IV
Harold Shea swore as his horse shied from yet another balky mule. He had been in the saddle for what seemed like weeks, certainly long enough to learn the difference between riding with a war party stripped for action, and riding herd on a cavalcade of merchants. The dust from a long line of horses, pack and riding mules, carts and wagons, and a fair bit of foot traffic kept his throat constantly dry. He was reaching for his waterskin just as Mikhail Sergeivich rode by.
"Drink up. We'll reach a spring before noon," Mikhail said. Like Shea, the Rus soldier wore the plain armor of mercenaries rather than anything with Prince Igor's device.
"I swear, we seem to add more merchants every day," Shea said.
"That ruse of yours worked a little too well," Mikhail replied. "But I must admit it was clever."
To get Reed Chalmers out from under Prince Igor's death sentence, Shea had improvised a fairly desperate plan: hit the Polovtsi while they're drunk. The prince had laughed aloud when the psychologist explained it, then had come close to him and sniffed.
"No, you are sober," he'd said. "Eh, well, with you in charge it might work. But how will we get them drunk?"
That was the difficult part. They needed thirty or forty wagonloads of wine and mead, more if all they could find was ale and kvass. They also needed an excuse for the Polovtsi to all be drinking at a particular spot. Finally, Shea needed to spare Seversk's treasury, or the plan would never go anywhere.
Remembering tales of moonshiners in both the old and new worlds of his own universe, Shea suggested that a rumor be circulated that the prince was planning to raise the liquor tax in kind, and that his agents would be starting their collections in the west very soon. He hoped that would put liquor merchants on the roads east, trying to dispose of their stocks before the tax collectors caught up with them.
The rumor succeeded far better than Shea, or Igor, could have believed. It was compounded by an even less pleasant one, that Seversk would face more frequent Polovets raids shortly. It was possible that some of the merchants were trying to turn goods into more easily hidden coin. Most of them, though, were probably just trying to evade their taxes.
The vintners and brewers were soon joined by all kinds of other vendors. Not the purveyors of luxury goods: silk, fine glass, gold and silverware, anything whose primary market was in the city itself was not put at risk on the roads. But woodwork, cheap iron and tinware, woolens, rough-cured hides—everything that could be taxed in kind found a market on the roads and added to the sights (and smells) of the cavalcade.
The merchants were being delicately herded to a spot on the border of the principality of Seversk. The area was hardly settled at all, thanks to Polovtsi raids as much as anything, and the actual border was somewhat disputed. Shea's plan required, however, that Igor claim the spot in question.
It was the logistics of getting the merchants there and no further, protecting them from raids along the way, and pretending all the time to have no connection with the prince, that was making Shea and the other men Igor had sent curse, sweat, and ache. The strain of holding back the "in the prince's name" they were accustomed to use soon had the soldiers beginning every sentence with an obscenity.
A few of the merchants, too poor to afford horses or mules, tried to make do with oxen. They held everyone back so much that Mikhail Sergeivich finally ordered them to the rear, to keep up as best they could, for the caravan could not be held to their pace. The merchants howled, they offered bribes, they threatened to protest to the prince.
Mikhail Sergeivich and Shea ignored them.
They couldn't ignore one peddler who'd been too poor even to buy an ox for his cartload of hides. He'd stolen two, and the owner came after them.
The guards couldn't formally arrest him, but Shea gave him a persuasive lecture about mercenaries needing to stay on terms with Igor much more than they did with thieving peddlers. Igor's arm was long and his justice swift and stern. The thief already owed fine of a grivna apiece for stealing the oxen. What else was he prepared to risk?
The oxen were returned, leaving the peddler sitting disconsolately on top of his cart in the middle of the steppe.
Then there were the merchants with expensive horses who needed cut fodder and few scruples about where they cut it when their bagged supply ran out. There were the merchants who didn't hobble their ponies and mules properly when they turned them loose to graze, so that Mikhail Sergeivich had to send out search parties for the strays, risking warhorses breaking legs in rabbit holes and lurking bandits picking off the riders. There was the cart that broke down so that it blocked the only strip of dry ground for half the caravan; it eventually ended in the bog.
There was enough trouble so that Shea was actually glad Reed Chalmers was not with him. The older psychologist was not the world's most easygoing traveler, and on a journey such as this they'd have given each other migraines, if not ulcers.
It surprised Shea that men who supposedly traveled for a living would make so many simple mistakes on the march. Shea wondered if most of the merchants were actually accustomed to selling their wares locally. If they were traveling now to avoid paying taxes later, they were certainly paying the penalty.
The biggest problem, of course, was keeping everybody from too much sampling of the main cargo. Shea didn't want to place aversion spells on it, not when his plan depended on free swilling by the right people. He had to fall back on persuasion.
By itself, that would not have been too demanding a job. Mikhail Sergeivich, and Shea as his nominal second-in-command put on a convincing mean captain/nice lieutenant act, which kept the soldiers and most of the merchants in line, most of the time. Once Shea had to draw his sword on a merchant's servant, and a few other times it took Mikhail Sergeivich and his biggest men cracking a few thick heads to quiet things down.
Fortunately that happened after they were far enough out on the steppe that deserting the caravan wasn't a good idea. The owners of the cracked heads stayed in the ranks. But Shea and the soldiers walked with eyes in the backs of their heads and their hands close to their sword hilts for a day or two, and went about in pairs after dark.
And everything from sweet reason to cracking heads had to be done during and after days in the saddle, short of sleep and struggling with thirst. As the days dragged on, Shea began to dream about adventuring in a world based on a work written by some cloistered nun a thousand years and a thousand miles away from the actual events. No long trips, no saddle sores, no reeking horse-barbarian camps, no subtler reek of blood from executed traitors!
"How far have we come today?" Shea asked Mikhail.
"A third less than we should have, so far."
"The devil fly away with this steppe!"
"Speedily a tale is spun, with much less speed a deed is done, eh? Well, by midafternoon tomorrow well have to send out scouts, anyway—and messengers."
The messengers would be riding to Igor's column, well to the rear. Chalmers was traveling with it as a closely watched prisoner, doubtless in no great comfort. But there was nothing Shea could do for his colleague except bring this off.
Over the next few days, Shea found that, this trip anyway, the steppe had no power to hypnotize him. The merchants were settling down for the most part, but the steppe made trouble on its own. A wolfpack stampeded some mules one night, and on another morning, short of water, they reached a spring only to find a dead aurochs in it. That was the longest day of the journey, it seemed, and before they reached the next water source, boredom was the least of Shea's worries.
They saw no Polovtsi, but endured enough else to test everyone's alertness to the limit. Even Shea's dreams of Belphebe grew faint, which he soon realized was just as well. Seeing Belphebe again depended on getting Doc Chalmers out of this jam, and if he'd stopped to think about it, instead of just doing it, he might have convinced himself that it was impossible.
The scouts had gone out as planned, and they brought the good news that the Polovtsi were approximately where they were expected to be, and in about the right numbers—several bands of various sizes. It was another two days before the scouts could, without being detected, pass between the Polovets bands and find the slave caravan.
"Good smiles," Mikhail Sergeivich said on the ninth day, after hearing the latest report. "The slave train's heading for Krasni Podok at about the pace we expected. But the two largest bands are coming our way. We'd best have the trade-truce banner up before dawn tomorrow. Oh, and send word back to our friends—they also have to move the way we planned, or they'll miss the party."
"The party" was crippling the Polovtsi by getting most of them incapably drunk. That was Shea's job, with Mikhail Sergeivich to lead the mopping-up operations. Another column was to drive through to round up the unprotected slave train before it reached neutral territory, and a third was a reserve.
Thanks to their care in not mentioning Igor's name, no one had yet connected them with Seversk's ruler. Some merchants thought the mercenaries might be the last of Sviatoslav Borisovich's household, fleeing an appointment with the headsman.
"Better hope the weather holds," Mikhail concluded. "The autumn rains have been known to come this early."
"I told you, I have no weather magic," Shea said irritably. "We'll just have to hope that the water doesn't come until the wine is gone."
At dawn the next day they raised the trade-truce banner. At noon a party of eighty to a hundred Polovtsi rode in. The smell was as overpowering as ever, even though this time it was only the men, not the campsite as well. Shea briefly imagined conjuring up a gigantic bathhouse, large enough to clean the whole Polovtsi nation—or deal with them permanently, as Olga had done with her husband's murderers.
Mikhail Sergeivich left the negotiations with the Polovtsi to a senior member of the vintners' guild. They came to terms with a minimum of insults, and half the Polovtsi rode away. The merchants started setting up booths and stands, but kept looking nervously over their shoulders at the Polovtsi wandering about.
"These sons-of-bitches," Mikhail told Shea, "are bad enough when sober. How do you plan to control them when they're drunk?"
"That's the point, to get them drunk," Shea replied. "I've been meaning to ask: what does trade law require them to do?"
"To pay for anything they want or break, and to observe the three-day limit. And even then one band once claimed they'd spent a whole day drunk before they looted a border household, so they'd forgotten where they were.
"That only involved maybe fifty Polovtsi. By the time all our friends' friends get wind of the party and come, we'll have half the steppe on our hands!"
"What happens when they have something to sell?" Shea asked.
"They stay sober then, and haggle like everyone else. They generally insist on selling first. Then, as often as not, they've been known to claim that the coin was bad, or the trade-goods worthless, so they can steal instead of buying in turn."
"If this works, they'll actually be falling down. Tell the soldiers to stick to water tomorrow. There's nothing we can do about the merchants."
"True," said Mikhail, and went off to give the orders.
Shea was up before dawn the next morning. Sure enough, one of the Polovtsi had made a nuisance of himself last night, insisting on having his cup filled again and again and never offering to pay. The merchant involved seemed more resigned than angry, and Mikhail told Shea (after saying "I told you so") that the guild would cover his losses out of total profits, if any.
The rider had thrown the cup away after emptying it the seventh time, and Shea had retrieved the leather vessel. The Polovets had been satisfyingly drunk, too, but in this matter of life or death Shea intended to hedge his bets.
Concealed among the wagons, and as close to the sleeping Polovtsi as he could stand, Shea held the cup in one hand and gestured with the other. He didn't quite sing, but a melody lurked under his intonation.
"They're Polovets riders who've lost their way,
Da! Da! Da!
Smelly steppe goats who have gone astray,
Da! Da! Da!
Lousy barbarians out on a spree,
Doomed to get drunk until they can't see,
And the Rus will make prey out of all they see,
Da! Da! Da!"
Then he crept back to the trade area proper, and unstoppered a leather flask. It was filled with a mixture of ale, kvass, mead, and wine, and the thought of drinking the concoction was enough to make Shea turn Prohibitionist. Again holding the flask in one hand, and gesturing with the other, Shea chanted:
"All liquor in the cask and tun
And every barrel on this ground,
You mighty waters old and young
In which our senses oft are drowned;
From strength to strength let every drop
Proceed, nor let that power fail,
Let kvass be strong, the limbs to stop,
Nor be there weak nor watery ale.
Let mead o'ercome the will to move,
And wine be poured that blood not flow,
And every drop a Samson prove
And twenty men or more o'erthrow."
They've been warned, he thought, as he curled up under the nearest wagon and tried to get a nap in before the action started. He wasn't sure just what the strength—he wouldn't have touched a drop of liquor in the camp.
As dawn lightened the eastern sky, the camp began to stir. The night guards came in, the day guards went out, the merchants lit fires and prepared meals. The wiser ones, Shea noticed, had all the old men and young boys out of sight and were offering food to the soldiers. The soldiers ate, and repeated their warnings about drinking only water today.
Mikhail added, "Put the best drink out first, to put them in a mood to pay."
Shea didn't really care if the Polovtsi were in a mood to pay. All he needed was Polovtsi in a mood to drink.
The first Polovtsi rode in shortly after sunrise, and they kept coming steadily after that. By midmorning the camp was surrounded by the steppe horsemen, and the stench was something one could almost reach out and pluck from the air in handfuls.
The riders needed no encouragement to drink, and some of them even had the courtesy to pay—at first. After the fourth or fifth cup, they seemed to forget that there was such a thing as money. Shea could see the merchants gritting their teeth as they watched their stocks disappear, without any reasonable amount of silver appearing in return.
There was also a little trading in dry goods. The psychologist saw an occasional Polovets festooned with wooden trinkets or woolen cloth. But balancing debits and credits (Shea was the son of a bookkeeper), he doubted that the merchants' guilds would show a profit today.
Shea was starting to wonder if his strengthening spell had worked at all, and if instead he should have tried turning the mead to whiskey. The amount the steppemen could get through, on empty stomachs too, gave him the feeling of lice in his pants (at least he hoped it was only the feeling).
But by noon, Polovtsi were falling down and crawling around like cockroaches. They couldn't walk, but they could still drink. If they couldn't get to the barrels, they could send friends who were still stumbling instead of crawling.
Shea watched one Polovets give friends his short sword, his metal cap (it looked like something captured from a long-dead Rus), his shirt (complete with lice), and his trousers, all to trade for more wine. They came back with the wine, all except one man.
The last friend came back empty-handed, just as the now practically-naked warrior was finishing off the wine. He glared at his friend.
"No friend of mine you are. Buy wine—with my trousersh—then drink it yourshelf."
"Ho, I did—"
"You did."
"Did not."
"Did!"
"Did not!"
"I'll take—your trousersh—"
"No, you won't!"
The warrior on the ground suddenly developed the ability of a leopard. He gripped his friend by the ankles, tumbled him off his feet, and began pulling at his trousers. The other struggled, kicking at the first man's face.
A foot connected with the first man's jaw. His head snapped back and to the side. He rolled over on his side, then onto his back. A moment later he began to snore.
His friend lurched to his feet and staggered off. He staggered straight into the wheel of a cart, then reeled back, rubbing his nose.
"No brawl, my chief," he said. "Nothing—like that. Just a bet between friendsh. Jusht a . . ." His voice trailed off. Having lost his vision, the Polovets now lost his balance. He gripped the iron rim of the cartwheel, but that only slowed his fall. In another moment he was as soundly asleep as his friend, the only difference being that the second man was facedown.
Those two were the first Shea saw go down from drinking too much breakfast, but they weren't the last. Between them, breakfast and lunch took out a good half of the visitors.
By early afternoon, they were coming in dribs and drabs instead of whole bands. Some bought drink and rode off with it; Shea hoped it would at least knock the fight out of them.
A Polovets lurched up, his arm around a merchants apprentice and brandishing an empty cup in his free hand.
"More wine! This—hish mastersh a pig. Won't—no more."
"You've had enough, friend," the young man said.
From his voice and breath, Shea thought that the apprentice could also skip the next few cups. But the spell was working on both of them; they were going to drink themselves under the table, under the wagon, or wherever else the drunks were ending up.
Shea personally refilled their cups. They emptied those cups twice before reeling off, thanking Shea with embraces that left him badly wanting a bath. Drunken Polovtsi were adding assorted stinks to a camp already ripe from the horde of sober ones.
Good thing I didn't turn the mead to whiskey, Shea thought. I wasn't planning to kill the Polovtsi from alcohol poisoning. Now, if the drink just holds out—
It did. A few Polovtsi seemed to realize what was happening, and tried to mount and ride off. Most of them fell right back off, and none of them got more than five hundred paces from the camp.
A few also didn't survive the afternoon—brawls, falling into streams and drowning, breaking necks falling off horses or wagons, and so on. Even that didn't sober up their surviving comrades.
Shea had seen alcoholics, people who couldn't stop drinking, and they weren't a pretty sight. Neither were the Polovtsi, as his spell drove them to pour more and more down their throats.
He reminded himself that Chalmers being executed or Florimel spending her life in some potentate's harem would be a much uglier sight.
By the time the sun was halfway down the sky, the work was done. Mikhail Sergeivich leaped on a wagon and waved his sword over his head three times, the agreed-on signal for the soldiers to set on the Polovtsi. Then he jumped down, joined Shea in pulling a sheaf of rawhide thongs from their baggage, and went to work.
Not all of the soldiers had obeyed orders to avoid the liquor, and those the two leaders left lying where they'd fallen. A few drunken soldiers didn't make much difference, anyway. The Polovtsi were either sprawled flat or sitting slumped against something, and none of them could have stood unless tied to a tree. As for fighting, they were so obviously past it that in a few minutes the sober merchants came out and began helping the soldiers bind the prisoners.
A few of the Polovtsi who'd been sleeping off their breakfast woke up before they were bound. They only stared dim-eyed at their captors; Shea wondered how many of them (especially the ones who'd drunk kvass or mead) would be paralyzed by hangovers.
They'd run out of thongs and were raiding the leather merchants' stores for more material, when Igor rode up at the head of his warriors. The prince stared at the acres of helpless Polovtsi, and laughed so hard that anyone but a Hero would have fallen off his horse. Then he dismounted and embraced Shea.
"You are a bogatyr like none ever named in song or story! The Polovtsi are finished and Rurik Vasilyevich has his life, by all the saints!"
"Did you capture the slave train, Your Highness? And what of that other wizard? And Yuri Dimitrivich's family? And—?" Shea hoped his day's victory entitled him to a few straight answers.
"We captured it, all right," the prince interrupted. "Word of your drinking party reached the guards, and half of them rode off to join it. They are out there," he added, waving a hand at the field of drunks.
"The rest seemed to suspect something, but we had a scout who knew a ford across a little stream that they counted on to protect one flank. We had our men on foot right into the camp before the guards knew anything. Then the horsemen charged before the Polovtsi could so much as draw a sword!
"We had the camp and the caravan under our hands in less time than it took one of those wretches to drain a cup. Yuri Dimitrivich's family and household, those who survived, are free."
"What did you do with the rest, Your Highness?"
The prince replied cheerfully, "They are on their way to Krasni Podok, and this vermin will join them. Don't worry about any blood prices, Egorov. The grivnas from that sale will more than cover the price of a few wounds."
Igor lowered his voice. "I think I really will raise the liquor tax. If these merchants will go to so much trouble to supply drink to Polovtsi, perhaps I can persuade them to take as much trouble for their prince. Speaking of which, I could use a drink right now."
"Ah, Your Highness, if anything is left, it would leave you flat alongside your enemies. In fact, I'd not offer anything here to anyone but an enemy."
The prince looked around, then headed for the spring. He gestured for Shea to follow, which the psychologist did, telling himself that his dreams of freeing all the slaves in the train had been a few centuries too early. But what about—
"Florimel, Your Highness! Was she freed?"
"I gave Rurik Vasifyevich permission to look for her, once we'd taken the caravan," Igor replied. "He will be coming in with the rest of my band. Oleg Nikolaivich will take the caravan to Krasni Podok and bring back my profits." His smile grew a trifle cruel. "I will also find out who has been depending on Krasni Podok to supply his needs, at the expense of his fellow Rus."
That should help a bit, Shea thought.
Near sunset the rest of the party rode in, including Reed Chalmers. Never was there a more truly named Knight of the Woeful Countenance.
He was still guarded, but Shea could see that the guards were now superfluous. Reed slumped in the saddle so that it was a wonder he didn't fall. There was no sign of Florimel.
Shea helped his comrade down, and wished he had a drink to offer him. The best he could do was privacy, so he took Chalmers to the outskirts of the camp.
"What happened?"
Shea was relieved to see a trace of life in Chalmers' eyes, even if it was only frustration. "I—I don't know."
"Can you tell me what you saw, at least?"
"What—how can that help?"
Florimel is gone again, Shea thought, Aloud, he said, "We never know what won't help. Besides, we kept our promise to Igor. He owes us something. Even if I can't help—"
"All right."
Chalmers described a search of the slave caravan, wagon by wagon and tent by tent, him and four guards. (Not just to keep an eye on him, either; suicidal last-ditch attacks were a Polovtsi specialty.) There'd been hundreds of slaves, some more wretched then others, but none of them as happy as Chalmers had expected to find them, now that they were free.
"One man was bold enough to explain that Yuri the Red's household had been freed but no others," Chalmers said. "He asked if this was a true prince's justice. One of my guards knocked him senseless."
Chalmers kept his anger on a tight rein until they came to the last tent. It had some sort of warding at the entrance, that kept Chalmers and his guards from going in.
The warding did not keep the psychologist from seeing Florimel, standing with Malambroso in the far corner of the tent.
"It should not have kept her from seeing me, either, but perhaps it did. Certainly she showed no signs of recognition. She looked like a sleepwalker."
Then Malambroso began making passes with his hands. Chalmers knew there was only one thing to do: break the ward, then negate Malambroso's spell.
He tried three times to enter the tent, using three different verses (and Shea couldn't have remembered what they were to save his life). The warding stayed firm, which was more than could be said of the guards. Igor's orders or no, two of them ran off.
The other two remained in sight, but at a safe distance, as if fearing Chalmers might Durst into flames at any moment, like a pot of Greek fire.
In the middle of Chalmers' fourth attempt, Malambroso and Florimel vanished.
"I'm sure I did everything correctly," Chalmers concluded. "Any one of those spells should have stopped him." His voice was tight with rage and grief. "And what has he done with my wife?" His voice rose to a shout. "Where has he taken her?"
Shea mentally cursed the whole continuum, starting with Malambroso, going on to the Polovtsi, and not stopping there. He didn't dare curse out loud, but right now he would knowingly have accepted a drink from the caravan's remaining stores.
The day was ending even worse than it had begun, and Shea hoped that Chalmers didn't want any company, because he himself certainly didn't. With a farewell grunt to Chalmers, he stumbled, half-blindly, back toward the center, where fires were beginning to glow.
Shea had to swing wide before he'd gone more than a few yards. The sober merchants had pulled their wagons into a tight circle, in case any sober Polovtsi wandered by. The drunken Polovtsi covered as much ground as ever, although some of them were awake enough to groan and a few were struggling against their bonas.
The psychologist was passing a wagon with a cover of smelly furs tied to poles, when one of the furs flew out and hit him in the face. Before he could react, a human figure leaped after the fur.
The attacker landed on Shea's back, and the Ohioan felt the pressure of a knife seeking to pierce his armor. He tried to keep his balance and draw his sword, but did neither. He went down, his sword caught under him and the attacker on top of him. Shea felt another stab, this time higher up. He tried to free one arm to draw his dagger, because he had the feeling that the third time his attacker stabbed, the knife wasn't going to hit armor—
Something cracked, something else thumped, and a third something went wssssh. The attacker let out a scream and released Shea. The psychologist rolled clear, drawing his sword as soon as his right arm was free, then leaping up ready to go into action.
He didn't have to. The attacker, a thickset man with a Rus robe and a scarf over his face, was sprawled on the trampled grass. Reed Chalmers stood over him, with a long pole from the wagons cover in one hand.
Shea took a deep breath. "Thanks, Doc. You're improving."
"I thought of killing him, but I suspect he may have something to tell us."
Definitely improving, thought Shea.
The scuffle had drawn the attention of the guards, and the prisoner was soon dragged to the center of camp and stripped of his scarf and headdress. In the light of fires and torches, it could be seen that in spite of his Rus merchant's dress, the prisoner had Polovets blood in him.
Chalmers looked closely at the man for a minute, then frowned.
"Do you know this man, Rurik Vasileyevich?"
Igor had come up, although both of die psychologists were too numb to notice. Chalmers stiffened like an icon. Those words were all too clearly etched in his mind.
"Yes, Your Highness," he said. "This is the man who approached me in Seversk."
"Doubtless a spy," Igor said. "But if I find out he had the cooperation of the merchants' guilds, they will pay."
He shouted for Mikhail Sergeivich. "Learn what you can from this one," the prince told his captain. "If he survives, he goes to Krasni Podok."
The return to Seversk took as long as ever, and what seemed like the final failure to rescue Florimel raised neither of the Ohioans' spirits. Chalmers was also frustrated and a little frightened at the failure of his spells. Shea did his best to help his mentor find an answer, but none of their speculation brought them any closer to Florimel or home and Belphebe, and chilly nights made it clear that winter was coming on fast.
They reached Seversk before the weather turned completely sour, and were promptly invited to the victory least in the palace. Neither of the psychologists was in the mood for a party, but neither of them wanted to insult their host by refusing to celebrate his victory, particularly when he owed much of it to them and was not backward in saying so.
By the standards of his time, Shea realized, Igor probably was a great and noble warrior-prince. So they put on their best robes and new boots of the finest kidskin, and went to the party.
They might as well have gone in monk's robes, for all the attention they drew. Everyone had brought out their finest garments, some of which had obviously been in storage a bit too long. Shea wondered if Igor would appreciate a gift of mothballs.
Cloth of gold, brocades with half a dozen colors in them, fine wool and linen with borders of gold thread and jewels, a dozen kinds of fur, swords with jeweled hilts—for once the diners in the great hall were brighter than the painting on its walls. The food was just as lavish; the stuffed-sturgeon dish appeared again, this time with the innermost item some kind of shellfish, and a sauce poured over the whole thing that made Shea ask for more ale several times.
As authentic bogatyri, Shea and Chalmers were seated at the head table, one on either side of the Patriarch.
He listened with fascinated amusement to their account of the piles of Polovtsi.
"You never tasted any of it?" he asked Shea.
"I didn't dare. And if I had known what the effects would be—a soldier who drank the mead said that at first he felt as if he could carry the world on his shoulders, and then felt as if the world had fallen on him. There is a riddle in this, for all that I cast the spell myself."
"There is another riddle to be solved here, is there not?" the Patriarch said. He looked at Chalmers in a way that told both psychologists that someone had been talking. "You were not able to defeat a single Polovtsi sorcerer, while your comrade was able to defeat entire bands. It may be that warriors with no magic are no match for a wizard, my son, but there may be another answer. Cast a small spell for me. Now."
Both psychologists looked at the Patriarch as if he'd grown a second head.
He smiled. "I grant you absolution if they are harmless. But I think I see the answer to your riddle."
Shea recited:
"Who hath a book hath friends at hand,
And gold and gear at his command."
Shea nearly dropped the small gold-stamped photo album into the sauce. It looked like—but it couldn't be. He opened it. Belphebe stared back at him from the photograph.
"Go back where you belong," he told the album. His voice nearly broke.
The album vanished.
Chalmers tried the same spell. The three waited expectantly for a minute. Chalmers tried again. Still no results.
Chalmers' face now showed stark horror. "Have I lost my ability?" His voice shook.
"You shouldn't have," Shea said. "Symbolic logic is a constant, all across the continua. It hasn't stopped." Shea did stop, as he realized that he still had more questions than answers, which wasn't helping Chalmers.
"You took the prince's bread and salt the night you met," the Patriarch said. "You, Rurik Vasilyevich, betrayed that bread and salt. This has become far too common among the Rus, and it is never pleasing to God. Sooner or later a traitor's luck deserts him. And your magic was your luck—at least that is how I read this riddle."
"But it was for my wife's sake—I didn't betray her!"
"Were you able to help her, when she needed help?"
"What can we do?" Shea asked. Chalmers was past speech, apparently not knowing whether to curse or weep.
"If you wish to help your wife, you must do penance for the wrong you did the prince. But it must be true repentance," the Patriarch warned.
Chalmers was a good academic; "repentance" was a religious concept and more than a little alien to him. He hemmed and hawed and blustered longer than Shea cared for. At any moment he was afraid Chalmers would use the word "superstition" or even "nonsense," and he didn't want to think about the Patriarch's reply.
But Chalmers had no alternatives to offer. The Patriarch had the patience of those who take on the work of leading strayed sheep back into the flock. He listened calmly, until there was more grief than anger in Chalmers' voice. Finally, the older psychologist put his head in his hands for a moment, then looked at the Patriarch.
"What must I do?" he asked.
"You must fast tomorrow—that shouldn't be difficult, after tonight—and come to the basilica tomorrow night. I will meet you there."
The next night a thunderstorm raged as the Patriarch led Shea to the door of the basilica. Shea wore a heavy wool cloak with a hood that so far had kept him no worse than damp, but the mud underfoot was another matter. It kept trying to pull his boots off, and he wished paving wasn't another of those little conveniences this continuum hadn't developed.
The basilica was the snuggest building Shea had yet seen here, and one look at the sanctuary told him why. A vast iconostasis—a screen of icons—rose higher than Igor's head and spread out wider than most rooms in the palace. On the left were Old Testament scenes—Cain slaying Abel, Noah leading the animals aboard the Ark, Moses breaking the Golden Calf, Daniel in the lion's den.
On the right, Shea recognized other scenes, from the New Testament—Christ walking on the water, performing the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and on the cross. Above the two wings was the Holy Trinity—and Shea couldn't tell if the Holy Spirit was intended to be incorporeal or if the artist hadn't known how to draw.
The whole iconostasis and many of the individual icons' frames were gold or silver or at least gilded or silvered wood. Elaborate carvings or castings, inlaid ivory and jewels, tapestry-work that made any formal-dress brocade look drab—the iconostasis outshone even the elaborately painted walls and ceiling of the basilica.
The only way to make that thing any brighter, Shea thought, would be to set it on fire. Then he hastily chased the irreverent thought out of his mind. This was a place that could almost make one believe in blasphemy.
It did make Shea remember Sunday school, and discreetly kneel.
The Patriarch returned, leading Chalmers, who was wearing a dun-colored penitent's robe. Facing the iconostasis, the Patriarch pointed out one just over halfway up the New Testament side. "Judas' kiss, the betrayal of Our Lord to His enemies. Meditate upon that, my erring son."
They watched Chalmers prostrate himself on the floor. The Patriarch turned to Shea.
"We must leave now."
The priest extinguished the basilica lamps and picked up their lantern. It penetrated the darkness but feebly, but it got them out, leaving Chalmers with only the sanctuary light.
"Let us pray that though he lie in darkness, God will lead him to the light," the Patriarch said. He began to pray, loudly enough not to notice that Shea was only mouthing words.
The problem wasn't that prayer might not work. Here the problem was that it might.
Shea had finally worked up an appetite for breakfast the next morning, when Chalmers entered their chamber. The older man still wore his penitent's robe, but he had the first smile on his face that Shea had seen in weeks.
"My penitence seems to have worked," he said. "I cast a small spell, and it worked. I changed wine into water."
Shea swallowed a chunk of dry bread. "I suppose the other way around might have been in bad taste."
Chalmers' smile turned into a grin. "Who cares about bad taste? Now that we can follow Florimel, all I want to do is leave this world. I have never been in one I shall be so happy to see the last of!"
His ending a sentence with a preposition told Shea just how excited his colleague was. Nor did he disagree—although there was no point in even thinking about returning to Ohio, not with Chalmers in this mood.
It took them barely ten minutes to dress and pack. Five minutes more and they were standing hand in hand, one on each side of a large puddle on the floor, the result of a leak opened by last night's storm.
"By the power of saints, and the might of princes, by the strength of men and the wit of women, may all the powers of the sky above, and the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth grant that if there is P, and there is Q, then P equals not-Q, and Q equals not-P. . . ."
They were off.