Stres was a servant of the state, and strived to remain neutral on the issue of religion, which was not really close to his heart in any case. All the same, he wasn’t pleased to see a part of Arbëria absorbed by the Eastern Church after a thousand years of Roman Christianity. Indeed, he might well have sought some excuse not to respond to the archbishop’s summons were it not for the fact that the prince, eager to avoid poisoning relations with Byzantium, had recently issued an important circular urging all officials of the principality to treat the Church with respect. The circular emphasised that this attitude was dictated by the higher interests of the state and that, consequently, any action at variance with the spirit of the directive would be punished.
All this passed through Stres’s mind in snatches as his glance embraced the bleak expanse of the plain. The October cold filled the air. Suddenly Stres shivered. Behind a bush several paces off the road he caught sight of the skeleton of a horse standing out in all its whiteness. It was a section of the ribcage and the backbone; the skull was missing. My God, Stres thought to himself a little further on, what if that had been his horse?
He drew his cloak tighter around him, trying to drive the image from his mind. He felt sad, but it was not a painful sadness. The shape of his melancholy had been softened in the great stretch of plain, in which winter’s approach could be read. What possessed you to come out of the earth, what message did you mean to bring us? Stres was astonished at the question, which had risen like a sigh from the depths of his being. He shook his head as if to clear his mind. He who had laughed so derisively at everyone who had believed that story! He smiled bitterly. What nonsense! he said to himself, spurring his horse. What a gloomy afternoon! he thought a moment later. Dusk was falling as he urged his mount into a canter. All the rest of the way to the village he strove to purge his mind of anything connected with the case. He arrived in the dark of night. The lights of the houses shone feebly here and there. From time to time the barking of dogs in the distance broke the night silence. Stres guided his horse not homeward, but towards the town’s main street. He had no idea why. Soon he reached the vacant lot that stretched before the house of the Lady Mother. There was no other house to be seen. The dark and dismal mass of the great abandoned building loomed at the far end of a desolate field studded with tall trees that now, in the dark, seemed to droop even more sharply than usual. Stres approached the doorway, gazed for a moment at the darker rectangles of the windows, then turned his horse in the direction from which he had come. He found himself among the trees. A man standing where he now stood could be seen from the door.
The night of 11 October must have been more or less like this one: no moon, but not too dark. It must have been here that Doruntine parted from the unknown horseman. It suddenly occurred to Stres that he had been in this spot before. But his memory of the occasion was all in a muddle, buried under rubble, as it were. For a moment even his horse’s hooves went silent. It was as if he was riding through the air. Rubbish, he thought. His imagination was so disturbed that fragments of the incident were sticking to him like flakes of wet snow. The sound of his horse’s hooves came back to life and soothed him … So this must be where Doruntine parted from the night rider. When her mother opened the door, he was probably riding off, but perhaps she had already seen something from the window. Something that caused that fatal shock … Stres turned his horse again. What discovery had the old woman made in the semidarkness? That the man riding off was her dead son? (“It was my brother Kostandin who brought me back,” Doruntine had told her.) Or perhaps, on the contrary, that it was not her son and that her daughter had deceived her? Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain her shock. Or perhaps, just before they separated, Doruntine and the unknown rider had embraced one last time in the dark— Enough! Stres said to himself sharply, and turned his horse back towards the road. At the very last moment, with the furtive movement of a man trying to catch a glimpse of someone spying on him in the darkness, he turned his head towards the closed door once more. But there was nothing, only the dark night that seemed to be mocking him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The day after his return from the Monastery of the Three Crosses Stres set to work again to unravel the enigma of Doruntine’s return. He drafted a new more detailed directive, ordering the arrest of all suspects, offering in addition a reward to anyone who helped capture the impostor directly or by providing information leading to his arrest. He also instructed his deputy to make a list of all those who had been out of town between the end of September and 11 October, and to look discreetly into the activities of every person on the list. In the meantime, he ordered one of his men to set out at once for the far reaches of Bohemia, in order to investigate locally the circumstances of Doruntine’s departure.
The man hadn’t yet left when a second directive, even more compelling than the first, came from the prince’s chancellery, demanding that the entire matter be brought to light as soon as possible. Stres understood at once that the archbishop must have been in touch with the prince and that the latter, aware of his captain’s reluctance to obey Church injunctions, had decided that a fresh personal intervention was required. The directive emphasised that the tense political situation of recent times, in particular relations with Byzantium, required caution and understanding on the part of all officials of the prince.
Meanwhile, the archbishop remained inside the Monastery of the Three Crosses. Why on earth had he holed up there and not moved on? Stres wondered. The old fox had obviously decided to keep an eye on things.
Stres felt more and more nervous. His aide was coming to the end of all that research in the archives. His eyes bleary from the long sessions of reading, he went around looking dreamy.
“You seem sunk in deep meditation,” Stres observed jokingly, at a break in his own hectic schedule. “Who knows what you’re going to pull out of those archives for us?”
Instead of smiling, the deputy looked strangely at Stres, as if to say you may think it’s a laughing matter, but it will take your breath away.
Sometimes, walking to the window as if to rest his eyes on a view of the wide plain, Stres wondered if the truth about Doruntine’s tale might not be completely different from what they all assumed, if that macabre ride with an unknown horseman was in fact no more than the product of the girl’s sick mind. After all, no one had seen that horseman, and Doruntine’s old mother, who had opened the door for her and who was the only witness, had made no such assertion. Good God, he said to himself, could it be that the whole thing never happened? Perhaps Doruntine had somehow learned of the disaster that had befallen her family and, driven mad by the shock, had set out for home on her own. In a state of such deep distress she might have taken much time indeed — months, even years — to complete a journey she believed had taken a single night. That might well explain the flocks of stars she thought she saw streaming across the sky. Besides, someone who believed that the ten-day-and-night journey from Bohemia (for that was the least it could take) had lasted but a single night might well feel that a hundred nights were one. And of course a person in such a state might fall prey to all sorts of hallucinations.
In vain, Stres sought to recall Doruntine’s face as it had looked when he saw her for the last time, so that he might detect some sign of mental illness. But her image eluded him. In the end he resolved to drive the theory of madness from his mind, for he feared it might dampen his zeal for the investigation. It will all be cleared up soon enough, he told himself. As soon as my man comes back from Bohemia.