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Chapter 23 - Parting the
Veil of Years

Sea breezes pushed up the eroded ravine in gusts and surges, like the ebb and flow of surf on the tiny beach below. Farther along, beneath the calanque's present waters, was another beach, that existed then, but not now.

Pierrette removed Gustave's halter rope and retied it around his front legs. "Don't try to chew through this hobble. Be good, and I'll feed you half the remaining oats tonight." She stopped, patted his snout on the side opposite his bruise, and turned away.

* * *

After an hour's walk, the sun seemed no further west. It was hard to tell; the path down took her deep within great eroded cracks in the creamy limestone. The sky was a narrow swath of blue. The azure and viridian of the inlet seemed no nearer. She had murmured the spell in rhythm with her footsteps, a long time ago. Was this timelessness a sign that the spell was working? Did every shimmery step part one small veil like dew-laden spiderwebs?

The endlessness of the descent reassured her. If the spell was not working, it would have been shorter, as in her time. And among familiar bushes were others that only grew in cool, wet places. She cast back in memory, to see this place through a magpie's eyes. Had the skin-clad hunters' world been cooler and more moist?

A rattle of stones startled her. She slipped behind a projection of rock. Someone was angry, and in pain. She crept forward and looked down on a head of shiny red-gold hair.

The girl, no older than she, wore a skirt of softened hide—and nothing else. Her speech seemed familiar, though Pierrette could make no sense of it. But then, when someone was holding her foot and trying to suck on a bloody toe, that was expectable.

"Let me help," Pierrette said quietly, in her mother's language and Ma's. Only afterward did she understand that the girl's words had triggered it. Both tongues had the same lilt and inflections; only time separated them.

Pierrette knelt, and uncorked her water bottle. Holding the girl's foot, she washed away bright, fresh blood.

"Edh merr," the red-haired girl murmured, sighing. Then: "Kwi h'es?" That sounded, to Pierrette, like "Feels good," and "Who are you?"

"I am Pierrette." She reached for the cloth that bound her hair, and wrapped the girl's toe with it.

Bright blue-green eyes, like white sand in the depths of a still pool, darted from the dark waves of Pierrette's hair to her own hurt toe, now wrapped in strange, unfamiliar stuff. She said something that sounded like "That is strange (something). What kind of (something) is it?" Strange skin? Or was it "What kind of beast?"

"It's made from flax," Pierrette replied. "It's not . . . not pwel?" How strange, Pierrette thought. We seem to be speaking the same tongue, but some words are different.

"Phlax . . . ?" The girl looked at her wrapped toe. "It does not look like a (something)." A leaf?

"Phlaxa?" said Pierrette, pulling a leaf from an unfamiliar, scrubby growth.

The girl giggled. "Fou-leya," she said.

"Well," Pierrette thought, "whatever `flax' means, it isn't `leaf'—or `linen fiber.' "

The girl's name was Rheudhi, which meant "red" to both of them. Fiery hair must be unusual, worthy of a distinctive name.

"Come," Rheudhi said, testing her injured foot. "We go down to people." She turned away from the trail to the beach "Quicker way through (something—kwah?)." Pierrette followed. "Something" was a shelf of looming rock overhanging a dark hole.

Rheudhi scrabbled in fallen detritus. "My fire," she explained, holding up a soapstone dish with holes in the top. She heaped crumbled twigs, set a bundle of dried weeds next to it, then shook a coal from the dish. She blew. Oily, fat-soaked weeds ignited. She stepped into the cave.

Pierrette could see only a few paces, once the blue-white light of day faded behind. Rheudhi knew where to turn, where to warn her of obstructions. Sometimes her voice sounded stifled, as in a small room, and at others it echoed, bouncing off faraway walls and columns. Had the torch gone out, or had Rheudhi left her, she would have starved before finding her way back. It seemed an eternity before she realized the glow ahead was daylight at last.

Rheudhi called out, her words too swift for Pierrette, and the women's and children's voices that answered tumbled word after word in untranslatable noise.

Pierrette stepped outside the cave. Above, cliffs and white pinnacles supported tufts of brush and twisted, feathery pines. Ahead, blue-green salt water gleamed.

"Aure Mamh'es," said Rheudhi, taking the arm of a light-haired woman. "This is Mother Dawn." Mother-Gold? Ah—Rheudhi's mother, Aure. Like Rheudhi, she wore only a scraped hide. Unlike Rheudhi, her breasts rested upon a swollen belly. Pierrette did not have to be a midwife to know she was near term.

"My brother is inside," Rheudhi said, stroking Aure's belly. How did she know it was a male child? It could be a sister, couldn't it?

"Come. The men return at dusk," Aure said. Actually, Pierrette heard, "Men, darkness, they come," but it was clear enough. "We gather (things) to eat with them."

Curious children fingered Pierrette's cloth tunic and trousers. A small hand brushed Pierrette's breast. "She's a girl!"

"Come," Aure said.

Pierrette found herself wading with ten women in a tidal pool, sifting sand with her toes, reaching down to grasp a mussel or clam when she felt hard sharpness, then tossing it ashore.

Her clothing lay on a rock, neatly folded. She had protested removing her garments. Rheudhi had laughed, and darted off, returning with lightly furred skins. She tugged until Pierrette unlaced her tunic and pulled it over her head. When the trousers and sandals followed it, Rheudhi tied the skins around Pierrette, one in front, one behind.

Self-consciously feeling every breeze that ruffled dark hair beneath the fur apron, Pierrette waded into the water, reminding herself that she was as well dressed as anyone. Besides, all were women, except for a few truly naked little boys and girls who splashed everyone.

"Did I come here to dig mussels with bare-breasted women?" she asked herself. "I should be fetching Marie." She had established that the spell Parting the Veil worked properly, and that was what she had set out to do.

Yet she was content, with her feet in cool water and her back exposed to warm late-afternoon sun, hearing a murmur of voices she could almost understand. Children's laughter was less than language, and more, needing no translation.

When she heard a resonant male voice, she wanted to squat in the water to hide her nakedness. She had wandered far from her clothes. But the pool was only ankle-deep, and the others were happily greeting the men.

"This is my father Bhirge," Rheudhi said, bringing Pierrette face to face with a blond, bearded man. "This is P'erit," Rheudhi told him.

Bhirge looker her up and down, his eyes thankfully spending no more time upon her breasts than her face or knees. She suspected that to this man she would be as easily recognized by the tilt of her upstanding nipples as by the shape of her nose. "Pebble," said Bhirge. "That's a funny name."

Pierrette caught a glint of red-gold on the shore. She looked up—and she saw him. She gasped. It was the man from her magpie flight, from her daydreams. He stood in a beam of sunlight, smiling as if expecting her, and glad she had at last arrived. "That's nonsense!" she told herself. But why was her heart thumping so? Why did her knees feel loose, and the breeze like feathers tickling her inner thighs?

"Pebble!" he said. He dipped a hand in the water, then splashed her lightly, laughing. "I wanted to see if you became even prettier when you were shiny and wet." Pierrette felt hot, and blushed all over.

Abruptly, the man raised his voice to speak to everyone. "The phokw have left us," he said. She was grateful for the respite.

She heard scattered moans, and a soft wail What was phokw? Obviously not happy news.

"We'll eat mussels," said Aure. "And we'll move on. It is the way."

Phokw? Like Latin phoca, seal? The seals were gone?

Women and men alike gathered mussels, lifting apronlike garments to hold them, unshyly exposing their most private parts. Only she and the man from her dreams did not lift their furs to collect shellfish. Rheudhi's thin tuft, she observed in a sidelong manner, was the same fiery shade as her head, while Aure's was dark, as if sunlight and salt-sea air accounted for her hair's coloration. Bhirge and the other men remained unstudied; Pierrette's eyes rapidly skipped away, unfocused, when her gaze accidentally brushed them.

"Help me prepare a fire," the man said. She willingly followed. Despite evidence of previous fires, there was plenty of driftwood. The waters of her time, that inundated this beach, these caves, had already begun their rise, washing trees loose, to gather in brittle heaps in sheltered bayheads.

Soon they had a crackling blaze. By the time the last of the mussels had been heaped beside it, the wood was settling, becoming embers with flickering tendrils of brilliant blues, greens, and yellows from salts and minerals left by seawater.

They draped mats of flaccid seaweed over the coals, then spread mussels on them. They built several layers, then mounded more seaweed and pebbly sand on the impromptu oven. Only vagrant wisps of steam escaped, but Pierrette knew the heap was hot and moist within.

She shied from that imagery, very aware that the man stood close by, and she had never felt like this, even in her dreams. What was wrong with her? She remembered the magpie dream—the woman, strong and lustful, who had . . .

"You're bright and pretty even when you're not wet," the man said, with soft humor. "Are all your folk so pale? Does your mother's skin talk so much too?"

"My people's skin," she murmured, not looking up at him, "is usually covered up, and cannot be . . . `heard.' "

"I'm glad yours isn't," he replied. "I like `listening' to you." Had her grasp of this dialect so suddenly improved, or had he spoken in Ma's tongue, not his own? She had understood not only his words, but . . . but what underlay them.

Her thoughts strayed to her one encounter with male desire. Jerome. Cernunnos. The Eater of Gods. But this was not the same. This was a man, not . . . something else . . . in man's guise. She felt like the woman in the magpie vision, and she had no idea how to deal with that.

"Why must you move away?" she asked him, to cover her discomfort. "Won't the seals come back?"

"Only when we have gone. The seals tell us we have lingered too long. We'll sicken." She asked him to explain.

He considered himself a predator like a fox or a wolf. Lingering too long, it had to take healthy prey, instead of culling the weak and sick, which it had already eaten. That was not good for predator or future generations of prey.

He told how foxes moved their young from nest to nest, leaving fleas and parasites behind.

"We'll need meat for the journey toward morning," he reflected. The journey toward . . . dawn? Eastward—toward the place Citharista would someday stand. "Tomorrow, I'll climb up to the high land, and will find a deer."

Pierrette envisioned his route—and conceived an opportunity to test the spell again. If she retraced her steps without invoking magic, she would see clearly what she had once seen in vision—the landscape of this time, laid out before her. Could she find the spot where she had left Gustave as well, or would it be too different?

"I'll go with you," she announced.

"I hunt best alone."

"I learn quickly."

He considered it carefully, and did not prate about hunting being man's work. "I'll teach you," he decided. "Tonight we'll go to the Place of Being Prey. If you are a deer, you'll know it."

The odd phrases reminded her she did not understand his speech well. She decided to wait and see what he meant.

"Rheudhi!" he called. "I think the mussels are cooked." They pulled the seaweed heap apart and tossed hot shellfish to those who stood around, laughing as people juggled their dinners to keep from burning their hands, then collected mussels in their skin aprons.

Women brought wild berries, crunchy roots, and nuts. Pierrette did not hesitate to lift her apron to hold her share. She was no longer surprised that no one's eyes lingered overlong in passing. She settled beside Rheudhi.

"Aam likes you," the redhead commented. "Will you (something) with him?" Pierrette repeated the unfamiliar word, as a question. Rheudhi made a poking gesture, and Pierrette's skin "spoke" loudly.

She opened her mouth to assert that she would die before . . . She did not say it. It was not so.

In her childhood fantasies, she had only envisioned kissing in a restrained way. Later, such imaginary embraces had become more intimate, her body pressed against his, feeling his warmth, his smooth skin, and the muscles beneath it.

Only after the magpie flight with Ma had her mental imagery grown up. Only then had she trembled with the desire and enveloping power her dream-Aure had felt. She had rejected those feelings with muted cries of despair—even as she would reject the man himself. She had to—or she would never leave this place, this time near the beginning of time.

"Why do you call him Aam?" That meant simply "man." Didn't he have a name?

Rheudhi giggled with girlish condescension. "What's wrong with `Aam?' " she asked. "I am Rheudhi, and see?" She lifted handsful of fiery hair. "He is Aam, and . . ." She lifted her skin apron, and feigned surprise at what she saw beneath it. ". . . he is a man." Again, Pierrette's skin "spoke" brightly.

When all had eaten, some departed for the caves. Others—couples—remained. Pierrette eyed what they were doing, and was glad that it was dark, and that the moon had not yet risen.

Aam came for her. "Let's see if you are a deer," he said. At least that was how she interpreted it. He led her toward the cave she had emerged from, the womb from which she had been thrust into the light of this strange world. He took her hand. His calloused palm satisfied a craving she had not known she had.

Inside the cave, they scrambled upward by torchlight, retracing her path and Rheudhi's. "There is where you entered the earth," he said, pointing toward a faint, distant glow, less red than a torch's light. "Tomorrow, we go that way, but now . . ." He guided her through a narrow cleft in smooth, water-shaped rock.

She could hear the echo of their soft footfalls; the space ahead was large. Aam's torch made a whooshing sound as he swung it in circles, fanning its blaze, illuminating the cave. She gasped. Where torchlight fell, the walls were covered with pictures. On her left danced running horses—gray-white mares and stallions, and dark, small colts. On the ceiling, black and white birds congregated, some upright, like herons, others sliding on plump, feathery breasts. Great, dark beasts humped sullenly across a plain of oxide-stained rock. In an alcove were hundreds of stencilled human hands.

"Go ahead," Aam murmured. "The deer are beyond. I'll light a fresh torch." His broad hand guided her. On a lumpy, irregular column, shaped as if by a potter working wet clay, a beast with a single long horn on its nose trembled in flickering light. Overhead, a tuft-eared cat crept forward on bent legs, his penile brush dragging on undrawn, unseen ground.

"Phokw," Aam said softly—slim, almost legless creatures with pointed noses and long whiskers. Seals.

They bore left, around a stone veil like a carved curtain, past a composite beast with horns, fangs, and broad clawed feet. A chimaera? A griffin? Had such things once stalked among the eroded rocks overhead?

"Ker'ph," said Aam, stopping. "Deer." The creature on the wall was no elusive woodland creature. It stood taller at the shoulder than the top of her head, and branching antlers stretched wider than her arms could reach. Pierrette's eyes were drawn within the beast. If she stared enough, she could see its beating heart, the rumbling progress of leaves and moss through its gut.

Once amazement faded, she saw that the effect had been created by many paintings, one atop another, seeming transparency with no real hint of internal organs.

"It's so big!" she marvelled. She had not seen spears or arrows in the cave-folk's camp. How would Aam take such a beast?

"Yes," he said. "It is big—I am big. But you are not. Come. I will show you yourself." It is big. I am big. He had inflected the words as if he considered himself not a man, but a stag. And the reflexive pronoun "yourself." As if Pierrette were also portrayed on these buried walls.

Again Aam whirled the torch into new life. The next deer was antlerless, with donkeylike ears. Her thoughts strayed: where was Gustave? Had he chewed through his hobble, and raided his feed? But enough! This deer . . . this doe . . . was special. Again, Pierrette felt as though she could see within the painting, as if she were falling into . . .

* * *

She pranced, sharp hooves soundless on the forest litter. Aromas swirled. She sniffed drifting scents—pine needles and moldy oak leaves, mice and chattery, furry things seeking the faint odor of . . . of him.

There! She raised her fine-furred muzzle, feeling the breeze on one side, edging sometimes in the stag's direction, sometimes not. She was in no hurry, and stopped to nibble succulent branches. When the time was right, he would find her.

Her nostrils trembled with the faint scent of his arousal. She moved on, foraging. He stalked, not stopping. Rut was upon him; he would not eat. Her droppings fell here and there, but he left his in heaps, mute warnings to other males of his strength, his confidence, his single-minded purpose.

Her hoofprints were clear and sharp, two horny toes together, dewclaws held off the ground. Heavy with his spread of antlers, his toes splayed, and dewclaws marked the earth. She followed a trail where others had gone. He strode as if all the forest was his, his hoofprints straight and purposeful. She ambled and nibbled, waiting . . .

* * *

"You are a deer," Aam murmured ever so softly.

"Yes," she replied, no louder. "I am a doe."

"When we hunt, will you know where they are?"

The paintings were not icons; people did not prostrate themselves before horse- or deer-god, or pray to the images for a successful hunt. One did not hunt deer—one hunted . . . oneself. "I don't know," she replied. "They are in a forest, but where?"

"Find out where you are, then in the morning we'll go there."

Again she peered into the transparent layers on the wall, and again fell like a stone into the mind of the doe, herself.

* * *

Elsewhere, fifteen thousand years away, shadowy antlers danced on another wall. Below pranced not a deer, but a two-legged figure that leaped around a blazing bonfire. When the horned man stopped dancing, he said, "It is enough. The green season will come, in the god's good time."

How good it felt to be himself again, not slave to . . . to that other god. How sweet to dance on Cernunnos's deer's feet, to pray as his grandfather, the old shaman, had taught him.

Reikhard set the horned headdress atop its folded sack. Spring would come—brought perhaps in some small measure by his prayers. He kicked loose soil over embers and his fellow worshippers rose to depart. The warm, brown of his deer's eyes grew pale. Illumined by moonlight alone, they were the blue of the horizon at sea on a hot day.

"I have the Christian Otho to thank for my rebirth," he said, for his own ears alone. "I will have to thank him someday."

* * *

The stag followed her lingering scent and, because her track wandered and his did not, he gained on her. She quivered in anticipation and fear.

When she saw him, he edged sideways as if her presence was incidental. He circled the clearing, marking it with pungent urine, sealing it from encroachment. He approached, and she skittered aside, her tail half-raised, unsure. He nosed beneath it, and drew in her identity.

Shyly, she circled away, but he followed, carrying his weight on his rear hooves despite the heaviness of his antlers. His forelegs floated off the ground. She jittered away. He followed, rising, bumping against her flank. They danced in a circle that became a shrinking spiral. Nose to tail one moment, the next his hooves brushed her flanks, his antlers rising high above her, the weight of him bearing down on her hindquarters . . .

* * *

"No!" Pierrette cried out, trying to roll away. Aam's chest pressed her breasts flat, his thighs inside hers. "No!" she moaned. "I must not!"

Aam's eyes widened. He lifted himself by the strength of his arms, and felt damp cave air rush in where he had lain upon her. It cooled her reddened breasts and belly, and dampened his raging heat.

His eyes asked, "Why?" but he did not speak. He watched panic fade from her eyes. He wanted this small, dark-haired woman, so unlike those he knew; he craved the difference, the fresh forest glade where no man had walked before.

He forced a smile. He was Aam, Man, not a boy whose member ruled him. He was Man, a hunter, and did not, in boyish excitement, throw his spear when his prey was too far away.

If he allowed rut to overpower him, she would not resist—but he would destroy something precious, something he had not felt with any other.

Sighing, he rolled to one side, and lay with an elbow beneath himself, a hand supporting his head. He felt the chill of the cave in earnest. She was shivering. "Come," he murmured, offering her a place close by himself.

He could almost feel her eyes' questioning touch. She smiled ever so slightly, and nestled against him, sharing her warmth and his. Both looked to the painting on the wall . . .

* * *

The stag lowered himself to all fours, and the doe skittered aside, kicking at air. Sometimes it was like that. Some does would not carry fawns their first season, but were the stronger for it the following year. He snorted, and sniffed the air. There were other does. Even now, the slow breeze that weaved among the dark-boled trees brought scents. Proudly, not looking back, he walked away. His trail in the forest mould was a straight line as before, purposeful tracks that did not wander.

* * *

Marie awoke from a dream of stags and does. Beside her snored a bearded Iberian sailor. His speech had been incomprehensible—as if that mattered. His loving had not mattered either; she had felt not the least flutter inside, though the man had pumped on and on, thinking himself a stag indeed.

She scowled. At first she had reveled in sensuality. She had eyed men's members speculatively—but only a god's great tool could sate her. How many men? She had lost count.

She nudged the sailor awake. She could not earn money while he occupied her bed. When he departed, she pried up a loose tile and gazed upon things that did matter: warm gold coins among cool silver ones, an emerald necklace that glittered enticingly in the strong light of afternoon.

* * *

Aam had no sense of time beyond the passage of days and nights, the march of sun, moon, and familiar stars, changing seasons, and migrations of seals and men.

"Another day," he said.

"When I go, I won't come back," she replied. The trail led not only through rocky declivities, but through years, centuries, and millennia. Going back to Gustave, would she pass herself coming down? Once returned, how could she come again? Could two of her exist here? Even without reasoning, she knew it could not be.

She wept silently, her back toward him, her buttocks snuggled against his warmth.

"Morning comes soon," he said softly. "Sleep, and later we'll find you again in the forest."

"Will we kill . . . me?" she asked, without the dismay she thought she should have felt.

"Of course. There's no foal in you. It is best—only one killed for one eaten."

That made cruel sense. It would be wrong to slay the stag in the peak of his years and his strength, to slay the strong young fawns he carried in his hefty sack, wasteful to slay a doe who carried a fawn.

As she drifted toward slumber, she thought she heard Aam speak again. "Don't worry, Pebble," he said. "You only think you know everything. We'll meet on another path, and finish what began on this one. We'll meet again and again, until at last it is done."

That was a dream, of course. Those were not Aam's words, just wishful thinking. Tomorrow, after the hunt, she would depart, and never return. Even in sleep, tears flowed, and when she awakened, her face was sticky with them.

The cave's chill awakened her. Where was Aam? Was he angry? But no—there was a flickering glow. A torch.

"My spear," he said, proudly turning a smooth shaft in the torchlight. Red highlights danced on smoothly flaked chalcedony fixed to the wood with fiber and pitch. "Your spear," he said, displaying another. She hefted it. How light. Thrown, it would not penetrate a deer's hide.

"This will help," Aam said, handing her a carved stag's antler as long as her arm from elbow to fingertip, with a crook at one end. A polished stone disc fitted just beyond the crook.

"A long-arm," Aam explained, showing her how the spear's butt fit in the crook. She hefted spear and long-arm together, and saw how it worked, like a lever to magnify the force of her throw. She would still have to be close.

"You can't run from yourself," he replied. "You'll be close enough."

She knew the way, despite the years that had not yet worn down the rocks, despite all the goats and sheep that had not yet grazed the high ground to barren rock, and all the men who would not begin cutting the timber, for yet fifteen thousands of years.

With a kind of double vision, she saw where Gustave the donkey would someday wait, a tall man's height below ground not yet eroded away.

With second sight of a different kind, she was aware of Aam beside her as they emerged on flatter ground high above the calanque, and was aware of her four-footed self somewhere ahead, grazing on leathery leaves.

She had practiced with the spear-thrower, and no longer feared she would throw it instead of the spear, or send both spinning away. She was cool, light-headed, and eager. She wanted to throw the spear.

* * *

Uneasy, she stopped nibbling to sniff the air, yet no threatening scents came. No moving shadows loomed among the further trees. There was only . . . herself.

* * *

"When you walk," said Aam, "put all your weight on one foot slowly, before you lift the other. Feel for twigs with your toes, and move between them." She slipped from one tree to the next. At each, she stood half-exposed, her human silhouette broken, like a burl on the trunk, yet not behind the tree, where she could have seen nothing.

"There's no hurry," Aam said. "She won't go far unless something frightens her." Then he lagged back, thinking stag-thoughts.

At first, she saw only a leg. "Look for part of a deer," Aam had said. "For something that isn't a tree trunk or a leafy branch. You may not see all of her until you are upon her." It was a foreleg. Pierrette studied the brushy cover. The foreleg blended into its surroundings. She did not see the deer's muzzle or long ears until it moved its head in search of forage. Movement stood out amid stillness. Had it been windy, she would have seen nothing.

Could she get closer? Had Aam circled, and stationed himself in the doe's path of flight?

When the deer moved its head, it could not sense external motion. Pierrette waited until it had stripped the branch, and it shifted to another. She slipped forward one step, two, masking her outline with low-hanging boughs.

She settled the long-arm, and snugged the spear's butt against it, balancing both atop her arm, keeping them in place with a curled finger. The fur of the doe's flank looked like dappled leaves.

Pierrette tensed, then flung her arm forward, a long motion, an exercise in geometry, not strength. The spear leaped ahead without effort.

It buried itself in the doe's side. A fiery pain shot through her. She grasped herself below her ribs: the spear twisted in her flesh, tearing her insides. She felt flint break against bone. She leaped away. The spear shaft thumped against a tree, tearing her more before it fell free.

She ran. She bounded ahead, fleeing the pain . . . and she ran behind, clutching her side with one hand.

"The first throw need not kill," she remembered Aam saying. "It is the running and bleeding that kills." He was ahead, somewhere, waiting.

She stumbled. Everything was blurred and faint. Her hooves felt far away, unconnected. She caught herself before she fell, and staggered on. Something was in the trail ahead. The wind was behind her, so she could not smell it. From behind came a scent, unfamiliar but . . . but not. She stopped, confused. Her flanks heaved. Blood dribbled down her belly. The pain was unendurable.

"Kill me," said the doe as its forelegs folded.

"Kill me," Pierrette said. "I hurt. Make it stop."

Aam shook his head, and handed her his long flint knife, a single blade flaked from a favorite core, unused and sharp. She grasped its leather wrapping and put an arm around the doe's neck. She pulled its head back, and sawed at its neck. A great artery slid sideways against the edge, and she pressed harder, feeling the icy slash against her own furless throat.

Blood gushed in short, regular pulses, and day turned to night. She lay still. Then there was only one of her, standing over the motionless doe, weeping, no longer in pain.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked Aam. "You should have warned me about the pain."

He looked surprised. "Haven't you ever hurt yourself before?" he asked. "Of course there's pain. How could you not feel it?"

Of course. How could she not? She had raised her tail to the stag, and had wettened between her human legs. She had browsed, and tasted sweet leaves. How could she not have suffered when she felt the spear point wrench at her insides?

"Show me what to do," she said. Aam did so. With quick, inexpert motions she made slits between tendon and bone above the doe's rear hooves, and together she and Aam hoisted the body by a thong. It hung with only its fore-hooves touching the ground. Following Aam's guiding fingers, she removed pebble-sized nodules from the insides of its thighs, then cut around all four legs, and up toward its belly. Her blade followed his finger, slitting skin without cutting muscle or rupturing the whitish sack around its organs.

The heavy skin pulled free. Aam held her wrist while she cut the peritoneum. Wet, pale organs fell free in heavy coils, and an odor of incredible foulness hung in the too-still air, making Pierrette gag.

Aam chuckled. How much the girl doesn't know, he thought. That took her by surprise. What a strange place she must come from. He did not think he would like living there.

When they left the site of the kill, little was left behind. Because they were far from the camp, they ate morsels of liver. Leaving the most perishable parts for scavengers, they wrapped the rest in the hide, which Pierrette carried. Aam shouldered the carcass.

It made cruel sense. If there were magic in "becoming" a deer, it was tacit magic without incanted spells. She had not tried her own lore since coming here. Her spells would do nothing. Here predator and prey were one and the same. There was no clear good or obvious evil, only an undefined sense that one was much as the other, seen from a different perspective. That was an important thought to remember. . . .

"Kill me," she had said, as much to free her terrified doe-self from pain as to relieve her human-self from it. The world would have to change greatly before men hunted deer with no thought for the pain they caused, because they did not feel it themselves. Was that evil? Did predator and prey feel less pain here and now, because it was shared?

She envisioned Father Otho pouring oil from one jar to the other. "Is there less evil now?" he asked. "Is there more good?" Did good and evil even exist here, where no distinctions were made between them, where gods and devils alike were unknown?

* * *

Pierrette heard a woman's drawn-out screams long before she and Aam could see the light of day, beyond their torch's red light.

"It's Aure," he said, and tightened his grip on her hand. "It's the birthing-time." Yet he did not hurry. Aam loved Aure. She had felt it in her magpie-mind. Why didn't he hurry?

When they emerged there were no more screams. "Aure is dead," said an old woman. Blood specked her arms up to the elbows. "The infant lives."

"Show me," Aam commanded.

She brought a small, fur-wrapped bundle. "Aure nursed him, but her bleeding didn't stop. Now Aure is getting cold."

Aam pulled back the skin covering the infant. "This might have been my son," he said, flicking its tiny penis with his finger.

Aure lay at one side of her cave. Aam held Pierrette's hand as he knelt to look at her. Tears streamed down his face, but he did not make a sound.

He stood. "Prepare her," he said. "Give me the infant." The baby slept. Pierrette watched as Aam took a fold of its wrapping and pressed it over the tiny face, holding it firmly. What was he doing? The child could not breathe. She reached to pull his hand away. His wrist and forearm were like stone. She could not move a single one of his fingers.

Aam looked her in the eye. "Was it so terrible to die?" he asked. "Does this motherless child deserve less kindness than you gave yourself?" Pierrette's vision blurred with angry tears . . . but her hand fell away. For long moments, nothing happened. Then tiny arms stretched out. They jerked slightly. One final convulsion . . . then the little body lay absolutely still.

Aam placed it in its mother's arms. "Cover them with stones," he commanded harshly. "We won't use this cave next time." Tears rolled down his face.

"Why?" Pierrette asked, looking up at him. The baby wasn't suffering."

"None of the women have milk, and we must march. Better it die now."

Better it be with its mother, she thought. Pierrette gazed at Aure, shrunken, without the vivacity that had swelled her in life. "Where have they gone?" she wondered aloud. These folk had not spoken of heaven, or an afterlife.

"Where has the doe gone?" Aam asked.

Where indeed? Pierrette looked within. Was the soul of the deer within her now? She did not think so. When she had felt its life depart, it had just faded. She turned away, her vision blurred.

"Come," said Aam. "Rheudhi will prepare the deer. We can watch the sun go down."

* * *

From the rocky spit where the calanque opened into the sea, they could indeed see the sun. Pierrette's sense of direction felt subtly skewed. Unless it was summer, shouldn't it be further south?

"Does it ever snow?" she asked Aam, suspecting that the word nhiegh would be as unknown to him as were so many others.

"Nheedge?" he asked, making fluttering motions with his fingers. "Of course—in winter. Not now."

"Oh," she replied, nodding. This chill season was spring, or fall, and her sense of direction was not faulty. There was no reason to have assumed that she arrived here in winter just because she had departed from it, and would—hopefully—return to it again. This was a colder world than hers, in more ways than one.

Yet Aam was not cold. He grieved for Aure, and for the child he had stifled. His grief was no less for his pragmatism, and he did not even have the consolation of an afterlife to ease it. Pierrette asked his feelings. "I'm sad," he said, surprised that she did not know. "I'll never see her smile, or lie with her."

"Aren't you angry?" Angry at a god or universe that had taken her away . . .

"It wasn't her fault!" said Aam, misunderstanding. "She didn't mean to die."

And there it was. No god had taken Aure. Her death was neither good nor evil . . . only sad. Was that so terrible? What good to rail against fate, to blame the heavens for a loved one's death? Did people suffer less for having divided suffering and joy, calling one evil and the other good? She did not think so. Yet she pitied Aam, because he had no god to blame.

She took his hand. For a long while, nothing more was said. Her thoughts were a tumult of relief and regret. Her rejection of Aam, and his restraint when she was helpless to stop him . . . Regret that they had not made love was mixed with profound relief that she was still free to leave this place. After Aure's death and the child's, she could not stay.

What if she had given in . . . not to Aam, but herself? She had not known then how different these folk were. She could think of a hundred things to try, to save the child. Yet herbs and potions could not replace milk. There were no goats to milk, likely no honey to sweeten it with. There was only quick, quiet death.

Yet beside her was Aam, the first man she had desired. Was he also sad that no more had come of it? Was he relieved that this strange, unpredictable woman, with her ignorance of ordinary things, would be on her way?

* * *

She awakened when Rheudhi stirred. They had slept, huddled against the night's chill, beneath ill-tanned and smelly furs. She did not know where Aam slept—if at all.

Today, all the folk would crowd into the cave, and would become seals. Had the seals all gone to one place, or had they split up? Had others, from other migrating groups, joined them? Where would the folk go? By evening they would decide.

She would go to the cave with them, and would continue on through. Had Gustave broken free of his thongs? There was much she did not know about Parting the Veil of Years. That magnified her ignorance of other magics: if she had to learn everything from the details first, she would never be wiser than now. There had to be a better way. Already, her ranging thoughts prepared her to return to that more complex world.

She could not say good-bye to Aam. He was convinced they would meet again, and they would not. But Rheudhi? When she shook out her woven garments, and laid her fur aprons neatly on the cave floor, Rheudhi knew. "I wish I could go with you," she said, but did not really mean it. Even the girl's hesitancy to hug her, to touch her strange cloth garments, showed that.

"I've never had a friend like you," Pierrette said. Besides Marie, she had not had friends at all. That, too, was sad—that a few brief days was the extent of her friendship with young women.

When they stepped from the sleeping-cave, the beach was deserted, the folk gone into the deep cave. Even without Rheudhi, Pierrette could have found her way by the low, droning hum of male voices, the soaring notes of female ones calling out—but not, this time, to her. They called to the seals—to themselves. Even that first time she had heard the steady "hunh, hunh" of the song, had it really been for her, or had she only overheard it, across those thousands of years?

They came to the painted chambers. Rheudhi's eyes darted from Pierrette to the others. "I can find my way from here. Go. Find yourself among the seals."

Rheudhi planted a kiss on Pierrette's cheek, and fled. Her red-gold hair was like another torch.

Aam was there. She could not distinguish his voice among the others. She murmured quiet words, and from her fingertips sprang clear bluish light. She would need no torch. She allowed herself one last sad glance. Aam saw her face bathed in elfin light, and he smiled.

* * *

She did not remember picking her way through the cave, but there, ahead, was sunlight. She quenched her own light, and began speaking the Parting of the Veil of Years.

Burying sadness beneath scholarly detachment, she observed how things changed as she ascended. At first were bushes she had no names for, then a tiny cypress, a sprig with a single whorl of branches. A dozen steps on, pushing up from a soil-filled depression, were two parasol pines.

She smelled thyme. She was home. Home? No—but whence she had come. Gustave heard her footfalls before she came into view. When she checked his hobble, the hide thongs were hardly damp with saliva.

The sun had moved no further across the sky than it should have, had she taken a short hike. In Gustave's world, an hour had passed, but she felt years older, her youthful face and body a disguise. She had known passion, and had denied it. She had come upon the throes of birth, and had seen death. She had witnessed . . . murder, and she loved the murderer, who was not an evil man.

Yet all that was long ago. Bright Rheudhi had loved, birthed children, and died. Aam too was gone. Aure's bones, and her child's, lay crushed beneath rocks, washed by the waters that now filled the low caves. Had she really been there? Had she voyaged into the depths of the past in body, or only in mind? She could not say; she had brought nothing back—not a chipped flint or a clamshell.

What if she had? If she had carved an initial into a soft seaside cliff, would it be there still? If she had made a handprint among those painted on the cave walls, would it be there now? There was no way to say. She had looked back after leaving the cave. The great brow of rock that overhung it had fallen, and the place where Rheudhi had kindled the torch was buried.

There were no answers. Still, she could not help but wonder. What if she used the spell Mondradd in Mon to journey to some more recognizable past? What if she visited the Eagle's Beak, at that moment Marie and her own younger self discovered her mother's sash on the trail, and moved the sash back? What if she had hurried the children (who would not recognize her adult self) along the trail and safely away? Would the whole course of events be different now?

Such thoughts occupied her, but those questions, fraught with paradox, could not be answered. She eventually put them aside, and turned her speculations in more immediately relevant directions. . . .

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