A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty Five: Shikari

Sergei loved the boy instantly, as though he had spent the past twenty years teaching and nursing and sheltering him. 

He felt proud of everything, even the fact that the young man had five fingers on each hand, as though his entire form was some kind of personal achievement on his father's part.

And, in this state of drunken excitement, he realized that he was reconciled to dying – reconciled to everything – because there was some small part of Elisabetta left in the world.

His stomach had been in knots for days. His shoulders had been weighed down by the grim, pressing weight of inevitability. But now he realized that inevitability wasn't as unkind as all that. Oh, it had done some terrible things – taking away Elisabetta and Ellini – but perhaps, if this boy was alive, it had all been for the best. Or, at any rate, not unambiguously for the worst.

The young man leaned against the closed door but didn't speak. He seemed quiet, cautious and capable, with a suggestion of amusement to his silence. He had something of Elisabetta's hardness. But something, too, of her tantalising unknowability.

Sergei was violently fascinated. All he wanted to do with his remaining time – be it minutes or years – was learn about this boy.

He leaned forward, half-eager and half-sheepish, and asked him whether he should be speaking English or Romanian.

"Actually, my mother's native tongue was Romany," said the young man. "But English was the lingua franca of the prison colonies."

Silence descended again. The young man seemed to wear it with ease, but it almost choked Sergei. He didn't know what to say. It would have been so much easier if it had been a daughter – even if she'd hated him, as this young man presumably did. He could have comforted her, put his arms around her. Although perhaps not, if she'd been as fiercely independent as Elisabetta.

He had her eyes – so dark they were almost metallic – and her long, interlocking lashes. Sergei remembered thinking how those lashes had made her seem so guarded, so mysterious, as though she had a portcullis in front of her eyes.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

The young man nodded.

"Your mother told you about me?"

Another nod.

Sergei took a deep breath – slightly hesitant, in spite of the eagerness. "How did she die?"

The young man raised his thick, sardonic eyebrows. "I think it was malaria, although there were so many epidemics sweeping the colonies at the time that it was quite difficult to be sure."

Sergei felt the reproach, but pushed onwards. "How old were you?"

"Seven. For a while, I had no home, and just lived on whatever I could steal. But then an Italian family noticed me splashing about quite healthily in the fetid puddles, and took me in as a kind of talisman against ill health. They thought, since I never got sick, I might help them to stay healthy too."

"Did it work?"

The young man shook his head. "There were no miracles in that place. They taught me a useful trade, though. I learned to hunt, and make bows and arrows, before they died. After that, I earned a living hunting swamp deer and painted storks in the terai."

"Before the liberation?"

"Yes."

"Which would have been when you were – fifteen?"

"Fourteen," said the young man, without friendliness or contempt.

"Did you hear Joel Parish's speeches? Did you go on the expedition to bring the surplus grain stores to Hyderabad?"