Not Less Than Gods (27 page)

It was only interrupted once more, when they ran out of fuel around four o’clock in the morning. The rabbi apologized profusely, explaining that this was the longest road trial the coach had yet had and he was still uncertain how far a tank of fuel could take them. However, Ludbridge pointed out that Hobson had providentially brought several bottles of slivovitz along in his trunk. Four of them filled the tank, and the coach surged ahead as though it greatly appreciated his sacrifice.

The east was growing light when they glimpsed the first farmer’s carts carrying produce to Silistria on the Danube. To avoid exciting comment, the rabbi switched the engine off and climbed down, while Mordekhay unfolded the wagon tongue and fastened the gelding into the traces. With the conversion complete the others climbed out. The first farmer to pass them on the road wondered whether he was not seeing some sort of funeral procession: jet-black horse straining at immense jet-black coach, and an odd-looking party of men in long coats following on foot.

“What was that you called my associate, back there?” Ludbridge said quietly to the rabbi, as they trudged along side by side. “You used a word with which I’m not familiar.
Golem
, I think it was.”

The rabbi nodded. He peered ahead at Bell-Fairfax, who with Mordekhay was pushing the coach to ease some of the strain on the gelding. In a low voice the rabbi replied, “The Lord made Adam from red clay, did He not? Well. Some believe that the learned and wise can also make living servants from clay. There is a legend that a certain rabbi in Prague made one such, to protect our people against persecution there.

“A golem is big, and strong, and usually obedient to the will of the rabbi who made him. But he has no voice, the golem. To give him a voice is to give him a soul, and who can say whether that ought to be done? And of course a gentile such as yourself will conclude this is all so much folklore, no?

“Still . . . if some other group of learned and wise men—such as our own brotherhood—were to develop the idea independently and create a man for their own purposes, they would most likely make him big and strong and obedient, and much more human looking than the old fellow in Prague. But they could not, I think, manage to completely disguise his true nature. And, being gentiles, they might not know that a golem shouldn’t be given a soul. Won’t he find it painful, when they set him about the work he is to do?

“But I don’t believe you will worry much about this, since you cannot believe it to be any more than a fable.” The rabbi gave Ludbridge a sidelong glance. Ludbridge, looking thoughtfully at Bell-Fairfax, merely nodded.

Fortunately for the gelding, they hadn’t far to go before they entered Silistria, a pleasant city in a curve of the Danube. They found an early-opening coffee house, and had breakfast while Mordekhay went off to obtain a team of fresh horses. Rabbi Canetti remained awake long enough to take them down to the riverfront and introduce them to a bargeman willing to take four passengers and their luggage up the Danube; then he climbed into the back of the coach and was sound asleep before Mordekhay and Asher waved and drove back to Varna.

From Silistria to Ruschuk by barge took them most of a week, for the barge was neither steam-powered nor driven by internal combustion engine. It was mule-drawn and capable of two miles an hour at its best speed. They made themselves fairly comfortable in a spare wood-paneled cabin and watched Bulgaria slip by on one hand, and Wallachia on the other.

Pengrove had plenty of time to develop the pictures he had taken in Silistria: more fortifications, more comic posing of Hobson and Bell-Fairfax against gun emplacements, and several studies of the island in the Danube across from the city. Hobson had unlimited hours at his disposal to encode and transmit the images to London. He woke them all one night, muttering strings of numbers in his sleep, and at last screaming that the number five was trying to bite his fingers.

The bargeman had a sloe-eyed daughter, young and possessed of a certain earthy charm, but she proved disinclined to cook for them. They took to venturing ashore at villages and purchasing bread and cheese. Bell-Fairfax bought a wooden tub and soap, and so they experimented with doing their own laundry. The bargeman’s daughter, who spoke neither Greek nor English, watched their efforts with amusement but seemed disinclined to assist with laundry either.

In one village they managed to purchase a deck of cards and thereafter passed the time with games of whist. The bargeman’s daughter, who did not play whist, circled round them impudently, peering over their shoulders at their cards and commenting to herself in an undertone. She contrived to bump her hip into Bell-Fairfax’s elbow at least once in every circuit. Pengrove and Hobson would exchange glances. Bell-Fairfax would keep his eyes resolutely on his cards. Ludbridge would watch them all with the same considered detachment with which he watched his cards.

One night, long after the lamp had been blown out, Ludbridge heard a faint tapping sound. It came from the other side of the bulkhead, just above Bell-Fairfax’s bunk. The sound persisted for a while before Bell-Fairfax rose silently and stole from the cabin.

Ludbridge got out his watch and checked it, and checked it again when Bell-Fairfax returned, a full three hours later.

“Bell-Fairfax.”

“Sir?”

“D’you remember what I said about being a second-rate Casanova?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I trust you’re not going to lie to me, Bell-Fairfax.”

“No, sir.”

“Then what in hell have you been doing for the last three hours?”

There was a long pause while Bell-Fairfax framed his reply. “Entertaining a lady, sir.”

“Hardly a lady.”

“As much of a lady as it is within her power to be, sir.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I’ll grant you she’s the sort who might cause a bit of trouble if you scorned her. Though rather obviously you
didn’t
scorn her. I expect you hardly had to use your, how did you put it? Your powers of making yourself agreeable. Did you?”

The silence that followed went on too long.

“You did,” concluded Ludbridge.

“I started to, sir. I stopped myself.”

“Stopped yourself! Ah, I see. And that makes it perfectly all right.”

“No, sir, I understand that, sir.”

“Not likely, you don’t. Listen to me, you God-damned young imbecile. Whether you seduce a girl or she knocks on the wall and offers herself,
it’s a complication endangering the mission
. If you’d ignored the knocking like a sensible man, she’d have been a bit pouty tomorrow but nothing worse. Now she has something to hold over you. She might go bearing tales to her father. What should we do then, eh?”

“Very sorry, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

“You bloody liar. I’ll tell you what
will
happen again, until we’re off this damned barge, because I’m giving you an order: you’ll dance attendance on that slattern as discreetly as you possibly can without her father finding you out. You’ll do whatever she wants, as often as she wants, and if you have to use your powers of persuasion to keep her happy, you will do so. In fact, you must. By the time we step ashore at Ruschuk I want that girl convinced you’re a dear friend for whom she wishes nothing but the best in the regrettable but utterly necessary affairs that will part the two of you, never to meet again.”

“. . . But, sir, that’s—it—altering her perceptions in that manner—that would be as though I’d raped her.”

“Ah!
Now
he feels compunction. How very unfortunate for your conscience, Bell-Fairfax, since you henceforth have no choice in the matter. I point out that you may avoid this sort of consequence in the future by exerting your self-control.”

“Yes, sir.”

At the end of a week they were lean, badly laundered and eager to see the last of the barge. The bargeman’s daughter waved cheerfully to Bell-Fairfax as he slunk ashore at Ruschuk, where there were both laundresses and restaurants. He endured a great many acid remarks from his companions before at last they crossed the Danube into Wallachia.

“Didn’t have to report to the British Consul anywhere else,” muttered Pengrove. Hobson shrugged. They were sitting in an antechamber in the consulate in Bucharest, with their trunks piled around them. Ludbridge
had vanished into an inner office, upon giving a certain password to a clerk.

“Any place the Russians are, you have to be careful with your papers,” Hobson said.

“Shame their revolution failed,” murmured Bell-Fairfax. “What, the Wallachians? Weren’t they like our Chartists?”

“Yes, but . . . this isn’t England.”

“This bit of it is,” said Pengrove cheerily. “Not likely to get shot by any glowering Russians or Turks in here, what? Which is more than one can say out there.” He waved a hand at the window. “Occupying troops that look as though they’d just as soon open fire on each other as the revolutionaries, and a new puppet prince with the Czar’s fingers twitching his strings.”

“We could have kept going up the Danube,” said Hobson mournfully. “We might have gone all the way to Austria. I’ve heard it’s very pleasant in Vienna.”

“Not worth spending another few weeks in the company of Konstantin the Bargeman and his charming daughter, though, what?” Pengrove elbowed Bell-Fairfax, who gave him an evil look

Hobson shuddered and shook his head. “What’s the point of coming here, then? You’re not to take any photographs. I saw Ludbridge’s orders. ‘Proceed to Bucharest HQ for further instructions,’ that was all they said.”

“So they did,” said Ludbridge sharply, emerging from an inner office. “And now I have further instructions, and you’ll know what you’re to know when I damned well choose to tell you.”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” they chorused.

“Are our passports all arranged now?” added Pengrove.

“In a manner of speaking. Get those trunks up off the floor! We’ve got a march ahead of us.”

“Are we going to a hotel?” inquired Bell-Fairfax, hoisting Ludbridge’s trunk, which was the largest.

“No,” said Ludbridge. “We’re going downstairs.”

Staggering under their luggage, they descended a staircase, and
then another, and at last, after Ludbridge flashed a pass at another clerk who unlocked a door for them, they descended a still narrower stair, and found themselves in what appeared to be the consulate’s basement. “Perhaps we took a wrong turn?” said Pengrove.

“No,” said Ludbridge. He opened a broom closet, which did in fact contain a broom, a mop and a bucket. He leaned down, touched a particular nail head in the side of the cabinet, and the whole closet swung back. A tunnel was revealed, descending beyond, vaulted brick painted white, and lit by a series of vacuum lamps.

“I say, one feels quite at home!” said Pengrove.

“Get in,” said Ludbridge, and when they had all dragged their trunks through he stepped into the tunnel as well and carefully closed the door and cabinet behind them. “Now keep going, and kindly oblige me by picking up the pace.”

They trooped along the tunnel for what seemed like miles and very likely was, with no change in the prospect before them: the same neatly painted brick walls and an endless succession of vacuum lamps overhead, around which Bell-Fairfax had to duck his head lest he strike them with the crown of his hat. Eventually, however, they heard a dim roaring sound ahead.

“That’s a waterfall,” said Bell-Fairfax.

“Got it in one,” said Ludbridge, panting. He offered no further comment and they continued on, and within a few more minutes emerged into an immense cavern, lit by vacuum lamps suspended on cables from the ceiling. At either end there was a round opening, seemingly the mouths of cylindrical tunnels in both directions; the distance between them was spanned by a cable above, and what looked for all the world like rail tracks below. In fact, the whole of the cavern resembled a subterranean railway station, with the only out-of-place elements being the complex of turbines and roaring waterfall, some three stories high, on the other side of the tracks. A uniformed porter with a baggage cart approached them.

“May I take your bags, gentlemen?” he said, in English only slightly accented.

“Oh,
thank
you,” said Hobson, nearly weeping with relief. They loaded their trunks on the cart and he wheeled it away to what was clearly a loading area, for there were other trunks and crates stacked there.

“This way,” said Ludbridge, striding off to the rather surreal-looking ticket booth—handsomely ornamented with a peaked roof and gingerbread decoration—that sat near the track.

“Something’s wrong,” said Bell-Fairfax. “This can’t be a railway station.”

“And why not, boy?”

Bell-Fairfax craned his neck, tilted his head. “There’s no smell of coal. No steam. No cinders.”

“Fancy that,” said Ludbridge. He leaned into the ticket counter. The clerk looked up at him and smiled politely.

“What becomes of illusions?” the clerk inquired.

“We dispel them.”

“And we are everywhere. Four passages?”

“Yes, please.”

“Calais or Aalborg?”

“Aalborg.”

“May I see your remittance card?”

“Yes, sorry,” said Ludbridge, and reached into his coat for it while behind him the others exchanged glances and Pengrove mouthed in silence,
Aalborg?
Ludbridge handed over a printed card to the clerk, who punched it four times and returned it. He pulled four green tickets from a reel and passed them across his counter to Ludbridge.

“You have a wait of approximately fifteen minutes. Please be seated.” Ludbridge exhaled in relief and stepped away from the counter. “There now! If you lot had dawdled we’d have missed it, and there won’t be another for a week.” He passed out their tickets and led them to a row of wrought-iron benches, where they took seats.

“What kind of railway uses no coal and only has trains once a week?” asked Hobson.

“Secret ones,” said Ludbridge. “And, yes, we’re going to Denmark.”

He said no more on the subject, but pulled out his cigar case and was soon puffing away contentedly on a cigar. Pengrove, watching him, saw the cloud of smoke about Ludbridge’s head suddenly disperse, blown backward; at the same moment he felt a rush of air on his own face. He looked around and saw dropped tickets flying like autumn leaves, whirling and scattering in the torrent of air that was pouring from the circular tunnel in the southern wall of the cavern.