L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 3 - Isle Beyond Time

The Isle Beyond Time

Table of Contents

Part One — Dusk

Chapter 1 — The Goddess Commands

Chapter 2 — The Scholar Demands

Chapter 3 — An Old Ghost Importunes

Part Two — Darkness

Chapter 4 — A Journey Begins

Chapter 5 — Beggars and Sacred Whores

Chapter 6 — Of Bishops and Priests

Chapter 7 — The Pagan Tale

Chapter 8 — A Christian Tale

Chapter 9 — The Last Tale

Chapter 10 — An Anomalous Vision

Chapter 11 — Darkness from the Land

Chapter 12 — A Close Call

Chapter 13 — The Burning City

Chapter 14 — Strange Houses

Chapter 15 — Lovi's Confusion

Chapter 16 — Moridunnon

Chapter 17 — A Deadly Companion

Chapter 18 — The Boatman

Chapter 19 — The Isle of the Dead

Chapter 20 — The Storm-wracked Sea

Chapter 21 — An Improbable Encounter

Chapter 22 — Gesocribate

Chapter 23 — Lovi's Choices

Part Three — Dawn

Chapter 24 — The Long Voyage Ends

Chapter 25 — An Inauspicious Welcome

Chapter 26 — The Sorcerer-King

Chapter 27 — An Imperfect Vision

Chapter 28 — Black Metal and Bronze

Chapter 29 — The Attraction of Opposites

Chapter 30 — The Not-So-Fortunate Isles

Chapter 31 — The Ancient Child

Part Four — A New Day

Chapter 32 — The Fall of the Kingdom

Chapter 33 — The Way Home

Epilogue

Afterword

Maps

The Isle Beyond Time

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: 0-7434-3598-2

Cover art by Dominic Harman

First printing, March 2003

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

MIND YOURMA!

Like soaring gulls, the goddessMa and the girl Pierrette hovered high above the black, jutting crags of an

island. "Follow me,"Ma commanded in a gull's shrill voice. She tilted her wings and dropped swiftly.

Pierrette knew where she was—the kingdom known as the Fortunate Isles, pulled from the realm of

time's passage by the sorcerer-king Minho more than two thousand years before, when the empire of the

Cretan Bull was buried in flaming ash and flowing lava. Her hard-working seagull's heart lightened.Ma 's

task could not be too terrible: Minho was handsome and charming. "Marry me!" he had begged her twice

before. "Rule with me, and never grow old."

They glided down on silent wings. She glimpsed a crowd in the outer court, all kneeling. Before them

stood a man with the head of a great horned bull. The Bull of Minos, the high priest.

Now the taurine man emerged in the smaller courtyard, letting the bronze door swing shut behind him.

He tossed his white robe aside with a relieved sigh, and lifted the hollow horned head from his shoulders.

Minho. Pierrette's seagull heart altered its rhythm. An anxious rustle ofMa 's feathers warned her not to

reveal herself. "Come," said the goddess.

Pierrette opened deep blue, altogether human eyes, and saw the cool shadows of beech branches

reflected in the sacred pool.

"Will you remember everything you have seen?" asked the goddess, again a crone in worn, frayed wool.

"You must remember, because your task is to find that place, and that man. You must set foot on

Minho's soil in the real world, and you in the flesh. Find the Isles and their king, and then . . ."

"Yes? And then?"

"Then," said the goddess, "you must destroy his kingdom and he must die."

Baen Books by L. Warren Douglas

Simply Human

The Sacred Pool

The Veil of Years

The Isle Beyond Time

Acknowledgments

Dave Feintuch, for reading and criticizing an early manuscript and making suggestions. Leo Frankowski,

for scathing criticism of the last chapters, as I had written them, and for thus saving the climax of the

trilogy, and saving Pierrette from unbearable guilt.

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

une chambre jolie et confortable, et un gai "bonjour" chaque matin.And Alain, for thetarasque .

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.

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.

Part One — Dusk

Prologue

The land is vast and ancient, and has many faces. Once it was Gaul, center of the Celtic lands that

stretched from Anatolia to Hibernia, linked by a common ancestry, a single speech, and by the

machinations of its scholarly caste, thedruidae .

Already, in the days of Our Lord, it had fragmented. Gauls spoke Latin, Gaels Celtic, and Galatians

Greek. They all worshipped gods with different names. Only when they accepted Christianity was there a

new commonality within the Celtic realm.

Now, eight centuries later, northern Gaul is called Francia, and is ruled by a coarse Germanic king. East

is Burgundia, west the Occitain lands, and here is Provence, my own sunny country. All exist beneath the

Frankish mantle.

But names and kingdoms are deceptive; beneath the differences beats an ancient heart, and the

rhythmically surging blood of the land is not Germanic alone, but Roman, Greek, Phoenician, and Celtic.

Here and there are currents of an earlier strain, too, a small dark-haired people sprung from the earth

itself, from dirt, rock, and the waters of the sacred pools.

This is a tale of a woman of that old blood, a devotee ofMa , the most ancient goddess of mountain

springs and forest pools, from whose name come words for breast, for female horse, and for mother. It is

the tale of the last priestess of the most ancient faith, whom the unenlightened call a sorceress.

Otho, Bishop of Nemausus

The Sorceress's Tale

Chapter 1 — The Goddess

Commands

Old skinny fingers stirred the dark water of the mossy pool. Old eyes peered into the dancing, sparkling

ripples at a scene from the Christians' Hell: towers of iron loomed above a dead sea, their tops blazing

with oily, stinking light. Strung like unseemly garlands from one shadowy edifice to another, fading only

with distance, were harsh, unblinking stars.

Black smoke billowed like a greasy cremation, staining the slate-gray sky. No sun cast shadows upon

the lifeless land.

"The Black Time comes," the hag intoned, and then: "From least beginnings forward creeps the dark,

and reaches backward from the world's demise; the Wheel of Time is broken—naught forfends." She

spat upon the water, and the ugly vision faded. Again, the sacred pool was clear and cold, fresh from the

depths of the earth.

Stark hills protected the moist, green sanctuary on three sides, so the drying winds slipped by overhead.

Such places were rare in Provence, where tiny-leaved scrub oaks, gnarled olives, and coastal pines

prevailed. They were magical places, providing what the broader land did not: sweet water and shady

refuge.

The goddessMa arose gracefully, for all her great age, and brushed dry beech leaves from her patched

homespun skirt. She paced impatiently from mossy boulder to great gray-trunked beech, from

rough-barked maple to lissome sapling, covering in half an hour the length and breadth of her holy grove.

"Where is that girl?"

The old woman paced and muttered. Even when a slight, dark-haired girl ascended the steep path from

the abandoned Roman fountain,Ma 's complaints did not lessen; the girl Pierrette was not reallythere

—not yet.

Mawatched her settle in a soft hollow upholstered with crinkly leaves, beneath a sapling no thicker than

her slender calf. Yan Oors, an aging Celtic demigod, had planted the tree, when Pierrette was only five.

Yan believed the tree was the girl's mother, magically transformed by a spell gone awry.

Pierrette crumbled blue-and-yellow flowers in her palm, then picked a small red-brown mushroom. She

ate flowers and fungus at once, grimaced, then washed the bitter taste away with a cupped handful of

springwater. She lay down, closing her eyes, waiting for sensation to fade from her hands and feet:

waiting to fly . . . * * *

On magpie's wings she fluttered down among the branches, beneath the speckling leaf shadows, and alit

beside the old woman. Her iridescent green, black, and white feathers blurred, and became a black wool

skirt, a white chemise, and a watery green silk sash. Now a clear jewel veined with red and blue, a

Gaulish priestess's "serpent's egg," hung from a string at her waist, glowing with ruddy, internal light, like

embers or the eye of a demon.

"Where have you been?" snappedMa . "I have a task for you."

Goddesses' wishes and human ones seldom jibed, and Pierrette had no reason to welcome such words.

She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a sudden chill.

"You won't like it at all,"Ma said, confirming the girl's silent unease.

"Show me," Pierrette said. "Let me make up my own mind."

The goddess knelt by the pool's edge, and Pierrette lowered herself to the mossy verge.Ma roiled the

water, and again an image formed beneath the ripples . . .

* * *

Like soaring gulls, goddess and girl hovered high above the black, jutting crags of an island, a truncated

volcanic cone awash in waves. It was a great ring many miles in extent, and leaden swells broke against

it. Lashing winds swept away a froth of white spume.

"Follow me,"Ma commanded in a gull's shrill voice. She tilted her wings and dropped swiftly toward the

scarps and across . . . into a world unsuspected from outside. Ring after ring of concentric islands lay

within a serene, deep blue lagoon, remnants of eruptions and explosions millennia past. Verdant forests

clothed the inner slopes of the immense caldera. A patchwork of green, gold, and russet fields covered

the islands like the plaid of a fine Gaulish cloak. Houses of imported marble lay scattered like handsful of

dice across cultivated land and pasture, linked by the threads of roads and lanes.

Pierrette knew where she was—the kingdom known as the Fortunate Isles, pulled from the realm of

time's passage by the sorcerer-king Minho more than two thousand years before, when the empire of the

Cretan Bull was buried in flaming ash and flowing lava.

Her hard-working seagull's heart lightened.Ma 's task could not be too terrible: Minho was handsome

and charming. Though she had never seen him in the flesh, she was in love with him. "Marry me!" he had

begged her twice before. "Rule with me, and never grow old." She remembered herself seated on a

throne next to Minho's own. She was laughing, calling upon Taranis, god of thunderstorms, to roil the

waters of Minho's placid sea, commanding winds to shake his pear and olive trees, which bore fruit

regardless of season. From her fingertips sparked lightning bolts that rose to dance among the swelling

clouds . . . She had been only five, when she had that vision. It had not really happened—yet.

At fourteen, testing her expanding skill at magic, she visited Minho again, arriving on a vessel made of

clouds, clothing herself in mist and vapor, moonbeams and the green and gold of spring irises. That time,

she begged the king to free her mentor, the mage Anselm, from the spell that held him trapped in his keep

atop the cliffs of the Eagle's beak. Again, Minho had offered her his kingdom, and again, she

refused—but his stolen kiss had remained on her virgin lips. Too distraught to recreate her vehicle from

the clouds and mists, she had fled on familiar magpie's wings.

Now, eager to see Minho again, she swept over the central island, a flat-topped cone, toward the

swelling black-and-vermilion columns of his palace.

"Wait!" screechedMa , winging in front of her. "Don't alert the king of our presence."

"But I want to see him . . ."

"You will. But he must not see you. I brought you here to refresh your memory, not to make sheep's

eyes with him. Come. We'll land on the parapet of the inner courtyard."

Puzzled and disappointed, Pierrette acquiesced. They glided down on silent wings, onto the painted tiles.

Below, a fountain bubbled and splashed, its ripples blurring the shapes on the pool's bottom—sleek

dolphins and sinuous octopi portrayed in obsidian, jasper, and cobalt glass.

She had glimpsed a crowd in the outer court, colorfully dressed merchants, plain farmers, and

white-robed temple acolytes all kneeling, their foreheads against the smooth cobbled pavement. Before

them stood a man with the head of a great horned bull. Its eyes were rubies set in ivory, the horns leafed

in gold, and from its nostrils gushed the smoke of sweet incense. Minos-tauros. The Bull of Minos, the

high priest.

Now the taurine man emerged in the smaller, more intimate courtyard, letting the bronze door swing shut

behind him. He tossed his white robe aside with a relieved sigh, and lifted the hollow horned head from

his shoulders.

Minho. His hair was glossy black, oiled and curled in the Cretan style of an ancient age. He was clad

only in a black kilt, cut longer in back than in front. When he stretched, athlete's muscles rippled beneath

bronzed skin. He eased himself onto a heap of cushions set beside the splashing water, his forehead

beaded with sweat from the heat inside the bull's-head mask. He wiped droplets from his raptorial nose,

and let tired eyelids droop over dark, warm, penetrating eyes.

Pierrette's seagull heart altered its rhythm. An anxious rustle ofMa 's feathers warned her not to reveal

herself.

"Come," said the goddess. She leaped into the air and coasted away from the wall, so the sound of

flapping wings would not disturb the king's slumber.

* * *

Pierrette opened deep blue, altogether-human eyes, and saw the cool shadows of beech branches

reflected in the sacred pool.

"Will you remember everything you have seen?" asked the goddess, again a crone in worn, frayed wool.

"How could I forget?"

"People remember what they think serves them, and forget the rest. You must remember, because your

task is to find that place, and that man."

"I can find him anytime. We've just been there."

"That was a vision. Here you are flesh—human, not an ephemeral gull. You must go there not on magical

wings, but on your own feet. You must find the Theran king, and then . . ."

"I don't know how to reach the Fortunate Isles, except through the Otherworld, where we are now.

Where we always meet."

"You may seek them however you wish—but when you set foot on Minho's soil, it must be in the real

world, and you in the flesh. That is your task. Find the Isles and their king, and then . . ."

"Yes? And then?"

"Then," said the goddess, "you must destroy his kingdom, and he must die."

Chapter 2 — The Scholar

Demands

Below lay Citharista, once a Roman port. Now, centuries after Rome's fall, it was a crumbling fishing

village. On the far side jutted Eagle Cape, three rounded scarps that, from the sea, resembled a raptor's

head. High atop the crest, the walls of the so-called "Saracen fort" were silhouetted against the bright,

blue afternoon sky. Saracens had not built the fort; themagus Anselm had lived there since Caligula's

reign.

Pierrette had no eye for scenery. Kill Minho? The vision of herself on a throne beside the king had

sustained her since her lonely, half-orphaned childhood. When she learned everything about magic, when

the threat of the Black Time was ended, she would wed the handsome king. Kill him? She could sooner

slay her toothless father. And the goddess had given her no idea how she was to accomplish the task,

anyway. How was she, hardly out of childhood, a sorceress more at home with theory (after eons of

study, of course) than with the actual practices of spells, to kill so mighty a sorceror? Angrily, she spat

strong words . . . and a brushy oak beside the path shrivelled, and dropped its leaves, all brown and dry

where a moment before they had been green. Then, relenting, she uttered a softer spell, but did not wait

to see its results. Had anyone been following her, a few hundred paces or so behind, they might have

seen the first tiny green buds appear above the scars where leaf stems had been. Or maybe not. What

people saw wasn't always real, despite their eyes, and what they didn't see was sometimes no less an

illusion.

Pierrette stumbled past the overgrown Roman fountain, through rocky pastures, and out into the valley,

passing ancient olive trees without seeing them, without waving at the men and women in the fields or

nodding to the soldier standing watch at Citharista's rotting gate.

She passed her father's house, and only drew herself up sharply in front of the wine shop. Two finely

saddled horses were hitched there, and two laden mules. What rich strangers had arrived? She caught a

glimpse of a blond head of hair: a tall Frankish boy was checking one mule's lashings. It was the scholar

ibn Saul's apprentice, Lovi.

Pierrette backed away. The mysterious ibn Saul, who voyaged extensively and wrote of his travels, was

drinking wine with Anselm and her father, Gilles. Neither the scholar nor his apprentice had seen Pierrette

except disguised as a boy; even now, almost sixteen, she could still pass for a boy of twelve. Perhaps a

small spell made people look less closely than otherwise.

She slipped away to her father's house, where she kept odds and ends of clothing. She did not want to

reveal her true self to them. Once Lovi, though believing her male, had been attracted to her, and had

distanced himself from his uncomfortable desires by accusing her of being Anselm's catamite, not his

apprentice. That rankled still, and it was all the same to her if Lovi were to continue to suffer the barbs

both of desire and of confusion about his own nature.

The back room of the small, two-room dwelling was windowless and dark. Pierrette could have lit the

lamp—a wick of twisted lint in a shallow bowl of oil—with a flick of her fingers. Her firelighting spell was

the first she had ever learned, and she didn't even have to murmur the proper incantation for it to work.

But magic, even small magic, was unreliable. The thrust of her studies with Anselm had been to codify the

complex rules that underlay its unpredictability. What she now knew was that a spell written in one era, in

one language, might have different results in other times and tongues. She had learned that ranges of high

hills, rivers, and even great stone roads separate the realms of different magics. No spells worked at all in

the highest places, or afloat—except on the open sea—or on a Roman road. But in the Camargue, the

delta of River Rhodanus, a magical place where dry land graded imperceptibly into a sea of reeds and

then open water, where the water was neither entirely fresh nor salt, and ocean creatures rubbed

shoulders with upland fish from the streams, her small firemaking spell had once started a conflagration.

Spells, like geometric theorems, owed their utility to the validity of their axioms—those unprovable,

irreducible assumptions that underlay them. When people's beliefs changed, so did those assumptions,

and so did spells' results. Pierrette no longer uttered such dangerous words casually. She took the time

instead to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom. . . .

* * *

When she stepped from the house, it was as a shabby boy with dirty bare toes, wornbracae —short

trousers—and tunic, and a conical leather hat. The hat concealed long, black hair bound in a tight bun.

Townsfolk who passed glanced at Piers with only ordinary interest.

At the tavern, that changed. Lovi was seated with the three older men, a disparate grouping. His eyes

bored into her. He was, thought Piers, quite attractive. Perhaps her opinion showed, for his scowl

deepened.

Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul was tall, and as skinny as a post. Gold threads gleamed at the hem and

sleeves of his tunic, watery silk lined his dark travelling cloak, and his hair was concealed within a tightly

wound cloth fixed with an emerald-encrusted fibula. His beard was curled and oiled.

Gilles, Pierrette's father, back from a morning at sea, wore only a ragged kilt, and reeked of fish, salt,

and seaweed. His few teeth were yellowed or brown.

Anselm's white hair and bushy beard, threaded with black, were only slightly darker than his robe, a

shapeless drape worn in the Roman style long out of fashion.

Gilles addressed his child appropriately: "I was looking for you, Piers. You weren't in the olive grove."

"I was out walking," she replied noncommittally. It would not do for ibn Saul to hear of the sacred pool:

he would want to see it, and then perhaps to write of what he saw—what he did not see. He would not

write of the goddess, or of visions in the water, but only of moss, trees, and cool air, and if he wrote it,

there would be no more goddess, and no more visions, for the written words of a disbeliever were a spell

of their own, that destroyed magic before the ink dried on the page.

"I'm glad you're here, boy," said Anselm, seamlessly continuing Gilles's deception. "My friend

Muhammad has a proposition that might interest you." His voice was easy, but Pierrette read tension in

the lines around his eyes.

"I am planning an expedition in search of a land unvisited for centuries," the scholar said. "Anselm claims

you have read every history written, and might know where I should begin. The place consists of islands,

and your father assures me that you're handy aboard a boat. Will you accompany me?" As always, ibn

Saul treated her as a colleague, an equal, and not an unbearded boy—much to Lovi's discontent.

Anselm's unease made her cautious. "I'm interested enough to listen," she said. "Does this place have a

name?"

"The Hibernian Brendan called it 'The Fortunate Isles.' "

Pierrette paled. Minho's kingdom. FirstMa , now the geographer. Could that be coincidence? Twice

before, she had felt compelled to follow a course of action when events pushed her from behind and

pulled her ahead, giving her no choice. Each time, she had resisted, but in the end had done what was

required of her when things went from irritating to unpleasant to intolerable.

If she helped ibn Saul to find the Fortunate Isles, Minho would be ill served: he would be forever

wrapped in the geographer's scroll. Did the goddess mean for her to "kill" the sorcerer-king by exposing

him to the unbeliever's eyes?

She must be cautious, and not reveal anything. "Aren't they near the mouth of the River Baetis, where

Tartessos stood before it sank into the morass?"

"Theywere once there," said ibn Saul. "They were also among the southern Kyklades in an earlier age

still—and they disappeared in the great upheaval that destroyed the Sea People, the Atalantans ruled by

Minos the Bull."

"I've heard of that," Pierrette said, searching for neutral ground. "The Hebrews recorded the islands'

convulsion as a pillar of fire by night, and smoke by day. But volcanoes are natural events, even ones that

blanket whole kingdoms in ash. I wouldn't have thought you interested in chasing disappearing islands."

"The plagues that preceded your pillars of smoke and fire were real enough, as was the recession of the

sea, and its resurgence in a great wave that destroyed Pharaoh's army. The walls of cities still stand

beneath the sea off Crete, and on the island's other side, the wharves are miles inland. The whole island

tilted. The Greek Theseus was only able to conquer Knossos and slay the bull-king because there was

nothing left with which to defend the kingdom. All was buried in ash. Those things are real."

"Of course they are," she agreed, "but they can be explained as natural results of a great cataclysm.

Nothing in the histories indicates that the so-called 'Fortunate Isles' still exist, or that Brendan was not

mistaken."

"There are too many tales," countered ibn Saul. "The Isles were seen near Tartessos, beyond the Pillars

of Herakles, and at the mouth of the Gold River in furthest Africa. Each time and place, the lands nearby

flourished, and great civilizations arose there. There must be some truth to the tales. I intend to find out

what it is."

Pierrette made a skeptical moue. "And where are those civilizations today? Gone, destroyed and

forgotten. And if the islands can move from one sea to another, how do you propose to find them?

Where are they now?"

"You can help answer that." * * *

"Master, have you gone mad? Ibn Saul is the last person in the world you want to find your homeland!"

Pierrette and Anselm were alone on the steep trail to his keep, even now looming up at the top of the

crumbling red marl scarp called the Eagle's Beak. Dry but salty sea breezes swept the sweat from their

brows as soon as it formed, and caused the graceful umbrella pines shadowing the path to sigh and rustle.

"He's my friend! He'll help me to go home at last."

"He'll destroy your 'home' as if it never existed—in truth, it will neverhave existed."

Anselm claimed to have come from the Fortunate Isles at Minho's bidding, his task to subvert the

nascent Christian faith by suborning its leaders. Now, hundreds of years later, his failure was obvious:

churches stood in every town, shrines at every crossroad, and the old gods and goddesses were only

worshipped by a secretive few. But Anselm's magic had kept him alive, and he had taught Pierrette what

he knew.

If ibn Saul destroyed Minho's kingdom with his skepticism, then the destruction of

Thera—Atalanta—would indeed have been only a volcanic explosion, and Anselm would never have

existed. Then what of his apprentice? Would she be a village girl without gift or talent, pregnant with her

second or third child?

The goddess's motivation became clear: if Minho diedbefore the scholar could translate the wonders of

his magical kingdom into something prosaic and ordinary, his legend and magic would live on. Ibn Saul

could not find what no longer existed—but whichhad existed. That was why she had to kill the king.

L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 3 - Isle Beyond Time

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