third, not first, and when she spoke to the Holy Mother, it was not so much the Blessed Virgin as her own dead mother to whom she prayed. No doubt this was damnation, and she sank down into sleep, into despair.
Then she awoke, and it was this strange boy bending over her, who was not a knight at all, and not terribly wise either, as far as she could tell. But perhaps his was the purest love.
But she did not have his love. She had only his promise, and that given under duress, and kept reluctantly. Lord Jesus, did I offend thee with my prayer? Forgive me, and let me have the husband who will save Taina from the witch. Even if it is Dimitri. I will do whatever my people need me to do.
And yet this thought also, this prayer at the back of her mind: Art thou not the God of miracles? Then is there not some miracle thou canst bring about to turn this boy Ivan into a knight, and somehow make him wise, and a man, and let him love me?
Ivan sat alone in the tiring-room. Father Lukas was out among the people, doing whatever it is that priests do. Sergei was cleaning out the priest's chamber pot and then washing the priest's clothes, hopefully not in the same water. Ah, how Ivan longed for the twentieth century at times like these. The lush melodies of a flushing toilet - the rush, the swish, the gurgle, the gulp, and then the lingering aftertones, the whispering hiss, and then... silence! The glorious rhythm of a washing machine with an out-of-balance load, knocking and pounding its way across a laundry-room floor! The bucolic life had lost its charms for him somewhere between the fleas and the itchy woolen clothing.
His little plan to record the stories of the people of Taina had come to nothing, foiled by the simple fact that cheap paper hadn't been invented yet, or at least hadn't yet reached Europe, while the birchbark they used for jotting notes on decayed about as quickly as toilet paper. Ivan wracked his brains to remember how and when papermaking had made its way west from China. Would it be three or four centuries he'd have to wait?
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, my ass. American ingenuity amounted to squat in this place. These people needed a very specific kind of man, and he wasn't it. Katerina was beautiful, but she hated him, which didn't bode well for the marriage. And Ivan simply wasn't interested in living the life that this time and place offered.
There must be other men of his temperament here. What did they do? The men who had no wish to do violence. The men who wanted to learn, to know the answers, to solve mysteries. The men who quickly lost interest in any physical activity that didn't let them think their own thoughts.
The men who hadn't yet grown up.
That's what Ivan had to face about himself. The life he had chosen was a cocoon. Surrounded by a web of old manuscripts and scholarly papers, he would achieve tenure, publish frequently, teach a group of carefully selected graduate students, be treated like a celebrity by the handful of people who had the faintest idea who he was, and go to his grave deluded into thinking he had achieved greatness while in fact he had stayed in school all his life. Where was the plunge into the unknown? Where was the man who would stand against all comers to protect his family, his people?
Easy to say that he was lucky enough to live in peaceful times, that he was never called to war. He was called now, wasn't he? And here he was slacking, avoiding practice with the weapons of this time and place. He was stronger than he let them see; finding himself unskilled when he was used to being a contender, resenting their scorn, he had backed off, had stopped trying. Like a kid who would only try when he knew he could win.
It wasn't childish to follow in the footsteps of a distinguished father, was it?
But his father hadn't stayed in the cocoon. Years before anyone guessed that the Soviet Union would collapse, Ivan's father had decided he had to get his family out. So he declared himself a religious man, let them slice him up, lost his home and his job, risked years of deprivation and harassment, and finally won, taking his family