“I wish him to be but I do not think he notices me,” Lesya said.
“What’s his name?” Constance asked. It was Lesya’s turn to blush now. “Come on, fess up,” Constance said. “I told you.”
“His name is Valentin,” Lesya said. “He is the son of a fisherman in our home village. He is…” the Russian girl struggled for words.
“Beautiful?” Constance offered. Both girls laughed.
“Yes,” Lesya said, “he is very beautiful.”
They talked until dawn and Lesya promised to return as soon as her chores would allow. That night Constance slept well and had no troubling dreams. It was the first time she could recall that for a very long time.
Lesya was true to her word. She visited Constance again and again, night after night. Constance soon began to look forward to the visits, and gradually she began to forget this girl was her captor. They talked about books they loved and hated. They described their homelands to each other in the kind of detail that only someone who is young and too far from home can provide. They talked of their training, of the ways it was similar in some regards and very different in others. They talked of their loves and their dreams. Whenever talk came to the future, Constance got quiet, and sad.
“What is it like to be able to see the future?” Lesya asked one night.
“I think it might be kind of like what it’s like to get old,” Constance said. “You see the people you’ve loved your whole life die, see the hole they leave in you, in your world. I hate it.” They were both quiet for a time. Then Lesya held up a worn deck of cards.
“Let’s build a house of cards,” she said, smiling. Constance agreed and wiped her eyes.
“Okay, let’s,” she said.
On June 14, Constance’s birthday, Lesya woke her up early, jumping in the bed and pulling Constance’s ears, as was the tradition back home. The two girls laughed.
“Did you dream?” Lesya asked. “The eve of your birthday is supposed to be a time of powerful omens.” Constance got a strange look on her face.
“Yes,” she said. “I dreamed.”
Lesya held out a closed hand. “Happy birthday! Here is your present!” She opened her hand. It was the key to the cabin door. Lesya dropped it in Constance’s palm. “Mother says you don’t have to stay locked in here anymore. I convinced her you are determined to see this through.”
“Thank you,” Constance said, and hugged the girl.
“Come on, let’s go up on deck. It’s a beautiful day!” Lesya said. Constance chased after the young Russian and they spent the day running up and down the rigging on the ship and watching clouds.
By the end of the week, Constance was helping with duties on the Caliburn and she and Lesya were training together. Lesya asked her a million questions about how it felt to take the blood.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Constance said as they sparred on the fore deck.
“You really think so?” Lesya asked.
“No doubt,” Constance said. The odd sadness that crossed her face from time to time passed over her like clouds hiding the sun. Lesya put a hand on Constance’s shoulder.
“When this is all over, I’ll take you to my home and show you my beautiful fisherman and then you can take me out to the American frontier and show me your cowboy Jim.”
“Deal,” Constance said, and the sadness passed from her face and the sun shone again.
* * *
They arrived in England the following week. They dropped anchor in a cove beside a deserted stretch of rocky beach. All the Daughters departed the Caliburn by ship’s boat, leaving the two girls there with the crew. By the next day, they were under way to Africa, but the mood aboard the ship had darkened. All the Daughters had returned from their meeting in London with Alexandria Poole sullen and silent, and Constance knew why—and what that meant for her. Constance did receive some good news, however. Lesya eagerly told her the next morning that her mother Inna had made inquiries at Lesya’s urging and that Martin, Constance’s grandfather, was alive, and so was Constance’s mother.
As Constance began to cry a little, she looked out over the ship’s rail at the bloody sun sinking in the west. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” The tears started and as hard as she wanted to stop them, to use the self-discipline Mother had been teaching her, her heart was a raging storm full of great relief and an odd alchemy of sadness and joy. The people she loved the most were alive and well and she was sailing farther and farther away from them, never to see them again.
Constance sobbed, deep wracking sobs. All the stress of the dreams, of the strange presences inside her mind, warring, of her impending death, it all fell on her like the boom of a sail. She wasn’t a Daughter of Lilith, she was a girl alone and frightened and missing her family. Lesya held her tight and pushed her damp hair out of her red-rimmed eyes, well after the sun had drowned.
* * *
One night, weeks later, lying on the deck on their backs watching the stars above them, Lesya finally broke the silence. “I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t want to,” Constance said. “I was kind of hoping to get a chance to kiss Jim before … you know.” They were silent again for a long time. “It really is beautiful and terrible, isn’t it?” Constance said.
“What?” Lesya asked.
“Life,” Constance said. “It’s cruel to have so much beauty and so much wonder and then to snuff it out. The only thing worse I suppose would be to never have all that in the first place.”
“As a Russian, I’m duty bound to disagree with you on that. If you never lived, you’d never know what you were missing. See, always able to harvest a darker cloud from a silver lining. Pessimism, it’s a Russian invention.”
“If I die,” Constance said, “could you go to Golgotha and tell Jim … I don’t know, that he was sweet, and kind. Tell my mother and grandfather how much I loved them.”
“I will,” Lesya said. “I promise.”
“And no stealing Jim, you sneak,” Constance added.
“Never,” Lesya said. “I’d never do that to you.” The two girls held hands and watched the universe spin and burn.
As the Caliburn headed closer to Africa, Inna Barkov, Lesya’s mother, felt more and more doubt creep into her about their mission. She told Itzel of her concerns.
“The Daughters must have the Blood of Lilith to continue,” Itzel said. “I, too, wish there was another option, but the Stapleton girl fits all the criteria of this prophecy as Alexandria has uncovered it. It has to be her.”
“Why do I get the feeling that we are in the wrong here?” Inna said. “If the Mother is such a force for personal freedom, and for good, how can it be her will to slay this innocent girl and drain her blood to fill the grail again? It’s obscene.”
“Good means many different things in different places, different times,” Itzel said. “I was taught that to be a sacrifice is a great honor, a kind of civic responsibility. Anything of true value exacts a price. Perhaps it is the Mother’s will to remind her children of that.”
“I do not know if I can … plunge a knife … I do not think I can do such a thing to that girl.” Inna tried to not use Constance’s name any more than she had to. “If the Sons had not resurfaced with such a terrible fury, I’d say let us die out.”
“You’d deprive your own daughter of the blood?” Itzel said. “I have not known you to be an overly sentimental person, Inna. We may hate this, but that is why we are the ones who must undertake it. The world will crumble to ash if Tezcatlipoca and his Sons run unchallenged in the world. We Daughters are all that stands before them. It is for the good of all, for countless unborn generations, that we must do this thing.”
“You sound like Ya now,” Inna said. Itzel smiled that strange, knowing smile that Inna had come to hate over the course of their travels together.
“Ya sees the whole mosaic,” Itzel said. “That is her strength and her weakness. She overlooks the details and that leaves
her vulnerable.”
“What do you see as my vulnerability?” Inna asked.
“The same thing that is your greatest strength,” Itzel said, looking over to the girls laughing and talking as they practiced their katas on the main deck of the Caliburn. Lesya waved to her mother. She looked like a normal child, no secret societies, no brutal endless training, no monsters to fight, no blood rituals. Inna hated to think she would be the one to take her daughter’s first real friend away from her. Africa loomed closer every day, and with it Constance’s death.
31
The Ten of Cups
Lake Chad, North Africa
July 19, 1871
They arrived with the sun breaking across the horizon of the lake. Maude was at the helm of the Hecate as they passed through the dawngate and she felt the ship sink a bit as it went from ocean water to the fresh water of the Chad. “Land ho!” Maude called. She was still garbed in Gran’s old sea-faring clothes. She had found more in the wardrobe in the captain’s cabin, along with an odd assortment of items in several sea chests, and she’d come to like the freedom and the feel of the clothing. She wore Gran’s machete at her belt now, as well as a holstered Colt revolver.
“Whoa,” Alter shouted from the mast. He climbed down and began to hoist a sail. Hecate assisted him in doing it. Amadia jumped effortlessly from the crow’s nest to one of the sail lines. She rode the line down as the sail went up, and when she reached the deck, she finished furling the sail with invisible help from the ship. The third, unattended sail began to furl on its own. Alter was dressed a bit more like a sailor than a New York gentleman now, after nearly a month at sea, and his hair was longer and he had decided a beard suited him. “We all right?”
“Yes,” Maude said. “Just the ship’s keel shifting a bit. Our draft changed when the water changed. She’s fine. But let’s drop anchor and check the plumb before we go any further.”
It had taken them over a week to get clear of the storm swirling about England and western Europe. They had headed south toward the Strait of Gibraltar, and finally got a clear night sky that allowed them to enter the Secret Sea. Amadia knew the way to Carcosa, and the three had discussed their choices one night over dinner. The best bet was to access the waters of the Chad to cut down the lead Inna and the others had on them.
“They will need to port, and then cross the upper Sahara,” the African Daughter explained. “We can port in the Chad and then head north into the desert. We’ll be closer. It’s about a week from there to Carcosa.”
The anchor lowered itself with a clatter of chains. Maude rubbed her eyes. It had been a long and stressful trip, wondering how they were treating Constance. She knew the Daughters were all decent people, merely misguided by Alexandria’s manipulations, however that did little to comfort her from the fact that her daughter was a prisoner of the most dangerous people on Earth, who intended to bleed her dry to renew the Blood of the Mother. Maude pushed it away from her mind again, focusing on getting to Constance before that happened.
“This lake is huge,” Alter said. “Should we bring the Hecate closer to shore?”
Maude looked to Amadia, who was busy retrieving the plumb and its cord. “Looks to be about forty feet deep,” Amadia said. Maude shook her head.
“I’m not going to risk it. We’ll take the ship’s boat to shore. Let’s start loading it.”
A few hours later, they were in the small boat, moving along the shore of Lake Chad. Amadia had directed them to a specific section of the coast.
“Is that a pyramid?” Alter asked, pointing to the distant shore. Amadia nodded.
“We’re close,” she said. “We need to keep heading north.”
They sailed along, following the shore for the better part of the day. As the sun was beginning to creep toward west, they caught sight of the blackened corpse of a burned forest. “There,” Amadia said, pointing. “We are almost to my home.”
They pushed the boat up onto the rocky, sandy shore. Smiling, Amadia admired the remains of the trees. “She most likely knows we’re here,” she said. “Her hearing is still better than your average panther’s, even at her age.”
Maude pulled her coat and her ditty bag out of the boat and looked about. “Do we camp here or keep going?” she asked Amadia.
“It’s not far,” Amadia said, “less than an hour. We’ll be home in time for dinner.” Alter carried his rifles over one shoulder, a box of provisions over the other. They made their way down a steep hill, following Amadia into the burned forest.
“This place was supposedly haunted once,” Amadia said, gesturing to the charred trunks all about them. “The pirate queen burned it down and destroyed the evil spirits that lived here.”
“Gran did this?” Maude said, looking about.
“You never mentioned your Gran was an arsonist as well as a pirate queen and Lilith cultist,” Alter said. “Busy woman.”
“Gran had hobbies,” Maude replied, then she paused and stopped walking. “We’re not alone.” Both Daughters dropped their burdens and took up a defensive posture. Alter set down his box and readied one of his rifles. There was a noise in the ruined trees and then a screech. A kite fluttered down, lighted on the charred stub of a branch and regarded the three.
“Iya?” Amadia asked, looking about. A blur moved between the two women, knocking Maude against a hollow tree trunk and taking Amadia off her feet. Alter felt something like a silent hurricane wind rip the rifle from his grasp.
A woman now stood in the path ahead of them. She wore a brown and gray feathered cloak and a bone mask that looked like a bird’s skull. She tossed Alter his rifle back, and shook her head disapprovingly.
“Sloppy, Amadia,” the woman said. Her voice was like dry leaves blowing across spring grass. “Your posture was imperfect at the ninth thoracic vertebrae, and that made you vulnerable. Your friend’s posture was somewhat better, but she lets her left arm droop too much, about half an inch, I’d say. Poor form for both of you, my omobinrin, my daughter. Certainly not fitting for the Oya.”
The old woman removed her mask. Her face was brown and deeply lined, her hair gray wisps about her crown. Her brown eyes sparkled with life and humor. The old lady sniffed the air and tsked. “And you are smoking again, those foul cigars. It would be better if you just chewed on charcoal! What am I going to do with you?” She offered a hand up to Amadia, who took it. The two embraced. “Welcome home, my dear one. I’ve missed you.”
“And I you, Iya,” Amadia said. The old lady turned and offered a hand to Maude, who took it and struggled back to her feet. “Tell me, daughter, who is your clumsy friend?”
Maude grinned. “I’m Maude, ma’am,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. You must be Amadia’s mother. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“We are distant relatives,” the old woman said, “but she is my daughter, my omobinrin, in all the ways that such things matter. I am Raashida.”
Raashida paused when she saw the old iron flask hanging about Maude’s neck as she helped her to her feet. “You carry the Grail. You are Anne’s student.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Maude said. “We were distant relatives as well, but she treated me like her own daughter.”
“She was a very good pupil,” Raashida said, “and a good friend. Even if her education was a bit … unorthodox.”
“Iya,” Amadia said, “we must reach Carcosa quickly. The summons to London I answered, it was Alexandria Poole, the latest in that line. She has convinced several of the other Daughters to undertake something terrible, and they have taken Maude’s daughter…”
“Constance,” Raashida said. “She told me her name. I have been having a dream for many nights now, of a young girl being led across the dunes, moving closer to Carcosa. You don’t have much time.”
“Is she all right?” Maude asked the old woman. Raashida nodded.
“She is not being mistreated, but she is afraid. She saw me in the dream.”
“What?” Maude said.
Alter had retrieved his rifle and joined the three women.
“She turned and talked to me in my dream,” Raashida said. “She says she knows you are coming.” She hesitated, as if there were more, but said nothing.
“Is that possible?” Alter asked. “Can one communicate through dreams?”
“Carcosa was the Father of Ill Dreams,” Raashida said. “The city is built of his bones, so it exists in the Dreamlands as well as in many different physical worlds and times. Constance is connected to the city and it to her by the blood of Carcosa’s sire that flows in her veins.” Raashida looked at Cline. “Your bearer will slow you two down. He should remain behind.”
“Bearer!” Cline snorted in indignation. “I’ll have you know, madame, that I am no mere stevedore!”
“Not a bearer,” Raashida said, nodding. “Bearers know when to shut up. Husband, perhaps? Which one of you two does he belong to? I hope not you, omobinrin.”
Maude and Amadia looked at Cline, and then at each other. “Not me,” they both said in unison.
“Come,” Raashida said. “A quick spot of food and we will prepare you for your journey.” The three women walked away and Cline looked after them.
“Hey!” he shouted, and followed. “‘Not mine,’ that’s a fine how-do-you-do!”
* * *
Raashida had prepared Amadia’s favorite, a dish called irio. It was a conglomeration of mashed potatoes, peas, beans, corn and onion with spiced meat. Everyone ate eagerly after so many weeks of ship rations. Raashida beamed proudly as she watched her food being devoured with so much abandon.
“When Amadia was little and first came to me to train with me,” Raashida said, “I would make her irio when she had had an especially difficult day of lessons. She used to sing a little song as I made it…”
“Iya, please!” Amadia said around a mouth full of food. Maude and Alter both laughed.
“Oh, now that you are the Oya and all grown up, you cannot have such things!” Raashida laughed, too, and clapped her wrinkled, veined hands. “Just remember, my darling one, the secret to staying young even when you are very, very old is to not take everything so damned seriously!”
The Queen of Swords Page 36