Frank squeezed his eyes together until sparks swirled behind his eyelids. He had thought he was prepared for this, thought he had accepted it, but he had not. It was as if he’d gone into the vril accumulator and come out into another world he didn’t recognise. This was . . . This was more than he deserved, damn it. He knew he’d been a pretty poor son, but Arthur Carew was far worse a father.
“Frank?” Alaya’s voice, sweetly concerned and reassuring. She took him by the chin and tipped up his gaze to meet hers. The fangs were gone; she was flushed and innocent, bright-eyed. “Don’t let it concern you, whatever it is. See, this will make you laugh.”
Seizing the body under the armpits, she leaped with one bound to the top of the boat’s slanting yard. She then positioned the corpse carefully over the top of the mast, one leg on either side, and pulled. Frank never wanted to hear again the sound of flesh and gristle parting, or smell the stench as entrails slid down the mast like noisome sausages. But it did make him laugh. It made him turn away with both hands over his mouth and laugh hysterically until he made himself sick, because crying didn’t seem intense enough to cover it anymore.
Footsteps broke his fugue, and Radu Văcărescu’s sigh. “Mother, that’s unsavoury. You two, take it off and burn it, and you . . . Oh.”
The note of surprise worked wonders for Frank’s composure. Probably the only thing that could have, since both censure and pity would have made him cry. He opened his eyes and glanced back at the gruesome scene on the boat. The boatmen were untying the stays. Unshipping the mast, they lowered it into the stream, where they could wrestle its grim fruit off it and clean it at the same time.
Radu was paying no attention to that. He had stopped in front of Nicu and was looking between him and the others with puzzled suspicion. “You again.”
“My lord?” Nicu rubbed his hands together in the same gesture of anxiety Frank had seen from Mirela in his room. Concern for her built a place for Frank to stand above the abyss. It was as fragile as a champagne flute under his feet, but it held for this moment.
“You . . .” again Radu looked between Nicu and everyone else, and Frank wasn’t sure if he was uncertain about what he was seeing, or he was uncertain about what everyone else was seeing. A thousand questions seemed poised beneath his scowl. “Are you physically capable of this job?”
Mirela’s borrowed eyes widened in a moment’s terror. Then—visibly recalling herself, perhaps remembering that terror was not an appropriate reaction for her persona—she settled on wary blankness. “Yes, my lord. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
He sees her, Frank thought, putting this together with Radu’s reaction in the sitting room, where he had instantly seen through her Vlach disguise. He sees her as she is. He doesn’t realise that the rest of us see something else.
“Very well, then. But stay on the first boat, and don’t go anywhere after the voyage. I could use someone with your skills.”
Hoofbeats approached and then stilled as Cezar rode into the torchlight and dismounted. When Radu turned to greet him and exchange a brief, bruising hug, Mirela cast her hood firmly over her head and huddled into the bow of the first boat, disappearing in a more traditional fashion.
Radu left Cezar to see to the disposal of Lewis’s body in whatever way they had found to be effective against unwanted resurrection. He picked Frank up by the elbow and said nothing condemnatory when Frank leaned against him. He said nothing comforting either, but sat down next to Frank in the boat and folded a sable fur over them both. Where they sat touching from knee to shoulder there was a faint, reassuring warmth.
Radu could have demanded an explanation, Frank realized. Could have revealed the girl for what she really was. She had insulted him by her existence, by her words, by her survival, and he was protecting her. Just as he’s protecting me.
The thought did not take away the pit of darkness in his mind left where a father’s love should have been, but it helped him to continue onwards despite it. Frank’s father had not killed him, but perhaps the attempt itself was reason enough to sever his connections with his family, his past.
Perhaps he would take Mirela’s advice. He would accept that Frank—old Frank—had died in the mountains at the hands of the bandits, and Radu, with the Cloak of St. George, had brought something new to life. Frank was more than ready to put it all down—the death, the guilt, the curse—and find something new in this country where love, at least, was not forbidden him. “How many days to Bucharest?”
“Not enough,” said Radu darkly.
A crunch of gravel and then they were floating, chill and damp, past stone and weed. It was a gloomy start to a new life. But then, all new lives begin in tears.
HMS Tiger, at sea off the coast of Greece
Second Lieutenant George Newman took off his hat and smacked it on the palm of his hand to dislodge the heavy pearling of fog. Three swift whacks, and his hat was drier, but now his wig was sticky and chalky with moisture, and the back of his neck felt like a fresh-plucked chicken brought out from the icehouse on a summer day.
Down in the waist of the ship, the reassuring whirring grind of holystoning was interrupted by a choked-off cry and splosh. Someone called out, “Oh you clumsy bugger, that were my bucket!” But from the quarterdeck all Newman could see was a darker grey blur in a grey haze, standing up like a bear on its back legs. He checked the compass readings and the speed and course chalked on their board. It was getting a little hairy, navigating so close to what should be land. He fancied he could feel it underfoot—the ship’s timbers dimly sensing a shallower draft, shivering in a different rhythm, where the long rollers of the open ocean crashed back broken from the shore.
Newman had been at sea since he was thirteen, had sailed for months on end out of sight of land. He no longer questioned his instincts in such matters. “Lookout!” He tipped his head back, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted up at the smudge above the fighting top. “Ho, Tom Barnabas, tell me what you see.”
“Sir,” came the distant reply, muffled by the wet air. “I can’t see much. But there’s a blur, I think, dead ahead.” There was a shaky note in his voice, more than could be accounted for by the cold.
“Do you see the land?”
“I don’t . . . It’s more like a ship, sir, but under no sail. No lights. And I hears something. A kind of . . .” A pause, perhaps he licked his lips, though they should be damp enough in this weather. “A kind of chattering, sir.”
“Voices?”
“No, sir . . . I don’t know.”
Newman handed over the quarterdeck to the midshipman of the watch, ran up the shrouds until he could haul himself—with the help of the ship’s roll—over the edge of the fighting top and stand next to the lookout.
Tom took his arm and turned him in the right direction, but kept a hand over his own nose and mouth as if to still the sound of his breathing. The fog was a little thinner up here, and looking down was like squinting at the back of an enormous dirty sheep. Newman pressed his telescope to his eye and focussed where Tom pointed.
There was something, but, as Tom said, if it was a ship, it was a strange one. No sail was bent there, but a large, dark mass—hull up, if it was a ship—bobbed on the surface of the water. As he frowned at it, the noise Tom had mentioned worked insinuatingly into his ear.
Not human voices. Harsh seagull cries, louder and more numerous than he would expect from anything but one of their colonies, and accompanying them a chattering, chittering scurry.
“I don’t like it, tell the truth.” Tom’s face might have been greyed out by the mist, might have simply been pale with fear. “Puts me in mind of the Dutchman, and we don’t want to see that no clearer.”
Apprehension trickled like cold dew down Newman’s back. He had no desire to see the ghost ship either, but he was an officer. He didn’t have the option of paying credence to supernatural humbug. It was his place to show the men that no trueborn Englishman was cowed by such things. “We will a
lter course to intercept.”
He took hold of a stay and slid down it to the deck, called out the course change to the men at the wheel, and directed six of the idlers to ready a boat. For a short while there was homely noise enough, as the rudder chains rattled and the deck crane groaned with a voice of stressed timber.
Now their dark blotch was visible from the bows. “I see it clear!” called Jemmy Ducks. “’Tis a first rate, a right huge ship. Under no sail, just sticks, and she be wallowing like a cow in a salt lick.
“Belay that order for the ship’s boat. Prepare to grapple her and bring her alongside,” Newman shouted, striding over. He could see the behemoth himself now, looming black out of the soft grey of the world. Not glowing, thank God, as the Flying Dutchman was rumoured to do, nor sweeping down upon them under full sail. But there was an eeriness about her nevertheless that made his skin crawl, and it was not only her bare yards, her odd, wine-cork buoyancy.
“Alright Davy Thomas, go knock on the captain’s door. Beg pardon, but there’s something he ought to see.”
By the time the captain was on deck, a shrouded figure in a sea cloak, tall and rawboned and not as reassuring in that atmosphere of gloom as Newman might have liked, they had coupled the hulk of the ship to themselves. They were close enough to see the endless fidgeting whirl of flying things above the masts, though the fog made it impossible to tell if they were seabirds or something more sinister. The cheeping and scuttling on board got under his skin like a parasite and made him want to scratch it off. Even the ship’s yards looked deformed in some way that the mist veiled, and they could not see the deck, for the first rate stood higher than their third rate by more than a man’s height.
The wind changed. It blew over the maimed vessel and laid its stench over them heavy as slime. Newman choked at the reek of old blood and ordure, cold shit, cold fear, and the nauseating musty-sweet smell of vermin. He fumbled for his vinaigrette, filled his nose to the point of skinning it with the scent of vinegar and bergamot, and narrowly staved off vomiting.
He passed the silver bottle to the captain, who took a deep reviving sniff of his own and managed a wry smile. “Pick me out the lads who are in charge of the pigs, and anyone else with a strong stomach and no sense of smell. Let’s see what we have here, shall we?”
They had grappled on close enough to the larger ship’s companionway to take a leap for it from the rail of their own. Newman took one look at the men’s faces and launched himself out first, running up the ladder fixed to the other ship’s hull with as much ease as he would have run up a flight of stairs. At this example, the rest of his boarding party followed, reluctant but given no opportunity to refuse.
Initially it seemed dark and deserted on the majestic sweep of deck. The men spread out in a loose semicircle as they waited for the captain to come up last. The chattering above them was accompanied by a never-ending swirl of white things, thick as the cloud of gnats that rose over country trees on a summer evening.
But that idyllic picture did not fit this place at all, Newman thought, feeling the deck pull stickily on his shoes. The planks at least were close enough for him to see clearly, their scoured, pristine whiteness now stained all over with something that glistened like gelatine and stank of the slaughterhouse. Was this blood? He’d been in enough battles to see the stuff freshly spilled, but no ship’s company would leave it to go rancid like this, to separate itself out like some kind of pudding. Disgusting!
“Larkin and Ali to the captain’s cabin. You four, check the boats. Solomon Bailey, I want you to find the sails. The rest of you check the lower decks and report back what you find. Go easy, ware ambushes.”
Captain Montgomery had the hang of imperturbability far better than Newman. No one would have known from his level tone that he had just grabbed on to Newman’s biceps with a grip that was making Newman’s arm go numb. His hooded face was tilted up at those bare yards now, and he had gone whiter than the grim reaper. “Mother of God! What manner of man would have . . .”
Newman had glanced at the rigging and dismissed the bundles up there as one more inexplicable strangeness that waited for clearer weather to reveal it. “What is it, sir?”
“You can’t see? I didn’t see it at first either. Pray excuse me, Lieutenant.” The captain made a dash for the rail to vomit over the side. Newman peered up into the fog until his eyes hurt. A dozen bundles per yard, sitting up there with no apparent means of support. They might have been the shape of men, had they legs to dangle.
He peered at the nearest, a misshapen barrel with a smaller round knob on the top like a head. One of the white, flitty creatures settled where it would have had a shoulder, if it was a man. As Newman took hold of the sticky shrouds, began to step up the ratlines towards the thing, the white creature raised its head to watch him. It was a seagull.
A moment’s relief—not something uncanny at all, but only one of the many birds that sometimes perched on a ship’s masts, taking rest when far out to sea. Then it chose to ignore him, buried its beak again in the raw mass of meat it was feeding on, and he was glad he’d been climbing ropes for so long that when his mind greyed out in the beginnings of a swoon, his hands clutched on tight reflexively, making sure he didn’t fall.
The curve that would have been a shoulder was a shoulder, a shoulder from which the arm had been torn. And with that realisation everything else shifted into diabolical focus. No legs dangled because the legs too had been wrenched off. Along the yards at regular intervals wide holes had been drilled, and plugged with tapering poles, one end of which was almost flush to the mast, the other end driven through the stump of body from the anus to the mouth.
Gulls had been at the faces. This corpse close to him was not recognisable as any particular human, but he wore a frock coat of purple brocade, and the heavy golden chain of a pocket watch strained taut over his swollen belly, still held together, thank God, by a waistcoat embroidered all over—perhaps by the loving hand of some female relative—with Tudor roses.
“Mr. Newman!” The captain’s shout snapped him out of his weakness. “We must get them down and covered before the fog thins. The fewer men who see this, the happier we will all be.”
“Aye, sir!” Normally, Newman would have slid down the stays to return to the deck in haste, but the ropes of this ship were painted with human blood and grease. He did not want to grind that residue into his palms. He ran backwards down the shrouds instead, hot and cold and hollow to the marrow, the taste of copper prickling his clamped-tight mouth.
Below, the men burst from the main companionway as if they’d been thrown. They were an assortment of the Tiger’s toughest characters, browned and wizened by a life at sea until they were gnarled and unbreakable as driftwood. Their wide, white trousers were red to the knee—their bare feet entirely crimson. Mutely, they shoved the oldest man forward, old Ydrith (Taffy) Davis, a venerable fifty year old who had claimed for the last thirty years that he’d seen everything there was to be seen under the sun.
“Taffy?”
“All of the crew are there, sir. Laid out on the gun deck, shoulder to shoulder, with their hands folded on their chests. Their eyes closed, we think. Hard to tell—the ship’s rats were thick as a fur coat over them. Shot, we reckon, except for the officers, and they was strangled with something thin. Something that cut in.”
His voice wavered. He took hold of his bushy sideburns and tugged. “Nothing at all on the lower decks, except where the blood had rained, like, through the cracks. Blood everywhere, and someone’s pet cat licking it off the decks.”
An answering growl of betrayal from the other men, and Newman wondered fleetingly what had happened to the disloyal cat. He didn’t much care.
“Sir?” Larkin and Lascar Ali returned from the captain’s cabin, Larkin with an inappropriately beautiful thing in his arms—a flat document case of dark-green leather tooled with tulips in gold leaf. The captain opened it and drew out a square of parchment the size of a city charter,
surmounted on top by a gorgeous extravaganza of loops that might have been writing. Hasty and humble underneath the document, someone had deigned to provide a translation on a small leaf of paper, and this the captain read through closely, his back stiffening, his shoulders straightening as he read.
“It’s a declaration of war,” he said, with something savage and glad beneath the solemnity in his tone. “The sultan returns to us the ship we sent to insult him, and the embassy staff we clearly no longer value. He bids us ready ourselves to accept the mercy of becoming a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire.”
The captain looked up into the rigging again, where the hardier of the men, under Newman’s instruction, were beginning to bring down the dishonoured corpses of Britain’s ambassadors. “They must be damn sure of themselves if they think they can get away with this.”
“But they won’t, sir. Will they?” Newman lit up at the thought of war—it was what he was for after all.
“Who knows?” The captain exhibited his iron hard nerves by laughing a little. The sound was odd in that place of vermin, but the men seemed cheered by it. “But their lordships of the Admiralty will not stand for this, nor parliament, nor the people. Whether it’s wise or not, the sultan will have his war.”
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