The Land Across Read Free Page B

flat, and her face held no expression. “Put tobacco on them.”
    “I see…” Volitain stalked over to a table in his parlor, which looked as big as Kleon’s entire house. In the table drawer he found a magnifying glass.
    “That will not help!”
    Volitain bent over the sting on my cheek. “Sit here, please. Now incline the head, eh? I must have light from the window.”
    I did what he said.
    “The sting is here. It must be drawn. The hand we see next, eh?” He moved my hand to bring it nearer the light. “Here, also. Wait a moment. Drink good wine.”
    He left us, slipping into some interior room through a door that was not quite open.
    I asked, “Does he always do that? Not open the door?”
    “He has no wife. The room where he go will be soiled, I think. He does not wish you to see it.”
    “Or you,” I said.
    Martya shrugged. “There is wine here. He desires us to drink. A woman brews tea, a man has wine.” She went to a sideboard. “Is Tokay, I think. We drink it much here. You will drink?”
    I nodded and she poured. It was pungent and a little too sweet.
    Volitain returned with tweezers and iodine. “The bee that stings, dies,” he murmured. “One would suppose that evolutionary processes would soon end such deaths. Is the hive stronger without him?”
    I said, “Ouch!”
    “First the face, because it must pain most. The hand next, where the pain is not so much.”
    I managed to keep quiet.
    “You are hungry? I have little cakes. Martya?”
    I looked at my watch. It was one p.m.
    Martya said, “I will make for us the sandwiches if you allow it.”
    “There is little,” Volitain said. “We go to a café.” He had finished with the iodine and was taping on moist tobacco.
    Martya looked at me, shrugging. “Volitain has much money, but he does not spend. Never for me, this money. Never for you, also, I think. You will pay?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be glad to.”
    Volitain shook his head. “You will not. You must not listen to our sour chit. I say the café and I pay.”
    Martya giggled at that. She had drained her glass, so I thought it had probably been the wine.
    “Now we will go out,” Volitain was saying. “The bees sting you if you think of them, so not. Think of pleasant things alone and you shall be safe.”
    It sounded silly but I tried it, thinking what kind of food a café here might have. Sandwiches, sure. Soups and salads … I tried to concentrate on those, but I could not keep my eyes off Martya’s hips. They were to die for, and she was leading the way.
    “You see?” Volitain said. “You were not stung. Of what do you think?”
    “Strabo’s commentary on the Euxine,” I told him. One of my professors used to talk about it.
    “Ah! It is interesting, no doubt. I must read it.”
    “I’m a lot more interested in finding out why Martya’s pestering you with me.”
    “She does not tell?”
    I shook my head. There were no sidewalks, so we had to walk in the street. A man on a bicycle zoomed past us, staring at Volitain and pedaling faster and faster. “He’s scared of you,” I told him.
    “He hates me.” Volitain sighed. “Hating me, he supposes I hate him. Supposing I hate him, he expects some hurt. Expecting hurt, he fears me. His fear make him hate me all the more. Is that not a sad circle?”
    I said yes.
    “As you say, but I am not in it. God may make him a king or give him a knife. All is one to me.”
    I was watching for the long building I had seen when I first got to the city, the yellow brick building where the Mounted Guards stabled their horses in peacetime, but I did not see it. Here the streets were wider, and a lot of the buildings had shops on the ground floor.
    We went into one of the biggest, following a path of well-worn cobbles and passing shoppers who carried their new stuff in string bags. Inside was a big atrium roofed with colored glass. There were balconies up the sides, and they were lined with shops like the floor we were