Angels of Istanbul, page 12
“I shall remember that.” Văcărescu bowed the Turk away, watching until he was swallowed up in the entrance of one of the side streets leading toward a modest grey mosque. Then he slumped from proud certainty to dogged relief. He covered his face with both hands, shoulders hunched, until Ecaterina pinched him hard on the inside of his elbow, because he deserved to have bruises that matched hers.
“What?”
“We made it,” she said. Radu, Frank, and she huddled together, enmities subsumed in relief. Mirela (if it was still Mirela under there) grinned at them from a couple of paces away but did not attempt to come closer. On the other side of the square, early risers in the army camps began to wriggle out of their tents and rekindle the camp fires that had been glowing sullenly.
“We did.” Radu nodded. “And we are among the first to arrive. There’s Vulpes, Tatarescu, Morariu, and Gusa still to come. The harbour officials will be busy today, and after tonight they’ll be preoccupied—”
“Then we can afford to rest.” Frank looped an arm through Mirela’s arm and pulled her in too. After a few seconds spent breathing and relaxing, one peril behind them, they followed him into the lodging house Radu had picked out. This was a three-story building, whose landlady haggled with Frank from behind a screen, nothing more than a voice and glimpses of black cloth. They took two rooms. Radu gestured Ecaterina in to sleep beside Mirela, and though it was what she would have preferred, she still found the lack of enthusiasm for her company somewhat insulting from her future husband.
Having brought no luggage, there was little to do to settle in. She made an unsatisfactory bed by piling one carpet on top of another, and sat there while her land legs returned. The first part of the plan was over and successful. They might survive this after all. In which case she could turn her attention to longer-term goals. The stabbing had been both unsuccessful and too public. Stefan would surely not mind a quieter vengeance, something subtler, and she should be ready to do it whenever the opportunity arose. She looked at Mirela with fascinated curiosity as the girl slid effortlessly into her own appearance and claimed the stack of cushions underneath the window. Roma were well-known for killing cattle without leaving the slightest evidence of how it was done.
“What do you know about poisons?”
A little pile of white arsenic, twisted into a cone of paper. Zayd had bought it some time ago and tucked it in his clothes chest, hoping never to unearth it again. But time was grown short, and he couldn’t in all conscience keep this last defence secret any longer. He had brought it out. Now it sat on the carpet between Zayd, his mother, and his aunty Jala and seemed to take the lamplight of the room into itself, the night’s darkness pressing in around it.
“I want us all to have enough.” Zayd untwisted it and poured it into the dish of his best brass scales. Then he scraped it into thirds and wrapped the thirds individually, giving each woman their own, taking one for himself that he pushed into his sash. “I have been warned to expect torment, not only for myself but also for you, if I cannot bring the sultan magic carpets. Though I am reluctant to disappoint him in anything, if we must die, I would rather know that you two had gone peacefully.”
“It will not come to that,” said his mother, but she took the poison and tucked it into her own clothes. “How goes the search for mages?”
Zayd felt as sick as if he had swallowed down the powder already. He wiped the scales carefully, packed them back into their lacquered box, and set it by the wall. “Badly. I begin to suspect that a man who could enchant a carpet to fly might be born so rarely there would only be one in the world at one time. How am I to find such a one? I’ve sent messengers out into the country to say I seek mages, but none have come. I . . . I don’t wish to worry you, but I think it would be a good time for both of you to make your wills, and settle our accounts in preparation for death. We will go to the mosque together tomorrow and make ready.”
Aunt Jala held her packet of poison reluctantly, as if it burned her hand. Then she tucked it into a box on the shelf by the window that opened onto the mausoleum’s internal courtyard—it was a palace of a place, as was only fitting for such a holy inhabitant. Dede Abdul had his own garden, which Jala kept tidy for him, and if she grew marrows in the flowerbeds and peaches up the walls, the saint had yet to object.
She went over to uncover a bowl of roughly chopped fruit, scattered with star anise and cinnamon. This she brought back to set between them on a tiny table whose feet covered the place where the scales had lain. “I will do as you ask.” She offered Zayd the food, with a resolute look. “But until the guards are at the door, I will carry on living with all the hope and enjoyment I can muster. Come, eat your supper, and then we will sleep to rise in strength tomorrow. Eat.”
He had just taken a piece of melon, pink as a sunset, when there came the rattle of stones shifting outside in the dark. A sliding grind of granite against granite, slow at first and then speeding, and a thud that shook the ground beneath them. Someone stumbled amid the graves.
Zayd’s despair gave way gratefully to disbelief and then fury. It sounded as though someone was taking the cover stones off the tombs, opening up the graves. But surely that was inconceivable? Who would do anything so blasphemous? And without even attempting to keep it quiet, to conceal it.
“What is that?” his mother asked, her head tilted and listening. “Grave robbers? Anatomists?”
A blackness fluttered at the window, eclipsing the view of the stars. But it was the inner window, that opened only on a space enclosed by high walls. No one would have climbed over, dropped into the private garden, when they could simply come to the door and be welcomed. Surely?
He had no sooner thought it than someone scratched at the front door, long scratches as though made by stone knives. A breeze cold as snow floated in from the window, except that snow would have felt pure, and this did not. Normally Zayd would have stepped through to the main room to open the door and greet a guest with tea and hospitality. Now he paused as both women reached out to stop him rising.
“Don’t,” Jala gasped.
“Wait.” His mother went to her writing desk and slipped a potent diagram from its leather case. Folding it and rolling it up, she threaded it into a clay bead and hung it around his neck. “There. Now you may go.” Patting his arm reassuringly, she smiled as the scratching came again, but he noticed she had given another copy of the paper to Jala and was uncapping her inkwell already, to put the finishing touches to a third.
“I’m sorry! I’m coming,” Zayd called out, as the scratching became a knock that made the door judder in its frame. He wanted to think he was being ridiculous. How could he fear any traveller destitute enough to need shelter here? But when he took his lantern out to the great room of the catafalque, and saw the heavy stone door fluttering like a carpet at the blows, his courage ebbed away.
Nevertheless, he lifted the latch, eased the door open a crack, and peered out. He managed not to drop his lantern at the sight of the thing that waited outside. Its skin was white as salt, its eyes blue like a cat’s, something very wrong with the shape of its mouth beneath its bloodless lips.
They parted, and he saw teeth like bone needles, those blue eyes staring as if they had been painted on. The words of hospitality dried up in his mouth. Now I know what the evil eye truly looks like. He would never mistake anything human for it again.
Cramps clenched in his bowels as fear tried to turn his insides into water. The creature spoke, hissing and whispering in a voice that had to be dredged out unwilling from a chest that didn’t move. He didn’t understand the words, but he was hit like a blow by the urge to open the door wide and invite it in.
No, no, no, no, no. He didn’t want to do that! His flesh shrank from the thought. Yet at the same time he took a step forward, his body traitor to his will, the urge to obey outside him, beating against him, his own mind screaming denial inside his skin, powerless.
He opened his mouth, the words please come in trapped on the tip of his tongue, stretched out a hand to push the door wider, and with a supreme effort called it back again, the gesture unmade. Perhaps it was the potency of the magic square, perhaps Allah’s intervention, but his hand, recoiling, struck the bead that lay around his neck and clamped there. Cool freedom pushed through the palm of his hand, up his arm, and into his head like the opposite of a burn.
“You are not welcome here!” He slammed the door in the demon’s face, just as someone screamed in the harem.
“Zayd! Zayd, help!”
He had never run so fast, was briefly impressed by his own speed, before the sight of Jala, struggling to hold his mother back from the window, dashed all other thoughts from his mind. His mother’s protective square lay still incomplete on the desk.
She opened her mouth. He threw both hands around her, one to silence any words of invitation, the other to grab her wrist and force her fingers to close around his large clay bead. She fought him a moment longer, then blinked up at his face, muzzy at first, then angry. They sidled together over to the table and carefully sat down so she could replace her left hand for her right, free her right to finish her own talisman.
The scratching of nib on paper. Their breath came white in the harsh cold air. Zerinah’s left hand trembled against Zayd’s fingers. If her right also shook, the charm would be less effective, so he stretched over for the abandoned fruit salad and fed his mother a slice of melon, sweet and calming, felt her sigh a little with relief.
The window shutters rattled in their casements, and in the saint’s room the door boomed and thundered with blows. Farther away, from their neighbours’ dwellings, they began to hear brief screams.
Zayd made to rise, to find his sword, and the women’s hands pulled him back down. “You don’t fight demons with steel,” Jala insisted.
His mother finished her amulet, sanded the ink dry, folded and rolled it, and placed it in the band of her headdress, in the centre of her forehead. She looked at Zayd, braced herself, and let go of his necklace.
Zayd and Jala watched her narrowly, in case they might need to pin her down. Heartbeats passed, and then she sighed. “Nothing. I am myself. It’s working.”
As they sagged with relief, long white fingers poked through the holes in the shutters and tore them cracking and splintering off their iron hinges. Tore the hinges out of the marble wall, reached inside, and snatched.
They shrieked together and retreated away from the fingers’ grasp. The creature outside pushed itself flush to the wall and fished through the window with dirty, skinny arms, but it didn’t seem able to come farther in. When the door was likewise torn off, they could see a second creature try and try again to pass over the threshold—fail and fail again.
It did not make for a calm mood, but once they had got over the animal terror of it, they were able to sit huddled around the table, turn their backs on the threat, and with one hand on their talismans, the other on their books, they worked out the theory behind this square, came up with a new, stronger version. Zerinah’s and Jala’s squares, tested by each of them in turn, allowed use of both hands, and removed the need for constant concentration, restoring its wearer almost to normality.
Zayd’s did not work at all.
“Well,” he said, after they had tripped and sat on him, pressing one of the earlier charms to his forehead. “All these years and I’ve been selling worthless goods.”
“Your honoured father always maintained the squares had magic of their own,” his mother reassured him, trying to soothe a domestic shame that added another layer of misery to one of the worst nights of his life. “Who would have known he was wrong? Perhaps we should have had a little less faith and done a little more testing . . . but we know now. Why don’t you go through the books again and see if you can strengthen it further, and Jala and I will carry on, try to finish another two by the morning.”
So Zayd had his head down, a headache burning at the back of his eyes and his sight blurring as he worked on recombining letters and symbols in his notebook by the dim lantern light. Only when the sun rose high enough for its beam to fall through the window and spill across his work did he look up and discover they were alone. The monsters had gone.
He touched his womenfolk on the hands, and they too put down their pens, rose blinking as though the night had lasted forever. Then his mother gave a brittle, brave smile and dashed her hands together. “I think this calls for something special for breakfast.”
Zayd smiled back, though he felt as though he had lain under a rock pile for days. “I must go and see if—”
And a hammering began again at the door. The breath caught in his throat. His numbed spirits, which had taken the brief reprieve as an opportunity to revive, tumbled back into the pit. But he evaded Jala’s catch at his wrist and sidled out from behind the harem’s screen, edging cautiously into the saint’s chamber.
A dark shape was outlined by the sun under the lintel. He peered but couldn’t make it out. Then it stooped, uninvited, through the entrance and straightened up. It was a living man, a heavily bearded, snowy-turbanned officer of the janissaries, dark-skinned, dark-eyed like a real person, who breathed even when he was not speaking.
Outside, two short rows of soldiers stood with their sword hilts glinting, and waited at parade rest for whatever was happening now.
“I . . . uh.”
“You are Zayd Ibn Rahman? You will come with me. The sultan, may he live forever, wishes to see you.”
Then Zayd remembered there were perils in the daytime as well as at night. “Of course,” he said, bowing. “Let me just fetch an item I believe he will wish to see.”
He ducked back into the inner rooms and grabbed the small rug he had prepared for this eventuality. “I am sorry. I don’t want to leave you here alone, after that, but—”
“When the sultan calls, all must answer,” his mother replied, with a thin but reassuring veneer of serenity. “You must go. We will stay here and make as many more amulets as we can.” She handed him the first spare copy. “Give this to the Sultan. We do not know how far afield these demons may roam, and I could not live with myself if—turned away from us—they got to him instead.”
Zayd settled on a hug to give her all the thanks he couldn’t say. “You are pearls among women, both of you. I should have thought of this.”
She patted his cheek as though she had understood everything in his silence. “You would have done, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded.”
And then he couldn’t think of anything more to delay his departure, so he put on coat and turban, followed the soldiers out into the day.
There was no sign of the shifted and tumbled stones he had heard during the night. The graveyard lay peacefully asleep beneath its green boughs and flowers, every white stone in place. But as they passed the mausoleum where the family of Ali Bin Daoud lived, it struck him that it was too peaceful. He would have expected the youngest boys to be trooping downhill to the madrassa school, and the two-year-old to be crying amid cooking smoke and the clatter of pans.
“Wait!” He darted out from between his escort’s neat lines and stuck his head through the tomb entrance.
The whole family lay piled in the single chamber, sprawled in attitudes of sleep, but for the stark terror on their faces. Their open eyes had dried and sunk and their lips drawn back from their teeth. Pale lips, pale, bloodless faces.
Zayd recoiled with a shout of dismay, stood shivering and breathing hard while the soldiers too stuck their heads in to see.
“More of them.” The officer gave a jerky, dismissive shrug. His face was so professionally smooth, Zayd could not guess what he thought about this. Whether he even thought at all.
“More?”
“You’ll see.”
He did. The streets down which the soldiers marched him were choked with wailing mourners. The baker’s was locked up tight, but outside, in the spot that he had occupied since Zayd was a boy, the beggar who had laughed at war lay tumbled off his wheeled platform in the dirt. A single spot of blood blotched his chest as he sprawled legless and undignified, abandoned in the dirt.
By the time they reached Topkapi, Zayd’s own personal fear was subsumed beneath layer after layer of concern for his city. He hardly felt it at all as he was ushered past the lines of weeping petitioners and straight into the great divan.
There the air was scented with patchouli and nargileh smoke, the white and blue walls glowed in morning sunshine cool and fresh as clean water. The great open sunlit space above the few men on the floor spoke of God’s serenity, of his luminous peace. And the men who sat in it glowed like enamel in gorgeous colours and were speckled all over with fragments of pure light in the shape of jewels.
It was as though he had passed through death and come out into paradise. At least, it was until Zayd looked up from his prostration and saw the cloth-of-gold slippers of the sultan. Then his thoughts flashed back to the damp warmth of the kafes, the memory that evil had reached even into this blessed house. What benefit offering the sultan a protection from demons without, when he had plenty of his own inside?
Nabih wore a green cloak that neither matched nor splendidly contrasted with his caftan. The effect was of a man who had dressed in the dark and been too shaken to correct the mistake later. Zayd felt some affection for him because of it.
The sultan’s foot tapped. “You have brought me a carpet?”
It astonished him that the sultan still had time for carpets with the devastation outside, but why should it? The Lord of the Horizons could surely afford to pay attention to everything at once.
“I have, Exalted.” Perhaps there was room for personal fear after all. It made a valiant attempt to stop Zayd’s mouth with lead, other things notwithstanding. But he unrolled the rug in the middle of the floor and sent up a quick prayer that no one would look too closely at the trick that was, he hoped, about to save his life.
