Making such a service available to our supernatural customers, however, had enormous potential. With such a service at my disposal, I almost certainly could have settled the quarrel between the Aerie Spirits and the watery ones a few years back, in time to avoid that terrible hurricane.
I was dreaming, of course. Logistilla had the Staff of Transmogrification and, with it, all the metamorphosis magic our family possessed. Except in the unlikely event that Logistilla could be convinced to join the company again, the resources for such a venture would never be ours. I sighed.
LOGISTILLA led us into a dining room. A long table had been laid out with a place for one at the nearer end. Silver dishes overflowed with fresh fruit. Pastries and steaming delicacies filled platters and crystal bowls. The sweet aroma of papaya and fresh bread mingled with the smell of wet fur. Above, two spider monkeys chattered as they lit the candles of the chandeliers.
Logistilla gestured with her staff, spreading her arms wide. The spider monkeys rushed from the room, returning presently with enough china and silver for three more settings. My sister swept aside the skirts of her deep blue robe to take the chair at the head of the table. She gestured for us to choose seats. Mab and I sat to her right. Mephisto sat to her left. Koala bears sidled up to our chairs and fanned us with large painted fans, which was pleasant, for the air was humid and hot. A fourth fan-bearing koala sat amidst the dishes, defending the feast from flies.
The pale green light emanating from the top of Logistilla’s staff died away. The globe now appeared to be an iridescent ball the color of mother-of-pearl atop a slender willow staff. Seven prongs, carved into the semblances of a bear, dog, raven, rat, horse, toad, and pig, held the ball to the staff. Logistilla placed the staff in a special holder beside her chair. It stood upright beside her.
“Mangos anyone? Oranges? Breadfruit?” She began to serve.
“Three years is an awfully long time for a man to be a beast.” Mab was carefully sniffing each dish before he took anything. Cautiously, he spooned some strawberries onto his plate.
“Oh? So, you disapprove? Just for the record, Mr. Snoop-into-Other-People’s-Business, I give them a chance to buy their way out at the end of the first year. This does tend to favor the rich, I admit. But then, life just never is fair, is it?” She bent and scratched an enormous pit bull behind its ear. “Is it? Yes, my sweet.”
“Can’t you just reproduce money? Wave your stick around and ‘zingo’ you’ve got bags of lucre?” Mephisto helped himself to three slices of blueberry pie. “You used to do that all the time.”
“That was coins,” she pouted. “My staff was particularly good at reproducing coins, but American money has some sort of spell on it that interferes with my work. Such an inconvenience. Probably put there just to stop me.”
“It was,” Mephisto replied, his mouth full. “By Cornelius.” He swallowed. “At least, Erasmus says Cornelius is the one who put that spooky eye in the pyramid on the money. That’s probably what’s stopping you from reproducing it.”
“An Orbis Suleimani spell,” I murmured.
“Cornelius! He lives to make my life miserable! Though he does have a very fine staff! Of course, I like mine better.” She reached behind her and petted the globe of her staff fondly.
“He does work for the Federal Reserve Board,” commented Mephisto. “Maybe he feels he owes it to the people of America to keep their currency magic-free. Besides, with neat digs like this, what do you need money for?”
“Taxes, mainly. You would think if a person owned their own island, taxes would not be a problem, wouldn’t you? But, no. Some foreign power is always sweeping in and declaring itself sovereign. I just pay them and hope that’s the end of them. I find it easier to pay than to protest.
“Then, there’s my estate in Russia,” Logistilla continued. “The bribes I’ve had to pay to keep the title to that place are exorbitant. And they refuse to accept anything but American currency. Or that’s how it had been for years, anyway. Such a nuisance! Shepherd’s pie, anyone?”
“Any shepherd in it?” Mab eyed it suspiciously.
“Not a one,” Logistilla replied.
Mab and I both accepted a serving. Mephisto made a face and shook his head. “Russia’s become boring this last century or so. All that violence and yuck. Why bother to keep a house there?”
Logistilla lifted her head regally and stared down her elegant nose at Mephisto. “That estate was granted to me by Peter the Great!” she said. “I’ll be damned before I let some insolent pack of transient mortals take it away.”
Mab glanced around nervously. “Wouldn’t say things like that, Madam Logistilla. Bad luck to call willingly on the powers of Hell.”
He poured salt from the shaker into his hand and sprinkled it about his seat in a circle. Turning to me, Mab whispered.
“Who was this great Peter fellow?”
“A king in Russia,” I replied. “He spent a year traveling incognito around Europe during the 1690s. Our family traveled with him for a time. Logistilla and he . . . got along well.”
“I would have made him a far better wife than that Catherine creature!” Logistilla said. “But perhaps it was for the best. I would have tired of him eventually. He was sometimes called the Bear, but the Russian people might have been a bit put out had he actually become one.”
“Apparently, Catherine thought you had turned him into a stallion.” Mephisto snickered, his face smeared with blueberries and marshmallow. “I heard it was her fatal flaw.”
Logistilla gave him a veiled look. “Wrong Catherine, you buffoon. You’re thinking of Catherine the Great. That’s a myth, anyway! And thank you so much for mentioning such an unpleasant subject in my presence, yet again.”
Mab looked up. “The death of Catherine the Great?”
“No, you fool,” Logistilla replied. “Horses. I should have known the two of you were just waiting for a chance to humiliate me. And after I attempted to be such a generous hostess!”
“Wait, I’d heard you liked horses,” Mab asked, confused. “I thought you were some kind of great horsewoman.”
“I do love horses,” Logistilla replied theatrically. “It is only when they are upon the lips of my relatives that they offend me.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Raiding the Treasures of the Popes of Rome
Logistilla stood. “We have lingered over our repast long enough. Let us withdraw to the drawing room.”
We followed my sister to a drawing room decorated with overstuffed Victorian furniture upholstered in deep blue velvet. The place smelled of pungent musk. Logistilla chased off several large beasts to make room for us all to sit. She gestured imperiously. A marmoset scurried over and poured a deep red port into our tall fluted glasses.
She took out a long cigarette, placed it in a long black holder, and murmured. “Look at that. Now we can smoke and drink port after dinner just like the men used to.” She glanced at the rest of us and gave a throaty chuckle, “Even if there isn’t a real man here.”
“I didn’t hear that!” Mephisto said cheerfully. He walked up to Logistilla and snapped her cigarette in half. “Besides, don’t you know that nobody smokes anymore. Smoking is evil, nowadays. Right up there with murder and loitering. Or did loitering go out of style?”
“Oh, pooh!” murmured Logistilla, but she did not take out another one.
Mab pulled out his notebook, “All this talk about horses reminded me of something. You guys never told me the whole scoop about that Vatican caper. This is as good a time as any, considering that we really shouldn’t try to sail out of here until the tide comes in. So, tell me about it. Who stole what?”
We all began talking at once, but Mephisto shouted over Logistilla and me.
“Oh, it was great!” he cried. “We broke in just before dawn, there was a huge commotion. First, Gregor walked out with the ring. Then, I stole the sphere. Miranda carried off St. George’s lance. You may have seen it, Daddy keeps it
by the fireplace. It’s all black and twirly with gold edges? No? Anyway, Titus was supposed get something, I don’t remember what, but after he dropped the fake dead body of Pope Gregory, he got too busy killing the guards. Ulysses . . . no, he wasn’t born yet. Erasmus took the Shroud of Turin. Cornelius stole the Ark of the Covenant—only he opened it, the dope. Too bad about that. Daddy got the scepter made from a piece of the true cross. Theo rescued the spear of Joseph of Arimathea. With Theo, it’s always a rescue. He never steals. And, who’s left?” Our hostess glared at him. “Oh, yeah. Logistilla held the horses.”
“What a night it was!” I cried, recalling our wild escape ride across the sky.
“Held Xanthus, Pyrois, Aethon, and Phlegon I will thank you to remember,” huffed Logistilla. To Mab, she said, “They left me holding the horses, while they got all the glory and the goodies. Then, they never let me live it down. After that, any time we planned to do anything, it was always ‘Oh, we can’t rely on Logistilla, she’s only good for holding horses.’ Or, ‘Here’s some horses to hold, Sister Dear, you excel at that.’ The ingrates!”
“You made your getaway on the Horses of the Sun?” Mab cried aghast. “Where was the sun that day? On vacation? Do you know those horses are relatives of mine? Nephews, I guess you’d call ’em.”
“It was dark, silly.” Mephisto spoke despite his mouth being full of banana bread.
“But what about the other side of the earth? Ah, never mind . . . why did you need horses at all?” Mab asked. “Why didn’t you just take . . .” He flipped through his notebook. “. . .the Staff of Transportation?”
“The travel staff was new.” I chose a candy from a box of bonbons offered by the marmoset. “Father made it while we were in Italy. It had never touched the earth of the British Isles, so it could not bring us there. Instead, Father sent Mephisto to capture and harness the Horses of the Sun.”
“It was a royal pain,” Logistilla complained, gesturing with her wine glass. “We could only take with us what we could carry by horse back. I had to winnow my childhood, my whole youthful life, down to two saddlebags.”
“Back up a step.” Mab held up a hand. “You were living in Italy? Last I heard, your family fled Milan and ended up in England.”
“You mean the famous ignominious retreat after they were betrayed by Uncle Antonio?” With a wave of her hand, Logistilla dismissed events that happened well before her birth as ancient history. “That was in 1499; this was 1623.”
I jumped in. “After that, we moved to Scotland, though we spent much of our time in London. In 1589, we moved back to Italy, this time as private citizens. The Spanish were ruling Milan then.” I recalled how strange it had been to see their unfamiliar faces living in our old castello.
“What was that all about?” Mab scribbled as he talked. “I mean, why did you go?”
“I’m not sure of the details, but it had something to do with the internal squabbles of the Orbis Suleimani. Father was constantly sending Titus and Cornelius to and fro on errands related to these matters. They had been born during our stay in Scotland; this was their first time in Italy.”
“And their first time carrying staffs!” Mephisto piped in.
“Titus and Cornelius.” Mab made a note and then looked up. “Where was everyone else?”
“Theo stayed behind in England for much of this period, fighting under the Earl of Essex. Erasmus married an Italian girl, a merchant’s daughter. When she died in childbirth a few years later, he and his surviving children returned to England, where he participated in the king’s translation project, helping to create what later became known as the King James Bible. I was with Father, of course,” I finished.
Mab scribbled down what I had said and counted my brothers quickly, tapping each name with his pencil as he muttered it. “Where were you, Harebrain?”
“Here and there,” Mephisto gestured airily. “I was in Germany, learning a new trade.”
“But you went to Italy . . .” Mab glanced down again “. . . by 1623?”
Mephisto tilted his head thoughtfully. “Well, I went back to England and hung out with the School of the Night for a while . . . or were those the guys who hunted Miranda? Mainly, I practiced gathering . . . stuff. Then, the Spanish Ambassador stole something from me and sent it to Rome. I wanted it back, so I went to Italy.”
“What was it?” asked Mab.
Mephisto squinted. He frowned. He rubbed his temples, concentrating. Finally, he shrugged. “Don’t remember.”
I sighed. Sometimes, Mephisto’s memory losses seemed far too convenient.
“Okay, so Mr. Prospero sets up house in Milan and remarries?” Mab asked.
“That’s right,” Logistilla nodded. “Gregor and I were born in 1593.”
Mab did some quick addition. “Hold on! This makes no sense! Gregor was born in 1593 and pope by 1623? The College of Cardinals confirmed a thirty-year-old man as pope?”
Logistilla put down her wine glass. “The whole adventure began in 1618, when Gregor and I were about twenty-five. We were visiting our mother’s family in Rome, and we happened to be the only ones present when a cardinal collapsed and died. Alexander Ludovisi, I believe it was. As a lark, Gregor asked me to use my staff—Papa had only recently lent us use of our staffs for the first time—to make him look like the cardinal. Only, once he was the cardinal, he turned out to be a natural. Within two or three years, they made him pope.
“Gregor made a pretty good pope, actually,” she continued. “Most of the popes back then were as corrupt as the dev il, carousing and wenching and taking bribes as fast as the money poured in. Gregor was devout. He refused to take bribes and cleared the cardinals’ mistresses out of the Vatican. He’d been pope about two years when Papa discovered there was still a great deal of true magic in the hands of the Catholics.
“Father was outraged to learn the Church was doing so well against his darling Protestants because they had magic on their side,” Logistilla continued. “By then, the whole family had turned Protestant, with the exception of Gregor and myself. And I’ve never been a great believer. So, when Papa asked us to break the power of the Catholic Church once and for all, by stealing their enchanted talismans, we agreed.”
“Even Pope Gregor agreed?” Mab asked.
“He was called Pope Gregory XV. Well, he was young then—despite wearing an elderly man’s body—and tired of the effort of being pope. Also, he was disillusioned by the lack of piety among the church officials. Gregor thought he was doing the faithful a favor by removing power from the hands of the criminals who were milking them in the name of Our Lord.”
“He thought the magic was harming the Catholics,” I explained. “He’s a little like Theo that way. In fact, Theo probably got his ideas from Gregor. He was a strange fellow, Gregor. For all his love of the Catholic Church, he had the soul of a Puritan.”
Logistilla drew herself up, frowning severely. “Do not malign my dearly departed twin!” She turned to Mab, pouting again. “Gregie-Poo was a pussycat and don’t you let my icicle of a sister convince you otherwise.”
“Er, as you say, Ma’am.” Mab lowered the brim of his fedora. Remembering that he should not be wearing a hat while sitting at a lady’s table, he quickly took it off and laid it on a chair beside him.
Sipping my wine, I recalled our daring escape that long-ago night in 1623, the wind whipping by as we clung to each other in our chariot pulled by the sons of Zephyrus. Stars sparkled overhead. As the Horses of the Sun mounted higher, the constellations swayed and danced, as if we had entered some higher realm, where Orion and Cassiopeia were living entities. That night was the end of an era for us. It was the night we left Italy for the final time.
Arriving home in Scotland after the raid, we freed our godly steeds, sending them back to their bright master, then stumbled laughing, windburnt, and exhilarated, into the Hound and Eagle Pub. Cornelius went upstairs to lie down and rest his eyes—back then we still expected his sight to return presently—w
hile the rest of us gathered in the common room. Excitement still crackled in the air. Easygoing Theo got into a fistfight. Mephisto left with two barmaids, and normally rowdy Titus relaxed by the fire, spent from his battle with the guards. Only Father remained silent. He sat by the bar watching his children, the furrow in his brow deepening.
The next day, Father took back our staffs and commissioned Mephisto to carve statues for Logistilla and Gregor, who did not yet have them. It was some time before we saw our staffs again.
MAB finished scribbling down Mephisto’s accounts of who stole what and looked up. “Okay, there’s the scepter with the piece of the True Cross, the ark, the lance of St. George, the spear of Joseph of Arimathea . . . that’s the same weapon as the Spear of Longinus, right? The ring? That would be Solomon’s Ring, the original Seal of Solomon. I’d heard somewhere it used to belong to the Pope.”
“That’s where the tradition of kissing the Pope’s ring came from,” said Logistilla. “Only a human being could bear to kiss that ring. It was the Pope’s way of testing whether or not he was being beguiled by a demon.”
“And the sphere?” asked Mab. “Would that be Merlin’s globe or John Dee’s?”
“They are one and the same,” I replied.
“Worse and worse! Dangerous object, that. Said to be one of the few seeing glasses capable of looking into truly vile places.”
“Mr. Dee once told Father that the angels he communed with warned him never to look anywhere infernal,” said Logistilla.
“Good advice,” Mab growled. “Where’s all this magical garbage now?”
Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I Page 25