Eager as Otho was for a drink, he had not failed to notice that when the four of them sat at a table in the tavern, Gilles and Reikhard hesitated until the others slid onto the middle of a bench, and then took places as far as possible from each other. That was no surprise. But nowunless the wine's fumes had made him fall asleep, and he was dreamingthe two men sat, arms around each other's shoulders.
And what was that gleam on the Burgundian's cheek? It was not sweat. Both men were weeping. It was a sight to behold. Otho was glad that Gilles, at least, was a Christian; should he feel need to confess, Otho would hear part of the story. For now, he simply thanked God for whatever He had brought about.
Anselm, true to his word, polished off two flagons of wine, but when he rose to cross the street to ibn Saul's, he was still steady on his feet. Drunkbut not on wine alone. For more centuries than he liked to remember, he had been cooped up in one place; his youth had departed, and the prime of his manhood. But now he had hiked the streets of Citharista and Massalia, had taken a sea voyage, and made three friends. He had complained with them about salt, waves, and glaring sun, drunk with them in a tavern, and now he was going to see his old friend ibn Saul. It was so very fine that he hardly thought about why Minho had visited him. . . .
"Anselm? Is it really you?"
"I'm not a Wendish virgin."
"It is you! Come in! I must hear how this has come to pass." He looked over the old man's shoulder, and saw Otho.
"He's a frienda Christian and a priest to boot. But he has promised not to pray loudly, or to pee on your carpets."
Ibn Saul realized then how drunk the mage was. "Loud prayers are the least of my worries," he said, smiling broadly. "Still, I think I'll seat both of you on a tile floor."
"You," Reikhard announced to his sole drinking companion, "are a coward and a whoremaster."
Only another drunkard could have understood the Burgundian's slurred speechand Gilles was just that. "I should die for my sins," he agreed, tears trickling down his cheeks. "I am that, and more. I'm as despicable as you."
Reikhard bristled momentarily, before realizing that he entirely agreed with Gilles. "Perhaps we can die together, shoulder to shoulder, in battle with the demon."
"Indeed so," agreed Gilles. "It is the least we can do for Marie."
"For Marie," the knight repeated, raising his cup. "We'll fight the demon for Marie."
Anselm, had he heard, would have marvelled at the power of the ancient spell. Otho would have thanked God. Reikhard and Gilles, with wisdom found in the bottom of a wine-cup, knew that the magic was in the goal they shared, the expiation they craved. No supernatural intervention was necessary.
Otho sucked pulp from a pomegranate seed. Having drunk much, he was content to nibble at fruits and nuts, and to pretend that the unsteady rolling floor was the boat's deck, and no cause for him to become ill.
"So," ibn Saul said, when Anselm had told him everything. "What about the letter? I find it curious that the legendary king of the Fortunate Isles should have heard of me. . . ." What he found most fascinating was the implied existence of the Fortunate Isles. He had always considered Anselm's claim of origin charlatan's mumbo jumbo. Had Anselm written the letter?
Had Pierrette been there, and read the doubt in his face, she might have observed that ibn Saul was as cynical as the donkey Gustave. She might further have observed that such suspicion could be useful.
"This isn't from King Minho," ibn Saul told them, peering over the top of the document. "It's from your apprentice, Pierrette."
"Let me see it!" Anselm demanded, reaching. "What does she say?" Ibn Saul raised a hand to forestall him. His eyes tracked down the page.
Ibn Saul rolled the scrolled letter up. "I can't tell you. I can't tell anyone."
Otho, a new guest in the scholar's house, did not react obviously, though disappointment and curiosity alike crossed his features.
Anselm felt no such restraint. "She's my apprentice, not yours. She has no secrets from me. Let me see the letter."
"It is . . . an experiment, if you will. If I were to reveal it to you, you would not react without expectations and preconceptions, and the . . . the test would be ruined."
"Test? Experiment? Now I'm convinced the letter is from the unruly scamp. Geometry, postulates, hypotheses . . . It makes my head spin."
"Your head is spinning for other reasons entirely," said ibn Saul. "Lovi! Show my old friend to his bed."
The apprentice appeared so quickly that ibn Saul knew he had been listening. He guided the old man from the room.
Ibn Saul sent Otho to fetch his companions from the tavern.
"Well?" Gilles asked, with the precise speech a drunkard affects when speaking to the (presumably) sober. "What does it say?"
"Yes!" urged the no less inebriated Reikhard. "Tell us!"
"The second letter was also from Pierrette," Otho told Gilles. "I'll explain when you're sober. If you two can find three good legs between you, I'll show you to a nice soft bed . . ." And somehow, without a fall, without more than loud eructations, he got them as far as ibn Saul's door, where he turned them over to the scholar's apprentice. He himself felt quite sober.
"I will," he announced to ibn Saul shortly thereafter, "have to test further this hypothesis I have formed." He saw nothing ironic in that turn of phrase, but ibn Saul, recognizing Pierrette's influence, smiled slightly.
"What hypothesis is that?"
"That pomegranate seeds are a cure for drunkenness," Otho explained. "I am entirely sober, now."
"That is an interesting notion," the scholar reflected quietly, smiling ever so slightly. Because the fellow was an entertaining talker when drunk, and because ibn Saul had never seen him sober, he sent Lovi to the cellar for a jar of cool wine to maintain Otho in his pleasant state. The conversation, turning to other things, continued for another hour.
"I'm going on ahead," Pierrette announced. "Riding alone, I can be in Saintes Maries tonight." She sought out the free-roaming Camargue horses and, walking among them, spoke to them as if they were people, explaining that she wished to ride to the town. A gray marethree or four years old, and not yet whitesidled up as if she had understood.
Pierrette flopped belly down across the mare's back, and then swung a leg over its rump. The mare chose an easy gait. Pierrette had to trust the horse to choose the best route southward.
They crossed a low sansouireexposed soil white with salt from winter's floodingcarpeted with leafless glasswort. Where sea purslane pushed up, her mare stopped to munch. Pierrette, a passenger by courtesy alone, made no attempt to urge her on.
Crossing two miles of sansouire, where Pierrette herself was the highest feature of the terrain, their pace slowed as the mare's hooves sank in loose-blown crystalline sand. Ahead lay a haze of stone pines, the roofs of the town, and the open sea. One gray shape, higher than the rest, was surely the church, ruined years before in a Saracen raid.
Had she waited too long to begin? Quietly, she murmured the ancient words: "Mondradd in Mon," she whispered. "Borabd orá perdó." A quiet breeze cooled her face, but beyond that she sensed nothing new, nothing . . . changing. "Merdrabd or vern," she continued. "Arfaht ará camdó." Only the sun's shimmer on the sandy track, and her mount's plodding step, gave motion to the stillness. The trees and low roofs ahead wavered as heat rose off the sun-baked sand, and gulls flashed whitely. A lone harrier or osprey, too high for her to be sure, rode rising hot air, hardly moving, its wings imbedded in clear amber touched with blue.
Approaching the reed-thatched town, she looked for the church wall, the landmark seen from afar, but could not find it; the roofs looked further away than a moment before. Then she knew: no church had yet been built among the twisted pines; the houses she had seen from afar would not yet be constructed, in this time; the sharp-grassed dunes were barren, the town still a quarter mile away.
She slipped from the mare's back. "Thank you," she said. "You should return to your herdto your stallion." She thought not of a white horse, but of Yan. The mare brushed its velvety nose across her cheek, and then turned northward, its hooves making only the softest rustling in the stiff, silica-rich grass.
Pierrette sighed, and began the long trudge to the sea.
Ibn Saul still refused to reveal the mysterious scroll, now hidden among thousands that filled the cubbyholes and shelves of his library.
"Well then?" queried the scholar impatiently. "Are you too sick to walk down to the quay?"
"Are you that eager to be rid of us?" Anselm grumbledsoftly, because his head felt large as a melon. Even the dribble of the fountain was painful. "I did not piss your carpets or your fine bed. What have I done to offend you?"
"Offend me? Why, nothing. But the sun is high, and we must be off."
"We?" asked Reikhard.
"I'm going with you," the scholar announced. "I can't perform myPierrette'sexperiment, unless I'm on the spot. Gillesis your boat large enough for five?"
"It will suffice."
"Very well. Lovi!" ibn Saul called out. The ailing men winced. "Bring as many jars of wine as you can carry."
On the way, the scholar recounted what Pierrette's letter said about Marie. He was unwilling to discuss why it was necessary for them to be in Saintes-Maries-by-the-Sea, but Gilles sensed his urgency, and added it to his own.
The boat was crowded, but stood high enough that there was little danger of swamping. Ibn Saul assured Gilles that the coast was sandy past the Estaque range and the gulf of the Fossa. They could run ashore if rough weather threatened.
"How far is it?" asked Otho.
"About fifty miles."
"Fifty?" Reikhard growled. Then he remembered his swollen brain, and muted his voice. "That's twice as far as we've already come."
"They should be easy miles," Gilles responded. "The wind is off the sea, and we're south of our destination. With luck, we'll be able to maintain a reaching course. The Rhodanus's currents may push us out, and give us even more sailing room."
Gilles amazed himself. Already, he had sailed as far as he had ever done, even before he became "cautious." Now he contemplated a further voyage, with no more knowledge of their course and destination than a few words with a merchant captain at the wharf.
Life is better now, he mused. Was that a selfish thought? The new Gilles was concerned about such things. Life was better, because he was no longer concerned about himself, but about othershis daughters, and even these four men whose lives he held in the hands that now clutched tiller and sheet. If it were selfish to enjoy his new freedom, surely it was not wholly terrible. . . .
The sea, when it was calm and the wind was right, fostered contemplation. Each passenger indulged in his own quiet thoughts.
Reikhard did not know what to expect when they arrived, but he had much to atone for. A priest of the horned one, he had taken Marie as a prize of battle, not a burden of blood that a man strong in the god's presence must bear. The Citharistans were his tribe by adoption, and one of them was lost, by his doing. He begrudged the vast, sparkling sea between him and his unfulfilled obligation. His eyes hurt from staring into the glare of the lowering sun.
Otho was curious and concerned, but he had been that way so long it felt almost comfortable, like a callus on his finger from clutching his quill. He was not convinced that the king of the legendary Fortunate Isles had actually appeared to the mage, guised as a stork, and bearing letters. He was less doubtful that Pierrette and Marie would be in the seaside town.
Anselm had an inkling of what Pierrette was up against, but his apprentice's tribulations could not make a dent in the ecstasy he enjoyedhe was free on the blue-green ocean. He was not young, but was sprightly as a youth, and was neither dying nor fading away. Though his companions were not ones he might have chosenwith the exception of ibn Saul, of coursethey improved after a cup or two of wine. The jugs now stored under the boat's thwarts promised to last until they reached shore. If only Gilles did not notice every time anyone else reached down for a sip, and demand one for himself . . .
Everyone believed Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul knew more about the situation than they did, but that was not so. Desperate urgency hid between the lines of Pierrette's neatly scribed words, but she had only told him what he was to do. It was nothing difficult, and was quite in character for himbut what did she really intend?
The breeze off lagoons north and east was hot and cool at onceor perhaps Pierrette's chill was internal. The village had continued to recede as she approached. There were only scattered houses, as when she had viewed it through magpie eyes. Most had faded with the evaporation of the years. When she looked away from one, then looked back, there was only sand and sea grass where it had been. When she looked down at her feet, the sandy path was a cobbled street a few paces on, but the next time she looked, having walked several paces, the cobbles were still a step ahead, then gone entirely. The settlement was as she had seen it long before, but rife with a wealth of detail her small magpie brain had not absorbed. Fish nets were draped to dry in the sun, a chime made of potsherds tinkled, and a trickle of smoke beyond the hump of a thatched roof carried a hint of roasting lamb that made her mouth water.
On the beach lay an abandoned boatthe one Lazarus had emerged from. Ahead was the house the old women had retired to. . . .
"Where did you come from, child?" Pierrette spun around, and faced an ancient woman with a shawl on her head. "Are you a girl or a boyforgive these old eyes. . . ."
"I'm a girl, mistress," Pierrette said meekly. Was this one of the women in her magpie dream? She could not tell. How many years had passed since then? How would such a woman have aged?
"Come, let's sit in the shade. There's water from the well. I must let down my hair and brush it." Her gaze was warm. "I am Maria. Who are you?"
"I'm called Pierrette," she replied. The woman's accent was not unlike ibn Saul's. "Would you prefer we speak another tongue?" she asked in the Aramaic of the Talmudic scholars.
"Heavens, child!" the woman said, her coarse skin breaking into a grin of deep crevasses. "I haven't heard such speech since I left home. You put music into those plain wordscan you sing, too?"
Pierrette hesitated. Sing? When had she last sung anything? The only songs she knew were the baby songs her mother had taught her, but those . . . were magic. "I don't sing much."
"Never mind. I'm a bit silly with age. There's music in your accent alone."
They sat beneath a twisted old pine. She was Maria . . . but which one? Did it matter which Mary this was? Pierrette did not know much about either of them.
The water was deliciously cool. The old one untied the heavy knot of her hair. She smoothed and straightened her lead-gray locks with a stiff, boar's-bristle brush.
"Are you alone, lady?" Pierrette asked. "Is there someone to care for you?"
"Sarah is nearbySarah the Egyptian. You'll know who she is when you see her, because she's very dark."
So much for Marah's tale, Pierrette thought. Sarah is an Egyptian, not a Tsigane chief. But the old woman had not mentioned anyone else . . .
"Will you stay a day or so?" old Mary asked. "For the burial?"
"Burial, lady?"
"Maria's burial. My sister Maria." Again, the face-crackling smile. "I won't be long, myself," she said. "Nor will Sarah, I suspect. If the Tsiganes be wise, they should dig one large hole in the sand for all three of us. . . . But forgive my rambling. Tell mewhy are you here?"
Pierrette had hoped the wise and holy old women would take pity on their namesake, Marie, and exert what ancient Christian magic they knew on her behalf. But . . . was this Mary befuddled by age? Pierrette sighed. It could not be helped. She would do what she had come here to do.
Old Maria was a good listener, though perhaps only caring for the "music" of Pierrette's accent. Pierrette told her of Ma and the pool among the beeches, of Marie and Gilles, of Cernunnos's rape of Marie. She spoke of Anselm and everlasting noon, of skeptical Gustave and cynical ibn Saul . . .
Another woman brought two earthenware plates, one with fine-cut morsels of food, the other well covered with tender spring lamb, long beans, and crusty bread. "I am Sarah," she said. Seeing Pierrette's hesitation, she shrugged. "I'm not hungry. A nibble or two is enough for one my age. It makes no sense to be buried with a full stomach."
Buried? She was not dead. Then Pierrette remembered: " . . . and at last the old women and Sara died," Marah had told her, "within three days of each other." Sarah and Mary spoke as if the time of their deaths was no secret, but a comfort. Would they indeed be buried in a common gravetomorrow, or the day after?
"Go on, girl," Maria urged. "You've hardly begun your tale." So Pierrette told of her quest for the logic behind the illogic of magic, and of her fear of the Black Time. The sun's last rays slanted through soft pine needles.
"Poor Anselm," Marie said. "That SaulPaul, he calls himself, nowwould be a thorn in anyone's side." Pierrette, thinking her senile, was surprised that she remembered the brief retelling of Ansulim's tale. "The king of those lost islands was right. Paul did change the nature of things." Maria's voice held aged petulance. "Our nephew would never have founded a new Church. The Church was old in David's time. Paul didn't need a new one. That wasn't the point. . . ."
"He did it, though," Sarah commented. "We've gotten letters, over the years . . ."
"Oh, yes," Maria cut in. "From Peter, and copies of Paul's. Our nephew would never recognize what they have created. He'd not recognize himself, from what they say about him." Sarah handed her a cup of water to smooth her cracked voice.
"I think you're right, child," she continued. "Things change with the telling, as what people believe changes. Isn't that right, Sara?" She purposefully cut the other woman's name short, emphasizing the Gitane pronunciation.
The dark woman nodded. "I am not Egyptian," she said, "but sometimes I forget I used to be a . . . a Tsigane. She gestured toward the distant huts, the boats drawn ashore in front of them. "Those folk call me `Egyptian,' all year long. Only in spring and fall, when my people visit, do I feel like Sara the Tsigane.
"It's late," she said abruptly. "Come, Maria. It grows chill."
"Wait," Maria commanded her. "Do you have a place to sleep, child?"
"Over there." She gesturing toward the faintly defined road. "It's not far."
Sarah nodded, ready to hustle Maria inside, but the old woman paused. "We'll help you, child," she said. "When the time comes, we'll be there." She held out her hand, and Pierrette grasped it. She felt something soft and springy against her palm, but did not look to see what it was.
The dark Gitane nodded agreement. "You have only to call us." Old Maria then allowed herself to be led inside.
Pierrette trudged wearily back the way she had come. In her half-open palm lay Maria's parting gifta clump of gray hair pulled from the bristles of the hairbrush. "What must I do with this?" she wondered.
She was hardly surprised to see Gitane wagons pulled up along the road, to see the glimmer of campfires, to smell smoke and suppers cooking. Neither was she surprised, when she looked back, to see the stone wall of the church limned by the sun's last rays, its yellow limestone blocks turned to fire.