The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (48 page)

Tatyana looked over at her husband, trying to quietly communicate her opinion without letting Vera know what she was thinking. As much as she wanted to indulge her precious girl, she did not want to make decisions that could be overruled by Pavel. The girls should think of their mother as a genuine matriarch whose word was never corrected or countermanded, and their differences should only ever be hashed out in private. Certainly never in front of impressionable little girls.

Chapter 7
1

Meryem felt spoiled by the officer following her all the way to the street with the small houses. They had hardly spoken, but she felt a little pleased to have a one-man military escort back home. She didn’t like walking on her own, even if they didn’t talk or otherwise seemed to acknowledge walking in company. There was just something about walking with someone—preferably Daryn—that made her feel like it was the right way to do it. Usually she wouldn’t have worn a military cap on her head, but there had been nothing more suitable for her when a non-commissioned officer had furnished her with clothes, but then, she had been used to dressing oddly manly since they left Shinkyou, and she could still not quite understand that she was home again.

“I had no idea that this is where you are from, Mrs. Ibrahim,” Captain Suzuki said when she pointed out one of the houses as hers. “I never knew your father’s home.”

The houses had gardens and were separate from each other with high wooden walls that shielded them from the outside with isolated courtyards. Tomoki had thought that she was something out of the gutter, and he felt a little guilty for assuming that she might be a young orphan or prostitute the lieutenant had picked up. Although he still thought that it had been inappropriate to bring a woman with him, Lieutenant Ibrahim obviously did not have as poor tastes as Tomoki had first thought. He had to change his underlying assumptions about her and her late husband just from the class of her neighborhood.

“This is home,” she mumbled to herself, still feeling so surreally happy to see the wide street and the familiar, welcoming houses.

This was it, wasn’t it? The real world she was from. Everything these past many months she had been away, something like two years, was just a bizarre dream. A nightmare. A journey through the underworld like in that book from one of the contemporary great novelists she had been forced to read in school, even though she didn’t really know anything about legalism, literature, and history. This was her world. The red walls looked so familiar, yet she wasn’t sure if she just imagined that the street looked exactly as it had looked before she left or not. Perhaps it was just her heart beating with happy nostalgia that made it feel like she had hardly been away, the past two years feeling like a short dream that she was waking up from.

It worried her that she was so happy to be home. She still hadn’t seen Daryn, and she had been resigned to Major Ueno’s insistence that he had been shot by the enemy and that brief glimpse of his soulless face etched to a photograph by the enemy. The evil Russians. Evil, evil, evil. The horrible devils, the vile murderous scum, the evil sons-of-their-own-sisters…

She was much too happy. Much too happy. Her bereavement should be much greater than any relief of standing outside the familiar gate, and it seemed wrong for her to feel happy about seeing the name of her family. If anything, she should be thinking about killing herself in a vain attempt to come to Daryn’s side. But that wouldn’t work, would it? God wouldn’t forgive her if she did that, and He would send her to hell instead. But she wanted to at least think about it. She wanted to want to die. She should want to die, but she didn’t. She wanted to see Mommy, and her sisters, and everyone else.
Mommy
…

On top of the wooden gate facing the street, her family name and crest was displayed prominently to people who passed it in the street. Her father's position in the government gave him a certain stature in the neighborhood, even if he was a Muslim Turk while everyone else in the neighborhood were ordinary Chuuka. The family name sounded aristocratic, like she might have been the descendant of generations of distinguished samurai like the Tokugawa, Mouri, Sanada, or some other illustrious family of warriors and statesmen.

She kept staring at the crest carved into the wood by a gifted craftsman. It looked so neat, and she remembered how her mother had explained that she should take pride in that carefully reproduced name. However, she was admittedly poorly educated on her father’s actual work and the importance of her family to other people. She only knew that he was a magistrate, but she had little understanding of what exactly he did apart from punishing evildoers who broke the law. It was men like him who decided what to do with criminals and things like that, but she had only a child’s understanding of the intricacies of law and justice—she wasn’t a great scholar of legalism who could explain the meaning of justice, law, and good. Maybe she was stupid, but she thought that the scholars of legalism and Islam were superfluous when it came to some things, like justice for example. Justice was simple, and something was either good or bad, right or wrong. She didn’t need to be a scholar to understand that. She had a God-given conscience and natural sensibility for telling apart right from wrong. Everybody knew right from wrong by their nature—they just had to be motivated to be good.

Tomoki felt like he should probably get home before it was too late. The sun had almost set completely, and he did not wish for his wife and mother to have to wait too long. He was impatient to see them again, and it seemed like his duty of escorting Mrs. Ibrahim was done. However, he was a gentleman, and he took his responsibility for the young widow quite seriously as his duty towards a brave comrade.

“If you ever need my assistance, you can seek me out on Matahashi 18, young lady,” Captain Suzuki said.

After all, Ibrahim had been one of the junior officers, and Tomoki felt some duty to make sure that his widow was properly taken care of. Yet, since she was obviously a woman of good breeding, he doubted she would need his assistance. Had she been an orphan or a pauper he might have had to make arrangements for her, perhaps find a man to adopt her, but such a fine young woman would surely not need his help. Before he realized that she had a proper home he had thought about offering her his services to sort out her affairs, but now he was quite keen on going home.

“Thank you so much, captain,” she said, bowing cordially at him before he turned to walk back in the direction of the bus stop after bidding her goodbye.

Matahashi 18?

That was a new neighborhood way over on the northern side of the train station with big houses. Well, it used to be new, before Meryem had left town so long ago. Of course, Captain Suzuki was an officer, so he should come from a good family, but Meryem hadn’t thought much about him at all. He had just been one of Daryn’s superior officers—and not a very pleasant one from her impressions of him. Most of the officers in Daryn’s special unit had come from up in the Altay Mountains rather than from Tekika, yet obviously there were at least some people in Tekika who might pass as Kazakh to the eye and speak the language. Unlike
white ghosts
, people in Asia didn’t all look the same, and if a bunch of typical Chuuka officers would have shown up in Russian Turkestan it might appear suspicious even to the stupid white devils. For all she knew, Russians and Germans were just people wearing different color uniforms. They all looked and sounded the same.

She hesitantly looked at the electric doorbell at the gate. She had only pressed it for fun as a little girl who was excited by the funny button; but as a woman she didn’t feel it proper to waltz into the garden even if the large door would have been open. Indeed, it was only right that she behave like a woman should and properly ring it like a visitor—though the barred door made that a hollow choice. There was no other way to get into the yard than to ring the bell so the solid gate could be opened from the inside.

Her finger pushed the button, and she remained patiently waiting in front of the solid gate. It wasn’t very inviting to the outside, but the privacy of the courtyard was very attractive, and her nostalgic mind wandered across the wonderful memories of when she had been small enough to be allowed to run around as she pleased before she had calmed down and had begun to mature and learn how to behave like a grown human being. Those memories of unhindered childhood were very old, but she could just barely remember them in a fuzzy, indistinct way of happy, fun obliviousness. She wasn’t sure if all her recollections were accurate since time doubtlessly befuddled her mind, but as far as she could tell she had liked being a child more than any other part of her life. Rules hadn’t meant anything, and she had been able to go wherever she wanted however she had wanted within the red walls of the compound. Only when she had grown older and taller had her mother begun to tell her not to run, and she had learned how women acted and had begun to mimic her mother’s manners. As recent as that had been in the short time her life really was compared to not just the history of nations and peoples, but also the eternity of God. She was still hardly a newborn by that standard, yet she had already lived for maybe a third or a quarter of a life.

The street was not very crowded, but a handful of people were out walking, like a woman carrying a basket of goods on her back, probably a servant who had been out to get something for her masters or herself. The basket was obviously heavy, and Meryem wondered what might be inside it. Perhaps some heavy fruits or something delicious like that for the little children of the woman’s household. She would sure love dried pineapple; she hadn’t had that for ages.
Yummy!

The houses were much too big to not have at least a few people to look after them, and if memory served her right, her father had had about a dozen or so people; maids, gardeners, a cook, a valet, footmen, and so on. Heating the bath, cooking, cleaning, and a host of other things required assistance, and the even bigger houses on the street must have even more people to tend to them. Together with her sisters, she had had a chambermaid who had helped them clean in the morning and at night, and to help them dress and—as they became older—she had helped to paint their faces a little to make them pretty.

She wondered if Momo was still working for her parents. Meryem had liked Momo, and she had been one of her best friends when she was younger, before she learned to call her by her family name instead of just calling her Momo like a friend. It had all been a part of growing up, and as much as Meryem would have loved to be a child forever, there was no way she could ignore the duties of life. If everyone would be selfish the world would be a miserable place, and Momo had been a good example of someone so kind and mature, yet still working hard and long to help prepare Meryem and her sisters for the future. She had known her place, and she must have learned it just like anyone else, since, as hard as it had once been for Meryem to grasp, Momo, her mother, and everybody else in the world had once been a small, ignorant child just like her. Even the prophets, the Emperor, and everyone else had had to grow into adults and pursue their duty rather than to be content with childish pastimes.

At long last she heard the heavy wooden bolt be pulled back on the other side of the door. Rather than the old porter, it was one of the maids who appeared to look through the crack that opened when she pulled the door a few inches open. The apron over her kimono and the kerchief in her hair looked so nostalgic, but the woman’s face was completely unfamiliar, and Meryem was not overtaken by any big feeling of nostalgia but by anxiety.

“Good evening, I’m sorry to intrude,” Meryem said, bowing her head slightly while trying to think of whether she recognized the maid or not.

“Good evening, young madam,” the maid hesitantly said, perhaps a little thrown off by Meryem’s odd clothing.

It wasn’t very ladylike, and Meryem could hardly wait to get into a nice silk kimono.

“Is the magistrate home?” she mumbled, a little unsure of how to ask for her father.

It was odd to ask after her father that way, but she wanted to be mature, and Mrs. Ibrahim shouldn’t refer to her father as if she was still a child. Especially not after the last time she had seen him when he had been so mean and angry that she almost thought that he would hurt her badly rather than just make it hurt. However, she had no doubt that he would be happy that she had returned to him again. She would ask for his forgiveness like a repentant woman, not as a spoiled child. She could already imagine kowtowing and apologizing and him pulling her up off the floor and insisting that she did not need to do that to her own father. He would be so happy to see her again.

“The magistrate unfortunately doesn’t receive unsolicited visitors, young madam,” the maid said. “You must make an appointment through the clerk at the magistrate court.”

She was knocked a bit off her track by the answer, and the maid looked like she wanted to close the door again, and Meryem quickly had to make her not turn her away like some random stranger.

“I’m the magistrate’s daughter,” Meryem said, deciding to go for the instinctive, familial route instead. “I want to see my father.”

The young woman looked confused, and she discreetly looked up at Meryem’s face, eyeing her intently without staring. The maid was young, and her face was pocky and not very beautiful. Meryem couldn’t blame people for being ugly; it took painting and effort to become pretty, and the simple, drab kimono, apron, and the kerchief on the girl’s head gave her a rather plain look. Obviously, a maid had to be practical, and she couldn’t be expected to look like a lady.

“I don’t want to be rude madam, but could I please know your name?” the girl finally asked.

Meryem was bad at telling people’s ages, but the girl was probably younger than her, but Meryem was much too shy to be angry with the stupid girl for not recognizing her master’s daughter. When this was sorted out the girl was going to feel so silly. Meryem was her mistress!