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.
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.
Thirty-six hours after the man’s departure, Stres was informed that some relatives of Doruntine’s husband had just arrived. At first it was rumoured that her husband himself had come, but it soon became clear that the visitors were his two first cousins.
After dispatching a second messenger to overtake the first and tell him to turn back, Stres hurried to meet the new arrivals, who had taken lodgings at the inn at the crossroads.
The two young men were so alike in bearing and appearance that they might have been taken for twins, though they were not. They were still tired from their long journey and had not yet had time to wash or change their clothes when Stres arrived. He couldn’t help staring at their dust-covered hair, and looked at them in so odd a fashion that one, with just the hint of a guilty smile, passed his fingers through his hair and spoke a few words in an incomprehensible tongue.
“What language do they speak?” Stres asked his deputy, who had arrived at the inn shortly before him.
“God knows,” was the reply. “It sounds to me like German laced with Spanish. I sent someone to the Old Monastery to fetch one of the monks who speaks foreign languages. He shouldn’t be long.”
“I have a hard time making myself understood with the little Latin I know,” said the innkeeper. “And they massacre it too.”
“Perhaps they need to wash and rest a bit,” Stres said to the innkeeper. “Tell them to go upstairs if they like, until the interpreter gets here.”
The innkeeper passed on Stres’s message in his fractured Latin. The visitors nodded agreement and, one behind the other, began climbing the wooden stairs, which creaked as if it might collapse. Stres could not help staring at their dusty cloaks as he watched them go up.
“Did they say anything?” he asked when the staircase had stopped creaking. “Do they know that Doruntine is dead?”
“They learned of her death and her mother’s while on their way here,” the deputy answered, “and surely other things as well.”
Stres began pacing back and forth in the large hall, which also served as the reception room. The others — his aide, the innkeeper and a third man — watched him come and go without daring to break the silence.
The monk from the Old Monastery arrived half an hour later. The two foreigners came down the wooden stairs, whose creaking seemed more and more sinister to Stres’s ear. Their hair, now free of most of the journey’s dust, was very blond.
Читать дальше