Angels of Istanbul, page 4
Another three courses, and the plates rose to teetering towers all over the table. Hot fried pastries filled with cream cheese and jam had given way to halva and chimney cakes and croissants filled with Turkish delight.
Then an incautious flirtation two places down from Radu made a lady recoil theatrically. She flung out an arm and her puffed sleeve brushed one of the stacks. It wobbled, lurched, and finally tumbled to the floor. Crockery smashed and rolled underfoot, knives and spoons pinged off the grey slate tiles, and the whole company roared with laughter.
Which seemed to be the signal for those who were not too drunk or stuffed to rise and filter out through the doors into the gardens. Radu found himself eddied back by the crowd into a position close to the family. They had taken up their place on one of the upper terraces of a garden that covered both sides of the river valley. A private bridge spanned the Dambovitsa’s sluggish flow—scarcely more than a hand’s width of silver under a dark sky full of stars.
Despite the alcohol, Radu shivered. He had not noticed night falling, had forgotten to be alert. He might, even now, be lulled by the plaintive singing of a Lăutari woman along with her two violinists, who stood beneath a rose-wound pavilion. Might be distracted by violets and anemones, dahlias and tulips and nasturtiums, lavender and mallow that grew in artful wildness on the riverbank, their scent faint and sweet in the welcome cool. It would be a mistake to forget to fear the night, but in this company, all too easy to do.
On the other side of the bridge, a pavilion like a shepherd’s hut had been assembled from canvas and flowering creepers. The tent door opened onto a small stage. A light inside threw a strange silhouette on the white walls, with bulbous skirts and a huge, triangular head.
The balcony around him began to fill up. Frank squeezed into the space on his left, and young Stefan, who had been in front of him, angled around to talk over his shoulder. Stefan, too, had the beginnings of the Sterescu nose—handed down from some Roman ancestor doubtlessly—and paired with his auburn curls and round, solemn little face, he might have been a young Augustus, except that he evidently wanted to talk about nothing but horses. “My father has bought me an Arabian, and I am on fire to go and ride him, but I have to do this instead.”
“Which stud is he from?” Radu asked, conscious that the boy’s sister was watching him again, with that same suspicious interest with which she had favoured him all evening. Stefan opened his mouth to answer, closed it again as all the folk packed tight around Radu gasped with expressions of mingled discomfort and awe.
“What?” Radu elbowed Frank. Stefan’s head had snapped back to watch the little stage, onto which a woman in an astonishing hat was squeezing. Her skirt had enormously emphasised hips, which she had to fold up against herself in order to pass the tent doorway. Her face was powdered to a stark white, and the shape of her huge triangular head was due to a wig almost as large as a sultan’s turban, topped with a miniature palace constructed from coloured feathers. She seemed an odd figure to inspire such awe.
He elbowed Frank again. “What just happened?”
“All the lights went out at once,” said Frank, apparently heedless that a lantern burned over the doorway through which they had come, and small candles flickered along all the branches of the tree in the centre of the terrace, lighting his stupidly wide-eyed expression with gold. “There’s a mist in the river valley and milky shapes moving in it like fish. Fish . . . in armour. Ah!” He laughed, the crowd with him. “And mer-creatures. How are you not seeing this?”
That was rather the question wasn’t it? Because what Radu was seeing was the back of someone dressed in black, hiding in one of the bushes, bent over a sullen orange glow. They piled on black handfuls of something, and then there was a thin trickle of smoke, accompanied by the rancid choke of wet leaves.
“Oh!” Frank pressed his fingertips to his mouth. “Now the mist is gone, and she’s there, all in golden armour and shining like the sun. And everything is glittering as if it was made of diamonds. There are palaces of glass and stars, and— Ah!”
Pleasant as it was to watch the elegant lines of Frank’s face express wonder, the sense of being excluded made Radu feel as hard done by as Stefan for a moment.
Though even Stefan was laughing aloud and clapping now.
“Horses”—Frank grinned, raising his hands to his ears—“across the whole sky. They look like they’re made of clouds, but they roar like thunder.”
A second small fire had been lit down by the river, and shone doubled, tripled. It took him a while to see mirrors in the dark, to guess that the scurry of six helpers was truly only the reflected endeavours of two.
Ecaterina dropped back from her father’s side to eye him with evident curiosity. “You’re not enjoying the greatest illusionist in the world?”
“All I see is smoke and mirrors.” He pointed them out, and she scoffed.
“Mademoiselle Giroux lives in a country where it is still legal to burn witches at the stake. Naturally she provides mechanisms behind the show by which those who would accuse her may be confounded. If ever France lost its head and chose to drag her to trial, she would be able to provide evidence that it had all been mere trickery and suggestion.”
Her earnestness, sister to Stefan’s grave solemnity, gave way to delight. She raised her hand as if to grasp something delicate, precious, that hung above her. “But you cannot tell me you look at that and do not see magic.”
“I see nothing at all.”
No, there was a fleck of white swirling, pale among the unmoving stars. He reached out, caught a paper butterfly, crushed by his hand. Caught, too, the sight of another black-clad helper in the far corner of the terrace, wafting scoops of the things into the air with the aid of a large fan.
“Frank?”
“They’re like tiny angels,” said the Englishman, holding out a hand flat as if to support a tame bird. “Or fairies, I suppose. And they’re singing.”
Radu turned to observe the crowd of his peers. Every one of them was smiling, exalted and delighted. “Would they really believe, in the morning, when the scars of fires are revealed, and they find coloured paper lying crumpled in the bushes, that that is all they saw? Are people so easily deceived?”
Ecaterina reluctantly took her gaze from the empty sky. “You would not believe how easily the masses of people are lied to. But even if they do not believe, the purpose of these small tricks is to provide evidence, just in case. There is no need to truly reproduce the spectacle without magic. It couldn’t be done. The point is simply to produce a reasonable doubt in a jury. This is as visible as magic ever gets, and although her audiences rejoice in it tonight, who knows whether tomorrow some priest or monk or pious lady might report it in a fit of conscience. That is why Mademoiselle Giroux refused to join the party, and refuses still to meet our guests afterwards. She does not wish to be recognised enough to be denounced.”
“I am the last person who could ever accuse her of anything.”
The pleasant warmth of feeling as though he might have a talent of use slid away as Ecaterina jumped with a shout of surprise and turned back to gaze raptly at nothing.
“Dragons,” said Frank, without prompting. Just like a man who has accepted that his companion is blind.
Radu had thought of this newly revealed talent of his as an ability to see the truth, but now it was revealed as an inability to perceive something that all others could. A lack of one of the senses common to mankind. It seemed he was a sceptic not because others imagined a magic that did not exist, but because he was blind and deaf to experiences that most humans shared.
“I’m glad to hear it.” Ecaterina took up the thread of the conversation again, but didn’t turn to face him, her eyes fully engrossed in whatever was happening above the river valley. For him, this “wonderful display” was boring as well as disheartening, and he wondered if the yawn was something else he should try to hide. He could go back inside and find a nip of ţuică and a book.
But the habit of secrecy was too ingrained. Everyone would notice if he did. Everyone would want to know why, and his peculiarities would be discussed. He could not afford that.
“There is such need for a school of magic in our country,” Ecaterina mused. “We have so much talent and strength, and all of it is currently undeveloped, our theoreticians ignorant, our practitioners untrained. We cannot afford to allow that to continue. Not if our neighbours discover how to harness it first.”
The idea was intriguing. If magic did indeed exist, and he had to admit it was beginning to seem likely, then perhaps this was a new avenue of working out his own situation with least damnation to all. Magic could do anything, yes? Then perhaps it might be possible to reverse the curse on his parents—make them human again. Let them live out their remaining years and atone and repent, so that when they did die naturally, they would have no reason to come back.
It was on his tongue to ask, Can magic cure the strigoi? but that would be a loose end that demanded to be pulled until it had unravelled all his secrets. “If I believed in magic,” he allowed instead, “I should like to know our country was well provided with it. Frank came here from England with a friend who studied it.”
Ecaterina strained her neck back to gaze at something in the sky. Something momentous, undoubtedly, from the hands she clapped over her mouth. Behind her a woman in emerald green was less restrained and shrieked. There were oaths and sharp laughter, and then the whole packed balcony of nobles applauded at once.
They stood for a moment longer, and then a dozen conversations started at once, and the crowd began to dissipate, taking the smoothed paths down to the gardens, or going back indoors. Ecaterina turned to Frank. “You couldn’t ask your friend to visit us?”
Frank stiffened, relaxed a little, and then stiffened again, as though he felt the pain twice—as though it echoed. “He’s dead, I’m afraid. A bandit attack.”
“I’m terribly sorry.” Her reaction seemed mere formality to Radu, but Frank must have seen a more sincere portrait of sympathy—he ducked his head and gave an embarrassed smile.
“I don’t suppose you have his notes?”
Radu bit down on a laugh. Ruthless girl! He quite liked that.
“Everything was lost,” he answered, sparing Frank the need. “Though if you put out a reward for them, it’s possible the bandits may find them again. But it shows they’re taking the subject seriously in England, yes? Perhaps you might find someone else at Cambridge with whom you could correspond.”
By way of apology, Ecaterina took Frank’s arm. He looked alarmed and delighted at the honour, like a fawn lured out of hiding by its loving mother. “You must absolutely come to the salon, and tell us all you know. Bring anyone else with a gift that you know of. There are not so many of us that we can afford to turn people away.”
“Anyone?” Frank asked, still mooning at her as if she were an angel come to earth. “Of any rank? Of any race?”
Go to Hell! Radu didn’t choose to move the weight of his habitual silence, but he allowed himself some inner incredulity and amusement. Frank meant to bring the Roma—what was her name? Mirela. That would be something to watch.
Ecaterina’s fierce certainty wavered. Perhaps she feared Frank would bring a Phanariot Greek, or a Turk. How far was this a nationalist movement and how far simply a lady’s hobby? “If you think they have the interests of our country at heart,” she managed at last, giving as little cause for offence as the diplomat’s daughter she was.
“It’s remarkable,” said Bogdan Ilionescu, the highest ranked of the onlookers who crowded around Frank’s chair. They were all, as far as Radu could see, admiring the empty palm of his hand, but he gathered that he was as usual missing something important.
Ecaterina’s salon had turned out to be a meeting with a cross section of Wallachian society, from Roma seers and witches to boyars of Radu’s rank. The meeting was held in a large apartment rented for the purpose, in the centre of Bucharest’s artistic quarter. It was brightly hung with Oltenian carpets and filled with furniture in the French fashion, rose pink beneath the warming spring sunshine. May was passing into June, and summer could be felt prickling at the skin at midday. Morning and evening, though, a cold wind still blew, and one wore linen waistcoats and carried a fur-lined cloak against the two extremes.
Tea was being served, a new fashion he did not see catching on. The proffering of small meat rolls and dainties was well enough, but Frank was the only man not to have brought his own alcohol and switched it at once for the steeped leaves.
“Are you going to tell me what wonder I’m missing this time,” Radu grumbled, “or are you going to leave me to guess?”
“You really can’t see?” Frank marvelled.
If Radu had known that attending this soiree meant being prodded like an experimental specimen, he would not have come. Next time, now that he’d had a proper introduction, the Englishman could come on his own. He certainly seemed to be causing almost as much of a stir in his own right.
“Bogdan Ilionescu here can call fire,” said Frank, still holding out his cupped hand. “He worked out a way of writing it down, so that when I followed the same steps, I could do it too. Apparently that’s not normal.”
“What isn’t?”
Ecaterina put down the large volume she and a companion had been examining at another table, and dragged herself over. She looked worse than usual today, her eyes bloodshot and the bags beneath them bruised. She moved badly too, as though her knees and hips ached.
“Typically those who have a gift have a gift,” she clarified. “They can make fire, but cannot influence water, they can herd mice, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or bake excellent cakes, or see into the future. One gift for one person. But Frank here can learn to do anything as long as there’s a spell written down that he can follow. His native gift seems to be the calling of light and darkness, though he’s inconsistent on that. But with the aid of instructions we’ve compiled from our books, as you’ve seen, he’s been able see into other rooms through the mirrors, turn a stick into a snake and back, move a vase from one end of the room to the other. His swift understanding of languages may also have some magical component.”
Frank smiled the little depreciating smile he used whenever forced to talk about his own virtues. “That would make me a true mage, apparently. Sounds special, doesn’t it? I can’t really believe it—not of myself—but Protheroe described it in a similar way. ‘Many people have a single magical gift, but only the mages can use magic for all things.’ That’s what he said.”
“My mother used to say the same,” Mirela agreed. She had put Radu’s money to good use and now wore a sturdy red skirt, a clean blouse, and a waistcoat and head scarf, though there were boots rather than shoes on her feet, suggesting she had not shed the habit of wearing trousers underneath. He didn’t know how she appeared to the others, but from the way the other witches had taken to her—from the way everyone startled a little when she spoke—he thought perhaps she was being herself.
“Most people have a dash of power, but it’s only the wise ones who have enough to do everything. We should have a toast to Frank, first mage of Bucharest. Maybe a party. Now you have to show us something else, though. What else can you do?”
“I don’t . . . This is rather . . .” Frank stuttered, taking refuge in his tea. “It’s all very well to say I might be able to do things, when I don’t know how. I can’t just make it up.” The stutter and the shrinking into himself was nothing like how Radu might have pictured a great magician from the folktales to act, and it was hard not to be charmed. Excited too, for Frank was his, and that meant the first mage of Bucharest was his. Perhaps it hadn’t been such an unwise thing to save the man after all.
“Are you saying,” Radu asked cautiously, “that if you can find a spell for something, Frank can cast it? Could he call up demons, or banish them?”
“Why would he want to?” Ecaterina lowered herself to sit on a rose-upholstered footstool, in a bright patch of sunlight, attracting perturbed looks from her little coterie.
Frank exchanged a glance with Radu, bless his quick mind. “Well, suppose someone else had summoned them—could I banish them?”
“I see no reason why not.” She joined her hands across her open mouth as she yawned, and then rubbed her forehead as if it pained her. “But that would certainly require the right ritual, the right spell.” She seemed to forget her weariness when she was lecturing, and the disturbed expressions on her guests’ faces eased as she grew enthusiastic. Even the women, Radu noticed, looked at her as if she were a gracious queen deigning to step down and explain concepts beyond the grasp of mere commoners like themselves. “The more complex something gets, the greater the difficulty in holding all the elements in your mind at once. That’s why there are rituals, to pin down each aspect before you move on to the next. To take something extremely complex and break it down into manageable pieces until the final incantation can release all the parts at once.”
She pressed her hand to her forehead, closing both eyes as if in pain or weariness, and yes, it was close and warm inside the room, and the heavy air smelled of old books and hot bodies wearing too much perfume, lye and soap and new boots and the vinegar of ink, but still it made the regulars rustle, distressed.
“Do you have such a spell?” Radu pressed, and she raised dulled eyes to his as though he was cruel to insist.
“No.”
May the devil eat you, he thought uncharitably, but she had launched on another explanation, every bit the host and expert at this gathering.
“We are working to collect such spell books as are in existence, but it’s a hard job getting hold of them. They are so valuable now, even though most of them aren’t accurate. They are often, as you’ve said yourself, only flights of fancy on the part of charlatans or madmen. Each spell recovered needs to be tested to see if it works, and then refined to perform better. It is the labour of lifetimes, and I . . . I really think we should start with better things than demons.”
