“So what do you do when the dead come back to haunt you?” Taziri asked.
“Nothing! We ignore them. They just want attention, and it’s not as though they can do anything to you except whine about their problems and shake their little hands at you.” Dante waggled his gloved fingers at them.
Taziri shook her head. “No, this ghost attacked Qhora with water and birds.”
“Then it wasn’t a ghost, was it? Some sort of rotting undead thing, I suppose, one that likes to lay with men and pump out squalling infants! That’s what happens when you don’t handle your corpses properly. Espani idiots.” Dante sniffed and spat in the snow. “Our priests have the good sense to teach us how to handle the dead. Bury them deep, ignore them, and they’ll go away. This drama is what you get from Espani romanticism. Water-women and iron imps and whatever else they call them.”
Taziri fixed the Italian with a long stare. He was still ugly, maybe slightly uglier with the darkening stubble on his cheeks, and the cold air had left his face a bit more discolored. A little redder around the eyes. His nose was peeling. “How does a chemist earn enough money to fly from Rome to Tingis? Mixing tinctures must pay very well in Italia. I had no idea your people were so sickly.”
“My business is none of yours.”
“I don’t care about your business at all. But I care about those men who put two bullets in my plane trying to catch you. I was going to ignore that little show in Rome and leave it for the police to keep an eye on you in Tingis, but since I’m stuck with you, it’s my problem,” Taziri said. “Actually, it should be the major’s problem, but he isn’t here. So tell me what happened back there and whether it’s going to be a problem for us here.”
Dante’s scowl brightened with a look of incredulity. “It’s not a problem, not here or anywhere except in Italia. And it’s personal. If you want to talk about problems, let’s talk about why you crashed us in this miserable cesspool and then set us on this death march to nowhere instead of getting us out of the country.”
Taziri sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dante. This is the plan, the best plan to keep us all alive as long as possible. We hide and we wait. With any luck, the major will be able to slip across the border and help will be on the way.”
“And what about the swordsman who gave Enrique his first shaving lesson last night?” Dante asked. “You’re supposed to be hiding us from the military, but there’s already at least one of them following us now. And as soon as we pass a fort out here, he’ll have a hundred soldiers riding us down. I’m starting to think the DeVelli woman had the right idea. We should turn around right now and head south before this Quesada character gets us all killed.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Taziri kept her voice low so neither the hidalgo ahead nor his students behind would hear. “I’m taking you to Zaragoza and wherever else the Don goes until we know for certain that we can safely leave the country.”
“And how long will that take?”
Taziri grimaced. “As long as it takes.”
Chapter 14. Syfax
The major had to admit that the last hundred miles had made quite a difference in more than just the Espani weather. On the road from Toledo he had seen the land swelling with color, if not with life. As the snow thinned, the warm browns and cool grays of the mountains struck dark outlines against the overcast sky and the pines and firs stood in bright greens up and down the hills. What little moisture fell from the sky was mostly sleet and left pale slush on the road that was equal parts hard ice and watery puddles. Both were treacherous, but both were easier to walk through than snow.
Syfax paused to consider the line of roofs and steeples on the horizon and the handful of round windmills standing out in the fields. “Any idea what this place is called?”
Kenan trudged past him, hands shoved in his pockets, face half-nestled in the upturned collar of his borrowed coat. “Ciudad Real.”
Syfax started walking again. “We’ll stay here tonight. Dry out and get some warm food. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I feel fine.” The lieutenant sneezed, leaving a long shining trail of slime hanging from the stubble on his chin. He wiped his face and rammed his fist back into his pocket.
“Come off it. You’re as sick as a dog.”
Kenan glanced up at him. “Just so long as we stay somewhere really quiet and out of the way. That mess back in Toledo was a little too close.”
“Nah, it was all right. No one got shot. Hell, those guys wouldn’t have shot us anyway. We learned that back in basic training. Espani don’t like shooting folks anymore than I do. They think knives and swords are more honorable or holy or something.”
Kenan sneezed again. “I don’t even remember basic.”
Syfax grimaced. I’m sure you don’t, kid. There was a good reason I took you with me when I went over to the marshals. Any longer in the army and you would have met a Songai arrow with your name on it.
Just outside Ciudad Real, Syfax paused to ask an old woman where they might want to stay the night. She described two places. The first was a large inn near an even larger church. The second was a small tavern near another, larger tavern. The major steered his subordinate to the larger tavern with a grin.
It was late in the evening when they found the Red Swallow, and they found the dining room overflowing with travelers and laborers who were already quite drunk. Two young men in the corner were abusing a pair of guitars and the lyrics of an old ballad between glasses of lager and most of the tables were rustling with piles of coins and stained playing cards.
After cramming some hot food into the sniffling lieutenant and depositing him in a bedroom in the back of the building, Syfax returned to the dining room to see if he could turn one handful of Espani reales into two or three handfuls. He found a table of stone masons who were all too happy to invite a stranger into their game. They were just dealing the first hand when a tall figure stepped up the table and said, “Good evening, gentlemen. Would you mind if I joined you?”
Syfax looked up, stone-faced. It was the Italian woman, Nicola DeVelli. She peered down at the table with a smug little smile and two of the men made room for her. But to the major’s relief, the woman never once made eye contact with him, never once gave any hint that she recognized him at all. They played monte for over an hour, the deal rotating around the table with every hand. And the hands were quick as the masons showed little care in placing their bets and only slightly more care in losing them. Syfax struggled to break even. There was no skill, no bluff, no real playing at all. Only the bet and the flip of the gate, and the sweeping of the coins this way or that.
By the time most of the men were ready to leave, the largest pile of reales sat in front of the tall woman from Italia. Syfax watched the masons leave the tavern before he leaned across the table and said, “You’ve got some stones on you, lady. What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you with Ziri and the others?”
Nicola swept her winnings into her pocket and unbuttoned her coat, folding down the high collar and moving her hat from her lap to the table. “Major, I never intended to ride off into the north and disappear into some church with a group of zealots and lunatics when my best chance for leaving the country was heading south to the coast. I left them on the first evening. I had thought I’d be able to catch up to you on the road rather quickly, but you moved quite quickly yourself, especially after Toledo, and I have found the weather to be uncommonly disagreeable.”
“Toledo? What do you know about Toledo?”
“Just what I was told. That two Mazigh spies matching your description had fought and escaped from the soldiers. In fact, if my Espani accent wasn’t so well-practiced, I might have ended up in a cell myself. They were interrogating everyone leaving the city. Thank you very much for that, major. It was one more delay on my journey south to find you.”
“Not my problem, lady. You’re Ziri’s passenger, not my charge. She made that pretty clear.” He rolled his empty cup between his fingers. “But I guess you’re going to keep following us anyway, and you’ve got a nice little pile of money there, so I suppose I’ll let you tag along.”
“How generous, major.” She smiled awkwardly. “Can I buy you a beer?”
