Angels of Istanbul, page 22
Radu allowed himself a moment’s respite, two steps back while he drew his sword, a glance about the battlefield and up to where Ecaterina struggled in Mahmud’s grasp, her hands fumbling for her pockets. Radu’s warning hadn’t been enough, or Mahmud had simply been too fast for it to make a difference.
Mahmud had Ecaterina by the hair, pulling her throat to him, paying no attention to her flailing. Stupid creature. As Mahmud’s lips lowered to her skin, she pulled light oil from both pockets, slammed one bottle into his mouth and a second into his belly. Radu could hear her cry out as the glass shattered in her hand, cutting her. But Mahmud the Warrior, Caliph of the Face of the Earth, burnt like an oil-soaked reed, and crumbled into dust.
A horrified shout went up like the boom of a distant cannon from the watching Turkish army. Radu’s own countrymen, freed of the strigoi’s control, had stopped trying to get inside the dome of Frank’s protection. They no longer wanted to tear Radu and Ecaterina to shreds. Now it seemed the Turkish army had inherited the desire.
“You’ve no friends out there.” Constantin strapped the remains of his arm to his body with his belt now. The blood in which he was covered had begun to congeal and stink. Radu thought back and could remember nothing—tenderness, guidance, honesty, love—that he owed this creature that outweighed a lifetime of slavery and fear.
Constantin gave a grin that might have been winsome, but for the chunks of tendon between his teeth. “Spare me and I’ll hold them back. I’ll let you and your chosen ones live.”
Having witnessed Ecaterina murder their sultan through witchcraft, the Turks were incensed. Their army appeared to be throwing itself repeatedly against some invisible barrier, something of Frank’s perhaps, quivering like a struck cymbal beneath the fury of the Turkish forces determined to avenge their fallen sultan.
To the north, where the largest street held the greatest concentration of troops, there came a rumble and shout. An artillery company ran up their cannon and hurled it like a battering ram against the impermeable barrier.
Even from here Radu could see the strain on Frank’s face, tense as the wire of a pendulum. The long hands that seemed to hold up the sky trembled. But his lips moved, and his face was lit from within by a stern, transcendent glow. For all he was dressed like a modern young gentleman in a snuff-coloured suit and riding boots, he looked very much like a wizard from a storyteller’s word hoard.
Mirela, running back from an errand of her own with Osman by her side, stopped and stared at him, openmouthed.
That was when Radu realized that Frank was now hovering several feet above the ground as if standing on a pillar of light. Radu could have shouted for joy to see the insecure little scholar so godlike—indifferent to the laws that bound other men—but the impressive display made him blindingly obvious to everyone in the Turkish army. None of them could fail to see that it was Frank who was holding them back.
Constantin’s sword glinted in the light of sorcery as he drove it towards Radu’s ribs. The glint saved Radu’s life, breaking him out of his distraction. He twisted aside, so the blade glanced off the metal plaques of his belt.
“I can feel your reluctance.” Constantin grinned. “You couldn’t kill your own father, child. Just think what that would make you.”
Radu had been thinking of that all his life. Parricide would make him a monster, yes. Perhaps it took one monster to destroy another.
Constantin laughed and, tilting back his head, shouted in Turkish, “Stone the infidel!”
This made no sense at first. Radu ignored it, circling his father, trying to come into a position from which he could take a clean swing at his neck. But then Frank cried out, and the reflection of his magic wavered along the blade of the sword, shades of indigo and viridian flashing through the light.
Radu looked—he couldn’t help it—and Constantin actually stepped back to savour his distress at the sight of the janissaries hurling rocks up at Frank, smacking into his upturned hands.
A cobblestone hit Frank in the temple. He yelled with pain and surprise, locking gazes with Radu. Knocked out of his trance, Frank still had that strange helpless innocence in him that had prompted Radu to save him, to start all of this. Then his eyes rolled up into white glistening slits, blood trickled from his nose. He fell back, limp and defenceless, into the angry crowd.
Radu’s whole body seized up. He couldn’t breathe, even to shout No! because every cell, every drop of blood was doing it for him. Frank!
While he was screaming silently in denial, Constantin surged in, grabbed his sword arm above the wrist, and pressed. The strigoi’s strength was gargantuan. Radu’s bones bent. He buckled, still struggling to breathe, but survival instinct set him fumbling behind himself on the corpse of his horse where he had left his broken bow, his quiver. There.
His arm snapped in Constantin’s hand, both bones, one after another, shearing into sharp points. The pain brought bile to Radu’s throat, but it kick-started his heart once more, as with a jolt of red panic his mind seemed to surge into one last gallop. Frank might have fallen, but Radu wasn’t yet ready to die. He ground his teeth to keep the scream in as Constantin squeezed his bones together, slicing the knifelike tips of them through the muscle from beneath. With Frank’s barrier down, Radu could hear the running feet, the jangle of sword belts and armour that was the sound of his enemies getting closer. He itched to strike, but he didn’t have the right angle yet, couldn’t waste his last strength.
“They’re coming for you.” Constantin leaned in close to whisper it, fetid breath cold. “They will ram that stake through you from the arse to the mouth, but not fast. With luck you’ll be screaming for days. Or—” He shook Radu by the broken arm, surprising a whimper out of him. “There is still time for you to accept eternity at my side. I am the only one who can save you now.”
Bone sawed through Radu’s skin in a burst of blood, drawing Constantin’s eyes. He lowered his head to sniff, and Radu—in a battle rage so pure he hardly had space for anger—brought up his other arm with all his strength and punched a wooden arrow into his father’s heart. “I will take impalement over you.”
Constantin’s mouth fell open, and his eyes widened. He clutched at his chest, trying to yank the arrow out, but it was in all the way to the fletching, and even that was burning with a blue-hot flame. He choked, and fire belched from his mouth. The skin began to peel back from his eyelids. Radu looked away—to the soot-scorched dais, where two archers had knocked Ecaterina’s feet out from beneath her, were holding her on her knees.
He wished her strength, to throw them off and die fighting. Or if not, then strength to resist torture with pride, as so many of his country’s martyrs had done. He was proud of her, at least—excellent and valiant woman, a credit to her warrior ancestors. God would be with her now.
And for me, death, he thought, as a dozen hands seized him and threw him down, pushed his face into the cobbles. Well, he hadn’t really believed it would end any other way. They pulled his broken arm behind him to manacle it, and the fire-arrow of pain ignited the little pocket of madness he kept in reserve. Death, then. But death while fighting, death clean and sudden at the end of a blade. He would force them to kill him now, not let them take him for torture at their leisure.
He kicked out blindly, felt someone grunt and reel back. The grip on his arms slackened enough that he could hurtle himself forward and drive his still lowered head into an unprotected stomach. That gave him space to lurch to his feet, and staggering, weaponless, punch the closest warrior in the face, all but pushing himself onto the sharp point of the man’s sword.
When Ecaterina glassed the dead sultan with a bottle full of sunlight, Mirela felt the mood shift in the crowd around her. The Turkish troops had been uncomfortable, sympathetic to their Christian allies’ plight, only too confused to disobey a direct order from their sultan, once-dead though he might be. With Mahmud’s destruction that changed, narrowed down and simplified into nationalistic rage. She watched them throw themselves against Frank’s barrier, watched Frank’s face smooth and empty as if he had gone somewhere very far away, and she could almost taste disaster on the air like an approaching storm.
Turning, she ran back the way she’d come, up through the paved streets and into the covered market. Figures hanging out of shop doorways and through the casements of upper windows called to her, perhaps to ask her to stop, to tell them what was happening, why the harbour was alight and the night a clamour with voices. She put her head down and ran on until she slid, gasping, throat burning, to a halt outside the perfume shop where they had taken refuge earlier.
Slipping a hand into her sash, she felt the hard lumps of the two sun-bombs she had palmed for herself from the boyars’ stash. Reassuring things, for one who didn’t know how to wield a sword and had no other defence.
The thought that she had been left on the sidelines unprotected, with no place in the plan—left once again to wait until she might be needed and ignored until then—made her pause on the threshold before going in.
She could walk away right now. The angry crowds down there didn’t know she had anything to do with the strigoi, the dead sultan, or the living one. She could simply keep walking, pick up another job the way she had picked up the work of a waterman or footman, lose herself in Istanbul, and finally be free. She did not stand out here, even in her own form. No one here looked at her dark skin and thought, Untrustworthy Roma thief, lying whore, devil’s mouthpiece, and temptress.
Here it was the Vlachs who stood out as evil-eyed foreigners. If she wanted a new life, escape from slavery, she only had to walk past the shop and keep going. The whole world was before her.
But her family was somewhere back in Wallachia. If she ever wanted to see them again, she had to make sure that the strigoi were dead. That hadn’t changed. If the monsters won here, home would not be safe for long. Even if the strigoi fell here, if Radu fell with them, then another boyar would be given his land, would technically own Mirela and her people. It wasn’t that she particularly liked Radu, but at least he saw her as a person. His successor would not. And Ecaterina had been kind—had treated her like a colleague, had been fascinated by her gift and respectful to the seers of her people. In Ecaterina’s salon in Bucharest there had been no seating the Roma apart, no watching them with sour eyes in case they stole the silverware.
It wasn’t that she liked her companions, she told herself again. She had no business going around liking Vlachs. She just didn’t want them to die. Sighing, she brushed aside the curtain on the door and stepped back into the shop. “Osman? Your Highness? I think we need you.”
He didn’t understand her words, but the beckoning gesture got itself across, and he returned with her. By the time they both got back to the harbour, the soldiers were throwing stones at Frank, Zayd ineffectually trying to bat them away from him with his bare hands.
Inside the enclosure, Văcărescu was fighting with Constantin. Ecaterina was on her knees by her father’s head. Praying, probably.
Zayd came to Osman’s side like a falcon returning to the wrist. “You shouldn’t have brought him here. It’s dangerous!”
Now that Zayd was out of the way, the soldiers rushed to get at Frank. A burly fellow stooped down and prised up a cobblestone from the street. But what Mirela thought was, Praying! Praying. Now there’s an idea.
She ducked into a patch of shadow under the doorway of one of the warehouses. Recalling every detail she had seen of Grand Mufti Nabih, she allowed herself to take on his appearance. Catia had asked her how shape-shifting worked, as though she assumed Mirela knew herself. She didn’t. And that was another reason not to run away. She was curious about what Catia’s university could teach her if it ever came about.
A worry for tomorrow. Now she wished to look like the patriarch of Istanbul, and so she did.
Frank’s shout of pain and shock almost broke her concentration as it was abruptly cut off. She opened one of the perfume bottles and splashed light into her palms, rubbed it into her face and all over her hands. It made her glow with a thin wash of golden, otherworldly light like a single layer of gold leaf. Like the radiance of one transfigured by divinity—a saint revealed in glory.
The crowd’s jeering was frightening now. The army rumbled with a low malevolence. She didn’t let herself think, simply adjusted her green turban and plunged back out into the night’s violence.
Osman and Zayd ran to her with choked voices and grief-stricken eyes. She winced with sympathy. They had loved the man whose form she wore. Now that she was wearing his body without permission, pretending to be him returned as a saint, she half expected them to slap her, to bawl at her for blasphemy and dishonour.
They surprised her. Zayd tapped a bandsman on the shoulder, showed him the apparition with one hand and borrowed his zurna with the other. Putting the oboe-like instrument to his own lips, he blew a weird, high creaking shriek of a note that made all of those around him stop and look.
The awe and dropped jaws would have made Mirela giggle if that had not been a good way to get herself killed. She watched men recognise Nabih—Nabih the saintly, Nabih the wise—and wished she knew enough Turkish to speak to them. Instead she simply nodded and smiled, parting the crowds easily to bend over Frank’s fallen form.
Unconscious and very much bruised, he was still breathing. Before Mirela could straighten, consider how to tell them she didn’t want him harmed any further, without revealing that she couldn’t speak Nabih’s language, Osman handed her someone’s cloak. The gesture made her beam at him. Oh, clever. This was a man she could imagine guiding a country well.
Folding the cloak up, she lifted Frank’s head and lay it on the makeshift pillow. It made the point—See? If I, the saint, treat him gently, so should you.
She motioned for Zayd to lead on. Going before her, he blasted her a way into the soot and filth of the arena with his tortured notes. She followed, and Osman followed her.
Văcărescu was still fighting out there, like a wolf with one foot in a bear trap. She was so close she could see the reflected shine of Nabih’s face in Văcărescu’s half-mad eyes before the men around him recognised her and dropped their blades.
“Who—” Văcărescu staggered as the fight went out of him. His whole throat was a bruise and his right arm bent where no joint should be, but he seemed on the verge of laughing. “Who are you . . .” And she remembered that he never saw her as anything other than who she was. Quickly, she gestured Zayd to intervene before he could say this time.
“This is the Grand Mufti Hajji Nabih Ibn Aaban Veli,” Zayd announced in his best carrying voice. He gave Văcărescu a pointed look. Mirela was so proud of them all when Radu took the hint and wearily, carefully, went to his knees in front of her.
The tenor of the crowd’s murmuring shifted back into confusion. Everyone knew Nabih. Clearly no one was surprised that at this dark hour he should be chosen by heaven to intervene. But they had expected him to smite down this enemy of the faith, not to lay a hand in blessing on his head. She could feel them wondering what it meant, what they had misunderstood.
Such fun! Resisting the urge to break out into an un-Nabih-like grin, Mirela beckoned to Văcărescu to rise. With Zayd’s help he managed it, followed her, white lipped and limping, up onto the dais. They had caught the attention of the whole army now—of both armies, the janissaries and the Wallachians. There was a tentative relief in the air. All these men had seen horrors: the fledglings, Constantin feeding on one of his own compatriots, walking dead men, corpses that burned at the touch of light. Mirela could feel how very much they wanted it to end like this—with a holy miracle. With direct divine intervention, the forces of good visibly triumphant over the dark.
All she had to do was shift their faith to someone who could actually give them an explanation. Conscious of all those hopeful gazes, she led Osman into the centre of the dais. He had already begun to walk as though the whole Earth beneath his feet belonged to him, and his face shone simply through the consciousness of his own glory. Attired in all the richness of his rank, handsome and in his prime, Osman already looked the part.
Mirela paused to drive home the drama of the moment, to remind everyone in the crowd that she represented a holy saint, a visitation of God on Earth. Then she prostrated herself in front of Osman.
At once, Zayd took a long deep breath and bellowed, “Hail to His Sacred and Imperial Majesty Sultan Osman Çelebi Khan, Padishah, Sovereign of the House of Osman, Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Commander of the Faithful and Successor of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe!”
And with a noise like the soft flump of snow off a roof, everyone in the dockyards fell to their hands and knees.
“My people,” Osman declaimed—a little uncertainly at first, but his voice firming up and gaining conviction as he went on. Zayd, on his knees beside Mirela, whispered a running translation.
“Today a great evil has been defeated by this saint Nabih Ibn Aaban, who you have seen by my right hand, by my archmage Zayd Ibn Rahman who you have seen by my left, and by the aid of our loyal vassals, the princes of the Aromani.
“This creature that you have seen destroyed by fire was not my brother, not the brave and radiant Mahmud your sultan, who lies now peacefully at rest with his forefathers. It was but a puppet in his likeness, controlled by the evil wizard Constantin. It was this vile sage who brought against us the demons in the night, and he it is, stained with the blood of his crimes, whom you have seen brought down here by a hero of Wallachia.
