The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  Soldiers lined Maynya’s path on either side, all smartly dressed in their blue uniforms, brass buttons, and well-placed caps. Many peasants had joined their ranks, dusty and shabby in comparison. The throng included gentry, as well, the men wearing wigs and lacy-sleeved topcoats, the women in their finest silk with smiles painted on their faces. Excitement gleamed in their eyes, perhaps even inexplicable pleasure. She couldn’t understand the betrayal by her own gender.

  She turned her attention to the other members of the bridal pool, dozens of women in long purple dresses—a faddish color choice thrust upon them by the bride master—and with hair brushed to a shine. Most had dark tresses, the signature of captured Mystics. A few others sported blonde locks and even red—women stolen from lands she’d never traveled. The brides had taken great care to look pretty, and Maynya could barely hold back tears over the thought of their motivation.

  An attractive bride might fetch a high bid at auction, bringing great pride to everyone in the pool. This propaganda drilled into everyone’s heads by the bride master wasn’t the true reason behind the pains the captive women had all taken to present themselves so well. No, these fellow inmates clung to the superstition that a pretty, well-groomed bride might catch the eye of a kindly man, one who wouldn’t be inclined to beat her on a regular basis.

  Halfway up the hill, Maynya paused to gaze at the plume of smoke rising from the foundry’s great chimney, careful not to linger long enough to feel the sting of a cane against her thigh from one of the two hulking, big-boned matrons walking with her on either side. The cloud of soot drifted to the edge of the forest and beyond, perhaps far enough for a free Mystic to see from a vantage point deep in the woods of Sanctimonia. She’d been transfixed by the smoke every day for a full year now. The sight of its unimpeded drift never failed to trigger a pang of homesickness. The path in life she’d chosen a year earlier, when she traded places with a pregnant prisoner, would probably preclude her from ever seeing her homeland again.

  She looked away and moved on.

  As heavy as the burden of homesickness might seem, another sorrow pressed down on her heart with greater weight than the cross on her shoulder. She’d enjoyed the company of an invisible sister in Sanctimonia. The mysterious companion of her dreams vanished on the day her captivity began. The memory still triggered aching sadness. Maynya could no longer travel to a remarkable world by night and view a different life through her other half’s eyes.

  She seldom dreamed anymore at all, literally or figuratively.

  “You go, Maynya!” The cry of a bride spurred her onward. The only joy she now found was derived from the company of these poor souls. They’d been drawn to her from day one as if they were her own children, even though many were her age or older. She sang to them, she combed out their hair, she whispered encouragement, and above all, she helped them plot their escapes. Thirteen brides had gotten away during this single year of her captivity. She’d used illusions most times, and she’d also taught others how to cast their own. Some few other Mystics in the pool had similar gifts but needed instruction on harnessing their powers, a knowledge that had come to her by instinct.

  The cross scraped through the thin shoulder fabric of Maynya’s wedding dress, stinging its way across a welt, a reminder of the price she’d paid for helping these cherished women. Although she’d never been caught in the act of aiding a slave’s escape, suspicion had been directed her way more than once by angry guards seeking a scapegoat. Just a week earlier, a flogging forced the bride master to throw aside the open-backed gown he’d originally planned for this momentous wedding in favor of something less revealing. He’d beaten her for spoiling his plans, nearly causing the need for a veil over her face. But the bruises had mended.

  Maynya distracted herself from the pain by gazing at her onlookers and imagining happy lives for each bride. Then she met the eye of a soldier whose intense return stare nearly buckled her knees. She almost thought she knew the man. Yet such familiarity couldn’t be possible. She’d been cloistered away from the men of Virtus for a full year except for two failed, unconsummated, and very brief marriages. The bride master had beaten her bloody the second time. No man enjoyed refunding money less than he.

  The soldier’s lingering gaze could only be born from lust, and she cursed the mother who would raise a boy to grow up so arrogant and presumptuous he’d look at another man’s bride in such a manner.

  Maynya lost her footing and stumbled to her knees, triggering a wave of murmurs, groans, and even cruel laughter from the throng. She blamed the soldier for distracting her, and she despised him all the more.

  The damnable dolt was at her side in an instant. His cap fell from his head when he bent to take her arm, revealing a mass of wavy blond hair. She turned away from the man’s handsomeness, but somehow the light touch of his hand stirred her heart, even though she held nothing but scorn for any and all barbarians.

  One of the matrons flanking her scowled at the soldier. “Let her be! She must rise on her own and finish the task.”

  Maynya found herself in league with a captor—a rare occasion indeed!

  “Do you not know who I am?” the soldier asked.

  The second matron pulled her companion aside, but not far enough to keep Maynya from overhearing her harsh whisper. “He’s Quintus Laskaris, the king’s brother.”

  The king’s brother! Maynya almost laughed at the cruel game. One man had set her on a path to role-play her own crucifixion. Now his brother came to her aide, no doubt with the design to further her humiliation. She spat at the man’s feet and tried to shrug his hand from her arm. “Leave me be.”

  Even if she were wrong, if the soldier acted with noble intentions, she had no need for a hero. She could have used her gift for illusion to escape from Virtus at any time from the moment she’d taken the pregnant woman’s place in the cage a year earlier.

  These brides needed her as their champion! A true guardian could find no nobler role. She’d been flogged, beaten, bound in the stocks without food and water for as many as two days at a time. She could certainly survive this latest trial without assistance from a soldier with lust in his eyes.

  “Let me carry the cross for you,” he said.

  “Do you see those brides?” she retorted. “You’ll be too busy pillaging to make the same offer when the next woman’s turn comes. My sisters will never find the strength to carry a cross if I don’t do this for them.” Maynya struggled from her knees and resumed her trek.

  The persistent fool came after her. “Drink from this then, and I’ll hire a soldier to offer water to each bride who follows your footsteps up this hill until I convince the king to stop this awful show.”

  She would have spat at him again, but the pitcher he offered was so familiar as to flutter her heart. She knew the moon-and-star pattern painted around its girth. Another bride had sculpted this very clay! The woman, Adala, later paid the price of her own virginity to quench Maynya’s thirst during a dark hour. In return, Maynya taught Adala a water-to-wine illusion and eventually helped the young woman escape the bridal pool. “How do you have this?” she asked.

  The man regarded Maynya with such remorse in his eyes a tingle of dread swept down her spine. She struggled to find her voice. “Please tell me Adala isn’t—”

  “I should have been there to protect her.” He scuffed the dirt with his boot.

  At that moment, she understood how anyone might turn cruel if provoked enough. She held pure malice in her heart for this barbarian. “Did you love her?”

  “We barely knew each other. I’d already fallen in love with the sketch of a woman I can never have.”

  “Then find someone you can have.” Maynya moved on without drinking. She couldn’t have swallowed for the lump in her throat.

  * * *

  And in Chicago…

  After bidding good-bye to Kara and Igor, Brewster headed to a bank across from the restaurant and withdrew as much cash as the ATM machine would allow. He
pocketed a paltry five hundred bucks and tried not to dwell on the futility of living off the grid. He couldn’t use any more plastic or he’d get tracked down. Maybe a buddy would let him sleep on the couch for a day or two when the cash ran out. After that he’d be out of luck.

  The wormholes sweeping him into this impossible situation simply had to whisk him out. And fast. He didn’t possess enough street smarts to evade the law and live underground. The transition from business executive to a homeless man reliant on someone’s uncle Henry, on dream walking, and on a hard reboot of history had him dragging his heels, hoping for divine intervention.

  He headed down the sidewalk into an older part of town, following a street lined with pawn shops, tattoo parlors, saloons, and numerous boarded-up storefronts. But he couldn’t find the Greyhound station. He thought he’d seen one in the general vicinity during better days, but who pays attention to such a thing when speeding through a bad neighborhood on the way to a cool party? Maybe the station had closed…another worry not to dwell on.

  Construction sawhorses blocked the direct route, forcing him to wander down streets gone even seedier. He stepped around broken glass and the occasional vagrant sleeping off a bender—each one giving him a shuddering glimpse of his own possible future—until coming upon another dead end. More sawhorses stood in his way as part of some massive construction project zigzagging through the stretch of broken-down territory he needed to travel.

  Maybe they were building a big bus station. He’d gone crazy enough to laugh.

  He caught two thugs eyeing him from a doorstep across the street. The men swapped a paper bag of booze back and forth, the loud beat of hip-hop music pumping the world full of anger as they plotted his murder. Not the best guys to be bothering with a request for directions. Nor were the arguing couple whose shouted curses and crashing bottles wafted out the open window of a tenement building not yet demolished by the construction project. Brewster turned back, hurried around a corner, and took his chances with a different forbidding street. He avoided eye contact with anyone unsavory—virtually every person he came across—until finally breathing a sigh of relief when he stumbled onto a thoroughfare far too busy for any mugger to stalk in broad daylight.

  A young woman with spiky purple hair emerged from the shadows of an alley and clattered up to him on four-inch heels. Her short, tight skirt and translucent blouse betrayed an age-old profession even before she opened her mouth to ask the trademark question. “Want a date?”

  He never failed to marvel over the irony of a modern world still caught up in a bad bargain dating back to biblical times. Thousands of years of evolution hadn’t taught his kind a simple truth. Sex without emotion leaves a man hollow. Fall in love, get married, then melt into each other. Not before.

  “I’m just looking for the Greyhound station,” he said.

  The hooker shook her head. “You shouldn’t wander on foot in bad neighborhoods. There aren’t enough of us to keep an eye on you.”

  The incongruous motherly advice rendered Brewster speechless for a moment, but she winked and smiled, no doubt having merely taken a weak stab at a joke. He unclenched his fists.

  “The bus station is around the corner.” She pointed it out and, in doing so, revealed a butterfly tattoo on her forearm identical to the one Heather sported on her neck.

  Brewster no longer trusted coincidences as random events. Again he found himself at a loss for words.

  “Come on. I can see you want some.” This hooker definitely had the moxie for her trade, but something about her seemed off. She’d dressed the part, even going overboard with the makeup—chapter one in the hookers’ handbook—but she hadn’t been able to hide the deep intelligence in her eyes.

  “No, I’m just… Let me ask you something. What’s the story behind that butterfly?”

  “This?” She traced a red-nailed finger across the black-and-gold body of her symbol. “Rebirth. Resurrection.”

  “So, it’s like a newborn Christian thing?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m strictly old school.”

  A car pulled to the curb and honked. The hooker sauntered over to chat up the driver, pausing just a moment to glance over her shoulder at Brewster. “Be careful which way you go. The roads have gotten twisty lately.”

  “Wait!” That purple-haired woman was no hooker. He needed to buy her a coffee and trade notes about wormholes, but the unexpected puzzle piece in a world holding precious few had already gotten into the man’s car and sped away.

  Brewster had no choice but to resume his original plan. He found the Greyhound station and caught a bus to Kenosha.

  * * *

  A few hours later

  Kara’s napkin map proved right on target. After getting off the bus, Brewster walked three miles to the X, Sacred Heart Cemetery, and found Sarah’s grave in a neglected section where hundred-year-old trees shaded a weedy stretch of forgotten plots. The weathered marker was the only one decorated with a wreath. Someone had also left a dazzling bouquet of blue roses.

  He bent to examine the stone’s faded inscription—A rose always blooms for my beloved Sarah—and the date—1676 to 1756. He swallowed. Henry Stoddard’s wife had been dead for over three hundred years?

  Brewster dropped to the stone and closed his eyes. They were useless, anyway. He couldn’t trust what they saw anymore.

  CHAPTER 29

  Meanwhile, in Virtus’s capital

  Another strange dream shattered into shards, leaving Quintus groping for his own name.

  He’d been visiting the impossible world in his sleep for as long as he could remember, a land of amazing machines, fantastic weapons, and dazzling women. Each time, he experienced the journey through the eyes of a man named Brewster. He usually awoke without emotion, but this latest turn in the story had him sweating. A wonderful woman had gone missing, presumably dead. Now, not only Brewster, he—Quintus!—ached with longing. Imaginary or not, this Carla had found a way to pounce out of his sleep-addled head and seize his soul.

  He’d fallen for someone in a dream, a dream, nothing more than a dream. He’d fallen for… His heartbeat quickened. He shook the cobwebs and realized he’d come across the spitting image of this woman in the waking world. She was the slave Adala had sketched! And earlier today before his nap, he’d met this defiant woman dragging her cross up a hill.

  Were Maynya and Carla the same—one the body and the other the soul? He rolled over and groped through the rift between reality and fantasy. On one side, daylight streaming in from a window tried to tickle his eyes open. And on the other? The dream hovered just beyond his desperate reach.

  “Quintus?”

  “Halt!” He shot a hand to the knife sheathed in the leather belt at his waist but came to his senses before lashing out with it. By all the gods, had he been at the front so long the voice of a harmless maidservant would stop his heart? Even worse, Teasha had stolen in on him, and he hadn’t been aware of her presence until she’d spoken his name—not a good sign for a soldier who prized his life.

  Too much dreaming threatened to get him killed. He blinked the last wisps of Carla’s image from the backs of his eyes, leaned with an elbow on his cot, and gazed up at neither a doomed woman from an imagined world nor the real-life forced bride who refused his pitcher of water.

  Teasha beamed at him. She was easy on the eyes, a shapely brunette with a flair for fashion, to the extent possible for a slave. In this case, she wore a captivating turquoise dress—he wondered whether someone’s curtain had disappeared in the dead of night—and an improvised necklace made of dried flowers. Best of all, her personality matched her looks—quirky, carefree, and full of good humor. She’d shown a quick wit when he flirted with her earlier.

  Why not defeat his sour mood by teasing her again? “You’ve changed your mind, dove? Come to lay with me?”

  Her smile evaporated. She swept her arm toward the window of his bungalow and the palace beyond. “I see through this façade of yours, Quintus. Unlike those ot
hers, you respect a woman’s virtue.”

  He threw his blanket aside and shifted off the cot, but she blushed at his near nakedness. He slipped behind a changing screen. “In this kingdom, the man who respects virtue is labeled either fool or traitor.” He grabbed his trousers from a chair.

  “Then your brother sent for a fool.”

  “Ah, him.”

  “Albus will see you now.”

  He reached for his shirt. “Let him wait. We’re on the subject of virtuous men and women.”

  “Idle chat about rare creatures is more important to you than the wishes of your king?”

  “Idle chat about one of them is.” He stepped from behind the screen. “I came upon a raven-haired slave lugging a cross up a hill this morning. Whom did I see?”

  Teasha crossed her arms. “Even the fool who respects virtue has the wandering gaze, does he?”

  “A beauty as proud as this one would catch any man’s eye.” He went to his dressing table, unlocked the drawer, and considered which weapons to choose. The knife at his belt was too puny an arsenal. He pulled out a pistol to holster beside it and a second knife to hide against his calf. As he bent to sheath it, Teasha’s skeptical gaze bore into the back of his neck. This slave had to be part Mystic, able to read a man’s true motives no matter which words he utters. “You think I should bring more?”

  “We slaves are told not to think.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle at her wit. “What would you say about a man who fell for a woman before they’d ever met, just by chancing upon a sketch of her face?”

  “We’re not supposed to speak much, either.”

  “Now this woman is troubling my dreams.”

  A mischievous gleam intensified the sparkle in Teasha’s eyes. “Maynya troubles every soldier’s dreams. This is why we find hope in her.”

  “Hope?”

  She motioned her hands to signify flight…escape.

  Quintus gasped. “Have you gone soft? Trust no one with such treasonous ideas. Not even me.” He headed toward the door but paused to glance over his shoulder at the pretty fool. “And this Maynya was carrying a cross because…?”