Ysabel

“I’ll buy your coffees. I’ll buy you a better shirt.”

“This,” said Kate Wenger, “is my brother’s shirt, and I happen to like it a lot.”

“It is great. Truly great. You look hot in it. A babe. Tell me about Marius.”

“Do I really look hot?”

“Hotter than Marie-Chantal could ever dream of being.”

“That,” she sniffed, “is no achievement.”

“Marius? Please?”

She sipped her coffee. She looked happy, though. Ned felt kind of pleased with himself. He was being funny, making a girl laugh. Around them the place was vibrant with the clatter of dishes and cups and the buzz of talk. One woman had a small dog under her chair; that wouldn’t have been allowed back home. He liked it.

“Marius was Julius Caesar’s uncle,” Kate said. “Married Caesar’s aunt. A general in North Africa at the time. Apparently a little guy, tough, smart, young when this happened—like maybe twenty-five or something? Well, what it was is these eastern tribes started moving this way. A lot of them, with their women and children, migrating, looking for a place to settle. They scared everyone, huge men, you know?”

“Blond dudes? Pumped iron, used steroids? Broke the home run record?”

“Pretty much. The Romans were small, did you know that?”

“I didn’t know that. Why would I know that?”

“Well, they were. But really organized. Anyhow, these tribes, the Teutones and Cimbrii, hung around here awhile and beat up a Roman army, then half of them went west to Spain. But they came back again and decided what they really wanted was land around Rome, and they decided they were going to go kick ass there.”

“Could they have?”

“Everyone seems to think so. That’s the point of the story. Rome was terrified. This is before their empire, remember? Before Caesar. They hadn’t even conquered here yet, just some Greek and Roman trading colonies on the coast…and Sextius had founded this city, Aix. Their first one.”

“And so?”

“And so if the tribes got down into Italy it was probably game over.”

“Melanie said more than two hundred thousand.”

“Who’s Melanie again?”

“My father’s assistant. I told you yesterday. She has notes on everything.”

“What a geek.” Kate grinned. “Way, way more than two hundred thousand. Some people say half a million, with the women and children. Some say more.”

Ned whistled softly. It seemed called for. Someone glanced over and he grimaced an apology. He tried to imagine that many people moving across a landscape and gave up. He couldn’t visualize it: just got an image of computer-generated orcs.

“Anyhow,” Kate said, “Rome ordered Marius here from Africa and he took charge. They’d been creamed by the tribes in that first battle, and all the soldiers were afraid of them.”

“But he won?”

“Spoiling the ending, you. Yeah, he won. From what I gather, he steered them into a trap by the mountain. He had a better position, and when the fight started some of his men ambushed the Celts’ camp where their families were. When they turned to defend them, the Romans just pounded on them from behind and it was a massacre. That’s your two hundred thousand dead. Marius saves the day. They built him monuments around here, but they’ve all fallen down.”

Ned looked at her awhile. “You’re good, you know.”

She shrugged. “Google is your friend.”

“Nope. You’re good.” He finished his orange juice. “So, like, if he hadn’t beat them, they’d have taken Rome?”

“Maybe. No Roman Empire. Celts settle Italy. Really different world. This battle was a huge deal.”

Ned shook his head. “Why doesn’t anyone know this stuff?”

“You kidding? People don’t even know World War Two.”

He looked at her. “I really need that paper of yours.”

“I’ll bet you do. I’ll think about it.” She hesitated. “I mean, no, of course I’ll give it to you. But doesn’t it seem pretty trivial after what—”

“Kate, it seems completely trivial! Essays? Are you kidding me? But if I think too much about this afternoon or yesterday I’ll freak.”

“There’s…nothing now? Inside you?”

He faked a shrug. “I’m too distracted by that way-cool tank top of yours.”

“No jokes. Tell me.”

“I told you. Nothing today since we left the battlefield. Nothing yesterday from the time our guy walked out on us. N-O-thing.”

“Have you tried to…?” she trailed off.

“Tried to what?” He knew he was sounding irritated, and knew it was unfair. “Control it? You gonna play Yoda now? ‘Use the Force, Young Ned’?”

“Stop joking.”

“I have to joke or I’ll go screwy with this. Be grateful you aren’t dealing with it!”

She was silent a moment. “I am,” she said. “I am grateful. But I was there too. I’m not trying to hassle you.”

Ned felt ashamed. “I’m not being cool, am I? Sorry.”

“Hard to be cool if you’re tasting blood and stuff.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Kate waved her hand for the bill. “Okay, I’ll take off. Call me tomorrow, if you like. After school.”

“Don’t go yet,” he said quickly. She looked at him. “I…there’s no one else I can talk to. I need to touch base. If you don’t mind.”

“I said call me. I meant it.” She flushed a little.

He sighed. “I did try, actually, middle of last night, to see if I could feel anything. Problem is, I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, or controlling. Maybe I do need a Jedi Master.”

“Not me, Young Ned. I can give you an essay, though. Want me to email it?”

“That’d be good.” She took out her notebook and he gave her his hotmail address, and added his new cell number.

“Reminds me,” she said. “You asked about Celts, where they were around here?”

“And of course you found out. Google is your friend?”

“Google is my midnight lover.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready to hear that, actually.”

She laughed. “They were all over the area. Which figured. There’s one place I’ve seen that we can walk to if you want. Above the city.”

The waiter came by and they paid for their drinks.

“Might as well,” Ned said. “Can’t tomorrow, we’re going to Arles.”

She nodded. “Day after? Thursday? Meet after school, say, outside Cézanne’s studio? Can you find it? We have to go that way.”

“I’ll find it. Where are we going?”

“It’s called Entremont. Where the Celts were based before the Romans built this city.”

“Okay. I’ll be outside that studio at five. I’ll call you tomorrow, when we get back from Arles.”

“Cool.” She got up, stuffed the notepad in her pack. They walked out together. On the street he turned to her.

“Thanks, Kate.”

She shrugged. “Down, boy. You may not like the essay.”

“Now who’s joking?”

She made a face. “Okay. You’re welcome. Call me.”

She gave him a little flip-wave with one hand, then turned and walked along the cobblestones. He watched her go.

Inside the café, the man in the grey leather jacket, two tables over from where they’d been, puts down his newspaper. There is no need to hide his face any more.

He might have learned something here, he is thinking.

A thread, a way into the labyrinth. This is a possibility, no more than that, but it is that. When you were in urgent need and time was very short and your enemy had most of the weapons—at this point—you used tools like these two children, and prayed to your gods.

In one way it is obvious; in another, the girl is entirely right: there are too many choices here. And from where he is—outside the fires—he has no easy way to narrow them down.

There are still too many places, that hasn’t changed, but he’s decided something, sitting here—and these two are at the heart of it, despite what he said to them yesterday.

The boy, from the start. From before the baptistry, since he’s being truthful—and he always is, with himself.

He isn’t certain about the girl. He’d waited and watched them from a distance yesterday, after leaving the cloister. Saw them walk here. Made an assumption they’d be back. If he’d been wrong, if they had met elsewhere, not after school, or not at all, he wouldn’t have been unduly disturbed. Few things affect him that much any more. When he is in the world again, when he returns, his is an entirely focused existence.

He is only ever alive for one thing. Well, two, really.

At the same time, he wasn’t surprised when they did show up here. Nor by what he heard the girl say, from behind the screening pages of Le Monde. They have no business going where they are going two days from now, but he might.

He might have many lives’ worth of business there. Or not. He might lose this time, before it even begins. It has happened. It is unfair, an unbalanced aspect of the combat, but he has long since moved beyond thinking that way. What is fairness, in this dance?

His sitting here is, in the end, just a feeble reaching out for signs—from two children who have nothing to do with the tale. At the same time, he has learned (he’s had a long time to learn) that little is truly coincidence. Things fall into patterns. You can miss patterns, or break them, but they are there. He’d acted upon that yesterday, and now.

He finds a few coins, drops them on the table, rises to go.

“Why didn’t I know you were here?”

He looks up. His way out is blocked. He is actually startled. The sensation is truly strange, a lost feeling remembered. For no easy reason he suddenly has an image of his first time here, walking through the forest from the landing place, invited but uncertain. Afraid, so far from home. Then coming out of the woods, the lit fires.

He sits down again. He gestures. The boy is standing between the table and the door. He sits gingerly opposite, edge of chair, as if ready to bolt. Not a bad instinct, all things considered.

The newspaper lies on the table between them, folded back. He’d been reading the forecast. Wind, clear skies. There will be a full moon Thursday. He’d known that, of course.

The boy has spoken in English. The man says, gravely, in the same language, “You have surprised me again. Brave of you to come back. I take it you sent the girl away?”

Ned Marriner shrugs. He has dark brown hair and light blue eyes, a lean build, medium height, wiry rather than strong. Barely old enough to shave. His face is pale; he will be dealing with tension and fear. Fair enough.

Welcome to my world, the man thinks, but doesn’t say. He doesn’t feel welcoming.

“No, she just went. I don’t send her places. I didn’t know anything till I was outside. And besides, I’m the one feeling…whatever this is. If you’re dangerous, there’s no reason for her to be here.”

“Dangerous?” He smiles at that. “You have no idea. I said I wouldn’t kill you, but there are others who might view your presence differently.”

“I know I have no idea. But what does ‘my presence’ mean? My presence where?” He stops, to control himself. His voice has risen. “And why didn’t I know you were here until I got outside? Yesterday I…”

That last he decides to answer.

“I was careless. I was screening myself from you, after yesterday in the cloister, but I thought you’d gone and so I let it down.”

“I had gone. I don’t even know why I checked inside. I was halfway across the market square.”

He considers that. “Then you are stronger than you knew.”

“I don’t know anything,” the boy says again. His voice is lower now, intense. There was someone like this, long ago. A vague sense tugs at him. But there are too many years between. He has been here so many times.

Ned Marriner leans back, folding his arms defensively across his chest. “I have no idea who you are, or what happened to me yesterday or today, if you heard us talking about that.”

He nods. The mountain.

“So what is this about?” the boy demands. He really shouldn’t be using that tone. “You said we were an accident, had no role to play, but you followed, or waited for us.”

He is clever, it seems. “Followed yesterday, waited just now. I took a chance you’d come back.”

“But why?”

The waiter is hovering. He signals for another of what each of them was drinking.

A mild curiosity rises. He still has some of that, it seems. “You don’t feel reckless, interrogating me like this?”

“I’m scared out of my mind, if you want the truth.”

“But that isn’t the truth,” he says. Who did this one remind him of? “You came back by choice, you’re demanding answers of me. And yet you know that I sculpted a column eight hundred years ago. No. You’re frightened, but not ruled by it.”

“I probably should be,” the boy says in a small voice. “It isn’t a column, either, it’s a woman.”

The quick, familiar anger. A sense of intrusion, violation, rude feet trampling in something private beyond words.

He makes himself move past it. By today’s standards this one is young, can still properly be called a boy. In the past, he could have been a war leader at his age. Fit for challenging, killing. He has killed children.

The world has changed. He has lived through the changes, at intervals. Coming and going, enmeshed in the long pattern. Sometimes he wants it over, mostly he is terrified, heart-scalded that it might end. You could grow weary beyond measure, feeling all those things at once.

The waiter comes back: an espresso, an orange juice. The brisk, habitual motions. He waits until the man leaves.

He says, still speaking English for privacy, “Once this awareness comes to you, it can be a kind of anchor against fear. You know what you are feeling, know a new thing is in you. The fear lies in not understanding why, but already you’re not the person you were yesterday morning.”

He sips his espresso, puts the cup down, adds quietly, “You never will be again.”

A cruel thing to say, perhaps; he isn’t beyond enjoying that.

“That’s scary too.”

“I imagine it is.”

He remembers his own first awareness of this boy, decisions made quickly. They look at each other. The boy glances down. Few people meet his gaze for long. He finishes his coffee. “Frightened or not, you came back. You could have kept walking. You’re inside now.”

“Then you need to tell me what I’m inside.”

Another flaring within. “I need to do nothing. Use words more cautiously.”

“Or what?”

Opposing anger across the table, interestingly. He really isn’t accustomed to talking this much any more.

“Or what?” the boy demands again. “You’ll stab me in here? Pull the knife again?”

He shakes his head. “Or I’ll walk out.”

Ned Marriner hesitates again, then leans forward. “No you won’t. You don’t want to leave me. You want me in this, somehow. What did we say, Kate and me, that you needed to hear?”

Someone else had once talked to him this way. That nagging memory still there. Was it centuries ago, or a millennium? He isn’t sure; people blur after so much time, but he believes he killed that other one.

He looks across the table and realizes that he was wrong, in fact. This impudent tone isn’t the same as that other, long-ago voice: with a degree of surprise (again) he sees that the boy is close to tears, fighting to hide it.

He tries, unsuccessfully, to remember when he felt that way himself. Too far back. Mist-wrapped, forest-shrouded.

This defiant anger is a boy’s, in the end. Or perhaps in the beginning. Anger at helplessness, at being ignorant and young, not yet an adult and so immune (boys believed adults were immune) to the pain he is feeling.

Had he been a different man he might have addressed some of this. Ned Marriner has, after all, come to the edges of the tale, and he might even be an instrument.

But that is all he can be. You didn’t confide in tools or comfort them. You made use of what lay to hand. He stands up, drops a few coins on the table. The boy lifts his head to look at him.

“I don’t know if you said anything I need. It is too long to tell, and I’m disinclined to do so. You are better off not knowing, though it may not seem that way to you. You will have to forgive me—or not, as you like.”

Then he adds (perhaps a mistake, it occurs to him, even as he speaks), “I wouldn’t go up to Entremont on the eve of Beltaine, though.”

The youthful gaze is sharp, suddenly.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Ned Marriner says. He doesn’t look any more as if he might cry. “What Kate said? About that place?”

The man doesn’t respond. He really isn’t accustomed to answering questions. Never has been, if truth were told, even from when he entered the tale himself a little west of here, having come across the sea.

Everyone here has come from somewhere else.

He’d said that to her, once. He remembers her reply. He remembers everything she has ever said to him, it sometimes feels.

He walks to the café door and out into the late-April afternoon.

The dogs have been waiting, scuffling around the market nearby. They attack as soon as he reaches the street.

Ned heard a woman scream. There were shouts and—unbelievably—the snarling of animals in the middle of the city.

At the two tables outside people were scrambling to their feet, backing desperately away from something. Ned leaped up. He wasn’t really thinking. Thought took too long, sometimes. He ran towards the door. On the way, he grabbed one of the café chairs.

It may have saved his life.

The wolfhound sprang just as he cleared the door. Purely by reflex, adrenalin surging, Ned swung the chair up. He cracked the animal on the head with all the power fear had given him. The impact knocked Ned into one of the outdoor tables and he fell over it, hitting his shoulder hard. The dog cartwheeled in mid-air, landed on the street. It lay on one side, didn’t move.

Ned got up quickly. The lean man was surrounded by three other animals, all of them big, dark grey, feral. These weren’t anyone’s pets off leash, Ned thought.

People were still screaming from farther along the street and in the market square, but no one came to help. He did see someone on a cellphone. Calling the police?

He hoped. Again, without really thinking, he stepped forward. He shouted, trying to get the animals’ attention. One of them turned immediately, teeth bared. Wonderful, Ned thought. When you got what you wanted, you really needed to be sure you’d wanted it.

But the man in the leather jacket moved then, swift and unnervingly graceful. He slashed at the distracted dog with his knife. The blade came out red, the animal went down. Ned moved forward, wielding the awkward chair, feinting with it like some ridiculous lion-tamer, facing one of the last two dogs.

He really didn’t know what he was doing. He was a distraction, no more, but that was enough. He saw the bald-headed man leave his feet in a sudden, lethal movement and the reddened knife took another animal. The man landed, rolled on the road, and was back on his feet.

These were more like wolves than dogs, Ned realized. There was nothing in his experience of life to fit the idea of wolves—or wolfhounds—attacking people in a city street.

But there was only one left.

Then none, as the last animal showed its teeth in a white-flecked snarl and fled through the market square as people backed away in panic. It tore diagonally across, down a street on the far side, and was gone.

Ned was breathing hard. He put a hand to his cheek and checked: no blood. He looked at the man beside him. He saw him wipe the bloodied knife on a blue napkin retrieved from the ground beside a toppled table. Ned set down his chair. For no good reason, he righted the table. His hands were trembling again.

The man looked at him and grimaced. “Curse his soul,” he said softly. “He thinks he is amusing.”

Ned blinked. He shook his head as if he had water in his ears, like after a high-board dive, and he hadn’t heard rightly. “Amusing?” he repeated, stupidly.

“He plays games. Like a wayward child.”

People were approaching, cautiously.

“Games?” Ned repeated again, his voice high-pitched, as if it hadn’t broken yet. He was aware that he wasn’t holding up his end of this conversation very well. “I…that thing went for my throat.”

“You did choose to come out,” the man said. “We invite our fate, some of the time.”

He said it the way you might comment on the weather or someone’s new shirt or shoes. He brushed at his jacket and looked at the crowd around them. “I suggest departing, unless you want to spend an evening answering questions you can’t answer.”

Ned swallowed. The man looked at him another moment. He hesitated. When he did speak, Ned had to strain to catch it.

“She is worth it, always and ever,” was what he heard.

Then, before Ned could say anything, or even begin to think of what he might say, the man spun around and began to run, north up the road towards the cathedral.

For an uncertain moment, Ned looked at the frightened, concerned faces around him. He shrugged, gestured vaguely, and then took off as well.

He ran the other way, across the market square, hearing urgent shouts in his wake. Someone even grabbed for him. Ned slashed the brief, restraining hand away, and kept going.

He sprinted until he was out of town.

Only on the Route de Vauvenargues, leading east towards the cut-off to the villa, did he settle into a proper stride. He was in jeans, wasn’t dressed for a run, but he had his Nikes on, and he badly needed to be moving just now.

Somewhere along the way he started to swear under his breath, rhythmically. His mother hated it when he swore. A failure of imagination, she called it.

His mother was in a civil-war zone where people were dying every day. Ned’s shoulder hurt, his cheek was banged up, and he was scared and angry in pretty much equal measure. He actually felt as if he might be sick for the second time in a day.

Amusing? Someone had meant that to be funny?

It occurred to him that the man—he really needed a name—had said pretty much the same thing about the skull and sculpted head yesterday.

Ned could almost smell the hot breath of the animal that had leaped for him. If he hadn’t grabbed that chair on the way out—he had no idea what had made him do that—he’d have had teeth ripping into him.

How amusing. Just hilarious. Put it on America’s Funniest Home Videos with all the other cute little animals and men falling over tables. And how extremely grateful that arrogant son of a bitch had been, come to think of it. Not a word of thanks.

We invite our fate, he’d said.

Whatever the hell that meant. Ned, rubbing his shoulder now as he ran, muttered a few more words that would have got him into trouble if either parent had been there to hear.

Well, they weren’t. And they weren’t going to be much good to him in this. Whatever this was, anyhow.

She is worth it, always and ever.

He was pretty certain that was what he’d heard.

As he turned off the main road, taking their own uphill lane, the words hit him hard, a different sort of blow. Tidings from that still-distant, really complicated adult world he seemed to be approaching. And from somewhere else, as well, a place farther away, that he also seemed to be entering now, like it or not.

A few dozen strides later it occurred to Ned Marriner that if he’d wanted to, or had been thinking clearly enough, he could have taken those last words as a thank-you of sorts, after all. A confiding, explanation, even an apology from someone not obviously inclined to any of those things.

As the villa came in sight at the top of their roadway, beyond a sloping meadow and the lawn, framed against the trees that sheltered it from the wind, he was thinking of a rose placed yesterday beside a sculpted figure that was not the Queen of Sheba.