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 house, 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.
Sivi came to see her and helped her with money. He offered to pay her fare back to America if she wanted to go but she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to be alone and study, languages she thought so she could earn a living doing translations. Over the next few years they wrote to each other and she saw him several times in Athens and Smyrna, always enjoying the visits yet always puzzled how the brothers could have been so unalike.
He was away so much, she said, sometimes I have the feeling I never really knew him.
Oh you knew him all right, said Sivi. What you saw was what he was, mountain men like that take their freedom or death in an uncomplicated manner.
And as for us being so different, he added mischievously, one of us was obviously an anachronism, either Yanni in his guise as an eighteenth-century brigand or me with my tastes that run farther back in history, several thousand years shall we say.
She met several men who weren’t important to her, summers she went to the islands. When the war had been over two years she turned thirty and then she decided the time had come, she was ready to go but where? It couldn’t be far, she had saved only a little money.
She looked at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean and put her finger on it. She laughed. Of course. Where else but that unparalleled theater of bazaars and races and faiths above the deserts and wastes, for so long the hope of wandering and lost and searching peoples, once more a dream and a place to dream.
So Maud made her way to Jerusalem.
12 Aqaba
Whispering do it again right now.
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN SHE was treading slowly up the steep steps from the crypt beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a figure suddenly emerged from the shadows and began whispering to her. He was a small dark man with a thin beard and burning eyes but she hardly noticed that. It was his voice that held her.
Beneath the city, that’s where I’ve just been and that’s where I’ve just come from, down there exploring places lost for millennia, Solomon’s quarries I’ve seen and Roman circuses and Crusader chapels and the cognac is eight hundred years old and the lances are two thousand years old and the carved stones are three thousand years old will you believe me.