THIRTY

October 11, 1888, near Brezna, Serbia

We made our plans that night and got a good sleep. Gordon, Durson and I spent most of the next morning hiking the mile up the mountainside. Durson knew a good observation post on a spur from the main spine of the ridge, but if we were going to avoid detection, we couldn’t chance any more than three of us. Gordon and I expressed our concerns about the raptors, although I had to explain what I meant by the word.

“The azhdaja,” Durson said. “They are nocturnal hunters, but even then we have little to fear from them. Our second day in the area they attacked. We killed three of them and they have not come near us since. They learn, so they are intelligent, as animals go.”

“Azhdaja. A jandarma back in Uvats used that word, but I’m not familiar with it. The local people know this species?”

“No one ever saw them before a few months ago. Azhdaja is a local word, the same in Bosnian and Serbian. In Turkish we would say iluyankas.”

“Dragons?”

He gave me a hard look.

“No, they are not real dragons, Effendi. They do not fly, they do not breathe fire, and they are not very large. The local people simply had no other word for them.”

They also had feathers instead of scales, but their mouths were lizardlike, and their crests reminded me of the crests of some oriental dragons and hooded lizards. Their coloration—green and black and flashes of yellow—blended in surprisingly well with the mountainous country, but it also reminded me of how some dragons were colored in art. I supposed dragon made as much sense as anything.

Durson had no more idea where they came from than we did, but my money was still on Tesla. If Tesla really could open doorways to different times, no telling what sort of fell beasties he could bring back.

On the way up the ridge we passed the twisted frame and deflated gas sack of the black zeppelin I’d last seen climbing away from the hotel on Agnes-Bernauer Strasse. There was no sign of the gun turret which had shot up Intrepid. The gas bag bore a name painted in white Cyrillic letters, which Sergeant Durson deciphered for me—Djordje Petrovic. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Petrovic was a famous Serbian warrior a century ago, against the Turks, of course,” Durson explained. “Bosnian women still frighten their children with stories of how he ate Turkish babies.

“I do not believe that, myself,” he added.

Dense, sweet-smelling purple lilac shrubs sheltered our observation post, which wasn’t much more than a half mile from Brezna but was separated from it by a deep ravine, all but impassable, so there was no reason for the hajduci to guard this spot. The town lay northeast of us, slightly higher on the main ridge. Beyond it the ground fell away into a deep valley which led down to Kokin Brod, seven twisting miles away.

The town sat near the summit of a long, steep-sided ridge of mostly bare granite. Gardens and vineyards surrounded the town, but the closest orchard stood a quarter mile farther up the northwest thrust of the ridge. A half mile of open ground stretched between the village and closest growth of thick woods to the south, the approach all uphill.

The stone houses of the village huddled together as if taking shelter from the winds which must have come howling in from the west in winter. Stone walls linked the buildings and made the place look like an Afghan hill fort, a comparison which did not put my mind at ease.

I handed the binoculars to Gordon and turned around to face Durson.

“How many men in the village?” I asked in Turkmen.

“About two hundred people live there, so perhaps fifty or sixty grown men aside from the whitebeards. I think a dozen actual fighters. Others would help but without the same skill or enthusiasm.”

“Doesn’t matter. A dozen good men can hold that place against a small army, unless the army has artillery or air support.”

Durson looked at me and nodded his agreement, and his expression grew harder when he did so.

“That would not stop the English from ordering an attack,” he added in Turkish, “with my riflemen in front, of course.”

There was a depth of feeling there which surprised me. What did a former slave know about the British? Durson saw my expression and shrugged.

“When Britain and Turkey were allies against the Russians, forty years ago, few Turkish soldiers survived the experience of being under English command. The old ones still speak of it.”

“Did I mention I’m from Illinois?” I said, trying to distance myself from the Anglophobia.

“Since coming to Turkey twelve years ago,” Durson said, “three American gentlemen have sought me out, each one attempting to collect the bounty for returning me to my former owner. One of them was from Illinois.”

Swell. So much for bonding.

“Ah, more visitors,” he said and pointed over my shoulder toward Brezna.

I turned to look. A black zeppelin, the twin of the wreck we had passed earlier, rose above the skyline in the valley beyond Brezna, and as soon as it cleared the ridge I heard the distant drone of its engines. Gordon heard as well and raised his glasses.

“Damn. Well, that ties it,” he said. “We’re too late. Tesla will snatch him up and that’s that.”

Sergeant Durson said nothing.

“What do you think, Sergeant?” I asked.

“I do not know what to think, Effendi. I am interested to see what will happen. Farther down the mountain, on this slope but below the wreck of the airship, my men and I found twelve large iron fire boxes with grates on the sides. They were rusty from having been there for months, but had recently been used.”

I didn’t see what that had to do with Tesla’s zeppelin coming to pick up Thomson. Tesla’s stronghold was in the opposite direction, on the other side of the ridgeline. They couldn’t have been used to signal him.

So what had they been used for? If the hajduci were going to signal with them, why not put them up on the ridge, where they could be seen from farther away? And why did they need a dozen of them? The Brits didn’t need a dozen Aldis lamps to send signals.

I looked at Durson, but his eyes were on the zeppelin approaching Brezna.

“Were the fire boxes all together or spread out?”

“They were spread out, Effendi, irregularly spaced over perhaps fifty kulaçi—one hundred meters.”

Huh.

I settled down to watch as well.

The zeppelin slowed and made a broad circle over the town, came toward us but made a slow turn to its right and doubled back, coming almost to a halt above the open ground on the ridge south of the town.

“Can you see any movement in the town?” I asked Gordon.

“No. The windows are all shuttered. There is nothing moving anywhere except some laundry drying on a line.”

The zeppelin hovered there for a few minutes, edging forward against the wind then dropping back.

“There’s someone at a window. I think he’s shouting at the zeppelin,” Gordon said. “Now he’s waving. I think he is waving for it to leave. Yes, he wants it to leave. More shouting. He’s gone. No, he . . . oh . . . I say!”

Durson and I didn’t have binoculars, but we didn’t need them to hear the crackle of small arms fire from the village. The zeppelin remained in place for as long as a minute. The first volley of rifle shots died away, and then started up again, less evenly as the riflemen loaded, aimed, and fired at their own pace.

The zeppelin’s engines grew louder, higher in pitch, as if someone had reached the controls, or regained their senses. The airship accelerated and turned away from the town, made a wide circle to the south, passing close by our clump of brush and rocks. It drew off, made several sloppy figure eights, as if considering its next move, and then closed on the town.

I knew the sound of the Gatling gun on the airship as soon as it started, that steady pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—I’d heard enough of them in films. The zeppelin passed on the far side of the town from our vantage point and then began circling it, like a C-130 gunship hosing down the target with a minigun. The popping stopped.

“Changing magazines,” Gordon announced. “Either that or it’s jammed.”

The hajduci must have figured the same thing. A ragged volley of rifle shots crackled from the ground.

The fight went on for a few minutes longer. Then the zeppelin beat a retreat back down the valley to the east. The airship had a Gatling gun, but the gas bag was made of canvas, the gondola of something light and flimsy. The hajduci had stone walls and overhead cover. I imagined some maintenance people would spend a fair part of the day slapping patches on that big black gas bag once they got back to Kokin Brod. No telling how many casualties the crew took.

“Interesting,” I said. “Not everyone in Serbia seems to get along.”

“I believe the Brezna hajduci support the king in Belgrade,” Durson answered. “Their neighbors incline more toward the Kradodevici. I have never heard of them shooting at each other, though.”

I translated that for Gordon, who looked thoroughly confused by it all.

“Well, if these chaps in Brezna are shooting at Tesla’s lot, maybe we can get them to help us out,” he suggested, and I translated that for Durson.

“Perhaps they will help you. They will not be happy to see me or my men. The royalists are more moderate in their views than are the Kradodevici. The royalists simply believe all Turks should be killed, while the Kradodevici believe unspeakable things should then be done to our corpses.”

I found it interesting that Durson thought of himself as a Turk, but then what else would he consider himself?

“I wonder if this is about money instead of politics,” I said to Durson, and he nodded in agreement.

“When I was a child in Carolina,” he said, “my mother told me of the wreckers, people on the islands along the coast. The wreckers lived by taking the cargoes from broken ships. When storms did not provide enough wrecks, the people lured ships onto the rocks with false lights, or so it was said.”

“I’ve heard that story myself,” I said.

“Yes, many people have, and many people believe the stories of the false lights. But later I became a sailor. I learned the stories of the false lights were legends, fairy tales. They could not be true, and any sailor will tell you as much. At night, ships near the coast do not steer toward lights; they steer clear of them.”

“Or over them, if the ship is a zeppelin,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, and for the first time he smiled. “But perhaps not very high over them.”

“And on a moonless night, the light shining through the grates of a dozen iron fire boxes spread out along the side of a ridge would look like the lights of a village on top of the ridge.”

“Yes, Effendi.”

“Especially if everyone in the village was told to keep their windows shuttered or their lamps extinguished on that night.”

“It is possible, Effendi.”

“Gordon,” I said in English, “we may be able to do business with these guys. How much cash is left in your war chest?”

Getting back to the camp was a lot easier on the lungs than climbing the mountain had been, but was strangely harder on the legs. You would think going down hill would be easier, and in a lot of respects it was, but it used a whole difference set of leg muscles, and a set you don’t use that much. Halfway down, Gordon and I had to call a break. My legs did not feel tired; they simply would no longer support me. While we waited for the strength to return to them, I outlined my plan.

We would return to Brezna that night, or rather to the wood below it. Durson, one Marine, and I would approach the town alone. I would need Durson to translate into Serbian for me. We would have to find some civilian clothing which came close to fitting, but a Marine overcoat would be the main element of his disguise, allowing us to pass him off as my servant.

We would have one of Gordon’s leather-wrapped rolls of fifty gold sovereigns, and we would buy Thomson’s release. If necessary, we would send the Marine as a runner back to the main party and retrieve the second roll of sovereigns. If the Brezna hajduci wanted more than that, everyone was out of luck.

If all went well, we’d have Thomson back. If something bad happened to us, Gordon would still have Gabrielle as a Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian translator. They could make a try for Tesla or attempt to get away.

I told Gordon and Durson followed along—the English was simple enough that he picked up most of it. I’d intended to tell him in Turkman once Gordon agreed, but he was ahead of me and shaking his head.

“Since we are not attacking the village, I agree to help. But there is a problem. All the people in these hills know me by sight, or at least by reputation. I am called Noć Ubojica. It means Night Killer.”

I translated for Gordon but kept my eyes on Durson, looking for a clue as to what this name meant about the person behind it, but Gabrielle was right. His face gave away little.

“I have killed very few people,” he volunteered, “and never at night. I believe my color has to do with the name they give me, that and fear. People are very superstitious. In any case, such a name has its uses.”

Yes, it does.

“They know your face?” I asked.

“They know my race and physical build. I do not know if anyone in Brezna knows my face, but it is possible. I have questioned and released many people during patrols into these hills in the last two years. Always I tell them I would kill them, but I cannot because, unfortunately, that day is a holy day on which I may not shed infidel blood.” He shook his head and smiled. “So many holy days.”

That said something about the guy right there.

“Okay, I’ll have to take one of your men. They speak Turkish, right?”

“They speak enough to take orders from Turkish officers, but they would have a hard time understanding you, Effendi. What you speak—it is like Turkish, I suppose.”

We walked the rest of the way to the camp in silence, each with our own thoughts. Once there, Gordon looked at me and looked away, reluctant to say what was on his mind.

“I’ll ask her,” I said.

He nodded.

“So that’s how it is,” I finished. “We only have two people who can translate Serbo-Croatian to a language I understand: Durson and you. They know Durson, so he’s out. I’ll tell you straight up, Gabi, this is really dangerous, and it’s not your responsibility. You don’t need to do it.”

“Non? What will you do if I say no?”

“I’ll go in alone. There are a fair number of German speakers around here; maybe I’ll get lucky. Or maybe some of the older folks speak enough Turkish. Or I’ll use sign language. One way or another, I’ll work something out.”

She sat on the stump of a tree, hands resting on her knees, elbows locked. She looked worn out. A night’s sleep and a day resting here while the three of us climbed the ridge and came back had done a lot to restore her reserves, but she still looked weak and bedraggled. She’d washed in the stream and tied her wet, tangled hair back in a ponytail behind her neck, but her riding habit was still dirty and torn from the attack two days earlier.

“Can you even make it up the ridge?” I asked.

She sat up straight, and her eyebrows came together in an angry frown.

“I am tired, but still I can walk your sad little Marines to their knees. See if I cannot.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

I sat down on the ground next to her and leaned my shoulder against her tree stump.

“I don’t want to argue. I’m too tired after that climb today. You could walk my sad little ass into the ground right now.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. It felt good.

“I will go with you,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I know. And I know why.”

I looked at her, but she wore that impenetrable look she almost always did.

“I’m not sure I know why, so how the hell can you? Besides—it’s lots of things.”

“Non. It is simple. You will soon have to make the decision, yes? And when that time comes, you do not want to be in my debt.”

I didn’t answer.

“You must discharge your debt in advance, then,” she said after a while.

“How?”

“Tell me the truth about you. Tell me what you have told no one else. Share your dark secret.”

The Bosnians and Germans and Marines had begun cooking. I smelled boiling pea soup, corned beef, onions, and coffee all mixed with the smoke of the wood fire, the smell of Gabrielle’s damp hair drying, the resin scent of the carpet of pine needles beneath us. I closed my eyes and from the forest I heard a woodpecker, distant and empty, as if an echo from the past, as if it were long dead and Gabrielle and I were the only two living things left in the world. My throat tightened, the same tightness I’d felt when Reggie mentioned my dead wife, so far from here, so long ago, a hundred and thirty years in the future.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’ve told you the truth.”

“Non. You show me the one man, but there is the other, the one you keep locked away. But when he comes out, men die. This I know. Which one is the real man?”

“I am only one man.”

“Ah, that much I believe. But who is he? What is his essence? However, you will not tell me today. So I go with you tomorrow, and you will be in my debt, and you will have to find a way to answer my question before you leave.”