The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (43 page)

Chapter 6
6

Meryem had hardly had a single bite for more than a day, and she pulled the blanket tightly around herself when the guard officer dangled with his keys outside the barred door. She remembered seeing him when she had been sentenced to become a martyr, but she hadn’t seen anyone but the men who had come with food twice a day since she was returned to her cell, and once in a while she had been taken out to a cold tub of water and a bar of soap, but she felt like she was going mad.

Were they finally going to kill her? She had no idea where Daryn was, and they hadn’t told her anything she could understand. Her dirty cage felt like it was turning her into an animal, and only her quiet mumbling had reminded her that she was human—praying was one of the few comforts apart from just talking to herself. Only the knowledge that it would be immoral had kept her from considering drowning herself in the cold water of the washing tub she had been sent to use the other day. Well, maybe not just that. She knew that God wouldn’t forgive her, and she should face the enemy courageously no matter what they did to her, but she wanted to go home. She wanted to be home with Mommy. And with Daryn too, but she missed her family a lot lately. Especially Mommy.

A worry passed through her head when the
white ghost
turned the key in the lock and opened the door. She had been left alone for so long. Was this going to be the moment when the whites were going to defile her? Her hands squeezed hard on the blanket around her, resolved to never let go of it no matter what. She had to be strong and defiant—they would have to kill her before she would let them touch her. When the door swung open, the white devil didn’t enter the cell, and another man came and passed him into the small cell. She couldn’t help but look at the man, breaking her general practice of ignoring everybody as much as she could.

His tunic had four front pockets, two at the hips and two at the chest, and the hard peaked cap had the small but distinct chrysanthemum symbol. The imperial chrysanthemum. It was the shining symbol of unity and the nation, just as significant as the sun of the national flag.

“Who are you, lady? Can you understand me?” the man asked in the imperial language of Asia.

Our language!
Meryem had learned her two languages simultaneously, and sometimes she thought in one of them, sometimes in the other. Yet, this was the national language, the language everybody should speak!

“Are you Japanese?” she asked, a feeling embarrassed to ask him so rudely, but she didn’t want to tell him her name until she knew who he was.

“I am Captain Onoue,” the man curtly replied. “Who are you?”

There’s no reason to sound so rude
. She wasn’t used to men speaking that way to her, but she answered almost automatically.

“Ibrahim Meryem, wife of Lieutenant Ibrahim Daryn,” she said, hoping that the man might know Daryn.

It was stupid to hope so, and the man didn’t look like he knew who he was.

“What are you doing here? The lieutenant here says you’re a spy.”

It was obvious to Onoue Atsuki that the dirty young girl was nothing of the sort. She looked like a young Turk, maybe a prostitute or a beggar of some sort. When the colonel had asked him to sort out this matter he assumed that there was nothing consequential to the claim from the Russians that they were holding a supposed spy. Nevertheless, she did speak Japanese, and that was awfully suspicious and odd for just an ordinary little Mohammedan on this side of the old border.

She shifted her eyes between Captain Onoue and the Russian standing behind him in the corridor. Was this officer a prisoner too? If he was, the Russian was sure treating him deferentially, standing back while he was free to talk to her.

“I am a spy,” she replied, feeling a little proud of herself, and she wanted to make this man know that she would die for her country. “I am going to be shot,” she added, quite pleased to share her heroic fate with a countryman.

The girl grinned, making Atsuki wonder if she was some sort of insane freak with a vivid imagination. However, the Russian officer had said that she had been arrested along with a man a couple of weeks ago as spies, and her fluent Japanese hardly indicated her being a delusional Turk. He had yet to dig into the matter too much, and he was keen on figuring out who this girl might be. Well, he was supposed to be keen at least, yet now he was actually curious about the matter.

“Will you come here?” the man said, waving his hand for her to come to him, like a teacher gesturing towards a young student.

He looked a few years older than Daryn, and he was clearly Chuuka. Although Chuuka people could look very different, the uniform, the way he sounded, and his face made her certain that he was a member of the same “race” as His Majesty. It wasn’t always simple to tell peoples apart; differences in people could make it difficult to say if someone belonged to a distinct “little tribe” rather than just being Japanese Chuuka like most people.

Meryem climbed down from the bed, still not sure who this officer was, but feeling obliged to obey him. After all, he was an officer. Even civilians should obey important officials, and she was something between a soldier and a civilian anyway.

“
I will take her from you
,” Atsuki said to the Russian officer.

“
As you wish
,” Igor mumbled, not going to make a fuss over the enemy deciding to take one of his prisoners—perhaps the Mongol prisoner wouldn’t get the opportunity to find salvation.

Meryem felt strangely happy when she saw two ordinary soldiers with rifles out in the corridor running through the cells, and the hope of preserving her purity and protecting herself against the monstrous whites skipped high after reaching some of its worst lows recently. She hadn’t expected this. Was the army here to save her? Daryn would be so pleased to see her again, no doubt.

Chapter 6
7

“Daddy,” Nadia exclaimed as she rushed across the room to embrace the man she hadn’t seen in like forever.

A
lthough she was uncomfortable about trying to snoop, she had wondered why her mother and father had become so distant from each other and she had almost felt like he didn’t care about her anymore. She had always loved her father very much, and she didn’t like being forced to follow her mother into semi-exile away from him.

“Aren’t you clingy?” Petar chuckled
after he had kissed the top of her head and she kept embracing him, not wanting to let go.

Of his four children, Borislava was the most adorable, despite being
the oldest of the lot. Although it was her younger sister who was physically attractive, Evgenia was too shy and disinterested, and the boys could hardly be called adorable. Borislava was intelligent and kind in contrast to the selfish Evgenia. If he was forced to pick a favorite from the four children it would be Boris, but of the girls Borislava was surely the better daughter. If she had been a man, she would have been a worthy heir presumptive to her uncle the crown prince rather than Boris who was more interested in billiards and guns than in weighty matters like law and government while Borislava was quite intelligent, despite her schooling.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, tears welling up while she squeezed the green-brown tunic
close to her face.

She had been used to seeing her father as a soldier, but the fact that he had
been at war for what would be two and a half years this summer had made it much clearer to her what that entailed.

“Where is your mother?” he asked as he gently freed himself from her grasp.

“Mommy?” Nadia asked, a little surprised that her father would ask for her. “Maybe she’s with Miss Schwalb?”

“And your sister?”

Nadia didn’t like to suggest that Evgenia was a bad child, but she should have been just as eager to see Daddy as Nadia. When the maid had said that their father was on his way, Evgenia had remained in her room, probably reading her bible rather than getting worked up about Daddy coming home for Easter. She was so selfish and lazy—a mean child.

“Well, never mind,” he said after she didn’t answer for several seconds. “You look healthy.”

“I am,” Nadia said as she followed her father and a servant to the large lounge shared by the different apartments.

“Aren’t you going to see M
ommy?” she asked when he sat down in a chair and pulled out his metal cigarette case from his chest pocket.

“She might be busy,” he said after lighting a cigarette with a match. “She’ll come around when she can.”

Nadia sat down with her father, so excited to see him again after so many months away from him. He had shaved off his moustache, and it made him look younger, maybe even a bit more handsome. His thin face had a contemplative look to it, and he always looked like he was thinking about something important. He wasn’t handsome like his older brother Boris, but he had a sort of manly charm about him. A daddy charm.

“Are things good where you are?” she asked, curious to ask something she couldn’t ask the men in the hospital.

“They are excellent,” he said with an encouraging grin.

It was perhaps an exaggeration, but it was not an outright lie. At the moment there was no reason to be worried about the state of the front, and things had been peaceful throughout Moldova for some months now. The bad fighting had been over to the west of Moldova where the Russians and Austrians had fought hard against each other. Bulgaria remained somewhat privileged with the Greeks as the primary adversary ever since Serbia was effectively knocked out of the war and occupied by Austro-Bulgarian forces, and the exiled Romanian army facing Petar and his colleagues in Moldova seemed more concerned about conserving their integrity than reclaiming their occupied homeland—perhaps being isolated from its recruiting grounds would do that to an army.

“They are?”

“Yes,” Petar insisted
before he kissed her head again.

He had received a letter from
his sister-in-law Miroslava about Maria being very dissatisfied, and he worried that Borislava and Evgenia might be as dramatic and unreasonable as their mother. There were days when he thought that it would have been much easier to have a wife as supportive, mature, and even patriotic as Miroslava. Maria was too willful and intemperate, and he did not want either of his daughters to pick up their mother’s bad attitude. The only asset that remained in her was her beauty, but that had not been inherited by Borislava.

“So we’
re winning?” Nadia asked, feeling a stupid for hesitating.

The hospital made her worry a great deal, and as much as she wanted to believe that the outcome was predetermined, it was obvious that it wasn’t. Bulgaria had lost the last war against Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, and Greece twenty-odd years ago, so it wasn’t like there was some natural law that Bulgaria would prevail this time around. Politics wasn’t run by God’s laws—they ran on faulty men’s laws, and there was no neat mathematical way to predict them the way scientists could predict natural things.

“Was there ever any doubt?” he smirked, keeping himself on the level of ignorant children.

Petar didn’t want to bother her mind with things she could neither understand nor do anything about. What difference would it make if she learned that the Moldovan Front had had a minor yet disturbing mutiny back in February after the costly series of offensives around Christmas? It would only make her worry
needlessly about things she could do nothing about. The state of the army and the country was not something that a young girl—even one as old as Borislava—should need to worry herself about. It was the business of men to resolve the national emergency and keep the nation united until the war could be won. She only had to do her duty and focus her head on that.

“I pray for you every night,” Nadia mumbled, not sure why she wanted her father to know that.

“I pray for you too,” Petar returned with a smile.

Nadia had been taught to pray twice a day, and she did it out of habit, when she got out of bed and
at night before she went to bed. She prayed for so many people that she had a whole litany in her head that she had learned by rote. But as her religious tutors had said; the most important thing to remember was that ultimately you had to accept that all prayers were still humble requests and that it was God’s will that settled everything. She still prayed for her family even though God might have some good reason to allow something bad to happen. But that was an academic point; nobody she really cared about had died a sad death; her granduncle Yakov had been an old man—though not as old as her grandfather—when he had died five years ago and despite her grandfather still living while his younger brother didn’t, Granduncle Yakov had been too old to feel like it was an almost malicious death. No, for Nadia genuine loss was a very abstract and foreign thing.

Petar got out of his seat and bowed his head slightly, a bit apprehensively, when he saw his
younger sister-in-law in the doorway. He had been taught to be courteous to ladies, and he did not treat his younger brother’s wife any different from any other lady.

“I am happy to see you well,” the princess
said mechanically in her adoptive tongue after he kissed her on her cheeks.

Elena was not an ugly woman, but Petar could not help but feel disgusted by the reminder that her uncle was the chief
betrayer of Bulgaria. As king he could surely have stopped Romania from supporting his country’s Serbian confederates against Bulgaria, and Petar’s troops were dying while fighting the Russo-Romanian armies facing them across the front. And despite evacuating most of his kingdom, the Romanian king continued the war without seeking an armistice. It was not surprising that many of his father’s subjects thought this woman a foreign alien and possibly an enemy agent who might serve her uncle’s hostile interests.

“You look well too,” he mumbled, not
successfully hiding his resentment towards her.

Elena didn’t know what to think. Every night she went to bed imagining that she would wake up and be told that the war was over. And every morning she found that the war still went on. Her precious homeland was still a battlefield between the two countries she was a part of
, and it was impossible for her to feel like any realistic outcome would make her happy. Her own husband might even be fighting her brothers and it was almost like she was part of a Greek tragedy, caught between conflicting duties to father and husband.

And the looks! Petar had been a very nice man, but when he addressed her now, it felt like he was quietly begging God
behind her back to strike her down. She got all the bad press too, despite not having a thing to do with the incompetents in government. The newspapers did not dare to mention her by name, but they seemed to accuse her of being some kind of foreign agent who was riding around on a broom sabotaging crops and factories when she wasn’t turning money worthless. Ridiculous!

Elena
would not deny her ancestry and her relations with her family, but she had done nothing and said nothing that could possibly give anyone the right to tarnish her as a traitor—not Bulgarians nor Romanians had any just cause to resent her. It was Princess Radoslava who had asked her mother to appeal to the king that Bulgaria should be on the side of Russia and all Slavs against the scheming emperor-king in Vienna. As far as Elena understood things, Radoslava had been on the verge of accusing the German race as being behind the convoluted conflict between the Orthodox nations—a charge that made Elena skittish because of her resentment of certain Orthodox activists dim view of people of German extraction like her own family. Elena had never tried to ask Vladimir or her father-in-law to change national policy, despite her hopes for an amicable peace in which everybody just became friends. Increasingly she felt like even those who had once treated her like one in the family suddenly thought of her as an alien. She had not once tried to in any way change the path of either Romania or Bulgaria, and people thought that she had a nefarious agenda?!

Was it because of the unreasonable standard set by the crown princess?
Miroslava would surely not have acted the way she acted if Bulgaria had been at war with Germany. Elena refused to believe that she could not understand that blood was still too thick to pretend like it wasn’t there and instead clothe herself in adopted self-righteous Slavophilia that could easily depict Romanians as enemies of the “Slavic race.” Elena had no wish to see either country suffer defeat, but just as Bulgaria could not let a foreign nation defile her honor, neither could Romania, and she knew that her uncle’s government had been forced to war as a matter of imperative, irreducible honor and security. The last correspondence she had had with her mother was a letter she asked the British ambassador to forward in which she explained that she would like to reestablish contact as soon as the war was over, but that had been over two years ago, and she had secretly hoped that her mother would defy her wishes to not write her as long as a state of war existed between the countries. They might both be princesses of hostile nations, but Princess
Ulrike
was sure to share a lot of agony from this war as her daughter. Other than the rulers of Serbia and Montenegro, all the Balkan kings were from German princely houses like Elena’s family whose senior line was headed by the Grand Duke of Friesland in northwestern Germany. Elena’s mother Ulrike had been a duchess of Pomerania-Wismar which similarly left her with familial ties to a country on the other side.

Although Elena had to be polite and all to her brother-in-law, she did not have to genuinely like him, and with his mean-spirited attitude towards her she had no reason to feel guilty for disliking him.
Elena left after some cursory words with her brother-in-law, feeling like she had been cordial enough to return to occupy herself with her children who were her sole comfort in this damned palace.

“What’s wrong?” Nadia asked
her father after the awkward arrival and disappearance of her aunt. “Has she done something?” she added, thinking that her father acted very coldly towards Aunt Elena.

“It’s your aunt,” he said curtly
, not too magnanimous to share his resentment towards Princess Elena with Borislava. “Her people have refused to surrender.”

The government had offered the Romanians a way out, but in the defense of the Romanians, it was not solely their fault. The war had become an affair between Berlin on the one hand and Paris and Petersburg on the other. Bulgaria and Romania could not
simply kiss and make up by their own volition. And besides, his own country was bankrupt and had been for months. Without Germany, Bulgaria would never have endured this long, and Petar was increasingly worried by the government’s reliance on German credit and insurance for the future. It wasn’t just the men of Bulgaria that might be claimed by the war; its freedom as a sovereign state had been undermined by its dependency on Germany just to feed its people and arm its soldiers and those bills could not be paid in the worthless toilet paper that was the modern lev by printing up the trillions needed to pay for everything.

“Her people…”