A lot of Dobreni girls were named Xanpia, after the patron saint, or angel, or mythic figure who had saved a group of local kids from marauders millennia ago. Many called that the first Blessing. But the common name didn’t explain why she seemed familiar.
“This door,” I said, raising my voice. “How does it work?”
“It is a door between.” Xanpia held her hands up, palms parallel.
“Between what?”
“Between this space and what you know as the Nasdrafus. It is also,” she said, “the door between your past and your future.”
THREE
“WHAT? Is this some magic thing? No way,” I said, backing up. “Uh uh. Nada. Zip! I am getting married in a month and a half, and until then, I do not want any magical woo-woo messing up my life. I don’t want to be rude, but—”
“It’s already happened,” Xanpia said. Her smile was entirely sympathetic as the song swelled around us, so close it felt like the singers were just out of sight.
I had it then, where I’d seen her. It was on a cold wintry day at the beekeeper’s house, when the Salfmattas had tested me with their crystals, and I’d looked into the past. It made me sick and dizzy. I’d thought her a ghost.
“You’re a ghost? No, don’t answer that. I’d rather not know, if I have any choice in the matter. Talk to me after the wedding, if you must haunt me. No, better make it after—”
“There is always a choice,” Xanpia said. “But it is between going back to where you have already been, and being unmade.”
“Unmade?” I repeated, every nerve flashing ice cold. “When you say ‘already been,’ what do you mean?”
“That you have already been there. Now the time has come for you to go to where you were called.”
“I hate time-travel stories,” I whined. “So you’re saying if I don’t go, then I’m going to vanish from history?”
“You and Dobrenica,” she said. She tipped her head, and I looked around, half-expecting to see the singers and those playing the instruments. “The ceremony is nearly complete.”
She began backing away.
I stepped through the doorway, questions piling up in my head. “Called where? Why? What am I supposed to do?” As I spoke, I recognized the shifting shapes behind her: ghost animals, dancing around the familiar fountain, Xanpia’s Fountain—which, technically, was several long blocks away from where I stood now, with a gigantic cathedral in between. The light was as bright as an August noon in Los Angeles. Brighter. And the music rose to a crescendo. “You’re that Xanpia?” I yelled, running toward her.
She and the fountain were slowly dissolving into sparkles of brilliant light, like sun on water. “You are called to guide the child Aurélie,” she said. “But that is only half your task, for those who call you cannot see into their future. I came to tell you the rest: you must bring her here to save Dobrenica.”
As the singers gave a last cry on a sustained note and rattled their drums and cymbals, the world around me began to dissolve. “Wait! Wait!” I cried, trying to turn around, to run back. “I have to let…”
…Alec know.
The words fell silently into the white.
FOUR
THAT BRILLIANT LIGHT BROKE into splashes and spangles of sunlight in a deep, cerulean world. Suspended between the blue of sky and water shimmered thin drifts of smoke, or ice, like ribbons, only here was the shape of a hand, and there the hazy outline of an uplifted profile.
Smoke ghosts, Tania Waleska called them.
They hovered above a darker shade of blue, blurred by tones of gray and a dull brown, as if a city had sunk below the surface of the sea.
Where was I? When was I? And how was I going to let Alec know?
Gradually I became aware of uneven juts of land extending into the blue of the ocean, and more across what appeared to be a bay. Close by hulked a monstrous fort built of red brick, an addition of newer brick below, along which were mounted twelve enormous cannon.
Cannon. My first clue to the time, if not the place.
Bobbing on the murky green water under those guns, and above the sunken city, was a pair of dinghies, their sails flapping loose.
In each dinghy a boy sat at bow and stern, with another standing in the middle, balancing precariously. They were all about middle school age, but otherwise, the two boys facing one another could not have been more different. The taller one had the awkward shoulders and bony wrists of puberty. His shock of hair had been bleached the color of corn floss, his freckled face burned a blotchy golden red around a ruddy, much-peeled nose. He wore a loose shirt gaping at the neck, and scruffy trousers that looked handmade.
He scowled down at the boy in the other dinghy, who was thin and light-boned as a reed, brown-skinned, with slanted black eyes under extravagantly winged brows. The hair escaping from his queue curled in tendrils around his face, giving it an elfin look.
His? Those winged brows, the charmingly lopsided grin, sparked a memory: the hunting lodge high on Mount Dsaret in Dobrenica. I was sitting in the breakfast room when I glimpsed that same room in the past, a honeymooning couple: the man blond, the woman with curling black hair, slanted black eyes, and a charmingly crooked smile…
The boy in the dinghy not only called to mind that honeymooning princess, he was way too pretty to be a boy. I wondered if this was my charge, Aurélie, dressed in boys’ clothing.
The kids looked up. Out on the water beyond the fortress glided tall ships on their slow approach, under full and glorious sail, trying to catch what seemed to be a skittish wind. But I couldn’t feel the wind. I couldn’t smell the sea. I couldn’t hear anything, except maybe the faintest mewling of…gulls? Hundreds of them swirled and dove off the coast along with a dozen other types of bird.
I began to assess my own personal details: not only could I not feel anything, but the boys, including the one I suspected was really Aurélie, were totally unaware of me hovering somewhere around them.
The big blond boy and Aurélie were arguing. She gave a tight shrug, then extended a hand toward the water. The big one appeared to reach a decision. When the red-haired boy at the bow of his dinghy gave what was obviously a loud sigh and pointed violently at the water, the big one ripped off his shirt, and with a glance of challenge backward, dove over the side of the dinghy. Within seconds the other five had followed, some shucking clothes, others not. Aurélie dove over fully clothed.
Oh yeah, definitely a girl in disguise.
All I could see were kicking feet in the golden light as the kids swam down and down toward what appeared to be rooftops. Rooftops? Waving strands of kelp and the barnacles and growths of sea life blurred the outlines, but it definitely looked like an entire street of houses sunk underwater.
Small splashes flowered around gasping faces as, one by one, the boys reappeared, sometimes throwing things into the dinghies, then diving down again. The big boy stayed visible longest, his pale hair catching the light as he looked around for Aurélie, whose white shirt billowed in the water.
Up on the wall, men swarmed around one of the cannon. In the distance, the schooner foremost of the three ships shivered briefly, its gun ports emitting smoke. The cannon responded, recoiling. Did I hear a boom, or feel it?
I tried to look around, but the sea and the sky blended together, the sunlight dazzling me. When I could see again, eddies of smoke were drifting lazily away from the cannon rampart, as below, the dark-haired girl-in-disguise clambered aboard her dinghy.
A distant boom sent seabirds squawking skyward. I heard that! Sound was coming, but I still felt nothing, smelled nothing. Aurélie and her two companions hauled themselves into their dinghy, streaming wet, and set their last findings in the bow. Then they turned their hands to raising their sail, as the dinghy rocked on the slowly widening wake from the last of the passing schooners.
The dinghy picked up speed, traveling faster in the light airs than the laden schooners, which dragged long trails of seaweed. All three kids gazed up at th
e schooners slanting slowly up a long passage that was divided from the sea by a thin peninsula.
The shadowy, wavering underwater city abruptly vanished from underneath the dinghy. The water turned aquamarine, clean except for floating detritus cast overboard from the ships, as the dinghy built up speed.
It soon caught up with the first of the schooners, then slid past them. From the way the sails filled and the schooners leaned and rocked, the wind was rising. The light changed, the westering sun slanting underneath gathering clouds as the dinghy left the schooners far behind.
In the distance, the end of the passage resolved into a forest of masts bobbing on the water, and beyond it, what looked like a handsome city, built mostly of brick.
But the little dinghy wasn’t heading there. It curved through greenish whitecaps into a sheltered cove between enormous limestone cliffs, birds weaving in dizzying patterns far overhead. In this cove a narrow two-master lay at anchor, its handsome lines reminding me of Revolutionary-era privateers.
The dinghy bumped up against a sagging wharf. The kids bound the sail to the mast, then leaped from the dinghy, the tallest one with painter in hand. They secured the craft with practiced speed and ran along the wharf to a path beaten into thick greenery. This led to a low, rambling two-story stone house of Spanish design, with balconied upstairs windows framed by wrought iron, windows and doors arched. Surrounding the main house on either side rose small cottages with pitched thatched roofs, wooden planks connecting them over ground that probably turned to mud in the frequent rains. Behind the cottages stretched rows of kitchen garden. I could see the heads of youngsters bobbing among the rows as they tended plants. Beyond the kitchen garden wild growth began: banana, breadfruit, and citrus at the forefront. The Spanish house and the flora made me guess we were somewhere in the Caribbean, and this was a plantation being worked by a variety of people, not just black slaves: As the kids from the dinghy reached the big house, people stilled into a tableau of faces ranging from very dark skinned to golden hued.
Then I found myself inside the house with a rapidity that reminded me of how films are edited—one moment you’re outside, a blink, and you’re inside. Only it wasn’t as neat as a film jump, more like a blur.
Candles and lanterns glowed in the rapidly falling darkness, throwing unsteady, ruddy light over a woman seated in a high-backed old chair. “Three ships, you say? But not British?” she asked in French.
Sound was definitely clearer. The woman could have been any age from thirty-five to sixty. It was difficult to make her out in that weak, uneven light, but from what I saw, her fair, freckled skin was sun-lined, her gray-streaked, honey-colored hair a sun-bleached mat untidily pulled back into a braid. She wore a loose shirt and voluminous breeches stuffed into high boots, into which two flintlock pistols had been snugged. The wide belt at her waist supported holsters for two more pistols.
“…biggest, a ship-rigged polacca, eighteen guns, all carronades,” Aurélie said. Her voice was much lower than you’d expect in a kid that size, and a little hoarse—not feminine at all. Maybe I was wrong, and she was a he after all?
A black woman emerged from a doorway, strapping a baldric over her shoulder, with a heavy sword attached. “Whose flags did they fly?” she asked. She had a gorgeous voice, low and husky-rough like a panther’s purr.
“Dutch and Swedish.”
“Good.” The black woman sighed and began to shrug out of the baldric, as the Caucasian sank back into her chair and asked, “So what is amiss with Harry, ma petite?”
Ma petite? “Ma” is feminine. So, a girl.
“He turned on me, Maman! I did nothing, me.” Aurélie answered in English, but she spoke slowly, regularizing verbs as one does who comes to English as a second language. “First he said that I lie, I do not see the ghosts like smoke over the sunken city. I told him what Nanny Hiasinte said, not everyone sees ghosts. Then he said Nanny Hiasinte does devil worship, but the other boys got angry, and George, the artillery sergeant’s son, told Harry that next he would slander Papists, and if he did, he could swim back to Fort Charles.” So Harry was an equal-opportunity bigot, I thought, first disparaging the Jamaican religious tradition, then taking a whack at the Catholics on the backswing. Typical for the time.
Aurélie went on. “I said we all are agreed against devils, so can we now swim?” Her French accent was strong, the names Harry and Hiasinte spoken without the h.
“Stap me!” the blonde said, laughing. “You’ve a quick wit, Aurélie chérie.”
Ah! Aurélie. So I was right. Chalk one up for Murray. I can do this.
The dark one stepped into the lamp’s soft golden glow as she gave Aurélie an approving nod. She was as beautiful as her voice, with long slanted eyes and sculpted bones that would have made Leonardo weep and think of angels. “That was well said. Remember what Nanny Hiasinte teaches about finding the place to agree.”
“I tried, Tante Mimba! Then Harry said he must be the leader, because his father is a captain of artillery. So I said, you can be leader, let us dive!”
“Well spoken, petit chou.”
Tante means “aunt” in French, and I could see a strong resemblance to the girl in her; so Aurélie had a white mom and a black aunt? “You lead by telling him to lead. This is quick wit.”
Aurélie’s mom cracked a laugh. “So it is.”
Aurélie tossed her head back. “But Tante Mimba! Maman! Then he said we had to shuck our clothes. I said, we never have before. Why now? He said, you are too fine a gentleman, René? I said like you told me, Maman, I cannot take off my shirt for the coral will scratch me again, and the scratch will go bad. The shirt protects me. George said, Are we to argue all day and not find any treasure? So we went into the water. But Harry swam near me, and once he socked me on the arm. I think he wanted another fight.”
While Aurélie chattered, the two women exchanged a long look, and Maman stretched her hand over a heavy packet tied with narrow ribbon. It lay on a side table with a pair of heavily bound books next to one of the guttering lamps. “It is meant to be,” she murmured.
“Nanny said so this morning,” Aunt Mimba replied quietly. “The obeah was to be at noon.”
Aurélie was not listening as she inventoried the extra hits and kicks Harry had aimed her way, touching her knee and ribs and shoulder as she spoke. She finished in an injured tone, “I think the devils got into Harry, for he was always my friend.”
“It’s a devil only if nature be devilish, and there are many who will so attest,” Maman said. “Harry suspects there is something amiss. I thought you would have a year or two more to be a boy, so it is as well that we come to what I—”
She paused as through the window came the sound of high, mellow tooting in a deliberate pattern. “The Abeng,” Maman breathed, and everyone stilled.
Abeng? Those horns were used both by slave holders and the Maroon guerrillas in Jamaica! I was definitely on the other side of the world from Europe. How was I supposed to get this kid to Dobrenica in order to save it?
Aunt Mimba held up three fingers as Maman said, “Two smaller ships, night, weather coming. Big one lying outside the cove. Would it be the Swedes? Exploring our cove, maybe?” She shook her head. “I don’t like this, Mimba.”
“Neither do I.” Aunt Mimba slung the baldric back on. “You raise the house and deal with the landing parties, Anne. I’ll take the field hands in the canoes. These ‘Swedes’ are not the only ones who can use the cover of a storm.” Her tone dropped to threat on the last words, and she dashed out.
Anne got to her feet and picked up a sword from a sideboard in a shadowy corner. “My sweet, take the small ones and lie up with your weapons. The way we drilled.” When the girl began to protest that she was big, now—she could defend herself—her mother flashed up a hand. “Only if they find you. Then strike and run, foot or knee. Just like you did on the ship. You must protect the small ones if I cannot get there at once.”
Aurélie sprang away as lightl
y as a deer, and I found myself bobbing after her into a confusion of shadows as darkness closed in with the building clouds. Lightning flashed. The two ships drifting into the little bay became stark black and white silhouettes.
Well, this really sucked. I had found my charge just in time for her to be attacked by pirates, and I couldn’t even pick up a weapon. How was I supposed to protect her?
More lightning. Aurélie crouched with several little kids in the lee of a rotting boat that had been overturned on a pile of mossy rocks. The bluish light revealed their intent faces and their weapons. Aurélie clutched a battered rapier in her left hand. In her right, protected by her body in a desperately dangerous way, she held a flintlock pistol, primed and ready to fire. There was no safety on that thing.
The kids stared out intently. Sand flew, grains glinting in the flare of lightning as a pair of silhouettes charged the kids’ hidey-hole, one with a dark-smeared upraised cutlass.
Out came the pistol. Aurélie squinted. Flash! Cutlass Guy recoiled, rocking back and forth with both hands clutched over a shattered knee, the cutlass lying in the sand.
The second pirate made a wide swipe with his weapon under the rail of the rotting boat—and met the rapier, which spun out of Aurélie’s grip. Then he let out a howl as a small boy stabbed him in the foot with a long knife. Whoosh! Orange flames shot up on one of the ships, lighting the bay. Aurélie led the kids in a low-running stream over the rocks in the other direction. They were partially obscured by the slashing rain.
Pistols flashed and silhouetted figures struggled, some falling. The fighting ended when the pirates fled down the beach to their boats, where they discovered the bottoms smashed. Some swam away. Others vanished into the darkness at either end of the cove.
Once more I heard the Abeng horn’s high toot in quick patterns that had to be code, for the kids whooped for joy, then splashed into the house.
A blink, and I was inside. Anne strode in through one of the low arches leading to the farther reaches of the house. She was wrapping a cloth around her arm and grimacing as she said, “…are the cottages clear?”