Angels of Istanbul, page 16
But Zayd stopped his retreat, flattened his hands against the aged wood of the door, as if to draw in its strength, and his expression shifted from fear to abhorrence. “This is how Christians wage war? Your God of mercy, he would be pleased with this, would he?”
It was as though Zayd had rammed a pick straight into the centre of Radu’s chest. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, sure he would die as his ribs broke under the sudden impact. Anguish and horror had piled up for years and years, concealed beneath carefully cultivated denial, and now his lungs were failing as it all burst out at once.
Below them, the father lay down his child at the end of one of the long lines of corpses, drew a fold of shroud over the boy’s face and knelt beside him, rocking as he keened.
Radu covered his own face and shook. Because he had concentrated on the surfaces of things, the abominations in the depths had been allowed to thrive. Now they had broken the glass under which he kept them and were climbing out, inescapably visible at last. The boy in the streets down there. Stefan. The girls his father had collected for him and whom he had allowed to be destroyed in return. He blessed Mirela for surviving, and desperately wanted her with him. He wanted Ecaterina, and Frank—those few people he had managed to save—so that he could gather them in his arms and say, Look, I tried!
I tried! I kept my staff safe. All my servants. My own people—I kept them safe . . . mostly. I saved their souls. I made sure they were burnt after—
A shove in the back belonged to a different world, one almost irrelevant to this place of terrible truth. He obeyed it without thought, allowing himself to be herded back down the steps. As they returned him to his cell, he was too distracted even to try to escape.
He had expected to die under torture, like the other Wallachian martyrs. True, it wasn’t a prospect he had relished, but he would at least have known that he’d won. This though . . . The understanding only got worse as his mental eyes adjusted to the light. Being allowed to live, with this whole universe of condemnation inserted into his head? No. He couldn’t do it. It was unbearable. Torture would be better.
Zayd’s mother was waiting for him as they dragged their prisoner back to the customs building between them. The man had gone silent, no longer responding to either courteous questions or blows, his harsh face closed up tight.
Still trembling in a mixture of fear and abhorrence from that moment when he had looked into the stranger’s eyes and seen a demon, Zayd did not want to see Zerinah. He wanted to have the creature taken immediately and given over to the torturers. Wanted to see it break and plead for the mercy it had denied his people. Wanted to laugh and tell them to carry on.
None of which was something he wanted his mother to know. But she stepped away from the basket she had resting at her feet and clutched him by the arm, making the guardsmen with him smile. Mother’s boy.
“I brought you breakfast,” she said, and tugged him. He now had the option of listening to her or of pulling his arm out of her grasp and telling her not to bother him while he was about important business.
“Take the prisoner to the torturers,” he said instead, his voice hardly recognisable even to himself. “But don’t start until I’m there.”
He couldn’t see his mother’s face, she wore a veil and headdress that covered everything apart from her eyes, but her hand tightened and shook, and her gaze flicked from his face to his prisoner’s. It lingered there on the swollen bruises and the ragged, limping walk as Radu was led away.
“Zayd. What have you done?”
Shame—a boy’s shame, as though he had been caught stealing sweets from his auntie’s plate. It seemed grotesquely out of place, but it still hurt.
“He’s the one who brought them here, Mother. The demons. I thought there could be something decent in him. I asked him to stop, and he said we deserved it for bringing his people into the abode of peace. He said . . .”
Zerinah let go of him to retrieve her basket. There, a new loaf, a pot of hummus, and a bowl of fresh olives were crammed in beside a roll of many papers. He took it with disbelief. Food no longer seemed relevant to his life, but when he unrolled the parchments, he found twenty more of the new, stronger talismans against the demons.
The lines of weariness around her eyes no longer surprised him. She and Auntie Jala must have been working on them all day and all night. Yet they had still taken the time to bring him food, to take care of him whose duty it was to take care of them.
“You know,” said his mother at his wordless look, as his anger faltered in the face of her kindness, “the stranger has a point. You cannot expect to take either a country or a person without their consent and have them be loyal to you afterwards. Nor, if you buy a troublesome slave, do you ensure their loyalty by punishing them. A slave should be part of the family, or she will run if given the chance.”
“You can’t believe that this . . .” Zayd offered her the city in evidence, “is justified?” The gesture wafted the scent of food to him, and the smell reminded him that he was ravenous. He tore the bread open, dipped it in hummus, gnawed.
“I don’t,” she said, the lines around her eyes easing with relief as he ate. “But do you know, no one bothered asking me if I wanted to marry your father. I was so angry the first year that I prayed in secret that he might die. I screamed and hit him and threw things at him, and if he had not responded with gentleness, and won my respect with reason and love, I can scarcely imagine how bitterly I might have hated him in the end.”
This was impossible. Impossible that his mother might ever have had evil thoughts. Impossible that she might draw comparisons between her own soul and that of such a monster. She was quite wrong. If one conquered a country, it behoved them to be grateful they were not simply wiped out. If one bought a slave, they should be thankful to be given whatever one chose to give them. If one took a wife . . .
But how would it be to be the one conquered, bought, possessed?
He scraped the last piece of bread against the bottom of the pot, and the weight of good food slowed and steadied his frantic thoughts. There was a bottle too, which he uncapped, washed down the bread with cool, sweet sira. The thought of his mother as a young woman forced unhappy into marriage was a strange one. A mother should not be a person in her own right, with sorrows that mattered as much as his.
And when he put it like that he was appalled at himself. Of course she should be. Was.
“I wish that had not happened to you.”
She snorted. “Perhaps if I had not been so proud, I would have seen sooner that my parents had chosen well for me. That’s not my point, son. My point is that Allah is merciful, and so perhaps we should be too. Because I think that is a proud man, as I was a proud woman, and as long as you remain his enemy, he will give you nothing.”
“You didn’t see him, Mother.” Zayd picked at the edges of the papers, where the pulp had frayed out into fibres. “I saw him talking to them—to the leaders of the demons. He has some kind of control over them. He is the only one I know of who has any control. We must make him stop them, and I have no other way of forcing his hand than this.”
“My son is not a torturer.” Zerinah settled the now-empty basket on her arm. “But he is a great man. He will think of something—something that does not besmirch his soul, or cover his own hands with blood. Peace be upon you, my son.”
Having thus thoroughly overturned his mood, she walked away, soon lost amid the other faceless women who had dared come out after daybreak. He watched her go and fanned the papers out between his hands, feeling raw. Twenty charms. Now he must choose twenty people to protect, in a country of hundreds of thousands of souls. It was not a choice he felt qualified to make.
Sighing, he turned his face away from the brisk, sunny morning and ducked back into the coolness of the customs house. His legs guided him down into the storeroom they had turned into a place of interrogation. His mind followed along, attached but apart, like a fool’s bladder on the end of a long stick.
His prisoner lay there. A man in a mask was just tightening the last of the restraints with a hand steady and professionally brutal. The torturer stood back when Zayd approached, respectfully letting him see the enemy before he was broken.
He looked strange, as though the lineaments of his face had reshaped around some thought he had never had before. A man transformed. White-faced, as if with rage or fear, but the gaze that had been sharp as a shard of ice now seemed to have turned inwards, and his nails bit his palms as though he was already in pain. Zerinah’s words returned to Zayd. Perhaps after all, something had touched the man, and what he had seen or heard was now working in him. This was no longer defiance or contempt. It might be doubt.
Zayd recalled, suddenly, what Ubaid had told him: “All those princes we revile as traitors, they revere as suffering saints, who died for their country’s pride.” If Zayd allowed the torture to begin now, this fragile uncertainty might be lost to the allure of joining those “saints.”
The torturer picked up a pair of pliers and came to his side—the only man in the room who seemed indifferent to a moment infused with the presence of God. Zayd put out his hand “No.”
They’d think he’d lost his mind, or his nerve. They’d think he hadn’t the stomach to do his best for his people’s good. They’d think he was halfhearted, not rigorous enough, not committed. The sultan did not scruple to destroy his own brothers in his quest for glory, what would he say to Zayd’s timidity? What would Haji Nabih say?
“No. Radu Văcărescu, I will not permit you to think yourself a martyr. I will not assuage your conscience with well-deserved pain. I am not the monster that you are. Unbuckle him.”
The prisoner flinched as if Zayd had landed a blow on a place already broken. His face was waxy smooth, like a death mask, but there were cracks in his eyes.
“I’m going to ask you instead. One choice, one chance, to prove you are not a demon like those you brought with you. Help us. You can influence these things. You have some control over them. Help us. I will not believe this is what you wanted. Help us to stop it. Please.”
Radu had held his guilt at bay until this moment, fighting it with all his strength though it would not stop coming back. He was a good man. He tried his best. He had not asked to be gifted with demon parents, told he owed them obedience and then also expected to control them. He had tried to protect what he had been supposed to protect. So perhaps some Turks had died—they were a cruel race, a people who had tortured the saints, a people who enslaved good Christians and tormented them into losing faith. They deserved . . .
And then the young man who was his captor offered him mercy, and it knocked away the straw-thin supports he had built to justify himself. After seeing his city invaded, his people devoured, this young scholar still had forgiveness in him. Such a man did not deserve Radu’s monsters.
But once Radu stopped fighting his guilt, it crushed him flat. It showed up by contrast what he had done. He had saved two people at the expense of thousands. He had condemned cities, murdered children as surely as if he had slit their throats himself. He was becoming the monster his parents were.
He didn’t want to be. Today some force stronger than himself had seized his head and held it still so he could not escape seeing what he had done. And he hated it.
“Help us,” said Zayd. “Please.”
Radu didn’t need to think any more, everything in him recoiling in horror from the path he had been on. “Yes.” He let the torturer drag him upright, hand wedged between the thick iron of his collar and the bruises on his spine, did not resist as he was dropped to his knees. “Yes. I’ll help.”
He thought of all those white bodies swaddled in shrouds, piled up like insect eggs around the city. In Bucharest, there had been a faint possibility he could have dealt with the situation alone, but he had failed then, and now look what had come of it. “I want to see them destroyed. I want to help. I don’t know what I can do, but yes.”
A silence. Zayd gaped at him, startled, as though he had not really expected his appeal to work. Then there came a great crack as of metal on stone, and the reverberations shook the brown spice dust from the shelves around them. Cannon fire, he thought. From the ships in the harbour? No, it hadn’t been that close.
The sound of feet running in the passages, like the clap of distant wings. One of Ubaid’s young pages hurtled into sight, followed a moment later by the man himself, puffing like a bull. Ubaid gestured his boy into silence, bent double, propping his hands on his knees as he got his breath back.
Straightening up carefully, he smoothed down his kaftan and writhed his hands together. “That was the cannon at Tophane. A town crier called it out in the marketplace: the sultan is dead. The kizlar agha found him this morning, drained of blood. The war is off until his successor can be invested.”
Radu laughed, because he’d just achieved everything he came to do, and it felt exactly like defeat. The laughter turned sharp-edged, caught in his throat. He had to lean forward and bang his forehead hard against the floor to stop it turning into helpless tears and shaming him before all. He would not ask for pity. He didn’t deserve it.
“That was your plan, was it?” Zayd produced a key from his robes and unlocked the cuffs on Radu’s wrists and elbows. His shoulders sprang back into place with a tide of such eviscerating agony he had to bite through his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming. He spat blood out onto the floor, shaking.
“Then you have what you came for. Now tell us how to stop them.”
“I don’t . . .” Receding waves of pain made it hard to think. He wanted to lie down. Wanted Frank—to be sure he was all right, to be sure someone would make certain Frank got out of this if no one else did. Other people too . . . no, he ought to answer the question before they put him back in those chains. “You should burn the bodies. All the victims will become strigoi themselves once you bury them. They must be burned before nightfall.”
“There are thousands!”
“It’s impious!”
Radu could move his arms carefully now, the agony settling down into more of a tearing, bright-red scrape. When Zayd leaned down to unlock the leg irons too, he did weep just a little and pressed his face into his knees to conceal it. “There will be tens of thousands by the morning if you don’t.”
“We can’t ask families to see their beloved relatives sent to the afterlife like heathens.” Ubaid had taken his turban off and was smoothing his bald pate into a high polish with a handkerchief.
It made Radu laugh again—the laugh that was like trying to throw up a handful of nails. “They make you do that. These creatures. They make you do abominable things. Make terrible choices. Disgust yourself. But you asked me what to do, and if you don’t want this problem to be ten times worse tomorrow, that is what you must do first.”
Zayd’s face had taken on an expression too complex for Radu to interpret, though it seemed no longer quite that of a wholly innocent man. When he came over to offer Radu a hand to help him climb to his feet, Radu took it in fellow feeling, glad to imagine that even this paragon knew what it was like to be human.
“And then what?” Zayd asked, when Radu was upright and able to hold himself so by bracing against the wall. “The white lord who was with you. He was their leader?”
“When did you see Constantin?” Radu remembered the argument with his father in the Turkish lodging, just before they had been captured. His parents had both broken off, turning their heads at the same time as if hearing something. It turning out to be a false alarm. “It was you they sensed? Watching us? How did you elude them?”
Zayd rested his thumb against his front tooth and worried the nail. “No,” he said gently. “You give us information. Not the other way.”
Habit told Radu to take offence at that, and his new humility told him not to be so stupid. He deserved no consideration at all. He settled on a compromise. “I want Frank. And my women. I want to see them. I want to be sure they’re alright.”
“‘Women’?”
Belatedly Radu remembered that Mirela was currently passing as a neutered boy. “My betrothed and her eunuch,” he corrected, slowing and shivering like a river when the ice creeped in from the edges. Shock, he thought. Injured, keyed up for torture that didn’t come, his mind being turned inside out and reshaped . . . perhaps he was allowed to feel a little shaky.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to put you in the company of those who will argue you out of this conversion.” Ubaid wiped his head a final time and slipped his headdress back on.
Radu forced himself to breathe as deeply as his shoulders would allow. “They were against this from the start.” He leaned more into the wall, savouring its delicious coolness, the chill that soothed the bruising and helped him stay awake. “They will want to help. Remarkable people, all of them with gifts.”
At that, Zayd stiffened like a pointer dog watching a pheasant fall from the sky. He stepped forward to peel Radu off the wall and guide him out of the cell, turning him to the right and up a series of stairs. At the end of these, they came to corridors skinned in tile and marble and followed one to a small room with a pool in the centre of it and a divan of indigo cushions tasselled with gold.
“You have magicians with you?” Zayd asked as he let Radu slump into the cushions, calling guards to stand at each doorway, and sending Ubaid’s page running for tea. Ubaid himself settled into the other corner of the divan, clearly intrigued.
Should he tell them? If he did, they might think them too important to free. But by the same count that would also make them too important to kill. Enough shilly-shallying. He had determined to help, so he should do it wholeheartedly, try to claw back as much human decency as he possibly could.
“Frank is. A mage, I mean. But not trained. He can do anything he can read out of a book, but something is holding him back from the greatness we believe is possible for him. The others have specific gifts. Mirela is a shape-shifter. Ecaterina is . . .” How to put it? He thought of her plain face and discoloured skin, her sturdy, Amazonian frame. It didn’t seem quite the right word, but it was the only one he had to fit. “An enchantress, I suppose. Everyone seems to love her except me. Funny that I’m the one who gets to marry her.”
