Fire, Wind & Yesterday, set in a treacherous ninth-century land that is now Ukraine and southern Russia, is a novel for those who love serious historical fiction. La sha sees the chance and claims her freedom from involuntary servitude, fleeing alone down a cold Russian river. Her escape is thwarted but perhaps she can manipulate Kolyek, a bumbling, vision-impaired Slavic healer deep in the woods, to shield her until she finds another way home. But the forest rings with the howls of wolves. Wait... no, not wolves - holy men from Greece singing of their distress and their hope. And they are headed in the right direction for La sha. Will they take a young woman along or does the healer have to come too? That's her perspective, anyway. What about his? Kolyek sees himself as a humble peasant aspiring to become a physician of modern ways. When an unconscious, injured woman lands literally at his doorstep he discovers that he is left no option but to take up the cause of two Greek holy men who also darken his door, if they will allow him to cross the steppe with them and with the fugitive woman, in pursuit of an elusive rendezvous. While Kolyek awakens to the Greeks' advanced culture, becomes an unwitting hero in his near-fatal defiance of a nomadic chieftain, and decides whether he is a man to whom things happen or a man who makes things happen, he also comes to understand the devotion that drives the holy men. They, in turn, discover in the humble peasant's cottage the rudiments of what is now the Cyrillic alphabet. So many deadly mistakes and the lies to cover them So where are the dangers if faith be bold and the truth be told? Once the four strike out for the east they encounter, one by one, the answers to that question.
