VI Encounter

FROM AFAR the gold shone like a daylight evenstar. Sometimes trees hid it, a woodlot or a remnant of forest, but always as the travelers moved west they saw it again, brilliant in a vastness of sky where a few clouds wandered, above a plain where villages and freshly greening croplands lay tiny beneath the wind.

Hours wore on, sunbeams now tangled themselves in Svoboda Volodarovna’s brows, and the hills ahead loomed clear, the city upon the highest of them. Behind its walls and watchtowers lifted domes, spires, the smoke from a thousand hearths; and over all soared the brightness. Presently she heard chimes, not the single voice of a countryside chapel but several, which must be great ones to sound across this distance, ringing together in music such as surely sang among the angels or in the abode of Yarilo.

Gleb Ilyev pointed. “The bell tower, the gilt cupola, belongs to the cathedral of Sviataya Sophia,” he said. “That’s not any saint’s name but means ‘Holy Wisdom.’ It comes from the Greeks, who brought the word of Christ to the Rusi.” A short, somewhat tubby man with a pug nose and a scraggly beard turning gray, he was given to self-importance. Yet leathery skin bespoke many years of faring, often through danger, and goodly garb told of success won by it.

“Then all this is new?” asked Svoboda in amazement.

“Well, that church and certain other things,” Gleb replied. “Grand Prince Yaroslav Vladimirovitch has built them since these lands fell to him and he moved his seat here from Novgorod. But of course Kiyiv was already great. It was founded in Rurik’s time—two centuries ago, I believe.”

And to me this was only a dream, Svoboda thought. It would have been less real than the old gods that we suppose still haunt the wilderness, did not merchants like Gleb pass through our little settlement once in a while, bringing their goods that few of us can afford but also their tales that everyone is eager to hear.

She clucked to her horse and nudged it with her heels. These lowlands near the river were still wet after the spring floods, and the mire of the road had wearied the horse. Behind her and her guide trailed his company, hah0 a dozen hirelings and two apprentices leading the pack animals or driving a pair of laden wagons. Here, safe from bandits or Pecheneg raiders, they had laid weapons aside and wore merely tunics, trousers, tall hats. Gleb had put on good clothes this morning, to make a proper show when he arrived; a fur-trimmed cloak was draped over a brocaded coat.

Svoboda was well-clad too, in a gown of gray wool bordered with embroideries. Hiked up across the saddle, her skirts revealed finely stitched boots. A headcloth covered flaxen braids. Weather had only tinged her with bronze, work had built strength without stooping the back or coarsening the hands. Well-figured enough that the big bones did hot stand forth, she looked at the world out of blue eyes set widely hi a face of blunt nose, full mouth, square chin. Lineage and fortune showed; her father had been headman of the village in his day, and each of her husbands had been better off than most men—blacksmith, hunter-trapper, horse breeder and dealer. Nonetheless she must keep herself reined in if she would appear calm, and the heart in her breast kept breaking free of that grip.

When she came in clear sight of the Dniepr, she could not help catching her breath. Brown and mighty rolled the river: easily five hundred paces across, she guessed. To her right a low, grassy island divided it. Lesser streams flowed in from either side. The far shore was surprisingly much forested, though houses and other buildings led up from the water to the city and clustered around its ramparts, while orchards or small farmsteads and pastures nestled elsewhere in the hills.

On this bank was just a muddy huddle of dwellings. Its laborers and peasants gave the travelers scant heed; they were used to such. What did draw some stares and mutters was her. Few women accompanied any traders, and those who did were seldom of an honorable kind.

A ferry waited. Its owner hastened to meet Gleb and chaffer with him, then went about calling for crew to man the sweeps. Three trips would be necessary. The gangway was steeply pitched, for the wharf was built high against the yearly rise. Gleb and Svoboda were among the first to cross. They took stance near the bows, the better to watch. Voices barked, wood creaked, water lapped and splashed, the vessel started off. The breeze was cool, wet, full of silty smells. Fowl winged about, ducks, geese, lesser birds, once a flight of swans overhead, but not so many as at home; here they were hunted more.

“We come at a busy time,” Gleb warned. “The city is crammed with strangers. Brawls are common, and worse than that can befall, despite everything the Grand Prince does to keep order. I shall have to leave you alone while I attend to my work. Be very careful, Svoboda Volodarovna.”

She nodded impatiently, barely hearing words he had spoken over and over, her gaze and her heed aimed forward. As they approached the west bank, the ships gathered there seemed to breed until they were past counting. She caught hold of her senses and told herself that now the outer hulls, riding at anchor, did not hide those at the docks from her, and the number must be scores rather than hundreds. It took away none of the wonder. Here were no barges such as she was on, nor rowboats and dugout punts such as her own folk used. These were long and lean, clinker-built, gaudily painted, many with stemposts carved into fantastic figureheads. Oars, yards, and unstepped masts lay on trestles above the benches. How their sails must spread like wings when they came to the sea!

“Yes, the famous merchant fleet,” said Gleb. “Most likely all are now gathered. Tomorrow, perhaps, they leave for Constantinople, New Rome.”

Again Svoboda scarcely listened. She was trying to imagine that sea the ships would find at the river’s end. It reached farther than a man could look; it was rough and dark and salt of taste; huge snakes and people who were half fish beset its waves. So the tales went. She strove to form the vision, but failed.

As for the city of the Basileus, how could the claim be true that it made Kiyiv, Kiyiv, look small and poor?

To go and find out, to be there!

She sighed once, then shoved longing aside. Quite enough newness lay straight ahead. What she might gain and what she might suffer were alike unforeseeable. Even in fireside stories, no woman had ever ventured this that she was venturing. But none had ever been driven by a need like hers.

Memories flitted through her, secret thoughts that had come when she was alone, working in house or garden, gathering berries or firewood in the outskirts of the forest, lying wakeful in the night. Could she also be special, a princess stolen from the crib, a girl chosen for destiny by the old gods or the Christian saints? No doubt every child nursed daydreams of that sort. They faded away as one grew up. But in her they had slowly rekindled—

No prince came riding, no fox or firebird uttered human words, life simply went on year by year by year until at last she broke free; and that was her own, altogether ordinary doing. And here she was.

Her heart quickened afresh. It hammered fear out of her. Wonders in truth!

The ferry knocked against bollards. Its crew made fast. The passengers debarked into racket and bustle. Gleb pushed through the crowd of workers, hawkers, sailors, soldiers, idlers. Svoboda stayed close at his side. She had always taken care to uphold self-command in his presence, bargain rather than appeal, be friendly rather than forlorn; but today he knew what he did while she was bewildered. This was nothing like a fair at the town she knew, which was little more than a fort for villagers to take refuge in.

She could watch, though, hearken, learn. He talked to a man of the harbormaster’s and a man of the Prince’s, he left orders with a man of his about where to bring the rest of his band, and finally he led her up the hill into the city.

Its walls were massive, earthen, whitewashed. An arched gateway, flanked by turrets and crowned with a tower, stood open. Guards in helmet and chain mail leaned on their pikes, no hindrance to the traffic that thrust to and fro, on foot, on horseback, donkey cart, ox-drawn wagon, sometimes sheep or cattle herded toward slaughter, once a monstrous beast, like a thing out of nightmare, that Gleb called a camel. Beyond, streets twisted steep. Most of the vividly painted buildings that lined them were timber, below roofs of mossy shingle or blossoming turf. Often they stood two, even three stories high. In the windows of those that were brick, there gleamed glass. Above them she glimpsed the golden cupola where the bells dwelt, surmounted by a cross.

Noise, smells, surge and push of bodies overwhelmed Svoboda. Gleb must raise his voice when he pointed out some new kind of person. The priests she knew at once, black-gowned and long-bearded, but a man more coarsely clad was a monk, sent into town from his nearby cave on an errand, while a magnificently robed elder borne in a litter was a bishop. Townsfolk—housewives who dickered on a market square overflowing with goods and people, portly merchants, common workers, slaves, children, peasants from the hinterland—wore an endlessness of different garbs, and nowhere the dear decorations of home. Tarry sailors, tall blond Northmen, Poles and Wends and Livonians and Finns in their various raiments, high-cheeked tribesmen off the steppes, a pair of Byzantines clothed with elegance and disdain, she was lost among them, and at the same time she was upraised, carried along, drunk on marvel.

At a house near the south wall, Gleb halted. “This is where you will stay,” he said. She nodded. He had told her about it. A master weaver, whose daughters had married, earned extra money by taking in trustworthy lodgers.

A maidservant answered Gleb’s knock. The goodwife appeared. Gleb’s followers brought in Svoboda’s baggage, and he paid the woman. They went to the room that would be hers. Cramped, it held a narrow bed, stool, pot, basin, water jug. Above the bed hung a picture, a man with a halo, letters around him to spell out a name that the wife said was St. Yuri. “He slew a dragon and saved a maiden,” she explained. “A fine guardian for you, my dear. You have come to be married, I believe?” The sharp, hasty accent forced Svoboda to listen closely.

“So we trust,” Gleb replied. “Arranging the betrothal will take days, you understand, Olga Borisovna, and then there will be the wedding preparations. Now this lady is tired after a long, hard journey.”

“Of course, Gleb Ilyev. What else? Hungry too, I’m sure. I will go see that the soup is hot. Come to the kitchen when you are ready, both of you.”

“I must be straightway off, myself,” he said. “You know how a trader has to watch and pounce at this season, like a sparrowhawk, if he would strike any bargains worth half his trouble.”

The woman bustled off. So did his men, at a gesture from him. For a moment he and Svoboda were alone.

Light was dim; this room had only a small window covered by membrane. Svoboda searched Gleb’s face as best she could, where he stood in the doorway. “Will you meet Igor Olegev today?” she asked low.

“I doubt that,” he sighed. “He is an important man, after all, his voice strong in the folkmoot, and—and very busy while the fleet is here, not just as a chandler but—well, when you deal with men of many nations, it becomes politics and schemes and—“ He was not wont to speak thus awkwardly. “I’ll leave word, and hope he can receive me tomorrow. Then we’ll set a time for you to meet with him, and—and I’ll pray for a good outcome.”

“You said that was sure.”

“No, I said I think it likely. He is interested. And I know him and his situation well. But how could I make you any outright promise?”

She sighed in. her turn. “True. At worst, you said, you can find somebody less well off.”

He stared down at the rushes on the floor. “That ... need not happen either. We are friends of old, you and I. Right? I could—look after you—better than, than you have thus far let me do.”

“You have been more than kind to me,” she said gently. “Your wife is a lucky woman.”

“I had better go,” he mumbled. “Get my whole party together, everyone quartered, wares stored, and then— Tomorrow, whenever I can, I’ll stop here and give you the news. Until then, God be with you, Svoboda Volodarovna.” He turned and hurried off.

She stood a while, her thoughts atumble, before she found her way to the kitchen. Olga gave her a bowl of rich beef broth, crowded with leeks and carrots, black bread and ample butter on the side. She settled herself on the bench across the table and chattered away. “Gleb Ilyev has told me so much about you—”

With a wariness that the years had taught her, Svoboda steered the talk. Just how much had the man said? It was a relief to learn he had been as shrewd as usual. He had described a widow with no dependent children alive and no prospect of remarriage in her distant, rude neighborhood. Out of charity, and in hope of earning credit in Heaven, Gleb had suggested her to the chandler Igor Olegev of Kiyiv, himself lately left bereaved among several youngsters. The prospect appeared good; a woodlander could learn city ways if she was clever, and this woman had other desirable qualities as well. Therefore Gleb helped Svoboda convert her inheritance to cash, a dowry, and took her along on his next trip.

“Ah, poor darling, poor little one.” Olga dabbed at tears. “No child of yours above the earth, and no man to wed one so young and beautiful? I cannot understand that.”

Svoboda shrugged. “There was ill feeling. Please, spare me talking about it.”

“Yes, village feuds. People can indeed get nasty, hemmed in by themselves all their lives. And then, pagan fears prey on them. Do they imagine you’re unlucky, cursed by a witch perhaps, just because you’ve had many sorrows? May God now, at last, prosper your life.”

So Gleb had told truth, while holding back truth. A trader skill. For an instant, Svoboda wondered about him. They got along well together, she and he. They could do more than that, if this marriage scheme fell through. Let the priests call it sin. Kupala the Joyous would not, and maybe the old gods did linger on earth ... But no. Gleb was already gray. Too little time remained for him that she could bring herself to hurt the wife whom she had never met. She knew how loss felt.

Having eaten, and Olga gone back to a housewife’s work, Svoboda sought her room. She unpacked, stowed her possessions, and wondered what to do next. There had always been some task, if only to spin thread. But she had left the things of home behind, with home itself. Nor could she just sink into blessed idleness, savoring it, or into sleep, as countryfolk were apt to when the rare, brief chance came. That was not the way of a headman’s daughter, wife to a man of weight.

Restlessness churned in her. She paced the floor, flung herself onto the bed, bounced up again, yawned, glowered, paced anew. Should she go help Olga’s household? No, she wouldn’t know her way about. Moreover, Igor Olegev might well think it demeaned his bride. If anything was to come of that. What was he like? Gleb called him a good fellow, but Gleb would never see him from a woman’s side, not even well enough that what he said of Igor’s looks called forth anything real for Svoboda.

St. Yuri, there on the wall, she could at least take the measure of, gaunt, big-eyed— She knelt before him and tried to ask his blessing. The words stuck in her throat. She had been dutiful but not devout, and today proper meekness was beyond her.

She paced. Decision came slowly. Why must she stay penned between these walls? Gleb had told her to be careful, but she had often gone alone into the woods, fearless of wolf or bear, and taken no harm. Once she caught a runaway horse by the bridle and dragged him to a stop, once she killed a mad dog with an ax, once she and her neighbors crowded into the stockaded town and stood off a Pecheneg raid. Besides, while the hours dribbled away here, life pulsed out there, newness, wonder. The bell tower shone tall...

Of course! The church of the Holy Wisdom. There, if any place, she could feel prayerful; there God would hear and help.

Yes, surely.

She threw a cloak on, pinned it fast, drew up the hood, glided forth. Nobody could forbid her to leave, but it would be best if she went unnoticed. She did pass a servant, maybe a slave, but he gave her a dull glance and continued scrubbing out a tile stove in the main room. The door closed behind Svoboda. The street swept her off.

For a while she wandered, shyly at first, then in a daze of delight. Nobody offered her any rudeness. Several young men did stare, and a couple of them grinned and nudged each other, but that just made her tingle. Now and then somebody jostled her by chance. It was less often than eartier, the ways were less thronged, as the sun sank westward. Finally she got a clear sight of the cathedral and steered by it.

When she saw St. Sophia full on, she caught her breath. Sixty paces long it was, she guessed dizzily, rising white and pale green in walls and bays, arched doorways and high glass windows, up and up to, yes, ten domes in all, six bearing crosses and four spangled with stars. For a long time she could only stand and look. At last, mustering courage, she went on past workmen who were adding to the splendor. Her heart thudded. Was this forbidden? But besides priests, commoners went in and out. She passed the entrance.

After that, for a time during which time was not, she drifted like a rusalka beneath the water. Almost she wondered if she too had drowned and become such a spirit. Twilight and hush enfolded her, windows glowed with colors and images, walls with gold and images ... but no, that stern strange face overhead was Christ, Lord of the World, in the ring of his apostles, and yonder giantess made of little stones was his Mother, and ... the song, the deep moaning tones that finally lifted from behind a carven screen, while bells rang high above, those were in praise of his Father... She prostrated herself on cold flags.

Awareness seeped into her much later. The church had become a cavern of night; she was alone, except for a few clergy and many candles. Where had the day gone? She crossed herself and hastened out.

The sun was down, the sky still blue but swiftly darkening, the streets full of dusk between walls in whose windows flamelight fluttered yellow. They were well-nigh deserted. Her breath, footfalls on cobbles, rustle of skirts sounded loud in the quiet. Turn right at this corner, left at the next— no, wait, that was wrong, she had never seen yonder house with the rafter ends carved into heads— She was lost.

She stopped, filled her lungs and eased them again, grinned wryly. “Fool,” she whispered. “At your age you should have known better.” She glanced about. Roofs stood black against a heaven gone almost as dark, where three stars trembled. Opposite, paleness crept upward, the moon rising. So, west and east. Her lodging stood near the south wall. If she kept on that way, as closely as these crooked lanes allowed, she should reach it. Then she could knock on a door and ask directions. No doubt Olga would make a fuss and tomorrow Gleb would chide her.

She stiffened her back. She was headman Volodar’s daughter. Picking her steps carefully, gown held above ankles, to avoid the worst muck, she set off.

Twilight thickened toward night. Air lay chilly. The moon gave wan light when she saw it, but mostly it was still behind roofs.

Lampglow, smoke, smells of kvass and cookery, spilled from a half-open door. Voices barked, laughter bayed. She scowled and went by on the far side of the street. An inn, where men were getting drunk. She had seen that sort of thing when she visited the town with a husband. Rostislav had grown too fond of it, he’d reel back to her, all stench and sweat—

Boots thudded behind her, louder, nearer.

She quickened her steps. The other did too, and drew alongside. “Ha,” he growled, “greeting to you.” She could barely understand him.

They entered a patch of moonlight and he became more than a shadow. A head taller than she, he blocked the gathering western stars out of her sight. She saw a pate shaven except for a lock on the right side, a bristle of mustache under a nose that had once been broken, tattoos over the shaggy breast and down the thick arms. He wore a shirt half unlaced, broad trews, short cloak, everything stiff with old grease. The knife at his belt was nearly of sword size, a weapon forbidden to everyone but the Prince’s guards within this city.

A demon flashed ice-sharp through her, and then: No, a Varyag. I’ve heard about them, Northmen and Rusi who ply the rivers, walking stormwinds— She pulled her look from him and sought to go on.

A hand clamped on her right arm. “Now, now, not be hasty,” he laughed. “You out for fun this late, no? I give you fun.”

“Let me be!” she cried, and tugged at the grip. He wrenched. Pain stabbed sickeningly through her shoulder. She stumbled. He held her fast.

“Come,” he said, “there’s an alley, you tike it.” The smell of him caught at her gorge. She must gag before she could scream.

“Quiet, you! Nobody come.” His free hand cuffed. Her head rocked. Darkness roared through. Nonetheless, somehow, she dug her heels down and screamed again.

“Quiet or I— Ha-a-a.” He cast her to the cobbles. When she could see upward, he had turned to meet two others.

They must have been on a side street and heard, she thought amidst the dizziness. Let them help me. Christ, Dazhbog, Yarilo, St. Yuri, help them help me.

The Varyag’s knife was out. “Go,” he snarled. “No need you. Go.” She realized that he was drunk, and that that made him the more dangerous.

The smaller of the two men advanced, cat-footed. “I think best you go cool that noggin of yours, friend,” he replied mildly. His own knife slipped forth. It was a tool for eating and ordinary cutting, a sliver against that great blade. Nor did its bearer seem any kind of warrior. His slender frame bore a fur-lined coat and trousers smoothly tucked into soft boots. Svoboda made out that much because his companion carried a lantern, which threw a dull glow on them both and a puddle of it at their feet.

The Varyag grinned beneath the moon. “Dainty lordling and cripple,” he jeered. “You tell me what to do? Scoot, or I find how white your tripes be.”

The second new man put down the lantern. It had been in his left hand. His right was missing. From a leather cup strapped to that forearm reached an iron hook. Otherwise he was muscular, his garb stout but plain. He drew his small knife. “We two,” he rumbled. “You alone. Cadoc say go, you go.” Unlike the slim man, he could barely speak Russian.

“Two cockroaches!” the Varyag yelled. “Perun thunder me, enough!”

He made a long step forward. His weapon flashed. The slim man—Cadoc?—swayed aside. He thrust out an ankle and gave a push. The Varyag tripped, crashed to the stones. The man with the hook laughed. The Varyag roared, sprang up, charged him.

The hook slashed. Its curve ended in a point that went deep into the attacker’s upper arm. The Varyag yelled. The opponent’s knife cut his wrist. His own iron clattered loose. Cadoc danced in and, half playfully, seized his hairlock and sliced it across. “The next trophy comes from between your legs,” Cadoc said with a leer. The Varyag howled, whirled, fled. Echoes died away.

Cadoc hunkered down by Svoboda. “Are you well, my lady?” he asked. “Here, lean on me.” He helped her rise.

His companion stooped for the Varyag’s knife. “No, leave that,” Cadoc ordered. His Russian must be for her benefit. “I wouldn’t want the guard to find it on us. That oaf’s carcass would scarcely be as inconvenient. Let’s get away. The racket may well have drawn attention we can do without. Come, my lady.”

“I, I’m unhurt.” The breath sobbed in Svoboda’s throat. She had, in fact, suffered nothing but possible bruises. A measure of daze remained. She went blindly along, Cadoc’s hand on her elbow.

The man with the lantern and the hook asked something that must mean, “Where to?”

“Our lodging, of course,” Cadoc snapped in Russian. “If we should meet a patrol, then nothing has happened, we’ve simply been out for a little drink and merriment. Will you agree to that, my lady? You do owe us something, and we’d hate to miss the fleet’s departure tomorrow because Yaroslav’s officers wanted to question us.”

“I must get home,” she pleaded.

“You shall. We’ll see you safely back, never fear. But first—“ Shouts lifted to the rear. “Hark! Somebody did come. They’ve found the knife, and if they have a lantern too, they’ll have seen the blood and scuffled offal. Here.” Cadoc led them into an alley, a tunnel of murk. “Roundabout, but it avoids trouble. We’ll lie low for an hour or two and then escort you, my lady.”

They emerged on a broad street, moon-bright. Svoboda’s wits had returned. She wondered how far she could trust the pair. Might it be wisest to insist she go back to Olga’s at once? If they refused, she could strike out by herself, no worse off than earlier. But that had not been well off at all. And—a throbbing, a warmth—never had she known anybody like this. Never again would she, perhaps. They were to sail in the morning and she, she was once more to become a wife.

Then Cadoc plucked his companion’s sleeve and said merrily, “Whoa, Rufus. Don’t go on past.” A house bulked before them. The door was unbarred. They wiped their feet and trod through, into a space where she could barely see tables, benches, a couple of night lamps burning. “The common room,” said Cadoc in her ear. “This is a hostel for those who can afford it. Quiet, please.”

She peered. Rufus’ lantern showed him to be lumpy-featured, freckled, the dense whiskers and thin hair a bright yellowish-red. Cadoc was altogether foreign, his face narrow and aquiline, the eyes slightly aslant tike a Finn’s but large and brown, hair shoulder-length and as raven-black as the beard he kept trimmed to a point. A golden finger ring was equally alien in its workmanship, a snake that bit its tail. Seldom had she met as ready a smile as was his.

“Well, well,” he murmured. “I had no idea that the lady in distress was so comely.” He bowed, as if she were a princess. “Fear not, I repeat. We’ll take proper care of you. Alas for your raiment.” Glancing down, she saw filth smeared over it.

“I, I could tell people I fell,” she stammered. “That is true.”

“I think we can do better,” Cadoc said.

Rufus followed them upstairs to a second-floor chamber. It was large, wainscoted, drapes by a glazed window and a rug on the floor, with four beds, a table, several stools, and whatever else comfort required. Rufus took the candle from his lantern and used it to light the tapers in a seven-branched brass holder. His deftness told Svoboda he must have lost his hand long ago, to have learned so well how to do without it.

“We are the only two,” Cadoc told Svoboda. “It’s worth the cost. Now—“ He squatted by a chest, took a key from his pouch, opened the lock. “Most of our goods are on our ship, naturally, but here are. some especially valuable, whether from abroad or acquired in Kiyiv. They include—“ He rummaged. “Ah, yes.” The fabric he drew out shone in the candlelight. “I regret we can’t prepare a hot bath at this hour, my lady, but yonder you’ll find a basin, water jug, soap, towels, slop jar. Make free, and afterward don this. Meanwhile, of course, Rufus and I will absent ourselves. If you’ll open the door a crack and hand out your soiled things, he’ll see what he can do toward cleansing them.”

The redbeard made a mouth. He grumbled in an unknown tongue. Cadoc replied and, somehow, jollied him till he nodded. They took single candles in holders and left.

Svoboda stood alone with her bewilderment. Did she dream? Had she blundered into elvenland, or had she met a pair of gods, here in this Christian stronghold? Suddenly she laughed. Whatever befell, it was new, it was a wonder!

She unfastened brooches and laces, pulled clothing over her head, held it around the door as Cadoc had suggested. Somebody took it. She closed the door again and went to wash. The cloth caressed a nakedness that the cool air seemed to flow across. She dawdled at the task. When a knock sounded, she called, “Not yet,” and hurried to dry herself. The garment, tossed onto a bed, drew a gasp from her. It was a robe of sheening, baby-smooth material, gold-trimmed blue, secured by silver buttons. Her feet were now bare. Well, peeping from beneath the skirt, they would catch glances, she thought, and flushed hot. Quickly she combed locks fallen astray around her coiled braids, and knew their amber color would show well above the dress. “Enter,” she said, not quite evenly.

Cadoc appeared, a tray balanced on his left hand. He shut the door behind him and put the tray on the table. It bore a flagon and two cups. “I never knew silk could be this beautiful,” he said.

“What?” asked Svoboda. She wished her pulse would slow.

“No matter. I’m often rather brash. Please sit and enjoy a stoup with me. I woke the potboy to give me of the landlord’s choicest. Take your ease, recover from that foul experience.”

She lowered herself to a stool. Before he did likewise, Cadoc poured out a red liquid with a summery odor. “You are very kind,” she whispered. As Gleb is kind, she thought; then, unwillingly: No, Gleb is a countryside trader growing old. He can read and write, but what else does he know, what has he seen and done beyond his narrow rounds? “How can I repay you?” Immediately: That was a foolish thing to say!

However, Cadoc only smiled, raised his cup, and replied, “You can tell me your name, my lady, and whatever else you care to. You can gladden me with your company for a short while. That is ample. Drink, I pray you.”

She sipped. Deliciousness flowed over her tongue. This was no berry wine of the backwoods, it was—was— “I, I am—“ Almost, she gave him her baptismal name. But of course that would be unwise. She believed she could trust this man, but if a sorcerer somehow learned it she would be open to spells. Besides, she seldom thought about it. “Svoboda Volodarovna,” the name she used at home. “From ... afar. Where is your friend?”

“Rufus? Oh, I’ve put him to getting your clothes as clean as possible. Afterward he won’t disturb us. I gave him a flagon of his own to keep him company. A loyal man, brave, but limited.”

“Your servant, then?”

Did a shadow flit across his face? “An associate of mine for a long, long time. He lost his hand fighting once, warding my back, when a gang of Saxons ambushed us. He kept on fighting, left-handed, and we escaped.”

What were Saxons? Robbers? “Such a wound should have disabled him, at least. Most men would soon have died of it.”

“We’re a tough pair. But enough. How did you happen to be abroad after dark, Svoboda Volodarovna? You’re clearly not the kind who ordinarily would. It was sheer luck that Rufus and I were in earshot. We’d been having a last cup with a Rus factor I’ve come to know; bade him goodnight since we must rise betimes tomorrow, set off, and then— Ah, it seems God would not let a lady such as you come to sordid grief.”

The wine glowed and thrilled in her blood. She remembered caution, but did find herself blurting out as much as Gleb had revealed on her behalf to Olga Borisovna and ... and, as her voice ran on, to Igor Olegev. Cadoc’s shrewd, quiet questions made it easy.

“Ah,” he murmured at length. “Thank the saints, we did save you from ruin. That besotted mercenary would have left you in no state to hide what had befallen, if he left you alive at all.” He paused. “Whereas you can tell your landlady, and afterward that man who’s playing father to you, that you stayed too late at the church, lost in prayer. It’s nothing unusual hereabouts.”

She bridled. “Shall I give them a falsehood? I have my honor.”

He grinned. “Oh, come now. You’re not fresh out of a cloister.” She didn’t know what that might be, but caught his drift. “How often in your life has a He been more than harmless, been a shield against hurt? Why put the good Gleb in an awkward position, when he has worked so hard on your behalf?” Impudently: “As the go-between who brought Igor the chandler a superb new wife, Gleb can await excellent business deals. Spoil it not for him, Svoboda.”

She covered her confusion by draining her cup. He refilled it. “I understand,” he said. “You are young, and the young are apt to be idealistic. Nevertheless, you have imagination and boldness beyond your years, more than most men do, that you would set forth into an altogether different life. Use that wisdom.”

Sudden desolation welled up in her. She had learned how to turn it into mirth of a sort. “You talk as my grandfather might have,” she said. “How old are you?”

His tone bantered. “Not yet worn out.”

Eagerness to know surged like lust. She leaned forward, aware of his awareness of her bosom. The wine buzzed, bees in a clover meadow. “You’ve told nothing of yourself. What are you?” A prince or boyar, ending his father’s name not in “ev” but in “vitch”? The byblow of a forest god?

“A merchant,” he said. “I’ve followed this route for years, building my wealth till I own a ship. My stock is fine things: amber and furs from the North, cloths and delicacies from the South, costly without being too bulky or heavy.” Maybe the drink had touched him a bit also, for he added, puzzlingly, half under his breath, “It lets me meet people of many different kinds. I am curious about them.”

“Where are you from?”

“Oh, I came through Novgorod, as traders from my parts do, by river, lake, portage, to here. Ahead He the great Dniepr and its falls—hardest of the portages, that, and our military escort much needed in case of raiders off the steppe—then the sea, and at last Constantinople. Not that I make the journey every year. It’s long both ways, after all. Most cargoes are transshipped here at Kiyiv. I return to Swedish and Danish ports, or ofttimes to England. However, as I said, I want to travel as much as I’m able. Have I answered you windily enough?”

She shook her head. “No. I meant, what is your nation?”

He spoke with more care. “Rufus and I—Cymriu, the dwellers call that country. It is part of the same island as England, is the last of the ancient Britain, best for me because nobody there would mistake me for English. Rufus doesn’t matter, he’s my old retainer, he’s gone by the nickname so long that he’s well-nigh forgotten any else. I, though—Cadoc ap Rhys.”

“I’ve never heard of those lands.”

“No,” he sighed, “I didn’t expect you had.”

“I’ve a feeling you’ve traveled more than you just said.”

“I have wandered quite widely, true.”

“I envy you,” burst from her. “Oh, I envy you!”

He raised his brows. “What? It’s a hard life, often dangerous, always lonely.”

“But free. Your own master. If I could fare like you—“ Her eyes stung. She swallowed hard and tried to lay hold on the tears before they broke loose.

Turned grave, he shook his head in his turn. “You do not know what becomes of camp followers, Svoboda Volodarovna. I do.”

Understanding washed over her. “Y-you are a lonely man, Cadoc,” she said around a thickness. “Why?”

“Make the best of that life you have,” he counselled. “Each in our own way, we are all of us trapped in ours.”

“You too.” Your strength must fade, your pride shall crumble, in one more blink of time you will go down into the earth and soon after that your very name will be forgotten, dust on the wind.

He winced. “Yes. Thus it seems.”

“I’ll remember you!” she cried.

“What?”

“I— Nothing, nothing. I am shaken and weary and, and I think a little drunk.”

“Do you wish to sleep till your clothes are ready? I’ll stay quiet— Svoboda, you weep.” Cadoc came around the table, stooped over her, laid an arm across her shoulders.

“Forgive me, I’m being weak and, and foolish. Not myself, please believe me, not myself.”

“No, certainly not, dear venturer. I know how you feel.”

His lips brushed her hair. Blindly she turned her head toward him, and knew he would kiss her. It was gentle. Her tears made it taste like the sea.

“I am an honorable man, of sorts,” he said against her cheek. How warm were his breath, his body. “I’d not force you to anything.”

“You need not,” she heard through the great soft thunders.

“I depart shortly after dawn, Svoboda, and your marriage awaits you.”

She gripped him hard, nails into his coat. “Three husbands I have had already,” she told him, “and sometimes, at the lakeside, the spring feast of Kupala— Oh, yes, Cadoc.”

For an instant she saw that she had let out too much. Now she must somehow answer his questions, with her head awhirl... But he gave her his hand, it was as if he lifted her to her feet, and went by her side to a bed.

Thereafter she was again in a dream. Her wanting him had come over her as a torrent. If she foresaw anything whatsoever, it was a slaking. He was not a big man, but he might be strong, he might take a while to finish, long enough, and then she could topple into sleep. Instead, he took the robe from her through a time that swayed on and on, and guided her to help him off with his garb, always his fingers and his mouth knowing what to do, what to evoke; and though the bed was narrow, when he brought her down upon it he still stroked and touched and kissed until she wailed for him to open the heavens and unloose the suns.

Afterward they caressed, laughed, japed, spread two straw ticks on the floor that they might have real room to move about, played, loved, his head rested between her breasts, she urged him anew and yet anew, he swore he had never known the match to her and the believing of him was a tall fire.

The glass in the window grayed. Candles had burned down to stubs. The smoke of them drifted bitter through a chill that she finally began to feel.

“I must see you to your lodging,” he said in her arms.

“Oh, not at once,” she begged.

“The fleet leaves soon. And you have your own world to meet. First you will need rest, Svoboda, dear.”

“I am weary as if I’d plowed ten fields,” she murmured. A giggle. “But you did the plowing. You rascal, I’m hardly able to walk.” She nuzzled the silky beard. “Thank you, thank you.”

“I’ll sleep soundly on the ship, myself. Afterward I’ll wake and remember you. And long for you, Svoboda. But that is the price, I suppose.”

“If only—”

“I told you, the trade I follow these days is a bad one for a woman.”

“You come home from it after the season, don’t you?”

He sat up. His face seemed as gray as the light. “I have no home any more. I dare not. You couldn’t understand. Come, we must hurry, but we needn’t ruin this that we’ve had.”

Dumbly, she waited while he dressed and went to get her clothes from Rufus. The thought trickled through her: He’s right, the thing is impossible, or at least it would be too brief and become too full of pain. He does not know, however, why he is right.

Her garments were wet after washing. They hung clammily. Well, with luck she could get to her room unnoticed. “I wish I could give you the silk robe,” Cadoc said. “If you can explain it away— No?” Maybe he would think of her when it passed to some girl somewhere else. “I also wish I could feed you. We’re under time’s whip, you and I. Come.” Yes, she was hungry, faint with hunger and weariness and ache. That was good. It pulled her spirit back down to where she belonged.

Fog hazed and hushed the streets. The sun had belike risen, but barely, in the east that Svoboda had forsaken. She walked hand in hand with Cadoc. Among the Rusi, that simply meant friendship. Nobody outside would know when the clasp tightened. Few people were around thus far, anyhow. From a passerby Cadoc learned the way to Olga’s dwelling.

They stopped before it. “Fare gladly, Svoboda,” he said.

“And you,” was all she could answer.

“I will remember you—“ his smile twisted— “more than is wise.”

“I will forever remember you, Cadoc,” she said.

He took both her hands in his, bowed above them, straightened, let her go, turned, and walked off. Soon he was lost in the fog.

“Forever,” she said into the emptiness.

A while she remained standing. The sky overhead was clear, brightening to blue. A falcon, early aloft, caught the light of the hidden sun on his wings.

Maybe it’s best that this was what it was and nothing more, she thought. A moment snatched free, for me to keep beyond the reach of the years.

Three husbands have I buried, and I think that was release, to pray them goodbye and see them shoveled under, for by then they had wasted and withered and were no longer the men who proudly stood beside me at the weddings. And Rostislav had peered at me, wondered, accused, beaten me when he got drunk... No, burying my children, that was the worst. Not so much the small ones, they die and die and you have no time to know them except as a brightness that goes by. Even my first grandchild, he was small. But Svetlana, now, she was a woman, a wife, it was my great-grandchild who killed her in the birthing.

At least that was the final sorrow. The villagers, yes, my living children, they could no longer endure this thing that is I, that never grows decently old. They fear me, therefore they hate me. And I could no longer endure, either. I might have welcomed the day when they came with axes and clubs to make an end of the thing.

Gleb Ilyev, ugly, greedy little Gleb—he has the manhood to see past strangeness, see the woman who is neither child of the gods nor creature of Satan but is the most lost and bewildered of any. I wish I could reward Gleb with better than silver. Well, I wish for much that cannot be.

Through him, I have found how to stay alive. I will be the best wife to Igor Olegev that I am able. But as the years pass, I will befriend somebody else like Gleb, and when the time comes, be will find a new place, a new beginning for me. The widow of one man can many again, in some town or on some farm well distant, and nobody she knew will think it is altogether outlandish, and nobody she comes to know will think of questions she dares not answer. Of course, the children must be left provided for, such as are not grown. I will be the best mother that I am able.

A smile winged by.

Who can tell? A few husbands of mine may even be like Cadoc.

Her dress clung and dripped. She felt how cold she was, shivered, and walked slowly to the door of the house.

VII The Same Kind

HABIT DIES hard, and then from time to time will rise from its grave. “What do you really know about this drab, Lugo?” asked Rufus. He spoke in Latin such as had not been heard for centuries, even among churchmen of the West.

Nor had Cadoc used that name for a span longer yet. He replied in Greek: “Practice your living languages more. Get your terminology right. The word you used scarcely fits the most fashionable and expensive courtesan in Constantinople.”

“A whore be a whore,” said Rufus stubbornly, though he did change to the modern tongue of the Empire. “You been, uh, in-vest-igating her, talking with people, sounding ‘em out, damn near since we got here. Weeks. And me left to twiddle my thumb.” He glanced down at the stump of his right wrist. “When’re we going to do something?”

“Perhaps quite soon,” Cadoc answered. “Or perhaps not. It depends on what further I can learn about the lovely Athenais, if anything. And on much else, to be sure. I am not only overdue for a change of identity, we are both overdue for a change of occupation. The Rus trade is spinning faster and faster toward ruin.”

“Yah, yah, you’ve said that plenty often. I’ve seen for myself. But what about this woman? You haven’t told me nothing about her.”

“That is because patience in disappointment is not among your excellences.” Cadoc paced to the single window and stared out. It stood open on summer air, odors of smoke and tar and dung and hinted fragrances, noise of wheels and hoofs and feet and voices. From this third-floor inn room the view swept over roofs, streets, the city wall, the gate and harbor of the Kontoskalion. Masts raked upward from the docks. Beyond glittered the Sea of Marmora. Craft danced on its blueness, everything from bumboats shaped like basins to a freighter under sail and a naval dromond with oars in parade-ground step. It was hard to imagine, to feel, the shadow under which all this lay.

Cadoc clasped his hands behind his back. “However, I may as well inform you now,” he said. “Today I have hopes that I’ll reach the end of the trail, or find that it was a false scent. It’s been maddeningly vague, as you’d expect. So-and-so tells me that somebody else once told him this-and-that. With difficulty, because he’s moved, I track down Kyrios Somebody Else to verify it, and to the best of his dim recollection that is not quite what he told So-and-so, but from a third party he did once hear— Ah, well.

“Basically, ‘Athenais’ is the latest name the lady has taken. No surprise there. Name changes are quite usual in her profession; and of course she prefers to obscure her origins, the fact that she was not always the darling of the city. I’ve established that, earlier, she worked as Zoe in one of the better brothels over in Galata; and I am practically certain that before then she was on this side of the Golden Horn, in the Phanar quarter, as a less elegant girl calling herself Eudoxia. Beyond that, the information is slight and unreliable. Too many people have died or otherwise disappeared.

“The pattern has been the same, though, an outwardly affable but actually secretive woman who avoids pimps—at worst, formerly, she paid off as necessary—and spends no more on fanciments than she must. Instead, she saves—invests, I suspect—with an eye to moving up another rung on the ladder. Now she is independent, even powerful, what with her connections and the things she doubtless knows. And—“ Despite the dull houndwork that lay behind, despite the coolness he kept m his tone, a tingle went along Cadoc’s backbone, out to his scalp and fingertips. “The trail reaches at least thirty years into the past, Rufus. It may well be fifty or more years long. Always she is youthful, always she is beautiful.”

“I knew what you was after,” said the redbeard, unwontedly low, “but I’d stopped thinking you’d ever find it.”

“I too, almost. Seven centuries since I came on you, and nobody before and nobody afterward, for all my searching. Yes, hope wears thin. Maybe today, at last—“ Cadoc shook himself, turned about, and laughed. “I’m soon due at her place. I dare not tell you what a few hours there cost!”

“Have a care,” Rufus grunted. “A whore be a whore. I go find me a cheap ‘un, ha?”

Impulsively, Cadoc reached into his pouch and gave him a fistful of silver miliarisions. “Add this to your own coins and enjoy yourself, old fellow. A shame that the Hippodrome isn’t open just now, but you must know several odeions where the performances are bawdy enough for your less elevated moments. Just don’t talk too loosely.”

“You taught me that, you did. Have fun. I hope she turns out to be what you want, master. I’ll use a bit o’ the money to buy you a good-luck spell.” That seemed to be about as much as the prospect could move Rufus’ stolidity. But then, Cadoc thought, he lacks the wit to understand what it will mean to find another immortal—a woman. At least, immediately; it may dawn on him later.

I don’t suppose I quite understand it yet myself.

Rufus went out. Cadoc took an embroidered mantle off its hanger and fitted it over the fine linen sakkos and be-jeweled dalmatic that enrobed him. On his feet were curly-toed shoes from far Cordova. Even for an afternoon appointment, one went to Athenais appropriately dressed.

He had already gotten his hair cut short and his beard shaven off. Fluent in Greek and familiar, after much prowling, with the byways of the city, he could pass for Byzantine. Not that he would try to do so unnecessarily. It wasn’t worth the risk. Rus merchants were supposed to stay in the St. Manio suburb on the Galata side of the Horn, crossing the bridge to the Blachernae Gate by day and returning at evening. He was still listed among them. It had taken a substantial bribe as well as persuasive chatter to get permission to take lodging here. He was not actually a Rus, he told the officials, and he was ready to retire from the trade. Both statements were true. He had gone on, mendaciously but persuasively, about certain new arrangements he had in mind, which would be to the profit of local magnates as well as himself. In the course of generations, given an innate talent for it, one learns how to convince. Thus he won freedom to pursue his inquiries with maximum efficiency.

The streets throbbed and clamored with traffic. He followed their steepnesses to the Mese, the avenue that, branching, ran from end to end of the city. Down its width on his right he spied the column that upbore Justinian’s equestrian statue in the Forum of Constantine and beyond it, just glimpsed, the walls of the Imperial palace grounds, senate house, law courts, Hippodrome; the domes of Hagia Sophia; the gardens and shining buildings on the Acropolis: glories raised through lifetime after transient lifetime.

He turned left. Brilliance flowed with him and glowed from the arcades that lined the thoroughfare. Plainness was nearly lost in it, workmen, porters, carters, farmers in from the countryside, priests of the lower orders. Even hawkers and strolling entertainers flaunted fantastic colors as they shouted what wonders they offered; even slaves wore the liveries of great households. A nobleman passed by in his palanquin, young dandies whooped in a wineshop, a troop of guardsmen tramped with mail agleam, a cavalry officer and his attendant cataphracts cantered haughtily behind a runner who shouted and elbowed people aside, banners flew, cloaks and scarfs billowed in a brisk wind off the sea, New Rome seemed immortally young. Religion yielding to commerce and diplomacy, foreigners were plentiful, be they suave Muslim Syrians, boorish Catholic Normans, or from lands farther and stranger yet. Cadoc was content to vanish into the human flood.

At the Forum of Theodosius he crossed over to its northern corner, ignoring the sellers who cried their wares and the beggars who cried their need. Where the Aqueduct of Valens overlooked the roof-decked hollow it spanned, he paused for a moment’s breath. The view swept before him, down to rampart and battlements, the Gate of the Drungarii, the Golden Horn full of its own farings, and across those waters hills green with growth, white with the houses of Pera and Galata. Gulls yonder made a living snowstorm. You can tell a rich harbor by its gulls, thought Cadoc. How much longer will this many fly and mew here?

He thrust sadness from him and continued north, downhill, until he found the house he wanted. Outwardly it was an unpretentious three-story building, hemmed in by its neighbors, the facade rosy-plastered. But that was ample for one woman, her servants, and the revelries over which she presided.

A bronze knocker was made in the form of a scallop shell. Cadoc’s heart skipped a step. Had she recalled that this Western Christian emblem of a pilgrim once belonged to Ashtoreth? The fingers with which he rattled it were damp.

The door opened and he confronted a huge black man in Asian-like shirt and trousers—an entire male, likelier hireling than slave, well able to remove anyone whom his employer found objectionable. “Christ be with you, Kyrie. May I ask what is your desire?”

“My names is Cadoc ap Rhys. The lady Athenais awaits me.” The visitor handed over a piece of parchment bearing the identification, given him when he paid the price to her broker. That woman had had to decide first that he was suitably refined, and still she had told him no time was available for a week. Cadoc slipped the doorman a golden bezant—a little extravagant, perhaps, but impressiveness might help his chances.

It certainly got him deference. In a twittering cloud of pretty girls and two eunuchs he passed through an anteroom richly furnished, its walls ornamented with discreetly erotic scenes, up a grand staircase to the outer chamber of a suite. This was hung in red velvet above a floral Oriental carpet. Chairs flanked a table of inlaid ebony whereon stood a flagon of wine, figured glass goblets, plates of cakes, dates, oranges. Light fell dim through small windows, but candles burned in multiple holders. Sweetness wafted from a golden censer. A lark dwelt in a silver cage. Here Athenais was.

She put aside the harp she had been strumming. “Welcome, Kyrie Cadoc from afar.” Her voice was low, scarcely less musical than the strings had been—carefully trained. “Twice welcome, bearing news of marvels, like a fresh breeze.”

He bowed. “My lady is too gracious to a poor wanderer.”

Meanwhile, keenly as if she were an enemy, he assessed her. She sat on a couch, displaying herself against its white-and-gold back, in a gown that enhanced rather than revealed. Her jewelry was a bracelet, a pendant, and three rings, small but exquisite. It was her person, not her wealth, and her spirit more than her person, that she had the intelligence to emphasize. Her figure was superb in a voluptuous Eastern fashion, but he judged that suppleness and strength underlay it. Her face he would simply have called handsome: broad, straight-nosed, full-lipped, eyes hazel beneath arching brows, blue-black hair piled thick around the tawny complexion. It was not looks that had brought her to this house, it was knowledge, skill, perception, the harvest of— how long an experience?

Her laugh chimed. “No poor man enters here! Come, be seated, take refreshment. Let us get to know each other.”

She never rushed to the bedroom, he had heard, unless a patron insisted, and such a one was seldom allowed back. Conversation and flirtation beforehand were part of a delight that was said to have a climax unrivalled.

“Marvels have I seen,” Cadoc declared, “but the finest of them today.” He let a servant remove his upper garment and sat down beside her. A girl knelt to fill their glasses. At a tiny gesture from Athenais, all attendants bowed out.

She gave him a subtle flutter of lashes. “Certain men of Britannia are more polished than news of it led me to expect,” she murmured. “Have you come directly from there?” He observed the sharpness of the demure glance and knew she was taking his measure. If he wanted a woman who had more in her head than a mouth, that was what she would provide.

Therefore—

His pulse stammered. The self-control of centuries underlay the calm wherewith he regarded her, took a sip of the estimable wine, and smiled. “No,” he said, “I have not been in Britannia, or England and Wales as they call it nowadays, for a rather long time. But then, though I told your ancilla that is my country when she asked, I am not really a native of it. Or of anywhere else, any longer. On my last visit here I heard rumors about you. They caused me to return as soon as possible.”

She half shaped a reply, aborted it, and sat cat-watchful, too wise to exclaim, “Flatterer!”

He calculated his grin. “I daresay your ... callers ... number some with various peculiarities. You gratify them or not according to your inclination. It must have been a cruel struggle to win this independence. Well, then, will you indulge my whim? It is perfectly harmless. I only wish to talk for a short span. I would like to tell you a story. You may find it amusing. That is all. May I?”

She failed to quite hide her tautness. “I have heard many stories, Kyrie. Do continue.”

He leaned back and let the words flow easily while he looked before him, observing her from the corner of an eye. “Call it the kind of yarn that sailors spin during calm watches or in taverns ashore. It concerns a mariner, though afterward he did numerous different things. He thought himself an ordinary man of his people. So did everybody else. But bit by bit, year by year, they noticed something very odd about him. He never fell sick and he never grew old. His wife aged and finally died, his children turned gray and then white-haired, their children begot and raised children and likewise fell prey to time, but everything in this man since the third decade of his life stayed changeless. Was that not remarkable?”

He had her, he saw, and exulted. Her gaze was utterly intent.

“At first it seemed he might be blessed of the gods. Yet he showed no other special powers, nor did he do any special deeds. Though he made costly sacrifices and later, approaching despair, consulted costly magicians, to him came no revelation, nor any solace when those he loved went down into death. Meanwhile the slow growth of awe among the people had, with equal slowness, become envy, then fear, then hatred. What had he done to be thus condemned, or what had he sold to be thus spared? What was he, sorcerer, demon, walking corpse, what? He barely evaded attempts on his life. Finally the authorities moved to investigate him and he fled, for he suspected they would question him under torture and put him to death. He knew he could be wounded, although he recovered fast, and felt sure that the worst injuries would prove as fatal to him as to anybody else. Despite his loneliness, he kept a young man’s desire for life and the savoring of it.

“For hundreds and hundreds of years he was a rover on the face of the earth. Often he let his yearnings overcome him and settled down somewhere, married, raised a family, lived as mortals do. But always he must lose them, and after a single common lifetime disappear. Between whiles, which was mostly, he plied trades where a man can come and go little remarked. His old seamanship was among these, and it took him widely across the world. Ever he sought for more tike himself. Was he unique in the whole creation? Or was his kind simply very rare? Those whom misfortune or malice did not destroy early on, they doubtless learned to stay hidden as he had learned. But if this be the case, how was he to find them, or they him?

“And if his was a hard and precarious lot, how much worse must it be for a woman? What could she do? Surely none but the strongest and cleverest survived. How might they?

“Does that conundrum interest my lady?”

He drank of his wine, for whatever tranquility might lie within it. She stared beyond him. Silence lengthened.

At last she drew breath, brought her look back to engage his, and said slowly, “That is a curious tale indeed, Kyrie Cadoc.”

“A tale only, of course, a fantasy for your amusement. I do not care to be locked up as a madman.”

“I understand.” A smile ghosted across her countenance. “Pray continue. Did this undying man ever come upon any others?”

“That remains to be told, my lady.”

She nodded. “I see. But say more about him. He’s still a shadow to me. Where was he born, and when?”

“Let us imagine it was in ancient Tyre. He was a boy when King Hiram aided King Solomon to build the Temple in Jerusalem.”

She gasped. “Oh, long ago!”

“About two thousand years, I believe. He lost count, and later when he tried to consult the records they were fragmentary and in disagreement. No matter.”

“Did he meet the Savior?” she whispered.

He sighed and shook his head. “No, he was elsewhere at that time. He did see many gods come and go. And kings, nations, histories. Perforce he lived among them, under names of their kind, while they endured and until they perished. Names he lost track of, like years. He was Hanno and Ithobaal and Snefru and Phaon and Shlomo and Rashid and Gobor and Flavius Lugo and, oh, more than he can remember.”

She sat straight, as if ready to spring, whether from him or at him. Low in her throat, she asked, “Might Cadoc be among those names?”

He kept seated, leaned back, but eyes now full upon hers. “It might,” he answered, “even as a lady might have called herself Zoe, and before that Eudoxia, and before that— names which are perhaps still discoverable.”

A shudder passed through her. “What do you want of me?”

He set his glass down, most carefully, smiled, spread his hands, palms up, and told her in his softest voice, “Whatever you choose to give. It may be nothing. How can I compel you, supposing that were my desire, which it is not? If you dislike harmless lunatics, you need never see or hear from me again.”

“What ... are you ... prepared to offer?”

“Shared and lasting faith. Help, counsel, protection, an end of loneliness. I’ve learned a good deal about surviving, and manage to prosper most of the time, and have my refuges and my hoards against the evil days. At the moment I command modest wealth. More important, I stay true to my friends and would rather be a woman’s lover than her overlord. Who knows but what the children of two immortals will themselves prove deathless?”

She studied him a while. “But you always hold something back, don’t you?”

“A Phoenician habit, which a rootless life has strengthened. I could unlearn it.”

“It was never my way,” she breathed, and came to him.

THEY LOUNGED against pillows at the headboard of the huge bed. Talk grew between them like a blossoming plant in spring. Now and then a hand stroked across flesh gone cool again, but those were gentle caresses. A languor possessed them, as if part of the lingering odors of incense and love. Their minds roused first. The words were calm, the tone tender.

“Four hundred years ago I was Aliyat in Palmyra,” she said. “And you, in your ancient Phoenicia?”

“My birthname was Hanno,” he answered. “I used it the oftenest, afterward, till it died out of every language.”

“What adventures you must have had.”

“And you.”

She winced. “I would rather not speak of that.”

“Are you ashamed?” He laid a finger under her chin and brought her face around toward his. “I would not be,” he said gravely. “I am not. We have survived, you and I, by whatever means were necessary. That’s now behind us. Let it drift into darkness with the wreckage of Babylon. We belong to our future.”

“You ... do not ... find me sinful?”

He laughed a bit. “I suspect that if we both grew quite candid about our pasts, you’d be the one shocked.”

“Nor do you fear God’s curse?”

“I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us.”

Tears trembled on her lashes. “You are strong. You are kind.” She nestled close. “Tell me of yourself.”

“That would take a while. I’d grow thirsty.”

She reached for a bell on an end table and rang it. “That we can do something about,” she said with a flash of smile. “You’re right, however. We have the whole future wherein to explore our past. Tell me first of Cadoc. I do need to understand him, that we may lay our plans.”

“Well, it began when Old Rome departed from Britannia— No, wait, I forgot, in all this joy. First I should tell you about Rufus.”

A maidservant entered. She dipped her glance, otherwise seemed unperturbed by the two naked bodies. Athenais ordered the wine and refreshments brought hi from the anteroom. While this was done, Cadoc marshalled his thoughts. When they were alone, he described his companion.

“Poor Rufus,” she sighed. “How envious he will be.”

“Oh, I expect not,” Cadoc replied. “He’s grown used to being my subordinate. In return, I do his thinking for him. Give him adequate food, drink, and swiving, and he’s content.”

“Then he has been no balm for your aloneness,” she said softly.

“Not much. But I owe my life to him, several times over, and therefore this day’s magnificence.”

“Glib scoundrel.” She kissed him. He buried his visage in her fragrant hair until she guided him to a glassful, a sweet cake, and sober discourse.

“The western Britons preserved some vestige of civilization. Yes, I frequently thought of making my way here, where I knew the Empire continued. But for a long time, the likelihood of arriving with any money, or arriving at all, was slight. Meanwhile life among the Britons was not too bad. I had come to know them. It was easy to move among identities and to stay reasonably well-off. I could wait for the English, the Franks, the Northmen to acquire milder ways, for civilization to be reborn throughout Europe. After that, as I’ve mentioned, the Rus trade route let me make a good living and meet a variety of people, both along it and down here in the Mediterranean world. You understand that that seemed my only hope of finding anyone else like me. Surely you’ve cherished the same hope, Athenais—Al-iyat.”

He could barely hear: “Until it grew too painful.”

He kissed her cheek, and she brought her lips to his, and presently she crooned, “It has ended. You have found me. I keep striving to believe that this is real.”

“It is, and we’ll keep it so.”

With that practicality which bespoke her intelligence, she asked, “What do you propose we do?”

“Well,” he said, “it was about time anyhow for me to finish with Cadoc. He’s been in sight longer than he should have been; some old acquaintances must be starting to wonder. Besides, since the Norman duke made himself king of England, more and more young English, ill content, have been coming south to join the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. Those who happened to hear of Cadoc would know how unlikely it is that a Welshman be a trader of his sort.

“Worse, when the Rus lord Yaroslav died his realm was divided among his sons, and they are now falling out with each other. The barbarian plainsmen take advantage. The routes grow dangerous. Fresh Rus attacks on Constantinople are quite conceivable, and could hurt the trade even more. I well remember what difficulties previous forays caused.

“So, let Athenais and Cadoc retire from their businesses, move away, and drop out of touch with everybody they knew. First, naturally, Aliyat and Hanno will have liquidated their possessions.”

She frowned. “You talk as if you meant to leave Constantinople. Must we? It is the queen of the world.”

“It will not remain that,” he told her grimly.

She gave him a startled glance.

“Think,” he said. “The Normans have taken the last Imperial outpost in Italy. The Saracens hold everything south of there from Spain through Syria. They have not been totally hostile of late. However—the Imperial defeat at Manzikert last year was more than a military disaster that led to an abrupt change of Emperors. The Turks had already taken Armenia from you, remember. Now Anatolia lies open to them. It will be touch and go whether the Empire can hold the Ionian littoral against them. Meanwhile the Balkan provinces chafe and the Normans venture east. Here at home, commerce shrinks, poverty and unrest grow, corruption at court vies for mastery with incompetence. Oh, I daresay the catastrophe will be a while in coming full upon New Rome. But let us get out well ahead of it.”

“Where? Is any place safe and, and decent?”

“Well, certain of the Muslim capitals are brilliant. Far eastward, I hear, an emperor reigns over a realm vast, peaceful, and glorious. But those are alien folk; the ways to them are long and beset. Western Europe would be easier, but it’s still turbulent and backward. Also, since the churches openly split apart, life there has been hard for people from Orthodox countries. We’d have to make a show of conversion to Catholicism, and we’d best avoid conspicuousness like that. No, on the whole I’d say we should stay within the Roman Empire for another century or two. In Greece, nobody knows us.”

“Greece? Hasn’t it gone barbarian?”

“Not quite. There’s a heavy population of Slavs in the north and Vlachs in Thessaly, while the Normans are plaguing the Aegean Sea. But such cities as Thebes and Corinth remain well off, well defended. A beautiful country, full of memories. We can be happy there.”

Cadoc raised his brows. “But haven’t you given thought to this yourself?” he went on. “You could only have continued as you are for another ten years at best. Then you’d have had to withdraw, before men noticed that you don’t grow old. And as much in the public eye as you’ve been, you could scarcely stay on in these parts.”

“True.” Athenais smiled. “I meant to announce I’d had a change of heart, repented my wickedness, and would retire afar to a life of poverty, prayer, and good works. I’ve already made arrangements for the quick, quiet transport of my hoard—against any sudden need to escape. After all, that has been my life, to drop from one place and start afresh in another.”

He grimaced. “Always like this?”

“Need forces me,” she answered sadly. “I’m not fit by nature to be a nun, a she-hermit, any such unworldly being. I often call myself a well-to-do widow, but at last the money is spent, unless some upheaval—war, sack, plague, whatever—brings ruin first. A woman cannot very well invest her money tike a man. Whatever pulls me down, usually I must begin again among the lowliest and ... work and save and connive to become better off.”

His smile was rueful. “Not unlike my life.”

“A man has more choices.” She paused. “I do study things beforehand. I agree, on balance Corinth will be best for us.”

“What?” he exclaimed, sitting straight in his astonishment. “You let me rattle on and on about what you perfectly well knew?”

“Men must show forth their cleverness.”

Cadoc whooped laughter. “Superb! A girt who can lead me, me, by the nose like that is the girl I can stay with forever.”

He sobered: “But now we’ll make the move as soon as may be. At once, if I had my wish. Out of this ... filth, to the first true home we’ve either of us had since—”

She laid fingers across his lips. “Hush, beloved,” she said low. “If only that could be. But we can’t simply disappear.”

“Why not?”

She sighed. “It would rouse too much heed. A search for me, at least. There are men, highly placed men, who care for me, who’d be afraid I’d met with foul play. If then we were tracked down— No.” A small fist clenched. “We must go on with our pretenses. For another month, perhaps, while I prepare the ground with talk of, oh, making a pilgrimage, something like that.”

A little while passed before he could say, “Well, a month, set against centuries.”

“For me, the longest month I ever knew. But we’ll see each other during it, often, won’t we? Say we will!”

“Of course.”

“I will hate making you pay, but you can see I must. Never mind, the money will be ours once we are free.”

“Hm, we do need to lay plans, make arrangements.”

“Let that wait till next time. This while we have today is so short. Then I must make ready for the next man.”

He bit his lip. “You cannot tell him you’ve fallen sick?”

“I’d best not. He’s among the most important of them all; his good will can spell the difference between life and death. Bardas Manasses, a manglabites on the staff of the Arch-estrategos.”

“Yes, someone that high in the military, yes, I understand.”

“Oh, my dearest, inwardly you bleed.” Athenais embraced him. “Stop. Forget everything but the two of us. We still have an hour in Paradise.”

She was wholly as knowing, as endlessly various and arousing, as men said.

A MINIATURE procession crossed the bridge over the Horn and approached the Blachernae Gate. They were four Rusi, two Northmen, and a couple in the lead who were neither. The Rusi carried a chest that was plainly heavy, suspended on two poles. The Northmen were off-duty members of the Varangian Guard, helmed and mailed, axes on their shoulders. Though it was clear that they were earning some extra pay by shepherding a valuable freight, it was also clear that this was with official permission, and the sentries waved the party through.

They went on by streets under the city wall. Heights soared above them to battlements and heaven. The morning was yet young and shadow lay deep, almost chill after the brightness on the water. Mansions of the wealthy fell behind and the men entered the humbler, busier Phanar quarter.

“This be muckwit,” grumbled Rufus in Latin. “You’ve even sold your ship, haven’t you? At a loss, I’ll bet, so fast -you got rid of everything.”

“Turned it into gold, gems, portable wealth,” Cadoc corrected merrily. He used the same language. While he had no reason to distrust their escort, caution was alloyed with his spirit. “We’re leaving in another pair of weeks, or had you forgotten?”

“Meanwhile, though—”

“Meanwhile it’ll be stored safely, secretly, where we can claim it at any hour of the day or night and no beforehand notice. You’ve been too much sulking when you weren’t off bousing, old fellow. Have you never listened to me? Aliyat arranged this.”

“What’d she tell their high and mightinesses, to make the way so smooth for us?”

Cadoc grinned. “That I let slip to her what a glorious deal I stand to make with certain other high and mightinesses—a deal which these men can have a slice of if they help me. Women, too, can learn how to cope with the world.”

Rufus grunted.

The building in which Petros Simonides, jeweler, lived and had his shop was unprepossessing. However, Cadoc had long had some knowledge of what trade went through it, besides the owner’s overt business. Several members of the Imperial court found it sufficiently useful that the authorities turned a blind eye. Petros received his visitors jovially. A pair of toughs whom he called nephews, though they resembled him not in the least, helped bring the chest to the cellar and stow it behind a false panel. Money passed. Cadoc declined hospitality on the grounds of haste and led his own followers back to the street.

“Well, Arnulf, Sviatopolk, all of you, my thanks,” he said. “You may go where you like now. You will remember your orders about keeping silence. That need not keep you from drinking my health and fortune.” He dispensed a second purseful. The sailors and soldiers departed gleefully.

“You didn’t think Petros’ food and wine be good?” asked Rufus.

“They doubtless are,” said Cadoc, “but I really have need to hurry. Athenais keeps this whole afternoon for me, and first I want to get myself well prepared at the baths.”

“Huh! Like this whole while since you met her. Never seen you lovesick before. You could as well be fifteen.”

“I feel reborn,” said Cadoc softly. His vision dwelt on distances beyond the bustle and narrowness around. “You will too, when we’ve found you your true wife.”

“With my luck, she’ll be a sow.”

Cadoc laughed, clapped Rufus on the back, and slipped a bezant into his single palm. “Go drown that gloom of yours. Or better yet, work it off with a lively wench.”

“Thanks.” Rufus showed no change of mood. “You do toss money these days.”

“A strange thing about pure joy,” Cadoc murmured. “One wants to share it.”

He sauntered off, whistling. Rufus stood with hunched shoulders and stared after him.

STARS AND a gibbous moon gave light enough. The streets, gone mostly quiet, were swept clean. Occasionally a patrol marched by, lantern-glow shimmering on metal, embodiment of that power which held the city at peace. A man could walk easy.

Cadoc drank deep of the night air. Heat had yielded to mildness, and smoke, dust, stenches, pungencies lain down to rest. As he neared the Kontoskalion, he caught a ghost of tar on the breeze, and smiled. How smells could rouse memories. A galley lay at the Egyptian Harbor of Sor, weathered and salt-streaked by fabulous seas, and his father towered over him, holding his hand. ... He raised that same hand to his nostrils. The hair on it tickled his lip. A scent like jasmine, Aliyat’s perfume, and was there still some of her own sweetness? That had been such a long farewell kiss.

And so happily weary. He chuckled. When he arrived, she told him a message had come from the great Bardas Manasses, he was unable to visit her this evening as planned, she and her dearest had that added time as a free gift of Aphrodite. “I have discovered what immortal strength means,” she purred at the last, close against his breast.

He yawned. Sleep would be very welcome. If only it were at her side— But her servants already saw how she favored this foreigner. Best not give them further cause for wonderment. Gossip might reach the wrong ears.

Soon, though, soon!

Abruptly darkness deepened. He had turned into a lesser street near the harbor and his lodging. Brick walls hulked on either side, leaving just a strip of sky overhead. He slowed, careful lest he stumble on something. Silence had also grown thick. Were those footfalls behind him? It crossed his mind that he had several times glimpsed the same figure hi a hooded cloak. Bound the same way by mere chance?

Light gleamed, a lantern uncovered in an alley as he passed it. For an instant he was dazzled. “That’s him!” struck through. Three men came out of the gut into the street. A sword slipped free.

Cadoc sprang backward. The men deployed, right, left, in front. They had him boxed, up against the opposite wall.

His knife jumped forth. Two of the attackers were armed like him. He wasted no breath in protest or scream for help. If he couldn’t save himself, he’d be dead in minutes. His left hand ripped his mantle loose from its brooch.

The swordsman swung back to strike. The lantern, set down at the alley mouth, made him a featureless piece of night, but Cadoc saw light ripple along his hip. He was mail-clad. The steel whirred. Cadoc swayed aside. He snapped the mantle at the unseen face. It drew a curse and tangled the weapon. Cadoc leaped right. He hoped to dodge past the foeman there. That wight was too skillful. His bulk stepped in the way. His dagger thrust. Cadoc would have taken it in the belly, had he possessed less than immortal vigor. He parried with his own knife and retreated.

Bricks gritted against his shoulderblades. He was trapped anyhow. He showed teeth and feinted, side to side. The daggennen prowled beyond his reach. The swordsman prepared to hew afresh.

Sandals thudded on stones. Light glimmered on a coppery beard. Rufus’ hook caught the swordsman’s throat. It went in. Rufus worked it savagely. The man dropped his blade, clawed at the shaft, went to his knees. He croaked through the blood.

Cadoc scrambled, snatched up the sword, bounced back erect. He was no grand master of this weapon, but he had tried to acquire every fighting art that the centuries brought. A knifeman scuttered clear. Cadoc whirled in time to smite the second, who was nearly at his back. The blade struck an arm. Through the heavy impact, Cadoc thought he felt bone give. The man shrieked, stumbled, and fled.

Snarling, Rufus pulled his hook out and went for the first slabber. That one vanished too, down the street and into night. Rufus halted. He turned about. “You hurt?” he panted.

“No.” Cadoc was as breathless. His heart banged. Yet his mind had gone wholly cold and clear, like ice afloat in the sea off Thule. He glanced at the mailed man, who writhed and moaned and bubbled blood. “Let’s go ... before somebody ... comes.” He discarded the telltale sword.

“To the inn?”

“No.” Cadoc trotted away. His wind returned to him, his pulse slowed. “They knew me. Therefore they knew where to wait and must know where I’m staying. Whoever sent them will want to try again.”

“I guessed it might be a good idea to tail after and keep an eye on you. That be a pile o’ treasure you left with that Phanariot son of a pig.”

“I shouldn’t pride myself on my wits,” said Cadoc bleakly. “You showed a banelful more than I did.”

“Haw, you be in love. Worse’n drunk. Where should we go? I s’pose the main streets be safe. Maybe we can wake ‘em at another inn. I’ve still got money on me, if you don’t.”

Cadoc shook his head. They had emerged on a thoroughfare, bare and dim under the moon. “No. We’ll slink about till sunrise, then mingle with people bound out of the city. Those can’t have been common footpads, or even killers for hire. Armor, sword—at least one of them was an Imperial soldier.”

VSEVOLOD THE Fat, who stood high among the Rus merchants, owned a house in St. Mamo. It was small, since he only used it when he was at Constantinople, but furnished with barbaric opulence and, during his stays, a wanton or two. The servants were young kinsmen of his, whose loyalty could be relied on, and upstairs was a room whose existence was not obvious.

He entered it near the close of day. Gray-shot, his beard fell to the paunch that swelled his embroidered robe. A fist clutched a jug. “I brought wine,” he greeted. “Cheap stuff, but plenty. You will want plenty, and not care how fine it is. Here.” He shoved it toward Cadoc.

The latter rose, paying it no heed. Rufus took it instead and upended it over his mouth. He had snored for hours, while Cadoc prowled to and fro between the barren walls or stared out a window at the Golden Horn and the many-domed city beyond.

“What have you found, Vsevolod Izyaslavev?” Cadoc asked tonelessly, in the same Russian.

The merchant plumped his bottom down on the bed, which creaked. “Bad news,” he rumbled. “I went to the shop of Petros Simonides and met guards posted. It cost me to get an honest answer out of them, and they don’t know anything anyhow. But he is arrested for interrogation, they said.” A sigh like a steppe wind. “If that is true, if they don’t let him off, there goes the best smuggling outlet I ever had. Ah, merciful saints, help a poor old man earn the bread for his little wife and darling children!”

“What about me?”

“You understand, Cadoc Rhysev? I dared not push too hard. I am not young like you. Courage has leaked out with’ youth and strength. Remember now the Lord, in these high days of your life, before age and woe come on you too. But I did talk with a captain in the city guard that I know. Yes, it is as you feared, they want you. He does not know just why, but spoke of a brawl near your rooming place and a man killed. Which I knew already, from you.”

“I thought as much,” said Cadoc. “Thank you.”

Rufus lowered the jug. “What do we do?” he grated.

“Best you stay here, where you have sought refuge,”

Vsevolod replied. “Before long I go home to Chernigov, you know. You can ride with me. The Greeks shall not know you in my ship. Maybe I disguise you as a beautiful Circassian slave girl, Rufus, ha?” He guffawed.

“We don’t have the cost of our passage,” Cadoc said.

“No matter. You are my friend, my brother in Christ. I trust you to pay me back later. Thirty percent interest, agreed? And you tell me more about how you got into this trouble. That might forewarn me.”

Cadoc nodded. “Once we’re outbound, I will.”

“Good.” Vsevolod’s eyes flickered between his guests. “I thought we would have a jolly time tonight, get drunk, but you are not in the mood. Yes, a terrible sorrow, all that money gone. I will have your supper sent up. We shall meet tomorrow. God cheer your sleep.” He rose and lumbered out. The panel slid shut behind him.

Constantinople was a blue shadow above golden-shining water, against golden-red sunset. Dusk filled the room in St. Mamo like smoke. Cadoc raised the wine jug, swallowed, set it down again.

“You really going to tell him?” wondered Rufus.

“Oh, no. Not the truth.” Now they spoke Latin. “I’ll invent a story that he’ll believe and that will do him no harm. Something about an official who decided to get rid of me and seize my gold rather than wait for his share of the profit.”

“The swine could’ve been jealous o’ you, too,” Rufus suggested. “Vsevolod might know you was seeing that Athenais.”

“I have to make up a story in any case.” Cadoc’s voice cracked. “I can’t understand what happened, myself.”

“Hunh? Why, plain’s a wart on your thumper. The bitch put one o’ her customers onto it. Shut your mouth for aye— they’d’ve gone after me next—and diwy your money. Maybe she’s got a hold on a fellow high in the gover’ment, like something she knows about him. Or maybe he was just glad to oblige her and take his share. We was lucky and lived, but she’s won. The hunt is out for us. If we want to stay alive, we won’t come back for twenty-thirty years.” Rufus took the wine and glugged. “Forget her.”

Cadoc’s fist struck the wall. Plaster cracked and fell. “How could she? How?”

“Ah, ‘twas easy. You wove the snare for her.” Rufus patted Cadoc’s shoulder. “Don’t feel bad. You’ll swindle yourself another chest o’ gold inside a ge-ne-ration.”

“Why?” Cadoc leaned against the wall, face buried in arm.

Rufus shrugged. “A whore be a whore.”

“No, but she—immortal—I offered her—“ Cadoc could not go on.

Rufus’ mouth drew tight, invisibly in the gloom. “You ought to could see. You can think better’n me when you put your mind to it. How long’s she been what she be? Four hundred years, you said? Well, now, that be a lot o’ men. A thousand a year? Maybe less these days, but likely more than that earlier.”

“She told me she, she takes as ... much freedom from the life ... as she can.”

“Shows you how fond she be of it. You know the sort o’ things a lot o’ fellows want from a whore. And all the times a girl gets roughed up, or robbed, or kicked out, or knocked up and left to handle that however she can—leave it on a trash heap, maybe? Four hundred years, Lugo. How d’you s’pose she feels about men? And she’d never’ve got to watch you growing old.”

VIII Lady in Waiting

RAIN FELL throughout the day. It was very light, soundless, and lost itself in the mists that smoked over the ground; but it closed off the world like sleep. From the verandah Okura looked across a garden whose stones and dwarf cypresses had gone dim. Water dripped off the shingles above her and filmed the whitewash of the enclosure wall. There sight ended. Though the broad south gate stood open, she barely glimpsed the avenue outside, a puddle, a leafless cherry tree. Fog had taken away the minor palace beyond. All Heian-kyo might never have been.

She shivered and .turned back toward her quarters. The two or three servants whom she passed by were bulky in wadded garments. Her overlapping kimonos kept some warmth of their own and the carefully matched winter colors preserved a forlorn elegance. Breath drifted ghostly. When she entered the mansion, twilight enfolded her. It was as if cold did also. Shutters and blinds could hold off wind, but dankness seeped through and braziers availed little.

Yet comfort of a sort awaited her. Masamichi had been kind enough to allot her a sleeping platform to herself in the west pavilion. Between the sliding screens that marked the room off, a pair of chests and a go table hunched on the floor. She had a fleeting fancy that they wished they could creep under the thick tatami that covered the platform. No one else was about, so its curtains were drawn back. By the flicker of a few tapers, futon and cushions lay as black lumps.

She opened the cupboard where her koto stood. It was among the heirlooms not yet removed; its name was Cuckoo Song. How right for such a day as this, she thought: the bird that is the inconstant lover, that can bear word between the living and the dead, that embodies the ineluctable passage of time. She had in mind a melody well-liked when she was a girl. Afterward she had sometimes played it for her men— those two among her lovers whom she truly cared for— But no, she remembered that the instrument was now tuned for a winter mode.

A maid came into the section, approached, bowed, and piped, “A messenger has arrived from the noble Lord Yasuhira, my lady.” Her manner took it for granted. The liaison between Chikuzen no Okura, lady in waiting in the household of Ex-Emperor Tsuchimikado, and Nakahari no Yasuhira, until lately a Minor Counselor to self-re-proclaimed Emperor Go-Toba, went back many years. Her own name for him was Mi-yuki, Deep Snow, because that had been his first excuse for staying the night with her.

“Bring him.” Okura’s pulse quivered.

The maid left. She returned as the courier showed himself on the verandah. With the light from outside at his back, Okura could not only see through the translucent blind that he was a boy, she made out that his brocade coat was dry, his white trousers hardly sullied. Besides wearing a straw cape, he must have gone on horseback. The least of smiles touched her lips. Deep Snow would preserve appearances until the end.

Her smile died. The end was upon them both.

With proper ritual, the messenger reached that which he carried under the blind to the maid and knelt, waiting for the reply. The maid brought the letter to Okura and went out. Okura released and unrolled it. Yasuhira had used a pale green paper, tied to a willow switch. His calligraphy was less fine than erstwhile; he had grown farsighted.

“With dismay I learn that you have lost your position at court. I hoped the Ex-Emperor’s consort would shelter you from the wrath that has fallen on your kinsman Chikuzen no Masamichi. What shall become of you, deprived of his protection when I too am made well-nigh helpless? This is a sorrow such as only Tu Fu could express. To my own poor attempt I add the wish that we may at least meet again soon.

“In the waning year

My sleeves, which lay over yours,

Are wet as the earth,

Though the rain on them is salt

From a sea of grief for you.”

His poetry was indeed not to be named with any line of the great Chinese master, Okura thought. Nevertheless a desire for his presence struck with astonishing suddenness. She wondered why. Whatever ardor they once felt had long since cooled to friendship; she could not recall just when they had last shared a mattress.

Well, seeing one another might strengthen them by the knowledge that each was not uniquely alone in misfortune. True, she had heard that the new military governor was confiscating thousands of estates from families who had supported the Imperial cause; but that was a mere number, as unreal as the inner life of a peasant or laborer or dog. True, this house would be taken over by a follower of the Hojo clan; but to her it had simply meant lodging given her out of a sense of duty toward common ancestors. Her dismissal was the sword-cut she actually felt. It lopped her from her world.

Still, she would shortly have left in any case. Surely Yasuhira’s isolation was worse. Let them exchange what solace they could.

One must cling to form, even in answering what she recognized as an appeal. Okura knelt silent, thinking, composing, deciding, before she called for a servant. “I will have a sprig of plum,” she instructed. That should complement her reply more subtly than cherry. From her writing materials she selected a sheet colored pearl-gray. By the tune she had the ink mixed, her words stood clear before her. They were only another poem.

“Blossoms grew fragrant,

Then faded and blew away,

Leaving bitter fruit.

It fell, and on bare branches

Twig calls to twig through the wind.”

He would understand, and come.

She prepared the package with the artistry it deserved and gave it to a maid to bring to the courier. He would fare swiftly across the city, but his master’s ox-drawn carriage, the only suitable conveyance for a nobleman, would take the better part of an hour. Okura had time to prepare herself.

Holding a taper close, she examined her face in a mirror. It had never been beautiful: too thin, cheekbones too strong, eyes too wide, mouth too large. However, it was properly powdered, the brows well plucked, the cosmetic brows painted just sufficiently far up the forehead, the teeth duly blackened. Her figure also left much to be desired, more bosom and less hip than should be there. It did carry its clothing well; the silks flowed gracefully when she walked with the correct gait. Her hair redeemed many faults, a jet cataract trailing on the floor.

Thereafter she ordered rice wine and cakes made ready. Her karma and Yasuhira’s could not be altogether bad, for she was alone with a few of the servants precisely now. Mas-amichi had taken his wife, two concubines, and children to settle in with a friend who offered them temporary shelter. Their private possessions were going along for storage. He had said Okura and hers could come too, but was noticeably relieved when she told him she had her own plans for the future. Well-bred, the family had never said anything unseemly about the men who called on her and sometimes spent the night. Nonetheless, the fact that somebody who mattered was bound to overhear things would have inhibited conversation on this day when, of all days, it must be either frank or useless.

With the clepsydra taken away and the sun obscured, it was impossible to tell time. Okura guessed that Yasuhira’s arrival occurred about midday, the Hour of the Horse. Because of the servants, she had one of them place her screen of state conveniently, and upon hearing his footsteps on the verandah she knelt behind it. Also for his sake, she thought wryly. Their world falling to pieces around them, the old proprieties mattered perhaps more than ever.

He and she spent a while in formalities and small talk. Thereupon she broke convention and pushed the screen aside. Once that would have implied lovemaking to come. Today a poetic reference or two among the banalities had made it clear that such was the intent of neither. They only wished to speak freely.

The maids Kodayu and Ukon might well be more taken aback by this than by any union of bodies so daylit blatant. They preserved blank deference and brought in the refreshment. Good girls, Okura thought as they went away. What would become of them? Slightly surprised, she found herself wishing the new master would keep the staff on and treat them gently. She feared he would not, being the kind of creature he was.

She and her visitor settled onto the floor. While Yasuhira courteously contemplated the floral pattern on his wine cup, she thought how he seemed to have aged overnight. He went gray years ago, but moon face, slit eyes, bud of a mouth, tiny tuft of beard bad remained as handsome as in his youth. Many a lady sighed and compared him to Genji, the Shining Prince of Murasaki’s two-hundred-year-old story. Today rain had streaked the powder and blurred the rouge, revealing darkened lower lids, blotchy sallowness, deepened lines, and his shoulders were slumped.

He had not lost the courtier grace with which, in due course, he sipped. “Ah,” he murmured, “that is most welcome, Asagao.”—Morning Glory, the name for her that he used in private. “Savor, aroma, and warmth. ‘Resplendent light—‘“

She was compelled to cap the literary allusion by saying, “But not, I fear, ‘everlasting fortune,’” and whetted that a little by adding, “As for Morning Glory, at my age might not Pine Tree be better?”

He smiled. “So I have kept some of my touch in guiding conversation. Shall we get unpleasant topics out of the way at once? Then we can discourse of former times and their joys.”

“If we have the heart to.” If you do, she meant. I never had any choice but to make myself strong. ‘”I had hoped the Lord Tsuchimikado would retain you.”

“Under these circumstances, dismissal may be less than the worst thing that could happen to me,” she said. He failed to completely hide puzzlement. She explained: “Without a family holding rice land, I would be scarcely more than a beggar, lacking even a place of my own like this to retire to when off duty. The others would despise and soon abuse me.”

“Indeed?”

“Women are as cruel as men, Mi-yuki.”

He nibbled a cake. She realized that was cover for the collecting of his thoughts. At length he said, “I must confess, the knowledge of the situation made thin my expectations for you.”

“Why so?” She knew the answer perfectly well, but also knew that explaining to her would help him.

“It is true that Lord Tsuchimikado stayed at peace during the uprising,” he said, “but if he did not work against the Hojo chieftains, neither did he assist them. Now I daresay he feels a need to curry favor, the more so because they may then make one of his line the next Emperor when our present sovereign dies or abdicates. Ridding himself of every member of any family that was in revolt seems a trivial gesture. Just the same, it is a gesture, and Lord Tokifusa, whom they have set as military governor over Heian-kyo, will take due note of it.”

“I wonder what sin in a past life caused Lord Go-Toba to try to seize back the throne he had quitted,” Okura mused.

“Ah, it was no madness, it was a noble effort that should have succeeded. Remember, his brother, the then Emperor Juntoku, was with him in it, and so were not only families like ours and their followers, but soldiers of the Taira who would fain avenge what the Minamoto did to their fathers; and many a monk also took up arms.”

A bleakness’ passed through Okura. She knew how the monks of Mount Hiei repeatedly descended on this city and terrorized it, not only by threats but by beatings, killings, looting, burning. They came to enforce political decisions they wanted; but were they any better than the outright criminal gangs who effectively ruled over the entire western half of the capital?

“No, it must have been because of our own former sins that we failed,” Yasuhira continued. “How far have we fallen since the golden days! We might have won to an Emperor who truly ruled.”

“What do you mean?” asked Okura, sensing how he needed to express his bitterness.

It erupted: “Why, what has the Emperor been for generations but a doll in the hands of the mighty, enthroned as a child and made to step down and retire into a life of idleness when he reached manhood? And meanwhile the clans have made earth sodden with blood as they fought out who should name the Shogun.” He gulped for air and explicated in the same rush of words: “The Shogun is the military head in Kamakura who is the real master of the Empire. Or who was. Today—today the Hojo have won the clan wars; and their Shogun is himself a boy, another doll who says what their lords want him to say.”

He reined himself in and apologized: “I beg Asagao’s pardon. You must be shocked at my bluntness; and needlessly, for of course a woman cannot understand these things.”

Okura, who had kept her ears open and her mind awake amply long enough to know everything he had told her, replied, “True, they are not for her. What I do understand is that you grieve over what we have lost. Poor Mi-yuki, what shall become of you?”

Somewhat calmed, Yasuhira said, “I was in a better position to bargain for leniency than Masamichi or most others. Thus I have leave to occupy my mansion in Heian-kyo for a short time yet. After I must depart, it will be to a farm in the east, well beyond Ise, that I am allowed to keep. The tenants will support me and my remaining dependents.”

“But in poverty! And so far away, among rude countryfolk. It will be like passing over the edge of the world.”

He nodded. “Often will my tears fall. Yet—“ She could not readily follow his quotation, having had scant opportunity to practice spoken Chinese, but gathered that it was about maintaining a serene spirit in adversity. “I hear there is a view of the sacred mountain Fuji. And I can take some books and my flute with me.”

“Then you are not wholly destroyed. That is one bright dustmote in the dark air.”

“What of you? What has happened to this household?”

“Yesterday came the baron who will take possession here. The worst kind of provincial, face unpowdered and weathered like a peasant’s, hair and beard abristle, uncouth as a monkey and growling a dialect so barbarous that one could barely comprehend him. As for the soldiers in his train, oh, they could almost have been wildfolk of Hokkaido. Yes, knowledge of what I leave behind may temper my longing for Heian-kyo. He gave us a few days to make our preparations.”

Yasuhira hesitated before he said, “Mine will be no fitting existence for a well-born lady. However, if you have nothing eke, come with my party. For the rest of our days we can strive to console each other.”

“I thank you, dear old friend,” she answered mutedly, “but I do have my own road before me.”

He emptied his cup. She refilled it. “Indeed? Let me be glad on your account, not disappointed on mine. Who will take you in?”

“No one. I will seek the temple at Higashiyama—that one, for I have often been there with the Ex-Imperial consort and the chief priest knows me—I will go and take vows.”

She had not expected him to show dismay. He almost dropped his cup. Wine slopped forth to stain his outer robe. “What? Do you mean full vows? Become a nun?”

“I think so.”

“Cut off your hair, your beautiful hair, don coarse black raiment, live— How will you live?”

“The fiercest bandit dares not harm a nun; the poorest hovel will not deny her shelter and some rice for her bowl. I have in mind to go on perpetual pilgrimage, from shrine to shrine, that I may gain merit in whatever years of this life are left me.” Okura smiled. “During those years, perhaps I can call on you from time to time. Then we will remember together.”

He shook his head, bemused. Like most courtiers, he had never traveled far, seldom more than a day’s journey from Heian-kyo. And that had been by carriage—to services that for his kind were occasions more social than religious; to view blossoms in the springtime countryside or the maple leaves of autumn; to admire and make poems about moonlight on Lake Biwa ... “Afoot,” he mumbled. “Roads that wet weather turns into quagmires. Mountains, gorges, raging rivers. Hunger, rain, snow, wind, fiery sun. Ignorant commoners. Beasts. Demons, ghosts. No.” He set down his cup, straightened, firmed his voice. “You shall not. It would be hard for a young man. You, a woman, growing old, you will perish miserably. I won’t have it.”

Rather than remind him that he lacked authority over her, for his concern was touching, she asked gently, “Do I seem feeble?”

He fell silent. His eyes searched, as if to pierce the garments and look at the body that had sometimes lain beneath his. But no, she thought, that would never cross his mind. A decent man, he found nudity disgusting, and in fact they had always kept on at least one layer of clothing.

Finally he murmured, “It is true, it is eerie, the years have scarcely touched you, if at all. You could pass for a woman of twenty. But your age is—what? We have known each other for close to thirty years, and you must have been about twenty when you came to court, so that makes you only a little younger than me. And my strength has faded away.”

You speak aright, she thought. Bit by bit I have seen you holding a book farther from your eyes or blinking at words you do not quite hear; half your teeth are gone; more and more fevers come upon you, coughs, chills; do your bones hurt when you rise in the mornings? I know the signs well, and well I should, as often as I have watched them steal over those I loved.

The impulse had seized her days before, when the bad news broke and she began to think what it meant and what to do. She had curbed it, but it stayed restlessly alive. If she yielded, what harm? She could trust this man. She was unsure whether it would help or hinder him against his sorrow.

Let me be honest with him, she decided. At least it will give him something to think about besides his great loss, in the solitude that awaits him.

“I am not the age you believe, my dear,” she said quietly. “Do you wish the truth? Be warned, at first you may suppose I have gone mad.”

He studied her before replying with the same softness, “I doubt that. There is more within you than you have ever manifested. I was vaguely but surely conscious of it. Perhaps I dared never inquire.”

Then you are wiser than I believed, she thought. Her resolution crystallized. “Let us go outside,” she said. “What I have to tell is for no ears but yours.”

Not troubling about cloaks, they went forth together, onto the verandah, around this pavilion, and along a covered gallery to a kiosk overlooking the pool. Near its placidity rose a man-high stone in whose ruggedness was chiseled the emblem of the clan that had lost this home. Okura halted. “Here is a good spot for me to show you that no evil spirit uses my tongue to speak falsehoods,” she said.

Solemnly, she recited a passage she had chosen from the Lotus Sutra. Yasuhira’s manner was as grave when he told her, “Yes, that suffices me.” He was of the Amidist sect, which held that the Buddha himself watches over humankind.

They stood gazing out at things of chaste beauty. Mist from the rain filled the kiosk and covered hair, clothes, eyelashes with droplets. The cold and the silence were tike presences, whose awareness was remote from them.

“You suppose I am about fifty years old,” she said. “I am more than twice that.”

He caught a breath, looked sharply at her, looked away, and asked with closely held calm, “How can this be?”

“I know not,” she sighed. “I know only that I was born in the reign of Emperor Toba, through whom the Fujiwara clan still ruled the realm so strongly that it lay everywhere at peace. I grew up like any other girl of good birth, save that I was never ill, but once I had become fully a woman, all change in me ceased, and thus it has been ever since.”,

“What karma is yours?” he whispered.

“I tell you, I know not. I have studied, prayed, meditated, practiced austerities, but no enlightenment has come. At last I decided my best course was to continue this long life as well as I was able.”

“That must be ... difficult.”

“It is.”

“Why have you not revealed yourself?” The voice trembled. “You must be holy, a saint, a Bodhisattva.”

“I know I am not. I am troubled and unsure and tormented by desire, fear, hope, every fleshly evil. Also, as my jigelessness first came slowly to notice, I have encountered jealousy, spite, and dread. Yet I could never hitherto bring myself to renounce the world and retreat to a life of sacred poverty. So whatever I am, Mi-yuki, I am not holy.”

He pondered. Beyond the garden wall swirled formlessness. Eventually he asked her, “What did you do? What have your years been like?”

“When I was fourteen, an older man—his name no longer matters—sought me out. He being influential, my parents encouraged him. I cared little for him, but knew not how to refuse. In the end he spent the three nights at my side and thereafter made me a secondary wife. He also got me a position at the court of Toba, who by then had abdicated. I bore him children, two of whom lived1. Toba died. Soon after, my husband did.

“By then the wars between the Taira and the Minamoto had broken out. I made an occasion to retire from the service of Toba’s widow and, taking my inheritance, withdrew to the family from which I sprang. It helped that a lady not at court lives so secluded. But how empty an existence!

“At last I confided in a lover I had gotten, a man of some wealth and power. He brought me to a rural estate of his, where I spent several years. Meanwhile he got my daughter married off elsewhere. He took me back to Heian-kyo under her name—such people as remembered marveled at how much she resembled her mother—and through his patronage I came again into service at a royal household. Gradually I outlived the scorn they have for provincials; but when they gradually observed how I kept my youth—

“Do you wish to hear it all?” she asked in an upsurge of weariness. “This has been my third such renewal. The tricks, the deceptions, the children I have borne and, one way or another, managed to have adopted elsewhere, lest it become too plain that they grow old while I do not. That has hurt most. I wonder how much more I could endure.”

“Therefore you are leaving everything behind,” he breathed.

“The time was already overpast. I hesitated because of the strife, the uncertainty about what would become of my kindred. Well, that has been settled for me. It feels almost like a liberation.”

“If you take nun’s vows, you cannot return here as you did before.”

“I have no wish to. I have had my fill of the petty intrigues and hollow amusements. Fewer are the midnight stars than the yawns I have smothered, the hours I have stared into vacancy and waited for something, anything to happen.” She touched his hand. “You gave me one reason to linger. But now you too must go. Besides, I wonder how much longer they can keep up the pretense in Heian-kyo.”

“You choose a harder way than I think you imagine.”

“No harder, / think, than most in times to come. It is a cruel age we are bound into. At least a wandering nun has people’s respect, and ... nobody questions her. Someday I may even win to understanding of why we suffer what we do.”

“Could I ever show courage like hers?” he asked the rain.

Once more she touched his hand. “I feared this tale might distress you.”

Still he looked before him, into the silvery blindness. “For your sake, perhaps. It has not changed you for me. While I live, you will remain my Morning Glory. And now you have helped me remember that I am safely mortal. Will you pray for me?”

“Always,” she promised.

They stood a while in silence, then went back inside. There they spoke of happy things and summoned up happy memories, pleasures and lovelinesses that had been theirs. He got a little tipsy. Nevertheless, when they said farewell it was with the dignity becoming a nobleman and a lady of the Imperial court.

IX Ghosts

DID SMOKE rouse her? Bitter in her nostrils, sharp-edged in her lungs, at first it was all that was. She coughed. Her skull flew asunder. The shards fell back with a crash. They ground against each other like ice floes on a lake under storm. Again she coughed, and again. Amidst the noise and the sword-blade hurt she began to hear a crackling that loudened.

Her eyes opened. The smoke savaged them. Through it, blurily, she saw the flames. That whole side of the chapel was coming ablaze. Already the fire licked up to the ceiling. She could not make out the saints painted there, nor any icons on the walls—were they gone?—but the altar abided. As the smoke drifted and the half-light leaped, its bulk wavered in her sight. She had a wild brief sense that it was adrift, would soon reach her and crush her under its weight or else float away forever on the smoke.

Heat billowed. She crept to hands and knees. For a while she could not lift her head. It was too heavy with pain. Then something at the edge of vision drew her in a slow shamble. She slumped above and groped after comprehension.

Sister Elena. Sprawled on her back. Very still, more than the altar was, altogether empty of movement. Eyes open, firelight ashimmer in them. Mouth agape, tongue half out of it, dry. Legs and loins startlingly white against the clay floor and the habit pulled up over them. White flecks likewise catching the light across her groin. Blood-spatters bright on thighs and belly.

Varvara’s insides writhed. She threw up. Once, twice, thrice the vomit burst forth. The surges ripped through her head. When they were done, though, only the foul taste and the burning left in her, more awareness had awakened. She wondered in a vague way whether this had been the final violation or a sign of God’s grace, covering the traces of what had been done to Elena.

You were my sister in Christ, Varvara thought. So young, oh, how young. I wish you had not been in such awe of me. Your laughter was sweet to hear. I wish we could sometimes have been together, only the two of us, and told secrets and giggled before we went to prayers. Well, you have won martyrdom, I suppose. Go home to Heaven.

The words wavered over pain and throbbing and great swoops of dizziness. The fire roared. Its heat thickened. Sparks danced through the smoke. Some landed on her sleeves. They winked out, but she must flee, or else burn alive.

For a moment, weariness overwhelmed her. Why not die, here with little Elena? Make an end of the centuries, now when everything else had come to an end. If she breathed deeply, the agony would be short. Afterward, peace.

Sunlight struck long, brass-yellow, through haze and whirling soot. While she wondered about death, her body had crawled out the door. Astonishment jolted her more fully back to herself. She swung her gaze to and fro. Nobody was nigh. Mostly wood, the cloister buildings were afire all around. Somehow she got to her feet and stumbled from them.

Beyond the enclosure, animal wariness took hold. She crouched back down, next to a wall, and peered. Monastery and nunnery stood a distance from the town, as was usual. The religious should have found shelter behind the defenses. They had not had time. The Tatars arrived too soon, were there, horses between them and safety. They scrambled back and beseeched the Virgin, the saints and angels. Presently some of the wild men came to them, yelping like dogs.

It made no difference, Varvara saw. Pereyaslavl had fallen. No doubt the Tatars stormed it before they troubled about the house of the Virgin. A monstrous black cloud rose from its walls, up and up into the sky, where it broke apart into smears across eventide purity. Flames stabbed into view beneath. They tinged the gloom with restless red.

She remembered dimly how the Lord went before the Israelites as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Did His voice roar like the pyre that had been Pereyaslavl?

Here and there across the rolling farmlands, villages burned too, smaller darknesses taking flight. The Tatars seemed to be assembling near the town. Squads galloped through grainfields toward the main body of horsemen. Warriors afoot herded captives along, not many—but then, Varvara saw, the invaders were no huge army, not the locust swarm of rumor, several hundred perhaps. They weren’t steel-clad either, it was mostly leather and fur on those stocky forms, now and then a blink but that was likelier off a weapon than a helmet. One at their van bore the standard, a pole from whose cross-arm hung—tails of oxen? The mounts were just ponies, dun-colored, shaggy, longheaded.

Yet these men had come as a runaway blaze over the land, driving all before them or trampling it down. Even cloister dwellers had heard, years ago, how the Pechenegs themselves fled to the Rusi, begging for succor. Riders who attacked like a single dragon with a thousand thunderous legs, arrows that flew like a sleetstorm—

Otherwise the countryside reached green, outrageously peaceful, eastward from the sun. Light streamed into the Trubezh, so that the river became a flow of gold. Flocks of waterfowl winged toward the marshes along its shores.

Yonder is my refuge, Varvara knew, my one tiny hope.

How to reach it? Her flesh was a lump of pain, splintered in places with anguish, and her bones were weights. Nevertheless, with the fire at her back, go she must. Knowledge made up for awkwardness. She could advance a bit, freeze, wait till it appeared safe to gain a few more feet. That meant a long time till she reached her goal, but time remained to her, oh, yes. She choked off a crazy laugh.

At first a cloister orchard gave concealment. How often had these trees blossomed amazing pink and white in spring, rustled green in summer, offered crisp sweetness in autumn, stood skeletally beautiful against winter’s gray, for her sisters and her? The number of years was lost somewhere in Varvara’s head. Certain of their people flitted through, Elena, shrewish Marina, plump and placid Yuliana, Bishop Simeon grave behind his huge bush of beard—dead, today or years since, ghosts, she herself perhaps dead too but denied quietness, a rusalka creeping back to its river.

Beyond the orchard was pasture. Varvara thought for a while she would do best to wait among the trees for nightfall. Terror whipped her onward. She found herself slipping along more and more snakishly. Skill returned, indeed it did, when you had gained it in your girlhood. Before Christ came to the Rusi, and for generations afterward, women often ranged the forest as freely as men. Not the deep forest, no, it was dark, trackless, a place where beasts and demons prowled: but the verge, where sunlight reached and you could gather nuts and berries.

That lost greenwood felt closer than the cloister. She had no recollection of what happened after the enemy drew near the sanctuary.

At a sudden thudding, she went flat in the grass. Despite utter weariness, her heart banged and a thin singing lifted between her temples. It was well she had not stayed in the orchard. Several Tatar horses trotted among the trees and out onto the slope. She glimpsed one rider clearly, his broad brown face, slant slit eyes, wispy whiskers. Did she know him? Had he known her, back in the chapel? They passed close by but onward, they had not noticed her.

Thanks welled in her breast. Only later did she recall that they had not been to God or any saint but to Dazhbog of the Sun, the Protector. Another ancient memory, another strong ghost.

Dusk softened horizons by the time she reached the marsh for which she aimed. Fitful reddenings still touched the smoke of Pereyasiavl; the outlying villages must be entirely ash and charcoal. Tatar campfires began to twinkle in ordered clusters. They were small, like their masters, and bloody.

Mud oozed cool over Varvara’s sandals, between her toes, up her ankles. She found a hummock where the grass was merely damp and sank down, curled onto its springiness. Her fingers dug into the turf and the sod beneath. Earth, Mother of All, hold me close, never let me go, comfort your child!

The first stars glimmered forth. She grew able to weep.

Thereafter she pulled off her clothes, layer by layer. A breeze nuzzled her nakedness. Having left the garments bundled, she pushed through reeds till she waded in the stream. Here she could wash out her mouth and gullet, drink and drink. The water was slow to reach every parched finger-end. Meanwhile she crouched and scrubbed herself, over and over. The river laved, licked, caressed. She squatted and opened her loins to it. “Make me clean,” she begged.

Light of stars and the Heaven Path gleamed off its current, enough for her to find her way back. She stood on the hummock so the breeze could dry her. That made her shiver but didn’t take long. Her lips quirked for a moment— cropped hair was a legacy of the cloister, useful tonight. Afterward she took up her clothes, and nearly retched. Now she caught their stench of sweat, blood, Tatar. It took almost the last of her strength to put them back on. Maybe she couldn’t have, were it not for the overlay of smoke-smell. Another legacy, another remembrance. She must keep covered against the night chill. Though she had never been sick in her life, she might well be too weakened to stave off a fever.

Slumping back onto the hummock, she dropped into a half-sleep wherein ghosts gibbered.

Dawn roused her. She sneezed, groaned, shuddered. However, as brightness lengthened across the land, the same cold clarity waxed within. Cautiously moving about her hiding place, she felt the stiffness work out of her joints, toe aches dwindle. Wounds still hurt, but lesseningly as day wanned them; she knew they would heal.

She kept well down amidst the reeds, but from time to time ventured a look outward. She saw the Tatars water their horses, but the river blotted up any filth before it reached her. She saw them ride from horizon to horizon. Often they returned with burdens, loot. When the shifting masses at camp chanced to part before her eyes, she spied the captives, huddled together under mounted guard. Boys and young women, she supposed, those worth taking for slaves. The rest lay dead in the ashes.

She still lacked memory of her last hours in the cloister. A blow to the head could do that. She had no wish for the knowledge. Imagination served. When the raiders broke in, the religious must have scattered. Quite likely Varvara seized Elena’s hand and led her, a dash into the chapel of St. Eudoxia. It was small and offside, without treasures, the devils might overlook it. Of course they hadn’t.

But what then? How had Elena died? Varvara—well, she dared hope she had fought, forced three or four to hold her down by turns. She was big, strong, a survivor of much, used to looking after herself. At last, she guessed, a Tatar, maybe when she bit him, smashed her head against the floor. Elena, though, Elena was slight and frail, gentle, dreamy. She could only have lain where she was while the thing went on and on and on. Maybe the last man, seeing what his fellow did to punish Varvara, had grinned and done the same to Elena. It killed her. Did they take her companion for dead also, belt up their breeches, and go? Or did they simply not care?

At least they hadn’t used knives. Varvara would not have outlived that. Indeed, while her skull seemed amply hard, she might not have roused in time to escape, save for the vitality that kept her ageless. She should thank God for it.

“No,” she breathed, “first I thank You for letting Elena die. She would have been broken, haunted all her days, hounded all her nights.”

Further gratitude slipped her mind.

The river and the hours muttered past. Birds clamored. Flies buzzed thick as smoke, drawn by her stinking garb. Hunger began to gnaw. She recollected another old skill, lay belly down in the mud by a backwater that some drifted brushwood had formed, waited.

She was no longer alone. Ghosts crowded close. They touched and tugged at her, whispered, beckoned. At first they were horrible. They took her against her will, drunken husbands and two different ruffians who had caught her during the years when she wandered. With a third she had been lucky and gotten a knife into him first. “Burn in hell with those Tatars,” she snarled. “I outlived you. I shall outlive them.”

Yes, and the memories of them. If nothing else, she would humble the new ghosts as she had overcome the old ones. It might take years—she had years—but at last the strength that had kept her alive this long would again make her able to live gladly.

“Good men, come back to me. I miss you. We were happy together, were we not?”

Father. White-bearded Grandfather, from whom she could wheedle anything. Elder brother Bogdan, how they used to fight but how splendid he later grew, before a sickness ravaged his guts and tore him down. Younger brother, yes, and sisters, who teased her and became dear to her. Neighbors. Dir, who kissed her so shyly in a clover meadow where bees buzzed; she was twelve years old, and the world wobbled. Vladimir, first of her husbands, a strong man until age gnawed him hollow but always gentle with her. Husbands later, those she had liked. Friends who stood by her, priests who consoled her, when sorrow returned to her house. How well she recalled ugly little Gleb Ilyev, but then, he was the first of those who helped her escape when a home turned into a trap. Oh, and her sons, her sons, grandsons, daughters and granddaughters too, great-grandchildren, but time took them away. Every ghost had a face that changed, grew old, finally was the mask that the dead wear.

No, not quite every one. Some she had known too fleetingly. Strange, how vivid remained that trader from abroad—Cadoc, his name? Yes, Cadoc. She was glad she had not watched him crumble—when? Two hundred years, more or less, since their night in Kiyiv. Of course, he might have perished early, in the beauty of his youth.

Others were misty. Certain among them she was unsure of, whether they had been real or were fragments of dreams that had clung to memory.

With a splash and splatter, a frog jumped from among the rushes, onto the brushwood. He settled himself, fat, green-white, to lurk for flies. Varvara stayed moveless. She saw his attention turn from where she lay. Her hand pounced.

He struggled, cool and slippery, till she knocked him on the head. Then she plucked him apart, gnawed and sucked his meat off the bones, cast them into the river with muttered thanks. Ducks bobbed in midstream. She could have shed her clothes, slid into the water, swum carefully underneath to seize one by the legs. But no, the Tatars might glimpse it. Instead, she grubbed sedges of a kind with edible roots. Yes, the forest skills lived on in her, had never really faded.

Otherwise— She supposed it was a growing despair, a sense of her soul slipping from her, that brought her to the sanctuary. No, that wasn’t the whole reason. She had said too many farewells. In the house of God was refuge that would endure.

Surely there was peace, around her if not always within. The lusts of the flesh refused to die, among them the wish to feel again a small warmth in her arms, a small mouth milking her. She reined them in, but then sometimes they kicked up mockeries of the Faith, memories of old earthy gods, longings to see beyond walls and fare beyond horizons. And petty sins too, anger at her sisters, impatience with the priests and the endlessly same tasks. Nonetheless, on the whole, peace. Between the chores, the chafings, and the puzzled search for sanctity were hours in which she could bit by bit, year by year, rebuild herself. She discovered how to order memories, have them at her beck rather than let them fade to nothing or else overwhelm her with their many ness. She tamed her ghosts. f A wind made the sedges rustle. She shivered likewise. What if she had failed? If she was not alone in the world, was the common fate of her kind to go mindless and perish helpless?

Or was she in truth alone, whether blessed or damned? Certainly the cloister had no record of such folk, ever, since the Methuselan morning of the world. Not that she had told anybody beforehand. The caution of centuries forbade. She came as a widow, taking the veil because the Church encouraged widows to do so.

To be sure, when the decades slipped by and her flesh continued young—

Noise thrust into the marsh, shouts, whinnies, drumbeats. She scuttered to look. The Tatars had trussed up their loot and marshalled their ranks. They were departing. She saw no captives, but guessed they were bound astride pack horses with the rest of the baggage. Smoke still blew thinly : out of the blackened, broken walls of Pereyaslavl.

The Tatars were headed northeasterly, away from the Trubezh, toward the Dniepr and Kiyiv. The great city was a day’s march in that direction, less on horseback.

O Christ, have mercy, were they off to take Kiyiv?

No, they were too few.

But others must be raging elsewhere across the Russian land. Their demon king must have a plan. They could join together, resharpen swords blunted by butchery, and go on as a conquering horde.

In the house of God I sought eternity, passed through Varvara. Here I have seen that it also has an end.

I too?

Yes, I can die, if only by steel or fire or famine or flood; therefore someday I shall die. Already, to those among whom I was ageless, those that live, I am a ghost, or less than a ghost.

First the nuns, later the monks and secular priests, finally the layfolk began to marvel at Sister Varvara. After some fifty years, peasants were appealing to her for help in their woes and pilgrims arriving from places quite far. As she had feared from the outset, there was no choice but to tell her confessor the truth about her past. With her reluctant leave, he informed Bishop Simeon. The latter planned to inform the Metropolitan. If they did not have an actual saint in the cloister of the Virgin, and Sister Varvara said she could not possibly be one, they had a miracle.

How was she to live with that?

She would never have to. The bishop, the priests, the believers were dead or fled. The annals of the cloister were burned. Anything elsewhere was likewise destroyed, or soon would be, or was doomed to molder away forgotten now when people had so much death to think about. A memory of her might linger in a few minds, but seldom find utterance, and it would die with them.

Had the Tatars come as God’s denial, His decision that she was unworthy—or as His release from a burden no child of Adam should bear—or was she, defiled and torn, nonetheless so full of worldly pride that she dared imagine she mattered?

She clung to the hummock. Earth and sun, moon and stars, wind and rain and human love, she could understand the old gods better than she understood Christ. But they were forsaken by man, remembered only in dances and feasts, fireside tales and fireside spirits; they were ghosts.

Yet lightning, thunder, and vengeance forever walked the skies above Russia, be they of Perun or of St. Yuri the dragonslayer. Varvara drank strength from the soil as a babe drinks milk. When the Tatars were out of sight, she sprang to her feet, shook her fist after them, and shouted, “We will abide! We will outlast you, and in the end we will crush you and take back what is ours!”

Calmer, then, she removed her clothes, washed them in the river, spread them on a slope to dry. Meanwhile she cleansed herself again and gathered more wild food. Next morning she sought the ruins.

Ash, charred timber, snags of brick and stone lay silent under heaven. A pair of churches were left, foul with soot. Inside them sprawled corpses. The slain outside were many more, and in worse condition. Carrion birds quarreled over them, flying off with a blast of wingbeats and shrieks whenever she approached. There was nothing she could do but offer a prayer.

Searching about, she found clothes, shoes, an undamaged knife, and such-like needs. Taking each, she smiled and whispered, “Thank you” to its owner’s ghost. Her journey would be hard and dangerous at best. She did not mean it to end until she had reached the kind of new home she wanted—whatever that was.

In the dawn that followed, before setting forth, she told the sky: “Remember my name. I am Varvara no more. I am again Svoboda.” Freedom.

X In the Hills

1

WHERE MOUNTAINS began their long climb toward Tibet, a village nestled. On three sides its dell lifted steeply, making horizons high and close. A stream from the west rushed through upper woods of cypress and dwarf oak, gleamed as a waterfall, passed among the buildings, and lost itself in bamboo and ruggedness eastward. The people cultivated wheat, soybeans, vegetables, melons, some fruit trees on the floor of the vale and on small terraces above. They kept pigs, chickens, and a fishpond. This, their score or so of turf-roofed earthen houses, and they themselves had been there so long that sun, rain, snow, wind, and time had made them as much a part of the land as the pheasant, the panda, or the wildflowers in spring.

On the east the view opened,-a wrinklescape manifoldly green and tawny with forest, to right and left a sight of snowpeaks afloat in heaven. Through it wound a road, scarcely more than a track, the village its terminus. Traffic was sparse. Several times a year, men undertook a journey of days, to market in a little town and home again. There they also paid taxes in kind. Thus the governor very seldom thought to send a man to them. When he did, the inspector only stayed overnight, inquired of the elders how things were going, received ritual answers, and departed eagerly. The place had a somewhat uncanny reputation.

That was in the eyes of orthodox outsiders. To others it was holy. Because of this awe, whether vague or devout, as well as its loneliness, war and banditry had passed the village by. It followed its own ways, enduring no more than die ordinary sorrows and calamities of life. Once in a while a pilgrim overcame the obstacles—distance, hardship, danger—to visit it. In the course of generations, a few among those had remained. The village took, them into its peace. Thus things were. Thus had they always been. Their beginnings were unknown save to myth and the Master.

Great, therefore, was the excitement when a herdboy came running and shrilled that a traveler was on the way, “Shame, bad, that you left your ox unattended,” chided his grandfather, but gently. The boy explained that he had first tethered the beast; and, after all, no tiger arrived. He was forgiven. Meanwhile folk bustled and shouted about. Presently a disciple struck the gong in the shrine. A metal voice toned forth, rang off the hillsides, mingled with shush of waterfall and murmur of wind.

Autumn comes early in the high hills. Woodlands were dappled brown and yellow, grass was turning sere, fallen leaves crunched underfoot near puddles left by last night’s rain. Overhead the sky arched unutterably blue, empty of all but wings. Bird cries drifted faint through air flowing down the mountainside. Smoke from hearthfires sharpened its chill.

As the stranger trudged up the last stretch of road, the gathered villagers saw with astonishment that this was a woman. Threadbare and oft mended, her gown of coarse cotton had faded to gray. Her boots were equally near the end of their service, and use had worn smooth the staff that swung in her right hand. From her left shoulder hung a rolled-up blanket, just as wayworn, which held a wooden bowl and perhaps one or two other things.

Yet she was no beggar granny. Her body was straight and slim, her stride firm and limber. Where a scarf fluttered loose, one could see hair like a crow’s wing, hacked off just below the earlobes; and her face, though weathered, drawn close over the bones, was unlined. Never had such a face appeared in these parts. She did not even seem of quite the same breed as the lowlanders from whose country she fared.

Elder Tsong trod forward. For lack of a better thought, he greeted her according to the ancient rite, despite every newcomer hitherto having been male. “In the name of the Master and the people, I bid you welcome to our Morning Dew Village. May you walk in the Tao, in peace, and the gods and spirits walk with you. May the hour of your advent prove lucky. Enter as a guest, depart as a friend.”

“This humble person thanks you, honorable sir,” she replied. Her accent was like none that anybody had heard before, but that was no surprise. “I come in search of ... enlightenment.” The word shook. Fervent must her hope be.

Tsong turned and bowed toward the shrine and the Master’s house behind it. “Here is the home of the Way,” he said. Some persons smiled smugly. Their home.

“May we know your name, that it be borne to the Master?” Tsong asked.

She hesitated, then: “I call myself Li, honorable sir.”

He nodded. The wind ruffled his thin white beard. “If you have chosen that, you have likely chosen well.” In her pronunciation, it could mean the measure of distance. Ignoring whispers, mutters, and stirrings among the folk, he forbore to inquire further. “Come. You shall take refreshment and stay with me.”

“Your ... leader—”

“In due course, young miss, in due course. Pray come.”

Her features settled into an aspect no one could fathom, something between resignation and an ageless determination. “Again, my humble thanks,” she said, and accompanied him.

The villagers moved aside. Several uttered words of goodwill. Beneath a natural curiosity, they were as alike in their mildness—the very children were—as in their padded garments and work-hardened hands. Alike, too, were many faces, broad and rather fiat-nosed above sturdy frames. After Tsong, his family, and Li disappeared, they chatted for a while, then piecemeal went back to their cookfires, handmills, looms, tools, animals, all that kept them alive as it had kept their ancestors alive from time out of mind.

Tseng’s oldest son, with wife and offspring, lived with him. They stayed in the background, except for serving tea and food. The house was larger, than most, four rooms inside rammed-earth walls, darksome but comfortably warm. While homes were poorly and rudely furnished, there was no real want; rather, contentment and cheerfulness prevailed. Tsong and Li sat on mats at a low table and enjoyed broth flavored with ruddy peppercorns, fragrant amidst the savors of other foodstuffs hung under the roof.

“You shall wash and rest before we meet with my fellow elders,” he promised.

Her spoon trembled. “Please,” she blurted, “when may I see the teacher? I have come, oh, a long and weary way.”

Tsong frowned. “I understand your desire. But we really know nothing about you, ah, Miss Li.”

Her lashes lowered. “Forgive me. I think what I have to tell is for his ears alone. And I think—I, I pray he will want to hear me soon. Soon!”

“We must not be overhasty. That would be irreverent, and maybe unlucky. What do you know about him?”

“Hardly more than rumors, I confess. The story—no, different stories in different places as I wandered. At first they sounded like folk tales. A holy man afar in the west, so holy that death dares not touch him— Only as I came nearer did anyone tell me that this is his dwelling ground. Few would say that much. They seemed afraid to speak, although ... I never heard ill of him.”

“No ill is there to hear,” said Tsong, softened by her earnestness. “You must have a great soul, that you ventured the pilgrimage. Quite alone, too, a youthful woman. Surely your stars are strong, that you took no harm. That bodes well.”

Dim of eye and in smoky dusk, he failed to see how she winced. “Nevertheless our wizard must read the bones,” he continued thoughtfully, “and we must offer to the ancestors and spirits, yes, hold a purification; for you are a woman.”

“What has the holy man to fear, if time itself obeys him?” she cried.

His tone calmed her somewhat: “Nothing, I daresay. And certainly he will protect us, his beloved people, as he always has. What do you wish to hear about him?”

“Everything, everything,” she whispered.

Tsong smiled. His few stumps of teeth glistened in what light passed through a tiny window. “That would take years,” he said. “He has been with us for centuries, if not longer.”

Again she tautened. “When did he come?”

Tsong sipped his tea. “Who knows? He has books, he can read and write, but the rest of us cannot. We tally the months, but not the years. Why should we? Under his good sway, lifespans are alike, as happy as the stars and the spirits may grant. The outside world troubles us never. Wars, famines, pestilences, those are gnat-buzz borne in from the market town, which itself hears little. I could not tell you who reigns in Nanking these days, nor do I care.”

“The Ming drove out the foreign Yuan some two hundred years ago, and the Imperial seat is Peking.”

“Ah, learned, are you?” the old man chuckled. “Yes, our forebears did hear about invaders from the north, and we know they are now gone. However, the Tibetans are much closer, and they have not attacked these parts for generations, nor ever our village. Thanks be to the Master.”

“He is your true king, then?”

“No, no.” The bald head shook. “To rule over us would be beneath his dignity. He counsels the elders when we ask, and of course we heed. He instructs us, during our childhoods and throughout our lives, in the Way; and of course we gladly follow it as well as we are able. When someone falls from it, the chastisement he orders is gentle—though quite enough, since real evildoing means expulsion, exile, homelessness for life and ever afterward.”

Tsong shuddered slightly before going on: “He receives pilgrims. From among them and from among our own youths who wish it, he accepts a few disciples at a time. They serve his worldly needs, listen to his wisdom, strive to attain a small part of his holiness. Not that this keeps them from eventually having households of their own; and often the Master honors a family, any family in the village, with his presence or his blood.”

“His blood?”

Li flushed when Tsong answered, “You have much to learn, young miss. Male Yang and female Yin must join for the health of the body, the soul, and the world. I am myself a grandson of the Master. Two daughters of mine have borne him children. One was already married, but her husband kept from her until they were sure it would indeed be a child of Tu Shan that blessed their home. The second, who is lame in one leg, suddenly needed only a bedspread for her dowry. Thus is the Way,”

“I see.” He could barely hear her. She had gone pale.

“If you cannot accept this,” he said kindly, “you may still meet him and receive his blessing before you leave. He forces no one.”

She gripped the spoon in her fist as if its handle were a post to which she clung lest she be whirled off the earth. “No, I will surely do his will,” stumbled from her throat, “I who have been seeking over all these lives, all these years.”

HE COULD have been a peasant man of the village—but then, every one of them was closely or distantly descended from him—with the same strong frame clad in the same thick coat and trousers, the same grime and calluses on feet that indoors were bare. His beard hung thin, youthfully black, his hair was drawn into a topknot. The house he inhabited with his disciples was as big as any, but no bigger, also of plain earth above a clay floor. The room to which one of the young men admitted her before bowing and leaving was scarcely better furnished. There was a bedstead, wide enough for him and whatever woman might attend him; straw mats, stools, table, a calligraphic scroll, gone brown-spotted and flyspecked, on the wall above a stone altar; a wooden chest for clothing, a smaller brass one that doubtless held books; a few bowls, cups, cloths, and other everyday things. The window was shuttered against a blustery wind. A single lampflame did little to relieve murkiness. Coming in from outdoors, Li was first aware of the smell. It was not unpleasant, but it was heavy, blent of old smoke and grease, manure tracked in on shoes, humanity, centuries.

Seated, he lifted a hand in benison. “Welcome,” he said in die hill dialect. “May the spirits guide you along the Way.” His gaze was shrewd. “Do you wish to make offering?”

She bowed low. “I am a poor wanderer, Master.”

He smiled. “So they have told me. Fear not. Most who come here believe gifts will win them the favor of the gods. Well, if it helps uplift their souls, they are right. But the seeking soul itself is the only real sacrifice. Be seated, Lady JLi, and let us come to know each other.”

As the elders had instructed her, she knelt on the mat near his feet. His look searched her. “You do that otherwise than any woman I have seen before,” he murmured, “and you talk differently, too.”

“I am but newly in these parts, Master.”

“I mean that you do not talk like a lowlander who has picked up some of the highland form of speech.”

“I thought I had learned more than one Chinese tongue well, as long as I have been in the Middle Kingdom,” broke from her.

“I’ve been widely about, myself.” He shifted to the idiom of Shansi or Honan, though it was not quite what she remembered from the wealthy, populous northeastern provinces and he used it rustily. “Will you be more at ease talking this?”

“I learned it first, Master.”

“It’s been long since I— But where are you from, then?”

She raised her face toward his. Her heart thuttered. With an effort like reining in a wild horse, she kept her voice level. “Master, I was born across the sea, in the country of Nippon.”.

His eyes widened. “You have come far in your search for salvation.”

“Far and long, Master.” She drew breath. Her mouth had gone dry. “I was born four hundred years ago.”

“What?” He leaped to his feet.

She rose too. “It is true, it is true,” she said desperately. “How could I dare lie to you? The enlightenment I seek, have sought, oh, that was to find someone like myself, who never grows old—”

She could hold back the tears no more. He laid his arms around her. She clung close and felt how he also trembled.

After a time they drew apart and, for another while, stared at one another. The wind boomed outside.

A strange calm had fallen on her. She blinked her lashes clear and told him, “You have only my word for this, of course. I learned quite early to be nobody that anybody was ... much concerned about or would ... especially remember.”

“I believe you,” he answered hoarsely. “Your presence, you, a foreigner and a woman, that speaks for you. And I think I am afraid to disbelieve you.”

A laugh sobbed. “You will have time aplenty to make certain.”

“Time,” he mumbled. “Hundreds, thousands of years. And you a woman.”

Old fears awoke. Her hands fluttered before her. She forced herself to stand where she was. “I am a nun. I took vows to Amida Butsu—the Buddha.”

He nodded, against straining muscles. “How else could you travel freely?”

“I was not always safe,” she wrung out of her lips. “I have been violated in wild lands of this realm. Nor have I always been true. I have sometimes taken shelter with a man who offered it, and stayed with him till he died.”

“I’ll be kind,” he promised.

“I know. I asked ... of certain women here ... But what of those vows? I thought I had no choice before, but now—”

His laughter gusted louder than needful. “Ho! I release you from them.”

“Can you?”

“I am the Master, am I not? The people aren’t supposed to pray to me but I know they do, more than to their gods. i Nothing bad has come of it. Instead, we’ve had peace, lifetime after lifetime.”

“Did you ... foresee that?”

He shrugged. “No. Myself, I am—maybe a thousand and a half years old. I don’t remember just when I came here.”

The past took possession of him. He looked beyond her and the wall, he spoke low and rapidly:

“The years blur together, they become one, the dead are as real as the living and the living as unreal as the dead. For a while, long ago, I was mad, in a waking dream. Some monks took me in, and slowly, I’m not sure how, slowly I grew able to think again. Ah, I see that something like that .t happened to you too. Well, for me it still is often hard to be sure what I truly remember, and I forget much.

“I had found, like you, the safest thing was to be a footloose religious person. I only meant to stay here a few years, after they’d made me welcome. But tune went on and on, this was a snug den and foes feared to come, once word of me had drifted about, and what else, what better, was there? I’ve tried to do my people no harm. I think, they think I do them good.”

He shook himself, trod forward, caught both her hands. His were big, strong, but less hard than other men’s. She had heard that he lived off their labor, at most diverting himself with his ancient trade of blacksmith. “But who are you, Li? What are you?”

In sudden weariness, she sighed. “I have borne many names, Okura, Asagao, Yukiko—names did not matter among us, they changed as our positions changed, and we might use a different nickname for every friend. I was an attendant at a court that became a shadow. When no more pretense of being mortal was possible, and I feared to proclaim what I was, I turned nun and begged my way from shrine to shrine, place to place.”

“It was easier for me,” he admitted, “but I too found I’d better keep moving, and stay clear of anybody powerful who might want me to linger. Until I found this haven. How did you come to leave ... Nippon, you call that land?”

“I was forever hoping to find someone like me, an end to the loneliness, the—meaninglessness; for I had tried to find meaning in the Buddha, and no enlightenment ever came. Well, the news reached us that the Mongols—they who had conquered China and tried to invade us, but the Divine Wind wrecked their ships—they had been driven out. The Chinese were sailing far and wide, also to us. This land is ... our motherland in spirit, the mother of civilization.” She saw puzzlement, and recalled that he was of lowly birth and had lived withdrawn since before she came into the world. “We knew of many holy sites in China. I thought, as well, there if anywhere would be other ... immortals. So I took passage as a pilgrim, the captain gained merit by carrying me, and on these shores I set off afoot... I did not then know how vast the country is.”

“Have you never wished to go home?”

“What is home? Besides, the Chinese have stopped sailing. They have destroyed all their great ships. It is forbidden on pain of death to leave the Empire. You had not heard?”

“We’re free of overlords here. Welcome, welcome.” His tone deepened, strengthened. He let go her hands and once more laid arms about her waist, but now the clasp was strong and his breath turned musky. “You’ve found me, we’re together, you, my wife! I waited and waited, prayed, offered, cast spells, till at last I gave up hope. Then you came. Li!” His mouth sought hers.

She turned her cheek, protested faintly, no, this was too fast, unseemly. He paid no heed. It was not an assault, but it was an overwhelming. She surrendered as she might have surrendered to a storm or a dream. While he had her, she tried to bring her thoughts under control. Afterward he was drowsy and gentle for a while, then wildly merry.

WINTER STRUCK with blinding snow on wind that rampaged among the houses and stretched fingers through every crack around door or shutter. The calm that followed was so cold that silence seemed to ring, with stars uncountable above a white hardness that gave back their glitter. Folk went into the weather no more than they needed, to tend their livestock and get fuel. At home they crouched over tiny hearth-fires or slept the hours away within heaped sheepskins.

Li felt sick. She always did in the mornings during the first part of a pregnancy. That she had become fruitful was no surprise, as often as Tu Shan lay with her. Nor did she regret it. He meant well, and bit by bit, without letting him know what happened, she schooled him in what pleased her, until sometimes she too flew off into joy and came back down to lie happily wearied in the warmth and odor of him. And this child they had gotten together might also be ageless.

Still, she wished she could exult over it as he did. On her best days she was free of forebodings, no more. If only she had something to do. At least in Heian-kyo there had been color, music, the round of ceremonies, the often vicious but oftener titillating intrigues. At least on the road there had been changing landscape, changing people, unsureness, small victories over trouble or danger or despair. Here she could, if she liked, weave the same cloths, cook the same meals, sweep the same floors, empty the same muck buckets—though the disciples expected to do the menial tasks— and swap the same and the same words with women whose minds ranged as far as next year’s kitchen gardening.

Their men took interest in a little more than that, some of them, though not much more. However, they felt ill at ease with her. They knew her for the chosen of the Master and accorded her respect, in a clumsy fashion. Yet they also knew her for a woman; and she was soon taken for granted, sacred but a part of everyday life, like Tu Shan; and women did not sit in the councils of men. Li gathered that this was no great loss to her.

One day of that winter stood forth in memory, an island at the middle of an abyss that swallowed all the rest. The door swung open on dazzlingly sunlit, blue-shadowed drifts. A wave of chill poured through. Tu Shan’s bulk blotted the light. He entered and closed the door. Gloom clapped down again. “Hoo!” he whinnied, stamping the snow off his boots. “Cold enough to freeze a fire solid and the anvil with it.” She must have heard him say that a hundred times, and a few other favorite expressions.

Li looked up from the mat on which she knelt. Bright spots danced before her. They were due to reflection off the brass chest, which the disciples worshipfully kept polished. She had been staring at it for—an hour? two hours?—while sunken in the half-doze that was her retreat from these empty months.

A thought smote. The suddenness of it made her catch her breath. Next she wondered why it had not occurred to her before, then supposed that was because the newness of this life had driven everything else out of her mind until the life went stale, and she was saying: “Horseshoe,” the pet name she had given him, “I have never looked in yonder box.”

His mouth was open, he had been about to speak. He left it hanging thus for a moment before he replied slowly, “Why, uh, those are the books. And, uh, scrolls, yes, scrolls. The holy writings.”

Eagerness thrilled through her. “May I see them?”

“They’re not for, uh, ordinary eyes.”

She rose and told him fiercely, “I too am immortal. Have you forgotten?”

“Oh, no, no.” He waved his hands, a vague gesture. “But you’re a woman. You can’t read them.”

Li’s mind leaped back across centuries. Ladies of the court in Heian-kyo were literate in the vernacular but seldom in Chinese.’That was the classical language, which only men could properly comprehend. Nevertheless she had contrived to study the writing, and sometimes in China had found a chance, a span of rest in a tranquil place, to refresh that knowledge. Moreover, these texts were most likely Buddhist; that faith had intermingled here with Taoism and primitive animism. She would recognize passages.

“I can,” she said.

He gaped. “You can?” He shook his head. “Well, the gods have singled you out... Yes, look at them if you want. But handle them carefully. They’re quite old.”

Joyful, she went to the chest and opened it. At first she saw it only full of shadow. She fetched the lamp and held it above. Wan light nickered and fell.

The chest gaped across rot, mildew, and fungus.

She moaned. Barely did she keep from letting hot grease spill onto the corruption. With her free hand she groped, caught hold of something, lifted a gray tatter up to view.

Tu Shan bent over. “Well, well,” he muttered. “Water must have gotten in. How sad.”

She dropped the shred, replaced the lamp, rose to confront him. “When did you last look into that box?” she demanded most quietly.

His glance shifted elsewhere. “I don’t know. No reason to.”

“You never read the sacred texts? You have them perfectly by heart?”

“They were gifts from pilgrims. What are they to me?” He summoned bluster. “I don’t need writings. I am the Master. That’s enough.”

“You cannot read or write,” she said.

“They, well, they suppose I can, and— What harm? What harm, I ask you?” He turned on her. “Stop nagging me. Go. Go into the other rooms. Leave me be.”

Pity overcame her. He was, after all, so vulnerable—a simple man, a common man, whom karma or the gods or the demons or blind accident had made ageless for no know-able reason. With peasant shrewdness he had survived. He had acquired the sonorous phrases that a saint should utter. And he had not abused his position here; he was a god-figure that required little and returned much, assurance, protection, oneness. But the unchanging cycle of season after season after season, world without end, had dulled his wits and even, she saw, sapped his courage.

“I’m sorry,” she said, laying a hand on his. “I meant no reproach. I’ll tell nobody, of course. I’ll clean this out and from now on take care of such things for you—for us.”

“Thank you,” he replied uncomfortably. “Still, well, I meant to tell you you’ll have to stay in the back rooms till nightfall.”

“A woman is coming to you,” she said in a voice as leaden as the knowledge.

“They expect it.” His own voice loudened. “So it’s been since—since the beginning. What else was there for me? I can’t suddenly withhold my blessing from their households. Can I?”

“And she’s young and pretty.”

“Well, when they aren’t, I’ve been kind to them anyhow.” He forced indignation. “Who are you to call me faithless? How many men have you been with in your time, and you a nun?”

“I said nothing against you.” She turned around. “Very well, I go.” She felt his relief like radiance at her back.

The four disciples huddled together in one room of their quarters, blurs of darkness by lamplight, and played a game with slicks tossed on the floor. They sprang to their feet when Li entered, bowed awkwardly, stood in abashed silence. They knew quite well why she was here, but could not think what to say.

How young they were, she thought. And how handsome Wan, at least, was. She imagined his body on hers, lithe, hot, delirious.

Perhaps later. There would be boundless later. She smiled at them. “The Master wants me to rehearse you in the Diamond Sutra,” she told them.

IT WAS raining when the village buried the first child of the Master and the Lady, They had hoped for sunshine but the wizard and the tiny corpse both told them they could not auspiciously wait longer than they had done. Spring that year had come late. Its bleakness and damp stretched on into the summer. They slipped through to the lungs of the girl-child, who gasped for a few days before she lay still. Oh, very still, when she cried and sucked and snuggled no more.

With Tu Shan, Li watched the wizard lower the coffin into a hole where water sloshed. The disciples stood close, the rest of the people in a rough ring. Beyond them she saw mists, shadowy hints of hillside, grandeur dissolved in this formless gray that tapped on her face and dripped off her hat and weighted her hair. Wet wool stank. Her breasts ached with milk.

The wizard rose, took up the rattle tucked under his rope belt, and shook it as he pranced around the grave screaming. Thus he warded off evil spirits. The disciples and those few others who had prayer wheels spun them. Everybody swayed to and fro. The chant sounded as raw as the air, “—honored ancestors, great souls, Honored ancestors, great souls—“ over and over, rite of a heathendom that the Tao and the Buddha had barely touched.

Tu Shan raised his arms and intoned words more fitting, but blurred and mechanical. He had spoken them too often. Li hardly noticed. She likewise had known too many deaths. She could not at the moment count the number of infants she had borne and lost. Seven, eight, a dozen? It hurt more to watch children grow old. But farewell, daughter of mine. May you not be lonely and afraid, wherever you have gone.

What Li felt now was the final hard freezing of resolution within herself.

Things ended. Folk mumbled words and went back to their work. The wizard remained. His task was to fill the grave. At her back, through his ongoing quavery song, Li heard clods fall on the coffin.

The disciples sought their parents’ homes for the nonce. Li and Tu Shan entered an empty house. He left the door ajar for light. Coals aglow on the hearth had somewhat wanned the room. He shucked his coat and tossed it on the bed. A sigh gusted from him. “Well,” he said. “That’s done.”

After a span, into her silence: “The poor wee girl. But it happens. Better luck next tune, eh? And maybe a son.”

She tensed. “There will be no next time, here,” she answered.

“What?” He lumbered around to stand before her. His arms dangled at his sides.

She met his stare full on. “I will not stay,” she told him. “You should leave with me.”

“Are you crazed?” Fear crossed the usually firm countenance. “Has a demon gotten into you?”

She shook her head. “Only an understanding, and it has been growing for months. This is simply no life for us.”

“It’s peaceful. It’s happy.”

“So you see it, because you’ve lain in it so long. I say it is stagnant and squalid.” She spoke calmly, the least bit sadly. “At first, yes, after my wanderings, I believed I had come to a sanctuary. Tu Shan,”—she would not give him his endearment name until he yielded, if ever he did—“I have learned what you should have seen an age ago. Earth holds no sanctuaries for anyone, anywhere.”

Amazement made his anger faint. “You want back to your palaces and monkey courtiers, eh?”

“No. That was another trap. I want ... freedom ... to be, to become whatever I am able to. Whatever we are able to.”

“They need me here!”

She must first put down scorn. If she showed hers for these half-animals, she could well lose him. And, true, in his liking for them, his concern and compassion, he was better than she was. Second she must muster all the will at her command. If she surrendered and abided, she would likewise slowly become one with the hillfolk. That might aid her toward selflessness, toward ultimate release from the Wheel; but she would give up every imaginable attainment that this life held. What escape, except through random violence, did she have from it?

“They lived much the same before you,” she said. “They will do so after you. And with or without you, it cannot be for always. The Han people press westward. I have seen them clearing forest and breaking earth. Someday they will take these lands.”

He fell into bewilderment. “Where can we go? Would you be a beggar again?”

“If need be, but then only for a short while. Tu Shan, a whole world lies beyond this horizon.”

“We kn-know nothing about it.”

“I know something.” Through the ice of her resolve shone a strengthening fire. “Foreign ships touch the shores of China. Barbarians thrust inward. I have heard about mighty stirrings to the south, on the far side of the mountains.”

“You told me ... it’s forbidden to leave the Empire—”

“Ha, what does that mean to us? What watchmen stand on those paths we can find? I tell you, if we cannot seize the opportunities that beckon everywhere around, we do not deserve our lives.”

“If we become famous, they ... would notice we don’t grow old—”

“We can cope with that. Change rushes through the world unbridled. The Empire can no more stay forever locked into itself than this village can. We’ll find advantages to take. Perhaps just setting money out at interest for a long time. We’ll see. My years have been harder than yours. I know how full of secret places chaos is. Yes, we may well go under, we may perish, but until then we will have been wholly alive!”

He stood dazed. She knew she would need months wherein to prevail, if indeed she could. Well, she had the patience of centuries to draw upon, when there was something for which to work.

Clouds thinned, light broke through, the rain in the doorway gleamed like flying arrows.

SPRINGTIME CAME back, and that year it was mild, overwhelmingly bright, full of fragrances and the cries of wildfowl returned. Gorged with snow melt, the stream sprang white amidst hillside leaves, brawled through the dell, plunged into the bamboo forest, bound for the great river and so at last the sea.

A man and a woman followed it on the road. They were clad for travel. Staves swung in their hands. On his back was a load of needful goods, on hers a swaddled baby boy who gurgled lustily and happily as he looked around him at wonders.

The people stood gathered together behind, where their homes came to an end, and wept.