by Alex Oliver
There was something but, as Tom said, if it was a ship it was a strange one. No sail was bent there, but a large, dark mass bobbed on the surface of the water. As he frowned at it, the noise Tom had mentioned worked insinuatingly into his ear.
Not human voices. Harsh cries atop a kind of chattering, chittering scurry.
"I don't like it, tell the truth." Tom might have been grayed out by the mist, might have simply been pale with fear. "Puts me in mind of the Dutchman, and we don't want to see that no clearer."
Newman felt the trickle of apprehension like cold dew down his back, but he was an officer. He didn't have the option of paying credence to supernatural humbug. It was his place to show the men that no true-born Englishman was cowed by such things. "We will alter course to intercept."
He took hold of a stay and slid down it to the deck, called out the course change to the men at the wheel, and directed six of the idlers to ready a boat. For a short while there was homely noise enough, as the rudder chains rattled and the deck crane groaned with a voice of stressed timber.
Now their dark blotch was visible from the bows. "I see something!" called Jemmy Ducks. "'Tis a first rate, a right huge ship. Under no sail, just sticks, and she be wallowing like a cow in a salt lick."
"Prepare to grapple her and bring her alongside," Newman shouted, striding over and countermanding that order for the ship's boat. He could see the behemoth himself now, looming black out of the soft gray of the world. Not glowing, thank God, as the Flying Dutchman was rumored to do, nor sweeping down upon them under full sail. But there was something about her that made his skin crawl, and it was not only her bare yards, her odd, wine-cork buoyancy.
"Alright Davy Thomas, go knock on the Captain's door. Beg pardon, but there's something he ought to see."
By the time the Captain was on deck, a shrouded figure in a sea-cloak, tall and rawboned and not as reassuring in that atmosphere of gloom as Newman might have liked, they had coupled the hulk of the first rate to themselves. They were more than close enough to see the endless fidgeting whirl of flying things above the masts, to hear a cheeping and scratching on deck. The yards looked deformed in some way that the mist veiled, and they could not see the deck, for the first rate stood higher than their third-rate by more than a man's height.
The wind changed. It blew over the maimed vessel and laid its stench over them heavy as slime. Newman choked at the reek of old blood and ordure, cold shit, cold fear, the smell of vermin nauseating musty-sweet. He fumbled for his vinaigrette, filled his nose to the point of skinning it with the scent of vinagre and bergamot, and narrowly staved off vomiting.
He passed the silver bottle to the Captain, who took a deep reviving sniff of his own and managed a wry smile. "Pick me out the lads who are in charge of the pigs, and anyone else with a strong stomach and no sense of smell. Let's see what we have here, shall we?"
They had grappled on close enough to the larger ship's companionway to take a leap for it from the rail of their own. Newman took one look at the men's faces and launched himself out first, running up the ladder fixed to the hull with as much ease as he would have run up a flight of stairs. At this example, the rest of his boarding party followed, reluctant but given no opportunity to refuse.
It seemed at first dark and deserted on the majestic sweep of deck. Quiet enough for the men to spread out in a loose semi-circle as they waited for the Captain to come up last. The chattering above them was accompanied by a never ending swirl of white things, thick as the cloud of gnats that rose over country trees on a summer evening.
But that idyllic picture did not fit this place at all, Newman thought, feeling the deck pull stickily on his shoes. The planks at least were close enough for him to get a good look at them, stained all over with something that glistened like gelatine and stank of the slaughterhouse.
"Larkin and Ali to the captain's cabin. You four, check the boats. Soloman Bailey, I want you to find the sails. The rest of you check the lower decks and report back what you find. Go easy, ware ambushes."
Captain Montgomery had the hang of imperturbability far better than Newman. You would never have known from his level tone that he had just reached out and grabbed on to Newman's bicep with a grip that was making Newman's arm go numb. His hooded face was tilted up at those bare yards, and he had gone whiter than the grim reaper. "Mother of God! What manner of man would have...?"
Newman had looked briefly, dismissed the bundles up there as just one more inexplicable strangeness that waited for clearer weather to reveal it. "What is it, sir?"
"You can't see? I didn't see it at first either. Pray excuse me, Lieutenant." The captain made a dash for the rail to vomit over the side. Newman peered up into the fog until his eyes hurt. A dozen bundles per yard, sitting up there with no apparent means of support. They might have been the shape of men, had they legs to dangle.
He focused on the nearest, a misshapen barrel of a thing with a smaller round knob on the top like a head. One of the white, flitty things settled where it would have had a shoulder, if it was a man. As Newman took hold of the sticky shrouds, began to step up the ratlines towards the thing, the white creature raised its head to watch him. It was a seagull.
A moment's relief - not something uncanny at all, but only one of the many birds that sometimes perched on a ship's masts, taking rest when far out to sea. Then it chose to ignore him, buried its beak again in the raw mass of meat on which it was feeding, and he was glad he'd been climbing ropes for so long that when his mind grayed out in the beginnings of a swoon, his hands clutched on tight by themselves, making sure he didn't fall.
The thing that would have been a shoulder was a shoulder, a shoulder from which the arm had been torn. And with that realization everything else shifted into diabolical focus. No legs dangled because the legs too had been wrenched off. Along the yards at regular intervals wide holes had been drilled, and plugged with tapering poles, one end of which was almost flush to the mast, the other end driven through the stump of body from the anus to the mouth.
Gulls had been at the faces. This thing close to him was not recognizable as any particular human, but he still wore a frock coat of purple brocade, and the heavy golden chain of a pocket watch strained taut over his wide belly, still held together, thank God, by a waistcoat embroidered all over - perhaps by the loving hand of some female relative - with Tudor roses.
"Mr. Newman!" The captain's shout snapped him out of his weakness. "We must get them down and covered before the fog thins. The fewer men who see this, the happier we will all be."
"Aye sir!" The stays of this ship would be painted with human blood and grease. Newman did not fancy the burns from them he might sustain from sliding down. He ran backwards down the shrouds instead, feeling cold and hollow to the marrow. The taste of copper prickled his clamped tight mouth.
Below, the men burst from the main companionway as if they'd been thrown. An assortment of the Minerva's toughest characters, browned and wizened by a life at sea until they were gnarled and unbreakable as driftwood. Their wide, white trousers were red to the knee - their bare feet entirely crimson. Mutely, they shoved the oldest man forward, old Ydrith (Taffy) Davis, a venerable fifty year old who had claimed for the last thirty years that he'd seen everything there was to be seen under the sun.
"Taffy?"
"All of the crew are there, sir. Laid out on the gun deck, shoulder to shoulder, with their hands folded on their chests. Their eyes closed, we think. Hard to tell - the ship's rats were thick as a fur coat over the top of them. Shot, we reckon, except for the officers, and they was strangled with something thin. Something that cut in."
His voice wavered. He took hold of his bushy sideburns and tugged. "Nothing at all on the lower decks, except where the blood had rained, like, through the cracks. Blood everywhere, and someone's pet cat licking it off the decks."
An answering growl of betrayal from the other men, and Newman wondered fleetingly what had happened to the disloyal cat. He foun
d he didn't much care.
"Sir?" Larkin and Lascar Ali returned from the captain's cabin, Larkin with an inappropriately beautiful thing in his arms - a flat document case of dark green leather tooled with tulips in gold leaf. The captain opened it and drew out a square of parchment the size of a city charter, surmounted on top by a gorgeous extravaganza of loops that might have been writing. Hasty and humble underneath the document, someone had deigned to provide a translation on a small leaf of paper, and this the captain read through closely, his back stiffening, his shoulders straightening as he read.
"It's a declaration of war," he said, with something savage and glad beneath the solemnity in his tone. "The sultan returns to us the ship we sent to insult him, and the embassy staff we clearly no longer value, and bids us ready ourselves to accept the mercy of becoming a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire."
He made the mistake of looking up into the rigging again, where the hardier of the men, under Newman's instruction, were beginning to bring down the dishonored corpses of Britain's ambassadors. "They must be damn sure of themselves if they think they can get away with this."
"But they won't, Sir. Will they?" Newman lit up at the thought of war - it was what he was for after all.
"Who knows?" The captain exhibited his iron hard nerves by laughing a little. The sound was odd in that place of vermin, but the men seemed cheered by it. "But their lordships of the Admiralty will not stand for this, nor parliament, nor the people. Whether it's wise or not, they will have their war."
Chapter Three
In which our heroes are Invited to a grand Spectacle.
∞∞∞
Wallachia - Frank
As Bucharest's river Dambovita was not navigable even by rafts in the summer, they left the boats at Râmnicu Vâlcea and transferred luggage and demonic passengers into a large wagon. Frank was impressed to find that the Vacarescus maintained a town house in this large market town, where a carriage only fifty years out of date waited in a stable block, and servants and horses alike couldn’t quite conceal how astonished they were to be called on for use.
On no occasion during the manhandling of the coffins - now nailed together and disguised as a single strangely shaped wardrobe - from barge to townhouse to cart, did Frank think how easily they might be dropped, broken open, have their have their contents exposed to the sun.
These thoughts only came to him at night, when Constantin or Alaya or both climbed effortlessly aboard the moving carriage, wiping their mouths. Then he would remember he had meant to find some way of killing them when they were out of the soil and defenseless. He suspected they only allowed him to think it then because it amused them to let him know he was their puppet. But he said nothing, and they only smiled sweetly at him, while Radu hunched on his seat like a raptor shivering on a snowy branch and looked at no one.
They took the journey easily, stopping at the inns of post which lined the larger roads at regular distances. They would draw up to one of these just after dark, have the vehicles taken to the stables. The servants - Mirela among them still, at Radu's command - disappeared to take clothes to rooms, prepare fires, and eat their own dinner in the kitchen. Frank and the family would gather for some variation of rough, peasant stew and mamaliga - a savoury yellow maize paste that seemed ubiquitous as bread. Then he and Radu would drink a glass of wine and talk about history and pride, politics and regrets
At some point in this ritual they would look up and find that the strigoi were no longer there. Then the conversation would falter a little as both of them tried not to think about what that meant, who they might find dead in the morning. It was worse, Frank thought on these nights, surprised, to bring the demons to little townships that had not had five hundred years of experience with them. Here death would come with horror instead of resignation. Radu's reluctance to take the creatures out of their native setting seemed wiser now, less like a petty child saying no just because he can.
When they could get a private room, they wedged the door shut from the inside and slept together, because Frank was a new man now and had decided that his time of mourning was behind him, and he would take what was on offer and be glad of it.
"What is there to be ashamed of in this, in comparison to the blight we carry with us in the wagon?" Radu had asked, when he was skittish and reluctant the first time, and that was God's own truth.
"Besides," afterwards he had continued the thought, hands behind his head, staring up at the lace of dusty cobwebs beneath the sloped roof, "Just think how this must choke them."
Frank had raised himself to his elbow and contemplated the rare look of suppressed laughter that he had begun to find familiar on Radu's face. "What must? They're getting what they want, aren't they? Because of me."
"Not entirely." The smile came out of hiding, white and sharp. "I understand that the laxity of our morals has been known to distress foreigners. So perhaps you're not aware that in Romania, even for the highest of the nobility, it is perfectly acceptable to have a son out of wedlock. If the family claims that child as its own, no one can consider him a less legitimate heir than one born into a marriage."
"So...?"
"My parents find me difficult, I believe. In my true-father's day they would have simply said 'I wish to go to Bucharest' and he would have taken them. His mind was in the palm of their hands. But me, well, they have to persuade me. They don't like that."
"I'm still not seeing what this has to do with me."
"Oh, Frank!"
At the scoff of exasperation, Frank grinned and pinched his bedmate in the shoulder, with a pressure that would leave a little purple mark in the morning. He was still many layers of fragility, a flaky pastry made up of devastation and guilt, but at least one of those layers had hints of contentment in it, and with the revelation of his innocence and the ending of the threats to his life he had begun to rediscover his own ability to laugh.
"Let me spell it out, then. Suppose I had a mistress or a concubine, or two - sooner or later I would have a child. That child could be their heir. Their future possession of their estates would be secured and I could be conveniently disposed of. Instead what happens?" He shoved Frank back in retaliation for the pinch. "You arrive, and you're beautiful, and you save me from all of that."
"Not quite what they wanted, eh? A child is one thing I certainly can't give you."
"I don't want this to continue. I don't want to bring another child into this situation, hand the family curse on with the estates. But I don't want to live my life alone. You have... you are very... useful to me."
A cold declaration, perhaps. It took Frank a while to set the words in their right context and see how the meanings changed by it. When he considered that with a mother like Alaya, his lover must associate sweet, fine words with insincerity, he gradually found it reassuring enough. To be useful was good. To foil the plans of the strigoi and save some future child from slavery, and to save Radu himself from cold inhumanity and isolation at the same time – these were admirable things.
"If I can help," he said, tucking himself back down beside the other man in unexpected content, "I am glad to."
~
In Bucharest, the Vacarescu family had a holding and townhouse on the east side of the Dambovita, in among the park-lands and the casas of the other nobility. An old house with squat, heavy walls that would have withstood the cannon fire of less advanced ages, it just avoided being a fortress by the number of its balconies and colonnades. It glowered over park-lands of carefully cultivated lawn, which swept down to the wide, shallow marshland about the lazy river. Under the heat of the last week, the river had all but disappeared, only visible as glints among thickets of lush green reeds.
They had sent a messenger ahead of them on a swift horse, so when they arrived the house was clean, the shutters of the windows open, the fires lit and the servants returned to their duties from whatever private lives they had been living with the family away. A footman took Frank's bag and guided him to one of t
he fifteen guest rooms. Unpacking for him, he pointedly did not sniff at his lack of belongings. Frank got the message anyway.
"I was robbed on the road," he explained, "and I am a foreigner here. I shall need new clothes, new shaving and grooming kit, new writing equipment. Is there somewhere I need to go to buy such things, or do I send for the makers to come to me?"
The footman smiled, reassured, he thought, by Frank's peremptory tone, as though he had resented having his lovely clean rooms touched by someone who clearly didn't belong in them. Now he revised his opinion of Frank's social status upwards. "Either would do, sir. If you wish to walk about Bucharest and make your own purchases, I will give you one of the boys to guide you. But I think, perhaps, we should summon the tailor here first, so that you may appear to your best advantage when you are seen."
It occurred to Frank, suddenly, that he had no money. The thought had been slow in coming - he was an earl's son, and no matter how he mentally cut ties with that life, the habits persisted. Credit should always be forthcoming, and debts wiped out by his father in consideration of his family's honor. Certainty that he had the means to buy whatever he needed lingered even through the knowledge that he was no longer the same man.
But he could hardly say as much to Radu's servant. He nodded, and thought viciously that he would have to tap his lover for money like a whore. Not a great start to a new life. "By all means, have the tailor brought here. When can that be done?"
"If I send a boy this morning, he'll be here this afternoon, sir. Doubtless the lord will wish to see him too. Will I have a bath brought up for you in the mean time?"
"Please."
Cleaned and re-dressed in his cast-offs (had the footman noticed the lengthened sleeves, on top of the fact that they were ten years out of fashion?) Frank leaned from his window and watched as the box containing the coffins was wrestled out of the wagon by four stout fellows, and taken to a stone building, chapel or folly, in the grounds, surrounded by marsh on three sides. Swans hissed at the burden as it went in, and from the alder tree behind the building the doves that had been droning croo, croo, took flight with a sound like applause. He wondered if the servants knew what they were installing.
