The last of the olive pulp was discarded in a heap. Cool air had speeded the work of carrying baskets of fruit to the press and heavy jars of oil to Gilles's storehouse.
Pierrette's thoughts had a similar pace. The olive grove was real. The warm ache in her arms at the end of a hard day was genuine. Was Guihen as real? What of the voice of the spring Ma, whom she thought of as her mother? Was reality determined by effects? She had never touched sun, moon, or starsyet they illumined day and night. She had never touched a cloud, but had felt rain and tasted it.
She stayed awake long after Gilles and Marie slept. Her struggle was real, too. Had she known how to phrase her question, she might have asked if something with measurable effect needed a real cause, and if her confusion proved that the causeGuihen, for instance, and the gaunt manwere also real.
P'er Otho pleaded that his years in Massalia had not prepared him to resolve such things.
There was only one person who might helpa person no more "real" than Guihen or the gaunt, hairy man. She would demand that Ma defend her own reality, as justification for Pierrette risking her own (however nebulous) soul.
It could not have been the same magpie feather, lying there among the contorted roots, because Pierrette had left that in the box where she kept the little sack her mother had given her. She twisted the feather. The musty aftertaste of mushroom clung to her tongue.
"Mondradd in Mon. Borabt orá perdó . . ." She waited for the dizzying fall, the sudden snap of magpie wings. Nothing changed. Frustrated, she stepped away, intending to kneel at the pool and wash the foul taste from her mouth.
She swayed, dizzy, feeling light as the magpie feather. She saw that her hand was empty. She gasped.
There, unmoved, still holding the feather, she stood. Yet here she also stood, looking at herself. Which one was shethe Pierrette who had moved, or the one who had not?
"I am real!" she said, perhaps aloud, though she felt no air in her throat. "That one is illusion." She could see through that other Pierrette. She could also see through the little beech tree, and where it stood was a shadow image, not a small tree but a great gray stump.
"I'm real!" she cried, frightened, because all around her were doubled imagesyoung trees and old, rocks covered with moss and the same stones half-buried in ashes, under great, dead branches that bore no twigs or leaves.
If the dead trees, and the oily, scummy pool were illusion, then the Pierrette she felt herself to be, the one who moved in that bleak world, was also, and the Pierrette who stood as if frozen beside the little tree was real. But if not . . .
She slumped to her knees. Tears blurred her eyes. "Which am I?"
The dull water's reflectionless motion caught her eye. An old woman waded ashore.
"Who . . . ?"
"I am Ma-who-is-not," the woman said. Thin lips covered a gap-toothed mouth. "Just as you are Pierrette-who-is-not. The spell has twisted, child."
"The spell? I don't understand."
"Mondradd in Mon," the crone said. " `The Parting of the Veil'a divination spell that used to allow a glimpse into days aheaddays of the masc's choosing."
"I didn't choose this black place," Pierrette protested.
"You cannot choose, child. The spell leads always hereto the far end of all time. Or so I believe, because here all I have is memories of times past." The old woman sat on a bare rock, and squeezed water from her shapeless dress. Pierrette saw, beneath yellow, wrinkled skin and brown age spots, the mother she remembered.
"Why am I here?" she asked, almost weeping.
"You must know of it . . . to prevent it. You are the lastbut onewho can. You must choose the path to the Eagle's Beak, to knowledge wherever it leads, or this place will be all that is."
"Guihen says I will lose everything. The gaunt man says I will lose my soul."
"Guihen?" She spat. "What does a wood-sprite know? And Yan Oorsthe dark oneonce earned a kingdom and a king's daughter for his bride. Now look at him. The old scarecrow. His great bears are wraiths without substance who steal starlight to fill their eyes. Choose."
"I can't! You goad me, but they bar my path."
The old woman sighed. "I suppose I'm being unfair. Here, look into the water. . . ."
The crone swirled the oily surface with a thin, spotted hand. "This is your first choice . . ." she said, and an image appeared. . . .
A young woman cradled her boy-child in the crook of her arm. She laughed at the antics of her daughter, who had put chicken feathers in her hair and waddled in the dust, clucking. "Elen! You're scaring the real chickens." The child looked up. Its face was Pierrette's own . . . and her mother's.
The old woman again swirled the water.
The young woman had aged, though no white strands marred the blackness of her hair. "Never go to the cape," she said to her daughter, perhaps ten years old. "You will lose your soul and be denied heaven."
"But I must, Mother," the child replied in a voice like Pierrette's. "I must go, because you did not."
"Who have you been talking to?"
"To Guihen and old John, the hairy manand to Grandmother, by the pool up the valley. . . ."
"No! Remain in the village, or you will be destroyed." She held the child close, sobbing.
"Was she my mother's mother?" Pierrette asked the hag. "The first woman?"
"Oh no, child. I didn't show you what was, but what will be. You were that woman, weeping for the fate of your daughter, Elen."
"If I don't choose the path to the cape, then my daughter must face the same choice?"
"She'll have no choice. You'll go, or she will, and she'll fail, for Evil will be stronger thenjust as it will be harder for you than for your mother."
"But Mama chose to be a masc."
"She chose to seek a male child. Before that, she chose to give her maidenhead to the boy Otho, by this very pool." Each time the old woman said "chose," spittle sprayed from her stiff lips. "The way narrows, girl. If you wait until springtime, it will be too late. Even now Samonios, the winter festival, approaches, and the mass for Christ's birth soon after."
Pierrette resented the crone's criticism of Elen. "Is maidenhood important to a masc?" she asked softly.
"To a backwoods herbal woman? Hardly." The old woman's lips drew down in scorn. "But for a great sorceress, as for a goddess, it is vital. Diana, Selene, Epona . . . virgins all."
"Is that why I would have no children? Not because of the curse?" Despite herself, the words "great sorceress" had piqued more than just curiosity.
"A curse? Who told you that? Guihen? Starved John?"
"I'm not sure anyone actually said it, but . . ."
"Don't assume. Know!"
"Know what?" Pierrette had overcome her fear of the crone. "I'm confused. Are there no other paths?"
"I hoped you wouldn't ask. I hoped duty would move youthat glory wouldn't be necessary."
"Show me."
The crone roiled the scummed water with skinny fingers. "See what will become of you. . . ."
Black clouds mounted the horizon, swirling, twisting, darkening the foam-tipped waves of the world-river Oceanos. The young woman's fingers tapped a rhythm on the gilded arms of her throne. "Come, Taranis," she said. "Thunder, come." She laughed, and raised her fingers. Storm-winds whipped her long black hair. Lightning glittered from her fingertips, and leaped toward the swelling clouds.
Beside her was another throneand a man. Black curls tumbled to his shoulders and intermingled with gold about his neck. Flashes from the approaching storm highlighted his features. "Enough! Send it away." He laughed.
She waved a hand as if dismissing a servant. Winds abated, the sky lightened, and distant currents of air tugged at the tops of the anvil-clouds, tearing them to wisps.
"There! Your Fortunate Isles are again at peace. See what a terrible disruption I would be?"
"Better storms with you than sunshine without. Marry me! Rule with me!"
He gestured. Pierrette saw a ring of black mountains above harbors, wharves, rich green fields, and waterways. Had the jagged peaks continued upward they would have joined in a single, enormous volcanic cone, larger and heavier than the earth's breast could support. "All this," said the kingfor such she knew him to be"will be yours until the last day of the world."
"Who was he?" Pierrette asked the crone. "Where?"
"The king? Ask Anselm. Once his kingdom, the Fortunate Isles, were on the sea-route to Egypt. Some say they stood in a great marshthe Camargue, or near Tartessos in Iberia. Now, who knows? They aren't ordinary islands."
"Are those visions my only paths?"
The next visions the old woman stirred up made her wish fervently that she had not asked. In one, she saw herself floating facedown in the pool Ma. She didn't need to see her face to identify the bloated corpse. She simply knew.
In another, she saw Gilles in rags. He had no teeth, and his cheekbones were sunken with starvation. "Bread!" he pleaded. "Please, a morsel of bread." His right leg was missing. The pedestrianwho ignored himwas little better off, except for having two legs. The place was Citharistabut the buildings she remembered were crumbled heaps.
"No!" she breathed. "Not that!"
"This?" asked her guide, rippling the pool. Pierrette saw Gilles, Marie, and herself sitting at a polished wood table, on a terrace tiled in a mosaic of dolphins and boats against a rich blue sea. Behind them reared the smooth walls of a fine stone house.
Pierrette-who-watched saw her father gesture toward new warehouses far below, by Citharista's harbor, and knew they were his. Fat merchant ships waited their turns to offload goods. Her father's arm was sleeved in silk. That vision was more comforting.
Again, as the pool's surface quieted, Pierrette saw herself dressed in furs and red wool, peering from a window. Beyond were tall steep-roofed houses with wooden shingles, snow-blown plains, and a great river. Kiev. The name came to her out of nowhere.
Window and high palace dissolved, and she was atop a pyramid of stairstepped stones. A green blanket of trees stretched to the horizon, broken by patches of fields and rooftops. Around her stood hawk-faced men draped in bright robes made of songbirds' feathers. They looked to her with awe, but she saw also fear in their eyesand hatred.
"Enough!" said Pierrette, grasping the crone's wrist. "They can't all be real. What good are such visions?"
The old one laughed, a brittle, harsh cackle. "How many choices in a lifetime, child? Nothing is sureexcept if you do not choose. See what indecision will entail. . . ."
Pierrette saw the dead pool, the blackened stumps, and the dry, ashy ground.