by Alex Oliver
The Jew, Ibrahim, turned out to be an older counterpart of himself - learned in texts and formulas, steeped in the Kabala. But he too was a scholar and no practitioner. Zayd retained him anyway. He would not help make carpets, but it was only prudent for the empire's long term future in this newly magical world to gather for it all the expert knowledge he could get.
"What do you do?" he asked the camel herder, a tall and slender man, very black of skin, in a billowing cloak that reminded Zayd sickeningly of wings of skin.
"I am very good with camels, effendi." He had stood in line all morning as the wind dropped and the sun climbed higher. Now the street was the approximate temperature of a clay oven and still he stood patiently waiting to sign on with the wrong guild?
"I am looking for magi, not animal trainers."
"I know this. I am very good with camels. Bring me one and I'll show you."
"You couldn't have brought your own?"
The herdsman grinned. "Then you would say I had trained it."
That being true, Zayd sent one of the small boys who sat in the shade and watched them - one of the boys who surely should have been in school - to fetch him a camel, and watched in astonishment as the herdsman made it dance with whispered commands. He entered the man's name - Suleyman bin Dada - and details into the records, not quite sure to what good he could put the talent, but grateful to have discovered anything at all.
A black Egyptian named Adham bin Adil, was his third recruit. Adham sat on the ground before Zayd and made the sand leap up and form itself into tiny models of the ancient temples of his own people. Only an ayak or so in size - small enough to be easily held between his hands, but exquisitely detailed and populated by fingernail sized people who walked and shopped and gossiped better than any puppet Zayd had ever seen.
After finding a true talent in two foreigners, he was not surprised that his third recruit with genuine magical ability was one of the women - a slave originally from France, captured on the sea, bought and eventually married by a maker of gold jewelery. Monique bint Maryse claimed an ability to find any small thing that had been lost, and proved it by telling three of the onlookers where they could find their keys, sarpech, and a sequin embedded in the heel of a shoe.
She was the last. Zayd felt satisfied on an intellectual level. It was just as he said to Haji Nabih—the people who had a gift were none of them from Istanbul itself. Each had all grown up within the range of one of the Jars of Heaven. Clearly the devices not only provided the raw power for magic, but also worked on the bodies of children raised near them, to enable them to use it. From a standpoint of theory, the fact that his mages all originated outside the city was further confirmation his understanding was correct, and he was enough of a scholar to be pleased at that.
From a practical point of view, however, he had spent a whole day, a whole day, of his three weeks and gained nothing. Torture so terrifying he could not bear to contemplate it loomed in his future if he failed. But what a camel whisperer, a sand-sculptor and a finder of lost keys could do to build him flying battle platforms he could not begin to think.
A clean death at his own hand might be his best option. He bought poison on the way home.
Chapter Three
In which Frank is the Mouse in a game of cat and mouse.
∞∞∞
"You!" the horseman snarled at Frank, "Tell me. Where have they gone? Why have they left you? Speak fast and make sense, for I am looking for someone to blame. Do not be that person."
Frank's mouth was so dry he could barely force words out. It didn't help that the man punctuated every sentence by shaking him. The grip of his fingers was marking Frank's arms with deep bruises, and his shattered body burst with pain every time he was jerked about. It was overwhelming, after so long alone, to be so violently, physically close to another man, and his heart raced and shivered under his breastbone as he groped after his fleeing words. "I... I don't know. I—"
The lord backhanded him casually. He was a big man, tall and broad, and his lazy blow took Frank off his feet, threw him five yards and had him tumble down, on the wounded shoulder rather than on the broken ribs. The agony was about the same.
Frank screamed. It seemed he had nothing at all to be proud about, so why not? "You fucking bastard! You whoreson bastard. I don't know anything."
He expected them to be his final words. Looked up breathless, waiting for the lord's fury to leap into white heat, for him to draw that long blade at his side and hack Frank's head off. It was a long startled moment before he realized that he was seeing curiosity instead.
"What language is that?" the man closed the distance between them again, wrenched Frank to his feet by the collar. Frank took the chance to rest a little, held up by the shirt digging into his armpits.
"I don't... What?"
"What is the matter with you?"
Under Frank's weight, the shirt had untucked from the sash at the back. Now his interrogator pulled it sharply over his head and off. He breathed in through his teeth at the sight of all Frank's bruises, the blood crusted on his bandages and the strapping of his shoulder now come awry, revealing the swollen angry red of the flesh beneath.
"You are very pale for a Romani," said the lord at last, considering. "Though you are clothed like one. Come now. Pull yourself together and tell me what I ask, lest I serve you worse than whatever you have already suffered."
Frank wiped his face again with his bad hand. "I am a..." What did he know about himself? A disgrace to England. "An Englishman of good family. My name is Frank..." The surname still eluded him. "I was attacked by bandits. On the river, I think - I don't remember... things. I was hit in the head hard. When I woke up, some Romani helped me. They bandaged me, gave me clothes, told me to come here. I arrived only this morning, found the place deserted. Everyone gone. I don't know..."
"I see." The boyar's face smoothed further towards civility. A wide, strong face, very regular and handsome, except that he had odd eyes. A fold of eyelid at the outer edge made them almost triangular. It gave him a suspicious, sarcastic look even when, as now, his expression might otherwise have been called pleasant. "I was told, a fortnight ago, that three English travelers sought permission to enter my lands to view the vril accumulator at Solca. Young scholars, they said, from Cambridge. You are one of these?"
"I don't..." A new and unexpected pain throbbed through Frank's chest. "I don't remember. It makes sense to have traveled with friends." His voice, quite by itself, slipped into a higher register. "I had friends? What happened to them? If I am alive, might they not be too?"
Doors began to reopen in the village behind them, as the man's troops came out into the sunlight. The oldest of them wore long, walrus mustaches that curved down to either side of their shaven chins and made their scowls look larger than their faces. Very foreign they looked to Frank, proud and brutal and dangerous.
Frank straightened up, trying not to show any more weakness, and although there was a flatness behind the boyar's eyes that matched his men's ungentle faces, he gave a small, cold glimmer of a smile. "Well, Frank. I am Radu Vacarescu, boyar of Valcea."
"You? You are Vacarescu?" He'd known it, of course, the moment he recognized the man's silhouette. He still didn't quite believe it. The nightmare hunter that had threatened to tear out his throat and drink – why would it be standing in front of him now pretending to have forgotten him?
The temperature of the conversation, already chilly, dropped into ice. "Someone has been saying unflattering things about me?"
And Frank pulled in his scattered pieces with quick concern. "No! No. Simply that the Roma who rescued me said they did it for you. Because they wanted to please you."
The anger was back like a bit in Vacarescu's mouth. He jibbed at it. "I am glad somebody around here shows the deference I am owed."
"I owe you my life," said Frank, intending it to be soothing. It worked a little too well. The boyar looked at him again, the long, speculative look of a farmer si
zing up a cow at market.
"So you do. I will think on what I can ask of you to repay me." He lowered Frank to the ground and walked away, speaking in low tones to the leader of his men - an ancient noble with a mustache as silver as a scythe and blue and green flowers embroidered over every inch of his faded red coat. This gentleman took half of the band and lead them trotting out of the village on the other side, over the bridge beneath which Frank had washed up this morning, and away, raising dust-clouds among the wild flowers, down the road he had not traveled.
Two of those left picked Frank up and manhandled him onto the boyar's horse. Vacarescu swung up fluidly behind him, having to reach past him for the reins. The cage of the man’s arms and legs supported Frank like a high backed chair, making it far less likely that Frank would slide sideways and fall off from exhaustion.
Despite his fears, there was something to be said for having a broad chest behind him, softened by fur coat, into which he could lean, and it was pleasant indeed to be surrounded by warmth, and not to have to walk any longer. Relaxing by degrees, he softened in the older man's arms, and though he still thought he should be afraid, he was too exhausted and comfortable to quite manage it.
"Do you know anything about my friends?" Half question, half yawn.
Vacarescu leaned forwards and put his sharp-edged smile against Frank's ear. The white teeth grazed his skin, made him shudder. "Alive or dead, they will be brought to me. Everyone comes to us in the end."
Frank had intended to stay alert, but the flesh was weak. He found himself jostled awake in the courtyard of a spun-sugar castle, all narrow, tall turrets and graceful buttresses of silvery stone with blue-gray roofs like high witch's hats, all of it reflecting the sky in a cool silver gleam.
Stiffly climbing down from the horse, he stood unsupported on the courtyard's cobbles while grooms and servants milled around the returned soldiers. Vacarescu spoke to several of them, leaning down to give instructions. One quick, cold glance back and he rode off - a busy man with many other things to do. And that too was not at all characteristic of the thing that had so lately seemed narrowly focused on seeing Frank dead.
"You poor young man."
Frank startled as his arm was taken by a gray haired woman, who wore an impressive set of keys on the chatelaine at her belt. She had a smile as warming as mulled wine and her ruddy cheeks were creased with humor, but even she had that dull, flat taint in the back of her eyes that Frank had noticed among the men. A room in her mind was bolted shut and bricked over.
"Come with me. I will have the doctor brought. We have a room being made up for you, and after you have been tended, and have eaten, you may sleep as long as you like."
The horses had been led away to their stables and the men disappeared to their duties. He was left with the housekeeper and a burly maid whose eyebrows met above her nose, and whose top lip bore a line of hair almost as luxuriant. This Amazon pushed a small glass of palinka into his hand, which he supped down in one swallow. At once, alcohol numbed his pains, warmed his innards and made his head swim. He staggered and she draped his good arm around her shoulders and supported him into the house.
A second glass made him so merry he paid no attention to the dark looks of the doctor. Why should he care if the man was angry with him? The doctor's hands were brusque, but thorough, and the shot of opium tincture Frank drank along with the spirits washed all Frank's pains straight out of him.
Cleaned and bandaged, re-clothed in a nightgown a dozen times finer than the coarse stuff of his borrowed shirt, he lay on his back in a proper bed and could not be troubled by anything, least of all the doctor and the housekeeper arguing just outside the door.
"What is the point?" the doctor was saying, his voice tight with frustration. "Why heal him if they're just going to— I protest. I protest most strongly if my arts are being used simply to assure he gives them better sport."
The housekeeper's sigh was as soft as Frank's feather pillow. "They are not beasts. Those of us who work here, we are never touched. Why should he not be the same?"
"You think they will spare him? A lone, friendless traveler who might, if let go, take tales of the family all the way back to England? Pah! You deceive yourself."
"How else am I to live?" she said, so sharply that Frank stirred, not liking the sound of anguish.
It seemed the doctor recognized pain even when he had caused it himself. His voice gentled and slowed, the tone of it turning to what seemed like a delicate apology, even a reassurance. "At least they are not Austrians. Or Turks. Whatever they are, they're ours."
"Yes,” the housekeeper echoed his uncomfortable warmth, as though they shared a vice that each of them was ashamed of, that it reassured them to see it in each other. “Not Turks, not Austrians, not Hungarians, but ours. Ours, forever."
Frank closed his eyes, relieved that the argument was over.
When he woke again it was to the smell of deep cellars where pungent rose perfume had been spilled. Gold light beat against his face, and the rest of his room lay in darkness.
He startled up, his head throbbing, to find a young woman with a candle in her hand, bending over him in a curve of white and silver like a sickle moon. She eased away when he moved, and gave him an open, delighted smile from lips as pink as rosebuds.
"Oh, hello," she said, moving away to a more comfortable distance. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you. Shall I light the lamp?"
"Please." She had a calm aura and a very pretty smile. When she touched her candle to the wick of the oil lantern which stood by Frank's bedside, the strengthening light made her seem doll-like, the delicacy of her hands and face overborn by the extraordinary volume and richness of her clothes.
From her tall headdress of palest blue silk, white lace fell onto her shoulders like spun frost. Over her alabaster forehead lay swags of silver chains that tinkled as she moved. Ropes and ropes of pearls wound like a collar around her throat and hung down at varying lengths to cover her chest like a breastplate. She wore a pale gray silk waistcoat over a chemise whiter than moonlight, and a half globe of silk skirts with an apron over it of lace so fine it might have been made by spiders - if spiders had the craft to work diamonds and stars and flowers into their webs.
"I heard we had a visitor," she said, and sank down with a whisper of cloth on the chair by the writing desk with which he had been provided. "I wanted to come and see you. Make sure that he had not... That is, I wanted to make sure you were well provided for, and recovering. It isn't often we have foreign visitors who are not intent on conquering and enslaving us."
She must have been perhaps sixteen or seventeen. Vacarescu's daughter, if he had married early, or perhaps a younger sister. Her smooth face was full of the delight of meeting something new, boundless curiosity mingled with pity for his sorry state. He smiled, and thought better of the whole household that it could raise such an innocent and give her so open and artless a smile.
"I'm afraid I am not very good company at present," he croaked. The opium had dried his throat, and though the headache was easing he could gladly have slept again all night through.
"Who served you so ill?" She rose and rustled out of the door, returning in a moment with a pitcher of water and a tumbler of cut glass. Filling it, she helped Frank up and arranged the pillows behind his shoulders so that he could sit and drink.
"Even there I am afraid I'm a disappointment. I don't remember, truly. Bandits, I thought at first, but I find I have a nagging doubt that it could be as simple as that. I..." Now he'd said it, the doubt coalesced into something he could almost call a solid certainty. "I don't know why, but..." He rubbed his temples as if he could massage the thought out of hiding. It didn't work. "I feel as though disaster pursued me. I cannot remember fully who I am, but I am sure I may be dangerous to you. Where I can go to outrun this curse, I know not. I know not fully what it is, but—"
She laughed, a silvery chuckle that went well with her many pale jewels. "You should not think too
hard while you're wounded. Wait, and when you're well again, everything will come back to you. As for curses, we have no fear of them. For thousands of years, our family has been here. We have owned this land and protected its people forever. The world has thrown armies at us - they come and we fight. They go, and we are still here. There is nothing following you that we need fear."
Frank was amused now too. She looked so earnest and so solemn, this maiden of a high-born house, who must only just have come out into society. He could see her in the nursery, refighting the battles of her ancestors until their victories became her own. He felt he knew the type. Without specific memories to go on, he yet recognized the slim, straight-backed pride of the women of noble houses, who might never be called on to do more than pass that steel to their children, but who carried it in their bones nevertheless. It was strangely poignant in this overdressed, blue-eyed girl. "That's good to hear," he said. "But it's good that you be warned too. You should tell your father, in case he needs to..."
But Radu Vacarescu had real armies to fight, bandits to put down, villagers to hunt. He scarcely needed warning that Frank had his own inchoate dreads. Abruptly, Frank felt ashamed, and recognized the feeling as an old, familiar friend.
The boyaryshyna was smiling at him still, more delighted than ever. "I don't think I introduced myself," she said. "That was rude. I apologize. I am Alaya. And you are...?"
"Frank."
"Would you like something to eat, Frank? You look starved."
He felt it too. Though he'd eaten before he slept, the days of famine seemed to have left him feeling permanently hollow. When he looked down at himself he saw he had not had much fat to lose - he was tall and spindly-slim as a mountain ash. "Please."
Again, she went to the door, but no further. Either servants waited just outside, or she was reluctant to leave him alone. He remembered the cold, misty thing that had followed him down the riverbank and was very glad of her company. "He said the gypsies found you. Did they not feed you at all?"