“Priestess! Are you prepared to tell my fortune?”
“If it will truly amuse you, tsarina. The trouble with sharing the future is that many find they would rather not have known it.”
“I promise to accept fate bravely if you promise to be honest.”
“I’ll tell you what I see.”
“What method do you prefer?”
“There are a dozen ways to forecast. The physiognomy expert Johann Lavater contends we can tell past and future by simply studying the face. One’s character, personality, and destiny are molded into its shape and lines. Your face is angelic, tsarina. That suggests good fortune.”
She laughed. “What a flatterer you are!”
“This is not true of all pretty women, whose less symmetrical faces betray worry, jealousy, or greed. Your features are good.”
“Only good and not perfect?” She was teasing.
“This world does not permit perfection,” I risked.
“Neither does court gossip! You’re not just a seer, you’re a truth teller. A formidable combination.”
“At personal peril, tsarina. Historically, many fortune tellers have found it wisest to bend the truth to prevent execution.”
“Don’t worry, I only imprison.” Her amused tone was much lighter than at the reception.
“I’m relieved.” We both smiled.
“Seriously, continue with the truth. A royal has difficulty differentiating between truth and flattery, and between friends and seducers. The fate of the mighty.”
“The fate of everyone. All of us want things from each other.”
“Especially love. Now. Would you like a teacake?”
“I actually have another means of fortunetelling that uses your cake.”
“Oh my. I hope the baker knew.”
I reached into my satchel as we glided beneath several bridges and emerged onto the broad white Neva, its ships and boats frozen in place until spring. St. Petersburg is built on an archipelago on the Gulf of Finland and so water serves as the city’s highways. Light snow was falling this day, making the city a fairyland. The Winter Palace and Admiralty were foggy bergs, and across the river was the glacier of the new Stock Exchange. The Peter and Paul Fortress was a softened gray mesa punctuated by the steep golden spire of the cathedral in its middle. That bell tower rose four hundred feet, highest in the city. Instead of the usual onion domes, Peter the Great had chosen a Dutch-style steeple as sharp as a needle.
We aimed for the fortress pier, which was somewhat disquieting since the fort also serves as a prison. Was the Tsarina really joking?
“What test?” Elizabeth prompted.
I brought out a goblet and flask and poured water. “This is liquid from the Fountain of Epidaurus in Greece, where people flocked to Asclepius the Healer.” The water was actually from our neighborhood well here in St. Petersburg, but truth can be embroidered. “In ancient times, people would come to the fountain pool and cast bread to see if it floated or sank.”
“And what did each result portend?”
“Try it first. Toss in a bit of cake.”
The fragment bobbed as I expected. Always rehearse your magic.
“It floats. Good fortune, again.”
She glowed. “You are the most delightful companion!”
“And I’m thrilled you believe my prophecies. So many doubt these days. My own husband, a Franklin man, likes to tell the story of an ancient army which came upon an augur watching a bird in a tree. The prophet said that birds fly closest to heaven, and thus reflect the gods’ will. So the general gave the fortune-teller a coin to tell which way the army should go. The augur explained that if the bird flew onward, the army should advance on the enemy. If the fowl flew the other way, the army should retreat. If it flew toward the other cardinal points, the army should go that way.”
“What did the bird do?”
“Nothing. It wouldn’t fly. Thousands of men sat to wait. Finally an impatient lieutenant took up his bow and shot the animal dead. ‘What are you doing?’ the general cried. ‘If that bird was so prophetic,’ the lieutenant replied, ‘why didn’t he foresee that.’”
Elizabeth smiled. “So you don’t really believe our games.”
“On the contrary, tsarina. I am not a Franklin man and, as much as I love my husband, I don’t always agree with his skepticism. Like many men, he’s blind to mystery. It seems to me that fortune is determined largely by chance, that the world has an order that implies divine intelligence, and that any sensible person thus recognizes both destiny and free will. I tell this amusing story to be fair, but I tell fortunes because they come true.”
“So the signs still seem positive?” I’d made her anxious.
“If I’m reading them correctly.”
We sleighed a moment in silence, me gambling that I’d deepened our relationship with honesty. I’ve encountered enough powerful people to know that they are just that, people. Marriage at fourteen to sixteen-year-old Alexander eventually turned the German princess Louise of Baden to Elizabeth, Tsarina of Russia, but ruling is a heavy fate. Many of the great are melancholic, and Elizabeth is no exception. Her dynastic union with the tsar is, by all reports, joyless, each finding romantic partners elsewhere. Her tyrannical mother-in-law still intimidates the tsar. Alexander’s wanton mistress takes pride in Elizabeth’s humiliation. So when the tsarina’s gaze strayed sideways to look down the river, her pretty lips sagged. She’s in a gilded prison.
“I think I trust you,” she finally decided. “So this outing is our secret, and we’re both tempting fate. Here, hold my hands for warmth and tell me how you met your infamous husband.”
“I was a slave in Egypt,” I began, knowing the admission jolts the listener. To be born fortunate doesn’t interest people, but to rise above low station intrigues them. “But before Ethan freed me I was educated by my Egyptian master.”
“Favored for your beauty?”
“Not in the way people assume. My elderly owner showed no romantic or sexual interest. He longed for companionship. He appreciated my looks as a man appreciates a flower, but he courted my mind.”
“An unusual master, and a fortunate slave.”
“It came to pass that my master was shooting at Bonaparte in Alexandria during the French invasion, and I was reloading his guns. Master was killed by a cannon shot and Ethan found me in the rubble. At first I assumed him a conquering mercenary with a man’s idea of repayment, but he, too, actually listened.”
“You must be able to seduce with words.”
“I recognized Ethan’s good character before he recognized it himself. We eventually fell in love along the Nile.”
“How romantic!” Elizabeth sounded wistful. “Like Antony and Cleopatra.”
“There was no royal barge, I assure you. We eventually had to separate, but I was pregnant with our son. Fate in the form of pirates reunited us, and destiny has driven us since. Just recently he rescued me again, or I rescued him—I suppose it was both. And then the tsar invited us to Russia. Your court has been very kind.”
She laughed. “Surely you’re the first to ever say that!”
“You listen too, tsarina. I’m flattered.”
“What stories swirl around you, Astiza! You’ve been called a fortune-teller, a priestess, a sorceress, a witch, a philosopher, and a seeker.”
“I’m proudest of being a mother.”
“Which I envy. My own daughter, Maria Alexandrova, was a child of love.” She meant her child by Czartoryski, not the tsar. “But she died at little more than a year old.”
“There’s no greater tragedy.” I squeezed her hands under the fur.
“So now I’m going to tell you a secret.” The tsarina squeezed back. “I may be pregnant again. Can you confirm it with your powers?”
“I have no powers. I know only what I’ve lea
rned from reading. Nor am I a midwife or doctor. But I share your excitement, tsarina. I hope your suspicion is true.”
“Women understand, don’t we?”
“If we’re wise.” I wondered who the father was this time. Her captain? “Is this why you’ve asked me here? I can’t cast a fortune for the unborn.”
“No, no. I simply trust you with this secret, as one mother to another. A favorable fortune suggests my suspicion is true. Can you look at my palm and see if it says anything about this pregnancy?”
I was again reluctant. I prefer not to deliver bad news, and had promised to tell the truth. But I’d trapped myself in her sleigh. I brought out her right palm and studied its lines. These can be interpreted a hundred different ways, and yet her heart line actually intrigued me. I bent to examine it more closely and then looked into her eyes. “Nothing about a baby, but one pattern is suggestive, tsarina.”
She was rapt. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure if you should know, and certainly no one else should.”
“Is it bad?”
“I wouldn’t say so, but your reaction will be your own.”
“Oh, please tell! You’ve made me so curious.”
I took a breath. “Someday you’ll be reunited with an old lover.” That’s what the lines said, and I was certain they meant Czartoryski.
“What? Who?”
“You cannot get names from a palm, tsarina.” A small lie.
“Oh my.” She sucked in her breath, eyes suddenly far away. Yes, we don’t forget love easily. “What a marvelous day this is. I was right to enlist you.”
“Enlist me in what, tsarina?”
“You’ll see. And I want to show you another mother, the God-bearing mother, so you understand Russia. And then something quite different that could change history. God sent you to us, I think.”
The sleigh coasted to the fortress’s Nevsky Gate. Elizabeth told her footmen to wait and we climbed snowy steps, sentries peering down from the rampart above. We walked the pier and passed though a tunnel in the thick wall to the grounds inside. Soldiers snapped to attention as rigidly as Horus’s lead toys, but otherwise the huge fortress, star-shaped like a snowflake, seemed hushed and deserted this snowy morning. Its stone was frosted, and its parade ground was an unmarked blanket. Built against the far walls were the cells of the empire’s most dreaded prison.
I expected a guard of honor for such an esteemed visitor, but we walked across the fortress courtyard alone, two monks swerving as if we were forbidden. “I’ve given orders to be ignored,” the Tsarina explained. This of course was impossible; soldiers gaped and several loped in all directions to warn of our presence. But the absence of the usual phalanx of attendants and guards clearly exhilarated Elizabeth, even as it made me feel more responsible for her. She wore bright blue boots on the slippery cobbles, the fur hem of her coat swishing the snow as we walked. Flakes hemmed it like diamonds. The bottom of her purple dress stained the color of wine from the wet. She held her mouth slightly open, like a little girl wanting to taste the snow.
Government buildings surrounded the courtyard. Russia’s tallest church was opposite its newest mint, God and Mammon eyeing each other like duelists. Atop the cathedral’s golden spire was an angel that pivoted with the wind. Ethan had told me when we first toured St. Petersburg that the holy sculpture hadn’t prevented the tower from being struck by lightning. Any failure of divine protection always amuses him; maybe because it confirms that our family’s bizarre luck is as natural as storms.
“I understand this cathedral burned,” I said to Elizabeth.
“Yes, and was rebuilt by Catherine. Providence, perhaps, sent a thundercloud to encourage improvements. The new steeple incorporates a lightning rod to prevent another fire.”
“Ethan admires Mikhail Lomonosov, the Russian Franklin. Lomonosov experimented with lightning and had a colleague killed by it, we’ve been told, and independently came up with the idea of the rod like Franklin did. He also managed to put lightning in a bottle, or rather he bottled its charge.”
“Every disaster has odd benefit,” the tsarina said. “Lomonosov was encouraged to invent. Catherine built a better church and fortified her chance at heaven. The monks got a new carillon from Holland.”
The result soars like a hymn, a rich yellow at the base and gold leaf on the spire, like a bridge between sky and earth. The top of the steeple certainly seemed to be poking heaven this day, its angel lost in the flurries. I felt it a conduit for sacred power, grace running down like lightning to cross the snowy plaza and dash against the evil of the prison walls.
“I want to show you the Goddess-mother,” Elizabeth said. “This way.”
On one side of the rectangular church, sheltered by an alcove, was a picture of Virgin and Child in the flat Byzantine style. In this portrait Jesus was more childlike than the midget man often depicted by Orthodox artists. The baby clutched its mother, cheeks pressed. Mary’s face was a serene oval, her pursed mouth much like Elizabeth’s, her elegantly long nose ruler-straight, and her eyes deep and farseeing. She looked from this world to the next.
“One of my favorite icons,” Elizabeth said. “The word comes from the Greek eikon, meaning ‘likeness,’ and indeed the common Russian regards the tsar as the living icon of God and the Orthodox Church as the icon of heaven.” Her voice betrayed a German wife’s skepticism. “I show you this to help you understand where you are, priestess. The style of the Russian icon, inspired by Constantinople, is not realism but dematerialization, a window from the physical world into the divine. It’s very different from paintings I grew up with on the Rhine, and at first I didn’t understand its appeal. But Russia always has one boot in this world and one boot in the next, which makes its soldiers obstinately brave. Russian misery makes Russians pious; the saying is that the less successful God is for you, the more you have to pray to Him. The Orthodox candles are like the flames that came down on the apostles. An icon can have supernatural power.”
“They’re building a cathedral to the Icon of Kazan near our apartment.”
“Yes. A dream led a young girl to that holy painting and it won a war. Russia isn’t about the brain, like Germany, or the heart, like France. It’s about the soul. Symbols have power here. Faith and superstition are more potent than reason. I’m telling you this because of the other thing I brought you to see.”
“I’m mystical too. My husband looks to the future, I to the past. We balance.”
“I hope your husband’s interests can be applied to the peculiar problem that Minister Czartoryski and I have. Let me show you why we’ve come.” She led me behind the cathedral to a plain brick building with a peculiar roof. The top was a line of squat, sturdy domes, presumably built to resist cannonballs. All were covered with snow. The building’s windows had been bricked up so that the entire structure looked like a squat loaf of lumpy bread. Two bundled soldiers miserably filled sentry boxes that flanked the stout door. Two cannon also stood guard, snow frosting each bronze barrel.
“The Royal Treasury,” Catherine told me. “A vault surrounded by a fortress with a thousand men.”
“It certainly looks impregnable.”
“My husband never visits, but I do. As a woman I pretend to be enchanted with the Treasury’s jewelry. What really draw me are the stories the objects tell. History is a record of unchecked passion and desire. So I’m no stranger here, but today you must help discourage obnoxious escort. Come.”
Our approach from the side startled the nearest sentry.
“Colonel Karlinsky,” Elizabeth demanded in the crisp royal voice of habitual command.
“Tsarina!” Eyes like saucers, he bolted to announce us. The second sentry fell to his knees and pressed his forehead to the snow, an act of obeisance that of course made him useless. The first soldier pounded on the thick door, the second trembled as if we might cast him into stone
, and the tsarina waited like an impatient Madonna.
Most Russian soldiers, I knew, could neither read nor write.
Karlinsky popped out in seconds to usher us inside, no doubt having been warned to wait in the anteroom until our stroll came his way. He apologized profusely for the moment of delay. “No footmen, your highness?”
“A quiet visit. No fuss.”
“We’re once again honored by your presence.” He looked puzzled by me. “I’m afraid you’ve taken us by surprise.”
“I’m here to get advice from my new companion. This is Astiza of Alexandria, a priestess and savant from Egypt. She’s an expert on the artifacts of the East.”
“A woman … scholar.” He hesitantly bowed. “It’s my honor … priestess.” Like most men his eyes paused to appreciate my features, his mouth frowned at the idea I might be capable of thought, and he then turned back to the tsarina. “Rarities of the Byzantine church?”
“Of the Turks and Persians, but our business is not yours, colonel. Astiza can establish the provenance of many fabulous things, but which treasures, and why, is my concern alone.” She looked as if this were my cue.
“I’m Greek as well as Egyptian,” I said. “Of Isis and Thoth, Athena and Odin, Enoch and Buddha. I’ve studied all creeds and all cultures.”
He looked wary. “But you’re satisfied, I trust, by the revelations of the One True God?”
“All spiritual paths lead to the same destination, colonel. At least according to Napoleon Bonaparte.”
His expression narrowed. “I’ve lost comrades to the fight against the French usurper. I wouldn’t heed anything he says.”
“This is a holy woman,” the tsarina injected impatiently. “We didn’t ask for your views.”
He bowed stiffly. “I’m honored to escort you both.”
“We’ll tour the repository alone.”
Now Karlinsky blanched. “That is against procedure.”
“It is my procedure, colonel. With my expert.”
“I annoy people with my unorthodox views, and find it simpler to consult with clients alone,” I justified. “My scholarship would bore you.”
The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Page 4