Part 15 (2/2)
Chapter 25 - An.
Inauspicious Welcome She heard the singing before she rounded the last headland. A hundred voices, or two, or three, floated across the water and reverberated from the black cliffs above. There! Trickles of smoke rose from braziers atop fat columns, at the end of a projecting wharf. Even from her distance, Pierrette could see the undulating movement of a white-clad crowd that covered the wharf and the sh.o.r.e beyond. She could smell the smoke.
An important ceremonial occasion was in process-from her many visions, she knew that white, Egyptian-style garments were worn on formal occasions and in the presence of the islands' king. She deftly adjusted her steering oar, let out the sheet, and altered course toward another wharf; it would not do to sail disruptively into the middle of some solemn ritual.
High above the main wharf, at the end of what appeared to be a processional road flanked by more gleaming green stone columns, stood the portico of Minho's palace. A chill ran up her ribs and down her spine: it was real-vermilion-and-black pillars, and beyond it, the windowed, multistory edifice itself.
She edged up against the mossy stone wharf and, slacking her sail, leaped ash.o.r.e with a line in hand.
Methodically, with the force of long habit, she secured the bow and stern to stone bollards. Only then did she pause to look around.
What now? Closer than ever before to her goal, the site of her childhood fantasies, she had never felt farther away. There was a road at the foot of the wharf that surely connected with the site of the white-clad gathering, but how could she tread it? Was she to shoulder her way through the crowd, or find someone in charge and demand to be taken to the palace? She glanced down at her frayed tunic and cracked leatherbracae -the gulf between this moment and her vision of herself on a gold-and-ivory throne had never seemed vaster. If only she could justbe there, and not have toget there. If only she could float down into the palace on a cloud or on seagull's wings and transform herself in a poof of vapor into a visiting princess clad in silk and fine wool . . .
A clatter of unshod hooves on stone paving shattered her fantasy. Gustave! ”Come back!” she called after the beast, who was already at the landward end of the pier. Gustave ignored her and edged into the brush with fresh, green leaves already dangling from between his mobile lips. Ah, well. He would not stray far. She could retrieve him later. Now, she had to make the best of her inauspicious arrival. Climbing back aboard, she cracked open her small trunk, from which wafted the aroma of cedar.
Careful not to let its contents drag in the boat's sloppy bilge, she shook out tightly folded blue cloth: a long, sleeveless dress. It was wrinkled, of course, but it was fine wool and would soon smooth in this sweet, moist air. With an armful of clothing, she returned to the wharf, and quickly slipped out of her tunic and into the soft blue dress.
She cinched her waist with a tan leather belt set with round goldphalerae . Two gold fibulae connected by a fine-wrought chain secured her soft Gallicsagus , a white wool cloak with a hood. When Pierrette admired the fibulae from the side, they were rampant stags with coral antlers. When she viewed them from a different angle, they were gnomish faces with inlaid coral hair-s.h.i.+fting, curvilinear patterns difficult to focus on. She looked for Gustave, but the donkey had retreated into the brush. Just as well. No one would try to steal him.
From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimmer of white beyond the tamarisk brush along the road linking the many wharves. Someone was coming her way. She hefted her leather pouch. It would hardly compliment her nice clothes, and there was little likelihood that she would need flints to light a fire, or coins. She emptied its contents on a flat-topped stone bollard, and quickly sorted out coins, flints, and oddments from her travels-including the gold cylinder seal. She no longer needed that; its purpose had been served, getting her here. The remainder of the contents she returned to the pouch, which she hanged around her neck and tucked beneath the bloused front of her dress. She reached back to unbind her long, black hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Now she felt like a woman, if not like visiting royalty.
At first she thought the figure limping hurriedly toward her was an old woman with long gray hair straggling almost to her waist, but the harsh voice demonstrated otherwise. ”Why did you do this?” the ugly little man snapped. ”You've ruined everything! I told the king you'd be nothing but trouble, and now you've proven that-trouble for me! I now look a fool in people's eyes.”
”I . . . what are you talking about?” Pierrette spoke in the staccato syllables of the Minoans' Asian language. ”I only just arrived. I have done nothing at all.”
”This is the wrong wharf! You should not be here.”
”I'm sorry. Are you the harbormaster? Just direct me to the proper landing, and I'll move my boat there.”
”Harbormaster indeed! I am Hatiphas, chief adviser to immortal Minho, and keeper of the palace.”
”Adviser to Minho? Where is he? I must see him.” Hearing her dream lover's name uttered, for the first time, by living human lips, made her heart pound with excitement.
”Why didn't you land over there?” Hatiphas snarled. His eyes were huge and dark, entirely ringed with kohl. His nose was sharp as a knife blade, and his teeth were gapped and stained. Pierrette immediately disliked him.
”There? Where all those people are gathered? Why would I do that? I didn't want to disrupt the ceremony or celebration.”
”The celebration is for you, you fool! The king is there, expecting you! Everyone has waited all day, since first your sail was seen beyond the sea-gates! But now you've ruined everything!”
”For . . . for me? Why would anyone go to all that effort for me?” ”Hasn't he mooned and moaned about you for thousands of years? Haven't I had to listen? How could he not know?”
”I haven't lived eighteen years, let alone thousands.”
”Didn't he meet you once, in a painted cave at Sormiou, and didn't you hunt a deer together? Wasn't he with you on the Plain of Stones, where the druid Cunotar sought your destruction, and didn't he save your miserable life? Didn't you cuddle with him beside the hot, fuming pools at Entremont, in the Roman camp? Have you forgotten all that?”
”You must be mad. That wasn't Minho.” Pierrette's mind raced. She had hunted with the golden Aam in an ancient time when elephants and rhinoceri-the fabled unicorns-grazed on the green hills near Ma.s.salia, millennia before the city arose. But Aam had been tall and yellow-haired, and Minho was dark.
And on the Plain of Stones, her almost-lover had been Alkides, a Greek trader in cattle, and their meeting had transpired seven hundred years before the Christian era began, when the great cities of Gaul were but villages, and Roma was a collection of mud hovels on two of its seven hills. At Entremont, she had dallied with the Roman consul Calvinus, and had supped with the historian Polybius, but Minho? No.
Hatiphas was wrong. She shook her head.
”You little idiot! It was the spellMondradd in Mon ! Did you think you could use it to part the Veil of Years, to voyage through the Otherworld to those long-past times, without its echoes being felt the world around? Of course Minho was there, gazing from behind the eyes of your stone-age hunter, touching you with the calloused hands of that uncouth Greek cowhand, and growing hot and faint when you shamelessly pressed your b.r.e.a.s.t.s against that Roman's hairy chest! Bah! And didn't I have to endure his tantrums every time, when he begged you to come to him, and you slipped away instead?”
Minho! He had been there, riding as an unnoticed pa.s.senger in the minds of the men she had loved. That revelation did not please her as once it might have. Instead, she felt violated, as if the urchin Cletus had spied on her while she bathed, or as if she had startled a stranger prowling in her bedroom. And that was the third-or the fourth-time this mean-spirited little man had called her fool, or idiot . . .
”What are you doing?” Hatiphas snarled as she untied the springline that secured her boat.
”I'm leaving. You were to welcome me-with great ceremony, I surmise-and you've done nothing but insult me, and . . .”
”No! Please stay. Minho will . . .”
”Will have your head on a platter? Will have you horsewhipped? I shouldn't doubt it.”
With visible effort, Hatiphas quelled his warring emotions-his exasperation with her and his anger at her insults to him. ”Please. Allow me to escort you. My master eagerly awaits . . .”
”It is there a back way in? I don't want to push through a crowd of strangers.”
”But . . . yes. There is a path up the mountainside. I will take you that way.” Pierrette knew that she had won this encounter, but she also understood, from the majordomo'ssullen glare, that she had made an enemy of him, and that the sweet, placid Fortunate Isles of her visions were indeed a fantasy that did not exist in this, the real world. Considering the circ.u.mstances, Gustave would have to fend for himself awhile.
Chapter 26 - The.
Sorcerer-King The path Hatiphas chose proceeded by lengths of short, almost imperceptible slopes interrupted by polished malachite-and-jasper stairways. Each path was smoothly graveled with blue stones too tiny and angular to turn an ankle. Flowering thyme and blue bugleweed clumped beside the path, but no single weed or plant had the effrontery to push up between the stones.
The green-and-russet stairs gleamed, scuff-free and unswayed by wear. Even the occasional scattering of leaves fallen from nearby trees gave the impression of deliberate floral arrangements, compositions that elevated the mason's craft and the sweeper's lapses to an air of studied disarray.
As they ascended-and the alternations of stair and easy path precluded even the thought of breathlessness-Pierrette observed that the fruiting bushes and trees nestling in mossy pockets amid the rocks were themselves elements in the artist's composition, drawing the eye from azure stones to cerulean blossoms to the celestine arch of a clear, cloudless sky. Those were exactly complemented by the ocher and vermilion of pine bark, intensified by the umber of oak branches, brightened by a hundred shades of green-malachite stair treads, the springtime hue of young maple leaves, the silvery verdigris of olives, the deep, relaxing shade of broadleaf oaks.
Now this, she reflected, was her vision of the Isles-every element as if designed by a sensitive G.o.ddess to please the eye and mind from every aspect or vantage. Even the white palace walls and the bronze gate-cast in a single mold, lovingly burnished-were foreshadowed by s.h.i.+fting vegetal hues as white alyssum and brazen-flowered spurge appeared first intermittently, then predominantly, then in entirety, as the walker progressed. Reaching the palace wall and postern, Pierrette perceived them as floating effortlessly over a billowy sea of white blossoms. The path was now dazzling white marble, and beyond and above the palace roofs, select c.u.mulus clouds puffed up in studied repet.i.tion of the themes and colors expressed in the blooms below.
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