A vicious child, she hissed. At first he killed only wild animals. He trapped the females in the mountains and ripped them open to roast the embryo. But later he began going into the mountains disguised as a holy man, just as he does today, hunting for stray boys. When he finds one he carries him off and ties him up and uses him, uses him and cuts him until the boy's nearly dead, then hacks off the head and eats the mouth. Do you understand? The peasants suspect it's him but they can't do anything about it because he's a Wallenstein. All they can do is never let their little boys out of their sight for an instant, but that makes no difference to him because there are always gypsies wandering through the mountains to provide new victims for his ecstasies, more sacrifices for his rites.
Thus Sophia raved in her boundless hatred for Catherine until finally Maud had to lock her door and refuse to see her.
A few weeks before Maud was to give birth, Sophia broke into her room one night. Maud had never seen the old woman so crazed. She screamed at her to leave but Sophia seized her by the arm and pulled her to the door with an unnatural strength.
Tonight you must see it all, she hissed, dragging her down the hall to Catherine's room where she worked a concealed lever in a desk. Inside the secret compartment was a thick book in a pale covering.
His life, she said, bound in human skin. Touch it.
Maud pulled away in terror but Sophia still held her tightly. She dragged her down a corridor to the back of the castle and lifted a tiny shutter in the darkness. They were looking down on a small windowless courtyard Maud had never seen before and there in the moonlight crouched Catherine, naked and thrusting, the hindquarters of a ram between his legs, his strong hands wrapped around the animal's neck.
To break it at exactly the moment, hissed Sophia. Now do you believe me?
Sophia had a carriage waiting and Maud left at once. By noon the following day she had gone into labor.
Catherine, in pursuit with forty horsemen, found the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtered all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle. His left eyelid was drooping in the familiar Wallenstein manner of past generations and to Maud he said nothing. His only interest now was to return to the castle and murder Sophia before she escaped.
But as it happened Sophia hadn't tried to escape. She was waiting for him, standing rigidly in a window of the old tower room where her lover had first learned to play Bach's Mass in B Minor nearly a hundred years ago. As Catherine neared the castle he caught sight of her. She glared at him, slowly making the sign of the cross and at that moment his furious gallop came to an end. His horse reared, a convulsion seized him and he was thrown to the ground.
His men propped him against a tree. His arms twitched violently, his mouth frothed, his knees jerked against his chest in successive spasms. Blood trickled over his lips and the veins in his face began to rupture.
In a few seconds it was over and the once powerful body of Catherine Wallenstein lay dead, not struck down by some primitive paroxysm of rage as it appeared, rather felled by the terminal onslaught of a massive and incurable disorder that had been ravaging him for years with a fever resembling paratyphoid, noncommunicable among humans, a condition visited upon him during the onset of puberty when he had first contracted a rare and largely extinct mountain strain of Albanian hoof and mouth disease.
Maud meanwhile, dazed and sickly and understanding none of it, crept on toward Greece with her two gifts from Sophia the Unspoken, a purse of Wallenstein gold and the secret of the Sinai Bible.
In Athens she eventually found work as a governess and came to know a Cretan visitor to the bouse, a fiery nationalist and soldier whose father had been one of the leaders of the Greek war for independence.
Although raised in the wealthy Greek community in Smyrna, Yanni had run away when he was sixteen to join the Cretan insurrection against the Turks in 1896.
He had the tall powerful frame and deep blue eyes common to the remote mountain area in southwestern Crete where he and his father had been born, an isolated enclave of shepherds who were said to be direct descendants of the Dorians, their harsh region notorious for both the savage bloodshed of its vendettas and the fierce independence of its people, so unyielding the Turks had never fully subdued them in their two-hundred-year occupation.
Yanni was proud of this heritage and always wore the costume of his native mountains, high black boots and black jodhpurs and a black scarf tied around his head, in his waistband a long pistol with a white grip and a knife with a white handle split at the end in the Minoan symbol of a bull's horns, a wild and dashing sight on the quiet streets of Athens where he looked like a ferocious corsair from another era, eyes alert and quick in his step, mouth set in such a way men often crossed the street to avoid him.
Yet there was another, softer side to him when he was with Maud. Then the powerful man who bristled with weapons and honor and courage fell into moods so awkward his direct and tender feelings were almost childlike in their simplicity. Suddenly he would look bewildered and fumble for words, lose them and end up staring at the floor helplessly gripping his huge hands.
It was flattering but she didn't prolong it. My eagle, she called him as she asked him to tell her about his mountains in Crete, and then all at once his awkwardness was gone and he was off soaring on the heroic words that had brought his people sweeping out of their mountain retreat again and again to fire yet another revolution in Crete down through the long nineteenth century, every ten years freedom or death, just as soon as a new generation of young men was old enough to fight and be slaughtered.
After a courtship that lasted a year his friend came to her with Yanni's formal proposal of marriage in which he stated that since she was an American, where the custom didn't prevail, he didn't expect a dowry, Maud smiling when the man gravely emphasized the depths of Yanni's love by pointing out that for a man of his name and reputation even a dowry of two hundred healthy olive trees would have been modest in Crete.
After they were married he took her to Smyrna to meet his half-brother, a man then almost sixty, nearly thirty years older than himself.
Not at all like me, he said with a smile, but family's important in Greece so that doesn't matter. And he's a kind man who means no harm, I think you'll like him.
Maud did like him immediately, fascinated by the strangeness of it all as they sat having tea in the garden of his beautiful villa overlooking the Aegean, Yanni nodding respectfully in his fierce costume and trying not to crush the delicate teacup in his hands, his worldly half-brother Sivi immaculate in one of the elegant dressing gowns he always seemed to wear until sundown, languidly passing pastries and discoursing on the opera he was to see that evening or relating the latest gossip of Smyrna's sophisticated international society.
When they returned to Athens, Yanni left her almost at once to enlist in the Greek army that was preparing defenses in the north. He came back a few times during her pregnancy but was away in 1912
fighting the Turks in Macedonia when their daughter was born, and away again a year later fighting the Bulgarians when the baby died. Maud tried not to be bitter but the resentment was there deep within her.
After the Balkan wars came the fighting on the Salonika front and in 1916 she received a telegram saying Yanni had died in a malaria epidemic. Maud cried but it also seemed she had been alone almost from the beginning, a young woman in a foreign land whose childhood dreams had briefly come to life only to slip away again after her first few months with Yanni, still not admitting to herself that once more she felt someone she loved had left her.