Anna opened the door as quietly as she could and peered around it. The room was dim and cool and smelled of the roses that grew up over the window from the garden outside. There was no one there except the stranger in the bed.
He seemed to be asleep. She edged into the room, her bare feet silent on the carpet that had come from Persia, and tiptoed to the bed. Her heart was hammering. But curiosity was stronger than fear, even fear of her father’s reprimand.
She looked at the pilgrim’s face. It glistened with the salve the servants had spread on it over a patchwork of purple and scarlet.
His eyes opened in the midst of it and stared at her. She almost turned and ran. But they were very quiet eyes, and very kind, and that was a smile on the blistered and bleeding lips.
She winced to see it. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No more than it ought.”
She liked his voice. It made her think of one of the bells in church, the deep clear one that rang on holy days. “Then it must hurt a great deal,” she said, “because it looks horrible.”
“It will heal.” He sat up. He was wearing a linen tunic; it was too wide, a little in the shoulders, much more in the middle. “I’m glad you came to visit me. I’m not nearly as ill as everyone seems to think.”
His eyes invited her; she perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m not supposed to be here. I just wanted to look at you without everybody pushing and shoving.”
“Why?” he asked.
She shrugged and looked at her feet. “I don’t know. I guess because I’ve never seen a Latin up close before.”
“Do I disappoint you?”
“A little. You’re so clean. And you speak Greek. And you’re not wearing a mail-shirt. Don’t you own one?”
He shook his head. “I’m only a poor pilgrim. Armor is for knights.” I
“You aren’t a knight?”
“Oh, no. I was a monk before I was a pilgrim. Never a knight.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. “You’re hardly a barbarian at all.”
He laughed. His laugh was even better than his voice, like a ripple of low notes on a harp; “But surely,” he said, “I look like one.”
“You won’t when it heals. The statues on the Middle Way have noses just like yours. Are you handsome under the burns?”
He would not answer, except to shrug a little.
“Mother says you are. Irene wants you to be. Irene is thirteen and getting silly. She’s always looking at this boy or that, and sighing, and quoting poetry.”
“That seems silly to you?”
“Well, isn’t it? She tells me to wait. Three more years and I’ll know what she’s feeling.” She shuddered. “I hope not.”
“Maybe you’ll escape it. I did for a long time.”
“Well. You’re a man. Men are slower, Mother says.” She looked at him, narrowing her eyes until he blurred. “Do you quote poetry at girls?”
“Not…quite.” He sighed. “I haven’t got that far yet. Maybe I never will. It was only one woman, you see. I lost her.”
“Because you burned your face?”
“It’s the other way about. She went away, and I stopped caring what happened to me.”
“Irene should hear you. She’d write a poem.” Anna brought her eyes back into focus. He had stood up and gone to the window. His tunic was too short as well as too wide. It showed a great deal of him; she observed it with interest. “Why did the woman go away?”
He spoke mostly to the roses and partly to her. “She’d just learned that all her kin were dead. I couldn’t comfort her as…as she wanted. We quarreled. She left. I left soon after. That was all. Life is like that. Love is like that, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “But I’m sorry she left.”
“Thank you,” he said, turning back. He had plucked a rose; he gave it to her. She buried her nose in it.
When she looked up, Nikki was standing just inside the door with his thumb in his mouth and his big eyes fixed on Alf.
Alf stood very still. Anna opened her mouth to say something, and shut it again. Nikki hesitated. After a long while he left his place by the door and inched toward Alf, sidling, stopping, never taking his eyes from the other’s face.
Very slowly Alf sank to one knee. Nikki stopped as if about to bolt. Alf was still.
He edged forward again. Alf hardly breathed.
Once more Nikki stopped. His hand crept out. It halted just short of Alf’s face. Drew back a little. Darted out, a quick, frightened touch. It must have hurt; Alf’s eyes winced. But he did not flinch away, even by a hair’s breadth.
More boldly now, Nikki explored him with hands and eyes, nose and tongue. He knelt patiently even when Nikki pulled his hair. He did not try to say anything, except with his eyes.
Suddenly Nikki froze. His eyes were wide, his mouth open slightly. Alf had not moved. Nikki made a small hoarse sound.
All at once he flung himself at Alf, clinging as he had clung to Sophia. Alf held him and patted him and looked at Anna over the tousled dark head.
She stared back. “He likes you. He doesn’t like anybody except Mother.”
“And you,” said Alf, “and Irene, and your father.”
“Sometimes. He can’t talk, you know, though he’s almost five. It’s because he can’t hear; God closed his ears before he was born. We’re all sinners, Uncle Demetrios says, and he’s our punishment. I almost hit Uncle Demetrios once for saying that. Father gave me a tanning, but afterward I heard him say that I had more sense in one eyelash than Uncle Demetrios had in his whole head.”
“I think I would agree.” Alf sat on the floor with Nikki in his lap. “There’s no sin in your brother. Only God’s will, for His own reasons; who are we to ask what they are?”
“That’s what Mother says.”
“Your mother is a very wise woman.”
“She has to live up to her name, doesn’t she?”
“And you try to live up to her.”
“I don’t do very well. She’s a great lady; I, says my nurse, am a perfect hellion. Someday I’d like to forget I’m a girl and travel about and see all the things I’ve heard about in tales.”
“Maybe you will.”
“You have, haven’t you? Did you walk all the way from Anglia?”
“Sometimes I rode. Sometimes I went by sea.”
“Where? When? What was it like? Tell me!”
Her eagerness made him smile. He sat on the bed; she sat beside him, and he began to talk. He was better than any storyteller in the bazaar; she forgot time and duties and even old terrors in listening to him.
The light in the window had shifted visibly westward when Alf paused. Anna waited for him to go on, but his eyes were fixed on the doorway.
She turned to look, and paled. A dreaded presence loomed there. “Anna Chrysolora!” thundered her nurse. “What did your father tell you about intruding on our guest?”
Alf rose with Nikki in his arms. “But, madam, she was not—”
“You, my boy, were told to rest; and look at you.” Corinna drew herself up to her full height. She was somewhat taller than he and thrice as broad. She planted a fist on each massive hip and glowered at them all. “Just look at you. What the master will say, I don’t like to think. Anna, Nikephoros, come here.”
They came, even Nikki, dragging their feet. Alf stood alone and defenseless in his ill-fitting tunic.
“To bed with you,” Corinna commanded. Her tone would have done justice to a sergeant-at-arms. He went meekly, to suffer the indignity of her tucking him firmly in. “There now. You stay put until you’re given leave to get up. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Good.” She swept up the children and bore them away, leaving him alone, half stunned, and beginning to shake with uncontrollable mirth.