Phantom (26 page)

But that was in the future. Now there was only the present and the need to gather my wandering wits in the face of his brisk dismissal.

"I beg your pardon for this intrusion," I said hastily, lapsing into Persian in my confusion. "Please understand that I do not come here simply as another credulous spectator, impertinent enough to expect a private performance."

"You are certainly impertinent," he retorted coldly, in my native tongue. "State your business with me and be brief."

He spoke to me with the arrogance of a king, and involuntarily I found myself slipping into the automatic deference that I normally reserved for the shah.

"Sir, your fame has carried many miles, even farther than you may have imagined. I have come from Persia to extend to you the personal invitation of the
shah-in-shah
."

Even as I spoke, I knew I was grossly exceeding my commission. I had been told to fetch this man, in much the same way as I might have been required to obtain a performing monkey. But suddenly I was deeply aware that it was not going to be so easy.

He laughed softly, a sound which made all the hairs on the back of my hand stand on end.

"So you think I come and go on the whim of kings, like other men?" he challenged.

No," 1 said quietly, "I can see already that you are not like other men."

He leaned back on the cushions, studying me with some curious emotion that I could not fathom.

"You speak more truly than you know, Persian. You may do better to remain silent!"

He rose and I felt cold with apprehension as he took a step toward me; I knew that I had angered him, but I did not know how or why.

"Suppose I do not choose to accompany you to Persia? What will become of you…
King's Messenger
?"

The menace in his voice had become indescribable, and his physical nearness was a thing of terror. I was suddenly aware that nothing could save me now from his unspoken threat except scrupulous and painful honesty.

"If I fail in my mission I shall lose my position at court, my livelihood, and quite possibly my life," I told him simply.

He was silent for a moment, regarding me thoughtfully, and I sensed that he had begun to smile behind the mask.

"What is your position?" he demanded unexpectedly.

I made him an ironic little bow of courtesy. "I am the daroga of Mazanderan."

"I see." He folded his arms beneath the enveloping black cloak. "Then I may take it that the chief of police has come with armed men?"

"No, sir, I come alone, save for a servant who waits outside." Allah! Why was I telling him this?

He laughed again, but this time there was no heart-stopping menace in the sound.

"That, if you will forgive me for saying so, is remarkably careless of you. I trust you conduct your business with greater efficiency at home!"

His mood had changed abruptly with my ignoble confession. He was still playing with me, as a cat plays with a mouse, but gently now, with sheathed claws. Refusing to rise to his bait, I maintained a dignified silence, and after a moment he shrugged and went to a corner of the tent where water was bubbling steadily inside the brass urn of a samovar. Removing the little china teapot from the top of the charcoal, he poured a single cup, added a slice of lemon, and offered it to me. I accepted this sacred gesture of Russian hospitality with great relief. In this country tea was a natural preliminary to business—indeed a natural preliminary to all civilized negotiation; more agreements were struck in the teahouses than anywhere else. So at least it seemed I was not to be thrown out of his tent without a full hearing.

"What docs the shah offer in return for my services?" he inquired abruptly.

I took a gulp of the scalding tea for courage.

"Wealth… honor…" He made a gesture of impatience, as though these things were of no interest to him, and I took a deep breath as I baited my final hook. "
Power
."

He placed the teapot back on the charcoal and swung around to look at me.

"Power?" The resonance of his single word quivered in the air between us, and I knew that at last I had struck the right chord.

"If you please the shah and the khanum, your word would be law."

"For a time."

"For a time," I agreed, knowing it was useless to lie, "but… during that time…" I spread my hands in an expressive gesture that was not wasted on him.

"Yes," he said slowly, "I understand your meaning."

"Then—you will come with me? If you agree we could leave tomorrow."

He snapped his fingers irritably.

"Your persistence begins to annoy me, and you will find I don't care to be annoyed—not even by the daroga of Mazanderan. Go now. You will have your answer when I am ready to give it and not before."

I knew that if I said another word I should lose all the ground I had made; so, infuriated though I was by his arrogant autocracy, I merely bowed and left him. My fate hung entirely on his whim, but I suddenly wished that I had come too late after all, that I had been unable to find him.

I did not know what dreadful chain of events I had set in motion that night, but a deep uneasiness came upon me as I contemplated his presence in Persia.

The sense of menace and ill omen was still with me long after I had left his tent. It was dawn before I was able to sleep that night, and when I did I heard his voice echoing through my restless dreams like a curious echo of doom.

Returning the following evening in good time to witness the performance, I was truly staggered by the sights which met my eyes. Such ingenuity and baffling sleight of hand as virtually defied belief! I was dizzied by the assault on my visual senses, and my brain reeled as all my concepts of gravity and time were turned upside down and inside out in merciless succession. All the laws which govern the universe were challenged within that tent. Some of the illusions were positively supernatural, and long before the show was at an end, I was quietly convinced that I stood in the presence of a genie, created from fire more than two thousand years before Adam. I noted uneasily that he was left handed. Every Moslem knows that the devil is left handed—it is for this reason that we always take care to spit to the left. My fingers felt instinctively for the amulets that hung at my neck, an outstretched hand made in silver and the dried eye of a sheep, killed at Mecca on the great day of sacrifice. Both were powerful protective agencies, and I had never felt more in need of their protection. I took care not to meet his gaze directly, for I already feared his evil eye.

The crowd in the tent became hysterical when the performance ended, surging forward, showering the floor with coins and clamoring for more marvels like greedy, wide-eyed children. But he turned away, telling them, with a note of weariness in his voice, that they had seen all he was prepared to show today.

They refused to go. Closing in around him like a pack of hungry animals, they began to demand, with mounting frenzy, that he should take off his mask and sing for them.

"Show us your face!" they shouted. "Show us your face, Erik, and let us hear the devil sing!"

His thin hands clenched convulsively into fists of rage and I felt a moment of stark fear that he would refuse; for if he did, I expected to be trampled in the ugly mob violence that would surely follow.

Then, without warning, his hands sprang open and stripped the mask away.

The silence that descended was awesome; it was as though everyone in the tent had ceased to breathe. I was standing very close to him, close enough to feel myself sway a little with shock when that horrific skull was revealed before my bulging eyes. The fur trader from Samarkand had never spoken of this; perhaps he had been afraid that it would discredit a tale already larger than life, for certainly no one who had not seen would ever have believed in such living horror. I could not take my eyes from him. I stood and stared like a mannerless peasant, aghast by an unparalleled, inhuman ugliness that was made somehow all the more terrible by the hatred that looked out of his sunken eyes and the pain that twisted his grotesquely deformed lips. In that tense moment before he began to sing, I sensed his deep and overwhelming loathing of the crowd.

And then I forgot everything as the real magic was revealed to me for the first time.

Nothing 1 had seen till now could compare with the wonderful alchemy that turned sound into liquid gold within my ears and washed me out of that dimly lit tent on a swift moving tide of ecstasy. For he sang of love, and with every nuance of his voice I saw Rookheeya reaching out to me across the endless void which separated us. Every word and every note brought us closer, so close that I found myself holding out my arms to her embrace.

Then silence fell once more and the vision was gone.

My throat closed and I wept, as so many were weeping all around me.

When the song ended the crowd drifted from his tent in soundless wonder. There could not have been a single person present who was not severely shaken and deep in private thought. He had conjured every remembered sadness from our racial memories and distilled it to a peak of unbearable beauty. No human mind could have tolerated more pain that evening; he had been revenged upon us all.

When the tent was empty, I watched him replace the mask mechanically with hands that trembled with emotion, and I wondered what terrible anguish of the past enabled him to express such an exquisite refinement of grief.

A remarkable physical change came over him as soon as his hideous face was out of sight. His shoulders straightened and his entire frame once more exuded the mysterious strength and power that 1 had sensed last night. A moment before he had seemed like an old man; now he might have shed thirty years in as many seconds, and I was once more aware that he was in the prime of manhood, probably a few years younger than myself.

"You have come for your answer, I suppose," he said grimly, when I continued to linger pointedly by the velvet-covered table.

"You will be greatly honored in Persia," I reminded him. "Anything you desire will be yours."

"No one in this world can give me what I desire," he said shortly, "not even the shah of Persia."

"But… you will come with me?"

He raised his shoulders in an elegant, scornful shrug.

"Apparently," he said, and turned away to relight the charcoal in the samovar.

*

The following day coincided with the end of the great fair, and the mass exodus from Nijni-Novgorod began in earnest. There were no immediate passages to be had on the paddle steamers, which were now full of rich merchants heading for home, and the best I could arrange was a place for our party aboard a barge grossly overcrowded with people, chests of tea, and bales of cotton.

We traveled as far as Kazan by river and there, very early in the morning, I chanced upon him unloading his horses with an air of quiet determination.

"What are you doing?" I demanded in alarm. "This is no time to go ashore."

"I intend to travel no farther like a crate of tea," he told me calmly. "You, of course, may do exactly as you please."

"You can't seriously mean to travel to the shore of the Caspian by land!" I gasped.

He glanced at me carelessly across the horse's mane.

"Perhaps I do not choose to continue at all. I don't care to be confined in such disagreeable proximity to the human race."

Sensing defeat, I did my best to be conciliatory.

"I admit the journey has not been comfortable—"

"Comfort has nothing to do with it," he muttered.

"I have every hope of transferring to a steamer at Samara, in which case we shall reach the Caspian in a matter of days."

"I am not interested in speed," he retorted sharply. "Only in privacy. If I am to continue this journey at all, it will be by land."

I lost my temper. "That's ridiculous!" I flared. "Such a journey would take us weeks—
weeks
! How am I to explain this unpardonable delay to the shah?"

He spread his hands in an arrogant gesture of indifference.

"Perhaps you would prefer to explain your failure instead. Good-bye, Daroga… enjoy the remainder of your voyage aboard this floating packing case!"

As he turned and began to lead his horses ashore, I grabbed at his sleeve.

"Wait!" I knew that if I permitted him to disappear into Kazan now I should never succeed in tracking him down a second time. "Give me time to arrange the unloading of my own belongings and we shall proceed as you wish… exactly as you wish. But I warn you now that the imperial displeasure is not a thing to be lightly risked. The king of kings does not like to be kept waiting."

"The king of kings must learn patience," said Erik coldly, "like everyone else."

That was the first occasion that I bowed to his capricious whims—the first of many, had I but known it.

Before we left Kazan, he insisted on visiting the mausoleum which stood roughly a mile outside the town. Since I had now abandoned all hope of a swift return to Persia— and because I did not trust him out of my sight for two minutes!—I was forced to accompany him through the dank, ill-smelling catacombs to admire the bones of those who had died three centuries ago at the siege of Kazan.

Human remains made me nervous and I was horrified when he began to assemble the relics of an entire skeleton, placing it patiently, bone by bone, into a bag.

"What do you want with that?" I demanded uneasily. "You're surely not going to take it away with you."

"But of course," he replied calmly. "I have rarely seen such a perfectly preserved specimen. Look… it is possible to see where the knife chipped the rib bone on penetration."

"How can you tell it was a knife?"

"I have dissected sufficient corpses who died of knife wounds to know that the signs are unmistakable."

"Dissected!" I stared at him aghast. "You have performed
dissections
?"

"From time to time. It is the only way to reach any true understanding of the human body. I have an academic interest in the physiology of
Homo sapiens
… a certain
curiosity
, you understand."