"L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 1 - The Sacred Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas L Warren)

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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 coldlyтАФperhaps 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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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.