A fair-haired young woman, tall, willowy almost, and a cumbersome man with a limp were loping down the hill from Hagia Sophia.

She kept turning to him. Then she threw back her head and laughed, and that was the most joyous sound anyone in Miklagard heard all that day.

Waiting for them at the top of a wide flight of stone steps leading down to the ancient cistern, the water pool that supplied the whole city, were a cordial-looking man with buckteeth and such a pretty, dark-haired young woman, plainly pregnant.

The two men stared unblinking across oceans into each other’s eyes. They clasped hands.

Then the two young women embraced. And without a word the fair-haired one pressed into her companion’s right hand a wide, flat ring of walrus bone. A teething ring!

Again they embraced.

A swarthy little man with the most extravagant mustache came bounding up the stone steps. His eyes were liquid and black.

He pointed and led them down the steps and opened his arms as wide as this middle-earth.

In front of them stretched an immense pool of water, lit by hundreds, thousands even, of floating, flickering candles: a magical, underground night sky.

The girl with the golden hair stepped a little apart. She gazed into the water.

Water rocking and fractious and seductive and bottomless, clicking and kissing, cradling and drowning, a mirror, no, a broken mirror, a dream, this water shining, violet and gray, green as her growing.

The girl knelt and trailed her fingertips through it. The water of life.