Angels of Istanbul, page 24
His mother’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. Some of her glee had given way to tenderness, but the majority of it was still pride. “You don’t have to do it alone,” she said gently. “And you build from nothing. Whatever you do will be greater than what came before.”
A quiet breakfast fortified him to a degree that made his earlier doubt seem childish. He had, with the help of others, saved the empire. Surely, with the help of others, he could establish an institution to rediscover the ways of magic and to teach them to others. It was no different an ambition than that of the foreigner’s woman Ecaterina. If she thought herself capable of it, surely he should too?
“I would like to see this house we have been given,” Jala said, after they had put away the pots from breakfast. She ran the silver coins in the chest contemplatively through her fingers. “And then perhaps go shopping. We will need rugs, cushions, tea sets, and tableware for guests—you must not be seen to live meanly, now you are such a great person.”
“Can you perhaps make it ready for a small party?” Zayd asked. The more he thought of it, the more Osman’s command to begin his reign with celebrations felt appropriate. “For those who were part of this guild before it was officially a guild: Adham, Monique, Suleyman and Ibrahim?”
“And for the foreigners,” his mother added. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking—if she remembered how she had persuaded him not to torture them for information, if she knew of the resentment and distrust he still felt when he looked at them.
But they were mages, all of them. Or whatever it was that Văcărescu was—an anti-mage, a thing in whose presence magic ceased to exist altogether. They were exactly what he had been asked to find for the glory of Istanbul. And they were Ottoman subjects.
Something shifted within him at that thought. Perhaps he did wrong to call them foreigners. They were, however reluctantly, fellow citizens of the abode of peace, people who had proved brave and essential allies when put to the pinch. If Zayd was Sheikh al Sihirbazlar, they were technically his resources to manage. “Yes, and for the foreigners too.”
A warm breeze slid down from the embassies on the brow of the hill and swayed the jasmine in Zayd’s new garden. The town house had proved to be on the Pera side of the Bosphorus, already furnished and decorated and with gardens just beginning to grow wild. Scattered books in English, and a bloodstain on one of the carpets suggested it had once belonged to one of the English ambassador’s staff. A small revenge, but an amusing one. Zayd had sent the carpet to be cleaned and hidden the books before Frank Carew arrived. This was an evening of reconciliation after all.
His foreign guests had come in tipsy and beaming, dressed for the wedding his messenger had almost interrupted, but sherbet and sweetmeats and a view of the sunset—brilliant bars of amber over a sky tinted and luminous as amethyst—had sobered them enough to sit among the flowers and hold a civilised conversation.
Frank and Monique indeed were already off into an impassioned discussion, in French, about the rights of women, and the possibility of persuading some stage performer, unknown to Zayd, into joining his guild.
The others sat mostly silent. Content, he hoped. They were watching the tortoises in Zayd’s garden, each of which had for the occasion been fitted with a little saddle wrought to carry a dumpy candle. Even illumined as they were, the reptiles could scarcely be seen among the foliage and the rocks—the effect was of slow stars, winding among the purple mullein and the gold and white nodding blooms under the swelling yellow globes of the ripening plums.
Mirela had coaxed one of the animals to her, was feeding it dandelion leaves while the light on its back shone on her bold, uncovered face. She had chosen to come dressed as a eunuch, and he had permitted it. What a shape-shifter actually was, was a matter of debate, and eunuch gave an approximate enough answer to that doubt. She smiled at him as he settled beside her, stirring the melting ice in his sherbet.
“So what now?” he asked, interrupting her impertinent remark about how he had come up in the world.
She laughed. “People are always asking me that. It seems a strange thing to ask a slave.”
Ecaterina, seated on a beautiful blue rug with a design of pink crocuses, looked up from what seemed to be a sober discussion with her new husband. He looked up too.
Zayd felt the remaining blame he held for Mirela fall away. It was true—why should you blame the slave for the uses to which their master put them? And she was so full of insolence and mischief it made him smile, made him want to do something good for her. “If you converted to Islam, took up a place with my guild, you would be freed. It is not legal to hold fellow Muslims as slaves.”
“You invited me here to steal my property?”
Văcărescu, however, he couldn’t get along with quite so easily, though he knew he should. The man had repented, had turned from his evil ways. Allah would forgive him and so Zayd had too. That was quite a different matter from the fact that the man’s arrogance still got on his nerves. “I am—”
Mirela put a hand on his sleeve and laughed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t play with you. The truth is they gave me my freedom as a wedding gift. It’s the first time I’ve been asked that question when it was my decision to make.”
“And do you have an answer?”
He had never seen her without the impetuous look, the devil-may-care dash. Not until now. She softened, almost to the point where he could believe she really was a woman. “I’m going home. Catia—Ecaterina, I mean—has offered me a place in her university, to find out how the shape-shifting works and how to teach it. I have my freedom, and if I go with her, then perhaps I can find my family again. They fled from a harsh lord and his demon kin. But perhaps when it is a well-loved lady who owns them, they might come back. I can search for them, at least.”
“Which means that you’re going back to Wallachia too, Khanum?”
“I am.” It was magic that made Ecaterina’s expression behind the veil seem so friendly, her voice so warm and her gestures so comforting. She had explained as much to him, but the knowledge did not make it any less effective. “I have a fief to rescue, a school to build, and a magical accumulator to guard and investigate. Also I want to be sure my father gets home safely, and to reassure my mother that she has not lost all her family at once.”
It seemed inarguable, but he was sad nevertheless. “I’ll miss you. We worked together well.” He contemplated the vast acreage of ignorance and misinformation in which he swam, and came to the conclusion that this university of hers might also be a valuable resource. “Since I am archmage of the empire, and your university will be within my purview, we should exchange notes, research, scholars, et cetera.”
“Of course.” She nodded. “I still want to learn your mother’s magic system. If you could get her to write down what she knows for me?”
Another thread of his resentment pulled away and unravelled in a long wisp, and suddenly there was nothing left of it. He could see that what waited underneath was excitement. Brimming excitement, as of a rare opportunity. Perhaps, with these people’s help, he could do this after all.
“When my mother has written the book, I’ll send someone to you with a copy. And while my messenger is with you, you can teach him everything you’ve found out about your Jar of Heaven, so that we can repair ours here in Istanbul and restore magic to my country.” He bowed to her, touching his forehead and his heart formally, and heard her breathe out quickly in what he thought was a silent laugh.
Rising, she took Mirela to join Monique, saying something to Frank that made him look over his shoulder, see Zayd and Radu together and head straight over, dropping into an absurdly protective huddle at his lord’s right hand.
Not absurd, Zayd reminded himself sternly. The young man might resemble a Circassian pleasure boy, but he was the most powerful of them all. He would be a prize to any nascent guild, and his own diffidence would keep him from trying to rule it, would make him a useful companion rather than a tyrant.
“And you two?” Because it was clear enough from the way they leaned together, each shifting unconsciously to accommodate the other, that they came as a pair, power and its antithesis, no matter which way you looked at them. “It seems to me that you owe us something. Will you not stay? Take the rank of Ikhtiyariyya in my guild and pay back labour for the lives your actions destroyed?”
Radu had not been prepared to be asked to stay. It felt unprecedented. In a long silence he tried to work out if he had indeed heard Zayd right. Why, after all of this, would he want to see Radu’s face for any longer than he could help?
Radu looked out to the river where a little caïque floated with a lantern in its stern. Night was falling, and the clear dark water had bloomed from beneath with a rising flood of jellyfish, white as appleblossom.
Stubborn pride pushed the words I don’t owe you anything to his lips, but he tightened them to stop the phrase from slipping out, while the world opened up around him like a casket full of treasures.
He didn’t have to go home.
Home was the windowed turret room in the library where even in sunlight he had known he was under siege. Home was a three-hundred-year-old burden, an endless guilt. It was being looked at by his peasants as though he was a monster, and by his monsters as though he was a shackle they would gladly shed. Home was a trap, and he didn’t have to return.
“If Catia went back in my place . . .” he mused, more to himself than to Zayd, trying to feel out where the ends of his chain might be. “Once Cezar was well enough to travel, he could teach her how to rule—he taught me. The people would love her. Everyone does . . .”
Frank leaned in and squeezed his arm, looking in his face as if he wasn’t sure whether to be encouraging or commiserating. “She’s going to change everything, if you let her loose,” he said, smiling. “She’ll have balls and salons. She’ll invite the Roma into the castle. She’ll have masons and builders all over the accumulator. That girl’s got plans.”
But there were no chains anymore. Laughter burst out of Radu in a startled bark. “Let her! I hope she guts it all. Except . . .”
Frank’s smile had widened, his whole expression settling on delight, as if he recognized that Radu was breaking through into a new kind of freedom. “Except?”
How beautiful he was! Thin lipped and grey eyed and capped with curling sunlight. Radu wanted him to have everything his heart desired, wanted him to be happy. “Except I know you coveted my library.”
Zayd snorted. For this party he had bedecked himself in a rose-silk suit and a turban like a small minaret, but his gentle, scholarly face was lit by a smile that approved of Frank’s priorities. “The guild of mages will need a library,” he said. “Here you could build your own, as beautiful and as well organized as you can possibly make it.”
Frank ducked his head, blushing. “You don’t have to sell it to me,” he mumbled. “I’d like that. I’d like being part of your new guild. But then I’d also like being part of Ecaterina’s university. The truth is, I’m happy to be wherever Radu is. I think he’s been owed the chance to make his own choices for a lot longer than I have.”
The stars had begun to come out in the sky, mirroring the ridiculous candle flames of the ambling tortoises. Every prick of light Radu tried to focus on swam in front of him until he realized there was water in his eyes, and shut them, pressing the tears back in with his fingers.
His monsters were gone, and his life was his own.
He turned into Frank’s embrace, putting his head down briefly on Frank’s bony shoulder, hoping the man could understand this meant thank you. This meant I love you. It meant I hope you know I would always be happy to be wherever you were too. But he couldn’t say any of those things. Not in public.
“My father named me Radu,” he said instead, “meaning it to shame me, because Radu Dracul tried to be a friend to the Turks. He believed that our two peoples would be better off allied in love and strength and honour. I no longer choose to be ashamed of that. If you’ll have me, I’d like to stay, at least for a while. To give something back, to learn to be someone new.”
Zayd sipped at his sherbet with an ironic tilt to his mouth, but his eyes had lightened, as though he was pleasantly surprised. “The ‘hero of Wallachia’ of whom Osman spoke?” He laughed. “You have not quite arrived at that title justly yet.”
It might have been a rebuke, but Radu chose to take it as a challenge. The night was sweet, he was free, and there was no one left in the world who could hold him back.
“Maybe not. But I will.”
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A note for eagle-eyed history buffs. Some of you may have noticed discrepancies between this history and the history of our own world. For example Constantine Mavrocordatos being on the throne in Wallachia in 1742 rather than Mihail Racoviță. From an author's perspective, I've made changes because I thought they were best for the story. From an in-world point of view, I felt it was hard to believe that nothing would have been changed by the Arising of Atlantis in 1732, and the subsequent resurgence of magic as an operative force in the world. A huge historical event like that must have had knock-on effects. The truth is, for ten years it's been a different world from ours, and in ten years an awful lot of things can change.
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Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She studied English and philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court, where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.
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Alex Beecroft, Angels of Istanbul
