Empire of Lies

75

Under a balmy late-summer sky, Kamal and Kolschitzky spent the rest of the night watching the pillaging from the sanctity of one of the bastions that overlooked the encampment.

Below, the camp was a frenzy of activity, an anthill of torch-carrying looters feasting on anything they could carry.

“What about you?” Kamal asked Kolschitzky. “Don’t you want your share? They’re picking it clean.”

Kolschitzky chuckled. “I already told Starhemberg what I wanted. He was a bit puzzled, but he agreed.”

“What did you ask for?”

“The Turks left behind a huge stockpile of coffee beans. Thousands of sacks.”

“And he gave them all to you?”

“No one else wants them. They have a sour taste. They’re disgusting to eat.”

“So why do you want them?”

“They don’t know what they are, but I do,” Kolschitzky smiled.

Kamal laughed. The Viennese didn’t know coffee. At least not yet. Kolschitzky, after years spent in Istanbul, did.

The city could look forward to a long tradition of coffeehouses.

“What I really want, though,” Kolschitzky added, “is for you to keep your promise. I need to understand what I saw.”

Kamal had been waiting for the Pole to bring it up. He’d wondered about how to deal with it, but his thoughts had migrated to a much more difficult question: what to do now.

He and Nisreen had vaguely talked about it, but it wasn’t something he thought he’d be considering on his own.

He’d done what they’d set out to do. He’d set history back on its course. There was nothing more he needed to do. From here on, what would happen would happen of its own accord. He’d leave the world to evolve as it once had, without his or anyone else’s meddling.

Which was why he couldn’t tell Kolschitzky the truth. At least, not the whole truth.

He knew he could get away with saying nothing. Or he could feed the Pole a lie. All Kolschitzky had seen, after all, was that Nisreen had vanished and reappeared in a slightly different location, in the nude. He also knew that Kamal and Nisreen knew a lot, but he couldn’t possibly suspect how they’d gained that knowledge. But Kamal felt he owed him more than that. The man had entrusted his life into Kamal and Nisreen’s hands; he’d taken the ultimate risk based on nothing but their word.

And so Kamal gave him an abridged version of his story. He and Nisreen had stumbled across the ability to travel through time. They’d discovered Rasheed’s meddling with history, which turned them into enemies of the state. The sultan’s men had come after them, her family had been killed, and they had traveled back to make things right.

He kept things deliberately vague and made sure he didn’t give Kolschitzky any specifics that could help the Pole discover more than Kamal wanted him to know. He didn’t want anyone else meddling with history, no matter how highly he thought of him. But his words only served to ignite fevered curiosity in the Pole’s mind, and Kolschitzky swamped him with questions.

Kamal deflected and demurred as best he could. It didn’t take long before it was clear that Kolschitzky understood his quandary. The questions petered out, and the Pole finally asked, “What happens from here on?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Kamal replied. “This is as much of a clean slate to me as it is for everyone else.”

Kolschitzky nodded thoughtfully. “And you? What are you going to do?”

Kamal shrugged.

Talking to Kolschitzky had made two things clearer to him. One was that he couldn’t stay there. Not in Vienna, not in that time. As an Ottoman, he would be living on the wrong side of the conflict. Sure, he was a hero. Sobieski and the rest of them would make sure he was celebrated as one and well looked after. But it would still be a difficult society to fit into, in all kinds of ways.

Beyond that, though, he realized he needed to know how it all turned out. There was no escaping that. He needed to see it for himself.

There was nothing there for him anyway. But then again, there was nothing for him anywhere else. But at least there was hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a new beginning in a better place.