Heart and Soul (32 page)

She looked as though she would protest, but in the end, she gave him her hand and returned his smile with one of her own. “Very well,” she said. “Let us be on our way. Where do you intend to marry me?”

“I believe,” he said, “there are some ministries in Hong Kong that will do most admirably. And in those far-off locations, they don’t tend to look too closely when one tells them one’s bride is of age.”

Something like a shadow passed across her face, and he was not at all sure what it meant. But one thing he knew—she put her hand in his arm and walked out of the compound under his escort.

NIGHTMARES

Nigel was sleeping, and he should have been having
quite a restful sleep. After all, he was in the broadest bed he’d been in since he’d left his parents’ home—a well-appointed, well-cushioned sleeping arrangement, consisting of a carved frame and a heavy mattress, surmounted with soft sheets and quilts.

Though it was a little warm and a little humid, it shouldn’t have been warm and humid enough to disturb Nigel’s rest. And yet, between the soft, well-pressed linen sheets, Nigel was tormented with unquiet dreams.

In his dream, he was aboard a carpetship. It didn’t look like the
Indian Star,
but more like a mishmash of all the carpetships in which he’d flown. On the broad navigation deck, Nigel sat upon the thronelike chair of the flight magician, his magic solidly enveloping him and the ship both, keeping them afloat.

A man bent over him, appearing with the suddenness of dreams, and whispering in Nigel’s ear, “Mr. Oldhall, your wife requires your presence.”

“Wife?” Nigel said, and turned to look at the man, wondering how Emily could possibly have made it aboard this carpetship. Hadn’t he left her in Africa, remarried—and quite happy, for that matter, in her new life?

In the dream he rose, ready to protest. If Emily was there, she was, in fact, no wife of his. As much as he felt guilty over his haphazard marriage, she couldn’t possibly consider herself his wife. They had never consummated their all too short-lived marriage. And she was now living with—and for all he knew, bearing children to—a tribal leader of an old and sacred village in the heart of Africa.

But just as suddenly as he rose, as suddenly as his mind had conjured up the image of this carpetship and its crew, he was in the crew quarters and knocking at a door. He almost called out
Emily,
but a momentary and disconcerting awareness of his body lying on the bed, many miles away from the dreamed space, stopped him. Instead, he knocked again, and the door opened, as though his mere knock had been enough.

In the cabin stood Red Jade Lung, wearing British clothes of a cut and make that Nigel had never seen on her. It was a society’s matron attire. A well-tailored dark blue dress with the curious bump in the back unfolded in a cascade of flounces. Nigel was not sure where the awkward fashion had originated, or why females thought it all the crack. In his mind he called it camel’s hump, for it seemed just as strange a disruption of a woman’s harmonious form. But the dress, at the sides, and in the front, displayed enough of Jade’s natural form that he could not help but be charmed, whatever the excrescences of fashion that accrued to it.

A wave of tenderness enveloped him, as though they were indeed married—and for many years now as well—and he extended his hands to her. “My dear,” he said.

She extended her hands to him, in turn, with equal warmth, but her face, surrounded by the complex up-swept coiffure of ladies in the social circles that Nigel’s mother frequented, remained aloof and, in fact, disturbingly intent. Like the expression he’d seen on her as he unveiled the ruby.

He got a feeling that this dream—and he was fully aware of dreaming—was both more and less than it seemed. It wasn’t a dream, as such, and probably it wasn’t premonitory.

Though all magicians are subjected to premonitory dreams now and then, the power itself was so little understood and so unpredictable that most civilized countries afforded it little or no credit. And though France and Italy both had graduate programs for it in their universities, and though young foreseers trained at such institutions of learning had risen to positions of prominence the world over, including in such places like at the elbows of English queens and kings, their testimony would not be admissible in a court of law. And no magician over the age of ten gave undue weight to a premonitory dream. The thing was too fluid, the format and the way the images presented themselves too vague, allowing the dreamer to interpret practically anything from the symbols he’d seen.

The dreaming Nigel seemed to be a puppetmaster floating above the scene in which the dreamed Nigel held the hands of his wife, Red Jade, and felt a wave of tenderness for her—together with a sudden concern that something was very wrong. And that made him think about an article he’d recently read in
Magic Users Weekly,
aboard a carpetship on which he’d served.

They spoke of a man in Vienna, named Freud, who was working specifically with farseers and interpreting the symbols that appeared in their dreams, trying to create a stable theory that might allow for routine interpretation. But the dreaming Nigel also knew that he had never met Freud, and suspected that the man’s research should, in the end, prove as fruitless as that of the others who had trod that same path.

He forced the dreamed Nigel to lean closer to his dreamed wife, and to whisper in a tone of urgency, “What is it? What is wrong? Why have you come to me and what can I do?”

Had the dream truly been just that, Red Jade—Mrs. Oldhall as she was in this confused scenario—would have been horrified at his seeming repudiation of her and at his treating her like a stranger. Or else, she would have turned into an octopus or something equally unlikely, fulfilling the even deeper and more profoundly unlikely logic of dreams.

Instead, she frowned slightly, like a child trying to remember a lesson, then spoke. “I am imprisoned in the Chinese quarter of the city, in the store of the drapers by this sign.” In his mind formed the sign of a tiger, holding something like a scroll in its mouth. “I am in the back room, and there should be access, somehow.” In his mind there formed an image of the store—of the two alleys bordering the building, and the road it looked on. “I don’t know if you can help me, but I beg you to do what you can. I’ve been given a potion that makes it impossible for me to change shapes, and the Ring of Power my brother gave me does not seem to be working.”

As the dream image stopped speaking, Nigel found himself stark awake in a room bathed by the early-morning sun. His friend, John Malmsey, quite overwhelmed by Nigel’s unexpected appearance in his residence, had given him the best bedroom, the one overlooking the harbor. Getting up and stumbling to the window, Nigel took in a vision of a morning sky struck by bands of color between pink and peach, whose hesitant fulgence bathed the ocean in a coppery color.

He’d arrived in Hong Kong almost twenty-four hours before, but he already felt much better. His explanation that he’d been on a small carpetcraft that was attacked by flying junk pirates was not questioned—possibly because everyone in this area believed these attacks to be very frequent. Whether they were or not, Nigel couldn’t tell, but he knew from dinnertime conversation the night before that just about everyone believed that any travel around the edges of the Chinese Empire could bring you in contact with the fearsome pirates, and that none of it was safe.

In fact, their depredations on traffic headed to Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou had become such that most of the traffic to these cities now took place by carpetship to the Philippines, and from there via boat or ship, as this was safer from pirate attacks—or at least the pirate attacks, not being surrounded by magic, were much easier to counter by normal means.

At any rate, Nigel’s injuries were neither strange nor difficult to treat, and a gentleman with white whiskers and a manner much like Nigel’s masters at Cambridge had come and given Nigel magical treatment which had finished healing what Jade had simply tried to stop bleeding, and what the people in Cape Town had tried to cure with potions. And when Nigel, curious, had asked the doctor why not use Chinese medicine, he’d been met with an incredulous stare and told that most Chinese medicine tended to focus on that Daoist goal of becoming immortal and, like most such disciplines, neglected the mere correction of physical ills in favor of improving the body immortal.

Nigel, who had met with such pronouncements on native knowledge and beliefs in other continents, hadn’t replied. The truth was that, right now, he felt much better than he had in days, perhaps in years. None of which helped him through his very bewildering dream.

Was it true that Red Jade was a prisoner, somewhere in the native city? And if so, how could Nigel save her?

It didn’t seem so much a matter for thinking. He realized if Jade was a prisoner he would have to find a way to get her out. And the only way he could determine if his dream message was right was to go out to the native city and try to find a sign with the tiger with the scroll in its teeth. And he’d hope that it was not too common a sign, and that it wouldn’t have found its way into his subconscious via one of those symbols the man Freud went on about.

He cast off his pajamas and found his day clothes—purchased just the day before at a native tailor’s that seemed to work at superhuman speed and turn out fitted clothes in a matter of hours. His hostess had told him how it would be, though Nigel had found himself unable to believe it until the clothes—several suits, shirts and a hat—were delivered to his host’s home before dinner. He’d also managed to have his hair clipped by a native barber of his host’s recommending, so that for the first time since he’d left England with Emily, his hair was exquisitely and carefully cut to mold his head and display its shape, in lustrous gold and white tones.

With his suit on, he looked, for the first time in a long time, entirely the gentleman, which might make him more conspicuous. But, if he was going to have his appearance disguised by a potion, he doubted it would make any difference. Besides, in Hong Kong most Englishmen looked the gentleman’s part even when they were not, in fact, gentlemen.

Taking a teak-and-silver walking stick that he’d purchased the day before, he found his way down the Malmseys’ broad staircase to the front door. Several Chinese gardeners were already at work in the immaculate gardens, clipping the lawn and doing something to the roses.

“Going for a stroll before breakfast?” John Malmsey’s voice asked from behind Nigel, and Nigel turned around to see John coming down the stairs, still in his dressing gown and smiling broadly at him.

John, Nigel thought, was as close to a disinterested friend of his parents as he was likely to meet. Though he’d heard of Nigel’s disappearance from Nigel’s parents, and was relieved and happy to see Nigel again, he had not pressed Nigel for news of Carew, nor had he any suspicion that Nigel had been on a secret mission.

The story of an attack by a native secret order that had killed Emily and left Nigel an amnesiac had seemed to convince him. Nigel had explained that his memory had only come back after suffering severe injuries and a fever in the attack on the small carpetcraft in which he’d been flying. This allowed him to disclaim any knowledge of what he might be doing upon the coast of China, or what it all might mean.

It also allowed him to reassure John that he would write his parents and be back to them as soon as his health allowed. Since John, himself, had told Nigel that it would not be a good idea to engage in a trip so strenuous as the trip back to London would be—since he would most likely have to first take a boat out to the Phillipines, and would only, from there, be able to take a carpetship with any impunity—until he was quite sure of his strength, Nigel was, in fact, safe to stay here for as long as he needed.