Warren L. Douglas - The Sacred Pool

The Sacred Pool

Table of Contents

Part One - Infans

Chapter 1 - The Masc

Chapter 2 - The Strange Ones

Chapter 3 - The Logical Child

Chapter 4 - A Dark Vision

Chapter 5 - The Olive Grove

Chapter 6 - The Gaunt Man

Chapter 7 - The Black Time Foreseen

Chapter 8 - The Horned God

Part Two - Discipula (Student)

Chapter 9 - The Reluctant Magus

Chapter 10 - King of the Fortunate Isles

Chapter 11 - The Theorem

Chapter 12 - The Castellan's Lust

Chapter 13 - The Spell

Chapter 14 - The Vow

Part Three - Tiro (Apprentice)

Chapter 15 - A Christian City

Chapter 16 - An Experiment

Chapter 17 - The Mage Reconsiders

Chapter 18 - An Impressive Debut

Chapter 19 - The First Blow Falls

Chapter 20 - Time's Wheel Broken

Chapter 21 - The Trial

Part Four - Exercitator (Magician)

Chapter 22 - Dangerous Magic

Chapter 23 - Parting the Veil of Years

Chapter 24 - The Demon

Chapter 25 - A Hideous Light

Chapter 26 - A King's Conscience

Part Five - Maga (Sorceress)

Chapter 27 - Unlikely Companions

Chapter 28 - Ancient Saints

Chapter 29 - An Unhallowed Mass

Chapter 30 - The Voyage Home

Chapter 31 - Small Evils

Epilogue

Historic and Other Notes

Bibliography

The Sacred Pool

L. Warren Douglas

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real

people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31956-6

Cover art by Larry Elmore

First printing, January 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Douglas L. Warren.

The sacred pool / by L. Warren Douglas.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-671-31956-6

1. Provence (France)—Fiction. 2. Lost children—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.O82627 S23 2001

813'.54—dc21 00-045542

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Sue E. Folkringa, my wife, my friend and companion on all the trails and byways of Provence, and

wherever else the endless quest may lead us.

Baen Books by L. Warren Douglas

The Sacred Pool

Simply Human

Acknowledgments

Poul Anderson, Dave Feintuch, Leo Frankowski, Cornell W. Lugthart, Jr., Sara M. Ormerod, W. F.

"Bud" Potts, and Ron Sarti, for reading the manuscript, criticizing it, and making suggestions. Judy Green,

for typing great chunks of it.

Leo Frankowski, for all the discussions of history and time.

Alain Bonifaci et Nathalie Bernard, Hotel Cardinal, 24 Rue Cardinale, Aix-en-Provence, France, pour

une chambre jolie et confortable, et un gai "bonjour" chaque matin.

Martine Lattouqoux,archaeologist at Entremont, where I saw my first Portal of Skulls, for the after-hours

discussion.

The Granet Museum, Rue Cardinale, Aix-en-Provence.

The French people for the preservation of so many antiquities among which we may, on certain magical

occasions, part the Veil of Years.

Sue, as always, for everything. Celeste Anne

and Emma Sue, of course, just for being warm

and furry.

Part One - Infans

Long before Romans made this land their Province, its forests, lakes, plains, and mountains were home

to men who fashioned tools of stone and ate roots, wild seeds, and small creatures of the bogs. The early

folk feared the spirits bound in brooding rock, lurking in shadows of great oaks, leaping in hares, bears,

great stags, and wild bulls.

Somewhere in the vast sweep of years they began to generalize their awe, and to understand the

underlying unities among stones, bears, stags, and summer thunder. They called such universal spiritsgods

.Ma meant "breast," and also "Goddess." "Man" meant the folk of Ma. In such ancient syllables lie the

beginnings of wisdom, the capacity for awe and worship, the great reality sensed only dimly, never

proven, that we call Faith.

This is a tale of a daughter of the land, a child of Ma.

Otho, Bishop of Nemausus

The Sorceress's Tale

Chapter 1 - The Masc

The moon shone bright upon the ancient stones of Citharista, lighting young Marius's dash to the chapel.

"P'er Otho!Pater! " he shouted. "Come quickly. Thegens are pursuing the witch Elen onto the rocks.

Bring theSancta . Come!" He had to stop, to take breath.

Father Otho rose from his knees, his face more drawn and angry than the boy's unseemly babbling could

account for.

Marius shrank back, averting his eyes from the priest, and from the reliquary where the holy bones lay,

in their tiny gabled house of gilt cedar encrusted with garnets and gold. He did not understand Otho's

anger, because he was too young to remember the revelation of the saint's remains, or to know what was

between the priest and the woman who fled. * * *

The moaning Latin chant was a distant dragon growling up the winding path from Citharista. Villagers'

torches curled like a glowing serpent from among red-tiled houses and Roman warehouses.

The fleeing masc's eyes, wide with terror, reflected the red and gold of serpentine flames, and when she

turned her head toward the dark, wooded path, she stumbled, blinded by torchlight. The roots of twisted

cypresses tripped her, slowing her headlong flight. Her twisted ankle felt as if a knife blade pried between

the bones.

The moon had withdrawn its light. Had she angered the Goddess, begging for a male child to quicken in

her womb? Had the Virgin Huntress abandoned her to that other Virgin, whose torchbearers even now

drew close?

She drew her skirts about her knees and stumbled onward in darkness and pain. A refuge lay ahead, the

old Saracen fort at the tip of the cape. There dwelled the magus Anselm. The Christian villagers would

not pursue her within those walls—but she did not think she could reach them in time.

Pressing on, she fended off stiff, scrubby oak branches grown malevolently hard and sharp, branches

that clawed at her eyes as she passed. Abruptly the moon emerged from behind its veil. The path

branched. One trail ran south to the cape, another eastward across the headland, where cliffs plunged a

thousand feet to the sea.

She let her sash drop on the southbound trail, then hid in the feathery shadow of a tamarisk bush. If the

villagers reached the fort without finding her, they would believe her already safe within. Then, later, she

would limp around to the fort by a goat path.

"Cado! Wait!" she heard a distant villager call. "We'll never catch a masc here by the sea, where the old

devils rule. Wait for Marius to come with the priest and Sancta Clara's bones." The witch smiled then.

Father Otho would not come. Thegens , townsfolk, would wait, but young Marius would return alone.

Otho would not allow his saint's relic to be so ill-used.

* * *

Otho sighed. "I'll go with you," he told the boy. "We need not disturb the Saint."

"P'er Otho, the castellan himself commanded it. You must bring her."

Commanded? Otho bristled. Only the bishop commanded him, not the Burgundian soldier.

Otho himself had discovered the holy bones protruding from the cut earth where the Burgundian

horseman had ordered a fortification built. The priest's nocturnal vision had revealed the holy one's tale,

which he told to the villagers and the Germanic soldier.

Sancta Clara. A name or a description? Clear and holy: Saint Claire. He envisioned her on the road

from Massalia, fleeing the Roman hundred with their bloody arrows in her back. There at the edge of

Citharista she had died, but her death provided a vital distraction that allowed the Magdalen to escape to

the north, to the Saint-Baume and the holy cave where she remained, preached, and prayed for yet

another thirty-three years. Thus here in poor Citharista had the life of Mary Magdalen, patron saint of all

Provence, been saved.

Otho's fiery inspiration had daunted the big yellow-haired German knight, and he had moved his

proposed walls twenty paces north. The shrine now stood over holy Clara's grave. Thus Otho's interest

was proprietary, and he did not take kindly to the boy's demand to jostle the saint and carry her bones

on a fool's errand.

"Saint Claire was hounded by the Roman hundred," he told Marius coldly—perhaps even a trifle

pompously; there was no proof of the tale, only the vision he had been granted during his vigil over the

newly exposed bones. "It's not right that she, the hunted, be used to track down another woman wrongly

pursued. Her bones are for healing. You have seen me wash them in balsam and oil. Didn't the drink cure

your own constricted throat, a summer ago?"

Young Marius scuffled his feet uneasily. "Elen is a witch, Pater, a masc who doesn't worship God."

"Ah, Elen," the priest murmured. "See what your pagan mischief brings?" Aloud, he said, "Wait, boy,

while I pray." He knelt again, unhurried. * * *

Elen crouched low as footsteps crunched stones on the path. She plucked a willow twig and urgently

whispered an incantation over its lanceolate leaves. For a moment they gleamed like the feathers of a

white hen or a gull.

The magics of the world are not evoked in silence, but with words. Elen's words were not in an old,

magical tongue, but were mere Latin overlain with Visigothic, a musical tongue that would someday be

named for a single word, "yes," which was "oc." TheLangue d'Oc .

"Oc," said Elen, satisfied, as the moon again withdrew its face. Her spell had come from the fairy Guihen

generations past: Guihen the invisible, who stroked his white hen and disappeared at will. Guihen the

Ligure, who righted wrongs and won the daughter of adux as reward, and a Roman villa, and a chest of

gold. She watched her hands fade to invisibility as the moon disappeared.

The footsteps on the trail were quick and light, no heavy farmer's tread, but Elen did not dare raise her

face from the curtain of her dark hair until she heard one pursuer speak.

"Look! It's Mama's sash." Appalled, the masc recognized her eldest daughter, Marie. "She must be

near. See? She dropped it on the path to the cape."

"The Eagle's Beak? Will thegens follow her there?" That was Pierrette, her second child.

Elen's heart sank.

"Let's trick them," suggested Marie. "I'll move the sash to the other branch of the trail, and they'll think

she fled east."

Marie and Pierrette had outdistanced the townsfolk. They would "save" her by undoing her own

deception. Elen was torn between bidding them leave the sash and remaining hidden. Once undone,

Guihen's spell would be difficult to renew. Magic failed oftener than not, or took strange turns.

* * *

Otho's knees ached on the unyielding stone. Tonight, his prayers took strange form, a reminiscence of a

time that he held close in his heart. . . .

That summer, he had been but thirteen. Elen had been a year older, a dark forest sprite tiny as the fairies

from whom her ancient folk had sprung. She had been to Otho a fairy indeed, and he had fallen in love

with her by the tiny spring her folk held sacred, the Goddess's breast from which they drank. The day he

met her, Otho had hiked miles in search of game for his father's table, and the water in his leather pouch

was warm, stale, and sour. When the dark-eyed wood spirit had offered him water fresh from the rock,

in a clean beechwood cup, he had drunk greedily, and had fallen utterly under her enchantment.

In truth, the spell had been his own, sprung not from the waters but from the life that pulsed in his groin.

Similar magic had flowed in the girl, unchecked by Christian inhibition.

That summer his hunting trips all took him near the Mother's breast, and he never again carried his water

pouch. He felt the urge to hunt whenever he felt the swelling of his maleness in the heat of the summer

nights, as often as his heart and mind sweetened with the memory of dark eyes, lithe limbs, and the

warmth between them.

But summer did not last forever. Even before the last leaves fell from the oaks, before the mossy ground

grew too chill for revels with the Goddess's child, his brothers discovered the game he hunted. His father

bundled him off to the abbey at Massalia, where he had remained for two years.

Returning to Citharista, he bore about his neck a bronze cross, and upon his heart a weight heavier still.

Elen carried another burden, for even then little Marie swelled within her—Marie, the daughter of Gilles,

a fisherman who also tended a grove of olive trees outside the town.

In two years a second daughter was born to Elen, and Gilles approached the young priest with an odd

request. Elen had lost two sons before their birthing, and it was likely the new child would be her last. He

did not say that Elen's old Ligurian magic had determined so. Otho suspected Gilles was but a

messenger, and that Elen herself had sent him.

Gilles was then thirty-two, and had lost many teeth. He might live another five years or twenty, but

without a son to aid him, their Burgundian defender would press him to sell the olive grove to him, and

Gilles's family would suffer.

Gilles fished also, as had his father, but his old boat was frail, and he was afraid to sail all the way to

Massalia, the only market for his sea urchins, a delicacy among rich folk of Greek and Roman descent.

He told himself he was a cautious man. Thus he must have his olive grove.

"I need a son," Gilles said. Otho protested that he was nomasco , and could not change the sex of a

daughter born. "Then I need only your silence," Gilles replied. "We will raise the child as a boy and call

him Petros, which means `a stone.' The Burgundian will not know of the deception until I am dead."

"Petros? I can't perform an unhallowed baptism using Saint Peter's name."

"Then don't baptize the child. Merely keep silent for Elen's sake, and we'll call him Piers." In the

vernacular tongue it meant the same thing, a stone. Otho did not ask its deeper meaning, suspecting it

was Elen's secret reprimand: the stone she had borne beneath her heart, since her first love had left her

and taken the cross.

The "boy," Piers, was now five, and no one suspected he was not merely small like his mother. Otho

speculated that Elen had cast a small glamour over the child, causing the eye to slip past Pierrette's

delicate features and focus upon the boyishness of her clothing and short-cropped hair.

Yet whether or not Elen had done so, she had not relented in her effort to bear a son. Her small forest

magics failed, but there were others. She visited the magus Anselm in his Saracen keep, and was heard

speaking words in a tongue no man could fathom. The pagan witches of the hills were tolerated, for they

sprang from the same roots and beliefs as Christian townsfolk, but this new sorcery was not. Folk had

talked harshly of Elen and her foreign magics. . . .

"P'er Otho?" At Marius's tremulous query, Father Otho's reverie faded. As smoothly as an aging man

could, an elder of twenty-seven with streaks of white in his hair, he got to his feet.

No need for haste; either thegens would catch the poor woman or they would not. He was too far away

to affect the outcome. If Elen was caught, they would beat her, perhaps even to death, and he would cry

shame and heap penances upon them; if they lost her on the rocks and forest trails, or if she reached

Anselm's stronghold, he would meet his flock on their way back, and shame them for their murderous

intent.

Then he reconsidered his resistance to the castellan's command: the Burgundian could request a more

docile priest. He sighed, picked up the reliquary, and held it reverently on supine palms. There was surely

no harm in carrying it forth; the saint, herself a fugitive, might even take pity on Elen and cast confusion

over her pursuers. Surely she would do Elen no harm.

* * *

The rough voices of the villagers neared. Elen heard a curse as someone fell. "Hold! Wait for the priest

and Saint Claire. Marius says they're coming!" Elen lost herself to despair. Even gentle, loving Otho had

at last completed his transformation, his rejection of her. He would bring his magical bones to sniff her

out.

"They're closer," whispered Pierrette. "What shall we do?" But the decision wasn't hers. As villagers,

priest, and holy bones drew near, Elen felt the Christian magic overpower Guihen's pitiful spell, driving off

her hard-won obscurity with its baleful might, with unforgiving Faith. The Moon's round disk again

emerged, and the light that shone on Elen was not the Huntress's visage, but a cold, bright, silver lamp

that belonged to Otho's celestial God.

"Mother!" gasped Marie, seeing Elen. She ran to her, with Pierrette close behind. Both girls, one seven

and in skirts, the other five, clad in a boy's tunic and small Frankish trousers, clung to her arms as she

tried to rise. "Mother, we must flee! Listen—they come."

"Marie, hear me," Elen said desperately. "They mustn't find you with me. Run to the Eagle's Beak. Stay

with Anselm. Go!" The moon was bright. Even the stars seemed unnaturally intense, and she knew there

was no hope—but the children must get away.

"Mother, come!" But the sharp crack of Elen's palm on her cheek cut off Marie's words.

"Obey! Go now. Take your sister." She pressed a small, soft leather sack in her youngest daughter's

hand. "Take this, my sweet. Give it to Anselm."

It was not her mother Marie saw then, shedding the two girls from her skirts; it was the masc Elen, the

witch, and Marie was suddenly cold with fear of sorceries, unnatural moonlight, and darkness among the

trees. With a tiny, despairing cry Marie fled, pulling Pierrette after.

Alone, Elen waited, now hearing the priest's sweet tenor joining the chant, guiding it, inspiring it to ever

greater volume and power.

Chapter 2 - The Strange Ones

The Eagle's Beak, a broken crest of red rock west of Citharista's small harbor, was almost unclimbable

on its gentlest side. It sloped like a steep roof. It was a soft, crumbly matrix of red marl encompassing

rounded pebbles. As climbers struggled, fragments broke off and rolled beneath their unsteady feet.

Below, shallow caves pocked the three scarps, which looked, from Citharista, like bulging domes of

bare, brown rock.

From the sea, the "roof" could be seen as an overflung edge, undermined by waves gnawing at its base

four hundred feet below. A pebble dropped from the scarp would fall well out beyond the surging waves,

in water as deep as the cliff was high.

The few faint trails to the summits were clogged with thorny-leaved scrub oak that clawed at skin and

clothing, and tangles of finely branched evergreens. Where rock had crumbled to make soil, the

spreading parasols of pines shadowed and obscured the narrow ways.

Otho, Bishop of Nemausus

The Sorceress's Tale * * *

Pierrette had seen the Eagle's Beak from her father's fishing boat. Riding the swell, she'd looked up not to

the sky, but to a looming roof of stone.

Now, on the slope, their way obscured by stubborn pines, it was not surprising that two little girls should

take a wrong turn, and then, in dismayed confusion, find themselves tantalizingly near the mage Anselm's

stronghold, but on the wrong side of an unscalable scarp, with the enraged townsmen between them and

safety. They huddled in a dank cave, hoping not to be seen.

They were close enough to hear shouts, and the thump of clubs on human flesh—but thankfully not near

enough to hear their mother's agony, which was wordless, except for a murmur, perhaps her daughters'

names.

Whether or not Elen spoke those names, they were what Cado the fisherman heard as he knelt close to

verify Elen's dying. "The brats," he growled. "She's saying something to them. Where did they go?"

"What does it matter?" Someone—a faceless shadow under stark moonlight—raised a club for a last,

killing blow.

"Never mind," Cado said, seeing the spreading stain on Elen's garment. "She's dead."

"Where are the whelps?" the other man said again—a harsh devil-face, Cado saw, one that ordinarily

belonged to Jules, a carpenter who repaired boats.

Warren L. Douglas - The Sacred Pool

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