THIRTY-TWO

October 11, 1888, Brezna, Serbia

After ten minutes of loud and animated discourse in broken German with a couple of the locals, the boss-man of Brezna showed up, still fastening his belt around the long peasant smock he wore over baggy trousers. He was younger than I’d expected, late thirties or early forties, and tall but not particularly muscular. It was hard to read his expression. His eyes were deep set, masked in shadows, a shock of unruly black hair fell across his forehead, and a luxurious flowing black moustache covered most of his mouth.

“You are English?” he demanded in excellent German.

“We’re with the English expedition. I’m American, and the woman is French. She has a wound which needs attending.”

“Yes, bring her along to my house. Your man, too. He is English?”

“No, Bavarian. We brought two of your guards with us.”

He barked an order in Serbian and two villagers leapt forward to cut the two prisoners free. Two more offered to carry Gabrielle, who was starting to stir in my arms, but I shook my head.

“Let us hurry,” the chief said and led the way. “You have come about the English scientist, Dr. Thomson?”

“He’s Scottish, actually.”

The chief laughed.

“Yes, he told me. This is a curious expedition the English mount, to send an American, a German, and a French woman in to rescue their Scottish scientist. But I believe it. The English seem always willing to spill the blood of friends and subject nations, provided it is for a noble cause and makes England richer.”

“Everywhere I go,” I said, “people love the English.”

He laughed again and held open the front door of a two-story stone house. I carried Gabrielle into the brightly lit front room, and the chief hurried past me. The house smelled deeply of garlic and cooked cabbage and stewed tomatoes.

“Bring her this way, into the kitchen. Put her on the stove.”

On the stove?

The stove took up half the kitchen and was more like a large brick oven built against a massive stone chimney. There were doors and nooks in the front and on the sides, but the top was bare glazed brick.

“Go on,” the chief encouraged me. “In the winter my wife and I sleep here.”

I put Gabrielle gently on the warm stove top as a woman came down the stairs at the back of the kitchen, tying her hair up in a kerchief. She was in her thirties, stout of build, average height or a bit shorter, but with strong features, a clear complexion, and dark, piercing eyes. She hurried to Gabrielle’s leg and began peeling back the blood-soaked bandage, frowning and shaking her head. She barked an order to her husband, the chief, and he answered with stubborn dignity but then started to leave.

“I return with water. You stay here.”

Gabrielle was fully awake now, although still pale, and she propped herself up on one elbow. She and the woman conversed in Serbian a bit, and the woman turned to me and scolded me. I couldn’t understand the specifics, but the general tenor was clear enough. Serbian sounded like a pretty good language for scolding people.

“Her name is Mirjana Radojica. Her husband is Jovo Radojica, the voivoda. She says you are a fool.”

“No argument from me.”

Mirjana pointed to the wound and asked a question, and when Gabriele answered I caught the word azhdaja: dragons. Mirjana frowned, nodded solemnly, and patted Gabrielle comfortingly on her unwounded leg.

“Ask if she has needle and linen thread so I can stitch up your leg,” I said.

Gabrielle translated, which set off another series of dismissive remarks aimed in my direction.

“She says men cannot even sew buttons on shirts. She will stitch my leg, and do it so there is only a small scar when it heals, instead of it looking like the seam in a quilt. Those were her words,” Gabrielle explained.

“Got it.”

Presently the chief—Jovo Radojica—returned with a bucket of water and moved quickly around the kitchen gathering bowls and pans at Mirjana’s direction, pouring water in them, fetching clean rags and jars of ointments. I backed away to get out of the traffic pattern and saw Melzer watching through the door to the front room. I gave him an encouraging smile, and he shrugged in reply. I had to admit that, whatever else happened, it was hard to think of ourselves in much danger. This was all just too . . . domestic.

“The woman fainted,” Jovo Radojica said to me from across the room. “We should loosen her clothes.”

Without looking up, his wife hit him hard in the upper arm with the back of her hand.

“You don’t speak German!” he protested, rubbing his shoulder.

“Know enough,” she answered in an accent thicker than his. She unbuttoned Gabrielle’s jacket, and she breathed more easily.

“You know what Mirjana means in Serbian?” Jovo asked me. “It means obstinate. Her father gave her this name, and he cursed all of us when he did.”

Mirjana Radojica shooed us all out into the front room and drew heavy drapes across the door to the kitchen. Jovo sat in the only padded armchair in the room and gestured to other chairs around the fireplace for us. He began packing a long white pipe with tobacco, and Melzer pulled his own pipe out as well.

“So,” Jovo began once his pipe was going, lit from coals in the fireplace, “you have come for the Scottish scientist Thomson. The Old Man of the Mountain wants him as well. Why should I risk that one’s wrath by giving the Scotsman to you?”

“I don’t think you’re afraid of the Old Man. If you were, what was that fight with his zeppelin all about this morning?”

“You heard about that? It was nothing. Rumors! These stories grow in the retelling.” He puffed on his pipe and frowned into the fireplace. The flames painted his face orange and yellow.

“I did not hear about it: I watched it from a ledge less than a mile from here.”

His eyes moved to me and then crinkled in a smile. He shrugged.

“Very well. I get along with some of my neighbors better than others. That is always the way, is it not? I have the crew of his airship, those who survived the crash, twelve men in all. Also his strange gun, although the barrel is bent and will require a master gunsmith to set it right. I thought to ransom the crew, but the Old Man sent word he might spare my life if I turned over them and Professor Thomson unharmed, and paid to repair the ship. Can you imagine the arrogance? Then he sent his other ship here to intimidate me. Well . . . things got a little out of hand yesterday. So now I suppose I will have to send his crew back just to settle things down.

“I would dislike giving Professor Thomson to the Old Man, even though it would help make peace. I have grown fond of the Scotsman. He is the only one I can talk to of the wider world. I went to school in Vienna, you know, two years at Die Akademie der Bildenden Künste. I wished to paint. Now, mostly I sketch—gun positions, poorly guarded gates, that sort of thing.”

“Life’s funny that way,” I said, and he nodded in agreement.

He turned to face me directly.

“So,” he said.

I pulled the five gold sovereigns from my pocket and handed them to him. They seemed to glow in the firelight.

“We will pay more,” I said. “This is just to demonstrate we can.”

“An impressive demonstration,” he said. “Now we haggle back and forth to reach a price. The people in these hills love it, because there is so little else to do. It is a form of entertainment, you see? But I have no love for it, and not enough patience.

“So this is what I do instead. You tell me your price, and I will tell you yes or no. No bargaining. If the answer is no, you leave and the Scotsman stays with me.”

“No second chances, huh?”

“No.”

He put his pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire, I guess to let me think it over. I didn’t need to.

“One hundred gold sovereigns. The five you have here and ninety-five more.”

He continued to study the fire, chewing on his pipe, as if thinking over the offer, but I knew from the way his eyebrows went up at the figure the answer was yes. Maybe he was thinking about whether there was a way to ask for more, but that would have broken the rules of his own game. Finally he turned to me and smiled.

“I will send for the Scotsman.”

I sent Melzer with the news for Gordon, but also to tell him we wouldn’t be leaving until morning. Thomson had banged his leg up and would need a litter, and Gabrielle would as well, just to be on the safe side. Rigging litters and trying to carry two people down the mountainside in the darkness was just asking for trouble. Besides, Jovo Radojica, voivoda of Brezna, was feeling hospitable.

His hospitality did not extend to a dozen or so heavily armed men, however, so the team would have to camp in the woods. It was just as well—I didn’t want Radojica giving our Bosnians, or Sergeant Durson, too close an inspection.

I rose when Thomson came to the door, and for a moment neither one of us spoke. His brief time in captivity seemed to have aged him. He walked with a wooden staff and favored one leg, and his face bore several abrasions and bruises, probably from the crash. He’d still been in his nightshirt when Tesla’s men grabbed him back in Munich. Now he wore homespun peasant clothing, and if his hair had been longer he could have passed for a gray-bearded village elder. He put his hand on my shoulder, and his face crinkled in relief and grief.

“Ach, look at yah!” he said, his voice thick with emotion, “your eyes black and nose crooked, and I’m that glad to see you. I saw them beating you, Jack, once you went down. I though’ you were dead. I did, it’s God’s truth.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

We shook hands.

“Come on and sit down, you old fart.”

I helped him to a chair by the fireplace, and from the other room I heard Gabrielle.

“Is that Professor Thomson’s voice?”

Within moments she joined us, supported under one arm by the formidable Mirjana Radojica, who frowned in clear disapproval of her patient being up and about. It was starting to look like a convention for the walking wounded.

“My word, is that Mademoiselle Courbiere?” Thomson asked. “I hardly recognized you.”

Gabrielle ran fingers through her straggling hair and smiled weakly.

“I recognized you at once, Professor. But we are so different from when we met at the house in Munich. Was that really only one week ago?”

I took her arm and helped her to a chair as Mirjana dragged a wicker hamper over from beside the wall and then gently raised Gabrielle’s injured leg and rested it on the hamper. Through the slit side of her riding habit’s skirt I saw a fresh bandage on her thigh.

I pulled a chair next to Gabrielle’s and sat, and for the next twenty minutes we caught up. I told the bare bones outline of our adventures, leaving out the rendezvous with Durson’s Turks and Cevik Bey’s promised intervention once we gave the signal. No matter how Jovo Radojica felt about Tesla, he probably wouldn’t be crazy about a Turkish-led battalion of Bosnian riflemen marching through his neighborhood. Thomson told of the flight through the mountains and the crash at night, and Jovo freely admitted to setting the lure for the airship, although he was surprised it had actually worked.

Marjana brought steaming cups of sweet coffee just when a villager knocked on the door. It opened to reveal the returning Sergeant Melzer with Gordon in tow. More introductions followed, along with another reunion between Thomson and Gordon, more reserved than ours had been.

“We need to talk,” I said once everyone settled in. I glanced at Jovo, hoping he would give us some privacy. He shrugged.

“What is it you want?” he asked us, looking around the circle of faces. “What is it you expect to accomplish here? I think more than simply rescue my new good friend Professor Thomson.

“I have a problem of my own. He is called the Old Man of the Mountain. He loves Serbia, he says, but he does not love me, and he does not love our king, this I know. He will bring ruin on our nation if he continues with his madness—this I believe.

“I think you intend to do something about him. Tell me if I am wrong.”

He looked around at each of us. No one said anything.

“I thought as much. I will not help you in this. Too many of my countrymen are likely to die. Even though my country may need this thing done, I will not bloody my hands with it. But this much I will do: my wife and I will go to bed.”

He rose, shook Thomson’s hand, bowed to the rest of us, and then he and Mirjana went back through the kitchen and up the creaking wooden steps to the second floor.

Thomson looked at each of us.

“Well, then,” he said, “I suppose the first order of business is command. Nominally I am supposed to be in charge, but I have some misgivings on that score. Captain Gordon, you have crafted a new plan and brought the expedition here, surmounting what sound like extraordinary obstacles. It would be foolish and irresponsible of me to supersede you at this point, particularly as I am physically unfit to actually accompany our move on Kokin Brod. I know that officially the responsibility is mine, but I surrender command to you on the grounds of medical infirmity. Do you accept?”

Surprise and embarrassment flickered across Gordon’s face.

“I do, Dr. Thomson. And I—I very much appreciate your confidence.”

“Not at all. Now, tell me what we know about Tesla’s plans.”

“Well—”

I heard shouts from outside, the sound of running feet. The door burst open and Sergeant Melzer came in, face red with excitement and alarm. Through the open door the sound of angry voices was louder, but I also heard the crackle of distant rifle fire.

“Herr Hauptmann, the natives say we have betrayed the truce! There is firing from the direction of our camp!”