James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (23 page)

“But it doesn’t make sense—” Lydia pulled her collar closer about her face. “—if vampires are all as—as jealous of interlopers as the Count Batthyany is. That is… are they?”

“Mostly,” said Ysidro. “Burning Fruhlingzeit as a warning was one of the milder expressions of displeasure I have encountered. Master vampires are not to be jested with when they conceive their territories in threat. Yet only a vampire could have summoned Ernchester to Constantinople. Only a vampire would know the threat that would bring him. Only a vampire would know that, of all the vampires I have met, Ernchester is one of the few capable of love.”

“Do vampires not love?”

Ysidro looked up from tallying his points. Lydia had scored sixteen for eight through king in hearts, with the nine making up a quart; Ysidro, by not declaring a sequence in diamonds, had managed to win most of the tricks, including the last. It hadn’t saved him.

They had spent the day among the ancient basilicas and rose farms of Adrianople, owing to Ysidro’s flat refusal to travel during the hours of light. Now the rough hills of Thrace, through which they had creaked with maddening slowness all of last night, seemed, as far as Lydia could tell, to have evened out. The train was a good one, German built and fitted, but even this first-class car smelled of garlic, strong coffee, tobacco, and unwashed clothing. On the platforms of Sofia and Belgrade, Lydia had observed that the farther east one got, the more casual railway personnel seemed to be about the presence of livestock in passenger cars. At Adrianople, earlier in the evening, she’d seen a Bosniak family casually load two goats into the third-class carriage, the father holding the long-fleeced kid in his arms and stepping back politely to let a bearded Orthodox priest climb on ahead of him, while farther down the platform people passed crates of chickens in through the windows.

Aunt Lavinia had always said that travel was broadening. Lydia suspected this was not what she meant.

The noise in the other first-class compartments seemed to be lessening, though in the corridors the tobacco fug still lay thick. Miss Potton, after her usual stubborn struggle to play a game in which she had neither aptitude nor interest, had fallen into a doze at Ysidro’s side. For nearly an hour the only words exchanged had concerned the lay of the cards and the trading of points, but Lydia suspected that the governess was as jealous of those as she was of other conversations Lydia and Ysidro had.

The wheels clacked steadily, like mechanical ram. Ysidro finished his tally, the steel nib of his pen scratching softly on the cheap yellow pad, the friction of his cuff on the tabletop a dry whisper against Margaret’s stertorous breath and the occasional bursts of laughter or speech audible through the compartment wall.

It was a long time before Ysidro replied.

At length he said, “As humans understand it?”

“How do humans understand it?” Lydia gathered the cards, turned them in her hands. Living half by night—half in the sunken silences of darkness—had given her a small degree of understanding of something Ysidro had mentioned early on, that vampires’ senses were far more sensitive than those of humans. With blackness pressing the window and gloom thick beyond the circle of the gas burner’s solitary light, every sound, every sight, seemed portentous, fraught with meaning beyond the simpler shapes of day.

“You said back in Vienna that Ernchester was a rarity among vampires, because he is capable of love. I wondered what that actually meant.”

“As with the living, among the Undead love means different things to different individuals.” He turned his head, champagne-colored eyes resting briefly on the woman who snored beside him in her muddle of yarns. After a moment her head lolled more heavily and her breathing deepened still further; she slumped against him, and with a fastidious care he leaned her into the other corner of the seat. In the five days it had taken them to work their way south via local trains—for the Orient Express only left Vienna on Thursdays—through Buda-Pesth, Belgrade, Sofia, Adrianople, waiting sometimes for most of a day for the next train that departed after sunset—Lydia had been occasionally aware of the highly colored romantic dreams that illuminated Margaret Potton’s sleep. In all of them Ysidro had been a vampire, outrageously Byronic in black leather and pearls, with daggers sticking out of his boots.

In all of them, love had been implicit. His professed, passionate love for her, bonding them, drawing her like a silver rope into love for him.

Whatever love is
, Lydia added to herself. It would hardly do, at this point, for Margaret to hear any true opinion of Ysidro’s on the ability of vampires to love.

“It is not unlikely, or even infrequent,” Ysidro said, “for those who have the capacity to love others more than themselves to also have the will to make the transition from the living state to that of the Undead.” The train jostled around a curve sharper than those found in northerly or westerly Europe. Ysidro put a gloved hand on Margaret’s shoulder to keep her steady—perhaps to keep her from waking. He touched her carefully, even with gloves. His hands, Lydia knew, were cold as bone these days. She could tell when he had fed, and she knew he had not hunted in Vienna.

“It is unusual, however, for such a one to survive long after the deaths of those for whom they care. In many cases, friends or relatives constitute the vampire’s early victims or fall prey to them in the course of the years. For those vampires who do not avail themselves of the convenience—and the odd comfort—of this resolution to immortality’s riddle, there is often a sense of disorientation when family and lovers age and begin to die. In my experience those capable of loving seldom make successful vampires.”

In the juddering glare of the gaslight, his face had the appearance of a skull in the ashy frame of his long hair; Lydia wondered whether he had always looked so or whether he had thinned and wasted in the past five days. Margaret stirred in her sleep, and Ysidro turned his face to look at her again, unreadable indifference in his gaze. There was long silence before he spoke again.

“You understand that having become vampire myself at the age of five-and-twenty, my experience of human love is… incomplete,” he went on, as if the matter were not one for his concern. “In this case, what love actually means is that someone—one of the Constantinople vampires, or one who has been in contact with him or her—would know that a threat to harm Anthea—by human agency, perhaps, or with the understanding that if human means proved ineffective, vampire agents would not be far behind—would bring Charles to heel. The vampire mind is an endlessly subtle one, and Charles knows the extent of their abilities to manipulate circumstance. Even were Grippen willing to defend Anthea, defending against a sufficiently determined attack might lie beyond his powers. For his own safety, Charles would not care, but as Dryden said, we give hostages to fortune when we love.”

He moved his hand, turning it as if revealing a hidden card. “I would guess that the sack of the house was an effort to take her hostage once he had departed, to prevent him changing his mind.”

“But if the Sultan wants a vampire,” Lydia said, puzzled, “and if he’s been in touch with one in order to know about Ernchester in the first place, why go to the trouble? Aren’t there plenty of vampires in Constantinople? At least from all the legends James hears, Greece and the Balkans have to be stiff with them.”

“Perhaps the vampire who spoke of Ernchester to Karolyi—or to the Sultan, if it was he who sent Karolyi—is now dead. We cannot know how long ago it was, and there have been upheavals in the city recently. Of a certainty, he—or she—would be dead, did the Master of Constantinople learn that there was a plot afoot to bring an interloper into his city. And it may be that whoever has sent for Ernchester feels that he would be more easily controlled than any under the sway of the Master of Constantinople. In this he would be correct.”

Ysidro stretched a hand like gloved bones to part the window curtain. “Behold.”

It was not like Paris, not like Paris’ glittering carpet of gaslights. Softer lights and fewer—amber, citrine, topaz, red as the juice of blood oranges—-jeweled the long spine of hills that made the city and lay in spangles of isolate flame in the nearly unseen movement of the sea. The train swung around a great curve. A many-towered gate loomed in the darkness, archways strung with yellow electric lights that cast reflections on a tree-filled ditch and a massy wall stretching into the night. Lydia gasped in surprise— she’d heard of the walls of Constantinople but hadn’t quite realized that the Byzantine ramparts would still be standing, watchtowers intact.

As the train slowed, the lights from its windows caught the black-glass combs of choppy sea beneath the railway embankment. Where the land curved, the old sea wall rose above the tracks, dark houses with outthrust upper floors growing from the ancient masonry like mushrooms from a riven oak.

Ysidro produced a gold pocket watch. “Twenty of one,” he said approvingly. “Only two hours late. Excellent, for the Ottoman lands.”

After coming into Sofia four and a half hours late, with the sky like wet slate and Margaret in hysterics as if she, not Ysidro, would be destroyed by the light of the dawn, Lydia could only be thankful. On that occasion, while the Sofia train lurched and stopped and started all through the shelterless hills of Thrace, Ysidro had grown quieter and, when he spoke, more incisive. Though Lydia did not know exactly how much light was necessary to trigger the photoreactive properties of the vampire flesh, she gathered that they had reached the Terminus Hotel in Sofia, and Ysidro had taken his usual leave of them, with only minutes to spare.

This had led to a furious and not very coherent scene with Margaret, in whose aftermath Lydia still felt embarrassed. The younger woman had accused Lydia of “not caring anything about” Ysidro, of “using people up like old dishes, and then throwing them away when they break.” When Lydia had pointed out that at any time Ysidro could have retreated to his coffin trunk and trusted the girls to get him to safety, Margaret had screamed, “If you’d ever had anything to do with earning your own living, without having everything you ever wanted just handed to you on a silver plate, you’d have learned you can’t treat people that way when they’re trying to help you!”

In view of Ysidro’s relations with Margaret, this had struck Lydia as so outrageous that she’d simply said, “Oh, stop behaving like an idiot,” and had gone into the suite’s single bedroom and closed the door. She’d been far too exhausted by her own fears to remain awake long, but during the few minutes she’d spent stripping off her outer clothing, petticoats, and corsets, she’d heard Margaret sobbing hysterically in the parlor. When she emerged, not much refreshed, hours later, it had been to see the governess sprawled unprettily on the sofa, face flushed, shirtwaist off, and corsets unlaced, sound asleep.

They’d made up after a fashion, as traveling companions must, but their never-easy relations remained strained. Now Margaret mumbled, “You should have waked me sooner,” when Lydia shook her.

“We’re here. Constantinople.” She didn’t mention that Ysidro had done his best to keep the woman asleep.

Margaret pulled a comb out of her handbag and straightened her hair, with nervous glances at Ysidro as if he hadn’t seen her in rumpled slumber for many nights. Only then did she turn to the window and say in disappointment, “Oh. You can’t see anything.”

Across tumbled onyx water a long curve of lights glimmered as if a congregation of shepherds had kindled watch fires on the point. Here and there, close to the tracks, reflected light showed a thumb smudge of honey-colored walls, but for the most part the city was dark. The high, dark backbone of the land was studded by minarets and domes under the gibbous moon’s waning light: the embodiment of formless dreams, a dark suggestion of labyrinth hoarding darkness within.

No, thought Lydia. You didn’t see it. You drank it, and it left you filled with an indescribable sense of hunger, and loss, and grief.

“They called it the City of Walls,” Ysidro said softly. “The City of Palaces. Like a Kipling treasure guarded by a cobra, they have fought over it, or feared it, for all the long centuries since the emperors departed from Rome. Not even those who won it, who dwelled in it, ever knew it all.”

Like James looking at the towers of Oxford, thought Lydia, and calling them each by its name. Did he name in his heart each dome, each quartet of spires, against that lambent sky? “Were you ever here?” Margaret edged possessively closer to him, took his arm—though Lydia knew he hated to be touched—and looked into his face.

Ysidro smiled, for her. “Once,” he said in a voice that promised her new dreams. Over her head his eyes met Lydia’s, enigmatic, and looked away.

The train chuffed to a stop at a small station beneath the beetling towers of an old fortress gate. Up close the ambience was anything but exotic. The station was Western, stuccoed and painted the same ochre hue so common in Vienna, and by the harsh electric lamps Lydia saw the grannies and goats, the gentlemen in red fezzes and black coats, the Greeks in full white pants and the Bulgarians with their crated chickens and straw suitcases, get on and off with the leisured air of those who know the train isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. The stink of slums and tanneries was thick hereabouts, and there were, Lydia noticed, a lot of soldiers in the stations, clothed in modern khaki uniforms, nothing like the colorful warriors of tales.

“Those aren’t the janissaries, are they?” she asked, and Ysidro’s yellow eyes developed the smallest of twinkles, like a fugitive star, at the bottom of their cold, ironic depths. Despite the insectile thinness of his face and its white-silk pallor, he looked briefly human.

“The corps of the janissaries was abolished a century ago— massacred wholesale, in fact, by order of the Sultan Murad, who wished to establish a modern army. This past July that modern army returned the favor by deposing the current Sultan and converting him by force into the type of constitutional monarch fashionable among those who like to style themselves enlightened.”