Halcyon (The Complete Trilogy)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “What do we do now?” Shahera asked.

  “We find the Don. He needs to know what’s happened. And he needs Alonso’s message.” Taziri took off into the city again without waiting for the others. It was becoming second nature. Just decide and go and let the rest sort itself out.

  Alonso hurried to keep pace with her. “Dona Qhora said he went out chasing after Dante, so we should probably check the bars along the river.” He froze. The sharp clapping of boots on cobblestones echoed from just around the next corner. “Off the street!”

  Taziri slipped sideways into a narrow alley and kept shuffling into the dark hole as the others crowded in behind her. The boots clapped and clicked louder as they turned the corner, and then began to fade quietly into the whistling wind.

  Alonso whispered in her ear. “Two of them! A soldier and an older man with a bag. Shit!” They shuffled back out into the street. Alonso clutched his short black hair as he stared after the two men. “That was the surgeon for Gaspar. I thought I had an hour. Shit. They’ll know I’m gone now, I can’t go back.”

  Shahera shivered. “Should we try to stop the surgeon then?”

  “No. Gaspar needs him. We’ll worry about that later.” Taziri took their arms and steered them back down the road toward the river, or where she guessed the river to be. “Right now, all that matters is that we’re all free and Qhora is in good hands with your friends, right?”

  “Absolutely. My friends won’t let Fabris touch a hair on her head.” Alonso led them to the riverside where they stood exposed above the banks of the Elbro, shivering in the starlight.

  Taziri clutched her arms around her belly, feeling the hard edges of her brace digging into her ribs. Where is Lorenzo? And what am I doing here? No streetlamps. No trolleys. No telegraphs. But they do have some sort of post service. I can send a letter. It might take a week, but at least I could warn Isoke about the warship and tell Yuba that I’m still alive. How many days have I been missing now? Five? Six?

  “Let’s try this way.” Taziri turned right and started walking. Any direction is better than none. Walking is better than standing. The wind blasted through her hair, turning every drop of sweat on her scalp into an icy finger clawing at her head.

  “Alonso! Alonso!” Don Lorenzo dashed out from a side street with Dante just behind him. “What happened? I saw the soldiers going into the cathedral. Where’s Qhora? Where are the others? Where’s Qhora? And why are you dressed like that?”

  “She’s fine, sir. They’re all fine.” Alonso winced. “Well, almost. It was the Italian, Fabris. He was looking for Taziri and Shahera, but Dona Qhora got them out in time. And then Gaspar tried to fight Fabris and got his arm slit open.”

  “Fabris’s arm?”

  “No, Gaspar’s. But it’s okay. They took him to the barracks and called for a surgeon to stitch him up, so he should be fine.” Alonso paused, chewing on his lip. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “What about my wife?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Oh, sorry, she’s with Gaspar and Hector in the barracks. In a cell. But that’s all right, too. She’s absolutely safe there. Most of the soldiers quartered there are old friends of mine. They’d never let anything happen to Dona Qhora or the others.” Alonso blew on his naked hands and rubbed them together. “They’re already on the verge of throwing Fabris out and letting everyone go free anyway.”

  “Well, thank God for that. Take me back there now.” Lorenzo checked his espada. “We’re going to get them out.”

  “No, sir, wait. I have a message from her. From your wife. She said to tell you not to come for her. She said to tell you to go get the stone and that she’ll take care of Fabris.” Alonso frowned. “I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I swear that’s what she said.”

  Taziri frowned too. What stone?

  “No, absolutely not,” Lorenzo said. “We’re getting them all out of there right now. I’m not about to take any chance that Fabris might hurt Qhora or the boys. If your friends are on our side, all the better. We can finish this business with Fabris right now. Tonight.”

  “But, sir, that’s not what she wants. She wants you to go get a stone. What stone is that? She didn’t say.” Alonso shrugged. “Whatever it is, she made me swear that I would send you out of town as fast as you can go to get it while she keeps Fabris here in town.”

  “But that devil could kill her!” Lorenzo shook Alonso by the jacket.

  “Not without killing the entire garrison first,” Alonso said, shuddering as he pulled his ill-fitting uniform tighter around his belly. “They drew up lots and plans before I left. Six armed men guarding the cell at all times, rotating shifts, with another two men keeping an eye on the Italian so there’s no surprises. They know who you are, sir, and they know who your wife is. They’d rather kill their own commander than let anything happen to her. And when I left they were talking about killing Fabris just for arresting her.”

  Don Lorenzo stepped back, one hand over his mouth. He stared out over the frozen Elbro. “If we did go back, there would be a lot of questions to answer. Fabris might have a chance to make his case to your commander. And I suppose, regardless of what’s said, Fabris would probably walk out of there alive and well, and this whole business would just repeat at the next town and the next until we’re all injured or dead.” The hidalgo exhaled slowly and peered at Alonso. “You’re certain that’s what she said? To go get the stone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What stone?” Taziri asked, but Lorenzo didn’t even look at her.

  The hidalgo exhaled slowly, his breath vapor streaking away on a sudden icy wind. “And you’re certain your soldier friends won’t harm her or the others?”

  “I’ve known most of them since I learned to walk. I was an altar boy with five of them. All decent lads, I swear it. Your wife isn’t so much a prisoner as a lady with a private army, at the moment.” Alonso was shivering continuously now.

  Lorenzo frowned and stroked his chin a bit longer. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. But she has a point about the stone, and I’d rather put my trust in a company of Espani soldiers than in my own, solitary sword.” He sighed and shook his head. “All right, we’ll do it her way.”

  “So what now, sir? And what stone did she mean? The stone in the message. What is that?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it. All of you.” Lorenzo glanced around the street. “But first we need to get indoors. It must be past midnight now. We need sleep and heat.”

  “I agree, but where?” Dante asked. “If you have more friends in Zaragoza, I hope they’re more trustworthy than the priests at La Seo.”

  “I know a place,” Alonso said. “The church by my parents’ house. We can sleep there tonight.”

  “More churches.” Dante scowled. “There must be a hotel or inn or something civilized in this frozen bunghole of a city.”

  “No, it’s perfect,” Alonso said. “Tiny. Dingy. Empty. No one will see us. And I can get us breakfast from my parents in the morning.”

  “Hot food?” Dante raised an eyebrow. “Free hot food?”

  “I suppose that’s decided then. We’ll get the horses from the cathedral on the way,” Lorenzo said. “We’re going to need them tomorrow.”

  With the hidalgo giving commands, and admitting that she knew nothing about this city or their options, Taziri followed the group back up to La Seo and helped to quietly steal back their horses from the cathedral’s stables. Back on the road, Alonso led them across the river and into a neighborhood of tiny stone houses and snowy streets. Every window was dark but smoke rose steadily from most chimneys to scatter on the surging winds racing across the rooftops. They stopped at the front door of a building that looked just like the houses to either side of it except for the large wooden triquetra carved over the door.

  Father, Mother, and Son.

  Taziri grimaced at the sight of the dark ruin before them, thinking of the bright and beautiful Mazdan temples back home in Tingis.

&
nbsp; Everything is better in Tingis, in Marrakesh. The food. The weather. Even God.

  Don Lorenzo led his horse straight through the open door and Taziri followed on her own mare. When they were all inside, the single room of the church was overflowing with bodies and horseflesh. But with a few simple directions, Lorenzo had the horses bedded down in the front to block the door and the rotting, overturned pews had been dragged into the outlines of beds.

  Inside and away from the wind, the temperature seemed to rise quite a bit. And after half an hour in a small room with four other people and three horses, the temperature rose a bit more than that. Taziri made a hard, lumpy pillow out of her bag and lay down on a carpet of decaying hymn book pages. She closed her eyes, intending to think about little Menna’s face, to wonder what her little girl was doing, what she was learning, what she was thinking. Instead, Taziri fell asleep.

  She woke in black silence. Still hours until morning. What was that noise?

  Taziri squinted in the gloom, trying to remember the sound that had roused her. A voice? Was it Shahera? She rolled over.

  A white face stared down at her, a man’s face, thin and drawn, a face of swirling silver mist that rippled out in the vague shape of hair floating on water. The ghost hovered over her, nose to nose, grinning a terrible toothless grin. “Bah!”

  Taziri screamed and scrambled back against the closest wall. The ghost vanished, its aether fading into the darkness. She sat against the cold stones, shivering, listening to her heart pound in her chest.

  “Are you all right?” Alonso propped himself up on one elbow, squinting around the dark church.

  “It was nothing. Just a ghost. Sorry.”

  He nodded. “Probably the old priest. Sorry. I should have mentioned it. I forgot that you folks aren’t used to ghosts.”

  Taziri crept back down to her blankets. “How can anyone get used to that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a face and a voice,” Alonso said. “Nothing dangerous. Not like Marrakesh. I hear in Marrakesh you’ve got a place called a factory.”

  She frowned. “Yeah, lots of them.”

  “Are they really full of giant machines that tear off men’s arms and legs?”

  She paused. “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, that scares me a lot more than any ghost. Good night.”

  “Good night, Alonso.”

  When morning came, she heard the crackle of a fire and she sat up in a daze, trying to remember where she was and why. A horse whickered by her foot and she remembered it all instantly. Looking around, she saw Alonso and Lorenzo sitting beside a small fire with an open tin of biscuits, white cheese, salted ham, and moldy black bread.

  Breakfast of conquistadors. She crawled over to them and began eating.

  A few minutes later, Shahera and Dante had joined them and Don Lorenzo was telling a confusing and disjointed story about his journey through a jungle, a dead nun named Ariel, and a burning hot ball of metal lost somewhere in the Pyrenees Mountains.

  “That’s fantastic. A magic stone.” Alonso grinned. “And we’re going to go find it?”

  “But what is it? What is it really?” Dante asked. “I may not be much of a chemist, but I’ve studied my craft a bit and I’ve never heard of any such metal.”

  “Neither have I,” said Taziri. “Metal heats when you heat it and cools when you don’t. It doesn’t stay hot for no reason, and I for one don’t believe in magic. Sorry, Alonso.”

  “I don’t know, I really don’t.” Lorenzo shrugged. “But I’ve seen it. I watched those priests use it to kill those men in the river. And now Salvator wants it, maybe for Magellan or maybe for himself. But I don’t intend to let either of them use the skyfire stone as a weapon. It’s a gift. It’s an opportunity. Whatever it is, I’m going to use it to heal this country, to soften the winter and help the crops, maybe even to power our cities as the Mazighs do with their steam engines. But most of all to show the people something good, something hopeful, something to revive their faith. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone use it to kill a single person. I’d rather see it lost in the depths of the ocean than that.”

  Taziri cleared her throat. “That’s all very well and good, but I still have two passengers I need to deliver to Tingis, and a home and family to get back to. I came this far because I believed you could hide us from the military. But now we have this Fabris person just half a step behind us with the Espani army at his beck and call, and you’re setting out to find some magic stone. I think it may be time for Dante, Shahera, and I to head down the river to the sea.”

  “Yes, finally, thank you,” said Dante.

  “No, please, you can’t do that,” Lorenzo said. “It’s not safe. We can’t afford to stay in the city another hour. I know I’ve kept some private matters from you, but I didn’t think I needed to tell you. I planned to leave you safe and sound in the cathedral while I went to find the stone. But here we are and I think I know where to find the stone. It’s near a town called Yesero, a prospector village at the foot of the mountains. We can be there well before midnight tonight if we ride hard all day. And tomorrow, if I’m lucky, and I am very lucky, I will have this stone in my hands. Then we can all go straight south to Tartessos and I’ll put you on the boat to Tingis myself. You’ll be perfectly safe once I have the stone. The stone is the key. We’ll show it to everyone we meet on the road, and by the time we walk into the capital we’ll have a procession of thousands of pilgrims with us. No soldiers will stop you. No Italians will swing a sword at you. You’ll be back home with your daughter in your arms before you know it.”

  Menna. Taziri stared down at her left hand, her fingers wrapping lightly around the plates and rods attached to her glove to support her hand. The two little fingers twitched, their nerves all dead leaving the flesh numb and rubbery. Home.

  “Two days to find your magic stone? That’s not too bad.” Dante frowned. “How big is it?”

  “What?”

  “How big is the skyfire stone?”

  Lorenzo blinked. “I have no idea.”

  Dante rolled his eyes. “Well, what if it’s too big to carry? It’s a meteorite, right? It could be the size of a boulder. It could be bigger than this church.”

  “I’ve just assumed it will be the same as the one I saw in the New World. I have a special harness with clay pads to carry it. But if the stone is too big?” The hidalgo shrugged. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “And what happens if we don’t find it?” Taziri asked. “What happens then?”

  Lorenzo exhaled slowly. “Then I will escort you all to Barcelona and put you on the first boat to Rome. I swear it. Either way, you’ll be safely off Espani soil by the end of the week.”

  Dante scowled. “I suppose that’s the best deal we’re going to get.”

  Shahera touched Taziri’s knee. The girl was smiling mischievously. “Oh come on, we’ve come this far already. Don’t you want to see if this stone of his is real? It’d be the greatest story ever. You have to be curious!”

  Of course I’m curious. I’m an engineer, after all. But I’m also a patriot, and a wife, and mother, and very tired and very cold person. She stared at the hidalgo. “Two days?”

  “Two days.” He nodded.

  Taziri nodded back and stood up, stretching and groaning. “Then let’s get the horses ready to go. Before I change my mind.”

  Day Seven

  Chapter 19. Qhora

  After one night in the cell, Qhora was ready to leave. The surgeon had done a fine job stitching up Gaspar’s arm and the young diestro had slept soundly through the night with Hector watching over him. Morning brought no sun, only a brighter haze outside the window. A soldier brought a tray of porridge bowls and as she sat eating her lukewarm breakfast she wondered what Lorenzo might be eating just then. Porridge, she guessed.

  When the soldier returned to collect the bowls, he was followed by Salvator Fabris and the Espani major.

  “Good morning, Sig
nora Quesada,” Salvator said. “It would seem your husband has abandoned you. I’ve just received a report that he was seen leaving the city this morning before dawn, under cover of darkness, with several confederates. No doubt one of them was the young man who accosted me in the nude last night and then mysteriously vanished from this cell. Now, you and I both know what your husband is going to do. He may have the journal, but I’ve read the journal. Unfortunately, I did not have time to properly analyze all of the information in it. So, my question to you is, where exactly is Lorenzo going now?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew,” she said. “But thank you for informing me that he is now at least two hours ahead of you and therefore far beyond your reach.”

  The Italian nodded curtly. “Yes, well, I had rather hoped to simply intercept your husband when he returned from his little expedition, and thus save myself the trouble of following him. But since he didn’t even attempt to save you last night, I can no longer assume if or when he might return for you at all, and I do not like to be kept waiting. So I’ll just have to find another role for you to play. Major, kindly release the lady, shackle her, and place her on my horse. I’m leaving immediately.”

  Qhora opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted before she could begin.

  “Yes, you are leaving, but the lady will not be accompanying you,” the major said.

  “Won’t she?” Salvator turned on the shorter man. “Need I remind you of my letter of command from Lord Admiral Magellan? It clearly states my acting rank as commander, which exceeds yours, major. You will follow my commands or I will find someone else who will. I only overlooked your incompetence regarding the escaped boy because I assumed Don Lorenzo would not leave without his precious wife. But since that is no longer the case, your incompetence is once again at issue.”

  Qhora saw a pair of nervous young soldiers hovering in the open doorway across the room.

  “Yes, yes.” The major sighed. “Your letter bought my obedience last night when I had no reason to doubt your actions or intentions. But you are persecuting Don Lorenzo Quesada, a war hero, and without offering a single accusation or shred of evidence to warrant such action. And now you have imprisoned the Don’s wife and students, again without charges or evidence. From what you have said this morning, it is clear you are simply abusing these poor people for your own purposes, and that I will not allow.”