What else did she need? It was hard to say, since she didn't really know where she was going. But money in some form was all you really needed, as a rule.

Judy slipped into her windbreaker, turned out the lights, and went out into the spring night. After a moment's internal debate she left her cabin door unlocked; somehow that seemed to make her departure less serious, more temporary.

The next step, of course, was to arrange a ride of some kind into town. Once she got there . . . well, she would just have to see then where she was called to go.

Walking toward the cabin that served Bill Bird as combination studio and living quarters, Judy saw with a mixture of guilt and relief that the lights were on inside.

Bill looked first pleased and then somewhat wary when he saw who was tapping so discreetly at his door.

"Judy. What can I do for you?"

"Something's come up, Bill. I absolutely need to get into town right away, and I wonder if you could give me a lift."

A hesitation. "Oh. Did you check at the office?" There was a prescribed system of signing out, and also one of pooling rides.

"Can I come in a minute?" And once inside the one-room cabin, much like her own, Judy pulled shut the door behind her. A crude female nude, about half life-size, stood under lights. The clay looked wet, and Bill was wiping his hands on a rag. It seemed he must have been working from memory; anyway there was no model in sight. "I'm going to level with you, Bill. There are reasons why I didn't want to do that."

"Oh? Something private?"

"Yes. And the truth is I don't know when I'll be able to get back. I want to-meet someone, in town or near town."

"Oh."

She wished he would stop saying oh. "No, it isn't anything like that. Just someone who desperately needs help. And there's nothing illegal or wrong about it, but at the same time it's very private."

Bill opened his mouth, but failed to utter the antic.i.p.ated word. Now Judy could almost see the wheels turning over in his head. Abortion appointment? Drug rendezvous? Or a friend of Judy's on a bad trip with some drug, or in some trouble with the law? Or simply running away from home? Bill asked: "Where are you supposed to meet this person?"

"It's not easy to explain. I'm sorry. Look, can you just give me a ride into town? If you don't want to, I'll understand and I'll figure out some other way of getting there. I appreciate that there's some chance of your getting into trouble here if you break the rules." Is this really me, Judy wondered, willing to use someone in this way? She thought that for the first time she could begin to understand how alcoholics, addicts, could be as ruthless as they sometimes were. The craving-dominated.

Bill was looking at her carefully. "It's all right, Judy. I'll give you a ride."

"Thanks, Bill. I mean it. I really do appreciate it, I can't tell you how much."

Waiting for Bill to take care of a few things and grab his coat, getting ready to go out, Judy leaned against the doorframe, groping mentally.

He, the man she sought, had been very recently in a great desert basin which contained a large city and a ma.s.s of warm air, almost hot air, fairly heavily polluted air. Names of course never came through the contact, but Judy had no trouble recognizing Phoenix. But Thorn, she perceived now, was there no longer.

. . . he was coming closer, moving almost straight toward her from the southwest.

His feet were running, racing at a terrible pace . . . four feet running, and all of them were his . . . this was a mode that she had never experienced before.

"What's wrong, Jude?"

She opened her eyes and pushed away from the doorframe, making herself stand up straight and smile. "Nothing . . . maybe a little headache."

Bill looked doubtful. But he was holding the door open for Judy now, and she went on out. Her own feet trod again the springy needle carpet of the forest path.

Two human feet, hers were, in shoes, not like . . . the landscape around him had been momentarily clear to Judy. It had seemed to be bright moonlight there, though from here her merely human eyes could see that tonight's moon was only a dim crescent.

Those distant, running feet were coming closer quickly, loping almost directly toward Santa Fe. It would be hours yet before Judy could meet them. How many hours she could not guess.

They were in Bill's car now, a small Buick several years old, and he was starting the engine. As he turned the key Judy at the last moment knew irrational panic that a great bomb under the hood was going to go off and turn them both to jelly. So strong was the sensation that she had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out.

Nothing happened, of course, and now he was driving over the rutted gravel of the parking lot toward the gate, which as usual this early in the evening was standing open. He asked Judy casually: "Where exactly are we going?"

Her conscience would not lie down quietly. "Bill, I don't want to get you into any trouble for doing this. Maybe you'd better not."

"Oh, just driving you to town isn't all that bad. Bending the rules a little, maybe, but . . . oh, h.e.l.l, look, Judy. You're already in real trouble of some kind. I'd have to be blind not to see that. I don't know if it really has to do with some friend, or if the friend in trouble is you-anyway I can see that you need help. So why don't you just tell me where you have to go? And on the way, tell me what it's all about."

"Oh, Bill. You're beautiful." Suddenly near tears, Judy reached to squeeze his bicep, which felt surprisingly large and hard. "Bill, the trouble is, I don't know anything exactly yet. Just that I have to be there . . . maybe when I get into town, things will be clearer."

"How is that going to help?"

"It's difficult to explain." Or maybe impossible. Once when her brother Johnny had been in the hands of kidnappers, Judy had been able to see, to locate perfectly, the house where Johnny was being held. Of course that time she had been hypnotized, by . . . maybe the trouble was that this time she wasn't hypnotized.

"No, I don't think I want to drop you just anywhere." They were driving the camp road now at a brisk pace, traversing a midnight aisle of trees. "Tell me, Judy. Are you really intending to cut out from school altogether? Or do you really mean to come back tonight?"

"I hope to be able to get back tonight, Bill. I've left a note in my cabin, just in case . . . but oh G.o.d, I hope I can get back there before anybody reads it."

Bill turned his eyes from the night road long enough to look at her. He whistled softly. "All right, this is very serious, I can see that. Is it all right if I ask what the note says?"

"It says . . . it's just meant to be rea.s.suring. I'm trying to keep my parents from finding out . . . Bill, don't mind me if I act a little crazy tonight. I know I'm acting like I'm crazy but I'm really not. Do you know anything about the psychic?"

"Psychic . . . well, not really, I guess. But I like to think I have an open mind."

Chapter Nineteen.

Helen was garbed in much poorer clothing than the elegant garments in which she had departed our Pisan cottage. She was shivering with cold, and her rags, like those of the traveling poor of any century, were marked with the dust of the road.

Her face looked thinner than I remembered it, and her hair had returned to the condition in which I had first seen it. Otherwise her appearance had changed very little in the two years since her desertion. She was leaning one hand on the wooden doorframe now, and the knuckles of the hand were white, as if she felt it necessary to grip something to keep from turning and trying to run away again.

I remember that as I looked at her my first reaction was only a curious numbness: all right, she is here. I looked past her then, and nodded a dismissal to the soldier who had brought her to the house. He went out behind her, and closed the door.

"Come in," I said. But of course she was in already.My wife and I considered each other in silence. I saw now that she had rags wrapped around her feet in place of shoes. Her shivering arms folded now beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she stood there waiting. I thought I could see in her face something of the same numbness that I felt myself.

"So." That was my next attempt to start. The truth was that in recent months I had no longer spent much time dreaming of revenge. I think now as I look back, I really think, that the first feeling I began to have was a simple, uncomplicated relief-that I could now settle the thing between us, somehow, and after that I would no longer have to stay near Venice and work for Colleoni.

Helen asked: "Have I your permission to sit down?" She was almost swaying on her feet, I saw. Certainly she sounded tired, or rather as if she had just been beaten, though I could see no bruises. Her voice had changed more than her appearance.

I gestured, and she sank into a chair, hands covering her eyes. "I am giving myself up into your hands," she said.

"I can see that."

"Because I am too tired to run any longer. Too tired even to try to bargain with you. Just giving up, that's all."

"I see." But really I did not, and I puzzled over the matter for a few moments in silence. "But what is there to bargain about? And why come to me at all? You are still young, still attractive. Surely you could find some protector who would take you in."

Helen at first slumped in her chair. Then she straightened, raising reddened eyes.

"All right, Vlad. Maybe you really do not know. But I am too exhausted for any . . . so I am going to tell you. Perugino is one of the hostages your men have taken here.

Now maybe I have d.a.m.ned both myself and him to h.e.l.l by coming to you. I don't know. I can't tell any longer what I should be doing. I'm too tired and weak and hungry to know anything. I'm giving up."

"Ah. Perugino." I leaned back in my chair. The name had a strange sound on my lips; it had been a long time since I had spoken it. Actually I had never really looked at the hostages, only glimpsed the huddled gray ma.s.s of them from a distance. I suppose I had not wanted to look at them closely. My men had informed me how they were being held, under close guard in an otherwise empty barn just across the road from my borrowed house. There were a lot of empty barns in the country now.

And now I wondered if I would have recognized Perugino had I seen him. My memory could no longer give me a clear image of what he had looked like, and anyway he might well have changed.

Helen spoke again, in the dead voice that was now hers. "We have been on the move almost constantly. We have run from the soldiers, yours and others, and we have looked for work. Artisan's work, peasant's work, anything. From Rome to Venice, even to Milan. There I saw Sforza once, by accident. We were quite close, but he looked right through me without seeing, as if I were a ghost. Then we moved back to Venice again. Then out here. We have been living in the next village down the road." Suddenly she put out a hand to grip my writing table's edge; she looked pale, as if she might be about to topple from her chair.

"You will need some food," I said. And instead of calling in a servant, whose presence I did not want just then, I got up and began to look around for some myself.

"Yes, some food please. I need some. It was not easy for me to come here, Vlad.

Vlad? I ask you to let him go."

In a rucksack I found some bread, and brought it to her. It was dark bread, and stale as I recall, having been for some time left in the pack forgotten. We soldiers had enough. Helen took a couple of bites with animal hunger. Evidently her teeth were still good. I sat down again and watched her eat. Whatever vengeance I decided to p.r.o.nounce upon her and her lover, it would have been foolish to try to gloat over her with it as she lay on my floor in a dead faint.

Chewing, she asked: "The hostages are all going to be hanged, aren't they?"

"So it would seem. No one has yet come to us with the names of those who killed the mayor."

"Is that why the hostages were taken? We did not even know."

"Bah. You really expect me to believe that?"

"We in the next village, I mean. That is where Perugino and I have been living.

The soldiers just came through, rounding up all the men that they could catch."

I looked at Helen closely, decided that she was telling me the truth, and made a small sound of disgust. The village I was in, now that I thought about it, did look small to have provided so many hostage bodies. I was going to have to take some disciplinary action, hoping to instill in my squad leaders some glimmerings of intelligence.

Helen went on: "There is always hanging, butchery of some kind, going on in these villages. I wonder that the people manage to grow any food at all." When I did not answer, she was emboldened, and pressed on: "You could let him go. It will not matter to you, will it, if there are twenty bodies hanging, or only nineteen?"

I thought to myself that it was hardly going to matter if there were twenty or none at all. Except of course to the twenty themselves, and to their families. And to leave the men alive might work a benefit to the land at large. But my words through some bitter perversity followed a different path than my thoughts.

"Maybe," I said, "I will be doing them all a favor by hanging them now. If I let them go, they will have a few more years of suffering in this G.o.dforsaken country and then die anyway. Will Perugino be better off or worse off if I let him go?"

"I don't know, Vlad." And I believed that she did not. But then she began to weep, sobbing so that she had to stop chewing on her bread. "I don't know. But let him go.

Please, please, let him go on living.""You still ask me not to hang him."

"If you put it that way-then you are going to do something to him even more horrible. Oh, I knew it, I should never have come to you." Yet hunger made her try to bite the bread again; she choked on it and went off into a fit of coughing. I got up from my chair again, to dipper some water for her from a pail.

"And suppose-just suppose-that I should let him go, entirely free? What would you do then? a.s.suming that for some reason you were given a choice."

Helen drank, and choked again, and drank a little more, and put off answering.

Later she was to tell me that at this point in our interview she felt sure that I was only playing with her, mocking her, that at any moment the horrors would be announced, that I would call out for the torturers to enter. But I was not playing. I was much less certain than she was of what was going to happen next.

It occurred to me that what I really ought to do was hang Perugino, who was demonstrably guilty of something, and let the nineteen innocent clods go free. But then the guilty man's troubles would perhaps be over-a church-painter like him would be sure to make his peace with G.o.d before he reached the gallows-whereas the nineteen would be doomed to who knew how many more years of suffering. Well, that was the kind of mood that I was in.

The reader doubts, perhaps. I have and had a b.l.o.o.d.y reputation. How is it possible to prove today that I did not torture a certain wretch to death in 1467? Well, can the reader himself prove himself innocent of all crimes committed in that or any other given year? But, the reader protests, in 1467 he was not yet born. Let him prove that, too, say I. If I can live so long, then why not he or she?

Forgive me, gracious Mina. I am overwrought, with reliving things that have more power over me than I guessed they would, when I sat down to write.

Let me put it this way. Though it was claimed even then that I had ruled too harshly in my own land, I had never gone so far as to hang nineteen men who were not even suspected of any crime. And if, in the time when I was Prince, some officer of my realm had reported to me that he was carrying on an investigation in such wise, depopulating my land of healthy industrious peasants to no purpose, his own carca.s.s might soon have been observed in a position higher and more uncomfortable than that afforded by any ordinary scaffold.

Something in my face must have inspired Helen to new hope. "Vlad," she burst out suddenly, "I know that I have already made wedding vows with you, and broken them. But they were forced and I did not consider that they bound me. I will make them again, if you would have me still. The position you hoped to gain can still be yours-you will be the brother-in-law of a powerful king-if you will let Perugino go free. I will never see him again. I will, I swear it to you by whatever you like, be a faithful wife to you, whatever you choose to do to me."

Now it seemed to be an effort to think about her at all. I rubbed my face, and suddenly felt tired, and angry-an anger on the level of irritation, as if my wife had been nagging me for days. "Quiet," I said, and as if to demonstrate her new talent for obedience, Helen broke off some renewed plea before its first word was fairly out. I sat there looking at the papers on the table as if I were eager to get back to them, as if Helen's coming had interrupted some delightful task.

"Where did you first meet Perugino?" I asked her. "I have often wondered about that."

Helen was silent for a few moments, trying to compose herself. Then she said: "It was when I was in the convent-the first time, I mean, the convent near Milan. I was staying there while the final arrangements were being concluded by my brother, for me to marry the Sforza. Perugino was working in the convent chapel. He had been hired to make paintings on the walls."

"Which Sforza were you to marry?"

"Galleazzo Maria himself. The negotiations were all secret. Matthias badly wanted an alliance with Milan."

"Ah. Small wonder His Majesty was so angry at you when you thwarted him. Tell me more. I suppose the bridegroom-to-be was perturbed also?" If Galleazzo Maria Sforza's reputation has now fallen behind mine-I should say remained above it-it was not always so.

"There was a delay in the final arrangements. The Sforza was away on some business or other, I was never told what. So of course there I was, waiting in the convent, as the only proper place for me to stay. And in the chapel a young painter was at work. I was consumed with quiet anger at my brother, at what he was doing with my life for the sake of politics. As if I were only a soldier, to be used up in battle at the commander's will."

"That is the way of battles. And of life."

"I tell you I . . . not of my life. Or so I thought. It began, with Perugino, as a way of getting back at Matthias. But Perugino was the first man I had ever had, and it became . . . great love. The two of us ran away together. And we have been together ever since, as much as we could be. We thought we would be quickly caught, so at first we lived with a kind of . . . raging joy. Do you understand? To do just as we liked, to fear nothing. I wanted to leave scandal wherever we went, to get back at my brother and at the world. For what they had tried to do to me.

"Then later, it was . . . later it began to be no good. I have sold myself, to get food when we were starving. Again to get shelter, when Perugino was ill. When I was sick, he . . . I don't know what he did, but he stayed with me. Now to save his life I will do anything you like."

"Why did you leave that dagger on my pillow?" Helen did not seem to know at first what I was talking about. I drew it from the sheath at my belt and held it up by the tip of the blade. The steel was still lightly notched where I had used it once to cut through a small chain. "This very dagger, here."

At last she remembered. "That? It was meant to show you that I did not hate you, you were not my enemy. Otherwise I would have killed you before I ran away."

"I see." I looked at the weapon, and restored it to its sheath. "And where have you been living? Just now?"

"As I said. In the next village down the road."

I had one more question. "Does Perugino know that you have come to me now?"

Helen took thought, then shook her head. "I don't see how he could."

"I want to talk to him, before I decide anything." Helen wanted to speak, but I put up a hand and she was silent. "I am going to have him brought over here now. I want you to step into the other room, and listen from there. As you value his life, keep hidden and silent, no matter what you hear, until I tell you to come out."