Part 2 (1/2)
Much later, well fed on bread, olives, and delicious fatty sausages spiced with pepper and thyme, they again descended. The pendulum, slowed by the stylus dragging in the sand, now hung motionless near the center of the bed. ”See!” exclaimed Anselm. ”It is not exactly over the center, as it should be. And the lines it has scribed are awry!”
”How can you tell?” growled Yan Oors. ”It's only a pretty pattern in the sand.”
”Once some of these lines would have intersected where I stuck those pegs in the sand. Now they are all s.h.i.+fted westward, and the pendulum has stopped somewhere at sea, south of the Saxon land, not over the great stone circle. And here”-he indicated a line of pegs trending north and south, on the Armorican sh.o.r.e-”there are great lines of stones that once matched perfectly with lines of power in the earth, but now do not.”
”What lines of power are those?” asked Yan.
”The lines the pendulum has drawn-or rather, the lines in the earth that the pendulum's lines represent, on the map in the sand.” There ensued a discussion of mystical lines that bound the entire earth in a web of immaterial forces, lines whose intersections marked places of great power. ”They are like fulcrum points,” Anselm said, ”where the effect of even the weakest spell is magnified manyfold.” Pierrette had never dreamed that the fluctuating nature of magic could be as symmetrical and elegant as those lines in the sand and their intersections. But something about them did not make sense to her. ”I have often watched my serpent's egg sway on its chain, and it has never described such patterns. It only swings back and forth.”
”Your bauble is not heavy enough,” explained the mage, ”and its chain is not long enough, and besides, you did not swing it here, inside my keep, where time marches to a different pace. Outside, a similar pendulum would take a full year to come to rest, and the pattern it drew would be entirely different.”
Pierrette's head swirled. A year? And here, what? Two hours? A few thousand heartbeats. But though her beating heart marked time here, as it did outside, it measured nothing relevant, because outside not a single heartbeat would have occurred. No mind could encompa.s.s the contradictions. But then, if everything made complete sense, and could be explained, there could be no magic, and the dead world of the Black Time, shown to her in the reflections of the G.o.ddess's pool, would come to be. That brought her back to a new dilemma: one strong intersection of many lines in the sand was right where the pendulum had come to rest-offsh.o.r.e of the last point of land, beyond Sena, where lay . . . the Fortunate Isles.
FirstMa , then ibn Saul, then Yan Oors-and now this. It could not be coincidence. She was not going to be able to avoid the trap. She must go there. But kill Minho? Kill the one she was promised to? No G.o.ddesses, scholars, or scary old ghosts with iron staffs could make her do that. There had to be another way.
”So all of those alignments of great stones once marked such lines of power in the earth?” asked Pierrette, after Yan Oors had departed. ”And the stone circles were where several lines intersected?”
”That is how it used to be. Where possible, roads followed the lines, and even minor crossroads were concentrations of magic-expressed, of course, as shrines to this G.o.d or that.” Pierrette reflected that all roads, all crossroads, had magical influence, but that a road built of stone slabs, like the Roman ones, nullified spells instead. There were obviously two separate principles at work: a trail made by human feet, that followed the course of a mysterious line of power, partook of that influence, but a road expressly constructed according to the lay of the land was subject to a different rule. She called that rule the ”Law of Locks,” though it applied as well to water wheels, windmills-that is, to any complex fabrication of human hands, including roads. Near such constructions, no magic worked at all.
So what did this s.h.i.+fting of lines mean? Was the magical nature of the entire earth rebelling against the imposition of stone roads, of mills, of doors with locks, of man-made and mechanical contrivances?
The Black Time-or so she had long suspected-was in part the result of such building: wherever the land was bound in such a reticulation of artifices, no magic worked. When men built roads, mills, ca.n.a.ls, and cities, they augmented the natural barriers to magic, like rivers and watershed ridges, a restrictive network like the cords that bound a bale of wool.
Of course, the Black Time's coming was not driven by a single cause. When scholars like the voyager ibn Saul wrote down their prosaic ”explanations” of why ancient rites and spells seemed to work, their writings, published and copied and distributed widely, were also counterspells, and destroyed a little more of the magic that had once been.
The great religions had similar effect: when the priests first named ancient G.o.ds evil, that created an anti-G.o.d they called Satan, who drew sustenance from ancient, banished spirits. Named as evil, Molochwas eaten, and Satan acquired his fiery breath; he ingested Pan and the satyrs, and his feet became cloven hooves, his legs covered in s.h.a.ggy fur. When the priests named snake-legged Taranis Satan's avatar, the Devil grew a serpent's tail; when the horned Father of Animals was eaten, Satan a.s.sumed his horns.
When at last all the G.o.ds and spirits were named Evil and were consumed, then would Satan stand alone and complete. When all the magics were bound in a net of stone roads, every waterfall enslaved in a mill-race to labor turning a great wheel, every spell ”explained” in a scholar's rational counterspell, then would the Black Time indeed loom near.
Even common folk contributed their share: when a child died, and bereaved parents no longer railed at unkind fate, at the will of the sometimes-cruel G.o.ds, but called it Evil, then Satan claimed the death, and all such deaths, for himself. Where would it end? Would the Black Time only arrive when house fires, backaches, and children's sneezes and sniffles were no longer merely devastating, uncomfortable, or inconvenient, but . . . Evil? Pierrette forced herself not to think of that. Her concern was-or should be-more immediate: ”Can we transpose the new lines your pendulum has drawn onto a tracing of this map? It might be useful, on my coming journey.”
”Oh-then you are going?”
”Do I really have any choice?”
Pierrette traced the original map onto thin-sc.r.a.ped vellum, carefully labeling features of terrain, rivers, and towns. Then, again using strings stretched between the marked points on the sand basin's rim, she transferred the curving, intersecting lines in the sand onto her chart.
”Look at that!” exclaimed Anselm when he examined her work. ”See those four lines that intersect just below the mountainous spine of the land of Armorica? How strange. An old friend used to live near there. I wonder if he still does?”
”Master, you haven't left the vicinity of your keep in seven or eight centuries. Your friend is surely long gone.”
”Oh no-Moridunnon was a sorcerer of no mean skill. I once believed him an old G.o.d in mortal garb, so clever was he. Besides, whenever he fell asleep, he did not wake for years, even decades-and while he slept, he did not age. Will you stop there, and see him? I'll write a letter of introduction and . . .”
”Master ibn Saul has planned a more southerly itinerary for us, I think. We will follow River Rhoda.n.u.s, then cross to the headwaters of the Liger, and thence downstream to the sea, where we will take s.h.i.+p to search for . . . your homeland.”
”Surely a little excursion will not delay you much. And see? Not far from the mouth of the Liger, an earth-line marks the way. You'll have no trouble following it. I'll square it with the scholar.”
”You'll do your old friend-Moridunnon?-no favor, introducing him to the skeptical ibn Saul.”
”Then you go, while he makes arrangements for a s.h.i.+p. You'll have a week or so.”
”Write the letter to Moridunnon, master. If I can deliver it, I will.”
”Oh-there's something else. For you. Now where did I put it?” ”For me? What is it?”
”Your mother left it for you-or, rather, she gave it to you, when you were little, and you brought it here . . .”
”I did? I don't remember.”
”Of course not. I put a spell on it. Ah! Here it is!” He pulled a tiny object from between several scrolls.
”Your mother's pouch.”
Suddenly, Pierrette did remember. She remembered a winding line of torches on the long trail from Citharista to the Eagle's Beak, and the terrible humming notes, sounding to a child like a dragon on the prowl, that was the Christian chant of Elen's pursuers. Elen: Pierrette's mother, a simple masc, a country-bred witch of the old Ligurian blood. She was thegens ' scapegoat for a failed harvest, a drought . . . for whatever sins festered in them, which they would not acknowledge.
She remembered Elen shedding the spell she had hidden behind until Pierrette and Marie appeared on the trail ahead of the mob, and she remembered being taken in her mother's arms for a brief, desperate moment. ”Go now!” Elen had commanded them, handing Pierrette a little leather pouch. It held something small, hard, and heavy. ”Go to Anselm's keep. There, that way!” Those were the last words Pierrette's mother ever said to her.
A shadow hovered in front of Pierrette's face. She took the pouch from Anselm. Her eyes were blurred with the tears she had never before shed. Marie had wept when it was clear that their mother was gone, but not Pierrette. Little Pierrette instead made a secret vow, that she would learn all that her mother knew, and more. She would be not just a masc, but a sorceress-and then, she would have her revenge on the murderers. Only after that would she weep.
Now she understood that she would never fulfill that vow. The townspeople had created their own revenge: they walked always in the shadow of their guilt, dreading the day they would die, for Father Otho had not absolved them from their great sin. Would he do so if on their deathbeds they asked? Who knew? No, she desired no revenge, and now, remembering, she allowed the tears to course down her cheeks.
She tugged at the leather drawstring. A seam broke, and a single dark object fell in her lap. It was a ring.
Her mother's ring. She held up her left hand and spread her fingers, blinking away tears, gauging where to put the ring . . .
”No! Look at it but, don't put it on!” said Anselm with great urgency. She looked. It was dark, heavy, and . . . and cold. An iron ring? There was no rust, but it could be no other metal. Now that her eyes were clear, she saw the pattern cast into it-the entwined loops and whorls of a Gallic knot, like a cord that had no beginning or end. A knot that could not be unraveled.
”What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked.
”You're a sorceress. You tell me. I just thought now was a good time for you to have it, since you're going away.” He cleared his throat noisily, to conceal his sudden emotion. ”I'm going to take a nap on the terrace. Don't forget to copy those maps, before you go. You may need them. Take a handful of gold coins from the jar in the anteroom. Fill your pouch. And don't go without saying good-bye.” He departed abruptly, stumbling on the door sill because his own eyes were far from clear.
Part Two - Darkness