The Enchantress of Bucharest

by Alex Oliver

  From one of the upper windows came the sound of quiet, inconsolable weeping. Across the city, in the stillness of the night, someone screamed, sounding like the yowling of foxes.

  It had been hot during the day. The night was cold. When they came out of the narrow streets into the graveyard, its enclosing wall was creaking as the bricks cooled. The carved monuments and the stone angels whispered as they settled.

  The ribbon of the Milky Way above them pulsed with light, and the moon glared. Stefan's grave was up high amid solemn yews, in a little family vault whose entrance was mourned over by a carved woman with her cloak pulled over her face. But down towards the tanneries, where the graves bore only wooden crosses, a long, low shape surrounded by scaffolding billowed in the breeze.

  Radu crossed himself, seeing it - a pit, covered with tarpaulin, shallow filled. When the wind gusted that way the smell of decomposition followed it, making him glad for the garlic. A plague pit.

  He shouldn't be glad. He reminded himself firmly he should not be glad that so many folk were dying of illness they could not be decently buried. But he was. Because if there was truly plague in the city, then there was still a chance that none of this was his fault at all.

  The doors of the Sterescu mausoleum were closed. "It's still sealed," Ecaterina noted, stepping out into the moonlight to check.

  "Which means nothing," Radu told her, unable to tell if she had sounded hopeful or dismayed. "They can come out as mist. It just means we can't go in to check whether he's there. We should have come earlier - they'll be abroad by now."

  "Then we'll catch them on the way back," Frank mediated the argument as he had earlier. He had found a sheltered spot beneath one of the yews, the tree's living presence adding some warmth to the night. When Radu sat beside him, he could see the doors of the mausoleum and the better part of the graveyard beyond. A good vantage point.

  Conceding that it was not worth having the argument again, he drew his sword and settled down to wait.

  It was odd being out at night at the best of times. Tonight a sense of cathedral silence came over him, the world and his heartbeat slowing. Cold bit his hands and feet and his exposed face. He thanked God he had no imagination as the slow hour before dawn passed with a tread like bare feet on newly fallen snow. Even his breathing had grown quiet, meditative, when the first movement caught his eye, woke him from a state of daze.

  Dew was falling thick around the stones, white as a mist underfoot, faintly reflecting the stars' light. It billowed now around solid shapes. He nudged Frank beside him and Ecaterina on the other side, but they had seen it already, hands over their mouths to hold in curses. As he peered harder he could see not one slim boy, but dozens of dark silhouettes, streaming through the graveyard's gates. Dozens of dark walkers silently shambling back to squeeze beneath stones, claw into newly turned earth, sated for the moment, putting themselves back to sleep.

  The stream that headed for the plague pit turned his stomach. They folded back the tarpaulin carefully and burrowed down through wet earth and bursting bodies like a man returning to his bed. He could see the hands moving like white spiders on the surface, drawing the thin soil over them.

  At last came Stefan Sterescu, with blank eyes and a smudge of blood in the corner of his mouth, and Radu's father with him, a hand on his shoulder.

  It was so like the old bastard. So like him to work out the absolute worst thing he could possibly do and then flaunt it in Radu's face, that he didn't wait to feel shame or disappointment or even horror. He went straight to fury, roaring like molten brass.

  He stopped thinking and hurled himself out of hiding. They had their backs to him, watching the sky pale over the distant hills. One swift heroic cut - all the power of his rage in his arm. Stefan was still half turning towards him when the sword bit through the vertebrae of his neck, tried to slow. Radu wrenched it all the way through. The head fell, hit wet grass, with a slow well of blood from the throat like the overflow of a sink. "I thought you were my friend!" it whispered.

  Constantin was staring at him, shocked. Good.

  "Ecaterina, the stakes!"

  Nothing. Frank and Ecaterina sat unmoving, frozen into statues by his father's command. He couldn't think about that. No time. He just grabbed a short length of hazel shaped into a spear from the girl's lax hands and kicked Stefan's still upright body in the knee. The boy fell, and Radu threw himself on top, pinning him with a knee in the stomach. How to get thick but brittle wood through the ribs up into the heart? Not through the breastbone, clearly. He shoved the tip of it through the belly, angled it up beneath the ribs, not thinking about the body thrashing beneath him or the wet yield of tearing flesh. Not thinking of anything until suddenly something gave, a rush of cold fluid spurted over his hands and the creature went limp under him. The whispering head fell silent.

  Constantin took a step backwards as Radu looked up at him, and it made him grin and wish for wolf's teeth to bare. The old man was afraid of him. Wasn't that something? "You and I will have words."

  But Constantin looked over his shoulder again, to where the tips of the nearest cupolas were rosy with sunshine. "Because you've killed a child? Yes, we will. " And he was gone, twisting through the morning haze like an eddy in the mist. Untouchable and always with the last word.

  Radu laughed like a hyena until his ribs and throat ached with it, and only stopped when Frank put an arm round his shoulders and gingerly squeezed. He pressed his face into Frank's throat and held on until he had command of himself enough to stand up, allow himself to be drawn into a proper hug, warm and firm, stinking of garlic and fear.

  Quite possibly he didn't smell too good himself, with his arms wet to the elbow with the leakings of week dead viscera. "How much did you see?"

  Frank sneaked a glance at Ecaterina, who stood with her back to them, leaning against the tree, her veil down and pressed into her face. "All of it. We couldn't move, but we could watch."

  He wasn't prepared to say 'I'm sorry,' to her. This was what they had come to do; he wasn't sorry - he wanted to throw up and then set something on fire. So he left her to mourn and walked to the doors of the mausoleum, using the hilt of his sword to smash their plaster seal with some satisfaction. There was a clean dark chamber inside, with a row of chests for bones and a single marble slab where a new coffin lay empty.

  Picking up the corpse, he laid it on the floor, its head down by its feet. "We need to burn this. Preferably before the city wakes up and finds it has new victims to bury."

  "This is my brother's body," Ecaterina had come to the door, her veil bunched around her fist. Her face still invisible but her voice hovering on the edge of hysteria. "Have some respect."

  Radu didn't have time for respect. Couldn't see how they could bring enough wood and kindling into the graveyard to dispose of the thing without being seen. So many strigoi, wobbly little fledglings though they were, meant as many new dead to bring to the plague pit - meant the gates would be thronged within hours of sunrise with funerals. They could hardly carry the corpse away, even wrapped in part of the tarpaulin, without being seen.

  But there were boxes along one wall, "I could cut it to three pieces. Put them in the chests, each carry one down to the house, and we could burn it there, privately."

  Now Frank was holding him again, part reassurance and part restraint, with an expression in which horror and pity mingled. He wasn't sure why. He seemed, to himself, to be dealing with this quite calmly.

  "You'll do nothing of the sort!" Ecaterina ripped the veil from her hair and covered the dead boy up with it, glaring at him.

  Frank murmured, "You don't have to do this alone. We'll tell someone: The arch-bishop; the Voivode. Everyone needs to know. Let Ecaterina and her family arrange it. Leave the body here. Go home, and Ecaterina can tell her father that Stefan's safe now, but he needs a cremation. Then later, when we're cleaned up and you've had a drink, we can tell the bishops. They can do something about all the other strigoi. You don't have
to handle this all on your own."

  Radu's thoughts snapped back from plans to anger. "No, of course not! Of course they'll be able to do something. Just as you two were. You just sat there. You sat there. And that's what the bishops will do, when it comes down to it. Nothing! Because the strigoi won't allow it. I have to—"

  "Frank's right," Ecaterina had taken a deep breath, curling in on herself and then straightening out, like a fern greeting the morning. Her voice was lower now and stronger. "You need to go home. Wash. Take a couple of drinks and calm down. My family and I will see to anything further that needs to be done for my brother." She gouged out a painful smile. "Thank you. As you say, I couldn't move. I couldn't have freed my brother from this curse without you. I shouldn't be angry."

  It was so much easier if she was, so that he could be angry in return, instead of any of the other alternatives. He didn't say so, just leaned on Frank's arm. Hard to believe, but he did feel a little watery, as if he too was liquefying from within.

  "I'm sorry," he managed, now. It meant 'I'm sorry for your loss. I liked the boy. I can't imagine what it's like to lose one of your family in such a way. I've always tried hard not to imagine it, in fact.' But they were both wrong. It was up to him to sort this out, because he was the only one who could. He would do it single-handedly. He would sort out this mess that he'd made and drag his monsters home and put things right, no matter that he had no idea how.

  He allowed Frank to urge him to the door of the tomb, out into a pared pewter dawn, still breathing hard. His hand ached around his sword hilt, clenched hard enough to dent the metal.

  Ecaterina caught his sleeve as he passed, dropped it with a grimace, wiping the stickiness off her fingers. "It was as if he knew you. That old man who was with Stefan."

  Despite his anger there was still a little room for fear. The prospect of hanging he could probably endure, that of beheading, certainly, but there were crueler punishments. The thought of impalement made his skin crawl. Not that. Anything but that.

  "I have books with pictures of him," he replied, with careful truth. "He's one of my ancestors. Buried in a chapel in the gardens of my town house. Not what I was hoping to find when I came to Bucharest."

  "How long have you known?"

  He chose to take the question to mean 'how long have you known that Constantin was responsible for all of this,' and not 'how long have you known your ancestor was a bloodsucking demon?' "I didn't. Not until I saw him just now."

  She sighed again and tucked the loops of her hair more firmly into its combs. It looked strange, indecent, uncovered as it was. Soft, as her face had softened. "I'm sorry too."

  So she was taking his outburst as a sign that he too was an innocent, horrified to find a monster under his bed. Good.

  "And at least, if you know where he's buried, you can go home and put him down, the way you did for Stefan."

  "Yes," Frank agreed, gentle and blithe as though he still didn't realize this was all his fault. He closed the mausoleum door behind them, got a hand in both of their backs and pushed them back out into the city. "That's what we'll do, after a wash and a very large drink. Ecaterina, can you make your way home from here, or do you need us to walk you to the door?"

  "I'll have your hat," she said, more firmly now, the note of confident command creeping back. "I can't be seen out of doors with my hair like this."

  "Of course." He handed it over, and they watched together as - stuffing all her stray hair up into it - she walked away to the Chancellor's house.

  "Now I've seen you kill one of them, I know you can kill the others too." Frank was still tugging, Radu still not quite himself when they crossed back over the river into the sanctuary of his own grounds. "Maybe you're the only one of us who can. You have to, Radu, we can't let this go on."

  It took him too long to realize that Frank was pulling him not towards the house, but out into the gardens, down to his parents' mausoleum. Only when he stepped incautiously in reed-bed and felt the cold of marsh water envelop his foot did he snap out of his fugue, look around him and gasp with something like betrayal.

  It was a modest little tomb, built on a platform of white marble that - when the river ran high - overlapped the water's edge and made the whole thing seem to float. The family crest was carved on the white doors, on a plaster seal that lapped over the join, and held the entrance closed. Marigolds and marsh mallows were in bloom around the steps of the white square, and herons had nested messily in the mock bell tower. A sound of paddling and cheeping nearby told of ducks with their fuzzy offspring, hidden among the reeds, and from the distant road came a faint sound of something large moving. Many horses, many feet.

  "Come on." Frank tugged at his drying sleeve, trying to get him moving again. Radu dug his heels in and scowled. Frank was very quickly running through the final stores of his patience.

  "Look. I'll do it myself then!" The Englishman drew his sword, marched forward, back straight, brow furrowed in determination. Radu had barely time to feel his flash of protective panic before Frank had stopped, just below the first marble step. He looked over his shoulder, puzzled. "What did I say I would do?"

  Radu laughed, with a laughter that tore like hooks. "Go in, Frank. Put an end to the strigoi inside. Go on. Do it if you can."

  Frank turned back, made one more step, stopped again, and returned to his side, shaking his head.

  "I get close, and then I forget what I came to do. Can they all do that? Even the new ones?"

  "I don't know," Radu admitted. "My parents have never allowed others to arise on our lands. I can only imagine they've lost their heads, presented with a feast like Bucharest after so long fasting. Perhaps if I speak to them, they will understand this cannot go on."

  "Speak to them?!" Frank was all aglow with righteous certainty. It looked beautiful on him - he would have made a good painted saint on a wall. "How many more of your friends will you let them kill before you do something?"

  "What do you expect me to do, Frank?" So this was how Frank repaid him for the sacrifice of letting him live? By adding salt to his wounds. "You expect me to kill my mother? I know what she is. I know what my father is. But they are still my parents. I owe them my life and my obedience. And more than that, I love them. I wouldn't weep overmuch if someone else was to kill them, but I can't. Do you understand me? I can't!"

  Frank bared his teeth in a show of power Radu had never seen from him before. He'd got some pride back along with his memories, evidently. "But you're the only one who can. So you must.”

  If he wanted to challenge Radu's authority, he could take the consequences. Radu put a hand in the center of his chest and shoved hard, always surprised at how little Frank weighed, how easy it was to overpower him. "I must do nothing. Have you forgotten why we're here? We're here because coming here was the condition of them sparing your life. We stay here because every day we remain is a day on which they don't kill you. I did this for you. So you don't get to tell me what I can and cannot do. I will keep my parents and my lover alive. The rest of the world can go hang."

  Frank reeled back, arms windmilling as he fought to keep his balance. He ended up, panting with fury, knee deep in the reeds. "I offered to let you shoot me. I begged you to shoot me. It was your choice not to. Don't blame this on me."

  "Oh, so I must do all the killing that you are too weak-stomached to do?"

  Frank stood with his mouth open and an expression of such anguish that it made Radu want to slap him hard just to wipe it off. "That's—that's unfair. You don't know how difficult suicide is when you want to live.”

  So self-absorbed. It was as though it had never occurred to him that Radu might have tried. “Do I not?”

  Startled out of his anger, Frank gave him a sharp, unhappy look, but kept to the point. “If I wasn't here to be in danger, would you take them back home?"

  Wait until they were in their coffins, paint the whole surface with garlic and salt, closing the lid down with iron locks. That might keep them co
ntained enough to be returned to Bircii in a wagon, while Radu dealt with the fledglings here. Though he could scarcely imagine how he was going to kill all the fledglings in one night, it could be done, perhaps. And he knew better now than to get attached to anyone whose survival could be used as leverage over him. He would be wiser next time. "Yes. I would take them home and keep them there, whatever their wishes."

  "Then I... I have to leave. If you give me a fast horse, I might be able to get to the coast, onto a ship, before they find me. I might be able to get away."

  Radu's anger gave way under him, revealed despair, like a black, unfrozen sea beneath. "They'll find you. They'll turn you and they'll bring you back here to mock me. Please don't, Frank. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was angry. But I swore to save you. If you go, I won't be able to do that—"

  "But you will be able to save everyone else." He had a martyr's look now, half resolute, half dazzled at the thought of his chance to play the hero. Part of Radu wanted to answer it by building a dungeon to keep him in, forcing him to stay—in chains if necessary.

  "I'll let them all die, if you leave."

  Frank smiled, oddly carefree, fond even. "I don't believe that."

  "You fucking pious hypocrite. You don't know anything! You don't know what I'm capable of." He charged forward, got Frank by the collar and shook him as he had when they'd first met, helplessness making him angry again. I don't know it myself.

  Stars burst in the distance beyond him. That noise Radu had heard earlier was now a thunderous rumble, and the ground shivered beneath his feet. Frank looked up from where he dangled in Radu's grasp, and Radu set him upright carefully, looking out across the river to where the main road of Bucharest curved down toward the Black Sea.

  The road was full of marching soldiers. A full janissary company, with standard bearer and cauldrons and supplies, curvetting horses and bright saddle-cloths and gilded tack bright as the sun. Their distinctive head-dresses lay over their heads like a draped sleeve, blinding white in the sunshine, and all their pikes glittered, and the bells on their scimitars jingled.