L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 1 - The Sacred Pool
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- Prologue
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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 spirits gods. 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
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- Chapter 1
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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. The gens are pursuing the witch Elen onto the rocks.
Bring the Sancta. 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The moon had withdrawn its light.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.
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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. The gens, 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,
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- Chapter 1
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." The Langue 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 a dux 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 the gens 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
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- Chapter 1
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 no masco, 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
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- Chapter 1
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 the gens 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
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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.
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Framed
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- Chapter 2
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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.
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- Chapter 2
"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.
The other villagers crowded around the inert masc. "They didn't pass us," someone muttered uneasily.
Otho, last to arrive, bearing his holy bones, pushed through the huddle. He knelt, and gently closed
Elen's staring eyes.
He arose.
The gens backed away, and none would meet his bleak, baleful gaze.
"Murderers," he grated. "Would you kill the children too?"
Those who could, slipped away. Among them were Cado, Jules, and the others who had wielded clubs.
Otho lingered, alone with Elen for the last time. At last he covered her battered face, and headed down
the narrow defile.
From the shadow of the shallow cave, the two children had heard enough to fear their mother was dead.
Marie spun away, covering her face. Little Pierrette stood like chiseled stone, unwilling to turn from her
dismay. . . .
And then she saw . . . him . . . just within the cave.
His hair was white as moonlight, yet his face was a boy's. It had a stiff little nose, and lips like those of
the tumbled Eros marble half-buried inside the ruined walls of a Roman edifice. Violet eyes seemed to
glow from within, like none Pierrette had seen, in that land where most were brown or black.
His ears were huge. They wiggled.
"You may laugh," he said. "It doesn't bother me." His voice was youthful, yet hauntingly familiar, with
inflections like Elen's—who had grown up speaking the old Ligure tongue.
"They'll hear you," Pierrette whispered, her eyes shifting toward the cave mouth behind the strange
apparition. He laughed, a sound that carried echoes of tiny bells. Moonlight wafted over his clothing.
Pierrette gasped.
His garments—a puffy moon-white shirt, green pantaloons, and floppy-toed shoes—all seemed to be
made of willow leaves. Or were they feathers? The shirt glowed like nacre, the short trousers like
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-PrologueBack|NextContentsPartOne-InfansLongbeforeRomansmadethislandtheirProvince,itsforests,lakes,plains,andmountainswerehometomenwhofashionedtoolsofstoneandateroots,wildseeds,andsmallcreaturesofthebogs.Theearlyfolkfearedthespiritsboundinroodingrock,lurkinginshadowsofgreatoaks,leapinginhares,be...
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