The Tourmaline (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  But Corelli had recovered his capacity for speech. “You have no right to come in here,” he protested. “We are private citizens in our own house. Gaston will tell them at the station house that you are trying to rob us. There are policeman in the next road!”

  So it was already “our house”—his and the girl’s! In five minutes the baroness had brought them together under one roof. But she could do more. She still had Mlle. Corelli by the arm. She could twist her arm and hurt her, or else more than that. Delighting in the moment, the baroness closed her eyes. And she imagined reaching out with some small spell or conjuring, something that would mar the girl in subtle ways and punish her inside, damage her so that her own father would no longer feel his heart touched in her presence.

  It wouldn’t take much. The girl was already so close. Smiling, cocking her head, the baroness opened her eyes.

  Always her power as an actress—supernatural, some people said—was in the way she could allow her intentions to be read in her expressions and the language of her body. Groaning and defeated now, Corelli went down on his knees to fumble with the combination of the safe. With her hand around his daughter’s elbow, the baroness listened to her own harsh, even breath, listened to the sobbing of the girl. What contempt she had for this man who now knelt at her feet, and who all these years had kept in a steel box one of the wonders of the world, a jewel that had grown inside the skull of Johannes Kepler the alchemist, a symbol of his entry into a mystic brotherhood of conjurers.

  Click, click, click went the combination dials, spinning under Corelli’s thin fingers. No doubt he was a scientist who neither respected nor believed the power of Kepler’s Eye. No doubt he conceived of it as just another object in his collection of historical and natural oddities—one with a greater than average intrinsic value, perhaps, and certainly a romantic provenance.

  A blinkered academician, he could not have been expected to understand. With his belief in rational categories, he would have had no mental compartment for an object that was described in different documents as a mineral, a bodily organ, and even sometimes as a piece of fruit—a grape, as the baroness had read in one possibly metaphorical poem. Or a berry, as she had read it described in one of Kepler’s own journal entries—a pitted fruit that had improved his vision, made him what he was. It had grown inside him from a seed.

  Now the door of the safe stood open. Nicola Ceausescu let go of the girl’s arm. Hoisting up her skirt, she squatted beside the fumbling Corelli, and with her own hands she drew out the wooden tray of jewels. But there was nothing but garbage—fossils, petrified remains, and in another small box some diamond jewelry, some diamond and platinum trash that had doubtless belonged to the deceased and unlamented Madame Corelli—oh, this was a family of slaves!

  Lips curled in disgust, she turned the professor as he labored to stand. She had scattered his wife’s jewelry over the carpet, and with a cry he bent to gather them again. Doubtless he had been saving them for his only daughter, and doubtless also it broke his heart whenever he looked at them—there was something like that now in his face.

  Enraged, the baroness raised her hand and saw his look of fear—what was wrong with him? Surely he could see that she was just one weak woman, weaker than he. Surely if he chose, he could punish her as she deserved.

  But now she realized what he was actually afraid of, and it wasn’t her, or at least not entirely. Maybe he’d been counting the minutes since Gaston had left, and maybe now he understood she had the power of the state behind her, and Radu Luckacz’s police force, and the German army, all of which allowed her to do whatever she wished, behave like a lunatic inside his house, humiliate him and his daughter, too. They had no recourse. They had no recourse if she struck him across the face, as now, and watched a gash appear over his eye. Even inside her glove, the baron’s golden ring must have caught him wrong.

  They had no recourse if she batted his spectacles to the corner of the room, as now. “Stop!” cried the girl, tears disfiguring her face. “Stop, you monster!”

  Was that the word? the baroness asked herself. Was that what Corelli had called her in the hall? No, it was an uglier word than that. No wonder she was angry now.

  And the girl had stumbled across the room to fall over her father, raise him up, cradle him in her arms, blot away the blood on his eyebrow and the bridge of his nose. “Papa,” she cried, “papa,” and he was weeping, too.

  The Baroness Ceausescu rose to her feet. All was quiet now except for their snuffling and the beating of her heart as she studied the room for other hiding places. There was the professor’s desk, and on the blotter under the lamp stood a row of photographs in silver frames: a gray-haired woman with a kind, soft face. A boy in military uniform, a row of ribbons on his chest. And an exposure of Mlle. Corelli with flowers in her hair, taken when she was eight or nine.

  Nicola Ceausescu turned instead to the collection. It occupied the back end of the room, a small three-sided chamber with a raised floor that separated it from the larger space. The baroness stepped onto the bare boards, stepped into the chamber; again she had the impression she was stepping out onto a stage. She felt the same gooseflesh, the same sense of anticipation and self-consciousness. Corelli and his daughter were her audience. Caught in each other’s arms, they stared at her with wet, frightened eyes.

  But as always when she’d taken a few steps, she stopped caring about any audience. It was as if the missing fourth wall of the chamber now magically reformed, and she was there alone. Alone with her art, and with Corelli’s strange collection of perplexing or disgusting artifacts—a row of fetuses in cloudy glass jars. Preserved specimens of enormous bugs. Human skeletons, wired together, hanging from hooks, and elsewhere bins of animal bones.

  The light flickered from the sconces. Somewhere in here, she knew or thought she knew, was Kepler’s Eye, a tourmaline (she knew or thought she knew) with a unique power. Johannes Kepler had a thousand lovers—that was factually correct. But he had also, as the baroness had discovered in last few days, won over a million marks at games of chance. On one occasion he had rolled eleven consecutive double-sixes with eleven sets of dice.

  The Elector of Ratisbon, what could he not have accomplished with good luck? Now he was dead. Luck also, the baroness knew, had deserted the Corellis over the past five years—but was it possible the girl had lied to her? Was it possible, finally, the jewel was no longer here? That she had goaded the baroness into throwing it into the fountain—throwing it away!—by claiming it was false. Real or not, it had taken Nicola Ceausescu to the apex of her power.

  And if the girl had tricked her, she would pay for it. The baroness now turned back into the room. The light flickered, and she saw the Corellis clutched together, only dimly now, unclearly as if through a scrim. At the same time she noticed on her right-hand side a line of stuffed birds. One of them she recognized, though she’d never been much for natural history. But she remembered the brandywine birds in the low bushes in the early morning when she was just a child.

  And she remembered it flitting from Aegypta Schenck’s cottage, after she had strangled her by Venus’s pool. That was the same night she had found the jewel, taken it from Claude Spitz in the entranceway of her old house in Saltpetre Street—surely all her bad luck since that night had been the result of that double murder. Horrified, she gaped at the bird that stood suddenly lifelike on the shelf, its head cocked as if watching her, a dried berry in its beak.

  Slowly, hesitantly, staring at the bird, she murmured a small prayer. It was a nostrum of her mother’s, passed down among the villagers of Pietrosul. The baroness had heard her mother say the words, once when she’d lost a copper coin.

  Hardly had the words left her mouth when the coin revealed itself in the dirt under a stool. Now, scarcely had the baroness finished when she spied a human skull on a shelf of human remains. It was unusually small, she thought. And there were holes in the cranium as if from a process of trepanning. And the bone gleamed like po
lished ivory. And there was a discoloration, a broken line over the eye ridge. And a tiny pasteboard placard: I. Kepler.

  She struck out with her hand. The cranium separated, bounced away. Disturbed also by the sudden movement, one of the skeletons made a little dance. At the front of the skull there was an empty cradle in the bone—nothing there.

  Corelli’s murmured voice came from behind her: “… my jewel…” Slowly, frightened now, a lump in her throat, she turned around. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was talking about his daughter, whom he now raised to her feet. He was crooning over her. What now?

  Unbidden to her mind came part of another prayer, which she had spoken in the room she’d shared with Kevin Markasev on the night Claude Spitz returned to life. And no sooner had it left her lips than she heard a fluttering and a whirring from behind her. What kind of a sour magic trick was this? When she turned, the stuffed bird had left its perch. It flapped around her in a circle and then out into the room.

  Awestruck, she let it go. She stood murmuring her prayer in the little room, the prayer that brings dead things to life. For a moment she blinked stupidly and brought her hands up to her face, unsure of what to do. She was alone. Corelli and his daughter had already stumbled from the room. Should she chase after them? Should she call for the police? Should she send a message to the Ukraine, to the commander of Lieutenant Corelli’s regiment? She had power to crush them all. And if she wanted, she could send Radu Luckacz’s men to scour the area around Maximillian’s fountain. They would question everyone who lived near there. Why had she not thought of this before?

  The bird fluttered in a circle around the room. Then it too was out the door and in the chamber there was quiet for the first time, it seemed, in ages. Now the decision was hers, but first she must convince herself. Had the Corellis ever really owned the jewel, or had the baroness possessed it for a while and then lost it? She found herself immobile, balanced between possibilities.

  But this she knew, or she suspected with a sudden certainty that was like knowledge: The tourmaline was gone out of her hands. It was gone like a fluttering bird, gone for good; and it was useless to search for it. And her husband had withdrawn his shelter, his protection, and the stone was gone for good.

  “Ah, God,” she murmured, unable to bear the thought of it. No, she would search at Maximillian’s fountain. No, she would press the professor for the truth, even if she had to torture it out of him. She would know the truth.

  But after another moment, standing in Corelli’s exhibition chamber as if on a stage, she changed her mind. And she remembered standing in the lights at the Ambassadors during the first production of Cleopatra—oh, she had begged and pleaded with the director and the costume mistress. In the last act, vulnerable and exposed, alone on stage she had looked out over the audience, feeling her humiliation and her shame. Then as her little, croaking voice had started on the final aria, she had imagined something else: a sudden power. That night she’d had no tourmaline. That night she’d seen her husband for the first time, captured him and the whole city of Bucharest.

  Now as then she stood on her own feet, feeling a sense of vertigo that was nevertheless exhilarating. What was it the baron had said the last time she had seen him? “It is confidence you lack. Faith in your own power. Faith to see yourself as others see you.”

  No, she told herself as if aloud, and for a moment she believed it: Everything she had accomplished she had earned and paid for. If men and women hurried to obey her, it was because of what she was and what she’d done. She was the white tyger of Roumania. Who would take that away without a fight?

  The Corellis—no—it didn’t matter. She would see Radu Luckacz at the station in forty minutes’ time. She would feel his love for her, and she would tell him her desires, and together they would plot the third act of her opera, The White Tyger. In the meantime, she had a train to meet. And she would see her son!

  * * *

  THE STREET DOOR to Corelli’s house stood open and the little bird veered out and up into the sky. She flew in a circle around the chimney, then streaked away north toward Constantin’s Ford. She carried something in her beak. It was a fondness for grapes that had given the bird her name.

  Earlier that same day, farther south, Andromeda had stood with her hand on the marble counter in a café in the town of Chiselet. She had finished her own cup of brandywine, which she’d had served with a bowl of ice. Once or twice in the past hour she had laid her cheek down on the stone countertop, taking comfort from its coldness. She was wearing the Abyssinian technician’s clothes.

  This was the town where Andromeda had wandered after the wreck of the Hephaestion. The technician had had money in his trouser pocket. Now, several days later, Andromeda had spent the last of it.

  Always when she found her human shape again, she was hectic and hot for a few days. Always she retained some of the dog’s temperature. But this time she’d felt something new when she had come to her woman’s shape again. Her eyes itched, her cheeks burned, her heart pounded in her chest.

  And she was not the only one in Chiselet to feel these indications. The old woman who took her last coin in the café, the boy who wiped the stone-topped counter where she stood, too excited to sit down, looking out into the dusty street—both of them felt much as she did, as if a sickness had spread from her.

  In the days that followed, the German health authorities would sequester both the old woman and the young boy, place under quarantine the wreck of the Hephaestion and the entire district of Chiselet. They were monitoring the effects of radiation. They were puzzled by the symptoms they observed. They had little knowledge of the facts, and there was little to be done in any case. The situation was more serious than they supposed. Nor at first could they rule out the effect of some separate contagion, a sickness spreading everywhere Andromeda had passed those first days of her homecoming, a fever of forgetfulness and change, moving everywhere away from her like a new, blank page.

  ALSO BY PAUL PARK

  A Princess of Roumania

  The White Tyger*

  Soldiers of Paradise

  Sugar Rain

  The Cult of Loving Kindness

  Celestis

  The Gospel of Corax

  Three Marys

  If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories

  No Traveller Returns

  *Forthcoming

  The Tourmaline

  “Young Miranda Popescu, spirited from her Massachusetts home by supernatural powers and guided by her sorceress aunt Aegypta’s spirit, pursues her destiny as the ‘white tyger’ prophesied to save ‘Great Roumania’ from German domination in Park’s lively continuation of the alluringly offbeat alternate-world saga begun in A Princess of Roumania.… Park fortifies his beautiful and baleful Roumanian milieu with deft characterizations and a clever ear for Balkan-spiced dialogue a shade shy of realism, while drawing on mythic resonances.… His long Roumanian rhapsody resembles the ambiguous gem of its title that holds the power to ignite love—it both glows coming-of-age-green and empurples with the passions for power.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The striking world first revealed in A Princess of Roumania here becomes both more fantastic and more real at once. It’s a magical alternative Europe that exists simply as itself, as in the very best novels—vivid, intense, exuberant, gritty, full of life.”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Park accomplishes in The Tourmaline one of fantasy’s finest and most incisive political novels.”

  —Locus

  “Captivating … few readers will find fault with his enchanting characters and compelling story line.”

  —Booklist

  A Princess of Roumania

  “Complex, elusive, haunting, written in a transparent prose that slips you from one world to another with prestidigitous ease, A Princess of Roumania is a quietly and profoundly original novel.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Paul Park is one of the most g
ifted and subtle story writers I know.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Paul Park knows fairy tales, contemporary and classic fantasy, and literary science fiction, and he borrows tropes from all these genres. So readers will find, as they enjoy this long novel (the first volume of two or more), that it provides the pleasures of the familiar—indeed, the archetypal—without neglecting some twists and enigmatic variations all its own. At times, though, it’s bound to remind you of the Harry Potter books, Philip Pullman’s novels about Lyra Belacqua, and even Gene Wolfe’s recent The Knight and The Wizard, as well as such older classic as The Wizard of Oz, Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite chronicles, and even Philip K. Dick’s classics such as The Man in the High Castle. But then all these works draw from the same well of fantasy, the same pool of dreams and nightmares.”

  —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

  “Superb … A Princess of Roumania may well be the year’s best book in any category.… Beautifully written, touching, and enchanting, it is the best fantasy novel I’ve seen in several years.… Marvelously conceived and majestically written … The manner in which Park revises almost beyond recognition the staple tropes of adolescent and adult fantasy … suggests that the succeeding volumes in the White Tyger sequence will complete a striking masterpiece, the equal of the finest works of Crowley, Pullman, and Le Guin.… We may be looking at one of the major fantasy works of the decade.”

  —Locus

  “No one writes like Paul Park, and when he turns to magic, the results are magical. A Princess of Roumania is weirder and wilder than any fantasy you’ve read before, and even those elements which might have been familiar—a princess, a werewolf, a jewel, a gypsy, magic, and murder—are transformed into strangeness. Park’s characters, incidents, and images will stay with you long after you’ve finished this book and are already dying to know what happens next.”