gracefully on his shoulder.

"Why are you surprised?" he asked in a firm, mellow voice. "You obviously knew the spellMondradd in Mon , when I voiced it. You must know what door it opens."

"The door to the past," she replied softly. "The portal to the Otherworld and the broken Wheel of Time.

But this is a new thing to me. You are no longer old, but I . . . I am yet as I was."

He shook his head sadly. "My appearance results from a separate spell entirely. It is a trifle, a vanity, that you might see me as I . . . as I remember myself, when I was indeedMor'h-i-dunum ."

"My master Anselm," she said pensively, "has never looked as young as you."

"He is older than I, by a thousand years or so. Even Minho's magic can't change that."

"Minho? Do you know him also? Tell me-where are his Fortunate Isles? I must find them, and . . ."

"Of course. I'll show you where they are. But first wine, and then a slab of that fine venison even now turning above the fire . . ."

She followed his lead. He pushed through a doorway she could have sworn was the one that they had entered by, which led up a staircase that felt just like the one she had recently ascended, but was well lit and dry, and the upper steps were flooded with light that could only be a clear, sunny day.

The wide bronze-railed balcony was not Anselm's sunny terrace overlooking the azure Mediterranean Sea, but it could have been. The magic that held the sun overhead at perpetual midday was surely the same, but the scenery was not. The dark forest that stretched from horizon to horizon, broken by stony gray ridges, looked much as it would in a later time, but east and west of her vantage point was a roadway paved with great, flat, square-hewn stones. Half were red, and half black, like a Gaulish cloak.

At regular intervals the road broadened and two lanes diverged around square, white stone monuments.

A column and a polished bronze sphere surmounted every eighth stone block. With distance, the smaller stones faded, but Pierrette was able to count twelve bronze-crowned columns before they were entirely too small to see.

Each small stone marked astadion, she was sure, and thus the pylons were one mile apart-whether by Greek or Roman measure, or some other, she did not know, but all were much the same-one thousandsoldier's marching paces to the mile were much the same, whatever the race of the soldier himself. Thus the horizon was thirteen, maybe fourteen miles distant. And beyond it . . . "Where does the great road lead?" she asked her host, her voice hushed with awe.

"You asked about Minho. That is the road to Ys-or, in your era, which is still many centuries away, I might say, 'the road to the Bay of Sins, and the Isle of the Dead.' "

"In my era? Then . . . whenare we?" Pierrette's face twisted in wry confusion, for two reasons, and the overt question expressed only one. The other was a matter of language. "When are we?" was an awkward construction in any language, because none had evolved to express such a displacement in time as the spellMondradd in Mon implied. In what language had she and the mage been speaking? Had they been conversing in Latin or Gaulish? She was fluent in several, able to shift easily between them. She awaited Moridunnon's next words.

"This is the Roman year 120," he said. "In a few years Pytheas of Ma.s.silia will voyage north, seeking the Ca.s.siterides, the Tin Islands, and will discover the mysterious 'Ultima Thule,' somewhere north of here."

Now she had it. He was speaking Greek. But before, when he mentioned "Ys," had he spoken in Punic?

And had she responded in Latin? It was all quite confusing. It lent the whole experience a dreamlike air, but she did not feel as credulous as she would have in a dream, where dogs could become bears in an eyeblink, and even the most abrupt shifts in perceived reality went unquestioned.

She forced her attention back to the current reality. "The legend of Ys survives in my era," she said reflectively. "The dearth of observable ruins, according to some scholars, can be explained by the failure of its great seawall, and the winter storms that swept every trace of the city away out to sea. But surely, some trace of that great road, with its marching lines of pylons, must remain." She could not seek the Fortunate Isles here, in this Otherworld, within the spellMondradd in Mon , but if in her own age there were still milestones, however weathered and worn, however hidden by tangles and thickets . . .

"Did you stumble across any, in the forest, while seeking me?" He raised his eyebrow. "No? I thought not. Perhaps, being of fine white marble, they have all been long since turned into Roman statues, their inscriptions chiseled away with the rest of the chips."

"You don't know for sure, Master Moridunnon? Weren't you watching when the columns were hauled down?"

He snorted-an old man's expression, incongruous because, except for his white hair, he was looking younger every time her glance fell across his face. "I was not always the homebody I was . . . I will be . . . in your time. A scant three centuries ago (or rather, six or seven hundred years from now, for no tongue has proper tenses for what we mages do with time, does it?) I will voyage across the channel north of here, to Old Britannia, and will meddle in the succession of their kings."

"You mean Artorius, don't you-the one with the famous sword?"

"Is that old tale still circulating? Yes, that was I. At least I think so." He wrinkled his brow, as if puzzled.

"The tales change, and sometimes I seem to remember events one way, sometimes another."

Pierrette understood that, at least. All the old G.o.ds and heroes changed, with the tales people told, the legends they created. But she did not explain that to Moridunnon. She was here on his terms, not her own, and she resented that, being a sorceress in her own right. She was not accustomed to being whisked w.i.l.l.y-nilly along the rim of the broken Wheel of Time by a spell she had not uttered herself. She would hold her counsel and retain whatever slight advantage that conferred. "You said your name-in my era-was Myrddin, not Moridunnon. The Franks have yet another name for you . . ."

"Bah! They are savages! Pretentious savages at that, with courtly cloaks over their woolly shoulders. In Frankish 'Myrddin' means 's.h.i.tty,' so they call me 'Pigeonhawk' instead. That's what 'Merlin' means. And ever since, I've been stuck with this d.a.m.ned bird."

Pierrette giggled. " 'Merlin' is better than 's.h.i.tty,' I think. What if they had called you 'eagle' or 'vulture?' "

Thus legends changed. The old sorcerer was lucky the Franks had changed his name, or he might have been doomed to spend an eternity steaming and reeking, a man-sized heap of . . .