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Chapter 2 - The Strange Ones

The Eagle's Beak, a broken crest of red rock west of Citharista's small harbor, was almost unclimbable on its gentlest side. It sloped like a steep roof. It was a soft, crumbly matrix of red marl encompassing rounded pebbles. As climbers struggled, fragments broke off and rolled beneath their unsteady feet.
Below, shallow caves pocked the three scarps, which looked, from Citharista, like bulging domes of bare, brown rock.
From the sea, the "roof" could be seen as an overflung edge, undermined by waves gnawing at its base four hundred feet below. A pebble dropped from the scarp would fall well out beyond the surging waves, in water as deep as the cliff was high.
The few faint trails to the summits were clogged with thorny-leaved scrub oak that clawed at skin and clothing, and tangles of finely branched evergreens. Where rock had crumbled to make soil, the spreading parasols of pines shadowed and obscured the narrow ways.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale

* * *

Pierrette had seen the Eagle's Beak from her father's fishing boat. Riding the swell, she'd looked up not to the sky, but to a looming roof of stone.

Now, on the slope, their way obscured by stubborn pines, it was not surprising that two little girls should take a wrong turn, and then, in dismayed confusion, find themselves tantalizingly near the mage Anselm's stronghold, but on the wrong side of an unscalable scarp, with the enraged townsmen between them and safety. They huddled in a dank cave, hoping not to be seen.

They were close enough to hear shouts, and the thump of clubs on human flesh—but thankfully not near enough to hear their mother's agony, which was wordless, except for a murmur, perhaps her daughters' names.

Whether or not Elen spoke those names, they were what Cado the fisherman heard as he knelt close to verify Elen's dying. "The brats," he growled. "She's saying something to them. Where did they go?"

"What does it matter?" Someone—a faceless shadow under stark moonlight—raised a club for a last, killing blow.

"Never mind," Cado said, seeing the spreading stain on Elen's garment. "She's dead."

"Where are the whelps?" the other man said again—a harsh devil-face, Cado saw, one that ordinarily belonged to Jules, a carpenter who repaired boats.

The other villagers crowded around the inert masc. "They didn't pass us," someone muttered uneasily.

Otho, last to arrive, bearing his holy bones, pushed through the huddle. He knelt, and gently closed Elen's staring eyes.

He arose.

The gens backed away, and none would meet his bleak, baleful gaze.

"Murderers," he grated. "Would you kill the children too?"

Those who could, slipped away. Among them were Cado, Jules, and the others who had wielded clubs. Otho lingered, alone with Elen for the last time. At last he covered her battered face, and headed down the narrow defile.

From the shadow of the shallow cave, the two children had heard enough to fear their mother was dead. Marie spun away, covering her face. Little Pierrette stood like chiseled stone, unwilling to turn from her dismay. . . .

And then she saw . . . him . . . just within the cave.

His hair was white as moonlight, yet his face was a boy's. It had a stiff little nose, and lips like those of the tumbled Eros marble half-buried inside the ruined walls of a Roman edifice. Violet eyes seemed to glow from within, like none Pierrette had seen, in that land where most were brown or black.

His ears were huge. They wiggled.

"You may laugh," he said. "It doesn't bother me." His voice was youthful, yet hauntingly familiar, with inflections like Elen's—who had grown up speaking the old Ligure tongue.

"They'll hear you," Pierrette whispered, her eyes shifting toward the cave mouth behind the strange apparition. He laughed, a sound that carried echoes of tiny bells. Moonlight wafted over his clothing. Pierrette gasped.

His garments—a puffy moon-white shirt, green pantaloons, and floppy-toed shoes—all seemed to be made of willow leaves. Or were they feathers? The shirt glowed like nacre, the short trousers like magpie feathers, first russet, then azure, then green. "They'll hear only the sighing of wind among the pine needles," he said. "They'll see only moonbeams and the flicker of a bat. Not me, and not you."

"How can that be?" the girl queried the apparition.

"Once you knew that," he replied oddly. "Once you knew me." Pierrette had ten fingers, and knew she had fewer years than digits. Her confusion showed. "Later, I'll explain," he said with a touch of sadness. "First we'll win free of this place."

Marie, the older girl, had hardly lifted her face from her sheltering hands. Now, she peered up at the odd little man. "Mother is dead, isn't she? Are you the devil, come to take us as well?"

Pierrette shook her. "Mother can't be dead. And the devil is Pan, with his horns. This is only . . ." She turned hesitantly toward him.

"I'm your mother's friend, and no devil—not yet. My soul is my own."

Marie rose, shrugging as if she did not care if their guide was a devil, or whether their mother still lived. Together, they climbed down from the cave. No townsfolk were in sight, though their cries could be heard among the rocks and twisted pines.

"They won't see us," said the feather-clad boy-man. He led them through gullies and up long, rough slopes. Red rock gave way to bleached limestone, scrub oak and pine to sharp-twigged, sticky-leaved brush, then to taller oaks with large leaves, thick boles, and heavy shadows that hid the moon and stars.

"We won't find Mother here," Pierrette complained. "Look—the Eagle's Beak is far away." At the extreme tip of the cape, high on the rock, but far below where they now stood, were the geometric shadows of the fort people said Saracens had built long ago.

* * *

In the shadow of those walls, something moved, low to the ground, humping from one dark place to the next, visible only when it crawled across a patch of moonlit ground. As it moved, it groaned like a soul tormented, and left behind a faint trail of scuffled pebbles, and dark wetness that glistened momentarily.

Its progress was erratic, yet it moved inexorably toward the wooden gate at the end of a narrow footpath. On either side of the path, the red rock plunged downward. Disturbed pebbles tumbled free and rattled down into silence long before they splashed into the sea.

Humping itself up, the apparition took on almost human shape: a head with hair that hung in rootlike clumps, arms like branches twisted by sea-winds.

"Aaa . . ." it croaked. "Aaa . . . Anssselm!" Again and again it uttered the cry, in wet, broken tones that bubbled up as from a depth of mud.

With a rattling of chains and the thump of a heavy bolt, the fortress's door opened. The yellow light of a candle flickered across the pebbled path. "Who calls? Show yourself!" The voice was high and querulous.

The flickering light revealed an old man in a gray nightshirt that matched his long, tousled hair and beard. A halo of frizzy hairs waved like seaweed across his pate as the breeze rushed past him, up the stairs, to dissipate in the maze of mysterious rooms beyond.

"Anselm . . ."

The mage gasped. "Elen!"

"Help me!"

"Poor girl, what have you done?" His skinny arms fluttered as he hovered about the broken shape on his path. "Oh, Elen, I warned you. Why couldn't you listen? Look what's become of you."

"My children . . ." The masc Elen saw the mage through a red haze of blood. The pain of her broken legs, wrist, and ribs was as nothing. Death would free her, but her daughters . . . "Help me!" she moaned, her words a wind among bare, dead branches.

"I can't," wept the mage. "I don't control the magic that destroyed you."

Elen, knowing full well that the gentes' clubs, not magic, had broken her, shook her head. The creak and groan of her neck-bones was loud in her ears—and she could not see herself as the mage saw her. She had not noticed the stiff, gray bark that wrapped her wrists, fingers and bare forearms. She could not see the beech leaves in her hair.

Beech leaves, on a windswept seacoast? Beech trees grew in the sheltered valley of the Holy Balm, where Magdalen's bones lay buried, and by the sacred pool, not by the sea.

Yet Anselm saw them, and realized they weren't merely clinging, but growing. The tips of twigs shaped themselves from clumped strands of bloody hair. "You've destroyed yourself, girl," he murmured sadly. "My own weak magic can't undo that."

"The children," Elen pleaded, her voice dry and rough as branches rubbing against stone.

"What can I do? They aren't here, and if I leave this place, I'll fade away. Perhaps they'll come to me . . . I'll do what I can." He hesitated "I don't know what help I may be."

"Teach them."

"Hasn't there been enough horror? Look what my magic did to you."

The masc, with sounds of agony, drew herself to her knees and examined her hands. Where fingernails had been pushed small, green leaves. Smooth, gray bark stiffened her fingers and obscured the joints. Nubs and knotholes scarred her arms, and a spur pushed itself from her elbow, a woody protuberance that ended in twigs and swelling buds.

Then Elen knew her destiny—and what must be done. "This is not your magic," she said, though speech became more difficult; beech leaves rustled where her tongue had been, and her lips were stiff and gray. "This is older. It's Mother's. The children, Anselm. Promise."

The mage nodded. "If they come to me. But you can't stay on this dry path. What's to become of you?"

"Take me to my Mother," she wanted to say. "Take me to the spring called Ma, far up the valley past the old Roman fountain." She tried to say that, but her voice was only the whisper of a breeze among her leaves, the rattle of stiff twigs, of insects upon her gray, smooth bark.

* * *

Marie huddled near the small campfire, silent.

Pierrette pulled herself closer. "Mother said I must go to Anselm."

"Elen was distraught." Their big-eared guide fed a twig to the flames. "That's no place for a child."

"Take me," she said, as if he hadn't spoken.

"When you're older and wiser, go yourself. I'll never take you." In his lap, between his skinny knees, was a plump white hen. Neither grief nor the darkness of the deep woods could still the growling of Pierrette's stomach as she imagined that succulent bird turning on a spit. She could taste it already.

When she said as much, the long-eared fellow reacted with voluble horror. "Eat my hen? Ignorant, nasty girl! Would you kill and eat me too? As well if you did—without my little friend, I would die anyway. Shame! Horrid carnivore!"

Only her tears, when he made as if to leave her by the flickering fire, seemed to stay him. "She is the source of my magic," he explained. "I stroke her feathers, and I become invisible." He made a show of stroking the bird's wings. "Watch," he said. "Now no one can see me."

"You're right there, in front of me. How could I not see you?"

"Oh, mud!" he said.

Pierrette giggled, her misery forgotten for the moment. He was so foolish, with his feathery clothes, his wide, crooked grin, and ears that wiggled as he spoke. His manner—boyish, yet as if inside his skinny frame lurked a grumpy old man—drove away her fear. "Why shouldn't I see you?" she asked.

He scowled. "Didn't your mother tell you who I am?"

Mother had said many things. She pondered for several moments. Feathery clothing, and a white hen . . . "Guihen?" Her voice was hesitant.

"You do know me!" he crowed.

Pierrette frowned. "I know of Guihen," she said, "but I'm not sure you're him."

"Oh?" He seemed crestfallen. "Why not?"

"My mother said you were old—or even dead. She said all the forest spirits were old, and had gone away to die. Besides, I still see you."

"Wait, let me try again." Once more he stroked the hen's feathers. For a moment, Pierrette thought he wavered, as if heated air from the fire had blurred his image. For one long second she saw, instead of a ridiculous feather-clad man, a small willow, the undersides of its leaves white, the tops rich and green as magpie feathers.

"How wonderful!" Then she smiled mischievously. "But you weren't invisible."

"What?" His features drooped. "What did you see? Sometimes my ears . . ."

"I saw a willow bush."

He brightened. "Well, then, I was invisible after all. You saw a willow, and I am not a willow. Q.E.D."

"Kewayday?"

"Q.E.D., child. Quod erat demonstrandum. `Thus it has been shown.' The conclusion of a mathematical or geometric theorem. It means I was right: you saw a willow, not me, therefore I was invisible. Q.E.D."

"I don't know what `mathematical' means," Pierrette confessed, "but yes, I saw a willow, not you, and you aren't really a willow tree." Her words were slow and thoughtful, uttered with unchildlike precision.

Guihen grinned broadly. "You have a talent for logic. Someone should teach you."

Pierrette thought of the priest, P'er Otho, who knew much. Then her face twisted in painful memory. He had climbed into the hills with the vengeful townsfolk. She looked away. She dared not think of her mother, yet she could not keep from thinking of her.

"What's wrong, child?" asked Guihen. "Why the dried-fig face?"

"The gens caught my mother. What will happen to me?"

Marie emitted a throaty wail like a terrified cat. "Now see what I've done!" Pierrette cried. She threw her arms about the older girl, muffling her wet, burbling sobs. "There, Marie," she crooned, stroking her sister's tangled hair. "Soon we'll go home to Father." She did not believe that, but giving comfort allowed her to lock her own torment in a cellar, deep within the edifice of her mind.

Marie lapsed silent, and her breathing became soft and regular. Across the dead ashes, Guihen sat, illuminated now by the first, rose-petal tendrils of dawn weaving themselves among the trees.

Pierrette asked him, "Is my mother dead?" Dawn took the edge from emotion. Someday, Pierrette knew, she would weep. . . . But not in the ashen light of this new, empty day.

"Am I dead?" he retorted. "I'm a thousand years old, yet still a boy. Perhaps I'm the oldest boy alive—or dead. I suspect there's something in between the life ordinary folk know and the death they fear, because I am here—or so I believe."

Time and place were abstractions in the damp woods. In the aftermath of emotion, gray light made whimsy of forbidding things and permitted one not to care. "I will believe Mother is dead," said Pierrette, "when I see what remains of her. Not before." And not unless, said the voice deep in her personal cellar, hoping it would not happen, and that Elen would continue to live, saved by the ignorance of a five-year-old child.

* * *

Gilles, Pierrette's father, was hiding.

The skinny peasant's breath whistled between gapped brown teeth, and he clenched his jaw to prevent them from rattling against each other. Not that anyone would have heard, for he was too afraid to venture near the gentes' campfire. Were his children there? Had the townsfolk found them?

Gilles was not brave. "Cautious," he said when villagers chided him for refusing to take his sea urchins to Massalia for the best price. "The coast is gray and dangerous," he told them. "The currents are treacherous, the fogs constant, and any cove might hide a Saracen pirate."

Yet tonight he could not justify cowardice as caution. Any man worthy of the name would have rushed from his hiding place to fight the torch-wielders who had killed his wife. A man would have died if needs be, with the mother of his children, but Gilles had watched Elen die. What then was he?

He watched the distant firelight. If the children were there, he would see them when dawn illumined the camp.

A short distance from Gilles's hiding place, Marius slumped against a flat face of limestone, which reflected the flicker of firelight. The bludgeons, the murder weapons, had long since been consumed by the flames. Now Father Otho and several townsmen huddled close, sheltering the embers from wind that swept over the bleak heights, feeding the fire with twigs, stretching their meager fuel, praying they might make it last the endless hours that held away impending dawn, and the return of God to this forsaken place.

The townsfolk were afraid of ghosts and their own guilt. Yet Otho was not afraid; he was sickened, grief ridden, and worried about two small girls, huddled alone and cold in that hideous night.

"I saw beasts out there," Marius muttered, his teeth clattering as with intense cold. "I saw a terrible, starving man. And two pairs of eyes as big as limes glowed in the shadows. I saw them! I did!"

"Bears," said Cado the fisherman. "His bears! Yan Oors."

"John of the Bears is only a story," said the priest, annoyed that Cado was further agitating the boy. "We've no bears here. The Romans killed the last of them, and are themselves dust. The boy saw the old hermit, Anselm, and the glowing eyes were deer, startled by our thrashing about."

"They weren't deer," Marius said sullenly. "And the old magus has white hair, and never leaves his fortress. This man had a fat staff, as tall as a doorway."

"Yan Oors has an iron staff," said Cado. "He rights wrongs and protects the innocent."

"Who here is innocent?" snapped the priest. "Have you no blood on your hands?" Elen's blood, he thought. Elen, whom I and Saint Claire failed to save.

"That's not what I meant," Cado said. "I fear he has come . . . for us."

"Then pray. If anything walks the night it is Satan, not some long-dead Gaul. Fear for your soul, not your bald head."

"That too," grunted the fisherman.

Otho knew what he was thinking: Cado had been caught up in the townsmen's rage. Otho had felt the power and elation of the mob. Even the night, realm of devils and beasts, was no proof against the villagers' frenzy to catch the masc, Elen, the pretty witch who had spurned all of them, who had married Gilles-bad-teeth, and had birthed his brats.

Whether Satan or Yan Oors trod the rocky hills made no difference, thought Otho. Neither would save them from what they and their bloody clubs had done.

* * *

"Careful! Careful!" warned old Anselm. "Her tender roots."

"She has reached between the rocks," said his tall, gaunt companion, leaning on a heavy staff. The cudgel—liver-colored like rusted iron—was wedged in a crack. "I must free her from them."

The two men stood on the narrow causeway to the fortress. A strong breeze blew from the open sea westward of them, and over the glittering waters of the fjordlike calanque east of the ridge, yet it disturbed neither the smooth drape of the mage's robes, nor his tall companion's rough-woven, patched cloak. Their task concerned a small beech tree, a slender, muscled trunk the same silver-gray hue as the sky, which dawn and impending sun had not yet quickened to blue. Small leaves not darkened by day's burning heat fluttered at the ends of tender stemlets.

"The sun comes!" the oldster hissed. "Hurry! You must carry her to the spring, Ma."

"Shall I hurry, and damage her roots?" rumbled the tall man.

"Bah! Do as you will. Don't stop to converse."

"Then put your breath to work by removing the stones I have loosened." For some time thereafter the only sounds were the rattle of red marl and quartzite pebbles falling, and the iron clank of the big man's staff working loose rock for his companion to drag away.

At long last the work was done. The big man removed his frayed cloak and spread it. Both men gently lifted the small uprooted tree and placed it on the cloak. They packed pale, exposed roots and clinging soil with soft pine needles, and wrapped the cloak tightly around all, binding it with twine from the mage's sandals.

Carefully lifting the bundle, the gaunt one turned to depart. The mage nodded and turned away toward the yawning darkness of his fortress's gate. Then, as an afterthought, he said, "Be careful; the gens of Citharista will be returning home. Don't allow them to consummate their murderous intent."

"They won't see me," said the other—sadly, or so it seemed. "I almost wish they would." He didn't explain, but the mage seemed to understand, and replied, "I too yearn for the old times, but that is not to be." Did tears glisten in his eyes, or was it a reflection from the bright blue-green waters far below?

The big man—call him John—strode purposefully down the long rough slopes, making his own path. If men saw him, they averted their eyes, concentrating on their own precious footing, or pretended that they recognized him as someone safe and familiar—the priest, perhaps, in his dark garment—or saw merely the shadow of a scrub oak disturbed by unfelt movement of the air.

He walked along the narrow trail south of the town, and those townsmen who might otherwise see him turned aside into the brush to relieve full bladders, or bent to relace sandal-strings that had been snug a moment before.

The hairs on the necks of such villagers stood on end as they urinated or fiddled with their footgear, because they felt eyes staring at them from brush and shadow, eyes that—without their looking up—they knew to be green, as large as limes, and belonging to no wayward deer.

Striding softly despite his purposeful pace, John carried his bundle across the sandy spit south of Citharista port, and past old stone wharves, built in Roman times. He walked on gravel, but beneath the rattling stones was Roman pavement, limestone quarried high on the slopes where white dragon bones protruded from the bleak, fearsome hills.

None saw him as he passed through Citharista. At the pool where the crumbling aqueduct ended, women bent low to fill their jugs with extra water. Their burdens, walking back to their houses, would be heavier than usual, but they would excuse their excesses. "It's a good day to dye that cloth I wove last winter," one might say. "I have roots to color it as yellow as sunlight, and a jar of old wine to set the dye. It's a fine day for it."

"Today promises to be dry," another woman might say. "I'll need more water than usual. Octavus will be thirsty when he returns from the hills . . ."

Other folk, other rationales. John continued out of the town unseen. The road widened between fields of scruffy grain, vegetables in crooked rows, and grapevines on frames of split poles. North of Citharista he left the last cultivated plot behind. Sheep grazed on the slopes where the valley narrowed. He crossed a tiny stream once captured by the aqueduct and led downward to the town, now freed to make its own way, or to be soaked up by the thirsting soil, evaporated by the relentless sun.

He passed a last ancient olive grove, planted five hundred years earlier. John had not seen that particular grove since it had been young, but he remembered it and assured himself that, for all the changes the centuries had wrought, he was on the right trail. It wound over increasingly rough ground, among ancient trees far younger than he—who remembered an earlier forest there, one long-since cut for ridgepoles and ships' timbers.

At last he neared his destination. Obscured by trees and a tumble of eroded rock were the cut stones of a Roman fountain long dry. The channel that had fed it was clogged with roots old as the forest. The spring that welled up from Ma, the mother of folk more ancient than he (who considered himself a Gaul), was ahead, restored to its ancient place.

There, amid beech trees that thrived in the shelter and shadow of hills north and south, amid maples and broad-leaved oaks entirely unlike the seaward kind, he set his burden down. He contemplated the grove, the upwelling spring and the great, mossy stones as if seeking instruction from them. Then, with an inaudible sigh, he plunged his staff into the soft mold to loosen it. Gently pushing aside pine needles and moist soil, he unwrapped his cloak from the small beech tree's roots. He held the sapling upright in the hole, and sprinkled crumbles of soil over the tender roots. As the hole slowly filled, he tamped them with prodding fingers.

At last, he was finished. He brushed detritus over the disturbed soil. From a rock exposed to afternoon sun he rubbed dry moss, crumbled it further in the palm of his hand, and blew it over the dirt. Moss would grow from the fine powder, and in a year or two there would be no hint of what had transpired there.

Yan Oors, John of the Bears, then cast his eyes upward at the barren peaks to the north. No one saw him, of course, when his feet followed where his vision had gone ahead. He almost wished someone had—some shepherd, perhaps, who might have hailed him, hoping for news from the town. But though there was a shepherd, he saw only his sheep, for he sensed the presence of wild beasts, and was afraid. He hailed no one—for in truth, no one was there.

"In truth," a dispassionate observer might have said, "Elen died upon the path to the Eagle's Beak, and someone—likely her husband Gilles—carried her poor remains away and buried them. That a spindly beech tree now grows in the ancient sacred grove means nothing, because the logical place for young beeches is where their parent tree's seeds fell. If indeed Elen is buried there, then the new seedling merely found the freshly turned soil hospitable." But no such observer had been on the Eagle's Beak that night, so who was to say what really transpired?

* * *

Far below—though high above Citharista, and in a forest also—Pierrette gently nudged her sister awake. "Guihen says it is safe now, Marie. We'll return to town. Papa must be terribly worried."

Marie's eyes, always dark, were lost in shadows her sister could not fathom. Would she ever smile again? "I want Mama," Marie said without inflection.

"Later, child," said their elfin companion. "She is resting, and must not be disturbed." That seemed to satisfy Marie, who was easily led down the trailless slope and out onto open ground.

"Why did this happen, Guihen?" asked Pierrette. "Why can't Mama come here right now?"

"She made a choice long ago, child," said the odd man, his ears hardly moving at all, as if they were leaves that had wilted in the sunlight. "Someday you'll remember, and will understand."

"How can that be?" asked the child—who knew that whatever choice had been made, it had surely been more than five years ago—and knew, though without training in mathematics, that she herself was but five. She explained that to Guihen.

He shook his head. "It's true that you are only five," he said, "but I remember when you were a great sorceress with magic in your eyes and flames dancing on your fingertips. That was very long ago, when I was not so young as I am now—or is it old? Oc, I think so. I was not then so old." He looked around himself, as if confused, his expression conveying dismay.

"What's wrong?" asked Pierrette, frightened by the change in him.

"I must go," he said. "I begin to fail. I've been away too long."

"Don't leave us alone."

"Look below. There are the red roofs of Citharista. You can find your way. I must go. Do not ask me to die for your loneliness."

"Where will you go? I'll find you someday."

"The Camargue," he said, edging away as if she might compel him to stay, "where the great river meets the sea—where the white horses roam free and salt lies in drying pools." The Camargue, the delta of River Rhodanus, was unimaginably vast and far away.

"Good-bye!" Pierrette called out, though he was already gone. Had he rubbed his hen's feathers, to disappear so abruptly? She looked for a willow bush, for leaves that fluttered where no breeze impelled them to move, but saw only oaks with leaves the size of her small fingernails, and pines, and stony ground.

* * *

The gentes' passion was gone, and in its place were bland, sheepish faces that wore a burden of unexpressed guilt. The Burgundian knight, Reikhard—baptized in his youth as Jerome—was as close as anyone to being a magistrate. He had demanded that P'er Otho take several men and recover Elen's body. When they came back and announced their failure to find it, the knight announced that without evidence of murder he could not establish guilt. The gens collectively breathed a great sigh of relief, and went back to their occupations.

Elen's children were mostly ignored in the weeks and months that followed. Marie hardly spoke to anyone, even Pierrette. The younger girl—the boy Piers as far as the villagers were concerned—seemed to recover more completely. Of course, said the common wisdom, boys are resilient, and Piers's tender age helped too. Likely the child would forget everything in a year or two. The villagers were content to pretend that nothing had happened. Later, as their natures dictated, they would be overly kind to the half-orphaned children or would continue to look past them as if they—and the reason for their orphaning—did not exist.

Thanks to the intervention of Guihen (who might, of course, have been a "just pretend" creation of the girls' imaginations), neither child had witnessed their mother's demise, and their last memories of her were less horrible than were their father's. They only knew she was gone, and many years would pass before Pierrette began to understand the connection between the townsfolk's silence about that night's events, and her mother's absence. Marie, older, scarred by her sketchy yet terrible comprehension, chose not to remember anything at all, and no one was wise enough, or cared enough, to worry that such denial might sow the seeds of madness within, to sprout when conditions were right for them. . . .

Pierrette hid the little sack her mother had given her on top of a rafter, and let it slip from mind. She did not, though, put her mother's memory aside. "I will someday be a powerful witch, and I will put terrible spells upon those who hurt Mama."

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Marie (who was the only person Pierrette confided in). "That would be a terrible sin. I will pray to Mary that she turn your heart from un-Christian revenge."

Pierrette did not protest. Marie was her mother now, and she would not gainsay her. Of course, Marie was only a child, and ill-fit the maternal role, but it was enough for Pierrette. Despite Marie's growing piety and Pierrette's lack of it, the two sisters would grow ever closer as time passed.

Gilles, the girls' father, didn't forget anything, but being a quiet, gentle man, consumed by his own guilt and cowardice, and being of little importance among his fellows, his mute agony meant little to anyone, because they didn't see it.

A niche in the front room held a leather-wrapped bundle, old and cracked. Within was an ancient sword, a Roman spatha, that had belonged to an ancestor of Gilles's. When the olivier's eyes fell on it—far too often for his peace of mind—he imagined himself unwrapping it, and running to stand astride the torchlit path to the cape, defying the murdering gens. Yet it was too late for that, even had the Roman blood not run thin in his veins. Gilles left the sword where it was. But there was another reminder of his wife and his personal failure. He packed up Elen's little sacks and jars of herbs and powders, and pushed them into a tiny cellar between sloping bedrock and timbered floor.

Pierrette, with a strange, distant expression, watched her father hide the wooden box. Despite Marie's prayers, she dreamed of being a masc like her mother. Those dreams would have frightened Gilles.

She had another dream, a recurring nocturnal one of a lovely, secluded calanque where she lived with . . . the Golden Man. He was taller than anyone in Citharista, and his hair was the color of late-afternoon sun. He wore only a fur skirt, so she knew that the hair of his chest was gold against the darker bronze of his skin.

The Golden Man laughed when she told him of Citharista. There were no towns in his world. His laugh was kindly, though, and if she had been older she would have put her arms around him as women did with men they loved. But she was a child, and did no such thing—and she told no one, not even Marie, what she had dreamed.

Pierrette had her Golden Man. Gilles had his own dreams, but while hers came in her bed, or dozing in the shade of an olive tree, or even while her head nodded in sea-reflected sunlight on her father's fishing boat, Gilles dreams came only in one place—the sacred grove of beeches and maples, beside the pool called Ma.

"You were gone all night, Father," said little Pierrette, close to tears. "I looked for you in the olive grove, and at your boat." Gilles laid two loaves of bread on the stone hearth and enveloped her in his long, skinny arms.

"There is a place, a long walk from here," he explained, "where I go when I feel lonely and old." Where I go when my yearning for Elen, and my inability to be both father and mother to my children, overwhelms me.

"I don't feel old," Pierrette mused, "but I am sometimes lonely. Will you take me there?"

"It's a long walk, and you are too big to be carried." In truth, Pierrette was small for six or seven years, even for a girl, but Gilles didn't wish to burden her with concerns over his health. He could not chew a thick crust of bread without soaking it in oil or wine, and he often left the table half-satisfied. In the olive grove, the children did most of the work.

"I'll wear thick sandals. I can walk a long way."

Gilles didn't agree at once. The spring Ma lay almost five milles, one thousand Roman paces, up an ever-steepening, rock-strewn valley, a long walk even when the sun's heat didn't drain one's strength, when the hard Mistral wind didn't blow down from the mountains like a great, cool hand pushing him back. Several things had yet to occur before Gilles would consider his daughter's wishes. Even he was not aware what they were.

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Framed