The Lightning Key (Wednesday Tales (Quality))

by Jon Berkeley

  “What do you mean?” said Little, sitting behind him and holding him loosely around the waist.

  “Which angels?” asked Miles.

  Little gave a silvery laugh that matched the sparkle of moonlight on the dunes. “The moon is a huge ball of rock orbiting around the Earth!” she said. “Nobody takes care of it.”

  “But . . .,” said Miles, then fell silent. He would never know what to expect from Little, but he was wise enough to know that that was part of her charm. They rode on until he glimpsed lights in the distance. A small village nestled at the foot of a bluff, surrounded by groves of palm trees whose shaggy heads nodded slowly against the sky.

  “Wa’il,” said Captain Tripoli, pointing at the cluster of lights. “We will make inquiries to see if your enemies passed this way, but you must rest at my family home, at least for as long as your chase permits.”

  They rode down a winding path into the village. It was late and there were few people abroad. A girl of about Miles’s age stepped out from a rectangle of yellow light and stared curiously at the travelers. She gave a little cry of delight and ran toward them. “Abun!” she said. “You have returned early.”

  “And you have grown quickly, Temzi,” said Captain Tripoli, dismounting carefully from his kneeling camel. He took the girl in his arms and kissed her on the cheek. “My friends will stay the night,” he told his daughter quietly, “but we must keep it a secret.”

  The girl laughed. “I like secrets,” she whispered. She gave Miles and Little a dark-eyed smile, though she could not see their faces; then she turned and ran back inside.

  Captain Tripoli led his guests into a courtyard, where his family sat at supper. His wife came to greet them in a robe of intense blue, like a piece of the evening sky, and he introduced her as Dassin. “You are welcome in our house,” she said, and she led them to a stone bowl that she filled with water from a pitcher. She had strong black eyebrows and a fine henna tattoo across her nose and cheeks, and in the darkness of her face her smile was dazzling.

  Once they had washed their hands and faces she found places for them among the captain’s numerous children, seated around a low stone table spread with a patterned cloth. Miles tried to count how many children there were, but as none seemed particularly good at staying in one place he soon gave up. The captain sent one of his older boys to see what he could find out about any other strangers who may have passed through; then they sat and ate as though they had never seen food before.

  Captain Tripoli’s scout returned before they had finished eating. “There are two burned men lodging with the medicine woman,” he said. “They will be there until the morning.”

  Dassin rose from the table and began to issue commands to her children in a soft voice. They cleared the table and returned with a smoking hookah pipe and the inevitable syrupy coffee; then the younger children left, and the captain and the blind explorer settled down to share the pipe. Dassin looked searchingly at the captain’s face, but she did not ask him about his injuries, or why he had returned early, and he made no mention of dueling with a tiger or the burning of the Sunfish.

  Miles took a small glass of coffee from the silver tray on the table. It tasted like bitter sludge, but he felt it would be polite to drink it. He was thinking hard about the Great Cortado and Doctor Tau-Tau. They were nearby, probably asleep. Surely they could be arrested and the Tiger’s Egg taken from them.

  “Are there police here in Wa’il?” asked Miles.

  “We have our own laws,” said Captain Tripoli, “but do not fear. Cortado and Tau-Tau will get no farther, and your property will be returned to you.”

  “Will they be put in prison?” asked Miles.

  “They have twice attempted murder,” said the captain. “They will certainly face execution.”

  Miles pictured a terrified Doctor Tau-Tau floundering in a pool of water in the underground caverns of the Fir Bolg, and remembered the start of fear in the Great Cortado’s eye at the sound of the tiger in Baltinglass’s bedroom. He was aware that the captain’s daughter, Temzi, was watching him from her father’s side.

  “I don’t think I would want that to happen,” he said.

  Captain Tripoli raised his eyebrows and exhaled a curling plume of smoke. “They tried to push you to your death, or had you forgotten?”

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” said Miles, “but I think Doctor Tau-Tau tried to stop it, and the Great Cortado . . . well, he’s not in his right mind.”

  “They tried to take the lives of my passengers, and for that they deserve to lose their own.”

  Miles looked at Temzi, leaning on her father’s shoulder and regarding him with dark eyes. “I know what it’s like to be under a death sentence,” said Miles, looking pointedly at the captain, “and so do you. You wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t objected to your beheading.”

  Dassin’s eyes widened, and she turned to look at her husband. “Is this true?” she asked.

  The captain nodded without meeting her eye. “It was a mistake,” he said. “I tried to avenge the loss of my ship, but thankfully nobody was hurt.” He turned to Miles. “You are right, Mr. Wednesday. Perhaps these things are not so simple. But we must bring these criminals to justice nonetheless.”

  “I intend to,” said Miles, “but if we have them killed, how do we know we are any better than they are?”

  “Miles is right,” said Little. “When a bad note gets into the One Song, singing another one does not fix it. It just makes the discord worse.”

  “Then what are you going to do?” asked Temzi.

  Miles smiled at her. “I think I’m coming down with a plan,” he said. “Do you have any goats?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SUNBURN AND SUBTERFUGE

  Temzi Tripoli, long-limbed and dark-eyed, called at the house of Xaali, the medicine woman, where the two sunburned foreigners were passing a very uncomfortable night. They were lying on their stomachs while the old woman lit fragrant barks and recited incantations over them to ease the burning, having first assured herself that they were able to make payment.

  “We’ve heard that you have a famous healer under your roof,” said Temzi. “We have a patient who is in need of his help.”

  The medicine woman, whose lined face looked about to collapse inward like a broken deck chair, frowned at her. “What are you talking about, girl? I will come myself, when I’ve finished with these two sand lobsters,” she said.

  Temzi gave her a broad wink over the blistered backs of the strangers. “My father says only a healer of international repute will do.” She winked again, in case Xaali had missed the first one.

  “If your father says so,” said the old woman with a wrinkled smile, “then it must be for the best.”

  “That would be me he is referring to,” said Doctor Tau-Tau in a cushion-muffled voice. “A reputation like mine is a hard thing to escape. To escape a reputation like mine is no easy thing.”

  The Great Cortado snorted. “Just make sure you charge double what this old crone is squeezing out of us.”

  “Don’t worry,” muttered Tau-Tau. “I know just how to milk a situation like this.”

  Temzi led the hastily dressed fortune-teller across the village to the house of her father. “I am glad to hear you are an expert in milking,” she said with a secretive smile.

  “What’s that?” said Doctor Tau-Tau. Being on the run from sword-wielding desert folk made him nervous about walking around in full view. You never knew when these lunatics were going to fly off the handle. The Great Cortado had warned the medicine woman to keep their presence a secret, yet already the local peasants had come to pester Tau-Tau for his services, and he was concentrating on keeping his protruding eyes peeled for danger.

  “The patient is our best goat, Queenie,” said Temzi, showing the foreigner into the goat shed. “She has . . . milk constipation.”

  “Milk constipation?” said Tau-Tau, wrinkling up his nose at the close air of the goat shed. “I’m not a
vet, child.”

  “Of course not,” said Temzi. She glanced at a crack in the boards that separated the pens, knowing that Miles was watching through the gap. “But if you are really as good a healer as they say, you will just need to lay your hands on her and she will be able to produce her milk. If she cannot, she will die.”

  The girl placed a milk pail under the goat’s swollen udders and looked expectantly at Doctor Tau-Tau. He knelt down awkwardly. The goat was staring at him with a sinister yellow eye, making him nervous. He placed his hands experimentally on the animal’s flanks, and the girl pulled on her teats, producing two streams of milk that rapidly dwindled, leaving the bucket less than a quarter full.

  “That’s very strange,” said the girl.

  “What is?” said Tau-Tau. “It’s milk, isn’t it?”

  The girl looked at him as though he were feebleminded. “That’s only a tiny amount. She would normally fill this bucket and have more to spare.”

  “I told you I’m not a vet,” snapped Tau-Tau. He could feel his irritation cranking up a notch or two. “A vet,” he reiterated, “is not what I am.”

  “Xaali uses a talisman,” prompted Temzi, “though she’s not internationally famous, of course.”

  Doctor Tau-Tau scowled and rummaged furtively in his pocket. He pulled out the Tiger’s Egg, and holding it with his thumb against his palm so the girl couldn’t see it, he again held his hands out toward the goat. He was apprehensive about using the Egg, half expecting the savage tiger to materialize on the spot and swallow the goat whole, a thought that gave him a certain grumpy satisfaction. The girl whispered something in the goat’s ear, and the animal suddenly gave a twisting leap, as though a demon had gotten into her. The Egg was knocked from his hand and fell into the milk pail with a plunk.

  “Stupid beast!” said Tau-Tau. He peered into the pail. The milk looked warm and slightly lumpy, and he was very reluctant to dip his hand into it.

  “I’ll get it,” said Temzi. She reached into the milk without hesitation and plucked out the Tiger’s Egg. She wiped the milk off with a rag that hung over the edge of the stall and handed it back to Doctor Tau-Tau. The fortune-teller snatched it from her with a wounded look. If he had been paying attention he would of course have realized, in his capacity as a cheap conjurer, that the girl had made a simple switch. The real Tiger’s Egg still lay submerged in fresh goat’s milk in the bottom of the pail, and what he replaced in his pocket was the clever fake that had traveled all the way from Cnoc in the pocket of Baltinglass of Araby.

  The fortune-teller’s mind, however, was on sunburn, subterfuge and the faint hope of supper, and when the goat’s milk inexplicably began to flow again he left with relief and scurried back to Xaali’s house, forgetting even to ask for payment.

  Miles Wednesday, blue-cheeked and smoke-skinned, knelt over Baltinglass’s map, which was spread out on the low table, and examined it in the lamplight. Their journey from Al Bab covered a surprisingly small part of the map, and though they were not far now from the town where Celeste had come from, the desert beyond it seemed to stretch to the very edge of the world. Beside him sat Little, carefully stitching the Tiger’s Egg back into its home inside a small, grubby orange bear.

  “Well, Master Miles,” said Baltinglass. “What’s the next move?”

  “If we leave early enough we can get a good head start on Cortado and Tau-Tau,” said Miles. He was watching Little out of the corner of his eye, half hoping that Tangerine would spring to life with the reintroduction of the Egg, and half afraid that he would do so in full view of everyone. Little glanced up and smiled as though she knew exactly what he was thinking, which she almost certainly did.

  “They have only one camel between them, so they’ll make heavy going,” said Baltinglass of Araby.

  “Or they’ll have to spend time here buying another one,” said Little.

  “I can help that to go slowly,” said Temzi.

  Captain Tripoli frowned at his daughter. “In order for them to leave this village I would have to forgo justice for my ship,” he said.

  Temzi drew herself up and looked the captain squarely in the eye. “Miles has promised they will not escape justice, Abun,” she said. “I think he bought his own right to justice with your life.”

  The captain’s glare deepened, and the air almost crackled between father and daughter as they faced each other across the table. The captain opened his mouth to speak, but Dassin’s soft voice interrupted him before he could begin. “Temzi is right. She speaks with the clarity that you yourself taught her. You are angry at the loss of your ship, but the boy’s justice has been longer maturing, and it should be done his way.”

  The captain sighed deeply and deflated a little, wincing with the pain in his ribs. “Very well,” he said, turning to Miles. “Tell us what you intend and we will help you whatever way we can.”

  “If they can be tricked into returning to our own country they can be turned in to the police, and they’ll spend a long time in prison,” said Miles.

  “Why did you not do that before they boarded ship in Fuera?” said Captain Tripoli.

  Miles glanced around, but with the exception of Temzi the captain’s children had left the table. He felt that he was in a place where a secret would be kept safe without his having to ask. “Cortado and Tau-Tau stole the Tiger’s Egg from me. It was a gift that my mother left me, and I needed to get that back first. It was the Tiger’s Egg that Temzi helped to retrieve tonight.”

  “Surely that would have been returned to you once you had turned in the thieves?”

  Miles hesitated before answering. He had not had to put his reasons into words before, and he had to think for a moment to make them clearer. “Do you remember the tiger in the wadi?” he said.

  “How could I forget?” said Captain Tripoli ruefully.

  “The tiger is . . . closely connected to the Egg,” said Miles. “If he appeared in a police station I might have found myself in more trouble than the Great Cortado was. It’s better that the Egg was returned directly to me.”

  Captain Tripoli contemplated this information. “And how will you trick them into returning to your country?”

  “They don’t know yet that they’ve lost the real Tiger’s Egg. They’re going to visit my aunt, who they believe will be able to teach them the key to the power of the Egg. I think they’ll accept anything she tells them, and with her help we can trick them into returning home.”

  “How do you know she’ll want to help us?” said Little.

  “I don’t,” said Miles simply. He had not had much experience of family, and had no idea how his might react to him appearing out of the blue. “We’ll have to deal with that part when we get to it.”

  Little handed Tangerine back to Miles. He took the bear carefully, but though Tangerine had regained his more familiar weight with the replacing of the Tiger’s Egg he lay limply across the boy’s palm, and Miles placed him carefully in his pocket with a mixture of relief and disappointment.

  They settled on cushions that had been laid out around the embers of the fire, and Miles and Little dozed intermittently, waiting for the dawn. Temzi was again dispatched to the house of the medicine woman with a suggestion that the Great Cortado and Doctor Tau-Tau should be given plenty of prune juice for breakfast to keep them—as Baltinglass put it—in the outhouse for some time.

  Miles was woken by Little just before the sun rose. They thanked Dassin for her hospitality and went outside to find their camels kneeling patiently, already saddled and equipped with plenty of water and food. Miles had hoped to see Temzi, so that he could thank her for helping him to relieve Doctor Tau-Tau of the real Tiger’s Egg, but when the time came to leave she was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  NURA

  Baltinglass, Little and Miles, map-led and morning-lit, crested a rise in the shifting sands and caught their first glimpse of the village of Kagu. A tall rock stood at its heart, with square buildings of mud and
stone clustered around it as though they had washed up there on a tide of sand. The houses were squat and low on the outskirts, and grew taller as they got closer to the rock. Many were topped with matching pairs of windows, keeping watch over the surrounding desert. The rock in the center had sprouted its own buildings and grown over the ages into a sort of jumbled castle. Here and there tiny gardens perched among the arched windows, and white birds spiraled slowly around it.

  They rode down a gentle slope toward the village. A knot was forming in Miles’s stomach, like the feeling that would come over him before his performances at the Circus Bolsillo. He had no idea what his family would be like, or even if they lived here still. Would they welcome him or treat him as a stranger? He wondered if it might be better not to reveal who he was straightaway, but if he kept his identity secret how could he get to speak to his aunt?

  As they entered the outskirts a gaggle of small children emerged from the violet shadows and ran to meet them. Their skin was dusty and their hair uncut, and they chattered and laughed excitedly at the travelers.

  “Mahnoosh?” said Miles. “Do you know the Mahnoosh family?”

  The children turned as one and pointed at the rock castle that loomed over them. “Qal’at Mahnoosh!” they said. “Mahnoosh Castle.”

  Miles looked up at the towering jumble. It was impossible to tell if it consisted of one enormous residence or a cluster of a dozen houses, but there was no shortage of small guides willing to bring them there. They followed the children up through the winding streets until they reached the bottom of a broad staircase that was cut from the rock itself. They dismounted from their camels and tethered them by a well. “That’s a tall shadow we’ve followed,” said Baltinglass. “Is there a big climb ahead, by any chance?”

  “It’s pretty steep,” said Little.