The place Besson brought us to wasn't in Russia. At first, it was just the sense of being foreign to my surroundings. A minute later, my brain caught up and started cataloging the non-Russian-ness of it.
The walls were of rough limestone dotted by pores and miniature shells. Gauze curtains breathed over the arched windows, sometimes drawn outside, sometimes limply draping the opening. They blocked some of the dust, and none of the heat.
The gap between the curtains was wide enough to glimpse red roofs stepping down toward the expanse of murky-green water. White sails darted across the bay; not the majestic men-of-war, but fishing boats. The air smelled of rot, pitch and muck—basically, the Volga on steroids—plus loads and loads of salt.
When the curtains undulated again, I even spotted a minaret.
If it wasn't for the breeze that played with the curtains, the place would have suffocated. It was so preposterously hot that I wondered if a bodiless essence could evaporate like a puddle in a parking lot. Even the flies preferred to crawl along the ceiling and a desk rather than to fly.
Their presence was probably why the only bed in the room was more diligently canopied than the window. Through the half-transparent fabric the figure of a man in it was like a cut-out puppet in the shadow-theater, but he was grievously ill. I judged it by uneven, raspy breathing and a bout of cough that followed.
At the desk, sat our man with the Greek cross. In this vision, however, the cross in the collar opening of his loose kaftan was a typical silver cross of Russian make.
Besson cleared his throat. He looks younger.
I wanted to sulk because of our falling out over name-calling, Osip's witch and the sixteenth century bigotry, but I had nobody else to talk to. So, I met him half-way. Uh-huh.
If we were on speaking terms, I would have said something like, He's already muscled out, but he is softer. It wasn't just the absence of injuries and bruises. The man's eyes appeared baby-blue in the warm southern light, rather than steely gray, as they were in Novgorod. His mouth was undefined, forehead—not yet etched with grief. He was a millennia younger, no matter how many calendar years separated Besson's two visions.
The man's stubby fingers didn't handle quill with the same elegance as Besson did, but he dipped it into ink and scribbled on the blank page laying before him on the desk.
Besson and I stretched out to look over the man's square shoulder without an argument. The man's penmanship was serviceable and firm.
Year of Our Lord 1559. Upon reaching Constantinople, Archdeacon Gennadii had been taken ill from the unnatural humors of the foreign lands we had passed. Upon rest, he shows no signs of recovery, moreover he no longer takes food.
As the man watched the ink on the last sentence dry, his blue gaze veiled with sadness. Finally, he startled, dipped his quill into ink again and scribbled some more.
The delegation shall continue onto Egypt under command of one Vasilii Pozniakov, the merchant of Smolensk, a skilled adventurer.
While he didn't mention Gennadii there—the sick men in the bed, I guessed—it sounded like his obituary. The impression was all the stronger thanks to another long silence after the man finished writing. The noise of the city filtering in with the wind and the wheezing from the bed only underscored the solemnity of the moment. He was mourning a life slipping away.
"Andrei," called a reedy voice from the sickbed.
Besson and I gave each other a mental shove: we had a name for our blond suspect.
YOU ARE READING
The Tetrachromat (On HOLD)
Historical Fiction||UMBRELLA ACADEMY x THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER|| In 2023, eighteen-year-old Grisha is upset over missing his admission to a prestigious Art Academy. Worse, he's drafted to fight in an unjust war he hates. In a fit of rage, Grisha rips his second-hand...
