Enchantment

8

Wedding

Dimitri awoke trembling from his dream. He felt as if he had not slept at all that night, though the sky was already grey with dawn. Over and over again he felt the caress on his cheek, heard the words of the herald, then shook with ecstasy as the kiss came, again, again, again. I am meant to be king through widow-right. The Winter Bear has conceived of such a plan for me!

Though why God should choose him, Dimitri had no idea. He had never converted to Christianity, having accepted baptism only as a courtesy to his king. He still did all the old rites, including calling the Bear back to the world in the spring, which Father Lukas had expressly forbidden. But they couldn't very well let the world languish in winter, could they? The soil had to thaw so they could plow. And now he had learned that apparently the Christian God had not replaced the old gods. Father Lukas was full of lies. And the Winter Bear was full of promises.

Dimitri had loved Katerina ever since she was old enough to draw the eye of a good man. Everyone knew that he was the one who, had the old laws prevailed, would have been elected king, and then any girl would have been proud to be his bride, or even a concubine, just for the hope of having the strength of a king in her babies. Yet the new laws were in force, and so only by marrying this one girl could he claim what would have been given to him freely had the people chosen. Thus he knew his destiny: to marry Katerina. She grew up pretty and clever and good—marrying her would not be a hard price to pay.

But even of that he had already been cheated without knowing it, by Baba Yaga's curse and the efforts of Katerina's aunts to weaken it. When Katerina pricked her finger and ran off and disappeared, a grieving King Matfei told everyone about the terms of the curse. Dimitri went forth the moment that he understood, searching high and low for her. But he never found her, though he taught three dogs to search only for the scent of her from her clothing. It was as if she was no longer in the world. That was what he told the king, though he meant to keep searching.

Then, as he was about to set out again, she came back with this weakling fool who insulted his sister and couldn't lift a sword. Dimitri despaired then, bowing to the humiliation of having to try to teach this mutilated woman-dressing half-man how to wield the sword of a knight. His only consolation was how slowly the fool progressed at it. Easier to teach a pig to sing or an ass to dance. But that was his fate. The gods hated him. And hated Taina, for that matter, to serve them up so ripely to the witch.

Now, after this dream, he wondered: How could he have lost hope? The Winter Bear loved the people of Taina after all, and would give them the king they needed despite the curses of Baba Yaga.

When the word spread through Taina that the wedding would be hastened, Dimitri smiled and rejoiced more than anyone. They thought he showed good spirits and true loyalty—and so he did. The sooner she was married, the sooner he could help Ivan to his accidental demise and so liberate the kingdom from Baba Yaga's interference. He would marry the widow and become king of Taina after Matfei died. He would be a good king, too, especially if the messenger came to him again and taught him how to please the Bear. Then just as the great Emperor Constantine became a champion of Christ after seeing the cross in the heavens promising him victory, so would Dimitri make sure that in his kingdom and in every other kingdom where he might have influence, the name of Bear would be on every man's lips, and every knee would bow to the Lord of Snow.

On Thursday Ivan was baptized. It was a simple ceremony at the river. Father Lukas was annoyed and showed it. King Matfei, Katerina, and Sergei were the only witnesses. It took all of ten minutes, including immediate confirmation, and there he was, soaking wet and a Christian.

Sort of a Christian. A Christian who knew that almost eleven hundred years later he would be circumcised to fulfill the covenant of Abraham. But for now, Christian enough to marry Katerina.

King Matfei embraced him and kissed him after the ceremony. Then he took Katerina's hand in one of his and Ivan's in the other, and beamed. "Well, now, there's nothing more to wait for. Let's have the wedding!"

Katerina smiled—but it wasn't heartfelt, or so Ivan imagined. He kept a grave demeanor himself, and nodded. "As you wish, Your Majesty," he said.

"It will take a couple of days for preparation. Shall we say Sunday at nones?"

"This Sunday?" asked Ivan.

"I think it would be unfair to ask the seamstresses to have the dress ready for Saturday," said Katerina. "But if my bridegroom is impatient, I can forgo the dress." From her tone of voice, it was clear she had no intention of forgoing anything.

"No, no," said Ivan. "Sunday will be fine."

The preparations for the wedding were both more and less than Ivan had expected. Certainly the event was the only thing that mattered in the village during the two days of preparation. And yet, when all was ready, it wasn't that much. Katerina's dress was extravagant, by local standards, but there were no jewels, real or fake, and apart from her dress and the paraphernalia surrounding the priest, there were no decorations. Fresh straw on the floor; a huge feast waiting for the guests so that Ivan's memory of the wedding would always be redolent of roast boar and stewing cabbage and beets; a crowd of people inside and outside the king's house; and Katerina's dress.

By now he knew to keep his comments to himself. The feast was a considerable portion of the year's calories. The dress was prepared in record time, considering it was hand sewn; later he would learn that it was really a remake of a dress that had belonged to her mother, or it would have been impossible to complete it. The food, the dress: that was labor enough to account for the frantic busyness of the two days between the decision to go ahead and the wedding itself.

So Ivan's new program of working hard at improving his fighting skills didn't have enough time to show any meaningful results, except that he ached all over. The days of agonizing repetitions led to nights of exhaustion and soreness and mornings so stiff he could hardly rise out of his bed. Marathoner and sprinter he might be, but he had never used his body so brutally. He knew that a certain amount of muscle tearing was necessary for the bulking up he needed, but since he had done little in the way of weight training and nothing of swordplay, he had no experience of his body under this kind of stress. He wasn't sure whether he was doing too much, whether he should back off.

Dimitri was downright cheerful in all Ivan's practices, praising him now, telling him he was going to be a wonderful soldier. But Ivan was pretty sure that the king must have told him to be more encouraging, because Ivan could see for himself that he was no more skillful with a sword now than he had been before, or, if he was making progress, it was almost imperceptible. Nothing happened by reflex yet. There was always a time lag while he thought of the next move. Dimitri could have chopped him to bits. But instead, he moved more slowly and never laid a blow on Ivan. He was almost... nice.

He smiled way too much.

Well, fine. Dimitri was a resource, a teacher—what mattered was what Ivan did, and the only judge Ivan needed to please was himself. As when he was an athlete in college, he had his own standard of excellence, his own goals to meet. Let Dimitri think it all had to do with the pace he set; Ivan would learn as quickly as possible. His life—and perhaps more lives—depended on it, and he was determined to disappoint nobody, least of all himself.

Meanwhile, every night Sergei showed him what he had written on the backs of Saint Kirill's parchments. Ivan cared nothing about the quality of the prose or of the penmanship, but it happened that in language and in lettering Sergei was simple and clear. Indeed, the first thought Ivan had upon reading what Sergei wrote was: How authentic!

Authentic, and yet he felt more than a little unease about the project. Sergei would never have written this document if Ivan had not virtually bullied him into it; Sergei didn't even see the sense in it. Ivan almost had to shake him to get Sergei to refrain from writing some introductory apology for presuming to deface these precious documents by writing stories of the silly country folk upon them, his only excuse being that Prince Ivan forced him to do it. Then Sergei wanted to have his first story be that of Ivan and Katerina and the fight with the bear. Even worse! It would have spoiled everything! No introductions, no explanations, no references to Ivan's existence. Certainly nothing to show that this was a directed project. Let it be itself.

For even though Ivan had caused Sergei's accounts to exist, they were still genuine. The stories were untainted by Ivan's expectations. Sergei's language was all his own. Not a letter shaped by Ivan's hand would appear on the page. It was real.

The trouble was that Ivan had no idea how to preserve these manuscripts so they would be found. If he buried them, the parchment would rot away. If he left them out to be preserved in the church, like all the other ancient manuscripts, some cleric would think it was nothing but working papers or scrap and would throw it away. No one would think of recopying it. There was almost no reasonable chance of it reaching the tenth century, let alone the twentieth. He had to hide it in such a way that it would be preserved... but what if he hid it too well? Even if it didn't rot, it would do no good unless someone found it someday.

If only he could carry the manuscripts across the bridge with him. But he couldn't even be sure the bridge would ever be there for him. The problems of this little kingdom were real. Why would Katerina ever let him go back home? When would it ever be convenient?

Besides, carrying it home would do no good at all. The manuscript had to pass through the eleven intervening centuries. If he crossed the bridge and presented it to the world in 1992, scholars and scientists would look at it and say, What a wonderful replica, how cleverly done, but please don't ask us to believe that something so obviously new is a genuine product of the ninth century.

To put it in its simplest terms, there had to be eleven hundred years of radioactive decay of the carbon-14 molecules in the parchment. And the only way to get that was for it to sit somewhere for eleven hundred years.

If only he had a nice big Ziploc bag.

Wrap it up in cloth inside a box of sand to keep it dry, inside tightly stitched leather, inside another layer of sand, inside another box, inside a case of stone; hide it all in a hole in the side of a hill where there'd be good drainage and the hillside would erode away at exactly the rate to make a corner of the box appear in 1992...

And then find some way to be back in his own time so he and no one else could discover this most precious find. Not because it would make him famous and be the foundation of a brilliant career. Or not just because of that, but also because these stories were truer of this time than anything that had passed through the centuries of illiteracy to be written down only during the folktale movement of the 1800s. Too many more-recent events and cultures had impinged on the tales since then.

Even now, studying what Sergei wrote, Ivan began to recognize even older tales underlying these. What would eventually be fairy tales still had redolences of god-stories and myths. Traces of the god who leaves and must be called back—the tale of the Winter Bear was clearly such a one. And in the Winter Bear were echoes of the Weather-god of the Hittites, of Zeus, of Jovis-pater, of Woden. The ancient Indo-European ancestors were still whispering in these tales. Priests once shed blood to make the tales come true. What Sergei could not guess, what Father Lukas would utterly deny, what Ivan himself had not been sure of until now was this: These tales were also a kind of holy book and deserved to be treated as such by scholars. People once lived by these tales as surely as they lived by the tale of Moses and the burning bush, of Abraham and the ram in the thicket that took the place of his beloved son, of the loaves and fishes that fed a multitude, of the God who put his blood into a cup and his flesh into bread and served them to those who loved and followed him.

These stories must survive to a time that is sorely in need of them. If I could only bring them forth and lay them before the people—not the scholars, they'll study them and argue and equivocate—but the people, the Russian and Ukrainian and Moldovan and Belorussian people, who have lost their way because for seventy-two years they were in thrall to a religion that gave them gods and priests who killed and imprisoned and cheated and betrayed them, the people then found that when this nightmare religion fell, the only new religions offered to them were the old Christian one that had been a tool of tsars for centuries and a whimpering dog kicked around by the Communists for another and the religion of brutal free-market capitalism, the worship of money, which the Americans insisted had to be the established church of all the newly freed countries, even though they did not really practice it themselves. Let the East Slavs, the freed slaves, find their ancient soul in the Ivan tales and the tales of Mikola Mozhaiski and Ilya of Murom and Sadka the minstrel and the Winter Bear. Before the great Saint Kirill gave you your state religion, before the Scandinavian Rus' put their name on your nation and your language, before the Tatars got you used to the yoke and a foot on your neck, before envy and admiration of the West led you to remake yourselves over and over again in their image, you had a soul of your own. The root of it is here.

He laughed at himself, thinking these thoughts. What have I become? A prophet of some ancient druidlike Slavic religion? I give too much weight to this. But my people have lost their way, and this is a small, faint whisper of a memory of ancient dreams that once bound us together.

My people? Am I not an American boy? I thought I was. Even during these months of my return to Kiev, I still thought of myself as an American visiting in a land that used to be my own. But now that I've lost Ukraine again, I think of it as my homeland, my people; now that I have no one whom I can speak Russian to, I think of it as my own tongue. I have lost them, perhaps forever, and these manuscripts are the only gift I can send to them, and I can't even be sure of doing that.

Four feverish days thus passed, in exhaustion on the practice field, exhilaration as he read over Sergei's work, and then lying sleepless and aching in his flea-ridden bed, pinching the damned insects between his thumbnails so he could burst their miserable tough carapaces and thinking grandiose thoughts of accomplishments that would remain forever out of reach.

So he was not in the best of shape when the day of his wedding began, and the king himself rousted him out of bed and insisted on the two of them going down to the river together to swim in the bitterly cold water. No doubt this, too, had its roots in some ancient, culturally potent ritual, but when it came to swimming, Ivan was a great believer in heated and chlorinated pools.

But when he and the king came out of the water, shriveled and shivering and stamping their feet, while dozens of men stood by laughing and making obscene catcalls about how disappointed Katerina was going to be when she saw her husband's cold-withered hilt, for the first time it dawned on him that this was the day of the irreversible steps. To marry Katerina was not just a show, not just a courtesy, a favor to a pretty woman who was in a bit of trouble the other day. If he made these vows, he was promising to be her husband. She was promising to be his wife. She would bear his children. They would raise them together.

He wasn't ready.

It didn't matter. Ready or not, he realized, here I come.

Sergei sat in Ivan's room, trying to remember all the details of the tale of the Bear's gold ring before committing any words to paper—there was no room for errors on the remaining parchment. Ivan was somewhere, probably with the king, getting dressed out in garments fit for a boyar's wedding; it would not be right for him to dress as a prince until after the wedding, and even then modesty suggested he might wear slightly humbler clothing. Only when he became king would the distinction disappear. To jump from peasant garb to boyar's clothing was shock enough.

Sergei valued such solitary time at a writing desk. Father Lukas so disdained Sergei's copywork that he rarely gave the young man much of anything to do that used his skill with letters. Until now, Sergei had not thought he had any. But over these days of furious writing, he could see how his hand had become smoother, tighter, more regular. He could also see how much more fluidly the language came from him. Looking over the first tales he wrote down, he saw that not only were the letters too large and ill-shaped, but also the language was awkward and sometimes confusing. What he was writing now, however, was in letters much smaller and yet more, not less, legible.

The trouble was, all the blank space on the backs of the parchments was nearly full. Sergei hated to see the project end. Though he had chosen the best stories to write down first, there were so many more yet to write; and when the work ended, what would there be for Sergei then, except more slavelike labor at the church? Father Lukas would not know how Sergei's hand had improved. He would have him hobbling about emptying slops, sweeping up, carrying things. Sergei had never understood why, if his malformed body made him so unfit for the physical labor of the village, they determined to give him to the priest—to perform his physical labor. Perhaps they felt that Father Lukas did not need to have his menial work performed quickly or well. Or perhaps they expected him to be more patient with Sergei's slowness and clumsiness. If so, they were mistaken. Well, not entirely. Father Lukas did not yell at him to hurry, or curse him when he spilled or broke something. But the look of beatific patience in Father Lukas's eyes as he mumbled a prayer—of course it was a prayer, he was a priest, wasn't he?—could stab deeper than the shouts of the village men and women ever had.

A message to a faraway land, to be wrapped and double wrapped and saved for a thousand years in the earth. It was surely an age of miracles, that such things were possible. Christ himself never buried a message.

Thinking of Christ in the context of stories made Sergei remember the parable of the stewards with their talents. It occurred to him that he, Sergei, was the steward with the single talent, and he was indeed planning to bury his talent in the earth. But how could he do otherwise? These stories were already had among his people—he could hardly show them his writings, for they would say, "We all know the story, Sergei, why would you write it down?" There was nothing to do but bury it. Still, it made him uneasy, to know that he was like the foolish steward in this way. But perhaps he was misinterpreting the parable. Or at least misapplying it. If only he could ask Father Lukas about it.

Out in the corridor, Sergei heard voices for a few moments before they came near enough for him to make out what they were saying. Two men.

"Of course she'll try to disrupt the wedding. This is a disaster for her."

"It's the child she'll go after, when a boy is conceived. What's the wedding to her?"

''The wedding is everything. She must respect widow-right, even without children, because she herself holds her kingdom by widow-right alone."

"Less widow-right than sheer terror. Who in her benighted land would dare stand against her? Only a few of them have even enough courage to flee."

"She will move against the wedding, and we must be prepared."

"If you say so. It costs nothing to be vigilant. Katerina and Ivana will have our protection."

The use of the female form of the name Ivan struck Sergei hard. He had not heard anyone speak so offensively against Ivan. Or perhaps he had, but now he knew Ivan better and so it bothered him more.

"As for the twig-man, the vigilance ends after he's bedded her."

The other chuckled. "I see now why you care so much for widow-right."

"Let's just say that it's to the Pretender's benefit to kill him before the wedding; afterward, we're the ones with the most to lose if he stays alive."

"He's such a clumsy fellow. Everyone knows it."

"He might fall into the river and get swept away."

"Or he might tumble from a cliff."

"He might even fall on his own sword."

"That's as clumsy as you can get."

Chuckling grimly, the two men parted.

If Sergei had ever been permitted at the practice field, he might have known the voices. Neither could possibly be the king—that was a voice he knew. He could also rule out Father Lukas and Ivan himself. But most of the other voices Sergei knew well were those of the women who came to pray and confess at the church.

A plot to kill Ivan, but the plotters were not known. Still, they were men who felt responsible for vigilance during the wedding. Not common peasants, then, but men of soldiering age and with the responsibility of boyars or of the king's own druzhina, the knights who stayed always under arms and under the orders of the king. If the king's own druzhina were plotting against Ivan, what did that mean? Either they were not obedient to the king, or they were. If they were, then the king was a murderer like King David of old; if not, then the king's authority was in danger, for his men were contemplating a great crime against the king's will.

Sergei must tell someone. But whom? Ivan, even if he knew, would be powerless to protect himself—he was the only man of such an age in Taina who handled the sword as feebly as Sergei himself. The king? Well and good if the king were not in the plot, but if he was, then what good would it do to tell him? Who is wise? Who can tell me what to do?

Father Lukas had grave misgivings about the marriage, just as he had had about the baptism. But as Kirill had told him more than once, a priest has no right to withhold the rites of the Church, even when the person receiving them is clearly unworthy. Let God damn whom he damns; it is our business to try to save all who come before us. Especially the marriage, Father Lukas knew, for there was no law requiring that a Christian priest give his blessing to a marriage. The old customs still had full force, and if he declined to marry this foreign pretender to the Christian princess, the marriage would happen anyway, but the priest would be seen by all as the enemy of the king and the people in their effort to stay free of Baba Yaga.

Thus did the compromises begin. He had seen a thousand such compromises with political power during his years in Adrianople, where bishops constantly had to bend to the will of the political and social leaders of the city. In Lukas's opinion, as a young cleric, bending to political pressure had become so habitual as to be automatic, even in cases where a good Christian should have resisted. Yet now that he himself had to weigh the needs of the Church in this place, where the foothold was yet so fragile, he could clearly see that it was more important to preserve the kingdom that preserved the Church, than to insist on utter rectitude when it might put the survival of the Church in danger.

So he put the best face on it, even refraining from complaint that Ivan had appropriated his one assistant. Truth to tell, he rather hoped Ivan would keep Sergei, thus putting King Matfei in a position where he would have to give Father Lukas a new assistant—preferably one who wasn't clumsy and stupid, and who wasn't deformed in mockery of the creation of God. How could anyone be expected to keep their minds on worship and holiness with the clump clump clump of Sergei's passage from room to room? A little boy would be preferable—they never talked back, or if they did, you could whack them a couple of times and get them in line. You could beat Sergei, too, of course, but it did little good. Sergei had never changed his mind through beatings—the man was stubborn beyond belief. A stump would respond better to teaching. At least stumps never talked back to their master.

Father Lukas went outside to greet the people gathering at the bower. Old pagan custom, this collection of greenery and flowers. Homage to some god whose name Lukas did not even wish to know. Well, the technique for dealing with that nonsense was well known to every priest. He would declare the flowers to be in homage of the Word of God, the ineffable Son, who made all things that grow upon the earth, and for whom palm fronds were laid down to cover the ground at his coming.

Oh, of course. Now that all the work is done, here comes Sergei. Father Lukas refrained from turning away in distaste. Let the man come. He was no worse a burden than the horsehair shirt Lukas wore under his tunic, where other men wore linen. The constant rashes and raw patches from the horsehair kept his flesh mortified before God; if God then chose to mortify the spirit as well, that was his holy business.

As he held still, waiting for Brother Sergei, the women who had been working on the bower came up to ask him for approval.

"Yes, lovely, lovely. God will be pleased that you did such work in his holy honor."

There. Now even the unbaptized among you have served God, without even meaning to.

"Oh, look, there's my boy."

It was Sergei's mother who spoke; but she was not speaking to Father Lukas. Instead, she was half-dragging a bent-over old lady along with her to intercept Sergei as he headed for Lukas. "Sergei, look who's come to the wedding!"

Sergei greeted the old lady with deference but without recognition. "You know, Sergei," said his mother. "The one who gave me the..." Her voice fell to a whisper. But Lukas knew what she was saying: The old woman who gave her the hoose that Ivan had supposedly worn. A troublemaker and a gossip, thought Father Lukas. A king by his conversion and example could create a church; old women with their gossip and nastiness could destroy one.

It was just as well that the old biddy was ignoring Father Lukas. Indeed, she ignored Sergei, too, after a perfunctory greeting. Apparently she wanted to talk only to her sisters in crime, the gossips of the bower.

Sergei quickly got away from his mother and closed the rest of the distance between him and Father Lukas. "Father, I need your counsel."

"Really? I thought only Ivan was your teacher now."

"I'm his teacher," said Sergei, somewhat resentfully.

"Let's not argue about who is teaching whom," said Father Lukas. "What did you want my foolish counsel for?"

"I overheard something in the king's house. Two men speaking, plotting to..." Sergei looked around.

So did Lukas. The old woman who had come with Sergei's mother was still loitering nearby. Listening? Lukas took Sergei's arm and led him into the church. He could see the old woman wandering off, around the church in the other direction. Well, let her listen. What could an old woman hear through walls?

"Speak quietly, we have an eavesdropper," Lukas murmured.

"A plot to kill Ivan, Father," said Sergei. "Two men in the corridor. Speaking of how there should be an accident after the wedding."

"More fools they," said Father Lukas. "They'd better await the birth of a son."

"Widow-right," said Sergei. "Have you heard that word before?"

"In whispers, lately," said Father Lukas. "But there is no widow-right. That's Baba Yaga's invention, to justify her continuing to hold her late husband's throne and forbidding a new election to replace him. Baba Yaga's law will never work to the benefit of Taina."

"Then perhaps at the wedding, if you say something to that effect..."

"There's no part of the ceremony where the priest, acting in the place of God, warns the guests not to murder the bridegroom because it might jeopardize the succession."

"You'll do nothing?"

"I'll do what I can. But to pollute the wedding with charges and accusations, especially when they're only vague ones about two men overheard and perhaps misunderstood through walls and doors, that I will not do, because it would do no good."

"That's why I came to you for counsel, Father. Because you would know what to do."

Cheerful now, Sergei bustled out of the church.

Father Lukas sat down on a bench and thought about what Sergei had told him. A plot to kill the bridegroom. It should have been foreseen. Indeed, Lukas had foreseen it—but not so early. Someone had lied to these conspirators and told them that there was no need to wait beyond the wedding night.

A great tumult arose outside. Cheers and laughter. The arrival of the bride.

Lukas went out to greet Katerina and bring her and the ladies who had sewn the dress onto her into the church.

"One last confession before the wedding," said Katerina.

Father Lukas led her to the one bench at the front of the church. In most churches it would have been reserved for the king and his family, but King Matfei insisted that old men and women use it while he stood during mass. Now, though, it was available for hearing confession. He seated her so that she would be facing the icon of Christ the Judge on the wall. "Keep your voice low," he reminded her.

Her confession was simple and rather sweet, as always. Father Lukas did his best to remain dispassionate during confessions, but it was hard to keep from being judgmental. The people whose confessions were always lies made him tired; others, though, made him seethe with the small-mindedness of their view of sin, or with their ignorance of their real sins. Some even spent their confessional time confessing the sins of others—always couched, though, as confessing the sin of "wrath" at this or that person, followed by a recital of all the awful things the person did to provoke their poor victim to sin. Wake up! he wanted to shout.

But never with Katerina. Her confessions were pure, laying no blame on anyone but herself. For instance, Father Lukas was well aware of how annoying—nay, disturbing—this Ivan fellow could be, yet not a word of complaint from Katerina. Rather she confessed to having neglected him, and failed to help him; by the time she was through Father Lukas was persuaded that indeed she could have done better. This was disturbing to him because he was quite aware that he himself had done much worse. It wasn't a pleasant thing, when the priest was guiltier of a sin than the parishioner who confessed it to him.

Which is perhaps why, when he had absolved her with advice about how to do better—but no further penance—he then unburdened himself to her. He told her what Sergei had overheard, and the obvious danger that Ivan was in.

"But that's so foolish," said Katerina. "There is no widow-right under the new law. If they're looking to the Widow to behave consistently with her own situation, it's in vain. If they kill Ivan before I have his child in me, they will have done the witch's work. It will give her the pretext she needs."

"Perhaps Sergei misheard them."

"Perhaps," she said. "He truly has no idea who the plotters are?"

"It could be anyone, though it's likely to be knights of the druzhina, or perhaps a few boyars." A conspiracy among boyars was less likely, if only because they were scattered on their manors throughout the kingdom, while the druzhinniks were always together in such a manner that conspiracies could grow like mushrooms, overnight.

"What can we do?" she asked. "If I ask men to guard him, then in all likelihood I'll be inviting at least one of the conspirators to protect against himself."

"I foresee the real danger on the practice field," said Father Lukas. "I hear that Ivan is working very hard now—but accidents can happen during practice, and who could prove it was anything else, should a passing blow inadvertently pass through his throat."

She was about to come up with something else, but at that moment the shouting began outside.

"Fire! Fire!"

Father Lukas rose to his feet and walked toward the door. "What a time for one of the kitchen fires to get out of hand," he said. "I hope it's not at your father's house."

"No," said Katerina. "I think it's here."

Sure enough, the flames were already licking in at the windows and crackling along the ceiling. The church was entirely of timber, with almost no daub in it at all, and it was bone-dry. The fire might have started only two or three minutes ago, and already it was almost too late to get out of the church.

"Run!" shouted Father Lukas as he headed for the door. By the time he got to it and held it open, Katerina had her skirt hitched up and was ushering toward him the old ladies who had been praying in the church. The slowest of them she finally picked up and bodily carried out the door. Only when they were all outside did Father Lukas remember that the precious books and parchments were all in the tiring-room. "O God, help me!" he cried as he headed back into the church.

"No!" cried Katerina. "It's too late! Come out! I command it in the name of the king!"

What was the king's word at a time like this? thought Father Lukas. It was the authority of the fire itself that stopped him, for he wasn't two steps inside the church when the roof collapsed over the altar. The tiring-room was gone. Father Lukas barely made it back to the door before the rest of the roof gave way, and as it was, flames shot out the door after him so fiercely that his robes caught on fire. He fell to the ground and several of the people fell upon him, to smother the fire with their own clothing and bodies. Except for the singeing of his hair, he wasn't even burned. But the church was gone, his books and papers were gone, even his robe was in ruins.

There was no kitchen fire close to the church. There was no lightning to spark a flame. It had to have been set. Who would set a fire?

As if in answer to his unspoken question, Sergei's mother let out a wail. "She's dead, she's dead, she's dead!"

Who? The old lady, Father Lukas soon learned, the one who lived out in the forest, the one who had brought the hoose to her, which she had so carefully related to him in confession—another of the ones who so gladly confessed other people's sins. Lukas expected to see a corpse, though the old woman was so dried-up that it was just as likely she had burned instantly to a single sheet of grey ash that wafted up into the breeze and was gone.

Gone, that was where she was. There was no body.

"I say she set the fire," said one of the men. Father Lukas looked around. It was Dimitri, the master-at-arms. "Who else? She's not here, she didn't burn, this fire was set."

"Why would she do it?" asked Sergei's mother.

"Are you that stupid, not to see it?" said Dimitri. "No wonder your son's such a dunce. This old woman from the woods, who else is it but the Widow herself? And you took her into your house!"

Father Lukas sighed inwardly at the way Dimitri refused to say Baba Yaga's name outright.

"She ate at my table," said Sergei's mother. "Would an evil witch do that?"

"She'd do it if it got her close enough to burn down a church," said Dimitri.

"It's no use arguing about this," said Father Lukas. "The building may be gone, but the Church itself cannot be destroyed by fire. If it could, the devil would be laying fires all over Christendom. What was taken by fire can be built again by sweat."

"Well said, Father Lukas!" cried Sergei. But Father Lukas was under no illusions about the reason for his enthusiasm. Anything to ease the blame that was bound to come to Sergei's mother for having brought the old woman here—especially if it really was Baba Yaga in disguise.

"Father Lukas," said Katerina, "what matters now is this: Shall we postpone the wedding?"

"Whatever you wish," said Father Lukas. "We could easily postpone the marriage to another day."

"No!" roared Dimitri. "Every day that passes brings more danger! Don't you see that the fire was set with Princess Katerina inside? This wedding must go on, so that the curse is swept away at last and Taina can be free of the Widow's claims!"

"If only it were that easy," replied King Matfei as he strode toward the group, Ivan jogging along behind him. They both went directly to Katerina, and Father Lukas was pleased to see that Ivan did look genuinely concerned for his bride, taking her hand and looking her up and down to make sure that she had not suffered harm from the fire.

"My lord," said Dimitri, "every moment we delay plays into the Widow's hands. I say we proceed with the wedding without delay!"

"Your kind suggestion is well meant, and I thank you for it," said King Matfei. "But let us take at least a moment to assess the damage that was done here."

Flames still burned hotly in the nuns of the church. There was no approaching it, the heat was so intense. King Matfei walked around it, Father Lukas following close behind. Only when they reached the end where the tiring-room had been did Lukas realize that not all the books and papers would have been destroyed. "Sergei!" he cried out. "Sergei, the book of the Gospels that you took up to the king's house! The manuscripts you were using to teach Ivan!"

Sergei's face brightened, but then almost at once he grew sad, and then began to weep. "Ah, Father Lukas! This morning Ivan told me to bring the parchments back here to the church, and I did it."

Father Lukas whirled on Ivan. It could not possibly have been his fault, and yet Father Lukas was filled with an entirely unjustified rage against him. "Could you not have studied for one more day!"

Ivan blushed. "Father Lukas, what study would I do on my wedding day? We thought to bring them here as the safest place to store them."

Father Lukas had not wept in the aftermath of the fire, but to have his hopes raised and then dashed again was too much for him. "Ah, God, I have been an unworthy servant, to let thy Gospels perish in the flames of hell."

"Not the Gospels," said Sergei. "I left the Gospels there in Ivan's room, because he was still reading them. It was all the parchments that I brought back."

"The book is saved?" Impulsively Father Lukas embraced the cripple. "God bless you, my son."

"A happy day, then, after all," said King Matfei.

"Let all see the wisdom in this," said Katerina, "that the priest cried, not for the wood of the church, but for the words of the Gospels. The Church is in the words, not in the wood!"

A cheer went up at those words. Most were cheering for the heartening sentiment; Father Lukas, who was now going to have to go back to working out of a peasant hut, at least for a while, joined in the cheering, but his approbation was for Katerina's cleverness in making a homily out of a church burning, and a lesson out of his own tears. She was very, very good at leading the people. A shame she had to have a husband at all.

"I wish I had been a more dedicated student," said Ivan sadly, "and had not caused Sergei to return the parchments." He turned to Sergei. "Go at once to my room and make sure the book of the Gospels is secure."

"No need," said King Matfei. "After the wedding is soon enough. Dimitri is right! Let there be no more delay. If this was the work of the Widow's hand, then let her get no satisfaction from it! Father Lukas, to the bower we go!"

After all the tumult, the wedding was an anticlimax. With the bonfire still crackling and popping its way through the timber of the church, there was a sense of the end of the world in the ceremony, as if they were getting married in the midst of the ruin of civilization. Which is not far from the truth, thought Ivan. These people wouldn't live to see it, but in historical terms, they would not have long to unite under the king of the Rus' in Kiev before the Mongols would burst across the steppe, toppling kingdoms and bringing all under the sway of the Golden Horde. The soul of Russia would be fatally compromised then, with no king able to survive in resistance. When all rulers must be quislings, cooperating with the conquerors to wring taxes and tribute out of the people, then the people have no reason to regard any government as legitimate. Here, though, Ivan could see what the Golden Horde stripped away from the Eastern Slavs. In the way the people revered King Matfei and adored Princess Katerina, in the way these two royals lived right among the people, serving readily and leading boldly, without pomp and pretension, Ivan could see how it used to be, what was lost. A government with true legitimacy. Rulers that the people know and, more important, that know the people. What tsar ever went out and sweated through the harvest with the smerdy? What princess ever called all her subjects by name, and laughingly bore their wedding-night jests?

In this moment, Ivan loved these people and this place. Not the way Katerina loved them, because she knew each one and all their stories from childhood on; Ivan loved them as a whole, as a group, as a community. Maybe Cousin Marek had such a sense of belonging, but no one had it in Kiev, not even among the Jews, who did a better job than most of holding themselves together. And if this is community, he thought, then America has no communities, or none that I have ever seen.

Was it smalltown life, then, that made the difference? Perhaps. But we could have kept it, had we valued it, this feeling of belonging, of being known. Instead we have a century and a half of American literature harping on the evils of smalltown life. How everyone is always in your face and knows your business, about how the guardians of virtue are imperfect themselves and so have no right to judge. Those poor elitist fools—they hated community but had no idea of the emptiness of life after community had been killed. Here it was, the people in each other's faces, the gossip as vicious as ever when the knives came out, no doubt the average number of plots and intrigues, hypocrisies and self-righteousness. But all that paled in the face of the great power of the place: that everyone knew who everyone else was.

Even Sergei. Everyone knows what he is and it's not a good thing to be. Yet where else could he go? Who would he be in another place? Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty. And with the death of Communism, that's what my own people in Russia are becoming, too.

There it was again, that thought of the Russian people being his own.

The Orthodox ritual was strange to him. He had been too young to be aware of religion when he left Ukraine—if, indeed, his family had known anybody who would seek out a church wedding under the Communist regime. And since returning to Kiev, he had not known anyone who was getting married. He knew the American and English Protestant services through watching old movies now and then. The showy Catholic wedding in The Sound of Music. Greek Orthodox services didn't show up much.

Father Lukas said his parts; Ivan and Katerina said their parts, with some prompting, at least for Ivan. Then they drank wine from the same cup, and it was done. The crowd cheered. Father Lukas beamed upon them. His smile was only skin-deep, though. He was not happy. And, if Ivan was any judge of character, neither was Katerina.

Relieved, yes, she seemed to be relieved. As if one great hurdle had been passed. But Ivan knew that this was nothing to her but a marriage for reasons of state. She had grown up knowing such a thing would be needed. He had not. He always expected to marry for love, or at least by his own choice. He had hoped for a bride who would be proud to say the vows with him. This was dismal indeed, to know that she was merely doing her duty to king and country, to God and Daddy.

And tonight. Oh, that was going to be the scene from his dreams. To bed a woman who was only doing it because her people were being held hostage. How is this going to be distinguishable from rape? Ivan had tried reading Ian Fleming once; a friend had lent him You Only Live Twice. In one of the early chapters, Fleming had written that "all women love semi-rape." Ivan was only fourteen at the time, and still not sure that he understood all the nuances of English. But the idea seemed so loathsome to him that even if it were true, he did not want to know it. He gave the book back to his friend unread. To sleep with an unwilling woman—Ivan was not even sure he would be able to perform. That was one difference between the sexes that women never really understood: A woman could just lie there, and the job would get done. But if the man was put off his mettle, so to speak, there was no way to sleepwalk through it.

Can't wait for tonight.

He just hoped that Sergei had the sense to head for Ivan's room the moment the wedding was over, and get those parchments hidden. Fortunately, King Matfei was conferring privately with Father Lukas, so if Sergei hurried, he could come back with the book of the Gospels before the priest thought of going to Ivan's room to get it himself.

It had been clever of Sergei, to think of using the fire as a means of convincing Father Lukas not to look for the parchments. Now Ivan and Sergei had more time to conceal them, and would never have to hear Father Lukas raging at their having defaced the precious manuscripts he was given by Kirill himself.

The surprise was how readily and convincingly Sergei was able to lie. He had to be a practiced liar, to do it so naturally, without a breath of embarrassment. It was a good thing to know about Sergei.

Of course, come to think of it, Ivan had not hesitated to join him in the lie. So much for their being Christians. Though, come to think of it, there was a good long tradition of Christians lying when the need arose, and often when it didn't. Ivan couldn't think of a religion that was any damn good at making utter truthtellers out of its practitioners. Maybe the Quakers were truly plainspoken at one time, but even they managed to squeeze out a Richard Nixon after a few hundred years of suppressing their human propinquity for untruth.

Sergei, if you're going to lie, I'm just glad you're on my side, and good at it, and smart about which lies are worth telling.

Then it occurred to Ivan: Who told the bigger lie today? Sergei, when he said that the parchments burned up in the fire? Or Ivan and Katerina, when they spoke as if what they were doing was actually a marriage?

He still held her hand in his. Her skin was cool. One of them was sweating so much that their hands were slippery against each other. Ivan was reasonably sure that it wasn't her.