The Strange Round Bird: Or the Poet, the King, and the Mysterious Men in Black

by Eden Unger Bowditch

  “So it’s genetically inherited?” Noah asked with false innocence. “It’s a defect in your genes, this ability to grow only half of a moustache?”

  “We have no defect,” roared the short and stout Komar Romak. “And we know of no genes. You shall obey the power and do as—”

  “Look,” said Noah, “how about you just explain what you want, why you want it, and how you plan to give me back my mother.”

  “We do as we shall do,” said Komar Romak.

  “What you do do,” and here Noah, out of anxiety and, in the face of all seriousness, had to stifle a laugh. “And where you do it is really not my concern.” He faked a cough to cover a giggle that escaped. “Except for my mother. You will release her immediately.” The absurdity of this scene overwhelmed Noah, with several pairs of Komar Romak around a table, genetically mutant half-moustaches galore.

  Komar Romak—the one with a huge scar across his face—opened his mouth, Noah guessed, to roar, but Komar Romak at the end of the table raised a hand and stopped him. That original sitting man was older than the rest and Noah decided must be some kind of leader.

  “Boy,” Komar Romak said from the end of the table, “clearly, we were mistaken. We assumed you were in possession of more knowledge than you are. This is no matter to us. What is a matter to you is your mother and our demands. You want your mother freed. We shall do so in exchange for something we want.”

  Noah gulped. Suddenly, things were no longer amusingly absurd. He looked around the room at the different faces. Each face lacked any sense of kindness. Each face was cold and cruel. Noah felt there was no avenue into the heart of Komar Romak. Perhaps that was genetics, too. There was no heart to Komar Romak. “What is it that you want?”

  “We want what is ours!” shouted the Komar Romak with the scar across his eye. He shook his hand at Noah. The man was missing a finger on his left hand.

  “You see,” said Komar Romak from the end of the table, “we possess great power. We have been the force on this planet for many generations. Much of what you believe is the work of nations and conquerors is actually the work of Komar Romak. Hundreds of years ago, a time arrived when a great but foolish mind came to believe there could be a vessel for an ultimate form of power, a power to offer freedom. Great inventors were gathered and this power came to be.”

  Noah nodded.

  “This power,” continued Komar Romak, “was meant for foolishness. The truth of its capacity was never to be unleashed. But Komar Romak understood the depth of this invention and sought to overcome the boundaries imposed upon it.”

  Komar Romak watched Noah. Noah could feel eyes upon him, waiting to see if he knew this already. Komar Romak would not reveal more than Noah was thought to already know.

  “This, I know,” Noah lied, casually. “This is…no surprise to me. What you call information here is not offering me anything new. You are supposed to be informing me what you expect me to do.”

  “Very well,” said Komar Romak from the end of the table, still calm and observing. “Il Magna belongs to Komar Romak. You will get it for us. And for that errand, we shall return your mother.”

  Noah’s face drained of color and he could feel cold sweat around his temples. Il Magna? He knew that name.

  “Get it yourself, if you are so powerful,” said Noah.

  “Ah,” said Komar Romak, from the end of the table, “we would gladly do so. However, the great Suleiman saw fit to behave like a burrowing mouse and hide his treasure in different parts of the world. He took Il Magna, the great round device, apart so that no one would ever possess its power. The fool believed it was too great for man. But Komar Romak is more than man. Il Magna belongs to Komar Romak.”

  Noah’s mind was racing. “Pieces of a machine.”

  “Boy!” came a voice that brought Noah back to the table. “You listen when we are talking.” It was a large gruff man with a barrel chest. His voice boomed like an explosion, blasting thoughts into Noah’s head.

  “So this is where the whole thing started? Il Magna or el magna or whatever it is you want?” Noah nearly spit when he spoke. “This all began with something you haven’t been able to get your hands on for over three hundred and fifty years?”

  “How dare you,” growled Komar Romak, big and burly, from the left side of the table.

  The Komar Romak at the end of the table laughed. “Il Magna is a recent pursuit. Ours is an ancient power. It is blood pure and of the ages. We held the cup of hemlock for the gadfly of Athens to drink his death. We are the hands whose knives felled Caesar.”

  When Noah took in that information, it tasted like hemlock.

  “Well, if you think I’m going to help you …” Noah broke off his declaration. There was a rumble of muffled laughter around the table.

  The Komar Romak at the head of the table raised a finger and the others fell quiet. He looked at Noah, mild amusement on his face. “One may think many things, boy, but we know that you fancy yourself a hero. If you are charged with the life of your mother, you shall not stand by and let her die. No, young scientist, you cannot let your mother become a victim. And so, we shall allow this. But remember, you will do as demanded. Your mother is as safe as we allow. We can as easily pluck her from a stage as from a laboratory.” He grinned at Noah as if he was explaining the rules of the game.

  “Well, you’ve not managed to pluck any of us from a laboratory,” said Noah, “and we shall never let you hurt her. We will find her and save her from your evil clutches.”

  “Evil? You amuse us, boy,” said Komar Romak, still grinning. “It is as if you claim evil to be a universal truth. To the powerful, evil is nothing more than a means to an end.”

  “Why me?” asked Noah.

  “Because,” Komar Romak grinned, “you believe you have the most to lose.”

  Noah was silent. He wanted to shout at Komar Romak. He wanted to climb on the table and throw food at every pair of faces that mirrored that ugly grin.

  But Komar Romak had more to thrust. “You see, on your own, you shall never find her. But that is no matter. We have always had the power to take her at our leisure. She is not protected by walls or force. She has chosen the stage as her home and we have shown how easily we can take her from her music box. No, boy, if you want to free her from threat and theft, you must decide.”

  Komar Romak turned over one hand and then the other. “One or the other. Do as we demand or offer up Ariana Canto-Sagas as your personal sacrifice.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE SCIENTISTS

  DIG UP THE PAST

  OR

  MR. TESLA HOLDS HIS NOSE

  They spent the first two hours waiting in the room with the great clock. It was a clock of inlaid silver and gold, of mother-of-pearl and ivory, with ornate gears and a rich rosewood casing. For its size, it had a delicate chime—almost an echo rather than a gong. But they found that, no matter how delicate the chiming, or the extent to which it seemed to make time slow down, the clock remained the measure they could not escape. They left the room and sat in the great hall for a while. Then they moved to the veranda, and the garden, and walked the corridors. Then they went back to the clock room.

  “It doesn’t matter where we wait,” Lucy said sagely. “The waiting always finds us.”

  Jasper reached behind the clock, where they kept their map. He looked over the diagram that mapped the flight of the butterflies. He turned it one way, then the next. The others sat and watched the clock. Jasper came to the silent conclusion that if he ignored the clock, it was slightly less agonizingly slow that if he sat and watched the hands barely turn. Two young brothers came in with a tray of tea. Miss Brett stood to help with the milk and sugar.

  “We might be on our way to save Madame Ariana,” said Wallace, looking away from the clock, “but we have done nothing to help Noah if he’s in danger.”

  “We don’t know that he is in danger,” said Faye, wanting to believe he wasn’t. “He’s probably out there expl
oring on his own. That’s something he’d do.”

  “We can hope that he’s on his way back,” said Miss Brett, handing Faye a cup. She could see the girl’s attempt to convince herself as much as convince the others. They all felt it.

  “But he might need us,” said Lucy, just looking at her cup, “and we can’t be the ones who he needs and not be there.”

  “And we need to let Noah know about Sabi,” said Jasper, looking up from his drawing. “Only he can tell us if the boy is innocent or not.” But Jasper knew that was not true. How could Noah know? Perhaps he, too, had been fooled.

  “But we don’t know that Noah really needs us or if he really knows anything,” said Faye, almost insisting she was right. “He probably extricated himself from the wreckage and is now on a hunt without us.” Faye demanded that Noah be off somewhere, searching alone. She demanded this rather than cope with her own grief. By now, Faye had lost her sense of frustration and anger, lost her fury, lost her desire to throw something at one of the brothers. She felt helpless and guilty. “I wish Mr. Bell would just tell us something. He must know…something.”

  “Faye is right,” Wallace said. “Mr. Bell is their leader, isn’t he?”

  “Well, it makes sense,” said Miss Brett, thinking of the sweet, kind little man. “I don’t know if that’s his official title. I knew him as a teacher, back in the days when I was at college. But he does seem to be the leader here.”

  Jasper stood. His heart suddenly began to pound. Yes, we must go to the leader, he thought. We must find out what is happening.

  But Faye had another concern. “Even if Mr. Bell is the leader, we don’t really know, for certain, who these mysterious brothers in black are working for.”

  “They are working for us,” came a booming voice from the doorway.

  The children all turned around. There, in the doorway, stood their parents and Nikola Tesla.

  “Not exactly for us,” Dr. Banneker tried to add, but it was impossible to be heard over the barrage of noise coming from Faye, Jasper, Wallace, Lucy, and Miss Brett, who were intermittently shouting, gasping, questioning, and wailing.

  “This cacophony is impossible,” said Nikola Tesla, his fingers in his ears.

  “S’il vous plait!” shouted Dr. Isobel Modest. “Please, let us explain.”

  “It is their job, it is their raison d’etre, their reason for being, to protect us and the work we do!” said Nikola Tesla, shouting.

  Isobel gently removed Nikola Tesla’s fingers from his ears.

  “Though not just us,” Gwendolyn Vigyanveta said nervously. “As you know, children, this has been the way for generations. But you see, the mysterious men in black protect the minds who, in turn, protect—”

  “Please, my dear,” said Dr. Rajesh Vigyanveta, placing a hand on his wife’s shoulder. He looked nervously at the brothers in black who were puttering around the room.

  “Please what, Father?” Faye demanded. “What are you protecting if it isn’t your families?”

  “It is the planet,” said Dr. Banneker. “Your daughter is right, Raj. We are all on this planet together, and if our mandate is to protect the planet, then we must protect ourselves with it.”

  “I’m right? Right about what? For the thousandth time, what are you talking about?” demanded Faye. “With everything that has happened, you still want to keep secrets? Ariana Canto-Sagas has been taken, Dr. Canto-Sagas is in a fever, and perhaps Noah is … is …” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  “My little marmelo,” Dr. Rajesh Vigyanveta started.

  Quickly, Faye said, “No, Father, do not try to make me feel like a child. Noah is out there. He…he may have learned important clues, but we still have not found his mother.” Faye gulped. It had been more than ten hours since Noah went missing. Soon, they would have to face their deepest fears.

  “You must tell them whatever you can to help them stay safe,” said Miss Brett firmly. “Because not telling them has not kept anyone safe. Your children will not sit here in the dark and expect someone else to find Ariana or protect any of us.”

  “They are smelly little children,” Nikola Tesla sniffed. “They do not have the ability to—”

  “You were smelly little children once, too,” said Lucy, moving closer to Tesla than he seemed to find comfortable.

  “I was nothing of the sort,” said Nikola Tesla, his arms akimbo.

  “Really, Niki?” said Dr. Banneker.

  “Very well,” said Nikola Tesla, rolling his eyes. “Perhaps I was a child, but I was never smelly.”

  “It doesn’t matter how smelly you were.” Faye pounded a fist on the back of the settee. “Listen to Miss Brett.”

  The parents looked at one another. Without a word, it was clear to them all that Miss Brett was right. Dr. Banneker looked at Miss Brett, as if to apologize. She walked over to him and placed a hand gently on his arm.

  “We, and the brothers in black, work for a common cause,” said Dr. Gwendolyn Vigyanveta, looking nervously from parent to parent. Her eyes rested on her husband before returning to the others.

  “We are,” said Dr. Tobias Modest, “in some ways, at the heart of it. But, like the brothers, it is a place we have inherited, from our parents and theirs, from marrying into it or from being born into it. We are a part of the history of the thing, as are they.”

  “It is how this has gone for centuries, mes chèrs enfants,” his wife continued. “Les frères, the brothers, protect us and guide us. And they protect you.”

  Then Jasper asked the one question that really mattered. Jasper looked at his mother. “Why?”

  Much was going on inside all of the heads in that room, as one might expect, but there was silence on the outside. Only the ticking of the clock, now ignored by the children, could be heard.

  “Because, at the risk of sounding dramatic, the fate of the world depends on it.” Mr. Bell was standing in the doorway. “But right now, we have something that requires our immediate attention.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A PICTURE THAT TELLS A

  THOUSAND WORDS

  OR

  NOAH CARRIES A HEAVY BURDEN HOME

  He was running. The salt of dried tears stung his cheeks. His bruises, swollen and red, pained him. Komar Romak had dropped Noah, blindfolded, on the side of the road. Somehow, he was managing to find his way back toward the Khan il Khalili. His shoulder throbbed, his lungs and legs burned, and his sides felt as if someone was poking him with a hot fork. But he kept running. It was as if the faster he could run, the sooner he would escape his fate.

  But he knew this was not true. He knew he could not escape. Noah slid on the sand-strewn cobblestones in the road and came to a sudden stop. Sweat poured down his face and his eyes blurred from sweat and tears. He coughed and spit and his nose ran in torrents. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and blew hard, streaks of blood among the dirt and mucus.

  And then, a very wet nose rubbed against his cheek. A warm tongue lathered his face from forehead to chin. Ralph was whining with excitement. Noah could hardly lift his head.

  “Good boy.” Noah wasn’t even sure if he had said this aloud.

  A strong hand clasped Noah’s arm as a shadowy image appeared in his limited line of vision. It was an outline of bunny ears. Noah had never been so relieved to see a brother in black. He leaned against the man in black and allowed himself to be carried into a waiting carriage. Ralph never left his side.

  “We go castle,” said the bunny man.

  “Yes,” Noah said, still gasping for air. “We go castle.”

  “When did he arrive?” cried Faye. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “We are telling you, Miss Vigyanveta,” said Mr. Bell. He had found the children in the great hall and brought them the news. “Master Canto-Sagas has just now arrived. Brothers were waiting for him in the Khan. We were hopeful he might find his way back there. The little dog went, too, and led the brothers right to the rubble where Noah had been, and then t
owards the tent maker’s alley. He was found and has been brought back here, out of danger.”

  “You knew he had been in danger?” Wallace asked.

  “We did not know,” said Mr. Bell. “However, we suspected.”

  “We…we believed he had been exploring on his own,” said Faye, semi-honestly. She did not say exactly what she suspected.

  “I have come to let you know he is safe,” said Mr. Bell, “but we are letting him bathe before joining us. Trust me when I say that this would be preferable to all, considering the state of his body and his clothes.”

  “He’s always a bit smelly,” said Lucy. “Especially around the behind.”

  And somehow, in the face of fear and unknowing, they all laughed together, though not for long.

  Wallace jumped to his feet and pointed to the clock. “Look at the time! We may get answers any minute. We should be in the laboratory.”

  Lucy went to Mr. Bell and pulled on his robe. “Please, Mr. Bell, can you send Noah into the laboratory to catch the butterflies with us?”

  Dr. Tobias Modest turned. “Lucy, what are you—”

  Mr. Bell raised a hand. “Of course, Miss Modest.”

  Miss Brett and the four other butterfly releasers went to the laboratory, where they waited. The first hour lumbered past in a painful drag. Miss Brett read to Lucy. Faye paced the length of the room, periodically checking the printing machine. Wallace and Jasper looked through the microscope, adding to the list of detectable elements they were able to isolate in Wallace’s coin.

  While they were intent on their work, the work was a mere distraction while they waited. Their focus was broken by the sound of the printing machine suddenly, rumbling to life.

  “What is that?” came a hoarse voice from the doorway that made them all forget the printing machine.

  “Noah!” cried Lucy, already squeezing him around the middle by the time the others rushed over to greet him.