Finally one day their luck took a turn. They were at Veliko Târnovo, where the Professor had gone to look into a variant of the ruchenitsa wedding dance, rumored to exhibit syncopations hitherto unrecorded on the underlying 7/8. It was mid-February, St. Tryphon’s Day, coinciding with a ritual pruning of vines. Everybody was drinking homemade Dimyat and Misket out of casks and dancing to a small local band made up of tuba, accordion, violin, and clarinet.
Reef, who never missed a chance to kick up his heels, was out there with a variety of appealing partners, who seemed actually to have formed a queue. Yashmeen, somewhere past the middle of her term, was content to sit under an awning and watch the goings-on. Cyprian was looking and not looking at young townsfolk he’d once have termed desirable, when all at once he was approached by a thin, sunburned individual all togged out for the wedding.
“I know you,” said Cyprian.
“Salonica. Year before last. You saved my life.”
“Why, it’s ‘Gabrovo Slim.’ But as I recall, about all I did was try to find you a fez that would fit properly.”
“Thought you’d be dead by now.”
“Doing my best. Was that you that just got married?”
“My wife’s little sister. With luck she’ll be able to work through harvest before they have their first.” His eyes had kept sliding away to look at Yashmeen. “She is your wife?”
“Not that lucky.” He introduced them.
Slim beamed in the direction of Yash’s belly. “When is baby?”
“May, I think.”
“Come be with us when baby comes. Better for you, for baby, for father especially.”
“Here’s the very bloke,” said Cyprian with every appearance of gaiety.
Reef got congratulated and re-invited to stay with Slim and his family, who as it turned out had a small rose farm near Kazanlâk, in the heart of the Rozovata Dolina, or Valley of the Roses. Cyprian, who had been inhabiting a one-to-one-scale map of the Peninsula since arriving, immediately grew alert. The Valley ran east-west, between the Balkan range and the Sredna Gora, and certainly was as likely a place as any to be looking for the Interdikt.
He waited till he and Slim had a moment to chat before bringing the topic up. “Have you noticed anything peculiar going on out there?”
With perhaps some general idea already of Cyprian’s profession, “Interesting you should ask. People have been seen who should not be there. Germans, we think.” He paused before looking directly at Cyprian. “Bringing machinery.”
“Not farm machinery.”
“Some of it looks electrical. Military also. Dynamos, long black cables they bury in ground. Nobody wants to dig them up to see what they are, though there were rumors that some local mutri thought they’d go steal what they could, and bring it down to Petrich, on Macedonian border, where you can sell nearly anything. Someplace between Plovdiv and Petrich, they disappeared, along with whatever they got. Never seen since. In Bulgarian crime world, these things ordinarily are looked into, and appropriate action taken, but by next day everything was dropped. First time anyone has seen those people afraid of anything.”
“How difficult would it be, do you think, to have a look round, without anyone knowing?”
“I can show you.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“You will see if it is something to be afraid of.”
DESPITE HAVING KNOWN that it would happen at some point in the journey, when they announced that the time had come for them to take off on their own, Professor Sleepcoat was devastated. “I should have known better than to come out this time,” he groaned. “It’s like musical chairs. Except that the music stopped two years ago.”
“We’ll keep our ears tuned for Lydian material,” Yashmeen promised.
“Maybe there is none anymore. Maybe it’s gone forever. Maybe that gap in the musical continuum, that silence, is a first announcement of something terrible, of which this structural silence is only an inoffensive metaphor.”
“You’ll let them know back at Yz-les-Bain that we—?”
“Part of my remit. I shall miss you, however.”
EVEN TO THE INDIGENOUS, used to twittering fools from the north and west in tourist attire, the three seemed gravely passionate, as if behaving not as they wished but as they must, in answer to unheard voices of duty. Who could know, finding them in any of these hill towns, climbing, descending, never a step in front of another you’d call level, thinking only when they must about the next meal, their faces shadowed by hatbrims of woven straw, taken from the flanks or beneath by sunlight off the ancient paving-stones or sun-battered earth too often into areas of angelic implication—what were they doing out here this late in history? when everyone else had long turned, withdrawn, re-entered the harsh certainties of homelands farther west, were preparing or prepared. . . .
Slim’s farm, from what Reef could tell after a quick appraisal that by now was second nature to him, enjoyed a good strategic position, in a little valley of its own, the creek running down out of the Sredna Gora bordered by other small farms, each with its murderous dog, alongside it a road that unfolded in slow curves, now and then a shade tree, geese up and down the roadside or running from ambush hissing and honking, traffic along the road easily seen for miles, most of it farm carts and horsemen uniformed and irregular, all carrying at least one rifle, all known locally, and called out to, by their diminutives.
The farmhouse was teeming with children, though when Cyprian actually counted, there were never more than two. Their mother, Zhivka, turned out to have a way with roses, and kept a private patch out in back of the house where she carried on hybrid experiments, having begun years ago by crossing R. damascena with R. alba and gone on from there. She had names for each one, she talked to them, and after a while, when the moon and the wind were right, Cyprian heard them talking back. “In Bulgarian, of course, so I didn’t catch it all.”
“Anything you’d like to share?” muttered Yash, big as a barge and having an uncomfortable day.
“They were discussing you and the baby, actually. Apparently it will be a girl.”
“Yes here’s a nice heavy flowerpot, just a moment now, stand quite still. . . .”
As her time approached, the women in the neighborhood drew closer around Yashmeen, Reef went out to raise whatever hell was available in these parts, and Cyprian was left to churches, fields of rosebushes six or seven feet high, extended sunsets, steel-blue night. Men avoided him. Cyprian wondered if, in a trance he could no longer remember, he had not offended someone here, perhaps mortally. It was not—in this he was certain, perhaps it was the only thing he could be certain of—the severity in the faces turned to him was not that of desire. This was one delusion he was not allowed the comfort of in what it sometimes seemed might be his ultimate hours, and did it matter two pins, really? He wasn’t looking for erotic company any longer. Something else, perhaps, but fucking strangers was scarcely by now of much concern.
THE BABY WAS BORN during the rose harvest, in the early morning with the women already back from the fields, born into a fragrance untampered with by the heat of the sun. From the very first moment her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her. What Cyprian had imagined as terrifying, at best disgusting, proved instead to be irresistible, he and Reef to either side of the ancient bed, each holding one of Yashmeen’s hands as she rose to meet the waves of pain, despite the muttering women who plainly wanted the two men elsewhere. Hell, preferably.
The afterbirth went into the ground beneath a young rosebush. Yashmeen named the baby Ljubica. Later in the day, she held her daughter out to the men. “Here. Take her for a while. She’ll sleep.” Reef held the newborn carefully, as he remembered holding Jesse the first time, stood shifting foot to foot, then began to move carefully around the little room, ducking his head for the slant of the roof, presently handing her over to Cyprian, who took her warily, her lightness fitting so easily after all into his hands, nearly tugging him off the
floor—but more than that, the familiarity, as if this had already happened countless times before. He wouldn’t dare say it out loud. But somehow, here was a brief moment of certitude, brought back from an exterior darkness, as if to fill a space he could not have defined before this, before she was really here, tiny sleeping Ljubica.
His nipples were all at once peculiarly sensitive, and he found himself almost desperate with an unexpected flow of feeling, a desire for her to feed at his breast. He breathed in deeply. “I have this—” he whispered, “this . . .” It was certain. “I knew her once—previously—perhaps in that other life it was she who took care of me—and now here is the balance being restored—”
“Oh, you’re overthinking it all,” Yashmeen said, “as usual.”
FOR MUCH OF THAT SUMMER, Reef and Cyprian were out in search of the elusive “Austrian minefield.” They made their way among tobacco patches and fields of sunflowers, wild lilacs in bloom, geese honking up and down the village streets. Shaggy dogs came running out of sheep pasture barking homicidally. Sometimes Yashmeen came along but more and more she stayed at the farm, helping with chores, being with Ljubica.
When the roses were in and Gabrovo Slim found himself with some time, true to his word he took Reef and Cyprian out to a promontory, wind-scoured and overlooking a treeless plain. Beside a small outbuilding rose a hundred-foot tower supporting a toroidal black iron antenna. “That wasn’t here before,” Slim said.
“I think it’s one of those Tesla rigs,” Reef said. “My brother used to work on them.”
Inside the transmission shack were one or two operators with their ears all but attached to speaker-horns, listening attentively to what seemed mostly at first to be atmospheric static. The longer the visitors listened, though, the more possible it became that now and then they were hearing spoken words, in a number of languages including English. Cyprian shook his head, smiling if not in disbelief at least in a polite attempt not to offend.
“It’s all right,” said one of the operators. “Many in the field believe that these are voices of the dead. Edison and Marconi both feel that the syntonic wireless can be developed as a way to communicate with departed spirits.”
Reef immediately thought of Webb, and the séance back there in Switzerland, and his jocular remarks to Kit about telephoning the dead.
From outside now came a massed mechanical uproar. “Motorcycles,” Cyprian said, “judging by the throb. I’ll just go have a look, shall I.”
Six or seven cyclists in leather fatigues that time and terrain had only made more stylish, riding stripped-down four-cylinder touring bikes—he identified them immediately as Derrick Theign’s elite “shadowing” unit, R.U.S.H., whom he hadn’t seen since the Trieste station.
“Is that you, Latewood?” Behind a pair of smoked goggles Cyprian recognized Mihály Vámos, a former hill-climbing champion on the Hungarian circuit. They had put in some time together in Venice—enough, one hoped—drinking late at night, helping each other out of the odd canal, standing around on small bridges in the moonlight smoking, trying to figure out what to do about Theign.
“Szia, haver,” Cyprian nodded. “Handsome machines you’re riding these days.”
Vámos grinned. “Not like those little Puchs they had us on at first. Some Habsburg jobber friend of Theign’s, attractive terms, all they did was keep breaking down. These new ones are FNs, experimental models—light, rugged, fast. Much better.”
“The Belgian arms factory?”
“Oh, these are weapons, all right.” He had a look at Cyprian. “Happy to see you’re still out getting in trouble. We certainly owe you our thanks.”
“For . . . ?”
Vámos laughed. “We didn’t hear in bloody detail about Theign. Messages from the Venice station stopped arriving one day, and since then we’ve operated independently. But it appears you did us all a service.”
Cyprian offered him a local cigarette, and they lit up. “But you’re still on station out here? What if fighting were to start? how would you be expected on your own, to . . .”
Vámos gestured up at the Tesla transmitter. “The War Office maintains receiving facilities on the Sussex coast, and cable links to London. We thought that’s where you’d be by now, back in England happy and secure, drinking tea in a garden someplace. Who in his right mind would want to be out here?”
There seemed no point in not bringing up the Interdikt. Without going into names or dates, Cyprian gave Vámos a quick summary of what he’d been up to.
“Oh. That.” Vámos took off his goggles and wiped them on his shirt while pretending to look carefully at the sky. “Around here they call it the Zabraneno. Whoever installed it, it no longer belongs to anyone—the Germans and Austrians pretend they never heard of it, the local people are terrified, the Turks send their probes every month or so, believing it is like the Great Wall of China, there to keep them from invading. The British as always are of two minds as to its usefulness. None of us know how to dismantle the thing, so the best we can do is wait, ride patrol, east to west, west to east, see that no one triggers it by accident.”
“And has it ever . . . ?”
Vámos had an unaccustomedly solemn look. “It behaves as if it’s alive. Knows when someone’s coming and takes steps to protect itself. Anyone who passes within a certain radius. We have learned the way in, for all the good that does us. I suppose now you’ll want to see it.”
Gabrovo Slim remembered an appointment with an attar-factory rep from Philipopolis, and left apologizing. Cyprian and Reef each climbed on behind one of the R.U.S.H. cyclists and were taken snarling across the foothills of the Sredna Gora, past trees grown over with ivy, a sinister topiary of green creatures stooped and hooded that almost looked like familiar animals but were deformed past comfortable recognition, that seemed to watch the riders as they passed, only a breath of wind away from having faces revealed from inside their dark green hoods. . . .
And creeping at the edges . . . or actually by now industriously in and out like a loom shuttle all through the structure of the field of vision, mapped onto the crossed invisible threads on which all that is is deployed, Cyprian, out in the ungentle wind, acquiring a variety of interdental insect life, was witnessing distortions, displacements, rotations . . . something else was there, just about to appear, something he understood had always been there, but that he had not been receptive to. . . .
“Here is where we must dismount,” said Mihály Vámos, “and walk carefully.” In single file, walking a zigzag pattern, as if counting paces, they approached a long structure of weathered concrete, strangely dark in this unaccustomed summer cold, a repetition of elements all grimly turned the same way, as toward intruders unknown but equally undeserving of mercy.
Vámos led them into a sort of enlarged casemate, built not long ago but already begun to corrode. Inside, in the afternoon-ochre shadows, flaking communiqué forms that once had screamed with emergency were still pinned to a framed ancient announcement-board, though many had fallen off and blown in drifts into the corners. Tunnels led off into stone darkness, toward adjoining structures unindicated miles away in what so clearly announced itself as a great barrier fortification.
In a storeroom they found hundreds of canisters, brand new, dust-free, each labeled PHOSGÈNE.
“They’re real enough.” Vámos said. “Phosgene isn’t especially exotic anymore, there are production plants everywhere, it’s only chlorine and carbon monoxide. With access to enough electric current, it’s easy to produce chlorine from salt water, and carbon monoxide can be collected from nearly any combustion process. Expose them together to light and you get phosgene.”
“Born of light,” said Cyprian, as if about to understand something.
“It seems this isn’t a gas weapon, after all,” said the motoros. “‘Phosgene’ is really code for light. We learned it is light here which is really the destructive agent. Beyond that the creators of the Zabraneno have proceeded in the deepest secrecy, thoug
h the small amount of published theoretical work seems to be German, dating back to the early studies of city illumination— they were devoting great attention to the Æther then, using as their model the shock wave that passes through air in a conventional explosion, looking for similar methods to intensify the light-pressure locally in the Æther. . . . From military experience with searchlights, it was widely known how effectively light at that candle-power could produce helplessness and fear. The next step was to find a way to project it as a stream of destructive energy.”
“Fear in lethal form,” said Cyprian. “And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once—”
“A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. Like nothing that has ever happened. Photometry is still too primitive for anyone to say how much light would be deployed, or how intense—somewhere far up in the millions of candles per square inch, but there are only guesses—expressions of military panic, really.”
“God,” said Reef.
“Maybe not.”
Slim had mentioned black cables. “But I don’t see any light sources here.”
The look he got from Vámos was not one Cyprian would remember with any sort of comfort, “Yes. Odd, isn’t it?”
As they were leaving, Vámos said, “Is this what your people sent you to find?”
“They said nothing about code,” Cyprian quietly furious. “More damned code.”
The riders left them at a crossroads near Shipka. “Sok szerencsét, Latewood,” nodded Vámos. By the protocol of these things, particularly perhaps in Thrace, one did not turn and look back. Soon the engine sounds had faded and the hawk-bearing wind resumed.
“What do we tell Yash?” Reef wondered.
“That we couldn’t find it. We’ll pretend to keep looking for a while, but in the wrong directions. We must keep her and the baby well away from this, Reef. At some point declare the mission a failure and get back to . . .”
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