Angels of Istanbul, page 14
This room contained only relics of the building’s warehouse past. A long rope, still with metal hook and winch attached, lay coiled in dust that must not have been disturbed for half a century. A ladder leaned against one wall, and a pair of empty buckets huddled by another. On the other side of the room a smaller pair of double doors also stood locked, but these were locked on the other side. From where he stood, he could only see the pins, and they were solid-bright in heavy, painted wood.
There was, however, a gap between the doors. He could see nothing through it at first but darkness, but as he was wondering if his presence here was useless, a door opened in the far wall, and a glow came in, sweeping around the room, showing it to Zayd’s watching eye.
It was a heavily shuttered room—the window covered with a carpet, fine carpets on the walls. A divan of cushions to the left supported an open book and one of the distinctive Balkan hats.
The glow came from a lantern in the hand of a young woman whose turned face made Zayd jolt with realization. Her skin was marked red as if scorched from the throat to the lower cheek. She had a long, harsh countenance, was tall and, even in her corseted bodice, wide across the shoulders. He could easily see her passing as a youth.
Her uncovered face made Zayd uncomfortably aware that he was trespassing across the boundaries of decency. He was about to retreat from his peek hole when she took a little cone of paper, just like the one he had bought the arsenic in, out of her skirt pocket. Glancing nervously around herself, she reached into one of the cases that lined the wall and pulled out a bottle of wine, from which she removed the cork. Pouring in a stream of white powder, she shook the mixture, recorked it, and sealed it with wax from a writing set, melted over the candle of her lantern.
Her expression was exactly that which Zayd’s mother used when trying a recipe new to her, or combining two magic squares to create a new effect. A detached, scholarly interest. Zayd blamed that for the length of time it took him to realise that he was witnessing the planning of a murder.
As she hid the bottle behind one of the seat cushions, as soon as the evidence passed out of her hands, Zayd doubted he had seen it at all. She was very plain, yes. But Ubaid was right to think she was inherently trustworthy. He could not have seen what he thought he’d seen. He should laugh at himself, really, for such a ridiculous notion. Anyone could see she was not that kind of a woman.
There were two somewhat mildewed sacks in the barrels. It must have been a spice warehouse once, for the sacks were streaked with bright yellow and stank of stale turmeric. He picked them out to cover himself with, to keep warm while he waited for something suspicious to happen, but for a long while there was only the woman, sitting by her concealed bottle and calmly reading a book.
It was full dark and cold outside by the time the door slammed open again, and several people pushed through, arguing. The first, a dark-haired man in an indigo coat, was saying, “I didn’t agree with this slaughter.”
Zayd sat up so quickly his head reeled.
More folk came in behind, one of whom was surely the slender, beautiful boy Ubaid had mentioned. One was a radiant, unveiled woman in a gorgeous dress and silver headdress grubby with soil, and the other was the sort of loosely turbanned, curly haired urchin that could be seen at any hammam or marketplace, teasing the older men and running away.
Last of all came an elder whose white hair and long white beard were as besmirched with brown stains as his white clothes. Patches of his jacket gleamed like snow through the filth, and his belt shone like silver. His eyes had something of the same cold metallic glitter as he turned to look at the speaker.
“I thought this was exactly what you wanted. To let us loose on the Turks.”
The creeping cold that prickled the back of Zayd’s neck drove deeper, extended spines that poisoned his blood. This atrocity of dead civilians was what the foreign boyar had intended?
It was clear the younger man was as noble as his elder—the quality of his garments was as good. His belt was studded with golden plaques and his scabbard mountings were chased all over with gilding. He must be the older man’s son, the family resemblance was striking—as was the way both of them expressed anger with icy rigidity and tension, their words snarled rather than shouted.
“I thought you would have the decency to attack the Turks’ armies. To take out the sultan and the janissaries and the sailors. Not beggars and perfume salesmen and children. You were the one who taught me that warriors do not waste their anger on the sheep of the kingdom. That there is nothing left to rule if one does not leave the shepherds and the farmers untouched. You taught me that. What changed?”
Zayd might have laughed if he had not been trembling with indignation. It was well known that no one could trust a Dacian. The Romans had known it before the Ottomans. Little barbarian lords of little barbarian kingdoms, who only ever gave loyalty to themselves.
It shouldn’t surprise him now to see it played out in the present, but it did. Anger stirred him at the ingratitude, at the endless rejection of a hand held out to them again and again, offering protection and civilisation and brotherhood in the greatest empire of the world. Children of these infidels had become viziers, in the past, had gained all the power and prestige possible for any man who was not sultan. Taken in and cherished and rewarded like one of our own, and still they turn in the hand and bite like snakes.
“What changed, Father?” Some of the same indignation reflected like light from broken glass in the noble’s tone. Zayd knelt on his hands, which seemed likely to punch the wall without his permission and give him away.
“We were hungry.”
No, that. Wait, that didn’t . . . Zayd’s mundane anger found a chink in the lakebed of his soul, washed through into deeper caverns. Brown stains on the older man’s white clothes, red spatters on that doll of a woman like jewels sewn in her headdress, and the memory of his neighbour’s children lying in a heap like unfolded flannels, new cuts on their hands that didn’t bleed.
Bodies in the mosque, laid out in lines as though a Tatar army had been through, taking what they pleased, destroying the rest.
“You were one of Vlad Tepes’s men, Father. You never stop telling me how the common folk loved him, how the pope blessed him, how he fought the Turks in a holy crusade. An upright man, fair, if harsh. He would not have touched boys in their schools, mothers in their nurseries.”
How odd it was to see something of his own fury, his own horror, on the face of the very enemy responsible for the atrocity. There was even a choke in the last sentence, as though the words had to be driven out around angry tears. “Father, Mother. I thought you were more than monsters.”
He turned away, covering his face with his hand. The others had already cast their gazes down, and for the ring leaders of a successful plot the expressions were funereal. Tight mouthed, grim, and sad, no one in the room seemed capable of looking at one another.
“Radu.” The white elder touched his son’s shoulder. It twitched as if to shake the gesture off. “There was no time when we arrived for strategy. We had been fasting for too long, and we were forced to find food and shelter at once. From now on, to please you, I promise that things will be different.”
“You fret too much, darling.” The blue-clad woman had a piping, childish voice to go with her fresh-faced beauty, but her smile was edged with the same ice that lurked in the elder’s eyes. “What does it matter who dies? They are not our people. If they are busy mourning their children, their mothers, they will not be waging war.”
Oh, they will. Zayd was no soldier, he had no sword, but he had a dagger stuffed into his sash, its hilt just protruding from the red linen. The British were plotting with the Dacians to win the war with an army of monsters? He drew his knife, burning with the need to fight, his hands shaking with it.
The blade made a snick as the point, withdrawing, clicked against the protective mouthguard of the sheath, and the heads of both of the soiled grandees turned toward the sound as lions turn toward an injured antelope.
Zayd’s fire turned instantly to ice, the swift change making him feel brittle. It occurred to him late that if he charged into the room bearing only a dagger and the wrath of Allah, he would face two, perhaps three men with swords, discounting the woman bathed in blood and the one who had posed last night as a cavalryman. That encounter would not go well for him.
His mouth dried. He closed it, trying to breathe silently. As he worked to appear simply a rat in the walls something brushed the back of his mind with inquiring, bloodstained fingertips.
It was just like the touch at his doorway last night, the wordless command to Let me in. But this felt smoother, stronger, more vibrant, like an Iznik tile set next to a child’s pot. It caught in something in his thoughts like a fingernail snagging on fabric. Panicked, he brought a hand up, grabbed his text in its bead, and pressed it to his forehead, silently reciting the names of God.
The mental fingertips slipped, scrabbled for purchase and couldn’t find it. A cold thing slid past him like a breath. Then the two blood magicians—whatever they were—looked at one another, frowning. “Did you . . .?”
“I thought so. But . . . no. Nothing.”
The horse-faced woman rose and poured wine for all as though she was the hostess. Not from the poisoned bottle, Zayd noticed—that remained hidden behind the cushions on the divan. Perhaps she was lulling them into a false sense of security. Making them drunk and unobservant first. Zayd had quite revised his opinion of her poisoning attempt. Of course she was right to try to get rid of these evil people. He should have known from the moment he saw her that she was an unwilling participant in all this. A hostage, maybe, who should be rescued when the chance arrived.
“Well, then.” The one called Radu rubbed his forehead again as if there was something sticky on it he couldn’t quite scrub off. “If the campaign proper starts tonight, I suggest you and mother take a bath. I have had fresh clothes laid out for you in your room.”
“A bath?” His mother, who did not look old enough to be anything of the sort, licked her pink lips. “I think we’ll take the clothes and go to the hammam. All those fat naked Turks lying around, drowsy from the steam, flushed and parboiled? What could be more delightful?” She laughed and almost danced to the door. “I do like it here. I’m glad we came.”
When they had both gone through and shut the inner door behind them, Zayd wriggled as quietly as possible out of his hiding place backwards, struggled down the wall, and went to fetch the army.
Unfamiliar with the neighbourhood of the harbour, Zayd returned to the harbourmaster for help. Ubaid listened gravely to his account, seeming to settle into the floor like a mound of couscous slumping under its own weight. “The corbaci of the local janissaries lives not far from here,” he mused. “We could send to him. But once the question is in the janissary’s hands, there is no getting it out again. There would end your control of the situation, unless you wished to challenge a force that keeps the sultan himself, may he live forever, in subjugation to their will.”
Zayd considered this advice with a mix of panic and despair. “The corbaci should at least be told to patrol the local bathhouses, to catch the monsters at their prey.” He thought about the miasma of guilt in the room, the woman who seemed too good-natured to be doing this willingly, the man who had sounded betrayed. “But you’re right. The janissaries would just kill them all, or throw them in the Seven Towers, and we would never find out what was really happening. Still, I can’t take them on my own.”
“I have a little lockup here.” Ubaid smiled. “To hold drunk sailors and dishonest warehousemen before I either let them go or send them on to the cadi to be judged. Bring them here. I will give you a dozen strong men who answer to none but me. Once we have these foreigners behind bars, we can consider what must be done before we take the step of handing this over to the soup-soldiers.”
He was as good as his word, sending a boy out to the local janissary firefighters to ask them to check the local bathhouses. While Zayd impatiently drank coffee and fumed at his own inactivity, Ubaid assembled a force of cheerful amphibious men, half-sailor, half-wharf-rat, armed with cudgels and marlinspikes.
Zayd led them back to the foreigners’ rooms, sending two by boat round via the door where he had entered. He had been given a brace of pistols by Ubaid, but was so awkward with them—so inclined to shoot a comrade by mistake—that he stationed himself at the back of the group, well out of the way. The burly Armenian in front put his shoulder to the door, broke it down with a crash and a burst of splinters, and flung himself through, club in hand.
The strangers had the gall to be surprised. Zayd could hear their exclamations, even though he could see nothing around the flapping coats and broad shoulders of his escorts. Then came the sound of blows, smashing glass, and a woman’s scream. Zayd pushed the last man in and followed in time to see the urchin boy hauled back by the collar as he tried to run for the rear exit.
They had been interrupted at dinner—the floor was covered with the remnants of dishes—and it made Zayd sick to think that they could eat. A familiar bottle lay shattered, unopened, by the side of the table. The golden-haired young man was sprawled in a mess of soup, with blood running from his temple to the floor, limp as if in sleep. The dark-haired man was crouched, struggling to draw a sword—the scabbard of which was pinned under the foot of one of Zayd’s helpers—while the boot of another man bore down on his neck. The urchin wriggled in the tight grip of a black-bearded Greek, and in the corner of the room the quiet woman stood against the wall.
It was encouraging to see that even Zayd’s rough brawlers could tell, instinctively, that she was not their enemy, not to be harmed.
Fighting against the weight of his captor, the dark-haired man, Radu, could just barely hold his head up, but he still managed to glare. Zayd motioned to two of his men who’d been hovering uncertainly around the innocent woman. They willingly left her to stamp on the man’s fingers to make him let go of his sword, kick his supporting elbows out from under him and force him properly to the floor.
Zayd put his unneeded pistol back in his sash and picked up his enemy’s sabre. “Where are the other two? The white lord and his wife?”
Silence.
“Make him sit up,” Zayd commanded, and tried to tell himself he was comfortable with the violence with which his command was carried out. This man deserved to have his hair wrenched and his eye blacked, both of his shoulders forced back in a wrestling hold until they were all but dislocated.
“Where are they?” Zayd asked again when the man was kneeling, tied by his own belt, his head drawn back by the hair and a long, wicked knife pressed to his throat just hard enough to mark a seeping red line.
He grinned. “Nu inteleg. Nu spun Turcă.”
“Perhaps not.” Zayd switched languages as easily as he might change a coat. “But I speak everything. Where are your companions, the white lord and his wife?”
The man visibly controlled himself. His expression had already shifted from the naked emotion of a hunted thing, fighting for its life, to defensive humour. Now it regained the many-layered ironies of a nobleman’s mask. His next smile was urbane. “I have no idea. They do not tell me their plans. You should be glad they’re not here. It would not go well with you if they were.”
Unhelpful, which was not surprising. Time to move the conversation to a place where there were implements for obtaining answers. He leaned down to hold his hand above the blond man’s mouth. Mist collected on his fingertips. He registered how intently Radu was watching the gesture. Holding back a desire to ask if the man was alive? Well, let him wonder a little longer.
“You two, bring this one and the boy. The lady must go to a women’s prison, but I don’t think we need to bind her.”
The one they called Radu rearranged his expression to something verging on concerned. “May she have her eunuch?”
Oh, so that was what the urchin was doing in this household. He must be recently purchased, and not yet fitted out with clothes of splendour to match his mistress’s. Zayd’s initial intention to grill the boy, force him to strip to prove his gelding, did not survive a pleading look from the woman. She had nothing to do with this. Of course she should be permitted a companion to cheer and protect her.
“Very well. Now come.” Zayd tapped the shoulders of the Greek and the Armenian. “But you two, stay here. When the other foreigners return, bring them too.”
Frank awoke to what was becoming a very familiar pain in his head. The floor was gritty, but cool beneath him, and for a while he could do no more than lie there and soak up the chill of a place that never saw the fierce Turkish sun. But he couldn’t keep thought away forever. Eventually he had to struggle up, to open his eyes and face reality.
Something clinked on the floor as he moved. When he tried to draw his legs under him, one was held back. He blinked open blood-crusted eyes and saw the iron locked around his foot, bruising his ankle when he moved it. A heavy chain stretched from it to a bolt deep in the stone wall. Light came into the room from a grilled square not large enough to put a head through, set in an iron-banded wooden door, at the bottom of which a rectangle of glowing stripes suggested a hatch. A bucket sat within reach, empty but reeking of night soil.
Two other bolts ending in empty fetters were attached to the other walls, though the room was tiny enough that if they had both been in use there would not have been floor space for three prisoners to sit at once. Apart from these things there was nothing, only stone.
