Angels of Istanbul, page 8
“It’s all the more vital now that I must go home.”
What part of ‘You will be hanged if you set foot in this country again’ did you not understand? Radu thought, remembering what Frank had told him of his father’s parting words. But he couldn’t say that here. “All the more impossible. We couldn’t let you, Frank. You’d be shot as a spy before you got out of Bucharest. So many people here know you as ‘that Englishman.’”
“Fond as I am of you,” Sterescu agreed, dull voiced, dull eyed, “I would have to agree. You have heard enough of the voivode’s council already for it to be treason for me to allow you to run back to an enemy with whom we are presently at war. I will have to ask you to give me your word of honour that you will not try it.” He raised that listless gaze to Frank’s as though it was infinitely heavy. “I warn you that if you do not give it, we will have to imprison you until such time as the hostilities cease.”
“You’re a Christian country,” Frank gaped, outraged. “Why would you ally yourself with the Turks against us?”
“It stings us too.” Radu thought of the casual superiority of the Ottoman ambassador, carried in so that his feet would not have to touch the floor. The fear on their foreign prince’s face, and the cowed sullenness of the other nobles. “For hundreds of years they took our sons in the devshirme—the slave tax—ripping them from their mothers to fight their wars for them. That has ended, but using us as expendable armies has not. They call us, and we come to heel like the dogs we are.”
“And if you didn’t?” Frank fixed him with that self-righteous look of his. The one that always reminded Radu that life must seem so straightforward when you were always on the winning side.
“Over centuries,” Sterescu admitted, sadly, “we have tried to fight off this yoke. We have never succeeded. Each time we try, the tribute grows heavier. Time to acknowledge when we are beaten, I think.”
An idea came to Radu like a morsel of food breathed instead of swallowed. It lodged in his mind unexpectedly, made him choke and then laugh—laugh with joy.
Both of his companions turned to him as if he’d gone mad. He laced his fingers together and pressed them against his mouth, to stop from guffawing. This was not the place.
“At any rate, you can’t go off to war until you’ve cleared out the plague pit and all the graves,” Frank reminded him. “Or you won’t have any sort of city to come home to.”
“Hn.” Sterescu tugged on his beard, looked at Radu this time with an eye grey as frog spawn. “I have kept that matter discreet, but even Father Iosif of Plumbuita, who exorcised the demon from Antim Ivireanu, could not find it in himself to approach the place with intent to dig them out.” He sighed so deeply that the candles in their lanterns by the door flickered. “So I don’t see what cause you have to laugh, young man.”
“Give me your word, Frank, that you will not run off to alert your countrymen, or for any other reason,” Radu said. He was trying not to be too triumphant prematurely. It might not work. Oh, but it will! “In return I will give you my word that I have an idea that will fix all of this. The strigoi, the war . . . I can put it all right.”
Frank glanced at Sterescu, as if to ask him what was going on. The stolnic smiled, looking almost interested for the first time in the conversation. Frank’s pale-blue eyes flicked to the icon of St. Mary that stood in its niche in the corner, and thence to the tiny barred window just beneath the ceiling, as though seeking divine guidance.
“Very well,” he conceded at last. “I swear not to leave your side except on errands I have agreed with you beforehand, and then I will return expediently as I can. I will not attempt to leave, nor send any message to my countrymen until the war is over. On this I give you my word of honour.”
“Good. Then come with me and we will try this plan.”
Sterescu interposed his bulk between Radu and the door. “You’ll tell me of your success, and some more detail, when you return?”
Radu wasn’t going to tell until he knew it would work, and maybe not even then. “Of course. I must ready my household to obey the sultan, but I will return with good news—I hope—shortly after nightfall.”
Frank fretted uselessly for the rest of the day. Oh, he was hard at work in his capacity as Radu’s secretary, but dashing off letters did not keep him from inner turmoil. He worried his lip as he wrote a letter to Cezar back in Valcea, ordering him to gather the household troops, “and as many large and deep wagons as you can bring,” and to ride as swiftly as he might to join them in Bucharest. This was dispatched by one of the fast couriers who had been cantering out from the capital all day long, as the other boyars gathered their troops and ammunition.
He exchanged a long series of notes with the palace official in charge of the muster, learning details of the ships set aside to carry them down to Istanbul, and where their troops would be bivouacked until the sultan’s generals had need of them.
“We are cavalry,” said Radu, offhand, as though Frank should know this already. “Not sailors. The fact that they want us at all means they are envisaging a land battle. So we can expect to be taken somewhere—perhaps to England itself—and landed there to make a frontal assault.”
Frank put down his pen, and Radu looked up at the sudden silence. “I hope it will not come to that. If it does, and we are landed in England, I will look the other way long enough for you to go to your own people.”
And that hurt too, surprisingly. It made Frank wonder again whether he had a people he could call his own. How much did he owe a country that had turned him into a pariah? Was not his new home, which had taken him in when he was broken and useless, and remade him with hope, more entitled to his loyalty?
Fortunately it was a question with a simple answer. “I gave my word. I will not leave your side.”
Radu laughed and cast a brisk glance at the tall windows that gave out onto the balcony. The sky was glowing like cherries above, indigo below. “Does that mean you’re coming with me now?”
“To finally hear this plan? I certainly am.”
Taking a lantern, they trekked back down to the chapel in the reeds—their feet had begun to make a little path of bent and browned grass. Evening was bringing calm with it, and dew, soft and cold. Along the river valley, mist thickened into fog, the same odd, washed-out silver blue of the distant stars.
Frank moved a step closer to Radu, who was already losing his own colour to the dark. He was visible enough for Frank to read his expressions, but twilight had painted him in shades of ice and midnight.
The hair stood up along Frank’s neck as he felt a cold far more profound than that of the night. The mist billowed, and then Alaya was next to him, beautiful as the spirit of the snow, in pale blue and silver lace, dotted here and there with blood spots.
Constantin stepped out of the silence next, all in white and scarcely to be seen in the mist, with water sparkling in his beard like combed diamonds, and on his hat like pearls. There was a brown crust around his mouth and in his moustaches, and he hadn’t yet shed his disapproval.
“Mother.” Radu removed Frank’s restraining hand from his wrist and stepped towards them, smiling. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. Won’t you come into the house and sit with us as you used to? I’ve missed you.”
This was not what Frank had expected to hear at all. Nor, judging from Constantin’s raised eyebrows, had he. But Alaya beamed with delight and stepped forward to hug Radu—carefully, Frank noticed—with her hands and face touching only the many layers of his coats.
“I’m sorry we were harsh to you before,” she said, smiling up at him earnestly. “We were very eager to come here, but we shouldn’t have bullied you into it. We should not have struck you. I don’t know what came over me, but I promise it won’t happen again. Can you possibly forgive me?”
A pause, long enough for Frank to suspect Radu’s reaction would be the subject of fierce inner debate, and then Radu hugged her back and smiled. “I always do.”
“Your father missed you too.”
The two men, one alive, one dead, examined each other over her head, exchanging a long, flat look as if each were daring the other to break first. At length Constantin shrugged one bony shoulder. “It’s true I turned the boy to annoy you. You had been ignoring us.”
“You old monster. You could have just sent me a note.”
Frank disapproved. Wasn’t this chat over cosy for a plan to end the war? He had obviously misjudged the amount of affection on both sides of this demonic family. Even now the marks of Alaya’s teeth itched in his skin, but Radu had missed her?
He turned away from the three of them, to watch where the torches and lit windows of the city shone through the thickening fog, and cold speared him through a second time. A white blur on a dark shadow moved, stepped close enough for him to see the sallow, yellow skin, the long, rat teeth, clumps of hair falling from its skull and the bones showing through its arms. It stood watching him with eyes as flat and expressionless as a shark’s, and as it waited another emerged to his right, and then a third.
“Radu!”
Radu looked, as they continued to come, singly and in pairs. He beckoned, and Frank scurried to him, breathing hard as the graveyard crowd grew. There wasn’t a sound from any of them. “They’re fledglings,” Radu explained, in the same voice he used for talking philosophy. “Halfway through their transformation. Their human bodies are decaying, the spiritual body is not yet fully congealed. They’ll be handsomer when they’re finished. I’m surprised young Stefan was as well formed as he was.”
“These we just tolerate.” Alaya smiled at them all with the condescending pride of an owner towards her dog. “Him we encouraged.”
As the night deepened, Radu’s lantern shone out intensely gold, making a sphere of illusory safety in the cold and dripping silence of the fog. Watching more of the creatures take their place at the edges of the light—there must be almost a hundred of the things by now—Frank was struck by the eerie feeling that he was the only human left. Radu was so unaffected, so confident in his fearlessness, that he almost convinced Frank he belonged with the dead rather than with the living.
“Let us not speak about Stefan,” he was saying. “That death has put your position in some peril.”
“At your hand, son?” Constantin levelled a measuring gaze at Radu. Frank could almost see the calculation in his eyes—the knowledge that here was someone who might pose a threat, balanced against the loyalty owed to family. “Though we have bred our line for strength, I did not think you had such violence in you.”
All around them, the fledglings took a step forward. Frank—who had lately learned, from his own father, exactly how much the loyalty due family counted—swallowed and crowded closer to the light.
“Mislike me not for being what you taught me to be.” Finally, Radu seemed to take stock, recognise that he was being threatened. “But hear me now. Father, you rode with Vlad Tepes, did you not, when he went to take the faith to the Turks and free our people from their oppression?”
“I did.” Constantin retreated, so that he could sit down on the damp marble steps of his mausoleum. Alaya moved to stand beside him. This left space for Frank and Radu to come a little away from the ring of watching corpses, though Frank still felt their thirsty gazes like a spiked collar around his throat.
“You have often spoken to me of the degeneracy of our own times, and how we should not have given up that fight until it was won.”
“I have. Though I am dead, I retain more true patriotism than any of the fat sycophants and fawning adulterers of this generation’s court.”
Radu smiled. “How would you like to go to Turkey? Here in Bucharest, you feed on your own people. It would be wise of you to restrain yourselves and ration your kills, lest you eat the entire city and despoil your own good country. But the sultan has commanded us to provide him with troops. We go by ship to a muster in Istanbul itself.”
Alaya clapped her hands together before her mouth and bounced on her toes, like the fifteen-year-old girl she had once been, offered a fine gown or a ball in her honour.
“In Istanbul,” Radu went on, his eyes fixed on his father, “there are five times as many people as there are in Bucharest, and they are all our enemies. You could feast without restraint. Avenge Dracul and Brâncoveanu and all our other martyrs. You could finally do what they could not and decimate the Turk from within.”
“A crusade, to finish what I began when I was alive.” Constantin stroked his beard thoughtfully, “I like it.”
“You will be saving your own people.” Radu reached out and squeezed Frank’s forearm in a grip that was probably meant to be reassuring. “And Frank’s too—for the Turks have called for war against Frank’s country.”
Frank drew in a deep breath and regretted it as the stench of decaying flesh hit the back of his throat. But this . . . this was the plan to make everything right? Not to destroy the creatures, but to let them loose?
It was true he had no love for the Turks himself. They had declared war on Britain, and he wanted them stopped. There was not a village on the coast without its history of terror at the hands of the white slave traders. The Barbary corsairs, who answered to the sultan, for centuries had carried off the flower of English womanhood to debase in their harems, young boys to be gelded for the same purpose, and men to be chained to the oars of galleys, starved and worked to death.
“I have men from Valcea coming with wagons to transport you and your creatures to Timișoara, where we will be provided with ships to take us down the coast of the Black Sea to Istanbul. There we will be expected to disembark to be given our orders. If the fledglings can be complete by then, I will land you as my troops. From there, I suggest you destroy the janissaries first. But you will do as you wish, I’m sure. You always do.”
“Ravagers of our men, despoilers of our women,” Frank’s father had told him. “Idol worshipers—devil worshippers, more like. Corrupt, cruel, and depraved. Poised to overrun the cradle of Western civilisation. It has always been our sacred duty to resist them. To drive them back and perhaps, one day, regain the holy cities for our own.”
It felt natural to hear Radu speak the same language. His people had lived that much closer to the threat, had feared and fought it almost since the time of the Romans. But if that was natural, then Frank must be unnatural in this respect too, because the thought of turning an army of these creatures loose on his enemies gave him no joy at all. Knowing it was something else Radu did partly for his sake . . . it made him want to tear his own skin off, put his hands in his cleft chest, and pluck out his own heart.
“What do you say?” Radu urged.
“Oh, darling, lets! Just think of all the juice we could squeeze from such a big city.”
Constantin smiled and raised a hand. As though they were will-o’-the-wisps that a breeze had snuffed out, the standing army of the undead disappeared suddenly, silently, from behind Frank’s back. Their master reached out a long white hand and ruffled Radu’s hair. He wore a smile that made the tip of his fangs poke out beneath his lips. “To war, then. After so long I feel . . . almost alive.”
“What if we wanted to recruit?” Alaya asked sweetly. “Better to take a big army than a small one, yes?”
“No.” The little glowing moment of mutual smugness passed. Radu’s face firmed up from hopeful to stern. “I believe the numbers you have already will fill to capacity the wagons I have to deliver us to Timișoara. Besides, I have already told the officials in charge of the graveyards to burn any new dead as soon as they arrive. It takes a strong will for a strigoi to assemble a body out of ashes, so I’ve heard. Your pickings here are over.”
Constantin’s smile fell away. His expression now was the one Frank read as Are you getting to be more trouble than you are worth? “And in Istanbul?”
“Make as many as you like. I don’t care. Eat them all.”
Constantin beamed with fatherly pride, seized Radu by the elbows, and leaned in, embracing him and kissing him on the cheek three times, without even breaking the skin. “You have my word.”
Frank didn’t know what to think of himself as he realised that some of the black bitterness in his chest came from jealousy. Some families were loyal to one another even across the barrier of death and species. Why then should his own have broken so easily? Was he really worse than this?
Ecaterina should not have been grateful that she was not the only heavily veiled mourner in the street, but she was. Not that sharing the grief with others made it easier to bear—if anything it made her angry that Stefan was not getting his due of sorrow because all these other people were busy with their own. But it did mean that she was not immediately recognized as she walked about the city. After courteously expressed death threats in the post and finding a pouch of hair and iron nails, and a tiny bottle of water and of salt tucked under the porch door step—a clear attempt to cast the evil eye on her—she had begun to feel under siege.
A pall of smoke from the graveyards darkened the summer sky and made the light yellow grey. Ash was falling like dirty snow. The first pyre had needed the driest tinder and most seasoned wood to burn, but now they were true bone-fires, and fed themselves on the fat and the skeletons of the city’s many dead. She didn’t at first distinguish the smell of wood smoke from that of burning fat. Not until she turned the corner and came into the quiet end of furriers’ street, where she had rented the rooms for her salon.
There a whiter smoke gathered in cloud-like roiling, the building itself gutted and smouldering—a heat haze still wriggling over the acrid black spikes of wood that poked from the tumbles of brick.
