Phantom (24 page)

Silence settled once more over the roof, disturbed only by the last, sickening shift of the stones; and the lantern light showed me the void that now gaped in the balustrade, like a lost tooth in the mouth of some grim nightmare creature.

Without urgency, without hope, I turned numbly and groped my way down into the courtyard where my daughter's broken little body lay surrounded by a shroud of decayed masonry. I had known she must be dead and even had one last flicker of hope remained with me, it would not have survived that first sight of her split skull, the slow grayish ooze upon the flagstones. Time and place had ceased to have meaning and the world seemed very far away from the silent void which closed around me as I carried her into the house and laid her on the creaking leather couch.

I did not hear his step, but I was aware of his presence just behind me, like some great black specter.

I did not turn. I felt that if I looked around I would be turned to stone, calcified by the bitter venom of his rage and grief. I did not fear the horror of his face—I could have looked upon that sight with equanimity at any time. But I feared his eyes now, those bottomless pits of sorrow that would only mirror my pain. I heard his ragged, sobbing curse and I knew I must not look at him… I would go mad if I looked.

Silence stretched between us like a stone wall and became the final separation. The oil lamps, still burning in their brackets, showed me his shadow moving slowly across the wall beyond the couch, a huge and silent shade slipping out into the night beyond my door, where darkness waited to reclaim him like a fond parent.

When he was gone… only when he was finally gone… was I able to weep.

The shadows are creeping steadily across the rooftop garden now… another bleak and meaningless day is ending. I have sat here once again until sunset, brooding, remembering, reproaching myself for the folly which emptied my life, the last mistake which killed my daughter and destroyed a unique boy.

Erik… I can say now what I could not say that night when Luciana's hand lay cooling in my grasp and 1 was struck dumb by outraged grief. You were not to blame for her death. Whatever blame there was I have long since taken upon myself.

You were the child of my imagination, the son that God withheld, and I learned to love you in your slow and painful striving for the light.

Tomorrow these flowers you cared for will lift their faces once more to the sun, stretching up proud and true to acknowledge their creator in all their beauty.

There was so much beauty in your soul, Erik, so much beauty that I fear now, because of one old man's folly, will never see the light of day.

In darkness you came to me.

And in darkness you left…

Ahraf was a magnificent ruin of palaces. There had been, over the centuries, as many as six different royal residences contained within its huge wall of circumvallation, all beautifully laid out in their time with stone terraces, canals, cascades, and lovely
aiwans
. But once the Hall of Forty Columns burned down, little was done to restore the opulent glories of former years, and an air of shabby decay hung over the Bagh-i-Shah and the Garden of the Seraglio. In the enormous grounds orange trees and gigantic cypress ran riot among a jungle of wildflowers and weeds. The court came to the maritime province of Mazanderan for a brief period each winter, to escape the harsh bleakness of Tehran's plummeting temperatures, but only infrequent, fleeting visits were made during spring and summer. So for much of the year the area suffered the neglect peculiar to deserted property, with scorpions and small lizards sunning themselves peacefully on the terraces. I had always thought it a shame; Mazanderan is a place of great natural beauty and deserved better from its imperial masters. It was said that the new shah intended to make changes; and since he appeared to me to be every bit as vain and pleasure loving as his predecessor, I thought it quite likely that he would soon come to require a residence more in keeping with his station than these crumbling relics of the past.

This was the second time in a week that I had received a direct summons to the palace, and once more I went there with a quaking heart, wondering what fresh unpleasant commission was about to be foisted upon me. Even in this tropical backwater we were not immune to the religious uprisings that had been taking place in the capital. The execution of the Bab in July had not put an end to the unrest, merely exacerbated it, with the result that the name of Babi had become a convenient label for any dissident and sufficient excuse for their elimination. Babi activity was reported everywhere, and I, as chief of police, had found my prisons bursting at the seams like everyone else's, until the executions brought their own form of relief. The stinking, decaying bodies had been publicly displayed as a timely warning to those who might still be tempted to voice their heresies. No wonder the flies had been so bad that year, issuing like a plague from the malarial swamps and lagoons along the Caspian shore…

I never asked to be made daroga of Mazanderan, and I am obliged to confess that there were times when I thought I should rest far easier in my bed as a lowly secretary. There were hundreds of us shahzadeh in Persia, all entitled to claim imperial descent from the thin smattering of royal blood that ran in our veins. The shahs had always exercised a peculiarly excessive talent for paternity, and blatant nepotism had run riot for countless years because of it. Until someone died and freed a post more suitable to my regrettably squeamish nature, daroga of Mazanderan I would remain. I had a modest estate, a son, and a respectable position in society to support—I couldn't afford to be overly particular about the nature of my employment in the royal service. The post gave me a good pension and brought me to court sufficiently often to enable me to keep a wary eye on those next in blood who were frantically trying to appropriate it behind my back. Rampant corruption and blatant backstabbing were the inevitable results of our system of government; the Persian court was not a place where a wise man took his eyes off an enemy for a single careless moment.

Passing through the Sublime Porte, which led into the palace complex, I was directed out into the gardens, to the wooden pavilion which had been hastily and halfheartedly erected to replace the Hall of Forty Columns. Already it looked ready to fall down, the product of inferior design, poor materials, and idle workmen. Persia was slowly stagnating after a glorious past; evidence of decadence and decay was everywhere.

I prostrated myself dutifully on the highly patterned carpet at the foot of a Turkish divan and gave the prescribed greeting to the king of kings.

"May I be your sacrifice, Asylum of the Universe."

Unmoved by the essential absurdity of my address, the shah looked up from the cat which was arching beneath his caressing hand, and made the brief gesture which raised me to my feet.

"Daroga! You're late."

"A thousand apologies, Imperial Majesty."

I bowed my head in assumed humility and he was satisfied. I wasn't late and we both knew it, but he was young, barely two years on the throne, and still felt the need to establish his querulous authority. Now that I had become the humble penitent, we could come to business.

"Have you interrogated the Samarkand fur trader, as I instructed?"

"Yes, Imperial Majesty." I got all the good jobs—the ones that no one else at court would touch. It had taken me two months to track down that wretched fur trader and extract his garbled, incredible tale.

"And what is your opinion of the man's honesty?"

"He was a simple man, Your Majesty, a very simple man.

I would say he lacked the imagination to embroider such a story."

The shah sat upright on the divan and the Siamese cat— his special favorite, a gift from the royal court of Siam— sprang down on the carpet, tossing her fantastically jeweled collar and eyeing me with a look of pure malevolence. It was a serious thing at this court to make a feline enemy, but no matter how I tried, I never had the knack with cats.

"So it is true, then," mused the shah thoughtfully. "He does indeed exist, this miraculous magician who sings like a god and performs wonders beyond all imagination. The khanum will be delighted. She has already said that such a phenomenon would be wasted in Nijni-Novgorod. He must be brought here at once, the khanum desires it."

I remained respectfully silent, not daring to voice my thoughts. Like the rest of the court I was heartily weary of satisfying the whims of the shah's mother. Beautiful, heartless, and politically shrewd, she had been the power behind the throne for the last two years and would continue to rule our lives with her caprices until her son broke loose from her maternal dominance. There was, regrettably, no sign of this happening. The shah had three principal wives and innumerable concubines, but no woman in the harem had yet shown herself capable of emerging from the khanum's shadow sufficiently to challenge her insidious influence. We all went in fear of "the Lady."

"I intend to entrust this little matter to your worthy care, Daroga," the shah continued, watching the cat circle me with an ominous swish of her tail. "You will prepare to leave for Russia at once."

I opened my mouth to protest and shut it hurriedly as the shah's expression hardened into displeasure.

"As you wish, O Shadow of God."

As I bowed myself out backward, my foot trod on something long and sinewy. There was a spitting screech of rage, and an unsheathed claw lashed at the bare skin above my ankle. Another infernal cat! Praise Allah, not the shah's favorite this time, but one sufficiently esteemed to win me a frown from the imperial brow and a rebuke that brought sweat glistening on my upper lip.

"You are clumsy today, Daroga."

I mumbled profuse apologies like an idiot, but my efforts at conciliation only won me another vicious scratch from the indignant animal. Allah, how I hated cats! The miserable creatures were all over the palace, filling the rooms with the stench of their urine. It was considered a particular privilege to be sprayed by one of the royal cats—one was not expected to exclaim in disgust and rush off to change into clean attire. Indeed I have known a courtier to cut the coattails from his jacket rather than disturb the Glory of the Empire while she slept. The animals had their own servants and rode in velvet padded cages whenever the court moved. Some of the especially favored even had pensions! Men have been thrown into prison for far less heinous crimes than treading on the tail of a royal cat; I knew I was fortunate to escape so lightly.