“Every winter they come from their kingdom of ice, to steal and murder among the innocent,” my father said after a moment, just as Irina had said, but then he asked me, as a plea: “Are there even ten righteous among them?”
I drew a breath, still afraid but half relieved, too: it made the answer so clear. “I know that there are three,” I said. I put my other hand around my mother’s and squeezed back. “I have to. You know I have to.”
I took the deformed golden crown to Isaac’s stall, where his younger brother was minding things for him, and he carefully melted the whole thing down for me into flat gold bars, and then I went out with them hidden in a sack, out to the great market in the center of the city. One after another I traded them, not caring if I made a good bargain, so long as I made a quick one. I traded for a cart, for two strong horses to pull it, for a crate full of chickens, for an axe, a saw, hammers, and nails. I bought a plow and furrows and two sharp scythes, and sacks of seed for rye and beans. Sergey and Wanda came with me; they loaded everything into the cart and piled it high. And last at the end, I bought two long hooded cloaks, exactly the same, a dull grey: those were a good bargain, their price come down far from what they’d been yesterday, on a table full of others.
It took us a long time to drive the heaped cart back to my grandfather’s house: the streets were crammed full of traffic and moving almost not at all. As we crawled along, Wanda said, “There is a wedding,” and looking down a side street towards the great cathedral I glimpsed a princess coming down the steps, wearing my Staryk dress of gold and white with a thin crown upon her head; she was smiling and triumphant, and her husband beside her equally so, among a crowd of splendid nobles. The dress fit better there than it had in my grandfather’s house. I looked for Irina: she was already at the foot of the stairs, with the tsar beside her, climbing into an open carriage. The sunlight caught on her silver crown, and he only sat leaning on an elbow, looking irritated with boredom, and no sign of the demon lurking beneath his skin. I looked quickly away.
It was beginning to be late by the time we got back, but the sun had not gone down: it was almost summer, after all. We didn’t wait to eat supper. It was our turn to be the ones leaving, saying our goodbyes to a thinning crowd. I kissed my grandfather and my grandmother at the table, and my grandfather drew me down and kissed my forehead. “You remember?” he said quietly.
“Yes,” I said. “In the street behind Amtal’s house, next to the synagogue.” He nodded.
We climbed into the cart and drove away from the house in front of everyone, waving. Sergey and my father sat up on the front seat: the horses had been expensive, but they were good, well-trained horses; it wasn’t hard to drive them. I wore the cloak and pulled the hood up over my head in the back. Even at this hour, the streets were still bustling: the eating-houses were putting tables and chairs outside in the street so people could sit in the warm air together, and we had to turn down a narrower street of only houses, where children had been called inside for supper. Halfway through the street, a moment came when there was no one there; my mother spread the second cloak over a couple of sacks of grain in the bottom, as if I was lying there asleep. Stepon took off his boots—my old ones—and tucked them poking out at the bottom. Then I slipped down off the cart.
I stood in the shadow between two houses while the cart drove down the rest of the street and turned towards the gate of the Jewish quarter. There and at the city gates, they would ask my father for the names of all the passengers, and he would put mine down with the others, and pay the toll for each with a few extra coins to speed the way. If Irina grew suspicious and sent men to look for me tomorrow, to ask if I knew where the Staryk had gone, everyone would say in all honesty that I had left the city before nightfall with my family; they would find the records in their own guards’ hands, and no one would admit to having been hasty when their hands had been greased for it.
After the cart was out of sight I kept my hood pulled low and my shoulders hunched like an old baba and went through narrow streets all the way to the synagogue, and there asked a young man going in to pray where Amtal’s house was; he pointed me to it. The cobblestones of the street behind it were old and worn soft, with deep cart-wheel grooves dug into them and many loose stones and empty pockets of mortar. The back of the house had a little narrow place cut out of it in the middle, only just wide enough for a single person to walk inside, and there were some old sacks of refuse blocking it off. But after I picked my way around them, the old sewer grating in the ground was kept clear. I pulled it up easily, and there was a ladder there waiting for me to climb down. Waiting for many people to climb down, here close to the synagogue, in case one day men came through the wall of the quarter with torches and axes, the way they had in the west where my grandmother’s grandmother had been a girl.
I let myself inside and pulled the grate back down over my head before I climbed the long way down into the thin damp puddle of the sewer tunnel. There was only the dim round circle of late sunlight over my head, getting smaller and smaller as I climbed down. I didn’t have a lantern or a torch, but I didn’t want one. A light would let someone else see me coming from a long way off. This was a road that had to be walked in the dark.
I turned to put my back to the ladder, and I put my hands out and felt over the walls until I found the little hole chipped out in the shape of a star, with six points for my fingers to pick out. I put my hand over it and started walking slowly straight into the dark, running my fingers spread wide at that height. By the time I counted ten strides, I found another star.
They led me onward for what felt a long way, although it couldn’t have been: it wasn’t that far a distance from the synagogue to the city walls. But the last light from the sewer grate vanished behind me very quickly, and I felt blind and smothered and loud with my breath noisy in my own ears. But I kept counting ten, and if I still didn’t find a star, I felt over the wall until I did, or I took one step back and felt around there. Once I had to take two steps back, with nothing but blank wall under my hands, and then in fear take four steps forward before I found it at last. And then the stars ended and the wall fell away from under my hand as I stumbled over a ridge of dirt in the floor and fell, putting my hands down in sticky wet. I stood back up, wiping myself off on the cloak, and groped backwards in the dark until I found the corner of the turning with my fingers, and the wall of the earthen tunnel.
“There was a tower in the wall here, before the siege,” my grandfather had told me quietly, there in his small closed-in room. “The duke’s men broke it when they came in. And after, when the duke rebuilt the walls, he did not want the tower rebuilt. The foundations were solid. There was enough money for it. He chose not to. Why not?” My grandfather had spread his hands and shrugged a little, with his shoulders and his mouth. “A tower to guard the back of the city, why not? So after the walls were built again, and all the workmen had left, my brother Joshua and I went down into the sewers with rope, to search without getting lost. And we found the tunnel he had made.
“No one else knows. Only your great-uncle and me and your grandmother, and Amtal and the rabbi. Amtal keeps the grate clean. I pay him for it, I pay his rent. When he gets old, he will tell his son. We never use it: never for smuggling, never to avoid the toll. No one knows that we know. That is where they will have put him, this husband of yours, in that tower at the end of the tunnel.
“Now you must tell me, Miryem. You understand what this tunnel is. This tunnel is life. If their prisoner goes, even if you are not taken yourself, these great ones, the duke, the tsar, they will not shrug and say, ah well. They will ask how. They will look for footprints. Maybe they will block off the sewer passages. Or maybe they will follow them and find the grate. Maybe they will even come up out of it and see Amtal’s house there, and put a knife to the throat of his children, and Amtal will tell them who pays him to keep it clean.
“I say this expecting you to understand, these are not certainties. If they come here, even if Amtal has told them my name, there will be things I can do. I have a great deal of money, and I am useful to the duke. He will not hurry in a rage to destroy me, that is not the kind of man he is. And there is also the chance that they will not do any of these things. They may say, he is a magical creature, he has flown! He did not go through sewers. They may leave it all as it is.
“So I do not say, put my life, your grandmother’s life, on the scale. I say to you, here are the dangers. Some are more likely than others. Weigh them, put them all together, and you will know the cost. Then you must say, is this what you owe? Do you owe so much to this Staryk, who came and took you without your consent or ours, against the law? It is upon his head and not yours what has come of his acts. A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp.”
He hadn’t waited for me to answer. He had only put his hand on my cheek, and then he had gone back out again. Now I stood there at the turning for a moment, with the dirt of the duke’s tunnel under my fingers, a road to safety that I might close forever to my own people just to save the Staryk’s. Or I might be caught myself, if there were guards down at the end, and do no one any good at all. I had already answered the question, but I would have to keep answering it with every step I took down that passage, and I wouldn’t be done until I came to the very end.
* * *
After Miryem climbed out of the cart, I took off my boots and put them there poking out under the cloak. I did not mind taking them off because it was warm, and I was sitting in a cart anyway. I was so glad to be leaving that terrible city. It was even worse than before. The streets were all crowded with people everywhere because now there was no snow and they wanted to be outside and they all wanted to talk at the same time and make noise. I lay down in the bottom of the cart next to the sacks that were pretending to be Miryem and I tried to pretend to be a sack myself, but I wasn’t a sack. I had to just lie there and cover my ears and wait until we were out. It took a long time until we came to that big city gate and Panov Mandelstam got down to pay the man at the gate some money, because that city was such a terrible place we had to pay to be let out.