Realms of Gold

by Terry Stanfill

  “Bianca—I think you've got something going here, but I'm wondering what Hermès would think about it. I'm sure that as a scholar of Burgundian history, he might be intrigued by your theory—and don't forget, as a follower of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, he wouldn't scoff at your imagination, your intuitive knowledge.”

  “I'm not sure I'll tell him about it yet. My ideas may be more effective if I send them to him as a saga—if I may be so overly generous to myself using such a word to describe my collection of vignettes.”

  “Your vignettes are your little vines—your golden vines.”

  “Strange, I never thought about the meaning of vignette.”

  “I'm sure it's occurred to Hermès, especially since he's a Burgundian.” he replies.

  “Maybe over lunch I'll ask his opinion about the historical Arthur Riothamus as the real King Arthur. Now--what are you going to do about the drawing of the Krater? You can't let your old friend and colleague read about it in Le Figaro.”

  “I thought about it during dinner—especially when I heard that the discovery of the Palace was made only a few weeks after I found the Krater's sketch. But I must first report my find to the Soprintendente archeologica di Calabria. I have an appointment with Professoressa Luppino on the fifth of January. When I leave her office in Sibari, my first call will be to Hermès.”

  Zatoria

  The arrival at Latisco

  The King of the River People begins his slow descent from the citadel to the river below. A harsh blare of horns rends the air. The road winding from the hill is soon cleared of barrows and wagons, and crowds scurry to make way for their silver-haired King, his fishing pole clasped tightly in his trembling hand as he attempts to hold it aloft as if it were a royal scepter.

  Now the King watches from the river bank as the dark boats approach. When he sees the shining woman, her hair spread out in fiery points, he thinks he looks upon the arrival of agoddess, the incarnation of the goddess Sequana. The woman sits in a narrow black boat filled with gorse picked from surrounding hills by her attendants. She is dressed in fine white wool, a mantle fastened with a gold and coral brooch falls around her shoulders. A necklace of amber drops to her breast: her bright hair, more red than gold, is garlanded with mistletoe.

  Behind her in a boat, young boys and girls play flutes Seven barges follow, each poled by men wearing hats of thin, hammered tin that flash in the sunlight. Other men watch from the river bank. Their long fair hair is tied back. Some wear wide hats like cartwheels turning up in front and behind. Women, many with water vessels on their heads, are clad in robes patterned in squares and stripes of blue, red, yellow, and green. Hooded men in long robes stand with heads bowed, and strong lads, freckled by the sun, look on in awe. Helped by her attendants, she steps off the boat.

  The King pulls the torque from his neck and places it on her head as though it is a diadem.

  "Who are you if you are not Sequana?"

  "My mother named me Zato, but the Hellenes call me Zatoria."

  *

  Winter Solstice Latisco. December 22. 2007

  The sky is a clear winter blue, the brilliant sun making up for the gloomy gray of yesterday, and for what will be the year's longest night.

  Hermès comes by to pick them up at ten in the morning. Bianca and Giovanni are ready, eagerly waiting outside. As they drive north, they stop in the center of town to have a look at the Seine, ever widening as it rushes through Châtillon on its short journey to Vix. On the way, Hermès relates the story about the days of the Krater's discovery by René Joffroy, the success of the dig almost sixty years ago. He has with him a few tear sheets from the London Illustrated News, the June1953 Coronation issue. “You see, the British thought the discovery of the Krater so important that they thought it worthy to include in this famous, collector's Coronation issue. I have some extra copies and I would like to offer one to you as a remembrance of your visit here with Giovanni, my long lost colleague.”

  “Thank you, Hermès—I happily accept this memento of today, ”she says scanning the article and its photographs of the Krater. “It seems fitting to read about the breathtaking discovery here, in this issue—as though the British regarded la Dame de Vix as a queen, an ancient Celtic Queen.”

  “Yes—these Hallstatt Celts spoke a proto-Celtic called Q-Celtic, or Goedelic, a language still spoken by the young Queen Elizabeth's subjects, the Irish and Western Scots. So there is a linguistic connection here.”

  *

  They turn off the road towards the village of Vix. From a distance they see Mont Lassois, also known as Mont St. Marcel, rising above.

  When they drive over the stone bridge spanning the widening Seine and approach the village, Hermès responds to Bianca's question about its population.

  “Now it's around a hundred people but in the summer many tourists make their way here. Until the mid-Nineties when the Internet helped the public take note of le Cratère , our great bronze was not very well known in Europe—not even in France. And in the States it's still hardly known at all. The last article about our treasure was in the New York Times, and that was about twenty-five years ago. Now, in the summer, besides tourists, we also have many student archeologists who work with Bruno Chaume and his French and German team.”

  They begin the gradual climb to the plateau of Mont Lassois. When they reach the summit, they stop to behold the rich farmlands of the Châtillonnais, precisely marked fields of tilled earth, ready for late winter seeding, as they have been for centuries. Hermès points out another tumulus, not yet excavated, close to the river, and the tumulus where the Krater was unearthed.

  At the summit, Giovanni parks the car by St. Marcel, the little Romanesque church “Come--let us make our way over to the Palais--is very close by. Follow me. "

  They trudge up a steep road cut through the brush and trees. Bianca is wearing her Nikes and manages to keep climbing without slipping in the mud around the tire ruts. When they reach the top, she stops to look out toward the east, over the woodlands and forests surrounding Mont Lassois. There are the seeded plains in the distance, and the Seine is fast-flowing its way to Troyes to Paris and the Atlantic. She knows--she feels--she can see that she's standing on the earth that was once Camelot, exactly as it was described in Chrétien's own words, Camelot, a city on the hill overlooking a river, surrounded by forest and plains.

  Hermès explains that the dig is covered in mid September to keep the work intact. Surrounded by a wire fence, the field of stones, once part of the palace, is protected by a waterproof canvas which clearly outlines its geometric form. Hermès points out the apse and its resemblance to a megaron, a Greek structure. “You can see here, by these symmetrical holes, how the palace was once supported by tall oak beams and how its pointed roof, covered in wood shingles, was able to withstand heavy snow. Of course, wood structures cannot withstand the test of time, but the depth of the holes, their spacing and the number of columns reveal a building of majestic scale. The entrance, facing east, was protected by an awning and the palace, from all evidence, was painted deep red. Archaeologists like to think that perhaps le Cratère stood in the center of this great hall, and personally I am convinced that it did. We have all the evidence of feasting here, thousands upon thousands of ceramic shards, evidence of foods--legumes, bones, grains. Can you imagine what the local folk thought about le Cratère in such a palace!”

  Bianca nods, smiling, “Oh yes, I can imagine the stories they told and retold about the castle on the citadel and le Cratère.”

  “Hermès, before we leave the site why don't you tell us more about these Hallstatt Celts.” Giovanni asks. “There are so few historical references to these people. Mostly what we know has come from fairly recent archaeological finds from the Prince's tomb in Hochsdorf, from Vix and other sites here in Burgundy.”

  “This ancient land, once Gaul, was a center of the Celtic lands that stretched from Anatolia to Hibernia," he replies. “Its peoples were linked by a common ancestry,
a single speech. You already know that these Celts traded tin and salt from the mines near Hochsdorf for riches from the Mediterranean. Here, at Vix, they also collected tolls for cargos loaded or unloaded where the Seine became navigable. Besides trade, Hallstatt peoples engaged in agriculture, wheat crops and raising livestock, especially horses, sheep, and cattle. And then from the artifacts we've found, the Hallstatt tribes were certainly influenced by Hellenic and Etruscan culture.”

  Giovanni adds, “Anthropologists believe that there is a very ancient racial Hallstatt connection to Scythians, also horse breeders who eventually became wheat growers along the Black Sea, in the region of the Ukraine. Similarly, they buried their dead in wagons for the afterlife. This is not a casual similarity, it is profound.”

  “What about human sacrifice?” Bianca asks, then wishes she hadn't.

  “There has never been any indication of human sacrifice in Hallstatt graves. And of course, there were no weapons in the grave of la Dame de Vix. War did not seem to be a preoccupation for these tribes —except to defend themselves. For instance, in one of the tumuli, the grave of a prince, only recently discovered in Hochsdorf, Austria, there were no weapons, only an impressive gold ceremonial dagger, part of the regalia of a Hallstatt chief or king. Other than these ceremonial artifacts, there was a lack of weapons, consistent with other Hallstatt princely burials.”

  “However, later on, around 480 BC, the La Tène Celts appeared on the scene. They swept down from the north and spoke another form of Celtic called P. Celtic or Brythonic. Among these La Tène peoples were tribes staking out territories; they overcame or eventually merged with the Hallstatt tribes. And about that time, trade from Cornwall to Vix and to the western Atlantic lessened. The trade route from the Rhone to the Mediterranean had been weakened, either by these hostile invasions, or because of new trade routes to the Atlantic. The Phoenicians no longer had the monopoly around the Straits of Gibraltar, and so the trade routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic were now open. This meant, for these early Celts of the oppidum of Latisco, that there was not only dwindling trade but also the loss of revenue from the tolls at Vix. Gradually the settlement fell into disuse, eventually abandoned, and then we have also found traces of devastation by fire and its ultimate desolation.”

  “But then there are the war-mongering, cattle-thieving Celts—when do the ancient historians begin to write about those La Tène Celts?” Bianca asks.

  Giovanni speaks up before his friend has a chance. “The first historical treatise was History of the Celts, by Posidonios, but it was lost, although there are quotes from much later writers such as Strabo and Tacitus who had read it. We have other later records: Julius Caesar in his Gaulish histories, writes about Celts first hand, some of it undoubtedly exaggeration.”

  Hermès nods and goes on. “And conversely, there are the Celtic legends, medieval Irish sagas. Indeed we do have two conflicting images of these tribes—on the one hand, the fearless Celtic warriors streaking into battle naked, screaming, terrifying and beheading their enemies, burning victims alive in wicker cages. Many of these were Celts who believed in the Cult of the Head, because to them the human head embodied the essence of being and imbued supernatural powers. They hung the enemies' severed heads as trophies or preserved them in cedar oil to show off to visitors. Even today, in a museum near Marseilles, you can how these Celts displayed the heads of enemies--set into niches on the facades of their dwellings"

  Bianca shudders. “Gruesome!”

  Hermès continues. “There are also the other mental images we have of Celts, nature-loving, wise, learned druids, intellectuals who contained the knowledge of generations—centuries of their people—and with no written language, everything was committed to memory. Not too far away from here, in the 19th century, at Coligny on the Seine, a bronze astronomical disc was discovered and only recently reconstructed. Some Celtic scholars consider this Sequani Calendar more accurate than the Roman Julian calendar, the one we use today. It must have taken millennia for these people to arrive at this knowledge of astronomy to explain it pictorially and in ancient Goedelic characters. It doesn't happen overnight, you know. This was real human achievement.”

  Giovanni adds, “If not millennia, centuries at least. Just think how many more centuries it has taken since then to achieve enough scientific knowledge to hurl a man into space and take the first step on the moon."

  Turning to Bianca who has been listening intently to the two professors expounding their knowledge, Hermès says, “Now let us move forward from science to the human imagination. Why don't you write one of your ritual vignettes about le Palais— like the kind we've enjoyed reading in Eyes and Soul?”

  She responds with a smile. “I do intend to write a vignette on le Palais de la Dame de Vix, even though I have no intentions of ever returning to the magazine. I promise to send you a copy when it's finished. My story has become all the more intriguing because of the discovery of le Palais.”

  As they stroll around the remains of the Celtic town, they listen in fascination as Hermès points out where the grain bins stood, the water cisterns, the tradesmen's houses. “The smith would have had a large house because of his important trade, working in metal, bronze and iron, especially. The rix. the king or chieftain of the tribe, would have rented his lands to the tenant farmers and animal breeders who lived in the countryside surrounding Latisco. Their houses would have been made of mud and wattle with peaked, thatched roofs. The houses on this site were made of wood, some painted. The larger, more important edifices were surrounded by palisades. The discovery of a Celtic town, a planned urban center, here or anywhere else in the ancient Celtic world, is unprecedented. We may have just taken a stroll around the first town in France."

  Re Artù. King Arthur, From The Tree of Life, Mosaic floor, Otranto Cathedral, Puglia, Italy. Designed by the monk, Pantaleone, in 1163, completed 1166-67. Chrétien died in 1180. Between 1160 and 1170 he was at the court of Marie de Champagne. The floor is contemporary with Chrétien, The story of King Arthur was most likely brought to Otranto by the Normans who had occupied what is now Puglia and Sicily since the early eleventh century.

  *

  At lunch Hermès asks the waiter to bring them a bottle of Romanée-Conti from his uncle's vineyard and explains, “This is still a young wine--2005--but it's supposedly the best year in memory. The local vintners claim that one day it will become legendary.”

  After a few sips of the garnet-red wine tasting of wild strawberries, Bianca relaxes and feels comfortable enough to ask Hermès, “May I ask if you agree with Professor Geoffrey Ashe's theory that in Late Antiquity, the historical King Arthur, the British general Riothamus, was urged by the Romans in Gaul to get rid of the Visigoths who were besieging the territory?”

  Hermès responds immediately, obviously with deep personal conviction. “After losing the battle to the Visigoths circa 450 A.D, Arthur Riothamus, which means king or chief, was taken to Avallon. This is not legend. It is historical fact.

  "A few miles away are Les Fontaines Salées. Like Source-Seine, these salt springs were a sacred phenomenon in Gaul, another place of healing and of curing, and had been so since the Neolithic period. It's not hard to imagine that this where the wounded Riothamus was carried by his stalwart, battle-weary soldiers after their defeat. It was in nearby Avallon that Arthur Riothamus died. I sincerely believe that our Burgundian Avallon is the true Avallon. Aballo, our Celtic apple isle, has always been here. There is no Avallon in Britain, nor has there ever been one. It is an imagined place. Geoffrey Ashe was asked in a BBC interview about the location of Avallon in the film "Camelot". 'It's in Somerset—why? Because I put it there, my contribution to Hollywood.”

  Bianca laughs, amused that Geoffrey Ashe, a serious Cambridge academic and a leading Arthurian expert, would make such a comment. She wonders what he might think of her ideas about le Cratère, Camelot and King Arthur.

  “I hasten to say that Professor Ashe, after a massive amount of hist
orical research, proposed the theory that the historical King Arthur was Arthur Riothamus, and that the hill in England, although it has been a mystical place for centuries, has no association with the historical King Arthur. I am convinced that Ashe is right. If you'd like to read more on this subject my friend Marilyn Floyde, an Englishwoman who now resides in France, is writing about King Arthur's odyssey in Burgundy. I know the premise of her book and I agree with it. I had also come to the same conclusion. Madame Floyde explores Arthur's extensive French connections. They are historically correct and, like Dr. Ashe's, they have not been vociferously challenged. The book should be published within a year or so. I will have Marilyn sign a book for you—and promise to send it.”

  “Thank you, Hermès. And I promise to send you the vignettes I've written on our journey from Sybaris, along with some of my own ideas—intuitive revelations, you might call them.”

  “Intuitive revelations?”

  “Yes, about Le Cratère and Chrétien de Troyes, Avallon and Camelot and le Graal. If I may ask, besides the historical information you have about General Riothamus, do you believe that your intuition helped you to come to this conclusion?”

  “Without a doubt. I am convinced that there is a filament in our DNA which holds the memories of mankind and another filament which holds memories of the lifetimes we've lived. This, I truly believe, is the source of intuitive knowledge.”

  “Hermès,” Bianca adds, “My intuition tells me that in your Burgundian DNA, you have the instinctive, accumulated knowledge of centuries of very wise and learned druids before you.”

  Obviously pleased, he responds, “Yes, I grew up only a few miles away from Vix. When I was a child, I wondered if there had ever been druids in my ancestry.”

  “Given your extensive, impressive knowledge, and your obvious passion and love of Burgundy and its history, my intuition tells me that you definitely have D for druid in your DNA.”