by Rob Preece
His English was better than that, but he obviously didn't think it wise to let on.
Dozens of gypsy children tagged after the Agent, jumping in front of him whenever he held out his crucifix at anything, pretending interest in what he was finding, then holding out a series of pendants and what looked uncomfortably like voodoo curses, offering to sell but also, Zack guessed, confusing the dousing.
"Want sex slave?” the twelve-year-old who'd accused Ivy of being a vampire demanded. “Buy this and no woman can resist of you.” She waved a doll with a large penis in his face. “Or no man, of course. I think you maybe like the man better than the woman."
The girl jumped out of his way when he threw a fist in her direction, then unbuttoned one of the buttons on her blouse. “Oh, you like women to hit. I am virgin. Ten thousand dollars and you can have me first. Hit me for five hundred dollars more. Special price in Euros."
"Whore.” The Agent shoved at her, then tripped and fell when she slipped out of his way.
"Whore is good, no? Have plenty sex and I make good dowry for handsome gypsy husband some day. You get nice virgin. Clean. Your wife, she understand. Or boyfriend, he no mind just a bit of difference."
The gypsies were playing a risky game, Zack saw. But they had little choice. The Agents knew he and Ivy had been there. They might suspect that the gypsies had sent them on their way, but they didn't know for sure. They would keep looking.
It took two of the gypsy women actually persuading Turkish soldiers to head into the trailers with them before the Turkish Lieutenant put down his foot. He wasn't going to risk losing control of his platoon just because some American civilian was standing around bugging him.
"Then we'll stay, without you,” the Agent declared.
"You will not,” the lieutenant growled. “America is our ally, not our master. You have no authority in our country without our agreement. I no longer agree to this."
"You're making a big mistake, sand-pounder."
The insult was the final straw. “If you aren't back in the jeeps in one minute, I will take you there myself."
The Agent swelled up like he was ready for a fight, but he was outnumbered twenty to five, not to mention more than a hundred hostile gypsies. “You're going to get busted back to private,” he assured the Lieutenant.
"Perhaps so,” the Turkish Lieutenant agreed. “Perhaps our government is as venial as you say, playing lapdog to you Americans. Until that happens, though, I suggest that you get into the vehicle.” He fingered his holstered sidearm looking like he'd like an excuse to eliminate this problem right there.
The Agent made a few more swipes with his crucifix, smacking it into one of the gypsy children who kept darting around him. The flood of tears from the little girl caused even the U.S. sailors to look at him with disgust.
"Don't go anywhere,” the Agent told the shotgun Gypsy. “Because I'm coming back. And next time, you won't get rid of me so easy."
"That'll definitely make them want to stick around,” Ivy whispered in Zack's ear.
* * * *
"Now, we recover the chalice. After, you leave,” the Queen said.
Ivy nodded. She trusted the Agent when he'd said he would be back. They didn't have long. “That American is going to cause problems for you if you run off. I bet he has some sort of monitoring around the camp."
"I said you will leave. Some of us will stay, including a pale-skinned female who will wear your same clothing. First, though, the key."
They'd had to explain the Cross to the gypsies when they'd taken it out of the Opal and handed over the keys to the vehicle. A little work with carpentry tools and the Cross now appeared to be a couple of beams in one of the oldest of the gypsy wagons.
Since no nail could penetrate the rock-hard wood of the Cross, it only took a few minutes to free it.
"Now, where's the hidden object supposed to be?” In the darkness, Ivy's second sight was more dominant and she could see countless shades of power, blobs of energy that seemed to come from everywhere. No wonder the Agent had been frustrated in his search for the Cross.
The Queen cackled. “In my trailer. You think I would let it get far away?"
Ivy shook her head. “Your trailer is old, but it isn't that old. I don't think they even made trailers in the 1940s."
"You know everything, do you? Follow me."
Ivy gestured for Zack to come with her and carried her section of Cross into the Queen's trailer.
"I can't see anything. Crap.” Zack bent down and rubbed his shin where he'd bruised it on a crouching red cat statue.
"Don't touch things,” the Queen demanded.
"Can we have some light for Zack?"
The Queen considered. Finally, she nodded. “Why not. Electric."
She flipped a switch and a couple of globes of pale light gleamed.
Since they were far from the nearest town, Ivy knew the lights were battery powered. Which may have been why the Queen was reluctant to use them. Of course, she also probably gained power over the other gypsies by being the only one who could see in the dark.
"What do you see, twice-dead?"
When she'd been in the Queen's trailer before, Ivy had been distracted by the icons and by the Queen herself. Now, she forced herself to relax, maintained a light grasp on her section of the Cross, and opened all of her senses to the trailer's interior.
The Queen had said that the gypsy treasure had been hidden inside this trailer decades before the trailer could have been built. But was that really a contradiction? Because the gypsies didn't just buy fancy Winnebagos and drive them around. They patched together trailers from the remains of vehicles abandoned by others, and from scraps gathered, or stolen, from non-gypsies. As Ivy let her senses penetrate beneath the surface of her surroundings, she saw that much of this trailer had once been something else. The wooden ceiling beams were not original to the trailer, but they were original equipment on some long-vanished gypsy cart similar to those they'd first approached when they arrived at the gypsy camp. Some of the beams beneath the floor were hewn tree trunks that dated back hundreds of years and who knew how many generations of gypsy transportation.
"You see it, don't you? Even my granddaughter can't see it and she has the sharpest sight in the Romany. But she is young and has plenty to learn no matter how smart she thinks she is."
"You've got hundreds of years of history in this trailer. No wonder everyone is confused.
The Queen gave another of her hacking laughs. “Confused isn't the word I would use. But before a cart is broken up, one of us, those with true-sight, find the parts that have absorbed power and then incorporate them into a new wagon. It has always been that way, and thus, with each generation, we grow in power. Only so can the gypsy survive."
She and Zack had been on the run for less than a month, but that was long enough to give Ivy a taste of what it must be like to be constantly on the move, constantly surrounded by distrust, hatred, and suspicion.
She could hardly imagine living like that for the long term, always prepared to flee, always threatened by the outsiders, always hoarding your treasures and your power—and then bringing children up to do the same thing, generation after generation for hundreds of years.
Then again, if she survived at all, her future would be like that. She hadn't though of anything beyond getting first to Byzantium and then to Venice. But getting to Venice, even if they could accomplish that, wouldn't solve their problem. The Foundation would still be looking for them. Would she and Zack grow old, perpetually on the road, always hiding, scrabbling for a few days of safety before they had to run again? Maybe, someday, she'd look back at the gypsies as having practically ideal lives.
She shook her head to clear it from the depressing thoughts. “What color is your chalice?"
"How would I know? I'm blind. I don't see colors."
"Do you know where, in all of these sources of power, the chalice is hidden?"
"I preserved everything from my grandmo
ther's old wagon. I know it's here, somewhere. I know we need it. It has power."
Not enough power to protect them from Hitler, Ivy knew. But, the Queen had said that Hitler and his Nazis had tried to gather occult powers for themselves. Maybe the Indiana Jones movies hadn't been as farfetched as she'd thought.
"Okay, let me concentrate."
Centuries of magic pressed down on her like a straitjacket, making it hard to breathe. Her instincts were to close herself to the sensory overload and she felt momentary sympathy for the Foundation Agents who had confronted the animosity of the gypsies. Even with the Queen's support, this wasn't easy.
But concentrating was the wrong approach. Only when she let herself relax did she start to feel the reality underlying the trailer.
"Your religion is dualistic, isn't it?"
"Good, evil, balance. Yes."
"And some of you gypsies worship the evil side?"
The Queen shrugged. “Good, evil people like good, evil deities. We Roma are no better than other people."
That went a long way to unlocking the puzzle of the accumulation of magic within the trailer. The lavender glow wasn't monochromatic after all, but composed of a rainbow of colors and powers.
Ivy concentrated on finding the greatest concentrations of power and then picking which of those were oriented toward the side of good. Because it was pretty obvious that not all of the Queen's predecessors had been wholly committed to the good. There was plenty of evil in here, too.
"You must hurry,” the Queen insisted. “The gajikané return now. They've left the Turks behind this time and have an aircraft full of angry men."
"How long?” Zack's sudden words made Ivy jump.
"Fast. Maybe ten minutes."
She almost missed it. She'd been discounting evil because she believed the Queen wanted to do good and supported the good side of the dualistic belief system. But death magic is wrapped up in evil, and the former Queen had died resisting the Nazi, a recent embodiment of evil on earth. And that knot of simmering heat in the very corner of the trailer looked nasty enough to be important.
"If you're lying to me about this chalice, I'm not the only one who's going to be sorry."
The gypsy Queen just cackled. “If I wanted evil to win, I would have handed you over to the Americans."
Well, that was a pretty depressing way to think about it.
Ivy closed her eyes and probed with her second sense.
It looked like a smooth ball of orange and purple, but when she reached out her hand for it, she contacted sharp edges—edges she would have mistaken for wooden splinters if she hadn't been relying on her second sight.
She pushed harder—and pain surged through her hand as invisible splinters dug more deeply into her flesh.
She wouldn't be able to discover more without using the key to open things up. If the Queen had laid a trap, she'd done an effective job.
Ivy hefted the Cross forward, nudging it against the death-magic that surrounded the hidden object, then twisted, letting the blunt end of the Cross loosen the knots that had kept the gypsy treasure from Nazi hands.
The flash of light seared her eyes even behind her closed eyelids.
"What the hell was that?"
"You finally saw something, did you, Zack? Welcome to the second sight."
With the outer layer unbolted, Ivy had no trouble reaching in and removing the clay vessel.
Her skin shriveled against it, as if it contained a powerful desiccant that soaked the life from her fingers.
It wasn't evil, exactly, but it didn't generate the life-affirming sensation she got from both Cross and Veil, either. And old? Eve might have poured Adam a drink from this small pitcher.
"Give it to me.” The Queen's gnarled hands clawed toward the precious chalice.
"This held the blood from human sacrifice,” Ivy said.
"Look more closely. That was long ago."
Which was true. The faith of the gypsies, or at least these gypsies, had changed. They still sacrificed, but for hundreds of years, flowers and fruits had, more often than not, provided the bodies offered to the deities. Rarely, a chicken or even a lamb might be offered. As Zack explained later, even the ancient Hebrew faith had gone through a similar transition.
Ivy felt a powerful urge to keep the chalice, to hoard its power to herself. Could the world really trust gypsies with this kind of object? Couldn't it be better used by those who saw one sacrifice forever eliminating the need for more?
Her fingers tightened on the clay pot and it seemed to cling to her more closely, whispering its promises of power. With this and the Cross, the Foundation would be no match for her. She could become the Foundation, transforming it from its present goals of war and destruction to those of peace and understanding.
That promise made her suddenly aware of the very personal danger the chalice represented. Ivy thrust it into the old woman's hands. She had been given a quest and two holy relics had fallen to her. Stealing others would pervert her quest, would turn her into what she had sworn to fight. “Guard it carefully and be careful not to listen to its whispers too much. It is a dangerous thing."
"They're almost here. You must leave now."
Chapter 19
They were less than a mile from the gypsy camp when Armageddon seemed to erupt behind them. The moonless sky lit up with parachute flares, heavy turbine helicopters thrummed their ground-rattling roars, and bullhorns shouted out messages in English, Turkish, Arabic, and Greek. Apparently the Foundation hadn't managed any gypsy interpreters because the one language that seemed completely missing was that of the people being surrounded.
"Will they be all right?” The Queen and most of the gypsies had stayed behind. The shotgun gypsy, the Queen's granddaughter, and one other gypsy, a man with a peg leg and a leering squint, had guided them out on foot.
Shotgun shrugged. “Gajikané always cause trouble."
That didn't comfort Ivy much. By gypsy standards, she was a gajikané herself. That seemed to be the gypsy equivalent of a gentile, someone outside the tribe.
"Including us, I guess."
Shotgun's grin exposed a gold tooth. “But you are our friend. You bring back the tribe's symbol of our days in India. You, we help."
She couldn't help wondering how many times he had said those words even as he gulled unsuspecting gajikané with one scam after another.
Shotgun urged them onward, until they came to a small farming village.
"Wait here,” he insisted.
He hotwired a farm truck and bundled Ivy and Zack, along with the Queen's granddaughter into the freight compartment and set off.
"You're not going to make any friends around here if you just steal their trucks,” Zack observed.
The girl laughed. “We no make friends anywhere. There are the Roma and there are the, how you say, suckers?"
"Sounds like something an American would say,” Zack warned.
She scowled at him. “That is different. Americans are, what is the word, obnoxious? The Roma are beset. Every man's hand is set against ours. Is that not what it says in your Bible?"
Ivy couldn't remember that quote, but she also couldn't remember the Bible saying anything about gypsies.
The girl, though, wasn't waiting for an answer. She reached out and grabbed Zack's hand. “Let me see your fate, friend of vampire."
Ivy pushed down an irrational surge of jealousy when the girl caressed Zack's hand. She didn't own Zack and even if she had, the gypsy was barely a teen. Hardly someone Zack would be interested in.
"You will go through great adventures,” she murmured although it was so dark, Ivy doubted she actually saw the lines on Zack's hands. “I see water and a strange circle of power."
"Aren't you supposed to tell me I'll marry happily and have three and a half children?"
"The second sight is also useful to see what people want to hear. For the suckers, even if I see their lifeline plunge into death, I promise them long years with grandchildre
n because then they give me money. You would not believe such nonsense. For you, I share the truth."
"No wife? No children?"
The gypsy girl shrugged. “If you survive, perhaps. If you die, the power of the Cross will not bring you back—you are not like the other, the vampire. If you die, you remain dead. And you may die. Soon."
"Glad I asked about that,” Zack said. He was trying to joke, but he sounded shaken.
"Ordinary people who stand too close to the power are often burned.” The girl put a bit of power into her voice, hinting at horrible danger, suffering, death. Thanks to her developing second sight, Ivy could block the effects of that power. Zack, however was unprotected.
"Sounds like tough times ahead,” Zack quipped. “And after we've been having such a pleasant vacation."
"Those who lie with vampires rarely live long enough to joke."
"That's enough,” Ivy said. “Do you have any idea where we're going or are you just along to keep us from catching up on our sleep?"
"I was sent with you to sense danger. This is my special talent."
"And is there any?"
The girl shrugged. “All around, of course. When is it not?"
"Yeah, that's a useful talent,” Ivy said. “I'm going to take a nap. Wake me when we get wherever we're going."
She laid down her head against the Cross and closed her eyes just as the truck creaked to a stop.
"Quickly,” the girl hissed. “The Americans have just given up searching the camp and are spreading out across the countryside."
Ivy picked up the shorter Cross section and hopped down from the truck.
Zack followed her with the other section. “Are we across the border?"
The shotgun gypsy shrugged. “Nearby. There is a passage. We'll leave you here. You will be met at the other end."
"Good enough,” Ivy said. “Where's the passage?"
Pegleg hadn't spoken the entire time and, from the way Shotgun talked to him now, Ivy guessed that was because he didn't speak any English. Finally, though, Pegleg grunted, then gestured at them.