It was night on the cliff-flanked path outside Anselm's keepbut what night? The magical sun that hovered always at zenith had disrupted Pierrette's subtle body rhythms. She felt as if it were morning.
By the time she slipped past Citharista's ruined gates, only the brightest constellations were visible. Would Anselm teach her to read the stars? Her mind roiled with things she wanted to learn, whole disciplines she had no names for. The most important was magic, and the mage had adamantly insisted he would not teach itbut life was long. She would find a way around that.
When she lay down on the pallet she shared with Marie, her sister hardly moved. Pierrette lay awake, listening to her sister's light breathing and the heavy, wet sounds her father made as he rolled back and forth.
With first light, Marie awakened. She put a finger to her lips. "Father got drunk last night," she whispered. "After you left, the merchant Theodoros returned. A ship had put in at the wharf, and something its captain said caused him to change his mind. He told Father he had a better source of casks. When he left, Father drank two whole jars of wine." Gilles had not done that since the year the olive trees had sickened.
There it was. Anselm had upheld his end of his bargain with Pierrette. The beech trees and the pool Ma would be spared. Pierrette resolved to ask Anselm to teach her law, as it applied to the tenure of land, so that she could do somethingthough she had no idea whatto prevent further threats to the precious, tiny valley.
Yet something Marie had said stuck in her mind. "That was last night?" she asked. "Not the night before?"
"What are you talking about? The night before last, Theodoros's ship wasn't even in port. He only arrived in time for mass."
"Of course," Pierrette replied with a crooked smile. "I slept soundly. It only feels like I slept through a whole day and an extra night. Only yesterday the bishop held mass, and Theodoros talked with Father last night."
She had indeed slept a whole night on the cape (and her visit with Anselm had not been a dream), because even at that moment, she picked a fig seed from a crevice between her teeth. She had eaten two figs with Anselm, but none at all the week before that, and the seed that now rested on her fingernail was still hard. She rolled the telltale bit between thumb and forefinger, and let it fall silently.
"So life will go on as before," she mused. "We won't be rich, and won't have a fine house up on the sea-cliff where the air is always fresh, nor a terrace of blue tile with ships and dolphins on it."
"Sometimes you sound just like Mother," Marie said. " `Ships and dolphins' indeed. Don't you even care that we're poor?"
Pierrette was pleased by Marie's allusion to Elen. Had Mother too had visions like hers?
She put her arm over her sister's shoulder. "Don't be sad. Everything will work out, you'll see." She couldn't explain her own happiness. Marie was her best friend and her stable foundation in that insecure world, but her piety was a weak joint in the edifice of their relationship. Pierrette's pagan affection for things magical, for forgotten goddesses who lived in sacred pools, was a wedge that might drive them apart. Pierrette said no more about dolphins.
-
The Sorceress's Tale
Days passed as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Folk confessed their trivial sins. The docks remained empty except for fishing boats. Occasional Saracen vessels were sighted far out, but the days when those were a threat to small, poor towns was past.
Gilles worked in the olive grove, and when the sea was calm took his boat outthough never for long enough, or far enough out, to get much of a catch. The grove prospered, but that meant little to either Marie or Pierrette, for Gilles diverted much of the profit to the taverner, Germain. He no longer visited the pool of Ma, whom he had intended to betray, but sought surcease in the wine-cup.
Marie grew tall like a Celt, from someone on Gilles's side. Her hair lightened to red-gold, which entranced Bertrandwho was wholly besotted with her, and paid little attention to other girls.
Anselm kept the rest of his bargain; no horned men or gods appeared in shadowed streets or from behind limestone outcrops. Memory of the repulsive Satanic organ still haunted Pierrette, especially in the seasons when rams or goats rutted, but gradually, through a summer, a winter, and the springtime that followed, such memories rose up less and less frequently.
To all outward appearances, her life seemed placid and normal. Pierrette grew taller, though she had long since abandoned hope of becoming as willowy as her sister.
Whenever her work was not pressing, she retraced her route up the narrow pine-shadowed defile to the cape, to the polished table in her room, where her days were spent with books, scrolls, and her charcoal-board. The cloth covering her small, hard buttocks gave a fine polish to her bench. As for sleeping (only drawing her curtains made it resemble night), there was the bed, made of feathers and very soft.
Her outward appearance was little changed, because she did not age within the timeless spell that enveloped the cape. But because her mind did not slow down or stop, she grew erudite, if not wise.
Was she becoming a woman, hidden within a skinny child's body? She was more knowledgeable, but if she never ventured outside, would she remain forever a child at heart? Only experiences gave maturity. Whether she slept one time or seven on each visit to the cape, she did not believe her mind matured any more than her body did. She might be a well-informed girl, but only in the world outside could she grow to womanhood.
Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
-
Pierrette's Latin expanded, because it was like ordinary speech, and because P'er Otho's lessons had provided a foundation. She found Greek not unlike Latin, with cognate words she already knew. She had to struggle with Etruscan. Anselm's native tongue, Minoan, was most difficult of all.
"One must be born to it," her mentor said. "But you aren't going to learn magic, so it won't matter if you mispronounce things." Of course once she realized that most of the spells written in Anselm's special booksones he had forbidden her to touchwere in Minoan, she studied that language harder than ever, until at last Anselm said, "Amazing! Are you sure you have no Minoan blood?"
She did not know where "Minoa" was, so she could not say. "Minoa?" Anselm laughed. "There's no such placeand never was. Once my language was spoken on all the islands of the sea. My people controlled the trade from Crete and Egypt, before the Phoenicians learned to build rowboats."
The Minoan capitalthe name derived from Minho, or Minos, the title of their priest-kinghad been the island called Thera. From the north, aboard a ship from Athinai or the Isle of Pelops, its profile resembled a hornless cow.
Thera was not the largest of the eastern isles but it provided the best harbor, and grew from a trade center to the seat of a mighty king.
Two pointed towers built at the western end of the island changed its aspect from polled cow to straight-horned bulland it was as a bull that Minos appeared before his peoplea man with a bull's head wrought in silver, electrum, and gold. "Minho-tauros," he was called. Minos the bull.
"In my grandfather's father's time," Anselm told her, "before the magical event that made Thera into the `Fortunate Isles,' Minos was the greatest king in the world. The pharaohs of Egypt kissed his feet, for he was a mighty sorcerer who could drink the Nile dry from his own wine-cup, without leaving his palace."
All might have remained unchanged, Anselm said, but for two events unrelated except by fate. The first was a human event. Two of Minos's wives gave birth to sons on the same day. Which one was to be heir? The king reached into one child's cradle, and pressed its cheek with his thumb. The babe turned, and grasped the digit with strong lips and gums, sucking so hard that Minos's thumb tingled. He laughed loudly.
When he repeated his action with the other child, the babe did not suck. He gazed at his father with clear, gentle eyes, and he smiled.
"It is clear which one will be king," Minos said. "That one, who could suck blood from a stone, has the drive. He'll inherit my throne and learn the ways of trade and war."
The king pondered the other child. "This one looks beyond me to the heavens. He'll be high priest. I'll teach him how the earth moves, the secrets of tides, and all my spells and magics. He'll wear the mask of the bull."
Dividing the roles of priest and king was unprecedented. People mumbled uneasily that no such change could be without consequence. They were right.
When the old king died, the aggressive son took the name Minos, and was king. The placid child, calling himself Minho, dealt with gods and the hidden powers of the world, and everyone prospered.
But the child who sucked did not become less greedy with age. When his ship-captains had bled the Egyptians dry in hard trading, when the Greeks groaned to see his vessels sail into their harbors to collect tribute, Minos's half-brother remonstrated with him, because the people were unhappy. The island folk were not immune to Minos's sucking, for the stones of his new palace came from their quarries, and the food to feed laborers from their pastures, fields, and orchards. But Minos continued to suck, just as when he was a baby.
"The second event," said Anselm, "was a change in rocks beneath the sea-bottom ooze. Have you read Strabon's thesis on the nature of rocks?" he asked his pupil. She nodded. She studied everything he gave her to read. "Then you know that rock flows deep in the earth. Beneath Thera lay a great pool of flowing rock, and like water beneath a spring, it yearned to push upward, and to become . . . a fountain."
"A volcano," said Pierrette.
"Just so. And Thera had been a volcano before. Weaknesses in the seabed were already there. The island of Thera, home of the high priest Minho, was doomed."
"Where did Minos, the king, live?" she asked.
"His palace was on Kriti, at Knossos, a town without streets, of buildings without corridors."
"That must have been confusing," Pierrette commented. "How did they get from place to place?"
"People went from room to roomfrom courtyard to kitchen, to get to the granary, or through a bath or winery to get somewhere else. Because the king's symbol was the labrys, a two-bladed axe, they called his palace the Labyrinth.
"Minho," Anselm continued, "knew the way of rocks and gods alike. He knew Thera was doomed, but took no measures to get people off the island. Instead, he sent agents and priests to all parts of the kingdom to seek out men who loved peace more than profit, and to bring those menand women, and childrento Thera.
"The hope of becoming rich means more to poor men than placid poverty. Yet though nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand stayed away, Thera was crowded with those who came. Profit-seekers and the discontented departed, and in a few years, none but the contented were left on the isle.
"Avaricious Minos could not believe Minho meant him well. All his priests and philosophers went to Thera. His fat chef had gone, and his mapmakers and goldsmiths. Among those who left Thera were soldiers and tax collectorsmen useful to Minos, had they remained."
Anselm sipped wine, his voice hoarse from unaccustomed speaking. But he pressed on to the end of his tale. He told how Minos suspected his brother of using his own wise men and advisors against him. "Minho the Usurper," he named him, and called his generals together to plan a military campaign.
Within months Minos's fleet sailed, and the sailors witnessed what became of the island. A half-day away they saw smoke as of a riot or conflagration. They approached, believing that unrest in the streets would make conquest easier. The smoke column expanded tenfold, twentyfold, laced through and through with fire.
Black clouds obscured the sun. Yellow fog billowed across the unnaturally quiet sea. Captains ordered their ships turned about, for the wrath of a god was at hand, but there was no wind. Then the fog was upon them, choking crewmen, captains, and soldiers with poisonous vapors.
Few survived to report. When the deadly yellow air dispersed, the great humped bull was no more. Remaining were shoals and the toppled remains of one hornlike tower. Island and city, wharves and rich fields, scholars and farmers, were gone. In their place a single, fresh volcanic cone jutted from the water, gouting black ash, fiery stones and terrible vapors.
Anselm sighed, drank deeply, and finished the tale. "Minos celebrated his brother's demise, but not for long. I won't repeat that tale, because I'm sure you already know it."
Pierrette did. She knew how the writhing earth had tilted the distant island of Kriti so harbors on one side were high and dry, miles from the coast, and ports and cities on the other side were miles out, beneath the ocean. Perhaps the kingdom could have survived that blow to its commerce, as well as the loss of its fleet, but it did not survive what came next: for months, clouds spilled their burden of gray ash on Kriti. The fertile fields were hidden beneath a gray, rolling blanket. Where no ash fell, crops wilted from acid, sulfurous rain.
Minos's empire starved. Men said it was destroyed by an angry god, and perhaps it was. Other empires were shaken, too. An angry God sent plagues to Rameses's Egypt. The skies turned black and unspeakable substances fell. Enslaved Hebrews waited in their houses for the manifestations to fade, then fled across the narrow sea into Sinai, where they wandered for forty years.
Storytellers made much of Minos's end. Shorn of imagination, it was this: a hostage at Knossos, Theseus of Athinai, raised a rebellion. The king hid in his palace, donning the bull-headed mask of a priest to disguise himself. But Theseus recognized him, and slew him. The rest was historyor a fanciful tale.
Pierrette was not satisfied. "What really happened to Thera, Master?"
Anselm twisted his face into a caricature of a frown. "You should know that, child. Minho was a sorcerer. He took his island out of the currents and winds, and out of ordinary timewhere it still lies."
Now she understood why her avatar, the woman who called the storm, had jested with king Minho of the Isles about allowing strife to return. Still, she was no closer to finding that king and his island, because Anselm did not know where they were.
The tale spurred Pierrette to new efforts. She needed to become not a masc like her mother, but a great sorceress. Anselm's refusal to teach her became only an obstacle, not a finality. She used her timehoping he would relentin preparing herself for that day.
She needed to know where the Fortunate Isles were. They were the site of her wondrous dream, and she suspected they held the key to becoming the enchantress in that vision.
Too, she had developed an affection for the old curmudgeon, and though he appeared to have given up hope of going home, she was still young, and had not discovered how to give up. Among Anselm's collection were not only travellers' tales and scholars' treatises, but maps that amazed and tantalized her. She studied where the Isles had been, and where they might be, and learned geography in the process.
The world, she discovered, had once been a marble slab held up by four turtles, and had been small. In the remote past it had changed, according to the maps, and had become grounded in the mud of the world-river Oceanus. Later stillperhaps just as a chip of wood floats from creek to still poolit had drifted into a great sea. The ancients had not sensed its movement. Thinking it still in the river, they continued to call the sea Ocean.
Beyond the Pillars of Herakles, on Ocean's Iberian shore, had been Tartessos. Further north, off a rocky point where tides made froth of the waters, had been Phoenician Ys, and the Isle of the Dead, from which none but druids could return.
Was the Isle of the Dead what she sought? Several scholars placed the Fortunate Isles there, just south of other islands called Hibernia (the winter land), Brittania (which might have been an island, or the mainland peninsula later called Armorica), Albion, and Avalon. The accounts were confusing, because Albion meant "the white," and may have been Hibernia.
Geography was confusing because the names of places changed through time, and men's understanding of the shape of the world changed too. It expanded. Did that mean only that people had explored further, and recorded new places, or that the world itself grew, accreting new lands at its edges, just ahead of the explorers with their measuring staves, their pens, and their maps?
Pierrette studied. She also swept floors, prepared meals, and washed Anselm's clothing, spreading his white garments in the ever-shining noonday sun to dry. Seasons passed outside, but within Anselm's keep it was always the samelate spring, she decided, never quite sure.
Outside, down the rough slopes and along the sinuous coast to Citharista and her father's house, Pierrette continued her domestic dutiessweeping, preparing meals, laundering her father's garments and bedclothes, and working in the grove.
She continued her lessons with Father Otho, who was amazed at her progress. How had she learned words even he did not know? Her manipulation of the clumsy Roman counting-letters surpassed his own fumbling efforts.
Because Pierrette was in Citharista for all but the stolen hours to walk to the cape and back, she grew apace. Few noticed that her mind and abilities grew faster than her body, that as yet did not betray her masquerade as Gilles's "son."
At some time between her eleventh and twelfth yearher thirtieth or fortieth, perhaps, if time had been measurable within the keepshe began writing observations in a volume of blank pages. There she confided her sometimes-cynical reflections, and snippets of magical lore than she gathered from the many sources at hand.