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Chapter 14 - The Vow

"We're not going to find Father and Marie tonight," Pierrette stated as they crested the high slope. The sun's passing had left a dull mauve glow. "We should stop before we leave the trees behind. Here, there is dead wood for a fire."

They dragged branches to the lee of a rusty beige outcrop. Pierrette reached out with an extended finger—but no spark flew to the tinder. Again she tried, carefully whispering the exact words of the spell—with no better result.

"Try this." Anselm proffered flint and a steel-bladed knife.

"I don't understand," Pierrette said. "That spell always works."

"Always? You have more faith than I do." He made as if to return flint and knife to his pouch.

"Master—give me the flint and steel. I meant only that it has worked, until now." She stroked the dissimilar materials, guiding sparks toward the tinder, then blew gently upon the dry shavings. A puff of fragrant smoke rewarded her. Soon they were settled with a fire between them, sharing bread and olives, washing them down with wine from a skin bag.

"I wish I knew why the spell didn't work," Pierrette mused.

"All magic is unpredictable. Remember that, or you'll be in trouble when it betrays you, and you've prepared no alternative."

"If I understood why it didn't work . . . I've gone over the words and the postulates, and nothing seems to have changed."

"Perhaps your postulates only apply to a limited case—some theorems only apply to right triangles."

"This isn't geometry, Master."

"Still, I suspect you have overlooked some greater principle. Perhaps it could be stated as, `Magics will always work until you have come to depend upon them and have no other recourse.' "

Pierrette went to sleep thinking about it. Yet when she awakened before dawn, she was no closer to an answer—and the spell still did not produce a spark. She had to heap tinder around a surviving ember to start the fire.

"Why are you staring like that?" the mage asked.

"Last night you walked between me and the fire, and I saw the flame as if you weren't there. I've been trying to see if I can still see through you."

The mage stiffened. "And can you?"

"Stand between me and the rising sun." She peered long and hard, at first unsure if the dim, vaguely circular glow was a trick of her eyes. Then she nodded. "I can see the sun. You must go back, or you'll fade entirely."

He squatted, and shook his head. "Why are you so sure this has to do with my departure from the cape? My earlier recovery didn't have anything to do with distance. I'm going on with you, at least until we pass the dragon's bones. If I fade further, then we'll be reasonably sure . . ."

She was not convinced. "If you're fading steadily—if it isn't a matter of distance from your stronghold—it will still seem so if we go on. We should wait here and see."

"It doesn't matter. Either way, you must go on to Massalia."

The long slope was cut by enormous ravines. Tough greenery clutched scant soil not scoured away by the monotonous wind. "Ahead, a great battle was fought," Anselm told her. "The last dragons were vanquished. Their bones lie half-buried."

Pierrette pushed on, eager to see. As the trail wound past a craggy outcrop, the mage stretched out a hand. "There!" he exclaimed. "The battlefield."

The land tilted northeastward like an eroded table with two broken legs, scattered with white objects. Some stood alone, and others were broken lines of convoluted shapes. "Those are dragon bones?" she asked, disappointed. "They look like white limestone—eroded into strange shapes, but still only rocks."

Anselm also seemed let down. There was a chain of white vertebrae several hundreds of paces long—or so it had once appeared to him, long ago. Now indeed it looked like an outcrop of limestone. The great skull looked like a reptilian head, but the arch of its cheekbone was worn to irregularity, and the single eye socket was only the mouth of a shallow cave. "I don't understand. I remember it differently. I was sure those rocks were dragon's bones."

Ideas tickled at the back of Pierrette's mind. "I can think of several possibilities. One is that enough time has passed for wind and weather to destroy a resemblance to bones. Countering that, inscriptions on Roman stelae, surely almost as old, have not weathered into unreadability. Perhaps your imagination was once more vivid, and you saw dragon bones where now you see rocks."

"I remember rib bones," the mage mused. "I remember teeth. I find it difficult to imagine myself gullible enough to have seen such details, where none exist today."

"Perhaps the world itself has changed, and what once were immense bones are now only limestone."

"That's not elegant," Anselm criticized. "Your earlier alternative is a closer fit: I am fallible. Perhaps my perceptions are in no better shape than my magic."

"I considered my fire-starting spell infallible, Master. Yet as you pointed out, its failure may result from some principle I haven't envisioned. If these rocks were once dragon bones, perhaps some equally grand principle lies at the heart of the change." Yet what it might be, she could not say. Only her uncomfortable sense that the universe was indeed in a state of flux led her to choose her final speculation over the others.

* * *

They picked their way between ambiguous formations, cutting across the stony ground instead of following the circuitous route the carter Gustave had taken. Shortly before noon, they spotted the wagon, less than a mile ahead.

"I'll catch up with them, Master," Pierrette said. "You must go back."

"I feel no worse than before."

Pierrette pointed at the ground. "What do you see?" Anselm stared at the cobbles and gravel, the tiny growing things. Pierrette did not elucidate. He had to see for himself.

"I have no shadow!" he cried. Pierrette's shadow pooled about her feet as if darkness dribbled from her and stained the ground, yet where the mage stood, sunlight illuminated every pebble.

"You're right," he admitted at last. "Ah, how I looked forward to this trip. Do you know how long it's been since I stood in a marketplace and heard the bustle of a hundred people? Ah well—at least I have looked at hills and smelled the rosemary that grows on them."

Trying not to think hopefully ahead to a time when—if Anselm's strength grew further—he might dare venture beyond this distance, Pierrette set about one final task. . . .

"What are you doing?" the mage asked, watching her heap loose fragments of limestone.

"I'm building a cairn. You must return here in a few weeks. If your improvement continues, then at some future time you'll see your shadow here."

"Ah," said Anselm. "Then when I return home, I should also pause when I see my shadow again, and build a cairn. If I can't see it there when next I come this way . . ."

Pierrette was saddened by his pessimism. "That will define the lower limits of my hopes, though I truly expect you to build a third cairn beyond this one.

"Perhaps," said the mage, "but now I must go—if I am to journey in sunlight and be able to see a shadow at all." He held out the package he had carried. "Will you deliver this to the scholar Muhammad ibn Saul, in Massalia."

"A Saracen? In a Christian town? Or is he a Jew, as his surname indicates?"

"He's mysterious, but is as near to being a friend as any man I might name. We had wonderful conversations when he visited my keep—my prison. I sorely regret that I won't be able to enjoy his hospitality, for a change."

"I'll deliver it, Master. Will this ibn Saul be there to accept it?"

"He explores the fringes of the known world, and writes of the folk he meets, and their strange ways and beliefs. If he's away, his servants will see that my parcel reaches him—or will keep it until he returns."

Pierrette was happy to have an objective in Massalia besides delivering her sister to the nuns. Now she had an excuse to slip away.

Pierrette reached out and hugged Anselm. He made a strange, strangled noise and for a moment he stiffened. Then his arms encircled her, and they stood, swaying, between the distant, encircling arms of the Middle Sea.

"I never held a woman," he murmured softly. "I was a boy for a long time, and have been an old man longer . . . but I never had much chance to be young." He grinned. "I wanted to squeeze your bottom. I've never done that."

She smiled. He had called her a woman—not a girl, or worse, a boy—and had reacted in a way no one had, before. She suspected it was qualitatively different than the way her secret love Marius reacted to Marcella, or Bertrand had felt about Marie. . . .

Marie. The moving speck of the cart was no longer in view. Favoring Anselm with what she hoped was a womanly smile, she said, "Keep well, Master. Perhaps when I return we'll remedy your lack." Before she could see his reaction, she set off in the direction the cart had gone. She did not look back.

She decided that the fort on the Eagle's Beak was, to Anselm, much like the mysterious Camargue to Guihen and dark Starved John. Their magics were tied to places as with invisible cords, and they faded with distance from their anchor-point. Was Ma constrained in a similar manner, unable to wander beyond the narrow confines of her valley and her guardian beech trees? Yet once Ma had been everywhere—at least, everywhere that beeches grew.

That thought led to another. The prayer written in the Mycenaean syllables had specifically cited the "Mother of beech trees," but the corrupt version written in Latin letters said "Bagos," the ash. The Mother Tongue had grown into all the other languages. Bhagos became Latin fagus; in Greek it became phagos, "oak." What happened to spells and magics when the words changed? What unknown words restricted beings like Anselm and Guihen to their places?

Her mind thus occupied, she caught up with the donkey-cart when the others stopped to break bread just past noonday.

Someone had joined them—a small, bearded man wearing leather clothing. He leaned upon the most enormous pack she had ever seen. He was no taller than Pierrette herself. How did he carry it?

"Breb," said Gustave, "is a trader."

"How odd," she said, eyeing him askance. "I thought traders used the valley road, and travelled in caravans."

"Seeing is believing," the little man said. "I am a trader and I am here, so what you thought is not so." He tore a chewy crust from his bread, and seemed to dismiss her.

Breb, explained Gustave, was one of a score of folk who lived in a cluster of huts hidden in a mossy declivity. "They speak an unknown language, and appoint one of their number to trade with the world beyond—Breb, in this generation."

Pierrette thought that fascinating. She resolved to speak at length with the odd little trader. But now . . .

Gilles had not reprimanded her for her absence. In a flash of insight, she wondered how often he had suppressed his objections to her mother's disappearances.

"How is Marie?" she asked.

"She ate bread dipped in wine this morning," Gilles said. "She's improving." Yet when Pierrette rode with her in the cart, holding her hand, it rested with claylike heaviness in her own. She saw no change in her sister's condition. Halfway through the afternoon, Marie fouled her garment, and Pierrette ordered the two men aside while she wrung urine from the shift and rubbed sand on the cart. They had too little water for bathing, so she brushed oil on her sister's skin to lessen irritation.

When she led Marie behind a scrubby bush, she squatted obediently, with no more expression than a milk cow at a comparable moment. That dismayed Pierrette more than when she had urinated in the cart. Where had her sister's soul gone? Was it still hidden deeply within, or had that hideous entity that consumed gods devoured her poor human soul as well?

Pierrette ordered Gustave to get his beast moving. The carter and her father did not resist her abrupt authority. After all, the boy Piers merely commanded them to do as they intended to do. The ass, ordinarily requiring blows to get him moving, hardly protested. He did, however, roll his near eye at Pierrette, as if blaming her for his burdens.

Breb cautiously kept the cart between himself and the beast, who had already bitten him once. Could a donkey be jealous of a man who could carry a heavier load than he? Or could an ass be annoyed that another beast of burden walked unencumbered while he was required to pull that beast's load? Breb was content to avoid the donkey's resentful eye. So, for that matter, was Pierrette.

In any case, the two Citharistans were content for her to walk with the little trader. She had seen nothing of the world beyond Citharista. This opportunity to experience someone wholly different was important. She did not know what she might learn from unprepossessing Breb, but book-learning had no texture or aroma. A child who read about battle or babies was hardly prepared for war or motherhood. She was glad to walk with Breb. The trader's huge pack was in the cart with Marie and their supplies—which, she decided, was his reason for travelling with them in the first place. "It's hard to imagine you carrying a load that would stagger a mule," she commented.

"Seeing is believing," he said.

"Why don't you have a mule?" she asked.

"When mules eat, children starve. Mules eat when they are not working, and more when they work." He shrugged apologetically. "What you see is what you get."

"As you said, `seeing is believing.' I saw you lift your monstrous pack into the cart."

Breb taught Pierrette a bit of his almost-extinct language. There were echoes of the old Ligurian dialect of her mother's incantations, but it seemed much older, without words for commonplace things.

"Only one of us may learn your speech," he told her. "In a year or two, my sister's son will come to live with me, and I'll teach him." Breb explained that knowing a "worldly" tongue was a sickness. Wherever he went, the world changed in unpredictable ways. Good food became inedible, and foul things tasted good. Thus he was a pariah among his own kind. A necessary pariah.

"I bring them iron needles made in Massalia," he said, "but I do not speak of blacksmiths, of making metal thorns from crushed red and yellow rocks."

"Why not?"

"If needles grow from ochre, then what will spring from clay? Dare I change their world so? Seeing, after all . . ."

". . . Is believing," she blurted. "And if they see only the needles, then . . ."

"What they see is what they get." As if what Breb's people believed not only shaped their thinking, but their reality. As if they intuitively knew what she had logically worked out—that their postulates would be dangerously changed if they were forced to accept a reality that contradicted them. If all Breb's tribe were as literalistic as he was, then their knowing that a mule could carry more than a man might incapacitate him.

* * *

The trail wound along cliffs at the western edge of the peninsula. The view was overwhelming. Pierrette clutched coarse red sandstone as if the slightest breeze might sweep her over the edge, and down . . . and down. Five paces from the edge she could hear waves breaking on fallen rock below, a mere whisper at this height, but she could not see them.

"How high are we?" Gustave did not know. She crept to the edge of the scarp and peered over. The carter slithered up beside her. "I won't fall," she said.

"I just wanted to see if Ant'ny's still there," he said.

"Antony?"

"See that bit of red about a third of the way down?"

"On that little pinnacle? What is it?" Pierrette saw a speck of red like a grain of russet sand at arm's length.

"Ant'ny—and his red horse blanket and cart. He was hiding under his cart, when the wind blew it over, and him and his blanket after."

"That tiny red patch is a horse blanket? And the wreckage of a cart?" That gave some idea of the terrible height of the cliffs—without some object to give them scale, the water might have seemed only fifty paces away—or ten thousand.

"I saw a Saracen war galley a hundred paces off the rocks, and it was the size of an ant—not even a big ant. These cliffs are a mile high, they say."

"Not that high."

"Who's to know? No one's going to climb down and measure."

"I'll find out," Pierrette said. She looked southward along the boulder-strewn coast, until she judged that her line of vision was close to forty-five degrees from the horizontal, and fixed a particular rock in memory. Then she backed up, and faced south. "I'm going to pace off the distance to the bottom of that cliff."

"You can't! You'll end up down there with Ant'ny."

"I'm not going down—just along the edge. Are you coming?"

"I better. Your Pa'll have my skin if you fall." Pierrette picked a fairly straight path south, making full strides. Her paces were shorter than the old Roman standard—she had once measured them between two worn milestones. Twelve hundred and two paces to the mile—to one thousand soldierly paces. A pace was two steps: left, right, or about five feet.

She counted two hundred paces, then crawled to the edge and peered down. The distinctive rock was still a bit south. She backed up, and walked fifty paces more. "Close enough. For a more accurate measurement, I'd need a graduated quadrant." Gustave did not ask what that was.

"The height of the cliff is one fifth of a mile," she said, "not a mile. Tell `them' I measured it for you." It was the first practical use she had made of geometry. Assuming that her estimate of forty-five degrees, at her first location, was close, and that she was directly over the stone 250 paces on, then the angle between stone, herself, and the first position was ninety degrees, and the original sight line was the hypotenuse of a right isosceles triangle. The distance she had paced was thus equal to the height of the cliff. "Quod erat demonstrandum," she said, with great satisfaction.

At nightfall, they made camp well back from the cliff. Marie neither improved nor worsened. Her clothing stank, but there was no water to spare.

While Gilles and Gustave gathered wood, Pierrette attempted to light tinder without flint and steel—with no more result than the night before. Did her magic, like Anselm's, depend upon proximity to the Eagle's Beak?

The chilly night passed uneventfully. Pierrette huddled close to Marie in the wagon, and wished that poor Antony's horse blanket had been eighty paces nearer.

In the morning, Breb shouldered his great pack. "Aren't you coming with us?" Pierrette asked.

"I dare not. The low air saps me. I will take the high road around."

"But that will take weeks. Leave your pack in the cart."

He shook his head. "I fear what I might see in the town below. Should I go there, I might not ever find my folk again. Besides, there are other valleys, other people who speak my tongue. I must visit them, or they will have to appoint one of their own like me."

She thought she understood why he could not go down to the fishing village. Who would believe such a little man could lift such a burden? As he said, seeing was believing. He might not be able to shoulder his burden at all, among so many people convinced he could not. So he would keep to the heights.

It took two days to reach the base of the cliffs. The ground sloped up from the north, dissected by ravines. The trail twisted back on itself time and again.

Halfway down, a small spring trickled from the rocks, and they filled their water-keg. Marie phlegmatically endured a cold bath, and stood naked, covered in goosebumps, while Pierrette washed her garment. Pierrette suspected that any discomfort she felt was nothing compared with what had caused her spirit to flee in the first place.

"The road to the village winds down that defile," Gustave announced, "but I'm not about to risk it in the dark. Those villagers keep heaps of rocks up above the trail, for bandits."

Gilles maintained his silence. Pierrette was still bitterly angry with his failure to protect Marie. If her sister had not been a constant reminder, she might have tried to draw her father out of his guilty reveries. Perhaps there would be time on the trip home.

Again Pierrette voiced her firemaking spell, and drew a quick, amazed breath. Had she seen a blue luminescence? The sun's afterglow made it difficult to tell. Again, she uttered the words . . . and a pale, cool glow suffused the air. A glow, not a spark. As quickly as it had formed, it faded, and she was reduced to kindling fire by ordinary means.

Would she ever understand? If a spell did not work, or worked differently, then, by her hypothesis, it meant one of its postulates had changed. In Citharista, the spell caused fire. On the heights, it did nothing at all. Now . . . a blue glow?

Her suspicion about distance from the Eagle's Beak was wrong. The spell was doing something. She decided to keep trying; if it changed again, that might provide further clues.

In the morning, Gustave went to the village. Pierrette dozed in a shady spot under some brush. Movement across her thigh alerted her, and she opened one eye. "Oh, aren't you lovely," she murmured. It was a ladder snake—so called for the linear pattern of its scales. She felt lucky. Snakes were sacred to Ma, for they lived close to her, never lifting their bellies from her. Even vipers were blessed, and as none had ever done Pierrette harm, she was not afraid. Ladder snakes were not poisonous, anyway.

The tiny copse was too small to support such a fat creature. "Have you come to encourage me?" The snake did not respond, except to look up at the source of the sounds. It slithered on its way, leaving Pierrette cheered by the encounter.

Gustave returned with stiff sun-dried fish, fat round loaves, and sharp goat cheese. Breaking a fibrous fish, Pierrette soaked the chunks in water to make stew. She tossed in fresh thyme and a few olives. Gustave produced clay cups and a small amphora of red wine. "There's no point in pressing on today, so we can take time to enjoy this."

As they ate, and afterward, Gilles and the carter drank cup after cup of sour wine. Gilles drank steadily, and Gustave matched him cup for cup. The carter attempted to sing, and enjoined Gilles to join in, but Pierrette's father did not drink for the joy of inebriation, but to reach an ideal (and unattainable) state of forgetfulness.

Pierrette again bathed Marie and saw to her needs, feeding her bread dipped in wine prudently set aside. Before retiring to the hard bed of the cart, she draped thin blankets over both men, hoping they would sleep through the night and not stumble about upsetting things.

During the night Marie awakened, trembling. There was no moon, and Pierrette could not see her face. She held up her hand and whispered the spell that no longer produced fire, and was rewarded with the bluish glow, enough light to see terror in Marie's wide, empty eyes. Shortly, they closed again.

Holding Marie close, suffused in magical light, Pierrette raged at the crazy unpredictability of witchery, sorcery, and all things magical, at the capricious greediness of her father and the castellan Jerome—and above all, at the vast manipulations of gods and demons who consumed each other and any hapless mortals who stumbled while crossing their unimaginable, unseen paths.

Carefully containing ire that boiled up hot as the lavas of lost Thera, Pierrette rolled away from Marie, taking her witch-light with her. She walked from the camp, and emerged on a bare promontory. She could see the flat, starlit sea, the black cliffs where she had played with geometry, and on her right the looming shadows of hills yet uncrossed.

"I will understand!" she hissed between clenched teeth—and her words seemed to fly forth as if she had shouted. "I will!" She flung her arms upward and flailed at the uncaring stars. The light that suffused her fingertips flew away with the momentum of her gesture. Upward it soared, coalescing into a sharp point of light, a fallen star returning to the heavens, then was lost amidst uncounted other lights. Pierrette's challenge was given, her vow sealed, and the very skies seemed no longer quite the same.

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