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

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 herтАФMarie, 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