by Alex Oliver
~
The next day was full of preparations. Riders went out to the nearest villages to gather supplies for the journey. Grooms attached two plow horses to an enormous, flat bottomed boat which had been resting against a wall in the hay barn and hauled it like a sledge down to the tributary that ran through Bircii village, whose icy depths Frank had cause to remember fondly.
Frank had been given a portmanteau, and filled it with the clothes Alaya had altered for him. He spent much of the day alone while Radu was riding around his holdings, speaking to the headmen he would leave in charge, reassuring them that yes, he was taking the strigoi with him and while he was gone they were as free to walk and work in the night as in the day.
Frank spent the day in the library, and half a dozen of the least rare books were packed in his luggage when he hauled it on board. A second much rougher raft was tied up alongside their boat, and one of the raftmen gave him a conspiratorial wink when Frank handed over the bag.
He stopped, disconcerted. "What do you mean by that impertinence?"
The young man tilted up his head and the shadow thinned beneath his bulky sheepskin hood, until Frank was looking at the roguish brown face of Nicu the boatman, the one who had brought him up the Olt, the one who had died, shot neatly through the throat the day Old Frank met with what was meant to be his death. Frank's heart froze solid. He clutched at his sash as if the crucifix he had once been given - had thrown at Constantin's face - had mysteriously reappeared too. "Nicu?!"
The man's brass earring wiggled as he smiled, but it was not Nicu's smile. "Oh, you know Nicu Karela? Perhaps I should have picked a different face."
"Knew him," Frank corrected, his mind whirling. "He was shot by the bandits - the same ones who beat and robbed me. You knew him?"
"He was one of my people, yes." Nicu's face went ashen, and the great droop of his moustache seemed to sag even further. Most odd, to see him mourn himself.
Franks wits recovered eventually, not soon enough to have done any good in terms of breaking the news more gently. "Is it... Is it Mirela under there? You can look like anyone at all? That's astounding!"
"Good, isn't it?" she agreed, switching topics like one who is well used to getting over bad news fast. "Sooner or later, if I stay here, that stupid guard will realize I'm not really his relative, and then there'll be thumbscrews and witch trials and 'burn the gypsy trash.' In Bucharest I'll be one among thousands. I can simply walk away, become someone else, and who will notice in the middle of a city, where no one knows everyone, and a stranger is an everyday sight?"
Frank couldn't help but be overcome by admiration of her resourcefulness, even if it was disturbingly like talking to a fleshy ghost. "If you walk away you will no longer be under the strigoi's protection."
"But that's the joy of it," she said. She had not quite replicated all of the old man's wrinkles, and she had made his long hair blacker – this looked like a younger, fiercer version, ready to demand respect from the world at the point of a knife. "In a city there will be so many other people for them to go for, I won't need it. Besides," she waved her work roughened hands at her compact, masculine body, "like this I can get on a ship. I can go anywhere, leave the country, leave everything. Never be a slave again."
"It doesn't scare you?" Frank asked, because it scared him. "To draw a line under your old life and start again with nothing?"
"Why would it?" she asked, still grinning, though this was the grin of a skull, as of one who has passed through death too many times already. "They took me and they drove my family out of the country. I don’t know where my people are now. So what else have I got to lose?"
Frank watched as footmen moved some of the luggage in the better boat, strapped it against the gunwales to make room enough in the center for two long, narrow boxes. He clenched his fists and felt, just under the skin, the liquid swell of whatever it was the vril accumulator had left in him. Mirela was an inspiration to him. Having lost everything, having 'died' in the bandit attack and the subsequent loss of memory, what indeed did he have to lose? Why not stop looking backwards now, put all that down, and become something new. Radu's... librarian? Lover? Pet?
He looked again at the space for the coffins and frowned. They did not belong in his new life. He had not been able to resist Alaya last night - magic or no magic, she had reached in to his head and moved him to her will like a doll. But perhaps tomorrow, when they were on the river at noon and the two of them lay sleeping in thin wooden boxes, he would tear off the lids and see how well they took to sunshine.
"What kills them?" he asked, realizing he didn't know.
"Not much." Mirela leaned on a punt pole, gave Frank a look that he had seen on Nicu's face a hundred times before, a sort of sideways laughter, as though she found him hilarious, but had decided it was not politic to say so. "Some elders say that a wooden stake through the heart will do it, but that you'd need to cut their heads off first so they slowed down enough to allow it. Some say that you can pin them down with spindles, and that then you should stuff their mouths with garlic and burn them to ashes. Then you should bury the ashes at a crossroads, so that even if they do walk again they won't know which way to take."
"That sounds elaborate," Frank was dismayed, "But if it works, I suppose—"
"As to that," she said, "I don't know. No one who wanted to kill them ever managed to get within a foot of the graves, so I don't know if it's ever been tried."
Radu did not return until twilight, and then insisted on eating and resting a while before they set out. So it was dark when the coffins were brought up from beneath the floor in the Vacarescu's private chapel. Their occupants walked beside them, bright eyed.
Having eaten and changed into warmer traveling clothes, Frank stood by the riverbank waiting for the boatmen to load the caskets into the space for them. He looked around with something like regret. So much had changed here he owed the place a little gratitude. The castle looked ridiculously pretty from this vantage point - high above them and silvered by an early moon. The forest by contrast was acres of sighing movement, so dark a green it seemed black.
Constantin stood as an icy white pillar on the bank, and Frank thought it was an after image embedded in his eye at first when he saw something equally white among the trees on the other shore. Then there was a blaze of smoky orange light and a roar, and something kicked him in the ear. Just behind him a sod of earth seemed to explode of its own accord, spraying his legs with mud. He knelt down and felt the ground, and his fingers discovered the smooth, warm roundness of a freshly fired shot. The wind of it passing within an inch of his face must have been what he could still feel phantom-hot against his face.
"Someone just shot at me!" he exclaimed, and despite the bandits, despite several suspicious incidents before that, he retained enough naivety to be indignant.
Alaya, dressed for travel and wearing only a simple flat hat over her veiled hair, smiled down at him. He knew it wasn't a fond smile, but it looked it, and he felt very in need of her affection, so he allowed it behind his defenses a little. "Well, we can't have that," she said, and moved to stand in front of him. The color faded out of her, leaving her as silver against the night as her husband. The next shot passed half-way through her and did not even billow the mist that she had become. The bullet seemed to lodge in the center of her chest. Reaching in to the cavity of her lungs, she plucked it out, let it fall at Frank's feet. Turning her head, bonelessly, like an owl, she grinned at Frank with those serpent-like fangs, and then any semblance of a human being was gone from her, leaving only a ribbon of fog that curled across the swift-flowing brook and streamed away under the boughs.
There was the sound of water, and the cold sough of the mountain wind through the pines. Another shot, deeper in the woods this time, and then a sound he thought at first was a cat in heat. He only realized it was a human scream when his body, wiser than himself, shivered all over with fear. It came again, more desperate and even more animal the second time.
Closer too.
Constantin stepped with heavy dignity into the first boat, sat on the coffins and beckoned for the boatman to tuck a travel blanket around his knees. Watching the man's attempts to achieve this without coming close enough to be grabbed might have been darkly funny without the distant sounds of agony and terror. As it was, Frank bit his lip and kept his eyes on the further shore.
From which at length a pale blur began to coalesce. Heedless of cold and wet, Alaya strode into the river at its shallowest point, dragging something behind her by its wrist. Before she was half way across the blood on her mouth was visible as a black stain. It tried to trickle down one corner of her lips, down her chin, but she licked it away. With a dismissive toss, as though the body weighed no more than a freshly picked bundle of wild flowers, she threw the corpse down at Frank's feet.
"I didn't quite believe you," she said, wiping her mouth on her hand and licking the hand clean, "when you said that death followed you. Do you remember me saying that all curses are nothing to the might of the Vacarescu family? Here is your assassin. He's not so frightening now, is he?"
He lay face down on the shingle bank, water still draining from him in a black, glittering sheet, from where he had been hauled through the stream. Dressed in a white jacket of sheepskin and white peasant leggings, he seemed just a local shepherd. Why would such a man try to shoot Frank?
Frank hunkered down beside him and pulled at his shoulder to turn him over – the touch of wet wool gave a sense of ebbing warmth, unclean as maggots. He was heavy, or perhaps Frank was unconsciously reluctant to look. If so, his unconscious too was wiser than he, for when he finally managed to roll the body over, bring the face into moon and lantern light, he recognized it well enough.
It was Lewis, with a bandaged gunshot wound through his side. Lewis, Arthur Carew's 'valet', where valet meant bodyguard. Picked from a foundling school by Frank's grandfather and given to his father as both pet and protector when his father was no more than ten years old.
Frank released the breath he hadn't known he was holding, nearly choking on it. So Lewis had been behind the bandit attack. By extension, it was his father's doing that Protheroe and Stebbins, Nicu, Apostol and Mihai were dead, and the only reason why Frank had got away was that Frank had shot Lewis. Unconscious, Lewis had not been able to insist the outlaws should finish him off after robbing him.
Frank squeezed his eyes together until sparks swirled behind his eyelids. He had thought he was prepared for this, thought he had accepted it. He must have been refusing to actually believe it all along. It was as if he'd gone into the vril accumulator and come out into another world he didn't recognize. This was... This was more than he deserved, damn it. He knew he'd been a pretty poor son but Arthur Carew was far worse a father.
"Frank?" Alaya's voice, sweetly concerned and reassuring. She took him by the chin and tipped up his gaze to meet hers. The fangs were gone; she looked flushed and innocent and bright eyed. "Don't let it concern you, whatever it is. Look, this will make you laugh."
Seizing the body under the armpits, she leaped with one bound to the top of the boat's slanting yard. She then positioned the corpse carefully over the top of the mast, one leg on either side, and pulled. Frank never wanted to hear again the sound of flesh and gristle parting, or smell the stench as entrails slid down the mast like noisome sausages. But it did make him laugh. It made him turn away with both hands over his mouth and laugh hysterically until he made himself sick, because crying didn't seem intense enough to cover it any more.
Footsteps broke his fugue, and the sound of Radu Vacarescu sighing with exasperation. "Mother, that's unsavory. You two, take it off and burn it, and you... Oh."
The note of surprise worked wonders for Frank's composure. Probably the only thing that could have, since both censure and pity would have only made things worse. He opened his eyes and looked back at the gruesome scene on the boat. The boatmen were untying the stays. Unshipping the mast, they lowered it into the stream, where they could wrestle its grim fruit off it and clean it at the same time.
Radu was paying no attention to that. He had stopped in front of Nicu and was looking between him and the others with puzzled suspicion. "You again."
"My lord?" 'Nicu' rubbed his hands together in the same gesture of anxiety Frank had seen from Mirela in his room. Concern for her built a place for Frank to stand above the abyss. It was as fragile as a champagne flute under his feet, but it held for this moment in which he needed it.
"You..." again Radu looked between Nicu and everyone else, and Frank wasn't sure if he was uncertain about what he was seeing, or he was uncertain about what everyone else was seeing. A thousand questions seemed poised beneath his scowl. "Are you physically capable of this job?"
Mirela's borrowed eyes widened. For a moment she looked terrified, and then - recalling herself, perhaps remembering that terror was not an appropriate reaction for her persona - she settled on wary blankness. "Yes, my lord. I'm not afraid of hard work."
He sees her, Frank thought, putting this together with Radu's reaction in the sitting room, where he had instantly seen through her Vlach disguise. He sees her as she is. He doesn't realize that the rest of us see something else.
"Very well, then. But stay on the first boat, and don't go anywhere after the voyage. I think I could use someone of your skills."
Hoofbeats approached and stilled as Cezar rode into the torchlight and dismounted. When Radu turned to greet him and exchange a brief, bruising hug, Mirela cast her hood more firmly over her head and huddled into the bow of the first boat, disappearing in a more traditional way.
Radu left Cezar to see to the disposal of Lewis' body in whatever way they had found to be effective against unwanted resurrection. He picked Frank up by the elbow and said nothing condemnatory when Frank leaned against him. He said nothing comforting either, but sat down next to Frank in the boat and folded a sable fur over them both. Where they sat touching from knee to shoulder there was a faint, reassuring warmth.
Radu could have demanded an explanation, Frank thought. Could have revealed the girl for what she really was. She had insulted him by her existence, by her words, by her survival, and he was protecting her. Just as he's protecting me.
The thought did not take away the pit of darkness in his mind left where a father's love should have been, but it strengthened the brittle construct under his feet. Frank's father had not killed him, but perhaps the attempt itself was reason enough to sever his connections with his family, his past.
Perhaps he would take Mirela's advice. He would accept that Frank – old Frank – had died in the mountains at the hands of the bandits, and Radu, with the cloak of St. George, had brought something new to life. Frank was more than ready to put it all down—the death, the guilt, the curse—and something new in this country where love, at least, was not forbidden him. "How many days to Bucharest?"
"Not enough," said Radu darkly, and the demons on his other side tittered a little in amusement at his sullen tone.
A crunch of gravel and then they were floating, chill and damp, past stone and weed. It was a gloomy start to a new life. But then, Frank thought, all new lives begin in tears.
Chapter Two
In which a Declaration of War is made in a Most Decided Fashion.
∞∞∞
HMS Tiger, at sea off the coast of Greece
Second Lieutenant George Newman took off his hat and smacked it on the palm of his hand to dislodge the heavy pearling of dew. Three swift whacks, and his hat was drier, but now his wig was sticky and chalky with moisture, and the back of his neck felt like a fresh plucked chicken brought out from the icehouse on a summer day.
Down in the waist of the ship the reassuring whirring grind of holystoning was interrupted by a choked off cry and splosh. Someone shouted out "oh you clumsy bugger, that were my bucket!" But from the quarterdeck all Newman could see was a darker gray blur in a gray haze, standing up like a bear on its back legs. He checked the compass
readings and the speed and course chalked on their board. It was getting a little hairy, navigating on readings so close to what should be land. He fancied he could feel it underfoot - the ship's timbers dimly sensing a shallower draft, shivering in a different rhythm, where the long rollers of the open ocean crashed back broken from a shore.
Newman had been at sea since he was thirteen, had sailed around the world and back, for months on end out of sight of land. He no longer questioned his instincts in such matters. "Lookout!" he tipped his head back, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted up at the smudge above the fighting top. "Ho, Tom Barnabas, tell me what you see."
"Sir," came the distant shout, muffled by the still wet air. "I can't see much. But something, I think, dead ahead. Not big enough for the shore." There was a shaky note in his voice. Maybe the cold, maybe something else.
"Do you see the straights?"
"I don't... more like a ship, sir, but under no sail. No lights. And I hears something. A kind of..." There was a pause. Perhaps he licked his lips, though they should be damp enough in this weather. "A kind of chattering, sir."
"Voices?"
"No sir, more... I don't know."
Newman handed over the quarterdeck to the midshipman of the watch, ran up the shrouds until he could haul himself - with the help of the ship's roll - over the edge of the fighting top and stand next to the lookout.
Tom took his arm and turned him, pointed, but kept a hand over his own nose and mouth as if to still the sound of his breathing. The fog was thinner up here, and looking down was like looking at the back of an enormous dirty sheep. Newman pressed his telescope to his eye and focused where Tom pointed.