But now he had to deal with the Persians in the city. They had signaled that they wanted a truce. He would act angry, but in the end let them have the same terms. This attack would give him a reason for having them come out in small, easily controlled groups. His past experience told him that many of them would offer to forgo their false beliefs if it would save them from slavery. That would be good-even if they secretly continued in their errors, their allegiance would not be tested in the fight to come-these men from the future were all true infidels. And some of those who were adamant in their allegiance-perhaps a hundred-could be sent back to their shah with the body of Mir Arash Khan. A gesture of respect for a brave enemy, he would call it. That might make peace easier. And perhaps it might save some innocents in Esfahan.
Zaynab held her daughter and watched her son, who sat between her and the door. They waited in silence and near darkness. They had exhausted all possible diversions in the week that had passed since they had been confined after word had arrived of the fall of Iravan.
Zaynab was torn. She loved her husband. She had wanted Arash to return. But if he lived, and perhaps even if he did not, she knew she and her children would pay the price for his failure to prevent the loss of that city.
Beyond the fact that the city had fallen, she knew nothing. The servants who brought the plain food every day didn’t speak, and the guards that accompanied them also ignored her questions. All she had been told was that she and her children would be confined until the situation was clarified.
The sound of the bolt being drawn seemed to echo. It was too early for the meal. Rustem stood up, still facing the door. His stance said he intended to defend his mother and sister as well as a nine-year-old boy could do.
The door opened. Light spilled in, blinding her so that she could not make out the face of the man who stood in the doorway.
“Your husband has fallen in the service of the shah. Go home and mourn him.”
Frying Pan
Part 1
Rostock, the harbor, 31 October 1634
“This is a cold evening, young man. Would you care to keep me company for a drink?”
Lasse had noticed the thin man eyeing him for a while, and wasn’t surprised when he finally spoke. Instead Lasse turned with his sweetest smile and the twist displaying his elegant legs that he learned during the year he’d spend as Otto von Quadt’s plaything.
“Gladly. I seem to have missed my ship.” Lasse tried to hide his lowborn Swedish accent, and imitate Otto’s upper-class German, but knew it wouldn’t quite work.
“Ah, are you a Dane?” The thin man opened the door to the half-timbered tavern, and stood aside to let Lasse enter first. Lasse considered accepting the man’s suggestion-anything to throw Otto off his trail would be fine-but decided to stick a bit closer to the truth.
“Only sort of. I’m from Norway.” Lasse wasn’t, but his grandmother had been, and had left just ahead of a witch-trial. It was the silver that the old harridan had earned from her herbal remedies and abortifacients that had enabled Lasse to buy an apprenticeship with the cook at the Oxenstierna manor house. The cooking she taught him had let him rise to junior cook in the household of Princess Kristina. But it was the poisons she taught him that let him escape from Otto’s house here in Mecklenburg.
Lasse sat down on the bench by the rough trestle table near the fireplace and wondered how to suggest something to eat as well. The landlord, happily, made that suggestion when the thin man ordered a bottle of Rhenish wine. Lasse knew how dangerous it could be to display any kind of weakness, in case the thin man turned out to have more in common with Otto than a taste for pretty young men. The last of the money he had stolen from the corpse of Otto’s comrade had run out yesterday, so he accepted an offer of a few slices of meat pie.
“My name is Friedrich Messer, silversmith,” said the thin man pouring the sweet, white wine into the clay mugs, “I’ve just arrived from Copenhagen and must continue on to Magdeburg tomorrow. Prince Ulrik of Denmark commissioned a set of silver goblets from me as a betrothal present for Princess Kristina. They are of course being guarded by my man in my room, so I find myself eating quite alone tonight. A state that I really dislike.” He looked at Lasse with what was probably supposed to be a knowing smile, but which actually made him look like a leering skull.
The mere mention of the princess made Lasse want to scream in pain and anger, but Otto had trained him well, so he made sure to smile back, while looking Herr Messer deep in the eyes. Two years ago Lasse had been so proud of his promotion into the royal Swedish household. It had been no secret among the servants that the queen didn’t like her daughter. She had even tried to do her harm before the king had given the princess her own household and ordered the queen to stay away. Lasse still had no idea whether accusing him of trying to poison the princess had been the queen’s attempt to get back into the king’s good graces, or Otto’s way to get Lasse into his power. What Otto had said during the months he had sent Lasse through Hell could certainly not be relied upon. Or perhaps it had been yet another skirmish in the ongoing power struggle between the queen and Axel Oxenstierna, who had recommended Lasse for the position as the princess’s junior cook. All Lasse really knew was that within minutes of the queen shouting poison, he had found himself being beaten senseless and thrown into a stinking hole of a cell beneath the castle. His attempts to protest that he really hadn’t noticed the hairline crack in the pewter had been ignored, and once he regained consciousness he had quickly become so terrified by the jailor’s talk of torture and execution for treason that he had barely felt the pain and humiliation of having the man rape him. This was repeated several times during the next days, alternating with new beating and threats of what the jailor would do to Lasse if he told of the rape during the process-even though no one would, of course, take the word of a traitorous servant over that of a respectable, church-going married man.
“Do try the egg pie as well.” Herr Messer pushed the brass dish towards Lasse. “It really is outrageous the prices farmers demand for food these days, but the political situation does open many new opportunities for a master craftsman.”
Lasse nodded in agreement, but in his mind he was seeing Otto coming to take him away from the cell in Stockholm. Otto had looked like the Savior himself in the flickering torch-light, with his handsome face and silver-embroidered white silk, taking Lasse away from the cell, promising that his hardships were over, and that Otto would keep him safe in his castle in Mecklenburg. Otto was the son of one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting from her youth in Germany. Immediately on his arrival in Stockholm, his beauty, wit and charm had made him the queen’s favorite. He had used his position quite ruthlessly to amass wealth and remove rivals, but that was business as usual for a courtier. Lasse had known nothing about the games Otto played for his pleasure.
Looking back Lasse could see that Otto had deliberately set out to break his will by gaining his love and trust, and then breaking it, over and over again, in a devil’s circle of betrayal and hope, abuse and excuse. And something had broken. It just hadn’t been Lasse’s will. Lasse wasn’t sure exactly what it was that was gone, but three weeks ago when he had stood looking at what was now the corpse of the most recent “friend” Otto had told him to entertain, he finally realized that the bright, young Swedish boy who had made such beautiful pies and sauces was now gone forever. He still planned to go back to Sweden, but his vague idea of seeking out Oxenstierna, exposing Otto’s schemes and crimes, and getting his old job back, could never work. Even if Oxenstierna believed him, he would be like a gutter rat set in the place of one of those caged songbirds in the queen’s garden.