The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) (8 page)

“They’ve blocked all the roads,” I guessed. “Prussians are thorough.”

“Can we turn around?”

“We’d risk arrest. We could even be accused of Gregor’s murder.” I studied the terrain. A slight rise on the left side of the road, a slight dip on the right. “These scoundrels expect us to stop. Which means hang onto Harry.”

“Ethan?”

“And if you have to, use the swords.”

CHAPTER 9

O
ur only chance was surprise. I cracked the whip and the sleigh leaped forward, our mare galloping hard toward the flames. My reins were in one hand, the ax in another, and I lifted off the seat in a balanced crouch. I’d spied a keyhole to squeeze through.

The rogues lurked out of sight in ambush, counting on me to be lit and blinded by the fire. I relied on the surprise of charging out of the dark, and the devils didn’t start to shout until the final seconds of our dash. I slashed with the reins and yanked the mare toward the rising side of the road. Guns banged, flashes in the dark, but the shots were hasty and badly aimed.

We careened like a toboggan and swept just left of the bonfire, one runner tilted high on the road bank, the other slicing through melt water and coals. A bullet buzzed. I leaned and swatted at the fire pyramid with the ax, clipping a burning log and sending it arcing into the woods like a meteor. More cries of surprise and hasty shots. The fire collapsed in an explosion of embers. A man screamed. The fools were hitting each other! But I also heard lead smack our sleigh.

Past them! I glanced at my family. “All right?”

Astiza nodded.

Then something hurtled down at us from the road bank like a pouncing lion. A man crashed onto the back of our sled and clung tenaciously. I awkwardly swung at him with the ax and the assailant leaned backward out of reach, balancing on the runners as my weapon awkwardly hovered. He used one hand to grab Astiza’s hair and she shrieked as he hauled her backward, Harry gallantly pulling the other way. “Mama!”

The bastard let go of the sleigh, hanging onto my wife’s scalp, and drew a pistol to aim at me as I drove. I could see the white of his snarl.

There was nothing to shoot him with. “Harry, get down!”

The assailant cocked the pistol. Astiza was bent over backward, mouth open, eyes wide with pain, groping under the furs.

“Where are they, American?”

As if in answer a pitted sword struck from the blankets like an angry snake. Astiza rammed it with all her strength into the assailant’s grizzled throat, its point grating on bone. The man’s eyes rolled, his pistol went off harmlessly, and then the assassin was gone as abruptly as he’d come, thumping onto the frozen road. The sword had popped clear of his neck. Astiza fell back onto the seat, gasping, the old weapon dripping on her furs. She clutched Harry.

I lashed the reins.

More shots, aimed at nothing. The wrecked bonfire was far behind, the road bent, and finally darkness clamped back down like the lid of a pot.

“That’s the way,” I exulted. “And I think the fools shot one of their own men.” Then I remembered to ask to ask again. “Are you hurt?”

“Of course it hurts. But quite alive, thank you.” The sword lay across her lap and her expression was fierce. “Horus, are you safe?”

“You got rid of the bad man, Mama.”

We could still hear distant shouts. They’d probably mount horses.

I used the whip, keeping our exhausted horse at a gallop. The sleigh bounded over dips and rises, the animal’s nostrils exhaling big puffs of steam, her flanks heaving. Runners quivered when we glanced off rocks. We needed to hide, but the road trapped us like a tunnel.

“We can’t outrun them,” Astiza said. “The land is flat, the ferries frozen, the lanes snowbound. And we can’t win forever with an ax and antique swords.”

“So we have to truly vanish, my sorceress. We’ve gained precious minutes but they’ll run us down like hounds.”

“The devil they will.” My wife is ruthless when our family is threatened. “Is there a bridge ahead?”

“We’ll soon cross the Slavyanka River.”

“Let’s vanish there. But we need a wider lead to give us the necessary time. Ethan, watch for a tree leaning precariously over the road. We’ll set an ambush of our own.”

“I love your resourcefulness, my pretty Amazon.”

“I believe it’s called desperation. And you drive a sleigh like a charioteer, my handsome thief.”

“I believe it’s called terror.”

We halted at an aged birch that tilted as if drunk. “Undercut it,” Astiza directed. I swiftly wielded the ax while she tied our remaining lariat between the leaning tree and a stout fir on the other side of the highway. Astiza has taken a keen and necessary interest in sailor and teamster knots in our travels, and now she used a haymaker’s hitch to pull the rope as taut as a harpsichord wire. It was the height of a horse’s neck but virtually invisible in the dark. Harry used a fir limb to brush out our footsteps.

Then we sleighed on, slower now to rest our panting horse. The mare would be going further than we would.

Minutes later we heard the scream of horses and the crash of the undercut tree as it fell across the road. I could imagine the confused tangle.

“Maybe they’ll give up,” I said.

“No, but we’ve gained ten minutes. Horus, do you still have your fir broom?”

“Yes, Mama.” He enjoyed responsibility, not to mention the novelty of being up so late. Maybe he thought every family traveled this way.

“Help make us vanish.”

“Yes, Mama.”

The bridge over the Slavyanka was a hundred meters long, built on two towers of timber cribbing that rose from the frozen river. I reined to a halt at mid-span, we climbed off, and I gave a sharp smack to the rump of our horse. Off she trotted to follow the road, no doubt surprised at the sudden lightening of her burden. The tracks of the sleigh’s runners were like an arrow pointing into the dark. It disappeared.

We worked to do the same.

Fifteen minutes later there was a rumble of hoof beats as a dozen anxious riders pounded over the icy bridge to chase our empty sleigh. They never looked or slowed. Our mare must have gone on for some distance, because it was an hour more before our disappointed pursuers returned the way they’d come, after catching an empty conveyance. They rode more slowly this time, peering into woods that were going gauze-gray as morning slowly took form. Flakes drifted down like blossoms. Fog hugged the frozen river. The men halted in the middle of the bridge.

“They ran into the trees,” one speculated.

“Without making a track?”

“It’s snowing.”

“Not much. Not fast.”

“Or they climbed a tree,” another suggested.

“Or drowned in the river,” said a third.

“The trees are bare and the Slavyanka is hard as a rock. I am surrounded by imbeciles.” It was Von Bonin.

“Or crawled into a snowdrift.”

“If so they’re dead,” another man said. “It’s freezing out here.”

“We must have the swords,” the one-armed Prussian said. “Without them we dare not go back, not to St. Petersburg and not to Berlin.”

“There’s no proof that the American even has the swords. I say he lost them in the river, if he’s alive at all. Who knows who was on that sleigh?”

“The man who killed Heinrich, you fool.”

“Bah. The American is a ghost. He drowns, he lives. He sleighs, he vanishes. His bitch of a wife, too.”

“That woman is a witch,” another chimed in. “Everyone says so.”

“All of you sound like gibbering old maids! No. We don’t give up until we find them. Half of you this way, half that. Search the road margins for signs of where they abandoned their sleigh. Give a shot if you spot anything. And you two—down on the ice. See if they fled on the river.”

Hooves thumped as our grumbling pursuers moved off on assignment. Two slid on foot down the bank, cursing, and we watched as they walked under the bridge and stumbled away, one upstream and one down.

No signal shot was fired.

Our hiding place was the timber cribbing where it joined the beams of the bridge. I’d used the ax to chop and pry a timber so we could crawl inside to hide, scooping up the chips and swinging the log shut behind us. We lay on a bed of ballast rocks, the bridge deck inches from our noses. Astiza kept her hand close to Harry’s mouth, but he was already old enough to know not to cry out. Our boy will worry me someday, when his bravery becomes boldness and boldness makes him reckless. But for now he’s exemplary.

We lay and shivered until the Prussians gave up for good and clopped west. “We’ll ambush them again,” Von Bonin vowed.

And then it was quiet. We’d lost everything except the swords.

“I’ll make it up to you,” I whispered, as much to keep up my spirits as Astiza’s. “Catastrophe now, but soon we’ll have royal help, if Czartoryski is right. Then Adam’s mother Izabela will welcome us in Poland. A title can still be ours. Then our life will truly begin.”

“This is our life, husband.” Clinging to the underside of a bridge, inches from discovery, in a wintry forest, flakes drifting down. “This is our destiny.” And sadly, sweetly, with real love and real regret, she kissed me.

CHAPTER 10

W
e eventually arrived as beggars at Jelgava Palace, trudging on foot while swaddled in enough peasant coats to look like tubs of dirty laundry. Our journey had taken us more than four hundred miles southwest of St. Petersburg and thirty miles inland from the Baltic Sea. Our clothes were wet and dirty, our bellies empty, and my face crusted with stubble that Astiza assured me was entirely unflattering. Just as well not to have a mirror. Ethan Gage, ambassador to the powerful and aspiring prince!

I looked across Latvia’s Lielupe River to the island where Jelgava sprawls. Completed in 1772, the edifice is one of those bloated and bland baroque slabs of a mansion that Italian architects churn out for any aristocrat who can afford the vanity. Inherited taste is rare among the rich, so the highborn hire swarms of Romans to choose for them. The result is that one noble’s sumptuous pile looks pretty much like another’s, with coziness and sense sacrificed to grandeur and debt.

Not that I wouldn’t like to have one, if I could afford the wood to heat it.

The island is an easily guarded place where Tsar Alexander granted refuge to the future Bourbon king of France, would-be Louis XVIII. Louis is impatiently waiting for Bonaparte to fall, while Napoleon has asked Louis to renounce all rights to the French throne in return for being allowed to return home. Neither event—Napoleon’s fall or Louis’s renunciation—seems likely to happen very soon. So the brother of the beheaded king spends his days warily looking out on a snowy landscape for French spies, while fantasizing about his own crowning. This was the man Czartoryski told us to rely on.

Our escape from Von Bonin’s henchmen had been deliberately slow, in hopes that further pursuit would overshoot us. They’d galloped off in the direction of Berlin while we left the main highway and trudged on peasant tracks, winding from cabin to farm in a daze of disappointment. Our cautious route took us east of gigantic Lake Peipus and then southwest into wintry Lithuania and Latvia.

We were a world away from relations or friends. Astiza was a refugee from Egypt, I a pilgrim from America, and Harry had been forced to leave his only childhood companion. We knew we’d been betrayed, but didn’t know who, entirely, had done the betraying. We assumed my drowning was likely no longer believed. We had no sleigh, little food, and scant money, and were weary from tension. To be hunted is to never relax. To distrust is to sour every encounter. Hunger initially sharpens the mind with desperation, and then dulls it with exhaustion. The cold bites deeper. Winter nights are endless.

Two things saved us.

The first was rustic Slavic hospitality. We followed snowy tracks through rolling hills and coastal plains to avoid grand estates with their brick-walled gardens. We also cautiously skirted snug villages with their onion dome churches, haze of wood smoke, tantalizing scent of food, and too many people. Instead we called on rural peasants for help, and thankfully Astiza and Harry had the knack of winning over these simple farmers. The men were bearded like shaggy bears, grinning with missing teeth. The bright scarves of the women framed cherry-red cheeks and kindly eyes in chapped faces. I’d no weapon—we kept the swords carefully bundled—and the wary serfs quickly judged us harmless and needy. The poor often show more charity than the rich and so we journeyed from hut to hovel, explaining by signs that we were almost bankrupt and harried. Our hosts nodded in commiseration and shared beet soup, coarse bread, and honey mead without expectation of payment, watching indulgently as Harry gobbled. They even gave us old coats and cloaks.

Our second salvation was the abiding peace of nature. Winter’s beauty became our antidote to despair, its blacks and whites starkly scenic. Oddly and unexpectedly, I found our plight lightening my spirit as much as it depressed it. Instead of maneuvering for advantage in cutthroat Russian society, we’d escaped to fundamentals. We gave ourselves over to the rhythm of the earth, its pale dawns and pink sunsets, its bitter freezes and cheerful campfires. The outdoors was pure compared to the hives and muck of cities and castles. I liked the company of my family, which required no posing. I liked that choices became simple. Which lane? When to rest? Where to collect firewood? Which cabin to approach?

It reminded me of my fur trade days. While I didn’t confess to Astiza that I’d begun to secretly wonder how happy I’d really be with noble title and overseer responsibility, I did wonder if Rousseau was right that our natural state is a more primitive one. “He who multiplies riches multiplies cares,” Franklin once warned me.

Some nights the aurora borealis was on display. Harry was initially uncertain about its eerie shimmer, but I told him it was a promise of better days to come.

“Is that heaven, Papa?”

“Maybe heaven’s door.”

The winter days were slowly lengthening and brightening. Snow sparkled by day and glowed by night. The stillness let us listen to the woods slowly drip to life. The forest streams smoked at dawn, their water sharp as champagne. The first birds of the year called and flitted. Moss had the glisten of fine raiment.

Sometimes Astiza and I took turns carrying Harry, but most of the time he marched manfully in the snow, fatigued, hungry, curious, and rarely complaining. He had us all to himself, after all, until he could bask in the attention of the fussy farm matrons who spoiled him.

The peasant huts were low, snug, and colorless, given that paint is one of the boundaries between city and country. On the outside the logs were weathered as gray as the periodic overcast, and inside they were stained almost black by hearth fires and rush lights. Yes, the habitation was rude. But there was a Red Corner for guests beneath an icon of Mary, shelves for precious cups and pots, and pegs for guests’ fur coats and woolen mittens. The wealthiest peasants had a prized ancestral samovar from which they would serve tea in tiny cups, guests taking ten servings each during the long winter evenings. The blackened ceilings were lightened by burning eggshells in the hearth, the heat carrying the white bits aloft to stick overhead and sparkle like little stars.

The rudest huts had no chimney or windows and an open hearth, which meant the door had to be cracked for ventilation when the owners lit a fire. We learned to wait to enter until heat carried the worst of the smoke to the ceiling, and then not to stand lest we spend our visit coughing.

Prouder cabins had a real oven, chimney, and even glass windows. Farm animals would be housed in stables either below or above the human quarters, lending heat, and we learned a cow was worth seventy iron nails. Chickens were kept in cages in the living rooms each winter. Dogs sprawled, and cats patrolled against mice. The men fished and hunted while the women weaved, everyone waiting for spring.

In sum it was rustic but surprisingly comfortable. Above and behind each hearth was a brick and clay platform warmed by the constant fire. Here was the master bed, our hosts always surrendering this prized perch to visitors while they took the cold floor. Richer peasants fed us potatoes, pork, peas, sauerkraut, and once some kielbasa sausage. When I gave them a coin or two, their eyes widened as if it were a fortune.

My reflexive greed shamed me.

“Our dreams are so foolish, Ethan,” Astiza murmured one night as we lay under their blankets, our hosts snoring on the other side of the oven. “These people seem more content than all the nobles in Russia. We contend for palaces and they abide with the seasons.”

“I’ve had the same thought. But we also know their lives are brutal much of the year, and that we’d never be content with a life like this. We’ve seen too much. Experience has doomed us to be strivers.”

“Which will be the death of us someday.” She tried it as a joke, and yet we both knew it wasn’t one.

“But what a life we’ll have led!” I rolled atop her, Harry sound asleep beside us. I was restless with desire.

Astiza shifted her hips away. “Easy for you to say,” she said as she pushed me off. “Horus hasn’t had a life yet.”

“He’s had the life of a dozen boys his age. I vow that someday he’ll live the life we dream of. He’ll be a great man.”

“And what makes a man great?” And then she did hug, but only that. By the curse of Casanova, we spend entirely too much time in awkward situations. That’s what striving does to you.

The Baltic clouds were like clammy canvas when we traveled that last day from forest farmstead to Louis’ refuge, and it was early dusk when we reached the still-frozen Lielupe. Like wary animals, we peered from the trees. The palace across the ice seemed as big as a mountain range, lights and lamps glowing in half the hundred windows we could count. “We couldn’t even afford the candles,” I remarked. The snowy lawn was an unmarked white sheet, and on the roof flew both the Russian flag and the fleur-de-lis of the displaced Bourbons. Maybe I could persuade Louis we were fellow exiles.

First I took precautions. We backed into the forest and found a hollow log to hide the swords, Harry cheerfully crawling far inside to secrete them securely. Then we took bearings to mark the spot and returned to the riverbank. Now we’d nothing to tempt our new host with, or arouse suspicion, or rashly trade away.

“Ready for a royal audience?” I asked my family.

“If he consorts with paupers.”

“What’s a pauper, Mama?”

“Us, Horus. People like us.”

We walked cautiously across the frozen river, in full view of the house, and then up the meadow toward the main entry. Armed guards with lanterns came out to challenge us, gigantic in their greatcoats and towering bearskin hats. They had muskets, pikes, swords, and pistols.

“
Nous sommes amis!
We are friends!” I called out in French.

“Friends are recognized,” their leader replied in heavily accented French of his own. “Who are you, and why do you trespass?” A woolen scarf around his mouth and nose muffled his voice, his eyes sharp and quick as an falcon’s. His companions reinforced his stare.

“We’re ambassadors, come to pay respects from the United States of America to the Bourbon heir to the throne of France,” I said, bowing slightly. Yes, our appearance made this absurd, but best to make an entrance. The art of the bow is to adjust the amount of incline to the station of the person being addressed. Sentries deserve a swift bob, beauties a slow tilt that hovers at their décolletage, and kings a full duck and flourish, fingers out and one boot extended. “I know we look hard traveled, but we’ve been hard used.”

“United States?” He made it sound like the Moon.

“Americans by way of France, Bohemia, and Russia,” I said. “A confidant of President Jefferson and a protégé of Benjamin Franklin. Something of an authority on Bonaparte, as well.”

One of the soldiers snickered at my name-dropping.

Astiza stood taller. “And the Tsarina Elizabeth.”

Their leader looked at her with interest, as men tend to do, and squinted dubiously down at Harry, an unexpected dwarf. What sort of diplomat materializes with a child? “You conduct your embassy in rags?”

“We were ambushed by bandits,” I replied. “We look molested because we were. But I truly do represent my country—or at least I have, occasionally—and it is in all sincerity that I’ve come to the future King Louis for sanctuary while offering insight into his usurper, the dictator Napoleon. Please, sergeant—if that’s what you are—send word that the American diplomat Ethan Gage and family are calling to bring reports from Trafalgar and Austerlitz.” I’d had the bad luck to participate in both battles, and have since tried to turn misfortune to profit by describing them. People love horror.

“Ethan Gage, is it?” Our interrogator actually sounded as if he’d heard of me, but then I do have dubious renown. “Lean closer.” He raised a lantern.

I tried to look dignified while unshaven, rank, and damp.

“You are he? The infamous gambler and spy?”

“None other. Though I would better describe myself as the exemplary sharpshooter and celebrated antiquarian. An electrician. A savant. A consultant on grand strategy.” I attempted the assured tone of the celebrated. Part of notoriety is playing the part.

“You have diplomatic credentials?”

“My knowledge of Napoleon and his schemes is my passport. This is my wife, Astiza, and my son, Harry.”

“Your wife.” His tone was oddly flat. His gaze flickered from Astiza to me in a way I didn’t care for.

“Sergeant, these may be French assassins,” one of the soldiers said.

“Of course they are,” his leader slowly replied. “With woman and child, weaponless in the snow, looking more like scarecrows than human beings.” He turned to his men. “I’ve heard of the rascal Gage. An adventurer with allegiance to none but himself, or so it’s said.” He looked back at Astiza and Harry. “No mention of family, though. Something of a scamp is what I heard.”

“We were married, sir, on an American ship.”

“An
American
ship? What name?”

“Off Barbary, the
Enterprise.
During Jefferson’s war with the pirates.” It’s a long story, as all of mine are, but another trick is arousing curiosity.

The man considered still longer, me noticing that it was damnably cold while he did so. Astiza shifted from foot to foot. Harry shivered and barked a cough. Finally the bastard relented.

“Corporal, take this lot inside and get the fleas off them. I’ll consult with his majesty’s advisor, the Count of Avaray.”

“But sir, if these are imposters …”

“Impersonating a rascal? A poor choice. Beggars, yes. Assassins? No. Quickly now!”

So we were marched into the palace, through a high chilly foyer to an anteroom warmed by a ceramic stove and several candles. After being relieved of coats and cloaks and carefully checked for hidden weapons, we were given soup, bread and watered wine while baths were poured by plump Latvian maids. Harry slurped. I spewed breadcrumbs like an exploding bomb. Only my wife ate with restraint, proving again that women are very much a mystery.

“Is this our new house, Papa?”