"L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 3 - Isle Beyond Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas L Warren)

Otho, Bishop of Nemausus
The Sorceress's Tale




Chapter 1 тАФ 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 brokenтАФnaught 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
тАФnot 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