The day before Lucia was to be married, a messenger rode through the town gates. His beard was frosty with his own breath, and his horse's flanks were covered with foam. The man smelled of stale beer and urine, and he told a strange tale: a man had made life. Usurping the power of the heavens, he'd animated a body sewn from the scraps of slaves and criminals, planting in it a soul born in the deepest pits of hell.

Lucia laughed along with the rest of the people in the square. Such things happened only in fairy tales, in the stories that mothers told their children when they were misbehaving. She could imagine her own mother repeating such a tale: "Don't you stick out your tongue at me, or the monster will come and chop it off, then use it as his own."

The man shook his head, angered by their laughter. "Stay inside your gates," he called as he turned his horse around and prepared to leave. "The Creature has escaped its chains, and it is coming."

He left, and the town square returned to its usual bustle. The people there lived in a hard land; they had little time for madmen and storytellers. There was enough to fear and dread in the snow and the sickness and the lowering of the wheat in the granary.

Lucia wandered about the square, purchasing the items on her mother's list: sausage, hard brown bread, onions, potatoes for soup. She almost wished that it could be true. The creation of life would be a miracle, a sign that something was possible in these lands except a steady battle with the rocky ground, a life in a crowded, hungry town that smelled of dung, a marriage to a fat, old man your father picked because of his standing among the town's merchants.

The creation of life should be a story of wonder, not a tale to convince people to stay in the shell of wood and plaster they'd created to keep the cold and the wind and the wild out. If man had created man, then shouldn't people flock to the laboratory where he'd created it? See there, something new under the sun.

Lucia sighed and examined a wrinkled onion, peeling back its papery shell to check for spots of black mold. The laugh of the onion seller broke through her thoughts. "Ha," he was saying to his wife. "Ain't hard to make life. Do it with you tonight, if the mood strikes you." The onion seller's large red face creased in a smile, and he made a clumsy grab at his wife's breasts.

Lucia paid for her onions and moved on. It would be nice if the rider's tale were anything but a fair story. It might make her more afraid to leave the town tonight, but it would still be nice.

Lucia walked home, still unsure whether she could really go through with it and run away. It was, of course, true that she didn't want to marry Arnd, but it was still midwinter, and the ground was frozen. It was far to the next town, and even if she got there, what would she do? Practice needlework? Sell her body to survive? At least if she did that here, she'd be guaranteed a survival.

But at the same time . . . Lucia looked out to the east, past the town's squat wooden buildings with their thatch roofs, out to the pine forest. Where the trees peeked through their caps of snow, they were a green so deep that they were almost black. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the sun shone like the brilliant, approving eye of God. Out past where the townspeople trampled it into mud, the snow was a perfect, virgin white. Lucia turned her gaze back to the town and saw the tracks of the horses in the mud, saw the black, ashy smoke rising from the smithy. A few houses down, a woman leaned out a window and dumped a pile of refuse into the street. Lucia sighed. A person could die out there, sure. But could a person really live in here?