Back | Next
Contents


Part Two - Discipula (Student)

One hundred and twenty-odd years before Christ, the Roman Calvinus defeated the folk of old Ligurian and Celtic blood at Entremont, and garrisoned the countryside.
Romans were in turn overwhelmed by Goths. Vandals left devastation in their wake. Visigoths lingered, and were conquered by Moors. Then came Franks and Burgundians, bringing myths, gods, and folktales of their own.
Others came one at a time, from more remote and stranger places. One of those called himself Anselm Girardel. For more ages than are easily contemplated, he kept his secrets and his counsel, and was not of the land at all, until at last . . .
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale

Chapter 9 - The Reluctant Magus

Pierrette's Journal

By moonrise I was on the path to the Eagle's Beak. If I did not do my mother's bidding, father would cut down the trees, beginning the vast devastation I had seen through a magpie's eyes. I had no choice. If I remained in Citharista, my soul would be forfeit to the hideous beast that had mocked the bishop. The Church protected the baptized, but not me. Only then did I know fear.

* * *

Pierrette teetered on the narrow path to the gate. Wind from the east threatened to blow her into the yawning chasm on either side, into the dark waters of the calanque; lovely, in shifting blue and green, in the day.

Her father's prosperity would come not from God the Father, or His Son. It would not come from Teyrnon, whom the Gauls believed was husband to Ma, nor from the more ancient, unwed Ma whose visions Pierrette had shared. It would come from Satan, who consumed the world and turned it ashen.

Several thoughts gelled. P'er Otho said goat-legged Pan was Satan's deception, to entrap men, but had it always been so? Otho speculated that Cernunnos was also Satan but hadn't the deer god been a benefactor, before his worshippers accepted the Christian God?

Once Pan had been good, she decided, and so had Cernunnos. They were not guises of P'er Otho's evil deity, but his captives. She remembered the pain in the apparition's eyes, the look of a wild thing caught in a snare, unable to escape even as it heard the heavy tread of the trapper approaching.

* * *

The keep lay ahead. This time no Guihen appeared to warn her off, no Yan Oors—yet she saw the flutter of willow leaves among the scruffy oaks, and low-hanging stars swelled and glowed atop the rocky scarp. Were they really there, just at the corner of her eye, powerless to stop her?

* * *

Where bedrock met stone wall was a door black with age, so engraved by wind and sunlight that it skinned her knuckles when she knocked. She heard the tapping of sandaled feet on the other side.

Iron hinges red with rust squalled protest. "Pull it open," a querulous voice said. "Must I do everything myself?" She tugged, until the opening was wide enough. "Are you going to just stand there? Most people who knock wish to come in." She entered the darkness.

First she saw only an oil-pot's miserly flame. Then, behind it, she made out a flutter of draped cloth, the fuzzy outline of an unkempt white beard, lank hair, and dark, hooded eyes, oddly familiar.

"Are you the mage Anselm?" she asked quietly.

"Who else?" snapped her host. "More to the point, who are you?"

She told him she was the daughter of the masc Elen, who had sent her, and proffered the small leather sack her mother had given her long ago. "This is for you."

"What's in it?" he snapped.

"I don't know," she replied. "It's from my mother."

"Hmph. Took you long enough to deliver it." Pushing the sack inside his garment, he went ahead of her, ascending a staircase in near darkness. Somewhere, she hoped, the stairway would end. She saw a vertical line of blue—the sky, seen through a crack between doors? But no—it was still night. What could it be?

"Squint!" the old voice commanded.

"What?"

"Are you deaf? Shut your eyes."

She squinted—unwilling to trust the crotchety old man.

The doors swung open. The glare was like coming out of a cellar at midday. She opened her eyes, blinking.

"Come." The mage grasped her wrist. "It's a lovely day. It always is." He led her across a red-tiled floor, through a square-lintelled arcade into the full sun of a summer's day. Blinking only occasionally, she looked out over a broad vista of blues and greens—the sea. A white stone parapet marked the edge of . . . of everything. Beyond, the scarp dropped so steeply that she saw none of it.

"Well?" he said, sounding neither old nor cranky. "Do you like it?"

She turned to look at him . . . and drew back, shocked. No old man stood there. His hair was black. It hung in curled ringlets. The white robe was gone. Only a brief cape draped over one broad, bronzed, muscular shoulder. Gold glittered at his throat, and bright sunlight made mock of its ornate details. He wore a kilt longer in back than in front, and no tunic. Sparse black hairs were strewn down the center of his chest and around his prominent nipples.

A child, with few sexual leanings, she was still discomfited by his beauty, his full lips and heavy-lidded dark eyes. Pierrette drew back from him—and from her conflicting emotions. She knew this man.

"I thought I looked fine. What's wrong with you?"

"You . . . you are the king—in my dream, by the pool of Ma."

"A king? Me? Oh no, child. Look around—is this tiny patio a kingdom?"

"I saw you on the island with the black mountain . . . the Fortunate Isles . . ."

His eyes narrowed. He gestured to a bench. "Sit. Tell me what you saw."

Pierrette sat. Despite her confusion—having stepped from midnight into noon, and having the old man she had seen in the darkness become the proud ruler of her dream—she managed to give a reasonably good account.

"I suppose I overdid things a bit," her host murmured apologetically, when she finished. "I wanted you to see me as I should be . . . not as I am. Vanity, I suppose. Being old before my proper time is hard. I wanted you to see me as . . . as I want to be." He shrugged. "Ah well, I'll remedy that—but first . . . are you thirsty?"

Pierrette grasped the opportunity to collect her thoughts. The breeze off the ocean was balmy, little puffs like her sister's breath at night, barely stirring her hair. The stone bench was warm, and felt like a well-stuffed pillow. Shadows pooled like cool water. She leaned back, and the sun danced redly on her shuttered eyes.

When her host returned, she viewed him from beneath half-closed eyelids. He was again as she had first seen him, robed from head to foot in white cloth. His hair and beard were long and white, his wrinkled face as old as Ma-who-was-not. "Now you see me as I am," he said sadly. "I didn't frighten you, did I?"

"I wasn't afraid. But I don't understand. You said you should be as I saw you before."

"True," he said, nodding, his beard flat on his thin chest. "I'm not as old as I look. Why, only a few centuries ago . . . A few? Oh, drat! I've lost track of time again. What year is it?"

Pierrette did not know. "I know that the last man in Citharista who remembered Charles the Hammer died last year."

"That doesn't help. Let's see. That Calvinus, the Roman, whipped the Vocontii in 124—that's B.C., the way you'd reckon it—about 800 years before Charles Martel. I suppose I'm a bit over a thousand. How old do I look?"

"About eighty," Pierrette said hastily. "Or ninety?"

"Ninety, you say?" His grin split his beard. "How kind." Pierrette did not try to correct his misapprehension. Eighty or eight hundred, he was very old, and looked it.

"You said you're Elen's child. Why are you here?"

"My mother wanted you to teach me."

"Teach you what?" His eyes shaped a challenge. "Not magic!" he said. "That's what she wanted—my spells. As if they work any more. I won't teach you magic."

Pierrette suppressed her disappointment. "Arithmetic?" she suggested. "Greek and Arabic?"

He crossed one skinny leg over the other, beneath his voluminous garment. "Arithmetic! Of course. Geometry, and the new Saracen numbers. Greek, Latin, and Minoan for sure, and Etruscan, just for the fun of it. Wonderful poets, those Etruscans; it's a shame nobody reads them any more." He nodded repeatedly, rapidly, like a hoopoe bird bobbing its ridiculous, crested head at a puddle. "History too? I love history. I have scrolls and scrolls of history. Herodotus . . ."

He stopped in mid-thought, as something occurred to him. "What will you pay me?"

"Pay?" She had not paid her father for teaching her to prune olive trees, or P'er Otho to read tombstones. The crone had not demanded payment. Was knowledge a commodity like oil or apricots, sold by the pound or basketful? "How can I pay?"

"I suppose you're right," he agreed. "I can't trade history for oil. We'll work something out."

"I'd be glad to bring oil—but I can't go back." She spoke of her father's plans, and of Satan, who waited for her return.

"You have to go back," he said, putting a gnarled hand on her knee. "As for your father, I can fix that, but you'll have to deal with that Satan fellow yourself. My advice is to ignore him like everyone else does. He can't be all that powerful, if no one but you can see him." That made sense. Even P'er Otho, who was terrified of Satan, had never actually seen him.

"But if I go back, I'll have to work with Father, and I'll have no time to learn things," she protested.

"Time?" His belly laugh seemed to issue from younger lungs. He gestured. "See the sun? What time is it?"

"It looks to be noon," she replied. The sun was overhead, a bit south.

"And where was it when you arrived here?" he asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "It was wherever the sun goes when it is night."

"No, no! Where was it right here, when you came through that door?"

"It was . . . right where it is now," she concluded. But that could not be so, could it? Always, the sun moved, or there would be no day or night, no time at all.

"It has not moved," she said.

"Not a finger's width," he agreed. "And, it will not. Do you see why you have to go back sometimes?" He looked miffed when Pierrette shook her head "no."

"You can't remain a child forever. You'll get tired of being no taller than a wheat stalk, and peering under the sheep's tails whenever you're in the pasture."

"We have no sheep," she said stubbornly, not wanting to acknowledge what she was beginning to understand—and not wanting to go home.

"Fah! Who cares? Don't you want to grow up? No one ages here."

"You do," she replied, unwilling to admit defeat.

"When you've learned arithmetic, you'll understand. I have been here nine hundred years—give or take a century or two—and you said I look ninety. Do you want to wait a hundred years to grow breasts?"

Considering the complications of womanhood (not least the moon's influence, as Marie complained), Pierrette thought a century not nearly long enough. Yet the reminder of arithmetic—she might learn what a "century" really was—forced her to agree. She would go home—and grow up a bit at a time—and would visit the mage between times.

"Father will ask where I go, and will worry."

"How will he know? Tell him you're going for a walk. If you don't grow older when you're here, then he's not worrying—not doing anything—while you're here, see?" Pierrette did not, but she decided to test what he said, the first time she went home. She would ask Marie how long she had been gone.

"Is everything settled?" she asked, rising. "When can I start?"

"Contain your eagerness. What about payment? Remember? How about an apprenticeship? I'll teach you everything—except magic, of course—and you'll sweep my floors and cook delicious meals, and will bring me a bottle of oil once in a while."

He too got up. "Tomorrow, you'll go home and verify that I have kept my part of our bargain. But right now, it's the middle of the night, and I'm sleepy. Your room is one landing down, at the end of the hall. Take this lamp—I know my way in the dark."

* * *

In the morning, the clatter of Anselm's sandals awakened her. "Come," he said, "there are figs and bread on the terrace." She recognized the great lumpy loaf as one Claudia had made, right down the street from her house, and she wondered how the old mage had gotten it. It was fresh.

"I'm not entirely isolated," he explained. "People want things from me—people like your mother, and the baker. They don't come empty-handed." He must have seen her disapproving look. "Well, it's only tit for tat," he said. "After all, if I starved, I wouldn't be able to give them what they want, would I?"

"Can't you use magic to make a loaf of fresh bread?" she asked. "Or at least a sack of flour . . ."

"Magic! Don't speak of magic. You're my apprentice, and must do as I say." Then he relented. "Magic is unpredictable, though it was not always so. I think it gets used up. I used to be able to do wondrous things, but now . . . I live in terror of the day it's all gone, because without magic, this place would fall into the ocean."

"I see. Would teaching me use it up faster?" Clearly the old man was speculating, but if magic was indeed a personal attribute . . . might she offer him some of hers in exchange for lessons in using it?

"I don't know," he moaned. "It never seemed like that, at home—but this world is different. Storms! I never saw a storm, before I left home."

"I don't know where you are from, Master," she remarked politely.

"You don't? But you thought I was a king. You mentioned the island, and the black mountain."

"The Fortunate Isles?" she asked, remembering what the crone had said.

"Of course. You thought I was Minho." He smiled reminiscently. "I'm related to him, though distantly."

Pierrette wanted to know more about the Fortunate Isles—the place where, according to her vision, a handsome king would entreat her to marry him—but Anselm would say no more. "It pains me to talk of it, because I can never go home."

"Why not?" she asked. "Are those Isles further than Tartessos, in Iberia?"

"They haven't been there in a long time. Perhaps they're off the coast of Armorica. The Phoenicians had a city, Ys, there once." He shook his head. "That's nothing to me. I can't leave here. When I go out the lower door, the further I go, the older I get. By the time I reached Massalia, I'd be dry, dead bones."

Pierrette wanted to offer sympathy, but he preempted her. "Enough. The day wears on, and you must return to Citharista." He grasped her arm and led her toward the long series of stairways, where he lit an oil lamp with a spark that seemed to come from his fingertip. "Can you do that?" he asked, with a superior grin. "It doesn't take much magic, one little spark like that."

"I don't know," said Pierrette, who very much wished to know how.

As they went down the stairs to the exit at the base of the fortress's wall, the darkness thickened, until only the wick's tiny flame illuminated them—just as when she first arrived. She heard the groan of rusty hinges, and was shocked to see that it was dark outside. There were stars, and in a moment the moon came out from behind a cloud. Hearing another creak, she turned, and saw the door pulled shut from the inside.

"Master!" she cried out, but no one answered.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed