Free Doruntine by Ismaíl Kadaré

standing where he now stood could be seen from the door. The night of October eleventh must have been more or less like this: no moon, but not too dark. It must have been here that Doruntine parted from the unknown horseman. When her mother opened the door, he was probably riding off, but perhaps she had already seen something from the window. Something that caused that fatal shock. Stres turned his horse again. What discovery had the old woman made in the half-darkness? That the man riding off was her dead son? (It was my brother Constantine who brought me back, Doruntine had told her.) Or perhaps, on the contrary, that it was not her son and that her daughter had deceived her. But that would not explain her shock. Or perhaps, just before they separated, Doruntine and the unknown rider had embraced one last time in the dark—Enough! Stres said to himself sharply, and turned his horse back toward the road. At the very last moment, with the furtive movement of a man trying to catch a glimpse of someone spying on him in the darkness, he turned his head toward the closed door once more.

CHAPTER IV
    The day after his return from the Monastery of the Three Crosses Stres set to work again to unravel the mystery of Doruntine’s return. He drafted a new directive, more detailed than the first, not only ordering the arrest of all suspects but also offering a reward to anyone who helped capture the impostor, whether directly or by providing information leading to his arrest. He also instructed his deputy to make a list of all those who had been out of town between the end of September and the eleventh of October, and to discretely look into the activities of every person on the list. In the meantime, he orderedone of his men to set out at once for the far reaches of Bohemia, in order to investigate on the spot the circumstances of Doruntine’s departure.
    The man had not yet left when a second directive, even more compelling than the first, came from the prince’s chancellery demanding that the entire matter be brought to light as soon as possible. Stres understood at once that the archbishop must have been in touch with the prince and that the latter, aware of his captain’s reluctance to obey Church injunctions, had decided that a fresh personal intervention was required. The directive emphasized that the tense political situation of recent times, in particular relations with Byzantium, demanded discretion and understanding on the part of all officials of the prince.
    Meanwhile, the archbishop never left the Monastery of the Three Crosses. Why on earth did he hunker there, refusing to budge, Stres wondered. The old fox had obviously decided to stick around and keep an eye on things.
    Stres felt more and more nervous. His aide was coming to the end of all that research in the archives. His eyes bleary from the long sessions of reading, he went around looking dreamy. You seem sunk in deep meditation, Stres observed jokingly at a break in his own hectic schedule. Who knows what you’re going to pull out of those archives for us? Instead of smiling, the deputy looked strangely at Stres, as if to say: you may think it’s a laughingmatter, but what I pull out of them will take your breath away.
    Sometimes, walking to the window to gaze out at the broad plain, Stres wondered if the truth about Doruntine’s tale might not be completely different from what they all assumed, if that macabre ride with an unknown horseman was in fact no more than the product of her own sick mind. After all, no one had seen that horseman, and Doruntine’s old mother, who had opened the door for her and who was the only witness, had made no such assertion. Good God, he said to himself, could it be that the whole thing never happened? Perhaps Doruntine had somehow learned of the disaster that had befallen her family and, driven mad by the shock, had set out for home on her own. In a state of such deep distress she might have