The Sea of the Dead

by Barry Wolverton

  “And she won’t be successful,” said Black. “But we’ll all get to go home.”

  “I showed our cards,” said Lady Barrett. “Your turn.”

  Black drummed his fingers on the table before finally answering. “David and I agreed to vouch for her claim that she has Christian allies already. That we were in fact spying on the Mogul Empire.”

  “She had me draw maps,” said David. “Archibald and I saw and heard a lot on our trek across India, and she intends to make a gift of these maps showing Akbar’s positions and his weaknesses.”

  “Not to mention my Gutenberg Bible,” said Black with disgust. “More of a symbolic gift than anything, but a show of good faith. Although it corrupts the word faith to use it in this context.”

  “What does all this mean?” said Bren.

  “Nothing,” said Black. “Shveta is Hindu. She’s not going to convince Christendom to go to war with the Mogul Empire because she thinks she’s entitled to be queen of Cashmere.”

  “I hope you’re right, Archibald,” said Lady Barrett. “But don’t underestimate Christendom’s fear of Moslems. No matter how cozy things seem with Akbar right now.”

  Before they had turned in for the evening, Ani had brought down fresh linens and silk sleeping clothes. Bren had never been so happy to get out of the clothes he was wearing and sleep in something clean and comfortable, and in a real bed. He wished he’d been kidnapped sooner.

  The next morning, Shveta led her entourage downstairs, dressed more like the queen she aspired to be rather than in her peddler’s disguise. Her bright clothes flowed around her as if she were wearing the light itself, and her jewels pulsed—especially the large red ruby that lay across her forehead.

  Bren and company were sitting around their table, having breakfast, and he could tell by the look on Lady Barrett’s face that she would love to disguise herself as Indian royalty.

  “Good, everyone’s up,” said Shveta. “Come with me.”

  She didn’t give them time to dress. Instead she led them back upstairs, through several heavy curtains to another part of the house, a large room ornately decorated with gilded furniture and wall-sized paintings. While the others sat down at a table, Shveta went and stood before one of the paintings, staring at it as if she were noticing it for the first time. It was a naked, muscular man holding a trident, riding a lobster-footed horse across a wild sea. Clouds roiled in a red-orange sky.

  “Poseidon?” Bren asked, almost to himself. He noticed two lines of writing at the bottom. Latin? But the words were too faded for him to translate.

  “I love this room most of all,” said Shveta, still gazing at the painting. “What do you think of this?”

  No one answered at first. Finally, David Owen said feebly, “It’s lovely.”

  Shveta folded her arms and tapped her feet three times before spinning in David’s direction. “It’s camel dung.”

  “Oh, well . . . ,” David said.

  “No, she’s right,” said Lady Barrett. “It’s a complete rip-off. I’ve seen the original in Amsterdam, right down to the Latin inscription.”

  “It’s not even a good rip-off,” said Shveta. “And you’ll see below the Latin there, a Persian inscription by the painter saying that this is his work.”

  “Well, technically, even a copy of another work of art is his work,” said Lady Barrett. “If you want to debate the finer points of forgery.”

  “I don’t,” said Shveta. “To me, this painting is symbolic of empire . . . any empire . . . the way they take from others what they want, discard what they don’t.”

  “That fairly well describes the general creep of civilization,” said Black.

  “Why are we here?” said Lady Barrett. “You aren’t really interested in discussing art.”

  “Oh, but I am,” said Shveta, and she snapped her fingers at Ani, who produced Bren’s tunic, the one the monk at the Leopard’s Nest had given him. She tossed the tunic back to Bren, but on the table she spread out the tangka that had been sewn inside it.

  “Hey! That’s mine!” said Bren. “You snuck downstairs and took it?”

  “Yes,” said Ani matter-of-factly as she spread the tangka out on the table.

  “You were hiding this from me,” said Shveta.

  Black and his father both looked at Bren, wondering why he had been hiding it from them, too.

  “Not exactly,” said Bren. “I don’t even know what it is. A monk who gave me the tunic had hidden it inside. I didn’t know anything about it until later.”

  “And what did you learn later?” Shveta asked.

  “That it might be a tangka,” said Bren. “Some traditional form of Tibetan painting done on cloth.”

  Shveta folded her arms across her stomach, inside the sleeves of her bright-orange blouse. “That’s it?”

  Bren hesitated. “Yes.”

  Shveta stared at him with the most penetrating dark-brown eyes Bren had ever seen. He tried to blink, but he couldn’t. Finally, she unfolded her arms and leaned over the table, studying the painting again.

  “Shall I tell you what this looks like to me?” she said. “It looks to me like a mandala.”

  “A mandala?” said Bren.

  “A picture of the universe,” said Shveta. “A symbol of balance and completeness, or the wish for it. Although mandalas have meant different things and served different purposes through the ages.”

  “What’s wrong?” said Lady Barrett.

  Shveta was slowly shaking her head, still staring intently at the painting. “Something’s not right, but I can’t put my finger on it. This seems . . . incomplete.”

  David Owen was now resting both elbows on the table, leaning in for a closer look.

  “It also looks like some of the first European world maps made,” he said. “Not terribly accurate, mind you. More representational. They frequently showed the world as a circle, with a T inside, representing the only three continents we knew—Europe, Asia, and Africa. And in the corners and around the edges would be all sorts of additional information and flourishes, a portrait of the mapmaker, pictures of angels . . . planetary and celestial bodies . . . winds. Sorry,” he mumbled, pushing back from the table. “After drawing maps for twenty years, everything looks like a map to me.”

  Shveta wagged a finger at him, but not in a scolding way. “No, you may be on to something.”

  “It’s a map?” said Bren, wondering how many different hidden maps a boy could uncover in one lifetime. The paiza, the oracle bones, Qin’s tomb . . .

  “Not a map, exactly,” said Shveta. “But it may be a painting of a place. Or places. When I said it seemed incomplete, I was looking at this . . .”

  She pointed to the sky-blue center, at what Bren had thought looked like three mountains, or parts of them.

  “I have to agree,” said David. “This looks less like a map than an actual landscape, one being viewed through a lens.”

  “Or a spyglass!” said Bren, thinking of how often seafarers first sighted land through their small telescopes.

  “So what are we spying at?” said Black.

  David Owen shook his head. “Good question, Archibald. Unlike a map, our painting here seems to lack notations or legends of any kind.”

  “Perfect,” said Sean. “So we know nothing.”

  Lady Barrett laughed. “You should be used to it by now.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE ROAD TO SAMARKAND

  Sean and Bren finished packing their things and loading their horses, along with one camel Lady Barrett had haggled for with a Cashmere livestock dealer. She claimed she had raced camels once when she was on an antiquities dig in northern Africa, disguised as a Bedouin. But the others were skeptical of her story when she tried to mount the camel like a horse.

  “You have to make him kneel first,” said Shveta, her voice a syrup of condescension.

  Lady Barrett, embarrassed at first, quickly recovered. “Unlike you, I don’t try to make everyone b
ow to me and my alleged royal lineage.”

  The barb almost got to the unflappable Shveta. Despite her dark skin, Bren could see tiny blooms of anger on both cheeks. He noticed that Ani was smiling. He was curious about her relationship to Shveta, and made a note to try and get to know her better as they went.

  “What’s our next stop to be?” David asked.

  “Samarkand,” Shveta replied. “The road is mostly flat across steppe land, and the territory is controlled by a remnant satrap of the old Persian Empire—the pre-Moslem empire, I should say. From there we travel to the Caspian Sea. The Volga traders will be all over the ports there, most going back north, but some resupplying to go south, to Baghdad. We’ll join one of their trains.”

  “That’s the most direct route to Baghdad?” David asked.

  “I understand how eager you all must be to return to Britannia, after all you’ve been through,” said Shveta. “Unfortunately, we’re not birds. Mountains and rivers and seas and, more important, people who might wish us harm stand in our way. Rather than the most direct route, I’ve opted for the safest. Okay with you, bub?”

  “Of course,” said David.

  “Besides,” Shveta continued, “you’ve finally found your son, against improbable odds. Enjoy some quality time together.”

  “How long must we actually travel as a group?” said Black.

  “What’s the matter, string bean? You don’t like our company?”

  Black looked in Aadesh’s direction. “I do enjoy our chess matches. I think I’m getting better.”

  “You’re not,” said Aadesh.

  They were on the road an hour after sunrise after a breakfast of chewy dates and some sort of porridge softened by milk that Bren just assumed was from a camel or a yak or maybe a giraffe. Srinagar was near the border of the Mogul line of control, guarded mainly by the fierce Rajput soldiers the Moguls had hired. But as the Rajput were Hindu, Shveta wasn’t concerned about being arrested, even if she was recognized.

  “Money talks with mercenaries,” she said, rattling a bag of coins.

  They crossed the unofficial border of the Mogul Empire without incident, but Shveta had neglected to tell them that the Hindu Kush mountain range stood between them and the flat steppe land. At least they were on horses this time, thought Bren, and as it turned out, there was a well-worn road through the mountains that kept them away from the highest, snow-covered peaks. It was the steppe land that proved the most difficult. It was flat, yes, but also nearly treeless. They walked under a scorching sun all day; at night they ate and slept exposed to cold winds.

  One evening after a supper of dried camel meat and more dates, Shveta told them a story about the city they were traveling to.

  “They say Samarkand is the city where all modern magic began.”

  “Modern magic?” said Bren.

  “Artificery magic,” said Shveta. “Magic performed with devices . . . crystal balls and wands and jewelry, to name a few of the more clichéd examples. And when I say modern, of course I’m being relative. Artificery magic is the only magic people have known for millennia now. And even that is almost gone, thanks to laziness, neglect, and misuse.”

  “What do you mean?” said Bren, thinking of Yaozu’s stories of the Eight Immortals . . . how they had come to be and then come to be abused.

  “Long ago . . . loooong ago,” Shveta began, “men and women knew the true language of magic. The first language there was, perhaps. The true names for things, and their meaning. Natural magic. It still had to be learned, and practiced, but once it was not unusual for a person to be able to call the wind and rain, or to heal . . . and destroy.”

  Shveta stoked their small fire as the wind picked up.

  “Natural magic, despite the name, is difficult. It requires discipline, patience, and above all, humility. Three things that ninety-nine percent of all humans lack. It was in Samarkand that an alternative was created. Summoning. Making a demon or a demigod or a djinn from the Other Side do the work for you.”

  Bren instinctively touched the black jade stone in his pocket. The worthless black jade stone. Except that it was the only thing he had left that had come from his mother—twice. And it reminded him of Mouse.

  He glanced at Lady Barrett to see if she, too, was thinking what he was. She was resting the palm of her right hand on the pommel of her now-powerless sword.

  “A powerful magician,” Shveta continued, “discovered not only how to summon a djinn, but how to trap it in our world, using a device. In this case, an amulet.”

  “The Amulet of Samarkand!” said Lady Barrett. “A legendary artifact in my field. And by legendary, I mean no one believes it’s real.”

  “Believe what you want,” said Shveta. “True, the amulet hasn’t been seen or heard from in centuries, but I know what I know.”

  “What did it do?” said Bren eagerly, ignoring Lady Barrett.

  Shveta smiled. She seemed to love an admiring audience. “This magician trapped one of the most powerful djinn from the Other Side, and then he himself became the most powerful magician in the known world.”

  “Merlin?” said Bren.

  Shveta scoffed. “Merlin? Please, boy. Get your nose out of storybooks.”

  “Hey!” said Black. “I make a good living convincing people to bury their noses in books.”

  It was David Owen’s turn to laugh out loud. “Archibald, your store hasn’t turned a profit once, I’d wager. You live off the magic of inheritance.”

  Black stiffened and opened his mouth to argue, but a convincing argument seemed to elude him.

  “Anyway,” said Shveta, drawing the attention back to herself, “you wouldn’t have heard of this magician, but you would certainly know him by his labors—namely, enslaving djinn to perform magic for the so-called magicians of this world. Big surprise, the djinn didn’t care for this arrangement, fighting it from the beginning, and for the most part, winning. Now humans have lost the true language of magic.”

  “Do you know the story of the Eight Immortals?” Bren asked.

  “Tell me,” said Shveta.

  He fumbled for the right place to start. “Before the world began . . .” No, that sounded like it would take too long. “In the time of the Ancients . . .” Ugh, now he sounded like he was trying to be a wise old man.

  “You see this sword?” Lady Barrett interjected, removing the scabbard from her waist and holding it at Shveta’s eye level. “It’s one of the Eight Immortals. Or at least it was.”

  “You ruined it?” said Ani.

  “Not exactly,” said Lady Barrett. “It was possessed with the power of a demigod the Chinese believed helped rule Heaven, Hell, and Earth at the beginning of time. There were eight of them—the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, and they eventually ceded control of Earth to people the Chinese now refer to as the Ancients. These Ancients were given the gift of magic—natural magic, as you call it. But they betrayed this gift by creating eight magical artifacts instead, one for each of the demigods’ gifts.”

  “The Eight Immortals,” said Shveta.

  “You catch on quick,” said Lady Barrett with a smirk.

  “So if you didn’t ruin it, what happened?”

  “She took it through the Dragon’s Gate, and it came back normal,” said Bren.

  “The what now?” said Shveta. Black and David Owen looked at Bren questioningly as well.

  Bren let out a deep breath. “The Dragon’s Gate. The place in China where Mouse wanted to go.”

  “Who?” said three or four people at once.

  How to explain Mouse? Was she a girl? An old woman? A spirit? “She was my friend,” said Bren. “I mentioned her before. We met on the Albatross. We found a sort of map on this island where we shipwrecked, and it took us to this mountain that looked like a dragon. But we had to rob a tomb first . . .”

  Lady Barrett jumped in when she saw the shock on David Owens’s face. “The Dragon’s Gate was a portal, I guess you’d call it. To another world.”
>
  “What other world?” said Black.

  “The spirit world?” said Lady Barrett. “An alternate universe? This Other Side Shveta refers to? I guess it depends on how you think about these things. I was there and I’m still not sure. All I know is, the power that went with this sword didn’t come back through the gate with me. As if the Immortal who empowered it saw his chance to undo a big mistake.”

  “We had another one, too,” said Bren. “The jade tablet. It let you find things.”

  “What happened to that one?” said Shveta.

  “Gone, I guess,” said Bren. “Our friend . . . guide, really . . . Yaozu had it. He went through the Dragon’s Gate and never came back, as far as we know.”

  Bren thought about mentioning his stone as well, but he didn’t want to talk about it, so he kept quiet.

  “What did you see?” said David. He was looking at Lady Barrett.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said you went to this other place. What did you see?”

  She told him the same thing she had told Bren—almost. “There was something I didn’t tell you before, Bren. The reason I knew, or thought I knew, I had gone through the Gate, into some other dimension—” She stopped abruptly, as if regretting the path she had started down.

  “What?” said Bren. “Please, tell me.”

  “I saw someone,” said Lady Barrett. “Someone I was sure was . . .”

  “Dead?”

  Lady Barrett nodded. David turned to his son, his eyes wide.

  “Bren, did you go through this gate as well?”

  Bren felt the saliva in his mouth turn to ash. He knew what his father was asking, and he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure it had been real, seeing his mother there, but then he remembered how their hands had touched when she returned the black jade stone to him, and the tremor it had given him. Though that could’ve just been an aftershock from the earthquake.