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found a new pseudonym, Jon Andersen, and trained Xenia to use it and to be vague about her own
origin. Helpfully, his Catholic acquaintances had no interest in her, beyond wondering why Ser Jon had
handicapped himself by marrying a heretical Greek. If he must have her, why not as a concubine?
How much of the truth did you tell Xenia? I inquired.
None. His brows bent. That hurt, not keeping secrets but lying to her. It wouldn t have been safe for
her to know, how-ever, supposing she could ve grasped the idea ... would it? She was always so
open-hearted. Hard enough for her to main-tain the deceptions I insisted on, like the new identity I
claimed I needed if I was to work for a new outfit. No, she accepted me for what I said I was, and
didn t ask about my affairs once she realized that when I was with her I didn t want to think about them.
That was true.
But how did you explain her rescue?
I said I d prayed to my patron saint, who d evidently re-sponded in striking fashion. Her memory of the
episode was blurred by horror and bewilderment; she had no trouble be-lieving. He winced. It hurt me
also, to see her light candies and plead like a well-behaved child for the baby of her own that I knew we
could never have.
Hm, apropos religion, did she turn Catholic, or you go through the motions of conversion to
Orthodoxy?
No. I d not ask her to change. There has not been a soul less hypocritical than Xenia. To me, it d have
been a minor fib, but I had to stay halfway respectable in the eyes of the Ital-ians, Normans, and French;
otherwise we could never have maintained ourselves at a reasonable standard. No, we found us an
Eastern priest who d perform the rite, and a Western bishop who d grant me dispensation, for, hm, an
honorarium. Xenia didn t care. She had principles, but she was tolerant and didn t expect I d burn in hell,
especially if a saint had once aided me. Besides, she was deliriously happy. He smiled. I was the same,
at first and most of the time afterward.
Their house was modest, but piece by piece she furnished and ornamented it with the taste which had
been her father s. From its roof you looked across crowded Pera and ships upon the Golden Horn, until
Constantinople rose in walls and towers and domes, seeming at this distance nearly untouched. Inland
reached countryside where she loved being taken on excursions.
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They kept three servants, not many in an age when labor to do was abundant and labor to hire came
cheap. Havig got along well with his groom, a raffish Cappadocian married to the cook, and Xenia
spoiled their children. Housemaids came and went, themselves taking considerable of the young wife s
attention; our machinery today spares us more than physical toil. Xenia did her own gardening, till the
patio and a small yard behind the house became a fairyland. Otherwise she occupied herself with
needlework, for which she had unusual talent, and the books he kept bringing her, and her devotions, and
her superstitions.
From my viewpoint, the Byzantines were as superstitious as a horse, Havig said. Magic, divining,
guardianship against everything from the Evil Eye to the plague, omens, quack medi-cines, love philters,
you name it, somebody swore by it. Xenia s shibboleth is astrology. Well, what the deuce, that s done no
harm--she has the basic common sense to interpret her hor-oscopes in a reasonable fashion--and we d
go out at night and observe the stars together. You could do that in a city as well as anywhere else,
before street lamps and everlasting smog. She is more beautiful by starlight even than daylight. O God,
how I must fight myself not to bring her a telescope, just a small one! But it would have been too risky, of
course.
You did a remarkable job of, well, bridging the intellectual gap, I said.
Nothing remarkable, Doc. His voice, muted, caressed a memory. She was-is-younger than me, I d
guess by a decade and a half. She s ignorant of a lot that I know. But this works vice versa, remember.
She s familiar with the ins and outs of one of the most glorious cosmopolises history will ever see. The
people, the folkways, the lore, the buildings, the art, the songs, the books--why, she d read Greek
classics my age never did, that perished in the sack. She d tell me about them, she d sit chanting those
tremendous lines from Aeschylus or Sophocles, till lightnings ran up and down my backbone; she d get
us both drunk on Sappho, or howling with laughter out of Aristopha-nes. Knowing what to look for, I
often happened to find books in a bazaar ... downtime.
He stopped for breath. I waited. The everyday, too, he concluded. When you finished up in the
office, weren t you in-terested in what Kate had been doing? And then --he looked away-- there was
us. We were always in love.
She used to sing while she went about her household tasks. Riding past the walls to the stable, he would
hear those little minor-key melodies, floating out of a window, suddenly sound very happy.
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