Angels of Istanbul, page 18
Radu tried pulling his arm out of the grip, hissed at the pain. Frank dropped it, ashamed. He’d seen the bruises, deep indigo and brilliant red, so tightly swollen the skin was glossy with it. If Radu’s shoulders had not both been wrenched out of their sockets, it was not for lack of trying. “I’m sorry.”
Frank let his fingertips fall on Radu’s wrist, soft as snow, in apology. But Radu had gone stiff as though set in stone, his focus somewhere behind Frank’s left ear. “Father.”
Everything in Frank froze to the marrow as Constantin’s voice whispered behind him, took him back to loneliness and desperation in the forested dark. “Radu, what is this betrayal?”
Stiffly, clumsily, Frank turned, put his shoulder to Radu’s, faced down Constantin’s glare. He didn’t think his stomach was capable of being more unsettled, but when Alaya appeared out of a column of pearly mist and smiled at him like a plaster saint, it lurched so hard he had to clap a hand over his mouth to stop himself from being sick over her little feet.
“Oh, darling,” she said gently. “Why are you being nasty to us all of a sudden? Aren’t we doing exactly what you asked?”
In Valcea she had appeared as a perfect boyaryshyna, scrubbed and pearly, flawless and clean, only the stench of dried blood to give away what she was. Constantin had been imposing, pure in white like a saint, with a long beard so silvery fine it resembled a shaft of moonlight through a window. Now their clothes were caked in mud and gore, their skin tight as a drum over blood that seeped out through tear ducts and sweat glands, coating them with a fine red film.
It made Frank think suddenly of Zayd’s words. Radu had let them off the leash, given them a chance to prove themselves—and they had shown that they were insatiable monsters.
Radu still seemed not to see it. “Father, Mother,” he said, the pleading tone always unnatural in his voice. “You take it too far. You could live here a thousand years and not exhaust the richness of it, if you would just . . . restrain yourselves a little.”
Alaya’s lips folded back from her long front teeth, she hissed like a kettle building up steam. Mental fingers brushed against Frank’s mind, but when he raised a hand to touch his pendant charm, they slipped away from him. He opened eyes he hadn’t meant to close, found Constantin’s gaze focussed beneath his chin.
Radu’s voice interrupted his shiver. “Father, you always said that fledglings were competition. You used to kill them yourself. Why did that change?”
It was not the only thing that had. In Frank’s experience, the strigoi had watched Radu in the past with an unsettling possessive warmth that could have been mistaken for love. If, for example, you were a lonely boy growing up in a castle with the monsters who had eaten all your human kin for the past three hundred years. Frank had always thought it was a pretence, put on and off as was convenient. At this moment it was off, and he didn’t like what was left.
“You want to know?” Constantin smiled, viciously amused.
“We don’t have to tell him.” Alaya pouted, but she gestured for Frank to fall in ahead of her as Constantin led them out of the cemetery, through dark streets scoured of beggars and bodies, where nothing moved but they. Lights behind closed shutters escaped in jolts and spots like furtive stars. Frank thought of the city as a body, with all the sweetness shut up inside, begging him, cajoling him, to find a way to breach the barriers and drink.
He put his hand to his necklace again and tried to draw St. George’s Cloak around him instead.
Topkapi was as tightly shut up as the city, Radu noticed as they walked through the first court without meeting a petitioner. The long leaves of the palms rustled against the sky, and on the janissary tree the bodies of traitors dangled like ripe fruit, a faint wind creaking in the ropes that held them up.
The fountains of the second court welled demurely with the stars shattered on their surfaces. Radu’s and Frank’s boots made sharp smacks against the stone paving as they walked, while the strigoi flowed through the silence like a scent.
They turned into the private apartments, and here finally were guards at their posts. Two black eunuchs, heavy with muscle, with faces as proud and stern as any lion’s, bloodless holes where their throats used to be, and teeth like those of cobras.
“Father?”
They walked along pierced corridors of glittering stone, and Radu glimpsed through the latticework the figures of half-naked women, standing to attention along the outer walls. Beautiful women, unveiled, clad in insubstantial scarves. Gold dripped from their arms and jewels flickered in their hair. They stood as still as soldiers, their eyes glazed with someone else’s will.
He had expected music, chatter, arguments. The clack of trictrac tiles on the board, running feet and children shrieking, and laughter, hopefully. But even the children stood by their mothers’ feet in solemn silence, packed away for later use.
Eunuchs—living ones this time—stood in regular spacing along the outer side of the partition walls, their truncheons dangling from loose fingers, a puzzlement in their eyes, as Frank and Radu passed, as if they had seen something that troubled them, but could not remember why.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Frank protested. “We shouldn’t have come in here. It’s not allowed.”
“I allow it.” Constantin’s smugness lifted the left side of his mouth, made his moustache crooked, and tapped a dried clot of blood and hair against his chin. He made a look all you like gesture, as if the harem belonged to him alone. “An admirable institution, don’t you think? So much more efficient than keeping so many unruly boys. When we have smoothed out the transition to power, I believe this is the breeding system we will implement in the future for our stock.”
“Father,” Radu said again, full of a very old, patient despair. He had tried and tried and tried to get through to some essential core of decency in Constantin, tried to reawaken the father he remembered from his childhood. The one who had occasionally been kind. Who had spoken of honour as though it was important to him. Who had given Radu presents on the appropriate occasions, and allowed his tutors to live. But he was beginning to wonder how far that had all been a performance, meant to tame him, to keep him compliant and dutiful and safe.
He’d always known he was only useful until he had sired the next, more tractable generation, but he’d also always tried to tell himself there was something real in the love that had bound them as a family. That there was something redeemable in Constantin and Alaya themselves. Something that made them parents and not just monsters wearing masks.
He’d told Zayd he would help save the city, thought he was committed to do anything to ensure that, but secretly there had always been the hope in the back of his mind that his parents wouldn’t force him to finally declare himself their enemy. They had survived through three hundred years of compromise. Surely they could make one more, for his sake, because he was their son? “Listen to yourself! Why don’t you come home? This gluttony will not stand. You set yourself up against the whole human race with this. They will destroy you. Come back, and let everything be as it once was—”
Alaya laughed behind him. “Like tame beasts? No. I’ve had enough of playing demure. I was born to be a queen, and I have waited long enough for it. Darling, I don’t know why it makes you unhappy. We can take you in, give you a principality of your own, immortality. Then you can be with us forever. The one eternal royal family of the whole world.”
Radu shuddered. He had been right to resist bringing them away from their own soil. Here, uprooted from history, they had begun to redefine themselves, not as the boyar lords of some little ancient holding, but as strigoi first. They were shedding their mortal identities as they had once shed their flesh, and the thing inside, the horrible unfettered determination to feed and eat and live no matter the cost, was beginning to show itself true.
Out of the silent harem, Frank and he followed his parents down into the sultan’s private apartments, through comforts the man would never need again, past servants whose eyes were blurred with someone else’s thoughts. They came at last to a small white bathroom, lit with a lamp of silver-green glass.
Next to a still pool lined with tiles like golden water lilies, there lay two things that could have been carved from oak, or mummified by hot sands. Radu could not quite unravel their shape at first. When he did, it took him even longer to believe it. The creatures lay face upright, sexless shrivelled corpses with wings. Each had a bowl beside them, empty now, only the stain remaining to show it had been full of blood. Their mouths, flushed with the same stain, were the only part of them that seemed as though it had ever been alive.
Between them, as though they were its honour guard, lay a shrouded body. The folds of the material showed where it had swelled over the long, hot day. It had been washed and perfumed with unguents—the smell of them overlaid the stink of decay but could not entirely disguise it.
As Radu watched, the central corpse twitched like a man falling in his sleep. Radu recoiled, and Alaya passed him to go to the corpse’s head and fold back the winding sheet from its face.
It jerked again as its skin tightened. With a purging hiss and miasma, the decomposition fluids voided onto the floor around it. Its eyes opened, milky as half-cooked eggs. Arching out of the noisome pool of its own dead flesh, it let out a howling sob. All along the corridor behind Radu, every servant collapsed to their knees. They pressed their foreheads into the ground as the new fledgling got its limbs together under it and crawled like a dog to Constantin’s feet.
Radu hated the Turks, but even he could hardly bear the shame of doing this to their king. There was no enemy so repugnant as to deserve this.
Constantin placed a hand in benediction on the fledgling sultan’s head. He smiled at it the way he had sometimes—just often enough to make Radu yearn for it with a terrible thirst—smiled at his son.
Radu clenched his fists. Hurt at a level below reason, below language.
“This is my son now,” Constantin drove the sting deeper. “I was the father of the ruler of a little petty fiefdom in the middle of nowhere. Now I am the father of the padishah emperor of the Ottoman Empire.” There was nothing in his expression but contempt, and even that was the contempt a man spared to a maggot—a distaste for its presence that admitted no kinship, no understanding, no care.
They cannot have lied all this time. All my life! The comfort of the thought had worn thinner than gauze. Because they could, of course. His life was a mayfly life compared with theirs, and love a useful tool. They’d had so much practice with all the generations before his that they could easily refine their technique to produce the greatest sense of obligation with the least effort.
“I have armies now.” Constantin raised the dead sultan up by his armpits. There was a pattering of fluid to the floor, as the body finished voiding its decay, but the presence behind its eyes had grown stronger. “I have the framework of a mighty empire, and territories to be bled. I will replace the elite troops with my own fledglings, and farm the humans like the cattle they are. My armies will go out and bring all the countries of the world under my rule. The first and the last, and the only undead empire . . . and you want me to return home?”
He laughed, but the sound was only a death rattle, the amusement just as false as the love. What was it Radu had lived with all these years? He had told himself that it was human, that it at least remembered what it was to be human, that he and it could touch across the barrier of death and shame and guilt. Was that true at all?
“But you could still be our child too.” Alaya held out a hand to him, small and strong and desperately familiar. He remembered running to her, as an infant, climbing on her knee, and hugging her tight, with her cold arms coming to encircle his back and a cold and perfumed cheek settling softly on top of his head.
“Mother.”
She came forward and took his hand, the touch seeming to divide him in two. He trusted her, deeper than blood. He knew she was false.
She turned his wrist up to the light. “It’s for your own good, darling. It’s only because we love you.”
And something in him still wanted to give her that, wanted to give in, wanted to comfort her distress and make her smile.
The silver-green light washed like spring over the thin blue veins under his skin. Across the pool from him, the wings of the mummified angels quivered, their knuckled knobs skittering against the floor.
“Radu,” Frank whispered, leaning toward him, arms coming up as if to hold him back. Radu tugged experimentally, but his mother’s grip didn’t give. She tugged him forward and he went—this was his mother, of course he went with her to where his father stood with his own hand outstretched. Ready to haul him towards the sallow, seeping thing that stood between them, its eyes eager and its lips opening on curved, translucent fangs.
Frank dithered and then followed, a pace behind.
They were going to feed Radu to their new son. Like cattle led to the slaughter. Somewhere beneath his dazed obedience he found the strength to say, “No.”
Constantin had not yet touched him. Radu pulled back on Alaya’s grip with all his strength, shocking her, making her stagger and hiss. The dead sultan lunged at him like a rattlesnake, fingernails catching on his sleeve.
Frank’s voice, breaking comically high with hysteria, shouted, “No! Leave him alone!” All at once it was as if he stood at the centre of the sun. The tiles and the water reflected a brilliant light pouring from no source Radu could see. Everything was white and gold, blazing. Alaya’s grip on his hand flinched away. Five voices screamed like Hell on Earth. Squeezing his eyes shut, warm tears dripping from his chin, Radu threw himself backwards to freedom, collided with Frank.
Frank stumbled, hit the wall, and as he righted himself the light went out. Frank was the source of it? I can see his magic secondhand? Radu picked him up, set him on his feet. Looked behind to where three strigoi smouldered: his parents were only singed, the sultan was on fire from the waist up. The angels were on hands and knees now, their eyeless sockets glaring.
His parents bent to put out their protégé. Radu seized Frank’s arm and fled.
There came a knocking at the door. Zayd froze with his hand on the bolt. No light came through the windows of Ubaid’s house any more, it was full dark. The city belonged to the foreign devils and the boyar responsible had not returned.
He didn’t know what had. Hand on his charm, he called out “Who’s there?”
“Is that Zayd? It’s me!”
He threw open the chains and bolts, opened the door, grabbed her, and pulled her inside. “Mother! It’s not safe. What are you doing here? Have you left Auntie Jala all alone?”
His mother set her back to the door as if the night was trying to burst inside. She adjusted her veil primly. “Jala is a grown woman. Besides, I saw your people going through the cemetery today weeding out the demons. It isn’t Jala I’m worried about.”
“We’re fine,” he said, as the foreign princess and her slave poked their heads out of the inner door and slumped to see their companions had still not returned.
“We’re not fine,” Ecaterina insisted. “The others are not back. What if they’ve been caught?”
“Then we’ll find out in the morning.” Zayd ushered the women back inside and shut the inner door. The whole household was gathered in the largest, innermost room—Ubaid’s wives and their slaves, his concubines and theirs and all their children. It was an oddly eerie experience, being surrounded by so many heavily draped and veiled women. He felt self-conscious, immodestly exposed.
“What if they need help?” Mirela insisted.
“I think, given that they brought this on us, if they need help, they can find it for themselves,” he said, trying not to feel guilty or ungracious.
But he couldn’t get his mother to sit, kept guiding her to cushions and pushing her down there, only to have her rise again as if on springs. “Zayd!”
“Mother, whatever it is, it can wait until the morning. We’re safe in here and here we’ll stay. The problem has already been reduced to what it was when they arrived—only a few score of them are left. They can be dealt with in safety tomorrow.”
But his mother was as wriggly as a two-year-old. “What about the padishah?”
She brought another roll of ten charms out of her basket and flourished it in his face. Zayd stepped back as if stabbed, because yes, as early as the end of the first night his mother had given him a charm to give to the padishah emperor. He had decided that Mahmud was not worth saving. He had given the only spare protection in the land to Haji Nabih instead. Now the sultan was dead, and it was his fault. He had allowed the Lord of the Horizons, the son of glory, father and protector of all, to die, and he had done it out of deliberate choice.
He had just rather hoped she hadn’t noticed.
“What about him?”
Zerinah pushed him in the chest with the roll of paper. “There was a brother brought out of the kafes this morning, bathed and groomed and prepared to be girded with the sword of Osman tomorrow. The criers say he also is called Osman, which is an auspicious sign in these dark times.”
“And so?”
“We didn’t make a charm for him. The demons killed the last sultan. What if tonight they’re going to kill his successor?”
Oh. Oh, indeed. They could keep the empire paralyzed if, every night, they bit off its head. How long would it function without a sultan? How long would law and justice and tradition prevail if the fountain from which it came was blocked?
The princess and her servant looked at one another, Mirela’s wide, tanned face bright and sharp, the princess’s eyes steely. They had returned just as the birds began to sing for evening, bloodstained and weary but with a light in their faces as of one who has done hard work and thinks better of himself because of it.
