Then it occurred to Ivan: Who told the bigger lie today? Sergei, when he said that the parchments burned up in the fire? Or Ivan and Katerina, when they spoke as if what they were doing was actually a marriage?

He still held her hand in his. Her skin was cool. One of them was sweating so much that their hands were slippery against each other. Ivan was reasonably sure that it wasn't her.

9

Honeymoon

Nowhere was the difference between the ninth century and the twentieth century clearer to Ivan than when it came to the little matter of the wedding night. Americans in the eighties and nineties had prided themselves on their openness about sex, but to Ivan those open-minded Americans seemed like prudes compared to the ribald—or downright lewd—comments, gestures, and charades that surrounded him and Katerina as they led a huge troop of villagers to the king's house.

Nor did an R or PG-13 rating seem to be much in evidence, for seven-year-old boys were making obscene suggestions and movements right along with their elders. There was so much of it that after a few minutes Ivan couldn't even bring himself to be shocked. He was numb.

Numb—that's just the feeling you hope for on your wedding night.

With all the discussion of his and Katerina's marriage as an antidote for Baba Yaga's curse or as a strategic move in the struggle to keep Taina free of the witch's rule, it all came down to this: Ivan was supposed to perform. But perform what? How? Like any other male American of even minimal alertness, Ivan knew that he was expected to be both masterful and sensitive, that the worst sin he could commit would be to finish before starting—in all the comedies people acted as if it were only slightly less awful than throwing up on the salad—and the second-worst sin would be to find himself unable to start at all.

Or maybe the worst sin of all was this: Ivan had no idea how it was supposed to go. Beyond what you got in health class and dirty jokes and bad movies, he simply had no serious hands-on experience.

All the statistics suggested that the only males who hadn't had sex by age sixteen were either quadriplegics or insufferable geeks. Ivan was neither—in fact, he was an athlete who had dated a normal amount in high school. And with the time he spent in locker rooms, he had heard all the boastful talk about how often and how manfully all the other guys performed. Only a few, like Ivan, didn't join in the locker-room brag; but Ivan suspected that the difference between the talkers and the quiet ones wasn't experience, it was honesty. If these clowns had really treated the girls they dated the way they claimed, why did women not fall over themselves clamoring for more of the miraculous pleasure that these love gods supposedly provided?

Not that nobody was getting any in high school. But the statistics in those social-science surveys were such hoke. If those "scientific" results came from teenage boys telling the truth about their sex lives, the scientists should be doing horoscopes or reading palms—they were more reliable. Or so Ivan had said to Ruth once, and Ruth laughingly agreed. She was a virgin, too, and didn't know any girls who admitted to anything else. There were girls with reputations as mattresses and guys whose reputations as cocksmen Ivan believed, but they were a lowlife fringe that didn't touch Ivan's life.

All this he had concluded years before; but there was one complication. About half the time, he didn't believe it. About half the time, he looked at the people around him and thought, They all know the secret, they've all done it. Any girl I marry will have slept with enough men to have some serious expectations, and I won't know what I'm doing. I'll fumble around, I'll give her no pleasure at all, she'll hate sex with me and within days she'll have an annulment going, if not a lawsuit for infliction of emotional distress. Or assault and battery.

So it didn't help one bit that every single person in Taina above the age of six seemed to know all about sex and have inflated ideas about exactly what Ivan's sexual prowess would be like. The crude comments about how he was going to keep the princess turning on the spit longer than a suckling pig gave him a new appreciation for the Jewish ban on pork. And the children who asked if they could come play in the tent that his erection would make of the bedcovers left him speechless.

It's all jokes, he told himself. It's a celebration of life. It's a holdover from pagan fertility rites.

One thing was sure, though. If somebody talked like this coming out of a wedding in upstate New York, they'd better be drunk or they'd never get another invitation anywhere in their lives.

Through it all, Katerina seemed not to hear a thing. At first Ivan thought she was as embarrassed as he was. But of course that could not be so—she must have attended other weddings in Taina. For all he knew, as a child she had invented some of the ribald jokes now being retold at top volume along the path to the king's house. Her grim silence had another cause entirely, he was sure. For to her, marrying him was a vile duty forced on her by the needs of her country.

And to him, she was a woman far more magnificent than he would ever have selected for himself.

A thought which made him feel utterly disloyal to Ruth, as if he hadn't already. Ruth was a pleasant, attractive young woman, but Katerina was heartbreakingly beautiful, translucent with inner glory. Men like Ivan didn't imagine for a moment that they were worthy of approaching such a woman. In fact, the only men who tried to date such women were the arrogant assholes who thought every woman wanted them to drop trou and let the poor bitch have a glimpse of Dr. Love. Even if Ivan hadn't known his script from the fairy tales, he certainly would have known that the only way he could ever kiss such a woman was in her sleep.

At long last—and yet far too soon—they reached Katerina's flower-strewn room and waited while the charivari continued for another few minutes. Ivan even submitted to letting the teenage boys strip off his outer clothing and throw it out the window to the amusement of those who hadn't been able to fit inside the house.

There were limits. No one laid a hand on Katerina. Indeed, she was surrounded by women primping her and whispering to her and glancing pointedly at Ivan from time to time, as if to make last-minute assessments of just how badly he was going to treat her and how to keep herself from screaming her way out of the room. He could imagine them saying, "Just lie there and endure it. It's the burden of a woman."

Then the rest were gone. The door closed.

The singing and hand-clapping continued outside their window. The people were waiting. Ivan had vague memories of some culture or other in which the people would expect to be shown bloodstained sheets. But surely that wasn't ninth-century Russia, was it?

He just wasn't getting into the spirit of this. Standing there in his linen tunic, he was keenly aware of how unready he was for any kind of sexual performance. He was so utterly unaroused that for the first time in his life, he actually wondered: Am I gay? After all, I did wear women's clothing.

She looked at him, her face hard-set. Still beautiful, of course.

But grim.

"Ivan," she said. "Come closer so I can talk softly."

Stiffly he walked toward her. To his horror, the very act of approaching her changed everything. Instantly he became aroused, a fact which his simple linen tunic did nothing to disguise. She glanced down and then looked away—in disgust?

"I'm sorry," he apologized feebly, wondering what he was apologizing for. When he wasn't aroused, he had felt the need to apologize for that, too.