Free The Oracle of Stamboul by Michael David Lukas

clockwork of an enormous timepiece, and a portmanteau stuffed full with love letters, but she found nothing to eat.
    Eventually, she came upon a line of five wooden crates, aloof from the rest of the luggage in a far corner of the hull. Each was as tall as Eleonora herself and stamped in gold with a calligraphic seal. In spite of their nobility, or perhaps because ofit, the crates had no locks or bolts. Their only fortification was a wooden latch and pin. The first crate she opened was filled with books, novels mainly, written in French, German, and English. Glancing over the titles, she closed the lid and moved on. They may be of interest later, but now she wanted food. The second crate was filled with Crimean rose water, and the third stacked full of caviar, smoked fish, and herring, hundreds of red and golden tins stamped with a few words of Russian or a picture of a fish. Looking over her shoulder, Eleonora removed one of the tins from the top row and, twisting off its lid, revealed a sheet of glistening black spheres. She touched the fish eggs suspiciously with the tip of her pinkie and brought it to her lips. Her nose tensed in revulsion. The pungent, salty flavor was not what she had hoped for, but it was food. In less than an hour, Eleonora consumed an entire bottle of rose water and three tins of the caviar, scooping hand after hand into her mouth until she was drunk with roe.
    She made her bed that night with the thick pile of a Shushan carpet and a bolt of velvet. Laying her head on a folded-up corner of the carpet, she pulled the velvet around her shoulders, closed her eyes, and began to drift. Her mind swam with fear and doubt, but as scared as she was, as much as she questioned the wisdom of her decision to run away, Eleonora was also very tired. As the grumbling of her stomach subsided and the furnace settled into a steady pulse, her mind slipped into that warm, salty ocean of sleep: white caps and waves, gulls gliding overhead, and, every so often, a distant glimpse of land. As she drifted further, the sea became a country road: a lonely cow regurgitating weeds, the occasional stone cottage, a stand of cypress trees, and, beyond that, vast tracts of yellow-green farmland. Soon the cottages turned to villages, the villages to cities, and the citiesgrew taller, with wide boulevards, crystal domes, and night gardens redolent of roses and jasmine.
    In the belly of the ship, Eleonora lost all track of time. The sway of the waves and sporadic coughing sputter of the furnace were her only indications it was passing at all. She slept when she was tired, ate when she was hungry, and relieved herself in a vacant corner of the hull like some feral animal trapped in a basement. In time, her eyes adjusted to the dim, sooty light of the furnace and, although she was attacked every so often by fits of coughing, she became accustomed to the coal dust. More than once she pulled a book down from the Sultan’s crate and tried to read, but the words blurred and fled across the page, allowing no more than a paragraph or so before she was overcome with a debilitating headache. With reading impossible, no sun, and no chores, Eleonora occupied herself by looking through other passengers’ luggage, thinking back over her favorite books, and wondering, like David Copperfield, whether she would turn out to be the hero of her own life or if that station would be held by someone else.
    Eleonora did not know that the ship was to stop twice before Stamboul, and so, when the engine slowed that first time and a horn blew above deck, her heart lurched. Had it been a week already? To be safe, she stashed her bed in the trunk and scrambled behind the Sultan’s crates. With a snap and creak, the hull door began to open. It was midday and sunlight cut deep through the widening crack, the light pouring into her cave like a barrage of flaming arrows. She stifled a sneeze as a trio of stevedores began loading and unloading trunks from the front of