“But Sutton Hoo . . .” continued Dee. “This is a place I know well. For years I have come here in fair weather to unearth its secret treasures, at the queen’s command. Last autumn, I had hired diggers to excavate another one of the mounds, and they uncovered what seemed to be a doorway. But then the order came from the queen to travel without delay to Bohemia as an ambassador to Prince Rodolfo’s court. I haven’t been back to Sutton Hoo since.”
Dee led the way to a mound not far in the distance, one that had been stripped of grass. Petra readily followed, drawn by the desire to understand one more piece of Ariel’s puzzle.
They walked to the other side of the excavated mound, where piles of sandy dirt were heaped up by a square door about three feet wide and tall. It was fastened with an ancient iron lock, but it was corroded and green. Dee swept aside his cloak to reveal a leather satchel at his waist. He pulled out a hammer, and swung it at the lock. It broke easily.
“Stand back,” he ordered, and heaved at the door, which opened with a splintery moan.
“Now for the mice,” Dee said, and lifted the crate’s lid to reveal many wire cages, with one mouse in each. He took a length of twine from his satchel and attached it to a cage. The mouse pressed its paws against the bars.
“What are you doing?” Petra asked.
He didn’t answer, but lowered the cage into the open doorway. Petra watched it descend until it disappeared in the shadows.
He is testing the air, Astrophil explained. Whatever is below, it has been there for hundreds of years. Sometimes dangerous gases build up in sealed sites like these. We will need to wait until the foul air has flowed out, and fresh air has filtered in.
After a few minutes, Dee raised the cage. The mouse was dead. He untied the string and attached it to the next cage. He lowered it, and Petra could hear the mouse squeaking below.
She said, “This is cruel.”
“It is necessary.”
After four more dead mice, Dee lifted a live one out of the cavern. Then he unpacked a stout rope from the satchel, knotted it around the base of a tree several feet away, and tossed it through the doorway. There was the sound of the rope hitting bottom.
“Wait until you see a light below,” said Dee. “Then follow after me.” He grasped the rope, and began to climb down.
When she saw the flickering of candle flame, Petra asked Astrophil, What if Ariel is evil? Dee said she could be dangerous. We’ve been so focused on trying to understand what her words meant that we didn’t think that she might be trying to trap us.
But there is the light. Dee seems to be just fine.
Yes. Pity about that.
“Petra?” Dee’s voice echoed. “You will want to see this.”
And she did. Whatever Ariel was, whatever she meant, Petra had to know what was below. She grabbed the rope.
As she lowered herself, she watched the square of sunshine above her shrink. She glanced at the bottom, where Dee’s face was distorted by shadows.
When her feet touched wood, Dee drew another candle out of his satchel, lit it with his own flaming wick, and passed it to Petra. Tomik’s Glowstone would have worked far better, but she didn’t want to reveal it to Dee, so she raised her candle high.
They were surrounded by gold. As Petra looked more closely, she saw curved wooden beams arching above them, and treasure heaped on either side. There were shields decorated with winking garnets, and pins shaped like eagles. She saw scabbards with golden, twisting dragons. There was a great deal of weaponry, but most of it was iron, and had rusted.
Petra looked at the walls and noticed poles sticking out among the gold. She stepped forward to examine one. “Are these . . . oars? Are we in some kind of boat?”
“Yes,” said Dee. “The ancient kings of England were buried in ships. Tread carefully, Petra. The wood is hundreds of years old, and fragile. One false move could bring the ship’s roof down on us.”
But Petra had not walked very far before she gave a strangled cry.
She was face-to-face with a skull.
A ghost! cried Astrophil.
The Gray Men! Petra saw their bony faces. She felt the burning tongue.
Petra tripped and fell. Her candle went out, and she heard something metallic spilling across the floor. She spun around in terror. Dee’s candlelit face loomed before her. “I said to be careful.” He grabbed her elbow and hauled her to her feet. “Do you want to be buried alive by rotten timber?”
“I saw—”
“This?” Dee swung his candle, illuminating a skeleton. It stood before them, arms crossed, wearing a golden helmet. Its jaw had fallen off, and lay by the bones of its feet. “It’s a skeleton, nothing more. Learn to control your fear, Petra, or it will control you.”
But Petra couldn’t look away from the jawbone. She saw then that it rested on a pile of coins mixed with scraps of disintegrated cloth. More coins were scattered into the shadows. She realized that she had tripped over the remains of a purse. Her heart still hammering, she bent to pick up a handful of gold coins.
Dee brought his candle close to her palm.
Each coin is unique, Astrophil observed. Each one bears a different mark, and language.
“They come from many countries,” said Dee. “From hundreds of years ago. Some of the kingdoms that forged these coins no longer exist.”
Petra stirred the coins with her finger, and then froze.
In the center of her palm was a disk stamped with a fierce bird. Its wings were flung wide, and it was hatched with lines. She touched the bird. “An air-swimmer?” she muttered. “Is an air-swimmer . . . a bird? Maybe, for Ariel, flying is like swimming through air.”
“King of the air-swimmers.” Dee nodded. “Changed into gold. Tell me, Petra: what is the history of this coin?”
Her finger still resting on the image of the bird, Petra closed her eyes. Only a few seconds had passed before they flung open in shock.
“What is it?” Dee asked.
“Nothing,” she said, but saw that he didn’t believe her. “It’s . . . each of these coins is from a different country, like you said. They were sent by rulers from all over the world as a sign of friendship to him.” She pointed at the skeleton.
That is not the whole story, said Astrophil. What else did you see?
I’ll tell you later.
“Keep the coin,” said Dee. “This must be what we came for, and it clearly belongs to you.”
Petra slipped it into her right trouser pocket, and heard it clink against the Glowstone.
Petra and Dee scaled the rope. When they were in the sun again, Petra leaned against the hill. She sucked in the spring air, pondering what she had just discovered about the coin.
Dee fastened a new lock on the door, which Petra now knew was a ship hatch. He asked, “How have your lessons with Christopher progressed?”
“What? Uh . . . they’ve been all right.”
“Hmm.” He packed his satchel with the coiled rope. “Have you grown fond of him?”
The last thing Petra wanted to say was the truth. “No.”
“Good. Because I fired him.”
He turned away then, toward his daughters picnicking on the grass. For a moment, Petra stood stock-still, her hands balled into fists. Then she strode after him, because she had no choice but to follow.
Petra was ruthlessly glad that she had hidden what she had learned about the coin from Dee, who was not only her competitor in the race to solve Thorn’s murder. Dee was also someone who seemed determined to thwart Petra’s every chance at happiness, however slender or slight.
The gold coin is Romany, she told Astrophil. It was minted during the reign of Danior of the Kalderash, about eight hundred years ago.
She reached into her pocket, touched the coin nestled against the crystal, and wished that her friends were with her now.
24
Arrival at Deptford
WHEN THE PACOLET limped into the harbor at Deptford, the other ships gave it a wide b
erth. The flag it flew belonged to Sea-Gypsies, and nobody wanted to tangle with them.
The Pacolet docked, and the sailors on ships close by watched curiously as the Gypsy crew lowered a small boat. When it hit the water, everyone could see that there were four people seated at the oars. And—how odd—one of them was blond. His hair was stiff and long and filthy, but there was no mistaking its color as it fluttered in the late April breeze.
Murmurs were exchanged. Everyone knew that Gypsies didn’t like outsiders. But—the English sailors took one look at the dark-skinned crew thronged along the deck—they also didn’t like people nosing into their business.
The whispers died, and Treb, Andras, Neel, and Tomik rowed up the Thames toward London.
TREB TAPPED ASH from his pipe into the water. “The Pacolet’s taken a beating.”
“That last storm . . .” muttered Andras as he pulled on the oars.
Tomik never saw anything to rival the tempest. But over the past few months, he had sailed through many storms where the green sea washed over the deck and the ship was surrounded by glittering hills of water.
“The rest of the crew can patch up the Pacolet in Deptford and guard the Terrestrial Globe while we search for its twin,” Andras continued. “We’re not far from London Bridge.”
Soon they were slipping under the bridge along with dozens of other small boats, and pulling into a wharf that reeked of fish. Tomik swung his legs over the side of the boat. Oyster shells cracked under his feet as he stood quickly, and swayed.
“Steady, Tom,” said Neel, though he was wobbling, too.
“It’ll pass,” Andras told Tomik. “Your legs aren’t used to being on land.”
“Where do we go now?” asked Tomik.
“Why”—Treb grinned—“to the Liberties, of course.”
As Tomik and Neel walked side by side, they were day and night, sun and moon. Looking at them stroll into the lawless part of London, you might not think they were friends, but you would still sense that to raise your hand against one of them would mean facing both.
“Get two rooms at the Sign of the Spoked Wheel,” Treb told them. “Andras and I are going to scout around and see what happens when we say the English word cotton.”
“Someone’ll try to sell you a dress?” Neel smirked. “You’d look awfully pretty in one.”
“Make sure you take a bath before we get back, little cousin, because you and your jokes stink.” With that, Treb and Andras turned away, walking toward a knot of villainous-looking people prowling on a street corner.
The Liberties were slummy and rough. Tomik had never seen so many fights in such a short space of time. Before he and Neel reached the inn, Tomik had counted two broken noses. There was also an incident where a whip-thin girl pulled a knife on a grown man and began pummeling his head with the hilt. That might have been funny—if there hadn’t been so much blood.
When they entered the Sign of the Spoked Wheel, Tomik had begun to doubt that they would find anything so civilized as a bath. But the inn was clean and even cozy.
“Two rooms for me and mine.” Neel spoke to the innkeeper in Romany. “And a hot bath. Name’s Neel.”
“Tribe?”
“Lovari. Got two more men coming, though, and they’re Maraki.”
“And who’s this?” The innkeeper jerked a thumb at Tomik. “Your pigeon?”
“Nah,” said Neel.
The man reassessed Tomik. “Not your courtesy-man, then?”
Tomik had had enough. In clear Romany, he said, “Will you say something resembling sense, or do I have to make you?” Months with the Maraki had taught him that if there’s anything people like better than kindness, it’s a bit of backbone.
The man held up his palms. “Sorry, lads. No offense meant. My wife will see to your rooms. Have a seat while you wait.”
“What’s a pigeon?” Tomik asked Neel as they took a table by the window. “And don’t tell me it’s a bird.”
“A pigeon’s someone caught in a trap set by—oh, me, for example. Like, say I was to tell you I knew that this tavern’s got a card game going between a lot of sloppy drunks and that you could make a killing. But really I just want to make you put in enough money for my cardsharp pals—who are faking their drunkenness—to take it all off you. You’re not a courtesy-man, either. Though . . .” Neel examined Tomik thoughtfully. “You could be, come to that.”
“A courtesy-man.”
“Yeah. Someone who plays the gentleman. The one who people will trust. If you cleaned up and threw some rich clothes on you, we could pull off a nice scam. We’d head into the market, find someone with a fat-looking purse, and I’d play the scary Gypsy. You’d sail in and pretend to save the day. Then you’d pick their pockets. Except you don’t speak English. And you don’t know the first thing about thieving.”
“And we have better things to do.”
“Like play some cards to see who’ll get to use the bath first?”
To his horror, and even though he cheated, Neel lost.
FRESHLY SCRUBBED, Tomik waited downstairs, eating a spicy stew and grateful to have a dinner that wasn’t dried. Neel skipped down the stairs and sat down with him, dragging his fingers through his wet, knotted hair. “We’ve got some plotting to do,” Neel said. “First thing, we check the weavers’ halls and the cloth sellers of London. We’ll see who deals in cotton, and ask after the globe and Petra.”
“Forget the globe.”
“You know, we wouldn’t be in this uncertain situation if it weren’t for you. At the scrying, you were supposed to question me about Petra after the Maraki got their turn with the globe. It was supposed to be a two-birds, one-stone kind of thing. Instead, you had to confuse everything. It’s not my fault if we don’t know what we’re after. We’ll follow the leads we’ve got.”
“What about talking to that English ambassador who visited Salamander Castle? Maybe he’s back in London. Wouldn’t John Dee help us? He helped Petra in Prague, after all.”
“I kind of got the impression that he used her,” said Neel. “Sketchy fellow. I’d trust him like I’d trust a viper not to bite me. Plus, he’s a spy for the queen of England. It’s never a good idea to catch the attention of governmental types, especially not when you’re looking for someone the Bohemian prince wants well and truly dead. Best to stay away from Dee. Let’s tramp a bit about London and see what that shows us.”
“London’s a big place, but I have an idea about how to find Petra.” Tomik slipped the Glowstone out of his pocket and placed it on the table. He explained.
Neel inspected the crystal, holding it up to the light. “Don’t you know Petra’s twitchy about spies? She hates ’em.”
Tomik was silent.
“And you gave her a gift that tracks her every move. Very spy-like. She’s not gonna appreciate that.”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, you do, Tom. You do.”
25
Shoe Lane
NEEL AND TOMIK were discouraged. They had visited the shops of drapers and dressmakers, weavers and embroiderers, but Neel had a hard time getting anyone to answer his questions. The shopkeepers narrowed their eyes at him as if he were a scheming thief—which he was. He should have done exactly what Treb and Andras were doing. They had hired a respectable, white Englishman to investigate the cloth shops for them.
Tomik was worse than no help. His regular, European features might have softened people up, but he didn’t understand English. Plus, he spent every second staring hopefully at his Glowstone like a moonstruck fool, waiting for it to glimmer with light.
“The Glowstone’s dark,” Tomik muttered as they walked down a narrow lane.
“Stop it.”
“But the scrying . . . you said Petra was in London, and there’s no light at all in the Glowstone.”
“Tom, who knows what I meant at the scrying?”
“Maybe Petra’s never been to this part of London. We need to keep looking.”
“No,
you need to stop.” Neel seized Tomik’s wrist, and the other boy curled his fingers protectively around the crystal. “Don’t you get it? There’s nothing here to make your crystal shine, and if you don’t put it back in your pocket I’m going to crush it under my heel into a thousand shards.”
The hand that held the Glowstone became a fist.
“Try it,” Neel taunted. “See where hitting me gets you, ’cause neither of us thinks that’ll make Petra alive and here.”
“What am I supposed to do, then?”
“Put that blasted thing away. We’re going back to the inn.”
Tomik thrust the Glowstone into his pocket, but it was Neel who felt defeated.
“IT WOULD NOT be difficult for me to spy on John Dee,” offered Astrophil. “I could creep into his library, see with whom he meets, and overhear his conversations.”
“No,” said Petra.
“I am not afraid. I do not think I could possibly be more frightened than when I slipped into the prince’s Cabinet of Wonders. Oh, how my legs trembled!”
“Dee is cleverer than the prince. He could catch you.”
“Petra, I am no use to anyone hiding under a dusty bed. I am proposing a sensible idea, one that we should have considered a long time ago. Do you not wish to know what Dee says when he thinks a conversation is private?”
“No.”
“Petra, listen—”
“I can’t!” Her voice broke. “You have to stay safe, and with me. I can’t risk losing you, too.”
Astrophil was silent. Then he said, “Very well. We will stay together. But we must do something. We cannot simply wait for Kit to help us.”
“That’s not the plan.”
“Then what is?”
“Today we go to Whitehall Palace. Tomorrow, Robert Cotton’s home.”
ONE THING PETRA had learned from her time at Salamander Castle was that it is easier to be sneaky when you’re a servant, because wealthy people have a lifetime’s experience of pretending that the hired help don’t exist. After stealing a plain dress from the clothesline in Dee’s garden, and a sack of turnips from his kitchen, Petra was well equipped to escape the attention of anyone who mattered at the palace.
The Celestial Globe: The Kronos Chronicles: Book II Page 20