The Veil Of Years - Isle Beyond Time Part 9

"What's so funny?" he snapped.

"I'm sorry. My thoughts wandered. I was smelling something . . ."

"The venison, of course! Come. Let's eat." That was not what she had been thinking of, but . . .

He led her to a room paneled with rich waxed nutwood, hung with blue-and-scarlet tapestries. A low table held platters of steaming meat, plates of neatly sliced fruit, a plank of golden, broiled fish, and a dozen bowls with olives and dates, and with cherries steeped in honey wine. The two low benches with fluffy cushions indicated they would feast Roman-style, reclining. But where were the servants who had laid this rich repast?

"They are as ephemeral as the dragons that guard my fountains out there," said Moridunnon, waving casually at the room's single window. Pierrette glanced out, and saw a great courtyard where water splashed from one clear pool to the next. One, two, three . . . were those the waters of youth, of invincibility, and of death? One pool looked much like another, and the water flowed between them, so it could not have had different qualities from one pool to the next-could it?

At Moridunnon's insistence, she chose a bench, and they lay head to head, she leaning on her left elbow, he on his right. She ate lightly, a sliver of crisp venison from the edge of the roast, a sip of clear wine, an olive that tasted of warm Mediterranean sunshine. When she raised her eyes from her chosen morsel of the moment, she saw that the mage's eyes were deepest blue, like Lovi's. She had not noticed that before. In the oblique light from the window, his hair looked gold, not white.

Between one sip of wine and the next, she wondered where his beard and mustaches had gone, but it was only a pa.s.sing thought, and did not rouse her from the pleasant languor that suffused her. He looks like Lovi, she thought. Somehow, that seemed exactly as it should be.

A brief thought furrowed her brow: Gregorius. But the imaginary flutter of his clerical garment did not linger. She was here, and so was Lovi. There was no one else. He rose and pushed back the table, as if it weighed nothing at all. He let his white cotton tunic fall to the floor. Sunlight reflecting from the gleaming marble turned the fine hairs on his chest to gold. She raised her head, and ran slender fingers through them. Her breath came quickly, in little pants, and her head felt light and empty.

Where had her tunic gone? Lovi drew her to her feet, and caught her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s in his hands, his expression amazed, as if he had not expected them to be there at all. . . .

What else might he not expect? she wondered briefly when he knelt and loosened the cord around her waist. She could not see his expression, but his fingers seemed unsurprised. Wave after wave of warmthcoursed through her, spiced with p.r.i.c.kly sparks as if she were made of wool, and he were stroking her.

His body rippled with smooth muscles as he guided her back against the bench, and swept her feet from the floor with one arm, raising her knees, pinning her shoulder with the other arm . . .

At some great distance, as if outside the window, she heard the harsh, cackling laugh of a magpie, and for a moment her eyes widened, and she saw . . . Moridunnon. The mage hunched over her with twigs and brambles in his beard, his eyes alight with an oily red glow, rimmed with shadows of shadows and swirling darkness that crawled across his wrinkled face . . .

She screeched, and flung herself sideways in a flutter of green, azure, black, and white feathers. Madly flapping her magpie wings, she careened toward the refuge of the window's welcoming light. Wings beating, she struggled upward through air thick as honey, fleeing the brown, long-winged form that rose below her like a shadow freed from the ground and flying into the air.

The magpie wheeled and the merlin followed, its talons spread for the kill. Magpie writhed and twisted in midair, and felt the brush of merlin-claws against its wings. Magpie, tiring, recited in its small mind strange words that magpie throat could not utter: "Mondradd in Mon, bora . . ." and it fluttered to the moss atop the great mound, among the roots of the sentinel beech trees.

Far off, above the obscuring branches and leaves, she heard a hawk's shrill cry. She was cold. Her garments lay scattered on top of the yellow, fallen leaves. Quickly she gathered them and dressed, glancing anxiously upward. "I'm not up there," said an old, cracked voice. She gasped, and stiffened, but the old man in his patchwork of skins, his lopsided antlers, made no move toward her. "Fear not," he said, quite sadly. "The moment is past. The magic is gone, and I am old and impotent. Your maidenhood is safe-from me."

She felt almost sorry for him. She felt almost sorry for herself. Lovi: illusion or not, the scene had been lovely, the l.u.s.t heady and compelling, their mutual desire entirely real. But now he was old and drained, and she was again neutered by her guise, a boy almost too young to have felt such pangs.

"Was it magic?" she asked. "I mean, was it all illusion? The feast, the fountains, the Punic road?"

"It seemed real to me," said Moridunnon. "It always does."

As ever, the distinction between reality and illusion was vanishingly small. Something perceived was something real, unless substantial and tangible evidence precluded it. Thus there was no way to establish that the Phoenician road to Ys, with its milestone columns and brazen orbs, had not once existed. There was equally, short of finding a broken bronze sphere, green with age, or a chunk of a marble pylon still inscribed with Punic words, no way to confirm its erstwhile reality.

Pierrette glanced at her fingernails, looking for some trace of a fine golden hair plucked from her lover's chest in a moment of abandon, but she saw only ordinary dirt under them.

"You aren't going to find what you want," he said softly. "The Fortunate Isles, I mean."

"Maybe not, but I'm still going to try. I have to."

"That's not what I meant. You won't find anything different there than you might have had here, with me."

"You aren't Minho. This mound is not a magical kingdom. If I find the Fortunate Isles in the real world, by sailing there, not by using a spell . . ." "I'm telling you, things won't be as they seem, even if they're 'real.' You won't like it."

"I have to find out for myself. I have had visions of the Fortunate Isles, of Minho, since I was little. He wants to marry me."

"That may be, but are you sure you'll want to marry him?"

"I do. I always wanted that."

"Have it your way. Just remember, you can always turn back. I'll still be here, waiting for you."

His sad demeanor moved her. He reminded her of her own master, Anselm, who was as old, or older, and who was often sad. Anselm too-despite his age-had felt l.u.s.tful toward her at times, though it had never gone so far. As a lonely and motherless child, she had sometimes crawled into his bed, and the avuncular emotions he had felt when she had been no more s.e.xual than a warm kitten always overrode the ones he felt later, when she began to mature.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed Moridunnon's leathery, wrinkled cheek. Then she ran down the steep slope into the fog, which roiled and swirled with the speed of her pa.s.sage. Soon, ahead, she saw the red-and-yellow glow of the campfire, and the moving shadows of her companions, not yet settled around the fire.

Chapter 17 - A Deadly.

Companion What, she wondered as they trudged now entirely westward along the new earth-line known only to her, had the encounter with Moridunnon been about, really? She would have taken it at face value had it not been for a small detail: when she had first recognized that she was making love with Moridunnon, not Lovi, she had seen the embrous glow in his eyes, the dying coals of an unfed fire. She had seen it again, just before she left him. And she had seen that tragic light in other eyes as well: the stag G.o.d men called Cernunnos, which in Gaulish meant "The Horned One," had possessed just such a light, after the Dark One had taken him. The same light had shined in the eyes of the demon that invested her sister Marie.

Pierrette knew what it meant. When the Christian missionaries declared an old G.o.d, who was neither entirely good nor evil, to be only an avatar of their own chief demon, whom they called Satan, and who had no goodness at all, then the old one was doomed. He was consumed, and Satan, eater of G.o.ds, grew stronger.

There was a princ.i.p.al at work. Pierrette called it "The Law of Conservation of Good and Evil." Simply put, most things were neither good nor evil, they were neutral. It took a powerful spell to tease a thing apart, to separate its components, to polarize them against each other. But it could be done, and once separated, each could be separately consumed. Nothing was lost, nothing gained: consumed by Satan, the evil portion did not disappear, and the good, wherever it had fled, still existed . . . somewhere. But nothing remained as it had been, either. She imagined the Christian spells parsing the mystic places, the springs, the caves, the crossroads, blessing the sparkling waters, cursing the darkness and shadows,locking up what they called Good in fonts and reliquaries and leaving the rest to be consumed by . . . another.

Moridunnon. Had a Christian bishop in Turones or Cenab.u.m (perhaps Saint Martin himself? Who could say?) heard country folk telling of the old mage, and named him evil, and thus doomed him? But he had not seemed evil to Pierrette. Crotchety, deceptive, manipulative, l.u.s.tful, indeed-but was that evil? She considered it only human, and forgivable, but then, she was not Christian. In her experience, most Christians lived in a world all black and white, and left little undefined.

Only the telltale fire banked behind Moridunnon's beady eyes had warned her. The conclusion was inescapable that the Eater of G.o.ds had gained subtlety since her last encounter with him, and she could no longer count on anything being what it seemed, when even Cunotar the warrior druid sounded thoughtful, and even . . . kindly.

Did he know what her a.s.signed goal was? Had his-Moridunnon's-attempted seduction been intended to stop her? The loss of her maidenhood, the G.o.ddess had a.s.sured her countless times, would render her ordinary, unable to work even the smallest spell. And it had been a close call, because her longtime infatuation with Lovi, silly and girlish as it was, had been exacerbated by his absolute unattainability in the real world, unless she became a boy, which she could not. It had almost worked.

She caught a whiff of something foul, something dead. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

There. A dead rabbit hung from a trapper's snare, forgotten. A haze of shadows surrounded it, shifting and pulsing. The darkness moved and stretched as if trying to pull itself free of the maggoty corpse.

Pierrette glanced back along the trail. She could hear Lovi and Gregorius, but they were still some distance behind. She continued to stare.

At last, the nebulous blot broke free, and as soon as it touched the ground, it slithered away along the faint trail-westward, of course.

The following morning, ibn Saul and Lovi climbed a rocky escarpment north of the camp, where the scholar could orient himself using his lodestone, and would then sketch a rough impression of everything he could see. Pierrette considered his efforts at mapmaking crude, but after all, she had the advantage of having read the lost treatises of the ancient Sea Kings, and had seen their maps of lands the rest of the world had forgotten.

At times like this, she slipped away, usually in an opposite direction, hoping for, though never expecting, Yan Oors. She always carried a rude willow basket, because whether wood, moor, meadow, or mountainside, she could usually find something useful to bring back to camp. Today, she found a patch of berries, and filled her basket while waiting, hoping for company. This time she was not disappointed. But Yan Oors did not usually make so much noise, so she slipped behind a tree until she was sure it really was him. Walking beside him, doing most of the twig crunching and leaf thrashing, was . . . a bear. It was a big bear, brownish-black, with summer clumps and tatters of loose fur dangling from its belly and flanks.

Pierrette did not understand. What was Yan Oors doing with a big, male bear? His long, big-knuckled fingers trailed between the s.h.a.ggy creature's shoulders. Since he seemed to have it under control, she stepped out from behind her tree. "There you are!" said Yan Oors jovially. "How do you like my bear?"

"I . . . have I misunderstood? We spoke only of cubs, and this is definitely not a . . ." "This is much better. This bear will take up the spirits of my poor faded companions, and I will not have to wait for cubs to grow up." The bear seemed to glower at Pierrette, its head lower than its shoulders, its eyes red-rimmed. It seemed almost to challenge her.

"Are you sure? We aren't anywhere near the end of the cape you showed me on the map. Shouldn't you be patient for a while longer?"

Yan Oors frowned. From the bear came a deep rumble. "You see?" said Yan. "He feels as strongly about it as I do. So will you, when you get acquainted with him."

"I'm sure I will," she lied. "I was only momentarily taken aback by the change in plans. You know how I hate surprises. Now come. I have picked a big basketful of berries. I'll share them with both of you." Yan seemed so happy. Why couldn't she share in his elation?

"How nice," said Yan. "Come, bear." The animal seemed reluctant to follow. As Pierrette led the way to where she had left her basket, she seemed to feel the creature's angry eyes boring into the back of her neck. Why had Yan changed his mind? Something felt terribly, terribly wrong.

They sat around the berry basket as if it were a hearth, and Yan scooped handsful of the fruit into his mouth. When she offered some to the bear, the creature turned its snout away disdainfully. "He likes meat better," Yan said mushily, his mouth full. "I've been trapping rabbits for him."

"It must have been one of your snares I found yesterday," Pierrette said. "There was a rabbit in it, but it was half rotten."

"He seems to like them best that way," said Yan, gesturing at the bear with his thumb. "But only to a point. Sometimes, he turns his nose up at the very ripest ones."

Pierrette now understood what Yan did not: what the bear craved was not dead meat, but something else, something that was present in the dead rabbits for a while, but eventually escaped. Slowly, as if only shifting away from a twig poking her behind, she edged to one side, where the gaunt man had leaned his iron staff against a sapling crotch. She stood, and made as if to stretch, then in one quick motion grasped the staff.

The cold, brown iron stuck to her hands, a coldness that burned, that sucked the heat and life from her fingers, her palms, and her wrists. Quickly, before her arms became leaden and could not move, before the greedy iron's craving reached her heart and stilled it forever, she swung his staff in a sweeping roundhouse arc, at the dark, dirty snout of Yan's companion.

The staff's b.u.t.t landed solidly across the bear's tender nose, making a dull sound. For Pierrette, it was as if she had struck a boulder. The shock of the blow travelled up the staff and up her arms. She cried out in pain as she dropped it-as it released her.

The bear roared, and rose up on its hind legs, its great front paws held forward, exposing long, yellowed claws. It staggered toward Pierrette, who backed away. The staff lay forgotten on the ground between them. "Here now! Here!" cried Yan Oors, his eyes shifting rapidly between Pierrette and the bear. "Stop that!" To Pierrette he said, "Why did you do that? He's angry now."

Catching her heel, Pierrette stumbled and fell backwards. The bear advanced, then loomed over her, and drew back one enormous paw to strike.Thump! Pierrette didn't know what made the sound, but the creature's roar became a high-pitched squeal. She rolled sideways, and it came down on all fours, rakingup great gobbets of soil with its claws.

Thump!Again the beast squealed, twisting around to get at the source of the blows that rained down on it: Yan Oors, who had recovered his staff. "Stop that now! Pierrette's my friend! She's sorry she hit you."

The bear, as if it had understood, glanced her way, snarled scornfully, and advanced upon Yan. "Hey!

You're my friend! Lie down now!" The bear rumbled ominously, and spread its forelegs as it rose to envelop him in a crushing hug.

Man and bear went down in a tangled heap. Pierrette feared Yan would be overwhelmed, disemboweled, but his cries sounded more indignant than agonized. Then he wrested himself free.

"Pierrette was right," he exclaimed. "You're not my bear!" He swung his staff over his head, and brought it down on the bear's head once, twice, and the creature sank to its belly, still snarling, its huge, stained teeth bared. Yan shook his head sadly. "You never were mine, were you? You wanted Pierrette!" He raised his staff one last time, and brought it down with such force that leaves on nearby trees rustled.

Thump! That time, the sound was wet and soggy, and Pierrette heard the crackling of broken bone. The bear now lay still.

She saw that her friend's face, dirty from the tussle on the ground, was streaked with muddy tears. She put an arm around his waist. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It's not your fault," said Yan Oors. "You saw. You knew something was wrong. I only saw what I wished. It was all a trick. He only wanted me in order to get at you, didn't he?"

"I don't know. He wanted what you gave him."

"Not my love," Yan said. "Only the rabbits, I suppose."

"The rabbits and . . ." She pointed. From the bear's nostrils and ears, from beneath its stubby tail, and from its b.l.o.o.d.y death-wound were emerging dozens of dark shapes, like greasy smoke. There was no struggle, as if to break free of the corruption that sp.a.w.ned them, only silent emergence, and then the swift, smooth slide as each one departed . . . to the west. "Those are what it wanted from you."

The big fellow's skin was gray, as he watched the procession of shadows. It went on for quite some time, but at last there seemed to be no more. "I had forgotten about those," he said.

"I suspect you forgot many things, while it had you in thrall. Perhaps now some of them will come back."

"I was a fool! I wanted a bear so much . . ."

"Don't feel too badly. I, too, was almost taken, because I wanted something that I could not have. We must both be on our guards, from now on. There is still much that I don't understand in this horrid land, but I know that the Eater of G.o.ds is here, and he grows ever more clever."

She sighed. "Tomorrow, or the next day, we may glimpse the sea. There you may find proper bear cubs, and I may find . . . answers. Now come. The others will be back in camp soon, and we must get you cleaned up. You have no injuries?"

Yan a.s.sured her that he did not, except for one that could not be seen, and that would not yield to poultices or healing herbs.

Chapter 18 - The Boatman.

Pierrette dreaded every step westward now. Yan Oors was safe, for the time, and she herself would not easily be fooled again. Ibn Saul remained safe within the armor of his disbelief in all things supernatural.

But Lovi and Gregorius? They were both vulnerable innocents, especially Lovi. The next attack might well be directed through one of them. She would have to be more suspicious of her friends than of any enemies she might encounter.

Enemies? There was only one enemy, whatever guise he chose. But why did he want to stop her? That didn't make sense, did it? If the Fortunate Isles held nothing that was evil, and if ibn Saul's skepticism could destroy them, then why wouldn't the Eater of G.o.ds want her-and the scholar-to find them?

She shivered. Moridunnon had not tried to stop ibn Saul, only Pierrette. And Yan Oors, enthralled, had not approached the camp and the others, only her.

They trudged over rolling hills where cleared fields and pastures usurped all but the forested slopes.

Weeds and thistles grew high everywhere, because no ground had been tilled for at least a year. Had the farmers all fled to the forests to escape the Viking depredations, or had they fled something else?

It was all too confusing. She attempted to set forth what she knew, suspected, and feared. First,Ma wanted her to destroy Minho and his magical realm-in this world-so it would remain a potent force in another, in the world of myth and legend, where it would remain an elusive paradise always just beyond the next wave, a goad and a goal for explorers like ibn Saul, but forever unattainable. In that scenario, the Fortunate Isles could not be destroyed by skeptics who would make them prosaic, because they would no longer exist-but the fact that they had existed once would no longer be subject to the test.

On the surface of things, it seemed that the Eater of G.o.ds opposedMa 's wishes, that he wanted Pierrette to fail, and ibn Saul to succeed. But could he really want the Isles to become ordinary and unmagical? What kind of victory was that? Only if the Isles became not merely neutral, but evil would he . . . her blood turned to icewater. Gregorius. A priest, even a priest whose profession was merely a convenience, who never spoke of G.o.d, was still a priest. If he attained Minho's kingdom, could Gregorius become a fire-eating reformer who would denounce Minho as an evil magus and declare his realm the devil's work? Was that what the Eater of G.o.ds wanted-not ibn Saul, but Gregorius?

She shook her head. She could not even imagine the vagrant priest becoming suddenly sincere and genuinely religious. And that was what it would take. There must be another answer, but she could not even make a guess what it was.

It was a lucky day. From a high ridge, they caught their first glimmer of the sea, the merest speck of pale silver between two gray, distant hills. Shortly thereafter, they came upon a wide Roman road, surfaced with well-packed gravel that made the going easy.

Lovi found a horseshoe that was hardly rusty at all. Most peasants believed horseshoes brought luck, but Pierrette knew they did not. They were lucky because they were valuable-for the price of a horseshoe, a farmer could buy an ox or a donkey. Onlymilites orequites , rich and n.o.ble soldiers, rodeshod horses, and only the Frankish king's couriers were too much in a hurry to stop and search for a shoe that had been thrown, so horseshoes were rare, too. Luck came first, then horseshoes.

She didn't know if Lovi believed them lucky, but she doubted he would have pranced around so if he had found a silver quarter-mark, which was worth more, and which was much easier to carry.

They crested the last hill. There, with a red-gold path drawn by the setting sun, was the sea. Just on their right was a deep bay whose south sh.o.r.e they had unknowingly paralleled for some time. Pierrette stared into its waters, trying to see past the surface glimmers and waves, because beneath that very bay were supposed to lie the ruins of Ys, a great Phoenician city that had been destroyed when a king's daughter foolishly gave the keys to its seawall floodgates to her lover-who opened them during a storm.

Now Ys was gone, but the reason it had been sited there remained: Raz Point, named for the terrible tidal race that had smashed a thousand ships against the rocks. The point was like the skeletal spine of a dragon lying with its tail out to sea, as if it were biting a great chunk out of the sh.o.r.e. It was a ragged line of brown-and-black crags, sharp and forbidding, draped in hardy salt-loving vines that grabbed at ankles as if they hated for anyone to tread upon them.

Beyond the point, individual crags jutted from the sea, black, spiky, hammered by the waves, becoming smaller with distance and in fact. Further still, white flecks marked the dragon's submerged "tail," rocks revealed only in the troughs of the swells.

The scene was more forbidding than anything Pierrette had imagined, or seen in incorporeal vision, and was made unique by one detail: the seas piled up on the north faces of the sea-crags, because the ocean was not only swelling and surging, but was rushing from the north, as if it were indeed Oceanos, the world-girdling river of the ancients, and was in springtime spate. South of each crag lay a deep, smooth hole in the water, a frighteningly deep pit unfilled by the rushing sea, and beyond that, the turbulent ocean rose up in a crest like the white plumes of an egret in mating finery, a long, bubbling trail that stretched like the wake of a great ship.