The Veil Of Years - Isle Beyond Time Part 19

Looking back, she wondered if the circle of devastation had grown larger. As she stared, she became conscious of movement at its edge, something dark, nebulous, shadowy and unclear, that crept along the boundary between green and black, consuming moss, leaves, and tender gra.s.s, leaving behind only dead, dry dust. She knew what it was. She had seen its like many times, more times than she wished to remember, but . . . this time it was not scurrying westward, seeking some distant goal. It had reached its destination: the destination its horrid fellow-shadows all sought, and it was . . . eating.

Horror-struck, Pierrette stared, but what she saw were images within her mind: a greasy shadow emerging from the mouth of a villager along with his infected tooth; another, wriggling free of a dead rat, a rabbit too long in the snare, a heap of dung in the road. She remembered Sena, another magical place, and a woman's dry bones crumbling away even as she watched, until nothing remained. They were all the small evils of the world, oozing free from the stink and corruption that engendered them, rus.h.i.+ng away toward their opposite, toward . . . the Fortunate Isles, the land where no evil was allowed. Now she had released just such a creature here, despite her precautions, and even alone it was striving to right the balance that Minho had upset two thousand and some years before.

She tugged on the sheet and secured it, braced the gaff, then adjusted the steering oar. Her little craft pushed ahead vigorously, its small bow wave chuckling like a cheery mountain rivulet, a contented sound.

But Pierrette was far from content. How much sweet, green gra.s.s, how much life and goodness, would the shadow consume before it was sated, or before it simply evaporated, nullified and canceled out by its opposite substance?

Should she sail back to warn Minho, so he could destroy the bridges and causeways that linked that island to the others, and thus save at least a portion of his kingdom? She shook her head. The small heap she had left behind that bush could not encompa.s.s the destruction of an entire city, and Minho had been quite clear: seventeen days. Only one had elapsed.

It was her fault. She was a plague carrier, a curse upon this lovely land, bringing death, and black destruction. These people were not concerned with the disposal of their wastes because there were none. Broken bronze was melted, and made into new tools. Broken bread was not eaten. Its aroma was savored, and then the tasteless stuff was crushed and baked again into fresh loaves. But she could not subsist upon the sweet, yeasty smell of bread. She craved its substance. She knew now that when she had eaten the flat, insipid fruit from Minho's table, the king had eaten none. What had he thought, watching her push slice after slice into her mouth, watching her throat ripple as she swallowed it? No wonder he had, despite his protestations, been eager to get rid of her even for a fortnight and a few more days.

She knew enough, now, to destroy this kingdom, to fulfill the G.o.ddess's command. A few s.h.i.+ps full ofugly little shadows gathered from the rocks of the Armorica coast would be enough-but could she do that? Even if she could get a s.h.i.+p past Minho's protective spells, spells he had let down to allow her pa.s.sage, could she bear to do it? Could she cause the very devastation she had just witnessed, on a grand scale encompa.s.sing not only gra.s.s, leaves, and moss but the smith whose bronze would not melt, the baker whose morsel she had eaten, and thousands upon thousands of others, all as innocent and inoffensive?

She eyed the rising sh.o.r.e of a smallish island connected by two soaring bridges to larger landma.s.ses of the outer and the middle rings. The gray-green foliage of lush old olive trees dotted its gra.s.sy slopes. No, she had not seen enough of this land to consider destroying it. That would be like burning a scroll unread, because the color of the ribbon that bound it offended her. She had to see it all for herself, and besides, though she now had one answer she did not have the other: how could shenot destroy the Fortunate Isles, but save them, and yet not disobey the one who had sent her? One solution was not enough. Just as the shadows of worldly evil nullified unworldly goodness, she needed not only the spell but also a counterspell. Now, she was no longer sure that seventeen days would be enough.

Pierrette pa.s.sed the following day and night at sea, but whether she did so from caution concerning what she had seen, or merely to have time to ponder the twists and turns of events, was not clear, even to her.

Then, by morning's slanting rays, as she rounded another small island, driven by an easy breeze astern, she observed a patch of bare, dark soil much like the one she had left behind on the city's margin. The wind and current did not favor a landing, or even a close approach, so she reluctantly sailed onward. It may have simply been newly turned soil, ready for sowing, she told herself. One couldn't discount that explanation, here where there was no fixed season for each agricultural activity.

Then, with the sun high overhead at noon, she spotted still another blackness. This time, she was able to ease her craft close in, though she could not moor among the blocky volcanic boulders that lined the sh.o.r.e, where there was neither beach nor quiet backwater.

Yes, she saw, it was much like the previous devastation, but with differences: tendrils of green ivy reached inward from the margin of destruction, and tiny seedlings had taken root where the breeze had blown them. How long ago had the causative event occurred? That depended on several things: the fertility of the bare soil, the heaviness of the morning dew (there had been no rain, in fact no clouds at all).

Could it have been only two or three days? She wondered this because, if her budding hypothesis had merit, only the impingement of someone from outside Minho's enchanted realm could have caused it, and she had never set foot on that island, or the one before. But perhaps Gustave had.

She envisioned her errant donkey wandering from island to island, keeping to thickets and ravines when people were about, crossing bridges and causeways at night (because Gustave was inherently cautious, and skeptical of all humans). Munching tender shoots here, succulent leaves there, and fat sunflower heads laden with oily seeds elsewhere, he would sooner or later find the need to lighten his internal burden, and . . .

She almost laughed. Would Minho be busier than ever, in the coming days, pulling scroll after scroll from his shelves as he searched for an adjunct to his great spell that specifically countered . . . donkey dung?

And Gustave? Did he find the luscious island vegetation all flat and insipid, as Minho's lovely sliced fruit had been to her? Would he eat less-and thus destroy less-because his meals had no savor, or would his sampling be ever more eclectic and more frequent, as each lovely scent led him along to one and another patch of disappointingly flavorless fodder?

Could she follow his dark, intermittent trail, and perhaps coax him back aboard her small vessel withgrain brought from the outside world, whose ordinary aroma might by now hold extraordinary promise, in his deprivation?

Elsewhere, in a curtained room where no lamps burned, a chamber illuminated only by the vermilion glow of a red-and-blue-veined gla.s.s bauble that resembled a tiny beating heart, the vizier Hatiphas and the druid Cunotar continued their conversation.

In yet another place, a secret chamber in the bowels of the great palace, but separate from it in a manner not clearly defined, King Minho labored at a task that had little to do with the preservation of his seminal spell (for he was no longer able to maintain it to his satisfaction, and his efforts were now directed toward a different solution, one he believed would prove final and complete, requiring no further tinkering, ever).

His success with that task would determine the ultimate fate of his kingdom-and, as well, the fate of his intended and long-antic.i.p.ated bride.

Chapter 30 - The.

Not-So-Fortunate Isles The days and nights that ensued on those islands and among them were for Pierrette a concatenation of events and encounters superficially different, but monotonously similar when viewed according to the principles they ill.u.s.trated. She observed an olive grower dumping baskets of shriveled olives beneath his trees, then watched him fill those baskets with plump, fragrant black fruit from the branches above. She followed him to a shed where he pressed some between flat stones, and she smelled the rich oil they produced. When he departed, carrying a clay amphora of old oil on his shoulder (to be poured out on the ground, she was sure, to feed the roots of the trees) she stole a handful of his fruits and ate them. For all their aroma, they were without savor, but they allayed her hunger and seemed to sustain her.

She caught no glimpse of the donkey Gustave, but she observed the evidence of his pa.s.sage: patches of bare soil, sometimes dotted with the stumps of saplings, mostly consumed, sometimes entirely dead, but often exhibiting traces of fresh growth. That was rea.s.suring to her. The dung of a single donkey, at least, was not so strongly defined as "evil" in Minho's spell that its effects continued unchecked.

In her mind, Pierrette created a map of such places, and she attempted to rank them by their apparent age or freshness. This was made difficult because the meandering course of her travels did not take her back across old routes often, and she had few opportunities to observe the same spot twice or three times, to establish the stages and sequence of recovery of the vegetation, from tendril and seed-leaf, vinelet and sprig, to leafy vine and small bush or clump of gra.s.s.

With no fixed itinerary, she was free to experiment, to attempt to predict where, from the limited evidence, a fresher patch of devastation might mean she was hot upon her four-legged companion's trail.

Thus far, she had encountered rather more barren spots with ungerminated or freshly rooted seeds than chance might account for, but she had not attained success, which would be to find Gustave himself. As for her own private functions, she limited them to appointments with the wooden bucket beneath the center thwart of her boat, and emptied it only when she was well offsh.o.r.e, with equal distances of all-absorbing salt water in every direction. This she did more from the desire to leave the evidence of Gustave's pa.s.sing unmuddled than from any consideration for her royal host, whose labors were surely, she believed, made more difficult by such things.

On one island, she watched a weaver's husband unravel old, worn garments and untwist every thread. A flock of children then carded the wool, and spun it, and the weaver worked the new yarn on her loom into cloth ready for the tailor's cutting. While Pierrette watched, several people deposited old garments in a basket by the door then chose new ones displayed on tables. When she did the same, leaving her old, worn tunic and choosing another, no one paid particular attention to her. But a few minutes later, as she watched from across the street, the thread-picking husband found the tunic she had left, gasped, and turned it over and over in his hands. "Wife!" he cried, "What cloth is this?" Together they examined its crisscross Gallic plaid, the faded pattern of colors unlike anything the wife might weave. "Take it to the Watcher," said the wife. "It is not right."

"I dare not. The Watcher will think we made it, and we'll be punished."

"Then unravel it, before someone comes, and sees it." They dithered, unsure how to treat the nonconforming garment, and at last decided to bury it beneath the rest in the basket, and not think about that complex cloth, the contemplation of which they feared would drive them mad.

"Where is the Watcher?" she asked a peddler of bronze needles and pins, squatting with his polished wooden box of small, s.h.i.+ny wares.

"I have nothing of interest to him," the peddler replied without addressing her question. "My pins are all much alike, one to another, and all are proper pins, though hardly exceptional."

"Where might I find the Watcher?" she asked a vendor of dried fish, who sat between two baskets of equal capacity. As it was early in the day (as she would realize later) the basket on his left was full of whole, flat fillets encrusted with salt, while the one on his right contained a scattering of cut, broken, and even soft, stewed morsels, but none chewed, none eaten.

"In the usual place," was the reply. "I have no need to go there. My fish are neither exceptionally odorous nor lacking in fishy aroma." Then why, Pierrette wondered, had he averted his eyes, as if afraid.

Was everyone secretly terrified of King Minho and his unseen, perhaps immaterial, spies? Was his pleasure perhaps expressed less often than his pain? And did that signify an imbalance, even in this perfect realm between the substandard and the exceptional, and did fear of singular accomplishment in either direction incline everyone to conscientious mediocrity?

When she found the Watcher it was by accident, straying into a small square where three streets met.

There, between two parallel marble walls seemingly purpose-built, was a statue of Minho himself. But what a strange statue! Approached from the left, Minho smiled and held out both hands in the manner of one receiving a gift. From the opposite end of the walled pa.s.sage, which was hardly wider than the king's shoulders, his brow appeared furrowed, his nose wrinkled as if someone had eaten spicy food, then broken wind nearby. His eyes seemed narrowed in anger. His palms were raised as it to fend off something unpleasant.

Pierrette went back and forth between both viewing positions several times, but she could not tell if the statue turned, and changed expressions, every time she walked around to the other side, or if it had been carved with two faces, two welcoming arms and two that rejected. She tried to crawl through, betweenthe statue's legs, but could not fit. Peering up between its legs, she could see no evidence of a second face at the back of the head.

Did Minho peer from the statue's stone eyes, then reach out with an ephemeral hand to bless visitors from the east, or chastise approachers from the west? Or did each visitor's own convictions about the quality of his goods govern his choice of entrances, and did his predispositions themselves generate whatever feelings of pride, pleasure, dismay, or despair he experienced, without burdening the overworked king with trivial rewards and punishments?

In villages and ports across the islands, she would find other Watchers, all much the same, but would find no immediate clarification of their exact functioning.

One evening, Pierrette sat at the feet of a poet, in a tavern where men sniffed wine, but did not drink.

She did, but the wine tasted like pond water, and failed to raise her spirits at all. The others seemed to progress toward drunkenness as they sniffed and raised their cups. The tavern master collected goblets already sniffed, and poured their contents into a tun. When that vessel was filled, his strapping son took it away for aging, and brought another, fresh and cool from the cave.

The poet sang of glories past, of the ancient Sea Kings who mapped and explored, and circ.u.mnavigated the world. Of course Pierrette knew that the earth was a sphere, or nearly so. Anyone who had read the Ionian Greeks knew that, and understood the means of calculating its size. It was vast, and she felt it would be wasted if that sphere were mostly ocean. Lands surrounded the Middle Sea: surely the great ocean that lapped these island sh.o.r.es must also be ringed with undiscovered continents, however far away those lands might be. The irony of her thoughts was not lost on Pierrette. She had found the Fortunate Isles, the ultimate destination of explorers everywhere, and already her mind reached out for more distant unknown strands.

The climax of the poet's narration was the story of Minho himself. He had shared his mother's womb with a twin, whom his father named Minos after himself. It was the traditional appellation of the kings of Knossos and Thera. When the elder Minos stuck out his thumb, his little namesake had sucked it most greedily, and yowled his disapproval when it gave no milk. Little Minho, however, only eyed his father with his great, dark, baby eyes.

Only one son could become king, in his appointed time, and aggressive little Minos was the obvious candidate. But the doting father did not scant his gentler son. "I will divide my kingdom," he decided.

"Minos, who commands and demands, will be king, but not high priest, as is customary. Instead, sweet Minho will rule my spiritual realm."

Thus it transpired. Minho, not required to learn the art of war, the science of control, the mathematics of taxation, instead studied the acc.u.mulated wisdom of the scholars, the natures of the G.o.ds, and, of course, magic. Chief among the tools of his trade was the Great Orb, which the poet called a "water-sphere." In its clear depths the universe existed in simulacrum, as clouds and shadows that sometimes coalesced into images, and at other times merely obscured. Because the poet described it as mounted on a bronze ring and three legs, Pierrette suspected it was not water but crystal or gla.s.s, like her little "serpent's egg."

In his sphere, Minho saw fire within the earth, fire that gathered beneath the rocky bed of the island where he lived and studied. He foresaw a great devastation. Fields, orchards, and cities would be destroyed, and such a pall of gray ash would fall, even on lands far beyond the realm of the Sea Kings, that many nations would collapse when crops, roads, and seaports were buried. Minho foresaw barbarians in armor of strange black metal laughing around campfires in the ruins of Minos's palace at Knossos. He foresaw distant Egypt convulsed in revolution, so entire subject peoples would pack uptheir querns and looms, and flee into the desert.

Minho sent couriers throughout his brother's kingdom with promises of gold and steady work, and gathered the best of every trade-potters, bronze, silver, and goldsmiths, masons, farmers, poets, and dancers. All others-warriors, taxmen, and trolls who made black weapons from red rocks, he turned away, and all lesser scholars and magicians also. When the fires below would no longer remain pent within the rock, he uttered a great spell.

Plunging his hand into his magical sphere, he plucked his chosen land-this very kingdom-from the face of the earth, and floated it in a pool left behind by the receding tide. When the cataclysm was past he returned it to its place, but its ties to the bed of the sea were broken, and thereafter, with a nudge of his finger, he could move it first here, then there, at his will.

"And so it is today," concluded the poet. "Here, all is perfect, for all that is evil was left behind.

"Sing praise to Minho," he cried, "who preserves us always in our perfection." Voices arose, as one, in a song all knew well. Pierrette remained silent, for she knew neither the words nor the tune, and she was not as impressed as they were with Minho's great feat, or indeed with their own complaisant perfection.

She slipped away from the gathering. Because she often ate the lovely but tasteless fruits of their labor, which they merely sniffed and admired, her requirements differed from theirs. Because her boat and the cedar bucket were not nearby, she performed her necessities in a secluded willow copse. When she looked back, from afar and above, the copse was already leafless amid a spreading circle of black devastation. Was this, she wondered unhappily, the means by which she would destroy Minho's kingdom-bit by bit, insidiously, without shouting or the clash of arms?

Seventeen days. Six had pa.s.sed. Eleven remained, and already she was tired of tasteless pap and innocuous people. She missed ibn Saul's snappishness, Lovi's petulance, Gregorius's elaborate lies, and Yan Oors's dark ugliness. She missed the stinks of offal and wet ashes and the raucous cries of crows, all long banished from these islands. She even missed bruising rocks beneath her hip and shoulder when she slept on the ground-because here, wherever she lay down became as soft as a bed of flower petals and smelled as sweet.

But her patience had rewarded her; she had learned several important things. Minho's tale, as recorded in Anselm's scrolls, had made no mention of a magic sphere that contained a universe in miniature, that could be manipulated at the sorcerer-king's will. Now she knew what Minho had concealed beneath the drape of dark cloth. She knew also that he had lied: was the "water-sphere" a device of his own conception and creation, or was it an artifact of an age earlier still, a creation of some mind that surely understood, as Minho did not, the logical basis for all things magical? And almost hidden in the poet's tale were other nuggets: iron was forbidden here-but she had her mother's ring, which sucked the heat from Minho's forges. And what did Minho fear, that he had banned all other pract.i.tioners of his sorcerous art?

Yet against her thigh (or so she believed) was a crystal egg that held the soul of Cunotar the druid, his malevolent spirit bound for almost a thousand years in reticulations of blue-and-crimson gla.s.s.

Here, people sacrificed the pleasures of food and drink lest their indulgence conjure elements at odds with insipid perfection. But Pierrette did not. Here, Neheresta, old and jaded, remained forever trapped in the body of the sweet child she had been, on that momentous day when Minho had uttered his spell.

Thinking of children, the recollection of another vision swam before her eyes. The vision itself was simple and straightforward, of two young people standing amid a mult.i.tude, the man's left hand and the woman's right resting on the shoulders of a smiling boy of perhaps seven years' age. The significance of that visionrequires exposition of events that transpired a year or so in Pierrette's immediate past.

Even in Anselm's ensorcelled keep, the histories written by Diodorus Siculus and t.i.tus Livius had begun to fade from the mage's books. All the events more than 126 years before the birth of the Christian savior were disappearing from the pages-and soon would fade from the memories of men. Somewhere in the past, Pierrette understood, something had been changed, and the course of events that led to her age-and to her existence-would no longer come about. She, and everything she knew of the world, would cease to exist. What new history would replace them? Desperately seeking a solution, Pierrette discovered that one event, only one, was causing the devastation: a battle fought in her world, her history, that now remained unfought, circ.u.mvented by the Eater of G.o.ds-and everything that had happened thereafter was changing. Voyaging through the Otherworld of the spellMondradd in Mon , she had meddled with that historic crux: if the Roman consul Calvinus stormed Entremont, the citadel of the Gauls, and vanquished Teutomalos, their king, then Marius would drive off the Teutons a few generations later, and Julius Caesar would make all Gaul a Roman province. If Calvinus dithered and procrastinated, Teutomalos would become strong enough to defeat him, and where Imperial Rome might have been would be a vast Celtic and Germanic state, an evil empire in which even G.o.ds themselves were slaves to that ent.i.ty Father Otho did not dare name.

Pierrette had succeeded in goading Calvinus to battle, and the resultant historic outcome was not much different from what she had known before. Even the tales people told, centuries later, were the same.

One such legend recounted how the centaur Belugorix had fled the slaughter at Entremont with his lover Aurinia on his back and had, after long journeying, attained the Fortunate Isles. Belugorix, whom Pierrette had known as Bellagos, had been indeed akentor , a captain of one hundred Gaulish cavalryman, and at Pierrette's urging had fled with bright Aurinia, already carrying their unborn son in her womb. When the dust and smoke of battle were centuries gone, and Pierrette had returned to her own-almost her own-era, she had again quested through the Otherworld and had seen the loving couple in a crowd outside Minho's palace. Their son Kraton looked to be seven or eight years old, and by that she knew their quest had been a hard one, and seven years long.

Where were Aurinia and Bellagos now? What had become of young Kraton? When Pierrette got up from her makes.h.i.+ft bed in a gra.s.sy hollow-no dew clung to her cloak, which was still white and clean-she knew how she would occupy the final days of her exile from the palace.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." It was an old adage, generally useful, and Hatiphas considered it applicable to present circ.u.mstance. The druid Cunotar more than hated the girl Pierrette. He loathed her, despised her. His voice dripped venom and sour bile at the most oblique reference to her.

Cunotar was also-though loath to admit it-very much afraid of her. She had trapped him in his present state, body and spirit alike compressed into the gla.s.sy orb that now rested on Hatiphas's table.

The vizier hardly dared contemplate Cunotar's rage, after so many centuries without food, drink, savor, or challenge, afforded only brief and tantalizing glimpses of a world that had evolved in a direction he would not have allowed, had he been free to influence it.

But "friend," as Hatiphas defined it, had strict limitations. There might come an appropriate time to shatter Cunotar's crystal prison, and thus perform what the druid would consider a friendly act, but that time was not yet at hand. Hatiphas's master had expressed strong feelings about the presence of other sorcerers in his realm. Though Cunotar's desire to eliminate the troublesome young witch felt genuine, and coincided with Hatiphas's own, King Minho, blind with that madness that afflicted all males unaltered as Hatiphas was (to their detriment, and the detriment of clear thinking) had not yet abandoned his ambition, which was to tame her and possess her. Thus Hatiphas would not-yet-free the druid. If all else failed, and the king's present efforts bore no fruit, then was soon enough.

Cunotar also pondered. He could not see much of this Minho's unlikely realm, but because Hatiphas was less careful than Pierrette, and did not store the egg in leather wrappings, or seal it in a wooden box, Cunotar was able to sense many things. One was that the gullible vizier accepted him as he portrayed himself. He also sensed changes occurring in this changeless land. Some he felt only as the righting of ancient imbalances, and they did not trouble him. Others were more sinister, and were the efforts of a sorcerer as powerful as himself. They did not have the fresh piquancy of the girl Pierrette's spells, so they could only be emanating from one source: Minho.

Cunotar reflected that Hatiphas also sensed something going very wrong, but he had not been able to define it. He erroneously blamed it on the girl. What would he do when he found out that his benevolent master was behind it?

Minho's task, had anyone been in a position to observe him work, gave him the semblance of a large, dark spider weaving a web of great complexity. In actuality, he wove nothing; the web's gossamer strands had been woven by processes entirely natural, and beyond the capability of any sorcerer to shape or alter in their least, most insignificant detail-except for one.

At the moment the king had first uttered his great spell, there had been no threads. The moment after, they had existed, and ever since had lengthened, had woven in and out amidst each other.

Each strand originated not in a place, but in the idea of a place: the emptiness where Minho's kingdom had been, when he had uttered his fateful words. Each one terminated in a person, an individual who had been saved from fiery death at that moment. Each soul in Minho's realm was thus not entirely free of its mortal origin, but remained linked to it by one tenuous thread.

In the centuries upon centuries since, the orb that men call "the world" had spun about itself three hundred sixty-odd times each year, twisting those threads. It had swung ponderously around its luminary a hundred times each century, and created great looping skeins of soul-stuff. And upon the face of Minho's island kingdom, men and women had danced by moonlight in intricate patterns, and by day had trudged this road and that, had sailed hither and thither, like tatting weights on a lacemaker's board, creating of their strands that intricate weave Minho now studied.

Could he untangle them?

Could he trace each lone thread through its convolutions and unweave it from the rest? Or was the only solution to cut them all at once, as Alexander had done to the famous and unfortunate Gordian knot?

Minho knew of Alexander only by rumor. He had been a thousand years yet unborn when Minho had performed his magic, and the sorceror-king could not remember Alexander's fate.

For now, he would continue to unweave the cloth of centuries, and would do nothing rash. He had given his bride-to-be seventeen days to make her decision. If her choice favored him-or if not-then he would decide.

Chapter 31 - The Ancient.

Child Sailing from one creek mouth or harbor to the next, the Fortunate Isles seemed a small kingdom of fourteen significant islands and a few score tiny ones out on the barrier reefs that protected it from the world beyond. Once ash.o.r.e, it seemed much larger, and she often hiked for days across an island she could sail around between a single sunrise and sunset. Afoot, the kingdom seemed larger than Francia and Iberia combined, its people as numerous as all Roma in its heyday. "Bellagos," she repeated at every inn and crossroad. "His wife's name is Aurinia, and their son Kraton looks to be seven years old."

"Kraton?" replied a shoemaker. "Does he deal in leather? I know someone of that name, but he is about my age, though less well preserved." He laughed. After two thousand years, everyone was, of course, "about his age," give or take an inconsequential lifetime or so.

"I knew a Kraton, once," said a farmer resting behind his plow. The grain he had harvested seasons ago now lay thick in his furrows where he had returned it as golden flour, hulled, winnowed, ground, and sifted, but never baked with water, salt, and oil into bread. "It seems to me," he continued, "that he was a maker of bows, instruments for killing, and was left behind."

So it went, until the fifteenth day of Pierrette's sojourn. "Of course I know them," the cheery, bright-eyed washerwoman said. Perhaps, Pierrette thought, she was cheery because alone of all the tradespeople and laborers, her task was entirely genuine-dirty clothes went into her wooden vat, which steamed with sweet herbs, and clean ones came out to be dried on tree branches in the perfect suns.h.i.+ne, where clouds were always "over there," and never between her and the golden orb. "The parents live right above me, in the village, and their golden-haired son-so like his mother-entertains his friends in that country house whose roof you can just see over the ridge."

Thus directed, Pierrette began the last leg of her quest, down the hill to the sprawling mansion where she would find young Kraton, playing at ball or pick-up-sticks with his little friends. What use, she wondered as she approached the magnificent dwelling, did a child have for a palace? How many rooms could he fill with toys? In how many courtyards could he toss and kick a leather ball? There was, she reflected uneasily, something terribly amiss.

"Kraton? Of course," said a tall, effete Minoan lolling by the gate. "Come. You're new here, aren't you?

Imagine the looks on their faces when I introduce you. We've seen no new face since Kraton himself arrived-and that was, oh, centuries ago."

Indeed, Pierrette caused a stir. Men and women-all young, all lovely-crowded around, eagerly absorbing her unfamiliarity. "I saw her first," one tall youth stated. "Come with me," he urged her.

"Imagine-b.r.e.a.s.t.s untouched by anyone I know, myself included. Thighs unparted by . . . You wouldn't, by some lucky chance, be a virgin, would you? That would be novelty indeed." Pierrette turned away from him, ashamed and disgusted. Where were Kraton and his friends? What were these jaded and debauched people doing here?

Kraton. At last. The blond boy sat at the center of an interior courtyard, in the arms of a marble statue of some G.o.d or hero of old. Around him danced men and women entirely naked but for golden spikes, pins,and chains that penetrated their bodies, some emerging from natural openings, others from slits and punctures in every fold, crevice, and protuberance of limb, trunk, and face. Kraton himself, she saw, with growing horror, wore a delicate chain that originated at his eyeball-an orb of gold, not blue like his other one. The chain snaked down his cheek, entered his mouth, and-Pierrette shuddered uncontrollably-seemed to be identical to one that emerged from beneath his b.u.t.tocks, and terminated in a matching golden eyeball that he swung back and forth in front of his face.

"You can't be the one my parents spoke of!" he complained, his face twisted in a petulant frown, his voice high and immature. "You look ordinary! My parents said you were a G.o.ddess, but you are not.

Come here." Hesitantly, she approached his perch.

He reached out and squeezed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s painfully. She drew back, hurt and shocked. "At least you're real," he squealed. "At least you're new. No, wait! Don't go! I want to play with you."

At that moment, Pierrette understood what evil she had wrought, all those hundreds of years before, a thousand miles away. As the battle for Entremont had drawn near, she had asked Bellagos, "Would you rather see Aurinia a slave in Rome, drawing water for some senator's herb garden, and going afterward to his bed?" Instead, she should have said, "Stay here and die with your sweetheart, for long life is an evil far worse than death."