Angels of Istanbul, page 11
“She will not bring much beauty to our line, but she has a certain charm and some fire. She might do.”
“I think at this stage, we can’t afford to be too choosy.” Now that nobody was bleeding, their circle of predators had begun to lose interest and drift away. Constantin’s voice was smooth and strong again. “What do you say, girl? Is it a bargain?”
Ecaterina was tempted to spit in his face, but she prided herself on her practicality. If she said no, they would kill her. If she said yes, she could marry Văcărescu, kill him later in safety, and take his lands as Stefan’s blood price. The Cloak of St. George stood on Radu Văcărescu’s lands. If she could get her hands on the source of all magical power in Wallachia, would that not be a perfect place around which to build her university? If she was patient now, if she waited until after marriage to have her vengeance, she could save her life, plot a surer method of murdering him, and afterwards have her heart’s desire. Whether that would taint the purity of her vengeance was something to worry about later.
“It is.”
“Wonderful. Welcome to the family.” Constantin bowed with the graciousness of an earlier century. “This is my wife, Alaya.” He indicated the creature that had nearly supped on Ecaterina’s blood. “You may call her ‘mother.’ You may call me ‘sir.’” He turned to the doctor, “Your captain can perform marriages, am I right?”
The doctor had spent most of this conversation looking between the bloody bandages in his hands and Văcărescu’s unscarred side. Now he lifted a medical alembic full of liquid out of one of his chests, poured himself a large dose, and knocked it back. He still had to try twice before he could force his shaking hands to set the measure carefully on the table—the first time, he had missed.
“Um,” he said, and risked a haunted glance out at the darkness of the hold, visible now his office walls lay slashed to pieces around him. “Um. Not . . . not real ones. The captain has power on board this ship, so it would be a marriage on board, but it wouldn’t hold once you stepped ashore. A lot of young women get fooled by that.”
Good, so here was a way to stave it off, perhaps until the end of the war. And she might kill him before then, if her conscience told her Stefan would prefer her not to wed her victim first. “My father and his household are in the ship following this.” She straightened with as much haughtiness as her boy’s clothes allowed. “He will not be pleased if it isn’t done properly. Besides, I am a boyaryshyna. I am entitled to all the ceremony that implies. I won’t have my wedding be some shame-faced back-door affair.”
The red-haired valet had disappeared as soon as the ring of strigoi had broken up enough to allow him to pass. Now he returned with a fresh shirt and waistcoat in his arms. Once Văcărescu had changed and stuffed the blood-soaked garments in a pail of salt water, a tension she hadn’t quite been aware of went out of both the elder strigoi. Something wolflike in their faces eased, and left them almost human.
“What . . .?” The doctor chased his dose of green liquid with a larger beaker of what smelled like gin. He was a young man, but he had the rosy-veined nose, waxy bags under his eyes, and pallid, clammy skin of a perpetual alcoholic. “What exactly just happened?” He pointed the index finger of his drinking hand at Alaya, the gin sloshing at the movement. “You. What were you going to do with . . .” he squinted at Ecaterina doubtfully, taking in her mannish clothes, her blotchy, horsey face, perhaps putting them together with the talk of marriage “. . . her?”
Văcărescu watched her, waiting, as if he knew this was her chance to denounce him. But really, if she was going to do that—and she was not entirely sure that she was, since the plan to give Wallachia’s monsters to the Ottomans was one she approved—she would choose a better audience than this unimportant sot.
“I have no idea what you mean,” she said coolly. “I think, if you have begun seeing things you cannot believe, you should go easier on the gin.”
How alike they all looked, Văcărescu and his monsters, with that little smile of grudging approval. “Indeed,” Constantin agreed. “Perhaps we should take this somewhere more private.”
As they trooped up the ladders, past the now-warm galley fire and shut themselves in the large room at the back of the ship, Ecaterina noticed that Văcărescu and Frank walked close together. Frank kept glancing at him, kept giving him little, concerned touches that the other man did not reject. Văcărescu’s face was as closed as it ever was, a mask shaped out of steel, but Frank seemed as shaken as any man who had nearly seen his lover killed in front of him.
They closed the door behind them, and sat down in a long, narrow room, where a table set with coarse linen hung from ropes attached to the deck above, and the folding seats had barely room to fit between the board and the lines of tiny cell-like cabins on either side. Watching Frank fuss, it occurred to Ecaterina that Văcărescu had saved her life. He no more wanted to marry her than she wanted to marry him, but he had made the offer rather than see her die.
Which made her feel sick, because it pawed at her certainty. If she owed him her life, did that cancel out the death she owed him for Stefan? Or did bringing her into peril too from his precious family only compound his guilt?
“I should turn around and take you home,” he was saying now, playing at responsible manhood while his left hand, beneath the table, lay possessively on Frank’s knee. “I can’t take you into a war.”
“You’re taking her.” She hoped she had this right, that the red-headed lad she pointed at really was Mirela, and not simply the original of Mirela’s disguise. When the boy smiled, and Văcărescu gave a snort of laughter, she knew she had guessed correctly.
“She is magically equipped to take care of herself.”
Frank narrowed his eyes at that, leaned forward, as if he could feel the blue-white glow of Ecaterina’s power like a flame on his skin. “Ecaterina can too. It’s come back then, your glamour? You don’t look different but you feel . . .”
“I have it under control now,” she boasted, proud to have achieved something that he with his many talents could not do. Reaching out, she plucked the second strand, watched all the expressions around the table—except for her fiancé’s—go slack with awe. Then she released it and let her false beauty lie dormant again, only bolstering the likeability to compensate.
“I still see nothing.” Văcărescu narrowed his eyes at his companions. “Is this some new trick?”
“I’ve lost the beauty,” Ecaterina explained lightly. “But people still want to help me. It’s an underestimated power, but a real one.”
Văcărescu thought for a long moment, as the room swayed around them and feet thundered over the deck above, voices and the rattle and gush of pumps echoing up from below. He checked his pocket watch. “Almost dawn.” And sighed. “Very well, then. I don’t want to risk taking an army of strigoi back home, when we so barely missed disaster last time. They’re hungry, and wherever we put into port now I suspect they will stream off the ship and never be persuaded back. Better to carry on and make sure that happens in Istanbul and not before.”
He turned to the one he’d called his father—and was that the truth? Could it be? Could familial love survive even death? Had she been wrong to see only the eyes of a demon watching her from the face of her brother?
“Can you hold your fledglings off from feeding on the sailors for the week it will take to get to Istanbul?”
“We can hold them from killing,” Constantin replied carefully—and how ugly it was, that they still felt able to make such nice distinctions, as though between death and life was as small a difference as between tulle and silk. “But if they are allowed to feed a little, it will make the crew more susceptible to my will.”
“And you can have them hold offshore long enough to arrive in the nighttime?”
“Exactly.”
The reason for this precaution became all too clear as they disembarked at the muster station in Prosphorion Harbour. They had indeed been able to delay sailing into the harbour until late evening, and now slipped quietly through shoals of other crafts, gusted along only by the smallest, highest sails. There was barely a bulge of water by the bow, and the sailors could lean out from the bowsprit nets and fend aside any moored craft that drifted into their path.
Ecaterina stood on deck, watching. Around her, the ship’s company worked in dazed silence, lowering the longboats over the side, filling them with the strigoi and ferrying them over to the shore. When her turn came, she clambered awkwardly down the side and sat in the last boat, crammed up against Constantin’s long legs, feeling the chill and the odd plasticity of them against her own knee.
She expected an outcry from the shore as the strigoi disembarked, where hasty tented barracks had been set up, and already encampments of soldiers were huddled around their fires, picking their teeth from supper. But there was no alarm, only laughter from one fire and the sounds of a quarrel from another.
As the strigoi drew themselves up into rough ranks, like a company of foot soldiers under Văcărescu’s command, a young man wandered over from the closest encampment. She recognised Ion Petrescu, whose father had claimed the gout and sent his son with their levy. He had the shiny, eager face of a man determined to rise to a challenge and simultaneously terrified of failing. The stress had brought him out in a rash of acne beneath his soft boy’s beard.
“I’ve mustered my troops.” Văcărescu indicated the strigoi with a convincingly nonchalant hand. “Where do I go to report in?”
“Troops are being counted and assigned barracks by the harbourmaster.” Ion tugged his sash tight over the barrels of his pistols and gave a self-important sigh, as though he was far too busy for this. He pointed. “You go and report in there, and he’ll sort it out. But he’ll be in bed by now. Why don’t your men come over and bunk with mine for tonight? You can sort it out in the morning.”
The ship’s boats had finished landing personnel. Now they began hauling the long empty boxes that must be serving as the chief strigois’ coffins up onto the docks. Constantin and Alaya were glancing nervously between the boxes and the eastern horizon. Disembarkation had taken longer than anyone hoped.
What would happen if they were caught out here when the sun rose? Would they turn to dust? Burst into flame? Ecaterina would quite like to see that.
“I will have my men seen and recorded now,” Văcărescu insisted, conveying a glimpse of a dangerous temper. “If I am awake and managing troops at this time of night, I see no reason why some Turk with no drop of noble blood should sleep. Catalin?”
Ecaterina was examining the hills on either side of the anchorage—dark bulks dotted over with the light of lanterns and torches. White buildings glimmering pallid and half seen as clouds, reflecting the moonlight from the sea. I didn’t expect it to be beautiful here.
“Catalin!” She jumped as the name snapped back into her mind like the flick of a whip. Oh, that was her! She had given Cezar that name. He must have told it to Văcărescu at some point on the dreary voyage. But what could he want with her? She was his bride (and then executioner), not his lackey. “My lord?”
“You will go and find this harbour official. Have him come here and sign us off.”
“I am—”
Văcărescu shouldered aside the helpful young man, barged through the knot of Frank and Mirela, and his parents, and grabbed her by the upper arm. His fingers dug in hard enough to leave bruises, and she was taken aback by the combination of outrage and tears that threatened in response. No one laid a hand on a boyar’s daughter in such a way!
She almost told him so. But she remembered just in time that Catalin, on the other hand, had probably spent every moment of his young manhood brawling. He would not bruise at a handprint; he would shrug off a broken bone like a hangnail. Văcărescu was only keeping up her disguise.
The wind was warm over the calm water, the streets smelled of cardamom, rosewater, and donkeys. There might be Wallachian and Moldavian troops camped around them, but beyond that shelter there were janissaries and spies, who would all want to know why she was dressed up as a soldier and yet demanding a woman’s rights. Time to toughen up.
She sniffed back tears and fury, let him shake her a little, punctuating his low, private words. “We need the Turks to accept I have brought the army I owe them. Do you want to be still standing here when the sun rises and the strigoi show what they are? Do you think the Turks will be merciful to you, when they find out what we’ve done? We cannot have them find out.
“You, with this charm you claim, can rouse a reluctant bureaucrat from his slumber and have him thank you for dragging him here. It will look efficient of him to inspect and dispose of us the same night that we arrived, but if you want to wait until he can come in the morning, you can think of a reason why our army cannot be seen in sunlight. It had better be a good one, because you’ll be repeating it in the Fortress of Seven Towers for all the sultan’s best torturers.”
She’d been a little reluctant to try to kill him again. This dispelled it. If he ended up in the Fortress of Seven Towers, it would be no more than he deserved. But she had no desire to be there with him. “I’ll go. But I don’t speak Turkish.”
Frank put his long hand sympathetically atop Văcărescu’s on her arm, made him drop her. “I do. I’ll be your dragoman. Come on.”
Frank had a certain likeability of his own. Ecaterina wasn’t sure if it was her glamour, or his androgynous beauty that got them past the guards at the door of the harbourmaster’s house. Both, perhaps. Inside, they were deposited in a narrow room empty except for a few cushions under the star-pierced shutters of the long window, while one of the guards went to see if the harbourmaster was awake.
“Will your power work through a messenger?” Frank whispered, watching him go—the servant’s light revealing scuff marks on the floor, drips of wax, and tiny dunes of ink drying powder.
“No,” she whispered back. “I don’t think so. And I don’t think we have long to wait.”
Perhaps a sincere apology and an I’m sorry, but we’re ignorant foreigners and don’t know any better would work. Better than whatever would come of a hundred panicking strigoi left to follow their instincts at sunrise. So they followed the guard out of the waiting room, deep into the house, past wary slaves in alcoves, and across floors where well-dressed men lay sprawled in sleep as though they’d been cut down where they stood. Did no one possess a bed in Istanbul?
At last the guard passed into a smaller chamber and bent to shake a heavy man by his peacock-blue shoulder. Ecaterina closed her eyes, poured all the strength she had into blue fire—I am ever such a nice person, you badly want to please me—and stepped out from behind the guard to launch into her spiel of mingled pleading and apology. “I’m so sorry, my lord is so rude to do this to you, but he will whip me if I don’t bring you. Please come.”
It worked, even with Frank having to translate the meaning of her words, but by the time the harbourmaster had washed and replaced sleeping clothes with day clothes, it was less late at night than very early in the morning. Time nipped at her heels like an angry terrier as they hurried together down to the docks.
She walked into gazes like broken glass. Văcărescu stood rigidly, with his chin up and his back straight and a muscle jumping at the side of his jaw. Constantin looked whiter than ever, his skin almost matching his snowy garments, his eyes so pale a grey as to be the colour of ice. She half expected him to dissolve into cloud and blow away on the wind. Alaya, conspicuous in her court finery, had already disappeared, taken her over-prettiness to find a burial place somewhere, or an early victim, before the sun—which already lit the tips of the distant minarets a blush pink—swung over the hills and hit her in the face.
The army of new-made strigoi were having a hard time passing as human in dawn’s broadening light. There was something ratlike about their faces, their stiff skin stuck as if by glue onto fleshless bones. The inspector leaned away from them when he walked down the final rank, noted their number in his book, beads of sweat on his forehead. Perhaps he too had noticed them twitching as they had done in the hold, their blood-lust held back by Constantin’s will.
The inspector had Văcărescu make his mark next to the tally. The troops were hissing now, as streaks of sunlight began to touch the flat roofs and gild the topmost trees in the many rooftop gardens.
“I will be living here with my household.” Văcărescu used that same grip on the inspector, the one that had left her with bruises. He turned the man round by force and led him to one of the lodging houses that lined the quay. Ecaterina followed as, behind her, a chittering noise broke out. A sudden gust of wind and then silence. Ecaterina could see from the corner of her eye some of the strigoi clambering into such ships as were moored close as if to burrow back to the dark gravel of their ballast. The greater part of them turned into an ashy fog and whisked up the hill to curl around gravestones and sink there into refuge just as the sun crested the hill and poured down over Ecaterina’s tired face.
Out on the bay, in a single-person rowing boat, there came a ffmff! noise and a burst of oily black fire. The boat burned bright for a moment, then folded in half and capsized, something dark falling from the centre of it and sinking in rapidly clearing water.
From every direction, all at once, came the call of the muezzin, earthy as musk and cumin, resonant as woodwinds.
“You will come in and take tea?”
The inspector noted down the address and shook his head. “I will go to morning prayers and then return to my own home.”
He turned, and the parade ground where once Văcărescu’s army had stood was altogether empty, except for a yellow dog, sniffing at a fallen hat. “Where did they go?”
“They have gone to set up their barracks.” Văcărescu smiled a slightly shaky smile. “No sense in wasting time.”
“Your zeal is remarkable.” The harbourmaster closed up the many leaves of his brass-bound notebook. “But perhaps could be toned down in the future. Allah gives us enough time to do all the things he gives us to do, including sleep. It is unnecessary to try to make more of it.”
