Part 15 (1/2)

Part Three - Dawn

Pierette's Journal

I can safely conclude that the shadowy apparitions that have disgusted, distressed, and even terrified me are not unrelated to the answer I seek. They are palpable expressions of the principle of the Law of the Conservation of Good and Evil. I am forced to conclude that the balance they seek to restore with their westward migration is the one that Minho's spell upset.

That they are so evident in Armorica, but not in Provence, suggests that there is still time to accomplish my task, because the disturbance of balance they embody is still localized. Further, the shadows are by definition Otherworldly, and can perhaps best be described not as objects but as bare phenomena: voids in the veil between the worlds. But it is a terrifying Otherworld those tiny portals open upon: that realm of greasy blackness and crimson light might well be what Christian visionaries see, that they call h.e.l.l. It is frightening to consider that the nearer I approach Minho's private vision of heaven, the deeper must I plunge through its opposite to get there.

I have surmised another phenomenon, not directly observable: just as the world, perhaps the universe, expands as man seeks its limits, so the past becomes more remote-and the future also-as scholars contemplate the infinite. Snorri and Brendan's voyages implied the former, and it is rea.s.suring to believe that explorers will never run out of new places to discover, and ibn Saul will never lack for new mysteries to debunk and destroy. It is also rea.s.suring to consider that the very nature of the Black Time may be to recede, not to arrive.

If my hypothesis is correct, then the original end points, the original break in the Wheel of Time, are no longer the ends of it, for new eras and eons are being formed in future and past alike. Thus the proximate cause of the break-the terrible, destructive spell gone awry that caused it-will not be found at the beginning, but somewhere along the way; not at the end, but centuries, even millennia before those ever-receding moments.

Chapter 24 - The Long.

Voyage Ends Ibn Saul and Lovi departed at the peak of the tide, without additional parting words except conventional well wishes. Even when their vessel went hull-down in the distance, Pierrette lingered on the wharf as the water slowly receded, wet and dark.

When the tide went out, the foot of the stone wharf ab.u.t.ted an expanse of s.h.i.+ny, dark mud. Pierrette scooped a handful of sediment and kneaded it, squeezing it between her fingers until it had the consistency of potter's clay, then pressed it flat on a worn stone bollard. Brus.h.i.+ng drying flakes from her hand, she worked two fingers into the neck of her pouch, and pulled forth the little gold cylinder. She set it at the leftmost edge of the flattened sediment, pressed it firmly in place, and then rolled it across the smooth surface. As it moved from left to right its impressed patterns remained in the soft material. First appeared the octopus, its tentacles now stretching leftward, two of them splayed upward, one down, and the rest reaching out toward two hitherto unnoticed dolphins now leaping from a wavy sea.

Pierrette rolled the seal until the pattern began to repeat itself, then replaced the glittering bauble in her pouch. She pondered what lay before her: Minho's engraved invitation to her, and her alone. A larger dolphin, with a star for its eye, lay left of the other two, and above them. A line traced between the three would form half a right angle with the bottom of the impression. Several other scattered stars completed the image of the telltale constellation that she recognized.

At the base of the image was a wavy line broken by upward-pointing teeth, and on the flattened top of the central tooth was a tiny rectangle, faced with three not-quite-semicylindrical marks, and surmounted by a large star. To Pierrette, the shape of those marks resembled the black-and-vermilion columns of the entrance to Anselm's keep-and the columns of Minho's palace.

Across the top of the impressed image were ten raised half-circles that she interpreted, knowing theengraver's intent, as waning moons. There before her was not just a picture, but a map, a simple star chart, and a rudimentary calendar. Tonight, she knew, was not only the tenth half-moon, but the autumnal equinox as well. Had Minho foreseen even that?

There before her was the route she must take to meet her dream lover in the real world, to step from a boat onto the solid ground of . . . the Fortunate Isles.

She sc.r.a.ped the mud from the worn stone, kneaded it into a ball, and then tossed it onto the tidal flat, where it immediately merged with the silt, the stranded seaweed, and the scattering of empty mussel sh.e.l.ls.

Boats were plentiful in Gesocribate. Refugees-villagers and fishermen from the length of the coast beyond the gullet-had trickled in over several years, fleeing Viking raids on vulnerable coastal villages.

For most of them, the craft they had arrived in were not necessities of their livelihood thereafter.

Pierrette bought one such idle craft for two silver denarii. Perhaps, she suspected, she only bought the right to provision it and sail it away, because the master of the little wooden wharf where it was tied alongside many others was clearly not a boatman himself, and she doubted he had clear t.i.tle to any of them. He asked a high price for a gilded galley of six oars that leaned on keel and rotted bilge ash.o.r.e, and placed low values on workaday vessels in the water, half sunken, slos.h.i.+ng with green duckweed.

Those craft, their seams swollen tight, were better off than the pretty, rich man's toy ash.o.r.e, whose planks had wracked and spread in dry air and sunlight.

Bailed dry, her boat stayed dry. She provisioned it with four kegs of water, a tight cedar box that held her few possessions, a dense, dry wheel of cheese, several flat salted fish, and a sack of crisp, unleavened black wheat biscuits. She wedged a clay pot of honey and a little cask of fresh cider by the boat's stem.

The boat's woolen spritsail, rolled on its yard, was striped with black mold and could not be trusted. She negotiated for a better one-as it happened, a bright red sail from the seam-sprung galley. Dry air, unkind to watercraft, was friendlier to cloth.

She paid the innkeeper's son to care for Gustave. ”My little boat is no place for a donkey,” she whispered to the beast, stroking his nose. ”The boy has promised to give you a handful of grain every day, as well as your fodder. You would be wise not to kick or bite him.” Gustave snorted his disdain.

When Pierrette approached her boat, there was her beast, his tether bitten through and dragging on the wharf. ”Oh, no! Did the boy say something about 'work' to you? A small boat is no place for a donkey.”

The stableboy arrived, panting. Gustave glanced at him, and stepped nimbly into the boat, and planted all four hooves against the spread of the bow planks, as if pegged and joined in place as firmly as the timbers.

Pierrette sighed, and proffered the boy a coin. ”How soon can you bring the fodder and grain you sold me to the dock? Clearly, he intends to go with me.” The boy eyed her as skeptically as Gustave might have, had the situation been reversed. ”An hour,” he said.

Pierrette pushed away from the dock at dawn, two days after her companions had departed from the main wharf. Would their paths ever cross again? The sunny streets of Ma.s.salia, the great market above the Roman dec.u.ma.n.u.s, and the little tavern opposite ibn Saul's doorway might as well have been inanother world entirely. Another . . . an other . . . an Otherworld. The last thing Pierrette had seen, as she rowed out of the sh.o.r.e's wind shadow, was a cl.u.s.ter of dark, formless shapes huddling at the end of the dock, as if yearning to follow her. . . .

She searched her craft from stem to sternpost for the slightest hint of an unnatural shadow lurking behind keg, crate, or coil of line, remembering her guide on Sena, crumpling in a rattle of dry bones. She did not wish to be responsible for transporting such a thing to Minho's fair land, where everything evil or even unsightly had been banished on that long-ago day when he had wrested his kingdom from the world of time's pa.s.sage.

She sailed outward beyond the gullet into a sea unmarked by other sails. On long, time-consuming tacks against the westerly wind (now s.h.i.+fting northerly as winter approached apace), she had many uneventful hours to ponder. She was now sure that for the small evils wending ever westward, Sena had been only a stepping-stone on the way to their true destination, the focus of their yearning. If she drew lines on a map, westward from the Liger's mouth, southwestward from Gesocribate, they would converge precisely at the patch of sea where she and her companions aboardSh.o.r.e Bird had seen unmoving clouds hovering about the peak of an unseen island, which was surely a ring of black volcanic crags . . . The shadows'

destination, one and all, the focus of their mindless craving, was the Fortunate Isles.

She now understood what her true mission was to be. The G.o.ddessMa was mistaken-for Minho's kingdom to recede into the mists of unprovable legend was no solution. Moridunnon's master, the Eater of G.o.ds, was also in error, whether he wanted Pierrette to succeed or fail. In one sense, if she did asMa wished, there would be no counterbalance to his growing power, no single realm where evil did not exist.

He would consume ever more of what remained, and the Black Time would come, when at last he was sated. But in another sense, his dominion would remain forever incomplete.

Minho, also, was a victim of flawed reasoning . . . but she did not dare to dwell on that. When at last she confronted him in the flesh, would the love he professed for her be strong enough to overwhelm the disastrous news she would bring him?

Pierrette leaned against the mast of her little boat. The steering oar was lashed in place, and she had nothing to do. A firm, steady breeze filled the little crimson sail, and she squinted past it, into the newly risen sun. Her last tack had been a long one, heeled over hard, sailing much closer to the wind's eye than a square-sailed craft could have done. Now she approached the stationary wisps of feathery cloud from the west, propelled not just by wind, but by rolling swells as high as her vessel's stubby mast, swells that first lifted her craft's stern, then raised the entire vessel enough so she could see for many miles. Several times, at the glossy crests of such waves, she believed she had seen a dark speck-a peak, jutting above the horizon?-at the base of those trailing clouds.

At last, finally, Pierrette was alone. Was she lonely? Many times, she had been lonely, even in crowded cities and marketplaces. She had not been close to Gregorius, and Lovi's a.s.sumptions and expectations had been an insurmountable barrier between them, but she thought with affection upon ibn Saul, and she missed the steady, quiet companions.h.i.+p of Yan Oors. Her mentor Anselm was a thousand miles away.

Yes, she was alone, but she did not think she was really lonely.

Besides, there were distinct advantages to being alone. Grasping a wooden water cup firmly, she reached over the lee rail and filled it with salt water. She murmured soft words, an ancient spell from one of Anselm's books, then raised the cup to her lips; the water tasted as pure and sweet as if she had dipped it fresh from the Mother's own sacred spring. She would not have dared utter those words (orafterward, sip that water) in the presence of others, except perhaps Yan Oors or the sprite Guihen. But then, they were themselves magical beings and ordinary folk did not even see them unless they wished to be seen.

Alone, she was free to behave as she wished. Alone, there was no one to doubt her magic. Of course, that was a double-edged sword: without impartial observers, how could she say that what she did, and the results of the spells she uttered, were not simply illusion or even delusion? Alone, she existed entirely in a subjective universe where whatever she chose to believe was not liable to contradiction. When the tall, rolling swells lifted her small boat high, she could now distinctly see the black, jagged cliffs that rose from their encompa.s.sing bank of concealing fog. Had there been others present, would they have seen them also? Would she herself have seen them? Who could say? Gustave could not speak, and at any rate showed no interest in scenery. His feed was stowed beneath the sternmost thwart, and he remained in the bow. His eyes, consequently, were most frequently fixed aftwards.

Pierrette saw them, however, and she knew what they were: fragments of the ancient caldera, the barrier islands that sheltered the inner bays, harbors, and wharves of the Fortunate Isles. As those black cliffs rose higher and higher before her, she adjusted the steering oar and let the sheet out just a trifle, because the gentle breeze that bore her forward had swung entirely aft. Even when her vessel nosed into the obscuring fog and she could not see to steer, she was confident that her boat would make no leeway, and would reemerge unharmed by rocks, reefs, or shoals.

And so it was. In the s.p.a.ce of a single breath, her boat's prow slid out of the fog in the middle of a broad channel between cliffs so high and steep they seemed to lean inward, as if the strip of sky visible above was narrower than the channel through which she glided, below. Hardly any sunlight penetrated that gouge in the monstrous crater's rim, but ahead it sparkled on the water and illuminated warm, green tree-clad slopes, brown, fresh-turned fields, springtime-green ones whose crops were just pus.h.i.+ng up from below, and others where golden-yellow grain waved in a mellow breeze, mature and ready to harvest. Now she was sure-only in the Fortunate Isles were crops planted year round, with seedlings, fruiting stalks, and stubble abiding in adjacent fields.

Now ahead, lesser craters' rims were broken in places by channels that led further inward, toward the very center of the Fortunate Isles. Despite the craggy terrain on all sides, the breeze that filled her sail remained exactly aft, and she made no leeway to one side or the other. She adjusted the steering oar again, to bring her bow directly in line with one of those channels. On either side, the cliffs fell away, and she could see great waterways that diminished with distance and their own curvature. Those, she knew, were the concentric circular waterways of which Plato had written, in the land that he had named Atlantis. The Atlantis of legend was many times the extent of the Fortunate Isles-because the unit of measure in Plato's time, thestadion , could be either one eighth of a mile or a multiple of that, and deciding which measurement to use was a matter of context. Writing of such a fantastic, marvelous land, Plato, and later his readers, of course, a.s.sumed the larger, more fantastic, more marvelous measure.

But even one hundredth the size of legendary Atlantis, this place was fantastic enough. Buildings of white and golden stone dotted the slopes that ran down to the waterfront, where broad wharves stood clean-swept and empty; once, many centuries ago, those wharves would have bustled with carts, wagons, and laboring stevedores, because the kings of this land had controlled all the commerce on the Mediterranean Sea, and all s.h.i.+ps docked here, for their cargoes to be inspected and taxed.

Here and there, dark upon the water, Pierrette saw fis.h.i.+ng boats, oared, without sails. The appearance of anything larger, she knew, would have been a rare and momentous event on these quiet waters, for that was the way Minho, ruler of these Isles, wished it to be. Had he not wished her to be here, she was sure the friendly breeze that bore her inward would instead have beaten against her boat's prow anddriven her back, the fog that wreathed the outer beaches would have obscured every channel, and she would have run up on jagged rocks, or would have found herself, confused, back at sea and heading away from the Fortunate Isles.

Here she was-and it was real, not a dream, not a vision. The cliffs were solid black stone, the trees at their feet were genuine, and their leaves s.h.i.+mmered in the palpable breeze that pushed also against her sail. She was here, and the long voyage she had-really-begun as a small child in Citharista, when first she dreamed of the sorcerer-king with the golden bull's-head helm, was soon to end. . . .