Miss Marsh was a talker. But she had fascinating tales to tell, and I soaked them up along with the rest of the family. Many an evening was spent around the fire in my parents’ private living quarters, nestled on pillows with furs tucked around us, listening to her tell of camels, elephants, painted tribesmen, vast waterfalls, daring escapes from death, giant sea creatures, and more. Her command of the language improved fast, and it became easier to follow her quick changes of subject.
Even Papa was enthralled, now and then having to jump up and pace when things got tense. She was a natural storyteller.
I wanted to ask her about those scars, and about the da resu, but never worked up the nerve. Her scars were her own, and anything she knew of the ways of the resura were best inquired of by my mother. But my mother seemed strangely reluctant to challenge this little Briton.
Three months passed. Miss Marsh got rid of her camels, except for one female, named Jasmine, whom she couldn’t bear to lose. It joined our stables and began to eat everything in sight and annoy the other animals. The other camels were either sent north to Soissons laden with specimen boxes, or sold. Miss Marsh had contracts to fulfill and bills to pay.
The vision of my bloody death faded, and my future fate lost urgency. I began to make better progress with languages, partly because of tutoring Miss Marsh, who appreciated the help. Also with map reading, of the earth and of the sky.
So many countries, cities, roads, rivers and mountain ranges. So many stars in the Heavens—and just to make things more difficult some of them moved along tracks of their own devising. But the tracks were in patterns that could be learned; something else Grandfather found interesting, the way some stars moved and others didn’t, the way stars sometimes fell to Earth but were never found. Surely their light should make them easy to locate and collect, like the rarest of jewels?
It was all like a tale from The One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of stories my papa had bought last year from a Jewish bookseller in Cairo. Full of tales of handsome princes finding emeralds and rubies the size of roc’s eggs, menaced by ghouls and talking serpents, tricked by wily genies, it was a world tantalizingly more glamorous than our own.
After I got over my revulsion, I enjoyed helping Miss Marsh sort her specimens, and became fascinated by learning how and where she’d found them. She didn’t need to embellish her stories as she did at our evening sessions. She had been all over—Europe, Africa, Asia, even the new western lands. “The world,” she told me, “is much larger than it seems.”
Unlikely. Everyone knew that the world was huge, and as round as an orange. A sphere, as Grandfather called it. Explorers seeking spices and other treasure had proved this a hundred years ago, though as yet none had managed to circumnavigate the ball of the Earth. But one could head west, turn around and return, holds crammed with money-making goods. Established Oriental traders ground their teeth at how their prices were falling.
Vascone sailors returned from the Western lands laden with furs, mineral ores and nuggets of gold, exotic plants and a few oddly-garbed, sharp-eyed emissaries from the new world. My own father had backed an expedition that he’d thought lost for three years, only to have the two ships return with soft, thick beaver and fox pelts, tobacco, amethyst crystals and the shells called wampum, used in trade with many new-world tribes. The explorers constantly begged for more backing in their efforts to colonize the new lands, but had pretty much given up trying to reach Serendib the short way.
I loved listening to Miss Marsh and Pada Josef argue and try to outdo one another in knowledge, as I wrote up neat little labels for all her collected things. My mother rarely joined in, and after a while I came to the realization that she couldn’t read. Or only enough to aid in her perusal of household records. She certainly spent no time immersed in poetry as I did. She had managed to hide this deficiency very well, and perhaps it explained why she seemed lacking in knowledge of the da resu. Had her training been curtailed by the inability to decipher ancient texts? Had her teachers given up on a girl they’d thought stupid?
I had to admit that it changed the way I thought of her. She wasn’t perfect after all. I needed to gain information from Miss Marsh, not from my mother.
One day, on the way to tackling Miss Marsh about resura, I worked up the courage to ask her what decided her to become an adventuress.
“It seems a hard and dangerous life. Why would you pursue it?”
“Very simple. I was betrothed to a man I hated,” she told me, her voice clipped and brisk.
Seeing my blank look, she expanded on this. “A scoundrel he was, so I ran away. I was fourteen years. Stole my mother’s jewellery and purchased passage on a ship southward heading. The thought of marriage to that debaucher was intolerated.”
“Intolerable,” I corrected.
She shrugged. “It was easy to run away.”
Easy? “But, you were promised in marriage. How could you…”
“How could I defy my parents? How could I steal?” She tossed her head, and got up to retrieve a tray of shells from its box and place it on the table where we worked. The cat nodded on his blanket, ears pricked and twitching, his green eyes half-closed, then suddenly stood, stretched and sauntered off. Perhaps he would start to earn his keep by catching a mouse.
I loved the shells, some delicately pink and spiny, some smooth and white, some black as a burnt bun. She also had trays of stone shells, which she called fossils.
“Simply because,” she continued, “I valued myself more than I valued… allegiance?” I nodded. “Allegiance to parents who thought me chattel. More than blind adherence to a rule I did not make.”
I opened my mouth, and closed it again. Her thin face had taken on a dark look. A rule one did not make? Surely that was every rule?
A thousand questions filled me, but she held up a hand. “My dear Miss Svobodová, you are young and innocent too much and not require details from me. At least for now. It is that I made decision right for me, though there were times when doubtful overcame me. Oh yes, not all my adventures were enjoyful.”
My eyes went immediately to the two deep parallel lines on her cheek. Her mouth turned down wryly, and she ran her fingers over the scars. Affectionately, it seemed to me. I longed to know how she’d got them, but she had never revealed it. “I have plan to write accounting of my travels from the very many notes I have made, and I will have copy prepared for you. I was much surprised you can read and write. Most women cannot.”
Tantalized, I was about to ask her about the University at Cambridge. A school set up by a group of the Kingdom of Wessex’s scientists, lawyers and mathematicians to rival the great College of Science and Mathematics at Byzantium, it gained prestige when internal disputes and lack of funding starved most of the greatest teachers out of Byzantium’s school and into Cambridge’s. Did she still lecture there, between her travels? Pada Josef had told me all about it, rubbing his hands together at the thought of all that brain power concentrated in one huge school.
Her servant came in just then and began to stack and replace the various boxes and satchels we had opened, working nimbly despite a withered arm. Apparently she had acquired him somewhere in Africa. Appearing about twenty, he had curly brown hair and skin as dark as mine, also a long, bumpy nose and a pair of startlingly light eyes, almost golden, which made him look like a wild creature. His name was Akil, he barely spoke, and tended to look at me with disapproval. His big ears, pocked skin and uneven teeth made him homely, so I ignored him, as Miss Marsh generally did.
For several days I felt exhilarated but uncomfortable in her presence. She was an iconoclast. A rebel. She was a daughter who disobeyed her father, stole from her mother. Thinking of the moment when she made her decision to run away made me remember how I had felt sitting on the minaret, deciding to let myself fall off it and fly.
And here she was, small, alive and loaded with exotic curiosities.
How had she avoided the snares and dangers of humanity? Never mind those of monsters and devils, of hungry Gods whispering in the air. I know what I felt and saw in that moment of desire on the minaret, my head swathed in cloth. They wanted everyone, not only da resu, to fall into their arms.
*
Petru Dominus eventually caught wind of Miss Marsh, her scholarly leanings and unwomanly exploits, and demanded her appearance at his local headquarters in Perpignan.
This could not be good.
Miss Marsh had once made the hard decision to run away from an intolerable situation. But also from home, from family, and from security. She had found a safe haven here. Would she run away again? It would take reckless courage rather than cowardice, for if Petru wanted her, he would have her no matter what disguise she attempted.
Yet she was strong and lucky enough to have met many devils and defeated them, perhaps even used them in her travels. Perhaps, from hints she had dropped, even loved them.
Could one actually use a devil, instead of being used by it? The devilish Petru Aska Tolny, for example. This was up to her. I knew Miss Marsh quite well by then, or so I thought; I knew Petru only by reputation. Would he test her, taunt her and let her go? Or would he keep her and drain her dry?
“Don’t worry,” she said to me. The day had come for her audience, and she was picking out what to wear, contemplating one of her dowdy boiled-wool tunics versus the local robe and loose trousers she’d bought in the market. “I can handle your Lord Petru.”
She had already received plenty of advice from Josef and my mother, and, oddly, from Saskia Lubodová. All agreed that an air of subdued, pious dimness would be the best. She would do best to keep her brilliant intellect under wraps.
She held her head high. But I saw that her face was pale and drawn, and her thin lips were even thinner. “I shall be the… epitome of foolish stupidity. He will believe I only travel for fortune, not that I spying am.”
Spying? I hadn’t thought of that, and felt stupid. Of course he’d suspect her, a reportedly clever woman with no husband, father or brother minding her.
She left her servant boy Akil at home with us, instead being escorted to Petru’s headquarters by two of our guardsmen and by a hired female bodyguard whose bulk served to emphasize Miss Marsh’s child-like slenderness.
The women vanished into a litter, flanked by the men who would walk alongside, and I ran back into the villa and up the stairs to a window from which one could glimpse the top of Petru’s sprawling palace, with its towers and its deep windows black as eyes at midday. But unless my gaze could penetrate rock, it was pointless to watch. I stayed there anyway, sending waves of courage from deep inside my body.
After a while I noticed a big bird circling over the city, swooping and soaring here and there, but always about the palace. Oh Sisters. What if it was a vulture attracted by the scent of a kill?
The sun sank as I waited and watched.
She returned just before the evening meal. She looked tired, but her back was straight as she strode in to the main reception room and its hot fire, stripping off her gloves.
“Well,” she stated calmly, “I am very glad that is over.”
I hung back, letting my parents and Pada Josef help her remove her heavy wrap and sit her down before the blaze. My father stood, arms crossed, glaring down at her. He wasn’t angry with her, he was furious at a guest of his being treated rudely.
“What happened?” Mama asked, her voice low.
Miss Marsh gave her a significant look and gently tapped her lips with a finger as a servant brought hot drinks. “Oh, it go very well I think,” she said brightly. “What an imposing man is Lord Petru. I was dazzled much by his knowledge. He must thinking me quite the fool!” She simpered and hid her mouth behind her hand, giggling.
She sat back and smiled guilelessly up at my father, whose lips were curled in a silent snarl. It was quite a performance. The servant shuffled out at last. Petru had his people everywhere, and if they were not precisely his, they were kept as such by threats and bribery.
“You are all right?” asked my father. “He didn’t…” He waved a hand expressively. Hurt you.
“I am quite well. Lord Petru was perfect host. We drinking spiced coffee and discussing New Western World. He had heard, somehow,” and at this Mama snorted, “that I have visit the Terra Torridia. I entertain him with tales of the very odd animals and men I encountered.”
Mama sat beside her on the padded bench, and took her hand. “How… delightful.”
“Hmm, yes. He say certainly that I must, must stay as an honoured guest in his city and think no more of travelling So welcoming, he put arms around me and gave me a very… affectionate squeeze.” She rubbed her shoulders as if they ached.
At this both Grandfather and Mama sucked in their breath. Papa’s nostrils flared. It was obvious what had happened. Petru had threatened her with violence if she attempted to escape Perpignan.
Fortunately she didn’t seem to want to leave anyway, though it must be galling to know you were essentially under arrest.
Miss Marsh had had a close call. We ordered fresh tea brought in, and talked loudly for a while about the magnificence of Lord Petru. Then we all went to bed.
*
All that long winter I got no answers about my fate. My parents never broached the subject, and I was too proud—and fearful—to keep pestering them. I felt as if I were being drawn along like a barge in a canal, unable to change course, ignorant of my destination. It was intensely frustrating.
However, some of my studies were less boring than others. The scroll Mother handed me on poisons, for instance. How to make them, detect them, and use them. Very interesting. For a while I went about sniffing everything suspiciously. Also, the talk she gave me on what men and women do together under the sheets. It is not always just to start a baby. She kept on relentlessly, showing me drawings she’d got from who-knows-where, as I blushed and squirmed and couldn’t keep from looking.
One very strange evening was spent with a woman, a Theravedan entrepreneur born on the island of Serendib, who travelled the world, she informed us, teaching the art of Deception Fighting which she had developed. It stemmed from her knowledge of Silat, an ancient fighting style based upon the movements of animals. Deception Fighting was mostly for women or delicate boys and men, and involved intense observation, training, and the ability to set aside squeamishness. I spent the evening marvelling at the grace and strength the woman exhibited. I was never told her name. She travelled with an entourage of other women whom she had trained, and who served as a buffer between herself and those who would wish to challenge her.
After her ritual movements and chants, she beckoned me to join her on the layer of thick rugs that had been laid on the floor of an empty storeroom. We circled for a moment, then I was suddenly flat on my back gasping for air. This happened over and over, until I was dizzy and humiliated. The one truly useful thing she taught me was very basic and not really part of Silat: how to kick a man in his most tender parts. I’d known these parts were there, of course, for every male animal had them—and mother’s drawings showed them—but I hadn’t understood their pitiful vulnerability.
I also knew that learning anything useful from her would involve many months or years of study, and that there was no chance I’d be afforded any such thing. So I merely marvelled, and bowed and gasped at her ability to disarm and vanquish men two times her size. In parting, she said, “Much strength can be gained merely by remembering what you have seen tonight. Think upon the moves and techniques I displayed, my child—practice them alone in the darkness of night if you must. Any training is better than not knowing such arts even exist.”
I bowed once more as she and her fighting women left.
In spring, as soon as the ruts in the roads had dried up and been smoothed by crews of workers, my father set off once more, north to Alemania and Germania and some of the prosperous merchant cities there. Perhaps even across the northern channel to Britannia if weather permitted. Now that the Viking raids seemed to be no more—the Vikings having decided to loot and pillage the New World instead of the old—travel was much safer. Grandfather had said more than once that we were in the middle of a Golden Age.
Which he would follow up by muttering, “If Petru doesn’t send us all to hell.”
Papa quietly asked Miss Carolina Marsh if she would like to take the opportunity to escape the city and return to her homeland under the protection of his caravan, defying Petru’s order.
She bit her lip, considering. Then, remembering perhaps that it would not be she alone who was punished for disobedience, she politely declined, in her best Latin, which was becoming very good. “I will stay here, as commanded. I do not mind at all, my dear Jameel ibn Hayyan al-Kindi. I fear that should I return to the cold and damp of Wessex, I would very soon sicken and die.” She looked down demurely. Papa didn’t even blink at this transparent falsehood. Everyone knew she had the constitution of a donkey.
I think he was disappointed at her decision, perhaps hoping to become embroiled in a thrilling adventure. But it wouldn’t have ended well.