Chapter 1 (Ash)

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Next: Chapter 2

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

It was snowing in the city of tales and Ash was not prepared for it at all. All she had was this flimsy purple windbreaker she’d snagged at discount in Bulgaria, and it had a huge hole in the right sleeve so that was killing her mood. Every time she felt remotely comfortable, a gust of wind would slip right in by her elbow and the whole jacket would fill up like an inflatable fat suit that was somehow also a refrigerator.

The city was beautiful, though—that she couldn’t deny. The streets of the Sultanahmet district were wide and winding, the domes and minarets soaring and ringed by birds, the people warm and loud, calling hello to her in every language they knew until she finally responded in English. They’d clap her on the back, and shake Gertude's paw, and give them long-winded directions before shamelessly plugging their bathhouse or restaurant or whatever they were selling. Ash didn’t usually enjoy being accosted by strangers on the street, but there was something pleasant and vigorous about the way they did it. If she never found Celtheste, she allowed herself to think for just a moment, maybe she could be happy somewhere like this.

The people here reminded her of Grandmama in a roundabout way. Not that Grandmama would have ever tried to sell you something, or smiled at a stranger, or smiled in general, no Grandmama would've hated it here...but there was something...maybe it was the way everyone here seemed convinced that they lived in the most splendorous city in the world—how much they liked themselves for it; that self-satisfied look New Yorkers and Parisians have when they talk about their hometowns that Ash had always been envious of, that she loved her Grandmama for. Even when things were bad, they knew where they came from.

Ash instinctively shrunk to the side of the path as a group of soldiers walked past with their big guns and long black bayonets. She waited for them to disappear in the distance before continuing towards her destination. She could see it now, or she thought she saw it, hidden behind a lattice of bare tree branches. It was a big thing that only looked small because the rest of the city was filled with a thousand magnificent, gargantuan wonders, and here was the old Hagia Irene, a dusty shell stripped of color and ornament, and Ash loved it the moment she saw it. There it was, all alone on a neglected side path with barely a sign post. She hopped on her tip toes across the snow to get there instead of going around on the path. It barely saved her a minute and got the tops of her socks a little wet, but that was a decision Ash was willing to live with

For the one lonely guard shivering outside the old church, it must have been a peculiar sight to see this ragged teenager and her equally ragged black labradoodle bounding across the lawn and screeching to a stop in front of him. She waved her city pass and tried to march in but he stopped her, pointing at the dog.

"No pets," he said, "no pets inside. You understand? No pets. No." Ash shook her head.

"Gertrude is not my pet," she said, firmly, "she's my colleague,"

"What?" said the guard.

"My colleague," Ash said again, more emphatically, which was perhaps enough of a shock that he didn't stop them as they went on through. 

It's beautiful, thought Ash. Their footsteps and pawclacks echoed across the sanctuary. And empty. Or beautiful because it's empty. The stone arches were bare of decoration, and so was the dome, besides a simple mosaic of a red Byzantine cross above where the alter would have been. Ash snapped her fingers a bit to test the acoustics further, and Gertrude yipped in solidarity. The air was chilly, but it was still.

"I know you don't believe in ghosts," said Ash to Gertrude, "but even you have to admit there's something heavy about old places like this. Old, layered places." Gertrude panted sympathetically. Ash closed her eyes and tried to smell the place with her stuffed up nose. "Can you imagine all the centuries of people who stood here?" she said. "Empresses and Patriarchs and famous artists. Maybe even a viking or two. And now we're here, and we get to fill it with our—" Gertrude filled the church with a happy little bark "—whatever we want," smiled Ash.

She touched her trusty military surplus backpack to make sure it was still there. Habit. There'd been a scare back at the British Library in London, when she'd left it in the map room. What a joke. All those maps and none of them any use to her. And she'd almost lost the only one that really mattered to her. Ash fought the urge to reach in and take it out right now. What would be the point of that? It was in there. It was definitely still there. Why wouldn't it be exactly where she left it? She took a deep breath to calm herself. And thought of Grandmama.

What a shame she wasn't there to see this. Not because she'd like some old foreign church, but because she'd like seeing Ash here, smiling. And though she wouldn't have shown it in any discernible way, Ash knew she would have loved to sit outside that cafe where that poet had lived, on that hill overlooking the golden horn, with a tiny cup of very strong coffee. She would have loved watching those bright green birds zip by, the ones with no business being around in the middle of January.

"Ms. Bell," Ash asked her dog, "what do you think Grandmama would have left here? To...echo into eternity." Gertrude wagged her stubby tail, as if to say, nice touch. "Maybe a poem? Or a song. I think she'd like to sing here, wouldn't you?" Gertrude lifted her head and sounded out some wheezy squeaks. Ash giggled. "Leave it to me, you dope."

Ash closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. She listened, like she’d been taught, for corners and surfaces, the faraway places. She listened until her whole mind was set on the faint whistles of wind through whatever seams they came through. Then she began to hum, her lips buzzing with the roof of her mouth.

When you sing, Grandmama always said, you must agree to be a fool. You must promise the world that you will be rude and you will make strange noises with your mouth and wake babies. In a song, restraint is foolish and foolishness is truth. So Ash untied herself from the everyday, un-singing version of herself, who hid her true feelings and tried not to attract too much attention. She made a choice to grow until she filled a room and cast her voice as far as it would carry. Her hum widened into an ahhh, and the ahh trembled until it wavered and wavered until it vibrated, and before long she was moving her mouth and tensing her tongue in the shapes of the old language, of her father, her grandmother, their people, and their desert homeland. Where the words began and ended, which ones meant what--Ash had never learned, but she knew what she was singing. They were the words of the dead:"Hang my rose cloak by the fire""see it tossing in a breeze""night will come but you can watch me""my shape still holds within its folds"She let the song drench her throat--in all its unresolved phrases and haunted melancholy. And as she did, Ash the girl faded away, until she was just Ash the song, in all the notes and shades of her grief; praying, begging, fading into quiet, receding into all those faraway places she'd thought of. It felt right, when she was done. Like she'd finally arrived somewhere after months of traveling alone. She took one last, cleaner, lighter breath before she opened her eyes and saw a woman standing halfway across the room.

Not just any woman, either. A short, very pregnant Turkish woman, staring intensely at her. They regarded each other for a moment before the stranger spoke.

"That language," she said, "...it sounds so familiar to me."

The air was totally still again, the ring of the song now dearly departed. Ash, once again, fought the urge to reach inside her bag and feel for the map. Her next instinct was to run. There were two exits, but both were on the other side of the sanctuary, past the woman—who, now that Ash thought about, could just be a nice pregnant lady who wanted to talk to her.

“Oh I don’t know,” said Ash, “I just heard it somewhere.” How far could a pregnant woman get chasing her, anyway? Assuming she was pregnant. From Ash’s experience in the last couple months, it was more appropriate to assume the baby was a beach ball full of guns.

“Actually,” said the woman, “I know a little something about—“ She looked down to fiddle with the zipper on her jacket pocket, and as she did, Ash flinched and Gertrude snarled, ducking into a crouch “—uncommon languages.” The woman’s eyes widened when she looked up. She put her hands up in front of her shoulders. “Oh no, I’ve startled you. Please don’t be frightened. I should have known you’d be frightened.”

“Do I know you?” Said Ash.

“Not directly. We’ve spoken—well not you and me exactly—over email? We—I was expecting someone older. Unless I’m terribly mistaken, you must be Hecuba Wadsfellow?” Ash let out a breath.

“Yes. No. In a way. You’re John Foxgear? I was expecting a man.”

“Oh, yes. How silly. I suppose that is me now. Perhaps I should Joan Foxgear, not John. It’s not my real name anyway. We’re not allowed to use our real names, you see. The previous Foxgear, we all just called him Foxgear. You can, too.”

“A code name?” Asked Ash.

“An alias. And is Hecuba Wadsfellow, professor emeritus of archaeology, your alias?”

“I guess. What kind of an archival institute uses code names?”

"Why not? It just makes things more fun, doesn't it? Though I wonder if you’ll tell me your real name.”

“No.”

“Hmm. Yes. Fair is fair. Well, Ms. Wadsfellow then, or Hecuba if I may be so familiar—”

“You may not,” said Ash.

“—let me see what I can tell you about this map of yours.”

“You can’t have it, you know,” said Ash, “it belongs to my people.” This caught the woman, alias Foxgear, off guard or at least shattered any illusions that she was talking to a child. She shook her head.

“I wouldn’t dream of taking it from you, my friend.”

“You’re not my friend.”

“No. I imagine I’d need to earn that.” The woman stepped forward. Ash stepped back.

“You won't touch it, understand? You'll keep your hands behind your back. If you even try to touch it, Gertrude will bite your fingers off.”

“Oh my,” said Foxgear. Gertrude barked to show they meant business.

Ash took off her bag and placed it on the ground, then signaled for the woman to come forward. Then she reached into the bag, searched around a bit through all her dirty clothes until she felt a familiar set of frayed edges and smooth, dusty creases. She pulled it out.

It was a small map. Folded into quarters, as it had been many times before, it could disappear neatly into a paperback book. But it was dense. Boy was it crawling with roads and cities and geographic landforms, all labeled in the neatest, tiniest block lettering, in the same alien language of Grandmama's songs. There was barely room for the title, SELTHEST; the top of the first S was cut off by the edge of the paper, along with the right half of the last T. And most curious of all, someone had gone over the original inking with their own sharp red fountain pen and marked it with one, two, three, four—five Xs. Ash held it up, map side out, in front of her chest like those drivers meeting people at the airport, and Foxgear approached, reverently.

"Ten minutes closing!" Shouted the guard from outside the door. Foxgear turned her head to shout something back in Turkish, then returned to the map. She leaned forward, slowly, with her hands behind her back as stipulated. Ash felt a flicker of panic and guilt as she watched the woman wobble and then regain her balance. It couldn't be easy with all that weight in her belly.

"I can...here," said Ash. She held the map up higher, but now it was blocking her face. No matter, Gertrude was on the lookout, and Ash could contemplate once more the fading pencil marks on the back of the thick, yellowed parchment. "Do not ingest."Foxgear gasped, then clasped her hand around her mouth. Gertrude growled, and the woman remembered herself, putting her hands up again and then behind her head this time.

"Where in the world did you get this?"

"My Grandmama. It was my grandmother's," said Ash, but it seemed Foxgear barely heard her.

"Oh Ms. Wadsfellow, PhD, do you have any idea what this is?"

"It's Celtheste," said Ash, moving the map back down to uncover her face, "Isn't it? It's where she came from. It's real isn't it? It's--everyone says it's not real, but it's real isn't it?"

"Yes of course," said Foxgear. She'd bent over again, her eyes scanning the map rapidly, drinking it in. A highly outdated sounding phone began bleating in her pocket. "Absolutely remarkable," she mumbled, "the names are third century but it's all written in Old Mahdradi." Ash could barely contain herself.

"Is it a treasure map?" said Ash, the phone in Foxgear's pocket was trilling away to the heights of the dome, "those Xs are marking something. Something hidden, right? They have to be."

"What? Oh. Your grandmother...is that what she told you?"

"No, she--I found this."

"Hold on, just one moment." Foxgear tore herself away from the map and stepped back towards the entrance. She unzipped her pocket, and pulled out her phone. A small wad of folded printer paper fell out as she did, and she bent over to pick it up with one hand while putting the phone to her ear with the other. It really was an old thing; all white and blue plastic with a whole number pad and everything. "It's Foxgear," she said. Then she switched to Turkish. Or was it some other language? Ash couldn't tell. She said "Yes, yes," a couple times in English while glancing back at the girl and her dog.

Ash rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. This couldn't be where it went wrong. She was so close to something. And this woman seemed...well, there was something trustworthy about her. Maybe just the baby bump. She nearly kicked herself for thinking she could possibly be safe. No sudden movements. While the woman looked away, Ash folded the map. Put it back in her backpack. Strapped the backpack on.

"Five minutes closing!" shouted the guard.

Foxgear hung up and walked back to Ash and Gertrude. She looked distressed.

"My dear, is there perhaps a Bulgarian hit squad looking for you?" Ash nodded. "I see. And you're not keen to see them again any time soon?" She nodded again. "Then perhaps you should come with me."

It all happened too quickly. So quickly that Ash couldn't be sure she'd actually made a decision; but before long she was walking briskly, while not inconspicuously, alongside Foxgear, out along the cobblestone tourist pathways of old Istanbul. The much larger, much more famous Hagia Sophia blocked out the sun to their right while on their left, red-faced foodsellers hawked roasted chestnuts and buttered corn from their carts. They made it all the way to a crowded park area without incident, at which point Ash was beginning to believe that all the business about the Bulgarians was a false alarm and Foxgear was luring her into some amateurishly transparent trap. But then there was a stampede of bodies, a sudden onslaught of tall, unshaven men dressed in comic approximations of an american tourist—fat sunglasses and various shades of sweatpants—one had a polaroid camera from the 80s strapped around his neck. They shuffled and bumbled into Foxgear and nearly trampled Gertrude, who scampered out of the way, away, in the most momentary of moments, from her human. And in that split second came a rough hand, clasped around Ash's shoulder, jerking her away into another tumble of seemingly identical sightseers, pointing at things and chittering, and closing in around Ash like fish net.

Ash swung her backpack around to her front and held it to her chest. She looked left, then right, disoriented, looking for some weak point in their line she could smash through and escape but they were everywhere and every time she tried to move she got bumped in a direction she wasn’t expecting. More hands and arms flew around her, swinging along like they were just brushing by, but then they’d grasp at her bag ands pull or try to shake it loose from her grip. She didn’t know entirely what was happening, but she did know she couldn’t panic. If there was anything Ash knew, it was that the fastest way to lose was to panic. So she tried to pop the swelling water balloon of fear in the back of her skull and shouted out for her dog, who was barking wildly from what seemed like an impossibly far distance.

But then there was someone beside her, or two bodies away at least.

“Excuse me! Sir, can you take picture!” It took a moment for Ash to realize that it was Foxgear speaking in an exaggerated Turkish accent, waving her circa 2004 cell phone in one of their impassive faces. “Hello! Hello man!” The man in question, though Ash couldn’t see his eyes tried to wave her off, but Foxgear stepped in a little to close and the wave became a push. She lost her balance—or did she? Because if she was faking as Ash expected, it was all a masterful stroke of theater. The small pregnant woman, caught full in the face by a tower of a man. She tipped backwards and then swung herself forwards, overcorrected, and fell nearly belly first into the mob that held Ash captive. They broke, scattering backwards except the few that found themselves stiffly propping up a flailing woman, not sure how things had come to this or, it seemed, what it was they were even holding.

This seemed to get the attention of passers-by. They rushed to her rescue. Those who had seen what happened scolded the shell-shocked Bulgarians, and in the commotion Ash made brief eye contact with Foxgear. Her message was clear: run.

But to where? It seemed like everywhere she looked, there was another tall bearded man in sunglasses aggressively crossing her path. She tried to dart  between them, but it was difficult carrying all her earthly possessions in front of her at the same time. Lead with your shoulder, she thought to herself. Now was not the time to worry about looking ridiculous. Then came the sound she was waiting to hear.

From ahead and to the right, came what Ash had come to call a reverse dog whistle. It was something like a proto-howl, a whine just pronounced and just high pitched enough that only Ash could recognize it for what it was. And she dove towards it until Gertrude came into view, her nose pointed to the grey sky.

“Let’s go,” said Ash, slinging her bag once more onto her back, pulling it taut against her so it wouldn’t bounce. They leapt onward, swerving past the main road with the tram, down a pedestrian walkway running past the archeology museum, which Ash glanced wistfully at as they sped by. Gertrude veered left and barked for Ash to follow.

Down an alleyway, then a right turn into another, the stately 19th century facades morphing into graffitied concrete alongside them. A left, then a steep asphalt tumble down to a major thoroughfare. Cars whizzed past. A chain link fence stood across the way. And worryingly, there were hardly any people around.

“Hello!” A random man with a shoeshine kit shouted. “Hello! Konichiwa! You’re Japanese? Philippines?” Ash ignored him. Gertrude was sniffing the air. “Very cute dog!” She caught whatever she was smelling or listening for and shot down the sidewalk, only to screech to a halt at the foot of four hulking tourists round in the corner, all decked out in designer sunglasses, sweatpants, and polo shirts. And one of them kicked her.

“HEY!” Screeched Ash from a hundred feet away. “HEY, YOU MONSTER. LEAVE HER OUT OF THIS.” Gertrude was scampering back to her now, in a disoriented zig-zag, shaking herself. The men weren’t running. They were just tall enough to make absurd strides with every step. Just seventy feet away now. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? YOU SICKOS ARE NEVER GETTING MY MAP, YOU HEAR ME? I’LL BURN IT BEFORE YOU TOUCH THIS MAP.” Gertrude pawed urgently at her leg. Fifty feet. “IT’S MINE! YOU HEAR ME? IT’S MINE! IT’S MINE!”

“Shh! Ms. Wadsfellow! You want the whole city to hear about your special map?” A junky white car had pulled up beside them, with Foxgear in the passenger seat and a white-haired, very square-shaped man sitting beside her. “Come on! Get in!” Ash looked at the scary men, then at the shoeshine guy with his mouth agape, then at Gertrude lolling her tongue out. She opened the back door and slid inside with her dog. They slammed it shut just as the men arrived, a languid hand smearing a trail across the window as they pulled away.

They sped away and Ash didn’t look back. She didn’t want to see those men or what they were doing. She just wanted to close her eyes and go back to somewhere she could breathe. No falling apart now. She’d escaped one kidnapping but now she was in a car with a couple of strangers, and Ash would be damned if she let anyone kidnap her except herself. So she did what she always did when she needed to find the ground again. She told herself a story.

It’s what Grandmama used to do for her; whatever dumb place they were living at the time, whatever awful things the girls at whatever rotten school were saying, whatever treacherous plan her siblings were concocting to torture her, she could always go to Grandmama and ask her about Celtheste. By the end, it was all Grandmama would talk about anyway, and everyone was sick of it except Ash. So it was a mutual sort of comfort. They needed each other.

There was one story that came to her now, as she looked out at the houses piled up the hills to her right, the glittering waters of the Golden Horn to her left: ''I grew up in a city by the sea, said Grandmama, a proud city that would submit to no rules and no ruler. We were so fierce we drew knives to greet one another, even the children, with their little wooden ones. We called the city Dar Ness—which meant to us, ‘hope lives here.’''

“You didn’t tell me she was a child,” said the square man. He had an affected, vaguely-wannabe-British accent that Ash couldn’t quite place and the inflamed pinkly skin of someone either chronically affronted or allergic to something. He drove aggressively, with sudden stops and spurts, cutting people off without a moments notice. The behavior might have been explained by their current circumstances, but Ash had the suspicion he was just one of those drivers. Foxgear replied with a practiced, airy cheeriness.

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“You shock me. You really think she is a child? And that—” the man’s finger went up accusatorily, like he was meaning to point at Gertrude, but couldn’t be bothered to check where she actually was, “you expect me to believe that with her is some kind of domesticated wolf?”

“It’s a dog, Jacoby. Do you remember I explained dogs to you? They’re quite popular here. And yes, I think she’s exactly what she appears to be.” Jacoby turned his shoulders towards Ash without looking away from the road.

“Your name is Hecuba Wadsfellow?”

“No,” said Ash. “Do I look like a Hecuba Wadsfellow to you?”

“Perhaps in some cultures,” said Jacoby, “you are the very picture of a Hecuba Wadsfellow. Who can say when in its elements, a name is just a collection of sounds?”

“I cannot entirely agree,” said Foxgear. She opened her mouth to start some clever conversation but quickly lost the trail when Jacoby took an unexpected turn. “You take a right to the safe house,” she insisted.

“I took a left to the bridge,” said Jacoby.

“You mean to say we’re going now? You and I—and the girl, too?”

“Where?” Asked Ash, “Going where?”

“Home,” said Jacoby. It was such a far away word to her that Ash found she couldn’t reply. She just repeated it.

“Home.” What a strange shape it made in her mouth.

“Jacoby, don’t tell me we, of all people received orders?”

“Orders! From who? My dear Foxgear,” and he said that not unkindly, “we’re all that’s left in the city. Perhaps the whole bureau. No, no orders. An advisory.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out another folded piece of printer paper. Foxgear unfolded and read it. It was a long time before anyone spoke again.

It was my home, Grandmama had said, ''and the only place I’d ever call so. Dar-Ness was a city without peer, older than Celtheste itself, so rich in culture and wealth, with a people so lively and angry and riotously funny, that every name worth its soil had to come get a glimpse. Princes, poets, philosophers, they all flocked to us, and more often than not, they stayed. In those days, I thought I would never leave the city, for I had no need to see the country, the world. The world, as it was, came to us.''

“So then,” said Foxgear when she had finished reading and staring out the front windshield, “it is our burden.”

“And not a moment to waste,” said Jacoby.

The car bumped onto the long suspension bridge. Front wheels, then back, the zipping hum of a drive on the pavement kicking up to the metallic whistle of wheels on high. The Bosporus strait stretched out on either side.

When they were across, Foxgear turned around to look Ash in the eye. She’d pulled her own crumpled papers out of her pocket, the ones she was reaching for when they’d first met.

“My friend,” she said, “your grandmother, she gave you this map, yes?” Ash nodded. The car jolted through a pothole and the woman bumped her head on the roof. She rubbed her bulging belly as she flipped through the sheets until she found the one she wanted. “This is her?” She handed it over and Ash flattened it out against her knee. Gertrude’s breath warmed her neck as the dog took a look over her shoulder.

It was a blotchy black and white photocopy of a much older paper, or file more like. There was a typewritten page, all in Turkish, with a little passport photo clipped to the corner, a photo of a young woman, mid to late twenties perhaps. Her name was printed at the top of the document: Maleha Nal Calagh. Ash caught her breath.

But I left one day on a boat, and I never returned.

“Who are you? Where did you get this?”

“From our archives,” said Foxgear. It looked like she was getting rather uncomfortable from twisting around in her seat, but she persisted. “So it is her, then?” Ash didn’t move, even thought she knew that was giving her away. It was. Of course it was. She could see now in the picture, it really was Grandmama. But her hair was so long then, and she looked more sad than angry. She had deep bags under her eyes, like she hadn’t slept in days. “We are called the Interrealm Service,” said Foxgear, “and one of our roles is to process displaced peoples. Maleha Nal Calagh arrived at our Turkish Bureau in 1967 with a jade comb, a box of inconsequentials, and nineteen children.” Ash’s eyes widened. There was a lot of questions she wanted to ask, but only one she really needed to.

“Where did she arrive from?” Foxgear opened her mouth, but it was Jacoby who cut to the chase.

“Another world,” he said. And again, more quietly, “another world.”