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Chapter 29 - An Unhallowed Mass

Ibn Saul was first to notice that Gilles had changed course. When he fell asleep they had been sailing due west on a close reach. Now the yard was around, and the sun's glow was on the port side.

Anselm also knew celestial paths. "Is the sun rising in the south—or are we sailing toward Africa?"

"Africa?" growled Reikhard. "Are we lost?"

"The wind," Gilles explained, "is out of the west, and I can't sail into it. We must zigzag south, then north, to keep the wind from backing the sail."

"How long will that take?" asked Reikhard. "We're almost out of wine."

"There's water." Gilles no longer kowtowed to the knight. When fear is behind, he reflected, vast freedom lies ahead.

Fear still limited Anselm. He could have called a favorable wind, but would it be breeze or tempest? He hunkered down next to Gilles, and eyed the fog that obscured the coast astern.

* * *

The new church, the monkish engineer explained, was a fortress. What Pierrette had thought were ruined walls were newly constructed ones. There were no windows on the ground floor, and only slits above, for bowmen. The stout oak main door faced west, sally ports north and south. The old stones were weathered to a rich ocher, the new were blindingly white.

"Saracens burned the houses," the monk told Pierrette, indicating the open square, "and we won't allow anyone to build there again—for a clear field of fire. And the well is within the church, now. None who take refuge there will thirst."

"Pier . . . Piers!" Agathe called to her from the shade of a nearby doorway. "Come here now!" Pierrette recognized that authoritative tone. "P'er Alfredus wishes to speak with you," the nun said. Pierrette remarked the odd shift in her voice, as if the sharp-tongued teacher had suddenly become the least of her own pupils. Sister Agathe hustled her inside.

Father Alfredus was a large, brown man with bushy eyebrows and hazel eyes like a Burgundian. She thought he would have been more comfortable clutching a war axe than the quill he fiddled with.

"Your sister," he announced portentously, "suffers from a feminine complaint." Considering Marie's difficulties, Pierrette was inclined to agree with him, but his authoritative tone made her uncomfortable. "Without a mother to advise her, she went to the wedding bed unprepared."

"She was raped!" Pierrette said, almost forgetting to keep her voice low. "The demon came later—in Massalia."

"Oh, come, boy—in the nunnery? Surrounded by holy women? There's no demon, and I'll waste no effort on exorcism. She is listless. Perhaps that is swamp fever—has she had chills? Yellow skin and eyes? No?" He shrugged, and turned to his papers.

"Thank you, Father," Agathe said, grasping Pierrette's arm tightly and ushering her out of the priest's house.

"He's wrong!" Pierrette snarled, when the door had shut. "He's a pompous fool."

"Pierrette! He's a priest!"

As if that were an excuse. "He hides ignorance behind an air of authority. What do we do now? We can't take Marie back to Massalia, and there's nothing for us here. Why didn't you stand up to him?"

"He's a priest!"

"He's an ass. You are wise and kind. He should listen to you."

Agathe sighed. "I'm happy you think well of me, but even Mother Sophia must obey the newest-ordained boy, fresh from school."

In the nunnery, the women were free, within the limits of their rule, to express their thoughts. P'er Otho, Pierrette's only other exposure to Christian structure, was perhaps atypically mild.

" `My nephew's church was for women and slaves,' " Pierrette quoted, " `but the new Church I foresee is of men and kings.' "

"Who said that?" Agathe asked her.

"Mary," Pierrette said idly, without thinking. "I never found out which one she was, but her name was Mary." Agathe stared, afraid to understand.

* * *

The Gitanes remained camped north of the town, waiting for other bands to join them. When all were gathered, the chiefs would occupy the church.

"The holy fathers will be in a dither," Marah told Pierrette across the fire. "They don't know why we come, but they can't stop us. There are enough of us to storm the fortress church, if we wanted to."

Pierrette nodded. She was braiding a cord out of undyed fibers, to keep her hands busy. She was thinking about Marie, and worrying that Gilles and the others would not arrive in time. What if she had to confront the demon alone again? What if the old Mary forgot, or had not been real?

Marah's eyes grew reflective. "Once everyone followed the wild horses, fished in lakes and rivers, and gathered the land's bounty. There were no towns, and no man owned anything. Everyone was a nomad then, though some folk stayed closer to home than others, if the land provided well. . . . Only we Gypsies have kept the old ways."

Only nomads refrained from cutting the Mother's flesh and trampling it beneath hooves of captive herds, or burrowing like maggots for wealth. They loved gold because other wealth was forbidden; they did not own land, and gold was free in Mother's streams.

"We have only one fixed place," Marah said. "Our ancestress's grave." That grave was now within the church of the Marys. Twice each year gypsies came, in May for the feast of Mary Jacoba, the mother of James, and in October for Mary Salomé's.

Carrying statues of the two Marys, surrounded by men on Camargue horses, Christian women from Arelate marched through the streets to the beach and the sea. At the same time, the Gypsies marched with Sara's statue—but their chiefs remained within the crypt, by Sara's sarcophagus, reclaimed for their people.

"They think we venerate Saint Sarah," Marah said, "but that's a ruse; we pay respect to an ancestor. We ask her advice, and her blessing when a new queen is chosen."

"Do all Gypsies know that?" Pierrette asked.

"When they're old enough to keep secrets."

"You must be careful," Pierrette said. "If you forget that Sara is Tsigane, not Egyptian, she'll be lost."

Marah peered closely, narrowing her eyes. "That's not an idle remark. Who told you?"

"A woman who . . . who used to live in a small house, over there, by the sea."

"Her name, girl? What was her name?"

Pierrette sighed. "Sara. She called herself Sara the Tsigane. She said that only on the feast days, when the Gypsies all come, does she remember she's not Sarah, the Christian saint. She's afraid that someday you will forget, and . . ."

"We do not forget!"

"There was an old woman called Mary. Another Mary had died, and was not yet buried. I think the others expected to die also, as your tale remembers it, within a few days. They said they would help when the time came."

"As will the Tsigane," Marah said, accepting her words without question or doubt.

"I'll need help. Father Alfredus won't aid me—he says there is no demon."

"Priests know nothing." She stirred the fire's embers. "Did you sneak into the church, to speak with . . . those old women?"

"There was no church," Pierrette said. "There were houses, and an ancient altar stone . . . I used a spell my mother taught me."

"What spell?" Marah demanded harshly, intensely. "What words?"

"Mondradd in Mon," Pierrette said, with considerable hesitation. "That means . . ."

"To Part the Veil." Marah shuddered. "Dangerous words. Women have been trapped by them, and have never returned. After a while, their bodies just died."

"It would be easy to be caught," Pierrette reflected, thinking of Aam and Rheudhi, the painted cave, and the powerful stag who . . . "I won't utter those words again soon."

"Good. But you asked for help. What must we do?"

Pierrette told her.

"The festival begins tomorrow," Marah said. "Will you be ready?"

"I don't know. If my message got through . . ." If Minho of the Isles were not a figment of deranged imagination. She had stood on the edge of a swampy lagoon. That was all. From the Fortunate Isles she had brought back only memories that could be a dream.

If my father puts aside his fears. If Anselm does not fade. If P'er Otho will participate in un-Christian sorcery. If Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul does not dismiss me as a madwoman.

There was no way they could arrive in time except by sea, but that afternoon great banks of fog had rolled in, and the wind died. No boat could put in at Saintes-Maries-by-the-Sea until the fog cleared.

"Go to bed, girl," Marah said. She raked ashes over the embers. "Always sleep when you can. That's an old rule of soldiers and wanderers."

* * *

Pierrette dreamed she was Sara the Tsigane, peering through the dense fog. Out there on the water, a boat beat back and forth seeking safe harborage; aboard the frail craft were not saints, but men . . . A bell was ringing, an eerie sound muffled by the wooly fog.

She sat up, the dream shattered. Anselm, Gilles, Otho, ibn Saul, and . . . was that big, light-haired man Jerome? The castellan? What was he doing in her dream? And what had been so different about him? Why were they all singing?

They were drunk. The dream was so preposterous she lay back down and tried to return to sleep, as Sara had done. But like Sara, before creeping dawn touched the church's fog-shrouded walls, she was at the sea's edge.

The fog was as in the dream—or was the dream's mist a recapitulation of the fog she had seen the night before? Something was not as it should be.

She heard the faint tones of a bell. But there was no bell, only the drip of dew from pine needles. That was not right. There should have been a bell to guide the boat to the unmarked strand where she waited, not far from the gray bones of the old ship.

A bell. She remembered the proud monk pointing. "The bell is up there, on wooden blocks. We have erected pillars and an arch to hang it from. . . ." Pierrette hurried back to the plaza. Fog's tendrils crept over cobbles imported at great cost from the hills north of Arelate. No one was about. She pushed and pulled at the church door. Was it barred from the inside, or was she simply not strong enough?

She rushed to Father Albertus's house, and pounded with a closed fist. A man stuck his head out a window. "Go away until morning."

"There's a boat out there. They can't find port because of the fog. Someone must ring the bell to guide them to shore."

"Let them sail down the coast, or wait until the fog lifts. The bell has not been hung, and can't be sounded."

"We must hang it, then. Call Father Albertus."

"You're mad. There's no boat. If you'd seen one, its captain would have seen you also, and would have no trouble finding port. Go away, before I call guards."

Pierrette turned away. Indeed, she must seem mad. She walked around the church and examined the small doors. Both were snug in their stops. She sat disconsolately on the front step, head in hands. There was a bell, but she could not ring it. Soon drunken Gilles would give up, and would sail down the coast, or back to Massalia.

A sound startled her. A sharp, metallic clank, not the melodious tone of a church bell. Again the off note sounded—and Pierrette's heart grew light. "Yan Oors," she whispered. "You kept your promise."

She felt a hand on her shoulder. "Yes," said John of the Bears. "I am here—and you must not be. You must return to the beach and await your father."

"I wanted to ring the bell, but . . ." She looked up speculatively. He was big, and strong. If he struck the unhung bell with his iron staff, it would be loud enough to be heard at sea. "Open this door for me. Strike the bell with your staff, to make it ring."

"That is a Christian shrine. I don't wish to shrivel into a Christian boy who hasn't discovered his prong."

"People's beliefs, not piles of stones, shape us. Hurry! Open the door."

Yan Oors put his shoulder to it. "It's barred from within."

"Let's try another." The southern sally port was locked, not barred. Had it been warded by spells instead, she would have whisked them aside. Yan prodded the keyhole with his knife, rotated it, and pushed the door open. "I don't want to go inside," he said.

Pierrette grasped his arm. "Come." She pulled him along the church wall.

"Look!" A wan, blue light sprang from her fingertips. They peered at the carved stone set into the wall. "What do you see?"

"A swineherd with a fishing pole," he said, "and two sows."

"Yan! Don't tease me. That is you, with your staff, and . . ."

"It cannot be. Not here."

"But it is. This far out on Rhodanus's delta, even cobbles must be carted in, so the masons reused old stones—and this was one of them. It was an altar. You aren't unwelcome here—you've been here all along. Now will you ring the bell?"

With a backward glance at his own worn image graven in the church wall, the big man edged toward the doorway. "I'll ring it. You must go."

She hugged him. There was nothing vague or unreal about that; he smelled of leather and sweat, of wool moistened with dew, and of damp iron. "Go now," he urged, pushing her away. "Bring them ashore."

The fog was thick. She almost took the wrong street; all were so narrow she could touch the walls of houses on either side. Once upon the proper alley, she hurried, stumbling. Before she felt sand under her feet, she heard the raucous clank of the bell. It was not sweet, because the bronze was dampened by the timbers it rested upon, and because the instrument that struck it was not a leather-wrapped clapper, but a great, iron staff.

Clank, the bell sounded. Clank, clunk. Pierrette hurried through a swale filled with sharp grass and scrub poplars, and out onto the strand.

Clang, clank, went the bell. She heard shouts; the priests and laborers were awake. How long could Yan Oors ring before they stopped him? She must hurry her father and his companions ashore.

There were the bare timbers of the old boat. Pierrette leaned on one to catch her breath. It snapped off below the sand. Others were equally frail. She heaped them against the boat's stem, and stretched forth her hand . . .

Flames sprung up as if kindled in pitch and splinters. Gold and orange sparks floated above the fog's gray blanket, a tower of blazing light.

She heard the sodden thunk of oars and the rumble of voices no longer lifted in song. Gilles's rang with a commanding tone. "Pull together now! Stroke, stroke, stroke! Sir knight, that's an oar, not a broadsword. It does no good waving in the air. That's it, now. Stroke! Stroke! There's no telling how long that fire will last. We're still a quarter mile offshore."

A quarter mile? The voices seemed to come from no distance at all. And how did her father dare command the Burgundian? Was this too a dream? Had she indeed crossed over into madness?

She glanced toward the towering fire. The wood seemed unburnt, as if the flames were a dream, and only the wood real. She shivered. Was she unable to separate magpies, beech trees, fires, and the blue glow of swamp wisps from her own imaginings? Was Marie's complaint also a derangement of the mind, passed from mother to daughter in their ancient blood?

Full of terrible doubt, Pierrette ran from the fire to the shore, and awaited whatever came. . . .

* * *

She saw the masthead poking through the gray moisture, then the familiar rigging—handmade sheaves her father had carved, frayed ropes she had hauled to raise the spar. The boat's battered stem pushed from the fog. The craft shuddered as it ran up the sandy shore. A rope uncoiled in the air and slapped down on wet sand at Pierrette's feet.

"You there!" Gilles barked. "Tie us off." Her father had not recognized her. He hardly glanced at the small figure walking the rope ashore. "All of you! Out! You too, Reikhard. A little more salt water won't worsen your rust. Help pull us ashore."

Even the big man, Reikhard, who looked like the knight Jerome, leaped to obey him. Pierrette did not know what amazed her most—that they were indeed here, or that Gilles was transformed, confident, and that the others accepted it.

Otho was first to recognize her. He gasped.

"Keep pulling," she said. Over the panting of straining men, the lap of waves, and the thudding of her heartbeat, Pierrette heard an angry roar from the town. She tied the rope to a slender poplar. "Save your questions for later." She led them the way she had come.

Her only question for Otho, jogging beside her, was the identity of the big German. His explanation was as complete as it could be, he being out of breath and hurrying to keep up.

Her tension drained. The knight had been as much a victim as Marie. Still, she was glad he was behind with Gilles, Anselm, and ibn Saul, so she did not have to deal with her entrained fear and revulsion.

"That explains what changed Marie," she stated. "This Reikhard's demon flew westward no further than the nunnery." Otho had been right to bring the castellan, for though the demon had been forced out of him, he had not forgotten it, and might know some weakness that would help destroy it—instead of merely driving it to another victim.

Dawn. Sun drove back fog. The square was full of angry people. The Gypsies had arrived, dressed in their best and brightest. The women's skirts were black, banded with ochre, orange, crimson, green, and a blue as intense as sunlit shallows. The men's shirts were rare silk, embroidered with herbs and vines. Gold glittered like fragments of sunshine. Gitanes stood six deep in front of the church door, brandishing staves quartered from upland oak, or crosstrees taken from their wagons, still jingling with bronze fittings.

Separated by the length of a Gitane club were dun-, brown-, and russet-clad churchmen, Bishop Albertus in their midst. It was not the first time the Gypsies had taken over the church, Pierrette remembered. Still, though the confrontation seemed to have elements of ritual, the angry faces were not mere convention: the Gypsy defiance was real; this was their time, their shrine, but the priests and monks who had spent years of effort rebuilding the edifice did not willingly cede it.

Pierrette pushed through, and her companions followed. The space between priests and Gypsies seemed wide as a Roman road. The Gypsies parted, making an aisle to the church door. "Where is Marie?" Pierrette hissed anxiously.

"Here," said Marah. Guihen and Yan held a litter—two poles and a blanket. Marie was humping and writhing like a fish dying on the sole-boards of Gilles's boat. A dark-clad figure with a hoodlike shawl bent over the stretcher like a crow over carrion. Who was that?

Marie had soiled herself. Her arms were bound at the wrists, and her legs had been belted with a Gypsy cincture. The dark-robed stranger backed away.

Swallowing her risen gorge, Pierrette leaned close to Marie and looked into panic-widened eyes. "Everything will be all right," she said loudly and firmly, so she could be heard over the crowd's din and Marie's inarticulate mouthings. "Hold on, sister. We'll free you." She desperately wanted the real Marie to hear, to take comfort. She wanted to believe Marie understood—but it was the demon that struggled and heaved her body about in its desperation.

"Release her, uncreated one!" Pierrette shouted. "Depart before you are brought inside. You'll never leave the sanctuary whole." It was bravado, but the crowding, the battering noise, and her hammering heart filled her with excitement. Now everything would be decided; all the principals were here.

"Bring her inside," Pierrette commanded. She held a braided, knotted cord out of sight behind her back.

Marie flung herself sideways, almost wrenching the poles from the hands that held them, then vomited over the side, spattering Pierrette's feet and adding acrid foulness to the stench about her. "I'll kill her," grated Marie's tormentor through a throat roughened by screaming, acid, and bile. "She'll not survive my departure."

"She will, and you will not," Pierrette responded angrily. "You are worse than doomed." Holding up her hitherto hidden cord, Pierrette made a bight and dangled it in front of Marie's face. "I have bound you. Chev't santú, chev't sanitú," she murmured, watching Marie's eyes widen. "Ligure e' ligamen; salix, Lex Salliorum. I bind you with a virgin's hair and a saint's, with the old law remembered, and the law written."

She drew the bitter end over the bight, around, under, and up through. She tugged on both ends, leaving a loop just large enough to slide over one finger. "As I bound you, I will lead you." She walked around the litter, and went inside the church.

She could see little, but the first bay on her left held something large and brightly painted. A boat? In a church?

The litter bearers followed. Marie struggled feebly now. "Place her there," Pierrette said, nodding toward the second bay, by an ancient carved stone. Her eyes adjusted to the low light.

She looped the long free end of her cord around a pillar and, withdrawing her finger from the bight, pushed the end through it, pulled it tight, and knotted it. "Here you will remain," she said to the demon.

"Come, Marie," she said softly. "Leave him behind. You have friends here. They await you." Guihen and Yan bore the litter toward the altar.

Marie shrieked. She struggled to rise. The knotted cord tightened as she was moved away, as if it were tied to her—to something that hovered about her face, in her breath. The complex, asymmetrical knotting reached out to her, and the cord drew straight. The knot hovered, held by some invisible bond.

Marie's blanket smoldered, but there was no flame, only an oily puff. The cord thrummed like a tight-wound harpstring. "Pull!" Pierrette commanded. "Pull her away." Marie screamed—this time in pain, not a fiend's anger.

Pierrette looked along the cord to the pillar where it was fixed. The roiling smoke remained bound to the cord braided of gray hair and black, a saint's hair and a virgin's. Red-brown shreds of willow bark were braided in it, and a ribbon that had once bound Anselm's law tables of the Salian Franks. It was a binding of twisted words and changing meanings, deadly humorless puns—ligatures, or binding spells, and Ligures, Pierrette's ancient kin, salix, which was willow, and Salian lex, or law.

The smoke billowed and fought to be free. People pressed into the church. Pierrette did not dare to turn to see who stood behind her, but felt their warmth, and drew strength from it. She could not prevail alone; she was no more than a focus for the hatred all felt toward the evil bound by the fragile cord.

"Marie is free of you," she exulted, despite her fears. Whether or not her sister's frail body survived the separation, she was free. Alive or dead, she was no longer bound by . . . The beastly essence was shaping itself to its lone existence. She did not recognize the form it was taking, or know what strengths it might call upon.

Tusks gleamed yellow in faint western reflections of the sun just risen in the east. The sanglier lowered its head to charge. It snapped at the frail, tight-drawn cord, and severed it. From the boar's bowels rumbled words: "You did not expect that to hold me, did you?"

"Only long enough," Pierrette murmured, shifting between Marie and the demon. "Marie is free of you. Your fate and hers are separated."

The boar lunged—and a leathery, black-clad arm pushed Pierrette aside. Tusks rang against forged iron.

"I am lord of animals," growled Yan Oors, holding the beast at bay with his staff. "I am master of he whose guise you wear."

The boar-shape hunched down upon its belly. The demon snarled, the boar wavered and shifted, becoming again formless smoke, its tusks the flicker of impending flames. "You can't elude me," Yan Oors said. "I'll have my part of you."

Flames consumed smoke, and Pierrette felt the red heat of Cernunnos's eyes. . . . She uttered soft words, and the lapping tongues dipped and danced to her cadence, trapped in her spell of bound fire, as any real flame would have been. Yet no magic could defeat the beast of many shapes. Only her friends could exhaust it. But there were many shapes, and so few friends.

"Become what you will," she said. "Shift and change, and someone will counter you as Yan Oors is doing. You will be whatever you seem, and one of us will defeat you." She hoped that was not a lie. She hoped the others had heard her words, and would heed them.

No longer bound, the demon's formless voice became the sound of the sea in a storm, and the air stank with the tang of lightning. A cold wind whipped her hair and she was transported to another place, where wind, water, and rock were entangled. She could not see or hear anything over their tumult. Still, she sensed something besides the clashing forces of earth, air, and sea. She heard someone shouting into the teeth of the wind. . . .

* * *

Giles did not know what Heaven was, but Hell was no mystery. Hell was a coward's denial. Hell was his daughter's degradation, his wife's death, and his silent acquiescence. Hell was the seat of his fears.

Hell was the storm and the clash of waves over rocks. Heaven was beyond: the glow of promised day on a far, low horizon, unattainable except through the churning black gut of the tempest that lashed his small boat.

"The dead don't fear!" Gilles shouted at his adversary. "And I am like a dead man. I will win through you, for now, at last, has my time come!" He pulled the tiller against his skinny ribs, and slatted the sail fore-and-aft. His frail, punk-rotten craft plunged toward the black rocks on the tightest tack its clumsy rig could handle.

Ahead, massing on his left, was the Anvil, and offshore of it the smaller knob called the Hammer, obscured by spume and surf. The wind on his sail pushed him west of north, but his waterlogged hull made leeway. Only by heading directly at the Anvil's rocks could he squeeze between them and the Hammer; only by confronting his nightmare head on could he avoid it.

Bitter salt spray harsh in his eyes, Gilles held course for his doom, and trusted the providence of his long-ignored God to push him through the narrow passage. Wave after wave sprayed over his rail and sloshed about his toes, then his ankles . . . The deeper his hull rode, the less leeway it made. Hell ahead, Heaven beyond. No man's effort would determine whether he lodged on the rocks, or came about behind the islands and made safely for the open sea, the light sky beyond the storm.

Ebon rocks loomed off his bow, but he kept his course. To aim for the safety of the passage, toward the perception of a clear way through, was a fool's heading. Wind, and the drag of his half-sunken hull, dictated whether he would clear the Anvil and pass the Hammer. Only by sailing closest to doom could he hope to avoid it.

His hull rose and fell, shuddering with the backwash of waves from the rocks on his right. Spray from the left stung his face and eye. He shot beyond the promontory into the Anvil's lee.

He laughed. He had won through. Snatching his bailing bucket, he began to empty his boat. Behind him, among the rocks, the wind screamed its thwarted hunger.

The demon screamed and thrashed amid the coastal rocks. Gilles, drifting now, had eluded him.

Gilles felt emptiness within, hunger like the wind's and the sea's. Gilles, the empty man, devoid of fear or hope, had set his course to the rocks. God himself, he decided, had provided leeway to carry him past them. God had saved him—but why? He was a sinner of the worst sort: lazy, weak sins of omission. He had grasped sin no more firmly than virtue. His self-disgust was a shapeless puddle of reeking seaside mud. Had there been genuine Evil in his sin—that thought shot into his brain with shafts of piercing sunlight as the clouds broke overhead—he might at least have been a manly sinner.

As his small vessel rolled and plunged outward from the shore and the wracking waves, he understood his emptiness. As he would put it years hence, "a bit of Evil is not a bad thing." He looked down at the bailing bucket half full of froth—the product of miscible wind and sea, the demon's substance. He now owned that small portion of Evil he had to have. . . . Then waves and sea faded, and Gilles was once more within the church.

Pierrette saw her father turn his back on formless blackness, and push through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, his head high. Swinging heavily from one hand was his bucket. Salt water within it sloshed with darkness. "This is my portion of you!" Gilles called out. "And I'll sip it with my evening wine until I have consumed it all."

Gilles had done what he needed to do, and Pierrette did not wish him to stay. She, too, had set her course, and could not change it without dooming herself.

As she looked around at friends, acquaintances, and strangers, she saw them nodding their heads, and knew they had understood what Gilles had done—and that it was the only way to rid the world of that demon. They saw, and she hoped each would be able to do what he had to, because she could not do it by herself.

* * *

The black shapelessness that had been rock and sea a moment ago loomed to engulf the slight girl, but someone large and rusty stepped between them.

"Traitor! Betrayer!" squalled the fiend, red eyes coalescing in the darkness, reflecting crimson from Cernunnos's antler-tines, mounted on Reikhard's casque. The knight was not the hideous, priapic god who had cavorted at the mass, but the spirit of the forest, the deer god as generations before had known him, with warm, brown eyes—yet also a man wearing an antlered helm.

"You cannot shed a hundred generations of sacrifices," shrieked the demon. "You are mine still."

"A hundred generations of druids' sacrifices, not mine," growled the deer god, whose visage looked much like the castellan Jerome's. "The last druids who remembered the sacred texts are gone, and I'm not bound by their acts—or by you." Christian priests had named the druids evil, because of deaths done in their gods' names. "No lives have been taken in my name," bellowed Jerome—or Reikhard, or Cernunnos—in the voice of a rutting stag. "You have no claim on me."

Pierrette's eyes betrayed her; deer, god, and armored man appeared and disappeared between one blink and the next, images fleeting as firelight shadows. The knight's opponent lashed out with red claws, a shapeless, inchoate beast, yet more fearsome for that. Cernunnos, again wholly stag, lowered his spreading antlers, and the creature backed away. It changed . . . Sooty blackness stretched out and coalesced into a long warrior's sword. Darkness swelled and split, forming legs and arms, solidifying. Circlets and eddies of smoke shaped themselves into a sculpted bronze cuirass.

Fully armored in blackened bronze, the demonic warrior raised his long sword and charged the stag. He met Reikhard's iron blade, not soft horn: Cernunnos was illusory, the armed knight real. The two crashed together, plate against rusty mail, bronze against iron.

"I am free of you," shouted the Burgundian, dancing back, swinging his weapon.

The demon warrior met his arcing blade, and twisted it aside. "I will have you again," he boomed, thrusting with a dagger hitherto concealed in his other hand. The short blade grated against mail . . . and it snapped. Reikhard stepped back, catching his opponent off balance. He spun, pivoting on one foot. His sword came around from an unexpected quarter and struck his foe's unarmored neck. The fiend's head teetered long enough for Reikhard to snatch its helmet.

"This is mine!" the Burgundian bellowed, backing away from the headless body, already dissolving into foul smoke. "This trophy will hang from my rooftree." Reikhard swaggered away with a rattle of linked iron rings and scabbard chains, his portion of Evil swinging against his thigh: the demonic warrior's grimacing head, already shrinking but still helmeted, like a melon thumping and rolling around in a pot. The watching Gypsies, villagers, priests and strangers parted to let him pass, carrying the head of the demon.

* * *

Old Anselm then stepped forward, spreading his arms like a hawk's wings, and came at the greasy apparition. Though diminished by a head and a bucket of sea water, the fiend still swelled to great bulk, and seemed unweakened. Like black, oily waters, it roiled and rippled, and above the waters an osprey circled on wings held at a high angle, watching the surface of the sea to see what swam below.

The grudging ocean danced with obscuring ripples, but the osprey plunged anyway, its eyes locked on a shadow shape seen a moment before. Down it shot in a flurry of black and white, into the sea, downward into the echoing silence of the deep. Talons stretched out two by two, backward and forward, and snatched its shiny, wriggling prize, a fat red mullet.

The fish hawk shot upward then, borne by air in its swollen lungs and trapped in its feathers, rising toward the shimmery hammered-tin ceiling of the foreign sea. It popped into the air. With great thrusts of its wet wings, the osprey lifted the plump mullet above gathering waves that came too late to foil it. Its wings folded and drew upward, then spread and beat down against the air, tips touching the water with each stroke. The bird turned its prey in its grasp until the hapless fish faced forward as if swimming willingly where the osprey took it.

Above, a gray-headed eagle, more thief than hunter, stooped to the attack.

"Mine!" the osprey squalled, warned by a stray reflection on the water. It leaned heavily left, skewing its course to take it toward dense pines at the foot of the promontory—and its nest.

"Give it to me," the eagle shrilled, threatening to strike the clumsy, prey-laden osprey between its laboring wings, to force it to drop the sluggishly waving mullet. Ordinarily, an eagle would not strike until an osprey had attained almost the altitude of its nest, so when it dropped its fish, the eagle had time to plunge down and catch it still tumbling in air. But this great gray-headed bird was no ordinary eagle, and was not motivated by hunger.

"Catch me, then!" the smaller bird called, and plunged back into the water, still holding its mullet. No eagle had ever seen an osprey do that. It turned sharply, dipping a wingtip into a wave, and returned to the spreading ripples . . . just as the osprey again shot from water into air, aiming itself toward shore and the safety of tangled pine branches no eagle could penetrate. The eagle was flying at great speed, and though it wheeled quickly, the fish hawk attained sanctuary with whole wing beats to spare.

Gray-head circled offshore, emitting loud cries. The hawk tore shreds of cool flesh from the fish, and the sounds that accompanied its feast were the strangest ever made by a bird—like laughter one moment, like a man gagging the next.

"Mine," it squalled happily, filling its throat with pale meat. "Ach!" it said then. "I hate raw fish!"

Soon nothing was left but scraps and sharp bones. The black-and-white osprey's feathers blurred and became a white garment and black, shiny oiled hair. Anselm the mage belched fishily, and grimaced at the flavor of his eructation. "Raw fish!" he grumbled, "but the spice of evil makes it tolerable."

The sea again coalesced into formless darkness, and if Anselm's breath, there in the church of the holy Marys, smelled of raw mullet, no one seemed to notice—not even Otho, who stood next to him. But Otho was already busy. Again, the fiend had changed . . .

* * *

"I know you," Otho said to the raven-winged angel. Eyes of crimson fire bathed him in their glare. "I know you, and I will have my piece too." He now understood what must be done. Reikhard had taken a head, Gilles water—demonic substance—and Anselm had consumed more, in the form of a fish. What would he, Otho, take from the abomination, to call his own?

He stood forward, fingers clawed as if both to grab at the demon and to fend it from him. He grasped its long, black hair. Huge wings beat at him, buffeting him, but he did not let go. He wrenched the hair, and came away with a bloody hank. The fiend screamed.

Otho staggered back, battered and bruised. He hurt as if the demon's wound was in his own scalp. The creature grinned, holding up a lock of Otho's hair. The priest raised the demon's torn forelock to his own wound. When he pulled it away, his scalp was no longer bloody. The devil's black hair had taken root, and grew as if it were Otho's own, giving him a strange, shadowed, lopsided look, right different from left. The shuddering demon still held Otho's skin and hair in its clawed hand.

"Keep a bit of me, if you want," Otho said. "It's only hair. I have my share of you, and more than enough; I'll give some away, as it grows."

In the struggle, demon and priest had gotten turned around, and the uncreated one stood between Otho and the door.

"Hypage opiso mou," Otho said in Greek recently learned. "Skandalon ei emou." He pushed the demon aside. Wearing his black lock of hair, he strode from the church.

Priests drew back, afraid of his terrible taint. "I will pluck hairs as they grow long," he told them, looking directly at Bishop Albertus, "and I will braid bracelets of black hair for each of you, to wear in remembrance of this day."

Albertus was astounded by the hard strength and conviction in the newly arrived priest. Was he a saint? An emissary from Roma? He had addressed the demon with Christ's words: "Get back, Satan. You are a stumbling block before me."

"You don't understand what you saw," said Otho, "but I will teach you."

* * *

Pierrette stared at the smoke. Was it fainter by the sum of a bucket of sea water, the flesh of a mullet, a lock of hair, and a warrior's severed head? Its implacable hatred was undiminished. If it reached her, she could not withstand it. But as it again approached, someone else leaped in its way.

* * *

"Blight!" cried Guihen, and darted forward. He snatched at the smoky air. "Smut and ergot!" he exclaimed, making motions as if he were stuffing a pouch with demon-substance. "Hellebore and nightshade," he crowed, shredding wisps of vaporous substance with his long fingers. "Mold and mushrooms, poisons and potions. I claim them all." He leaped away with a tinkling of muguet-flower bells, leaving a silvery scent of the tiny lilies that ornamented his shoes and cuffs.

"I've always had evil enough," he announced, "so I will share these with everyone."

He grinned at Pierrette. "Good and evil," he said, making a motion as if pouring oil from one jar to another. "Medicine and poison. Which is which, and when? Ask Augustine of Hippo. He knows." The priests shrank back in terror as he ran laughing and leaping from the sanctuary.

"Did you hear?" Otho asked Bishop Albertus. "Do you remember what Augustine wrote? In the substance, not the usage, does evil lie." Albertus had not read the saint's works, or much else. Pierrette wondered when Otho had found time to do so. He had always portrayed himself as an uneducated village priest.

"Come," Otho commanded the churchmen, "now do as you have seen done." He led them forward. First Albertus, then each priest and monk in turn, stepped up to the pillared bay where the roiling darkness stood. Each one reached out a hand and took a portion—a wisp of smoke, a pinch of swirling soot. When they were done, the demon indeed seemed diminished. It twisted in upon itself, as if by becoming dense and solid it could prevent further attenuation.

* * *

Marah, queen of Gypsies, gathered her people behind herself. For a moment, Pierrette saw no fat woman in bright clothing, glittering with gold, but a figure in uncut cloth draped in an ancient manner: the pneuma, the soul and breath, of Sara, unchanged and undiminished by births, deaths, and generations.

She saw no demon of smoke, whirling dust, and stygian blackness, but a great loaf of coarse bread resting upon the pagan altar. Sara broke it across her knee.

Once she had taken a pinch of blackness and chewed it, Pierrette again saw Marah, gold bracelets warm in the faint, indirect light. Each Gitane partook of the unconsecrated feast, then retired to the front of the church, where Pierrette heard water being drawn from the siege well. The well: the ancient source and soul of the community, one reason why folk had built houses on this undistinguished strand.

Marah and her folk left by the south portico. The church seemed empty. Pierrette, dark Yan Oors, and Marie remained. She heard a faint scratching, like a mouse gnawing a crust; the scholar ibn Saul sat cross-legged against a pillar, a filled parchment on his writing board.

Yan Oors approached the ancient stone. The shadows his bulk cast seemed out of proportion, as if independent of him and the light from the distant doorway. One shadow followed his movement, and two separate ones dogged his heels. He broke chunks of dark bread from the loaf, taking the greater portion of what remained on the stone, and fed one to each of his shadowy companions.

For a moment—just a brief span, hardly a heartbeat—Pierrette saw in those umbral shapes two great bears, male and female. Their small eyes gleamed balefully as the stars between the cleft to the Eagle's Beak. "My brother, my sister, and I will slip out by the north portal," Yan said quietly, his resonant voice echoing in the empty church. "No one will notice us. They are all outside, waiting for you."

"Will I see you again?" Pierrette asked plaintively.

"You'll see us—all of us—better than before." He chuckled. "So will all the folk of this country—and when you don't see us, you'll hear tales . . . for there are pranks to be played, mares and housewives with a lust for wildness . . ."

Pierrette giggled . . . and he was gone. No shadows stirred. Pierrette felt battered by strong winds, each having struck her from a different compass point. She felt fuzzy-minded and deafened. She glanced at the pagan altar stone, which held only crumbs and a single crust, and knelt beside Marie.

Her sister's face was serene and childlike. She looked too innocent to live in the harsh world.

"She's too frail indeed," said an old, cracked voice. "As she is now, she'll again be taken by darkness. She's an empty vessel with no lid to protect it, no contents a demon would have to displace."

Pierrette recognized old, gray-haired Maria, her shawl thrown back on her narrow shoulders—the dark figure with Marie when Pierrette had first arrived at the church. Or was she an apparition who looked much like Sister Agathe? Nothing was what it seemed. Was all this a mad nightmare?

Maria shook her head. "Wake her, child, and we'll help her to do what must still be done." Trustingly, Pierrette knelt and gently shook Marie's shoulder, feeling the warmth of her through the blanket and the palm of her hand.

Her sister's eyes opened. Pierrette helped her sit. "Is this a church?" Marie asked. "I've never been here before."

"It's the church of the Holy Marias by the Sea," Pierrette replied.

Old Maria—or Sister Agathe?—murmured something in Marie's ear. The girl shook her head vehemently. "No. I don't want to."

"You must, child, or all you have suffered will be for naught." She turned to Pierrette. "Help her stand and walk. She knows what she must do."

Pierrette also knew. "She's so innocent," she protested.

"She must," insisted the woman.

"Who is she?" Marie asked Pierrette.

"I'll explain later," Pierrette said. Had Marie forgotten everything that had transpired while the demon had resided within her, since her wedding night? If she had forgotten, it might be for the best. But there was something that had to be done. . . .

"Come," she said, and led Marie to the pagan altar stone, and picked up the crust. "Take this, and eat."

"I don't want it," Marie responded, grimacing. "I don't like black bread. I will not . . . Oh!" Marie gasped as the old woman grasped her arm, squeezing it painfully.

"Eat it," Maria commanded. "Eat it, or suffer again all those things you do not wish to remember."

"Is it blessed?" asked Marie, confused, thinking that as this was a church, and the bread had been taken from an altar . . .

"It is not," Maria grated. "It is dark as murder, sour as envy, coarse as a whore's laugh, and heavy as guilt. Yet eat it you must, for there is not one of us without sin, and that crust is your fair portion."

She guided Marie's hand to the crust. Marie took it, her whole body trembling as if with ague. She pressed it between slack, trembling lips and chattering teeth, and the sound of her chewing was loud in the silence, a silence broken only by a faint scratch, scritch, scratch, as of a mouse somewhere in the shadows. Marie choked the dry stuff down.

"Now come, and drink," Maria said. A wide-mouthed clay jar beside the well brimmed with water.

"Is it foul too?" asked Marie, her voice rough and choked with course bread.

"It is water, fresh drawn from the earth," said Maria.

Marie drank. She took a second sip, and a third, darkening the front of her thin garment with spilled water.

"Come," said Maria. "Friends await outside, in the bright sunlight of morning." She led Marie away. The robed figure whose arm encircled Marie's waist resembled Sister Agathe, from behind. Where had the nun been during the terrible confrontations, and how had she appeared so suddenly, as if from behind a pillar?

"Pierrette?" Marie called out, turning back.

"She'll come soon. She still has one task to perform here," Agathe said, soothing her. "Come." It was Agathe. . . . But then, where had Maria gone? Had she really been there at all? It was all too confusing.

Pierrette knelt by the stone altar, not in reverence, but like a housewife; she swept the remaining crumbs into her palm, took one pinch of them, and ate. The gritty substance was like sand on her tongue. The rest she carried to the well, and brushed it from her hand, for the earth itself was not without pain, nor its waters without sorrow, and all who walked upon the land and drank from its breast must accept their share of it.

She then sighed loudly, and walked toward the light. "Are you coming?" she asked ibn Saul, still making mouse scratchings.

"Soon," he said. "I've almost finished writing what I saw here."

"Good," she said. "Guard your scribery well, but let no one see it. The truth of what you have observed—and what you did not see—may be all that stands between us and terrible doom."

Ibn Saul did not understand. Of course, facts written by an unbiased, rational observer were important, but what did she mean, "a terrible doom"? Nonetheless, impressed by the gravity of her statement, he tucked the sheets beneath his belt.

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Framed