Sophia closed her account book firmly and laid her pen aside. “No more today,” she said to the house steward. He bowed with Arab formality and withdrew.
Once he was well gone, she indulged in a long delicious yawn and stretched until her bones cracked. Voices from outside came clearly to her ears as they had throughout the morning; she rose and sought the window.
In the garden below, her guest and her children sat in a circle, three dark heads and Alf’s fair one. They all had pens, even Nikki, and writing tablets; when Alf spoke they wrote. Greek now. It had been Latin earlier.
The cadences were familiar. Homer?
Alf paused. The girls continued to write; he bent toward Nikki. From her vantage directly above them, she could see the tablet in her son’s lap. The scribbles on it looked remarkably like letters.
Her fingers clenched on the window frame. No, she thought. They had all told her, doctors, priests, astrologers: he would never speak or read or write. “Raise him as you may,” the most learned of the doctors had told her in ill-concealed pity. “Train him as you would a puppy or a colt, else he will run wild. More than that, short of a miracle, none of us can do.”
For a moment Alf’s hand guided Nikki’s. He drew back.
Nikki paused, head cocked. Suddenly he nodded and bent over his tablet. If he had been any other child, and if any word had been spoken, she would have said that he had been instructed; had questioned and been answered; and had returned to his task with new understanding.
She drew a breath to calm herself. She hoped for too much; it made her see only what she wished to see. What could one young Latin do, however brilliant he might be, where all the wise men of Byzantium had failed?
In the garden Anna said, “There. All done. Now will you teach me a new song? You promised!”
Though Alf’s voice was stern, Sophia could have sworn that there was a smile in it. “Patience is part of your lesson, demoiselle. Come, let me see if anything written in such haste can be perfect.”
“It is,” Anna insisted. “Alf, what’s dem—demi—”
“That means ‘young lady’ in Frankish,” Irene informed her virtuously, “and he’s being much more polite than you deserve.”
“Every man owes a lady courtesy,” said Alf in a tone that so withered Irene’s pretensions that Sophia stifled laughter. “Yes, Anna, it seems that you’ve done the impossible. There’s not even an iota out of place. However—”
It was Irene who cut him short. “Then you’ll sing for us? A new song, please.”
“Ah,” he said. His voice had deepened a full octave. “A conspiracy. For that I should give you ten more lines apiece, to teach you how to treat your master.” As they burst into loud protests, he added, “But since we’ve already had our full hour and more, just this once I will yield to your impudence.”
Even Nikki laid aside his tablet, leaning forward eagerly. Alf’s voice in song was at once deep and clear: like the rest of him, an uncanny mingling of potent maleness and almost feminine beauty.
It caught Sophia and held her fast. She did not move when all too soon it fell silent, but stood by the window, gazing out with eyes that saw only sunlight.
Someone came to stand beside her. “There doesn’t seem to be much he can’t do,” Bardas said.
The rough familiar voice called her back to herself. She smiled and took his arm and walked with him out of the workroom. “It’s a bit of a scandal, you know. How can we allow a Latin—a boy—to teach our nubile young daughters? Are we positive that he’s only teaching them Latin and tutoring them in Greek, with a little music on the side?”
“That sounds like my sister,” Bardas muttered.
“Well, yes. Theodora was here yesterday. We visited the schoolroom.” Sophia’s eyes glinted. “Alfred, as usual, was infallibly polite. Theodora, as usual, completely failed to captivate him with those famous eyes of hers. And she suggested that maybe we weren’t entirely wise to expose him to such temptation, with Irene growing so pretty, and he so young and evidently a man entire.”
“‘Evidently,’” he said. “I like that.”
They paused just past the door that led to the garden. Alf and the children were out of sight around a corner of the house, but they heard Anna’s tuneless treble and Irene’s sweet soprano rehearsing the song Alf had sung.
“It’s obvious enough to me,” said Sophia, “but I think I’d trust him with any woman living. Except perhaps for one.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She raised both. “Well? Have you ever seen anyone look at a woman the way he looks at Thea?”
“It seems to me,” mused Bardas, “that I saw a boy or two mooning after you in your day. And you inveigled your father into marrying you off to an old man from Constantinople, purely and simply for his money.”
She glared at him. “Money, forsooth! I had enough of my own. Good sense, that was what I admired in you. No fumbling, no foolishness. You knew what you wanted, and that was that.”
“Two of a kind, weren’t we? Though as I recall, the first time I saw you, you were flat on your behind in a dungheap, roundly cursing the half-broken colt who’d thrown you there. I admired your vocabulary. And,” he added after some consideration, “Your trim ankle.”
“You saw more than that, that day.” Sophia smiled, remembering. Bardas sat on a stone bench against the house wall where the sun was warm, drawing a breath, of contentment perhaps, that caught and broke into a spasm of coughing.
Sophia sprang toward him, but he waved her away. His breathing had steadied; he leaned back. “Something in my throat,” he muttered.
He said that every time. Often lately, since the fire. She looked hard at him. He seemed as strong as ever. A little thinner, maybe. A little greyer. He would be sixty on Saint Stephen’s Day.
“It’s true,” he said in almost his normal voice, “those two children seem unduly interested in each other. Has anyone caught them at it yet?”
She knew he was leading her away from himself, but she did not resist him. “I can’t imagine Alfred doing anything of the sort. He’s too…well…young.”
“Is he?” Bardas smoothed his beard. “How old would you say he was?”
“Seventeen, maybe. Eighteen. But that’s not what I mean.”
“I know. In some things he’s a complete innocent. Blushes like a girl if he hears a coarse word. It’s the other things that concern me. He can tell a rare tale when he has a mind. Ever stopped to wonder how he could have been a monk and a priest, taught that great clever ox from the camp, gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem—the last of which, by his own account, took years, with a year at least in the holy places afterward—and all before he’s even grown a beard?”
“Latins take vows almost blasphemously young, sometimes.”
Bardas frowned. “There are times when I think he’s about fifteen. Other times I’m sure he’s as old as the Delphic Oracle. Those eyes of his—he’s no boy, Sophia. Whatever else he is, he’s no boy.”
She shivered in the sunlight. “I know,” she said very low. She remembered the doctor in Chalcedon and shivered again. “I don’t think he means us harm. The children love him, and I think he returns it. The servants quarrel over the privilege of waiting on him.”
“He’s bewitched us all, hasn’t he? You should hear the tales they tell in and around Saint Basil’s. He’s supposed to have walked unscathed through the fire, carried any number of people out of it, and worked authentic miracles of healing, aided by a golden-eyed angel in boy’s clothes and another disguised as a Frankish priest.”
“Jehan is no more uncanny than you are,” Sophia said quickly.
“You think so?”
“Of course I think so. He’s a good deal brighter than he looks, and he knows more about Alfred than he’s telling, but he’s no more than he seems to be.”
“That still leaves the other two.”
Bardas shifted slightly; Sophia sat beside him. “You aren’t going to send them away, are you?” she asked him.
He regarded her in honest surprise. “Why would I do that?”
“The stories—”
“Are just stories until they’re proven otherwise. I don’t deny that I’m highly suspicious, and I’m not at all sure what we’re harboring here. But I agree with you. Neither of them means us any harm. Whatever they are.”
“Maybe, after all, they’re only a pair of pilgrims.”
Bardas snorted and stifled another cough. Before he could answer her, a procession rounded the corner: Anna running ahead with Nikki, Irene walking more sedately behind, and Alf in the rear most dignified of all.
Sophia could not quite suppress a guilty start. What if Alf had heard them?
He showed no sign of it. The younger children paused only briefly before vanishing in the direction of the stable; Irene excused herself to attend to her studies— “A love poem, I bet,” Anna said, and was firmly ignored—and Bardas had business in the City.
Which left Alf, and Sophia sitting in the sun. There was an awkward pause. “I should see to the kitchen stores,” Sophia said to fill it.
Alf sat where Bardas had been, with no show of self-consciousness. Since he neither responded to her inanity nor looked at her except to smile his quick luminous smile, she stole the chance to look at him. His face was smooth, unlined, with no mark or blemish that she could see; the last scar of the burning was gone wholly, without a trace.
It could have been a cold face, white and flawless as it was. But the tilt of his brows warmed it, gave it a hint of the faun; and when he smiled it could melt stone.
“Should you be in the sun?” she asked.
His eyes flicked to her. They seemed to change whenever she saw him, sometimes grey, sometimes silver, sometimes colorless as water. Now they were palest gold, with the same sunstruck sheen as his hair. “I’ll go in in a little while.”
“Soon, then.” He was silent; she added, “I liked your song. Was it Latin?”
He nodded. “A hymn for Rachel bereft of her children. ‘Why are you weeping, maiden mother, lovely Rachel?’” he sang very softly in that marvel of a voice: “‘Quid tu virgo mater ploras, Rachel formosa?’”
He sang no more than that, although she waited, expectant. After a moment she spoke. “Do you miss your monastery?”
She could hear his breath as he caught it, see his fists clench in his lap. For an instant his face was truly cold. Yet he spoke quietly, without either pain or anger. “Yes. Yes, sometimes I do miss it. The peace; the long round of days from prayer to prayer and from task to task, with now and then a feast or a guest or a villager who needed healing or comfort. I miss that. The Brothers whose faces I’d known all my life; my Abbot who was my friend…there are times when I ache to take wing and fly back and never leave again.”
“Why don’t you?”
He startled her with a flicker of laughter. “For one thing,” he said, “I don’t have wings. For another, I don’t belong there any more. My Abbot is dead; the world has claimed me.”
“Has it?”
“Do I look so much like a monk?”
“You look like a gentleman of the City.”
“Who longs for his cloister.” That had been her thought; she stared at him, silenced. He smiled bitterly. “I suppose one can’t repudiate one’s whole upbringing in a day or even a season. But I’m going to have to do it.”
“Why?”
He paused. His eyes had darkened almost to grey. “Many reasons,” he answered, speaking as quietly as ever. “I killed a man, you know that.”
“Against your will and in defense of your Abbot.”
“No,” he said. “It started that way. But when the stroke fell, I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wanted to do it. I took a human life; for that I was truly repentant and atoned in every way I knew how, even to Jerusalem. I shall never free myself from that guilt. Yet that I killed when I did, whom I did—he was mad, and he wanted to destroy three kingdoms, and he murdered my friend who had never raised a hand against any living thing. I rid the world of him. I’ve not been able to regret it.”
She took his hand. It was the left, his writing hand, its fingers stained with ink. Black, not blood-scarlet. “You killed one man. How many have you healed?”
“That’s what everyone says. I know about sin and repentance and absolution; who better? But I can’t go back to Saint Ruan’s. It’s more than the act of murder long since atoned for. It’s that I could do it and feel as I do about it. I’ve changed too much. They raised me to be a ringdove, Thea says; I grew into an eagle.”
“Thea has a clear eye.”
“Thea has a gift for irony. She also says that no one can turn a leopard into a lapcat. By that, I suppose, she means that I’m innately vicious.”
“She means that you were stifling in your abbey. Maybe someday when you’ve had all the world has to offer, you’ll be ready to go back and find peace.”
The bitterness had left his smile. It was gentle and a little sad. “Maybe,” he said without conviction. He rose. “Master Dionysios will be looking for me. Good day, my lady.”
When she found her voice again, he was gone, and she had asked none of the questions she had meant to ask. She realized that she had crossed herself; cursed her own folly, and turned her back on the garden.