women decorating these sacred eggs for Easter, applying the hot melting wax to them with their wooden pens to mark the ribbons or the stars or the crosses or the lines which meant the ram's horns, or the symbol which meant the butterfly or the stork. Once the wax had been applied, the egg would be dipped in cold dye of amazingly deep color. It had seemed there was an endless variety, and endless possibility for meaning, in these simple patterns and signs.
These fragile and beautiful eggs were kept for curing the sick, or for protection against the storm. I had hidden such eggs in an orchard for good luck with the coming harvest. I had placed one once over the door of the house in which my sister went to live as a young bride.
There was a beautiful story about these decorated eggs, that as long as the custom was followed, as long as such eggs existed, then the world would be safe from the monster of Evil who wanted always to come and devour all that was.
It was sweet to see these eggs placed there in the proud corner of the Ikons, as always, among the Holy Faces. That I had forgotten this custom seemed a shame and a warning of tragedy to come.
But the Holy Faces caught me suddenly and I forgot all else. I saw the Face of Christ blazing in the firelight, my brilliant scowling Christ, as I had so often painted Him. I had done so many of these pictures, and yet how like the one lost that day in the high grasses of the wild lands was this very one!
But that was impossible. How could anyone have recovered the ikon I had dropped when the raiders took me prisoner? No, it must surely be another, for as I said, I had done so many before my parents had ever gotten up the courage to take me to the monks. Why, all through this town were my ikons. My Father had even brought them to Prince Michael as proud gifts, and it was the Prince who had said that the monks must see my skill.
How stern Our Lord looked now compared to the recollection of the tender musing Christs of Fra Angelico or the noble sorrowful Lord of Bellini. And yet He was warm with my love! He was the Christ in our style, the old style, loving in severe lines, loving in somber color, loving in the manner of my land. And He was warm with the love that I believed He gave to me!
A sickness rose up in me. I felt my Master's hands on my shoulders. He didn't pull me back as I feared. He merely held me and put his cheek against my hair.
I was about to go. It was enough, was it now? But the music broke off. A woman there, my Mother, was she? No, younger, my sister Anya, grown into a woman, talked wearily of how my Father could sing again if somehow they could hide all the liquor from him and make him come back to himself.
My Uncle Borys sneered. Ivan was hopeless, said Borys. Ivan would never see another sober night or day, and would soon die. Ivan was poisoned with liquor, both with the fine spirits he got from the traders by selling off what he stole from this very house, and from the peasant brew he got from those he battered and bullied, still being the terror of the town.
I bristled all over. Ivan, my Father, alive? Ivan, alive to die again in such dishonor? Ivan not slain in the wild fields?
But in their thick skulls, the thoughts of him and the words of him stopped together. My uncle sang another song, a dancing song. No one would dance in this house, where all were tired from their labor, and the women half-blind as they continued to mend the clothes that lay piled in their laps. But the music cheered them and one of them, a boy younger than I had been when I died, yes, my little brother, whispered a soft prayer for my Father, that my Father would not freeze to death tonight, as he had almost done so many times, falling down drunk as he did in the snow.
"Please bring him home," came the little boy's whisper.
Then behind me, I heard Marius say, seeking to put it in order and to calm me: