Traveling With The Dead(36)

“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.”

“You mean there isn’t a Sultan anymore?” Margaret sounded like a child who has been told on the twenty-fourth of December that Father Christmas has been pensioned off to a villa in the south of France.

“July…” Lydia said thoughtfully. “The printer’s deadline for my monograph on the effects of ultraviolet light on the hypothalamus was August fifteenth… And I never can remember whether they’re on our side or Germany’s. So it couldn’t have been the Sultan who sent for Ernchester?”

“It may well be,” Ysidro said. “He is not without power, even yet. But if he thinks to regain it by bringing in a vampire whom he hopes to control, he reckons without the Master of Constantinople.”

The train lurched and began its slow, rocking progress again, the city growing above them in thick accretions of shadow, lamps, and ancient walls shrouded in vine.

“Who is the Master of Constantinople?” Lydia asked quietly.

They were all three clustered by the windows of the compartment, looking out over the inky water toward the lights of Seraglio Point and the dim hills of Asia beyond.

“In my day it was not considered a wise thing to speak his name.” Ysidro turned back to the table and gathered the cards. He fumbled, dropping them; Margaret sprang at once to help him but he’d retrieved them already, slipped them into the paper band that usually encircled the pack, secreted them in a pocket of his mouse-gray coat.

“He was a sorcerer in life, a title which could mean anything from a theoretical alchemist to a student of the properties of herbs. Certainly he was a poisoner, possibly an astronomer, though one does not always keep these things up. He wielded tremendous power, before and after his death, with the Viziers of the Sublime Porte. Legends said that certain of the sultans gifted him with prisoners, that he might feast upon their deaths, though considering the size of the beggar population of Constantinople, I do not find this at all likely or necessary. And as Juvenal says, ‘Foolish is he who puts his trust in princes.’ Personally, I wouldn’t touch any edible offered me by any of the sultans.”

Ysidro put out a hand again, to steady himself on the wall as the train swung around the rocky slope of a hill and lurched into another suburban station. There were electric lights here, too, and soldiers armed with businesslike Enfields.

“It is probably best,” he said, “that the master of this city not be spoken of in any terms until we are in Pera.”

Another of Ysidro’s gruff local henchmen awaited them in the square before the main Gare of Stamboul, this one a Greek— whom Ysidro addressed in Spanish—with the usual wagon and horses. Lydia had removed her glasses before leaving the train compartment, but the moment they were settled on the high seat and moving off through the tangle of drays, donkey carts, and foot passengers, she sneaked them back on, gazing around her in wonderment. At the foot of the square the dark waters of the Golden Horn flashed with the lights of ships moored there, and even at nearly two in the morning the lights of small boats could be seen plying between the Stamboul shore and the lamp-flecked hills of Pera on the other side.

Black streets swallowed them, and for a few minutes Lydia could no more than guess at the houses crowding above, balconies—sometimes entire upper stories—-jutting overhead as if grabbing for airspace, here and there the low glimmer of lamps behind thick latticework. Cats’ eyes flashed everywhere, and the smell of goats and dogs and human waste was like a curtain thick enough to be touched with the hand. Lamps in iron cages showed her the somber glory of a mosque half veiled in Stygian gloom as they passed through a square, a note of great age on the lighted threshold of a modern iron bridge.

On the bridges other side the houses were European—or Greek, with white walls like clotted cream in the moonlight. They wound their way uphill to a tree-grown public square lying beneath a splendid Italianate palace of pale golden stone.

“The British Embassy,” came Ysidro’s soft voice. “I trust you ladies will present yourselves to the Right Honorable Mr. Lowther in the morning. For many years the embassies have been the true power here.”

As usual, Ysidro had wired ahead for lodgings, this time a pink-washed Greek-style house whose stone-flagged arch led into a court shaded by a massive pomegranate tree, staffed by three thickset Greek women, evidently a mother and two daughters, who smiled and replied “Parakalo—parakalo …” to everything Lydia said.

As at Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople, once Lydia’s trunks and portmanteaus and hatboxes and baskets of herbs were carried upstairs, Ysidro climbed into the wagon once more and disappeared to some secret lodging of his own.

“You can’t ask him to continue what he’s doing.”

Lydia turned, startled, the moss-green velvet of her dressing gown weighting her arms. Tomorrow she’d present herself, not only to the Right Honorable G. A. Lowther, but, armed with Mr. Halliwell’s letters of introduction, to Sir Burnwell Clapham, the attache in charge of what were nebulously referred to as “affairs.” It was entirely possible, she thought, that Jamie would be there, or Jamie would be somewhere close. Oh, yes, Dr. Asher. He arrived last week…

Please , she thought, shivering inside. Please…

Margaret stood awkwardly in the doorway of the single large bedroom the two women would share. As in Vienna, in Belgrade and Sofia, it was not by their choice—even had relations between them not been strained, Lydia would have preferred to be spared her companion’s nocturnal sighs and mutterings in dreams. But in no house had more than one bed been made up, nor could the servants anywhere be induced to do so. In the small connecting chamber, Lydia had already found the dismantled pieces of a massive four-poster that looked as if it had been ordered from Berlin at the height of the Gothic craze. Its sister ship filled most of this room, the bright pink-and-blue local work of its coverlet incongruously gay; the dressing table, mirrored armoire, and marble-topped washstand had clearly been ordered en suite, and though the room was large, with a bay projecting over the street, they gave it a cluttered feeling, jammed and awkward.