Son of the Dragon

by Victor T Foia

  The secretary withdrew, closing the door behind him. The abbot’s office was a whitewashed cell with a single crown glass window, now darkened by the night. The only colorful object in the room was an icon of the Holy Virgin holding baby Jesus at her breast. The abbot was seated on a plain straight-back chair with high armrests. He wore a simple black cassock and a soft cap on his head. A wispy white beard reached to his waist, making him appear more a wizard than a man of the cloth. Next to the abbot, a beardless novice stood behind a lectern. Vlad guessed he’d been reading to the abbot from the Bible.

  Michael approached the abbot’s chair and bowed deep, touching his right hand to the ground. Then he straightened and, placing his right hand over his left, lifted his hands toward the old man, palms upward. “Bless me, Very Reverend Abbot,” he said.

  “May the Lord bless you,” the abbot replied, making the Sign of the Cross in the air. His voice was raspy and so feeble, Vlad had to strain to hear the words. Without rising from his chair, the abbot extended his right hand, and Michael kissed it.

  When his turn came, Vlad imitated Michael’s every move and received his own blessing. In Vlad’s hands, the abbot’s claw-like hand felt cold and weightless. He’d heard the abbot slept in his own coffin, as a way of preparing himself for death. Judging by how emaciated his hand, Vlad guessed that moment couldn’t be far off.

  “I had to give up my spectacles,” the abbot said with a wan smile. “They weren’t of use anymore. The young brother here has become my eyes. Pull up two chairs for my guests and then leave, Theophil. I’ll ring you when we’re done.”

  The novice obeyed the order, head bowed.

  “Michael Novak... how good to see you again, my friend,” the abbot said, and leaned forward in his chair. From the way he looked past Michael, Vlad realized he was blind, or nearly so. “Praised be the Mother of God. Thirty years must have passed since last we met.”

  “Thirty-three, to be exact,” Michael said.

  The abbot nodded, pensive. “The same number of years our Savior spent on earth among men. Perhaps there’s a hidden message for us in there, Michael. I’ll pray to the Holy Virgin tonight for a clue.”

  “When I came here five years ago with the king, you were on pilgrimage to Holy Mount Athos, so we missed seeing each other.”

  “I was still vigorous then. Now I’m happy if I can drag my bones to my own church in the courtyard. And how is our dear king? He’s been most generous to Cozia. Fishing ponds along the Danube, salt from the Slatina mine... thanks to His Grace, salted fish is now our main staple.”

  Vlad felt precious time was being wasted with idle prattle. It was already getting late and Oma might be asleep by the time the abbot approved his visit. He signaled to Michael to ask him.

  “I’m here to beg a favor on behalf of Prince Vlad, Very Reverend Abbot,” Michael said. “He desires to—”

  “So, you’ve come to pay your respects to your grandfather, young man?” the abbot said, looking in Vlad’s direction. “Like so many of your kin have done over the years. Yes, King Justus, may his soul rest in peace, sired a good many sons and was rewarded with even more grandsons. I, myself, lost track of their number.” The abbot stopped and bit his lip, as if pondering whether to continue. Then he shrugged. “I don’t mind saying it now that he’s dead: King Justus was as great a fornicator as he was a soldier. And you must know what a soldier he was.” The abbot made a little rattling noise in his throat that Vlad took for laughter.

  “I hope the king confessed on his deathbed and was forgiven this grave sin,” Michael said.

  “As his confessor, I can reassure you he did.” The abbot leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if conveying a great secret. “However, I have doubts about the salvation of his soul. See, the king confessed in a state of madness. The last weeks of his life, he no longer made any sense. He had hallucinations too, about lions, dragons, falling stars, don’t know what other nonsense. All he’d talk about was a grandson he hoped would never be born. ‘Seed of my Seed’ he called him.”

  Vlad felt a tingling sensation in his fingertips and his ears became warm. It was him Opa was talking about on his deathbed. He glanced at Michael, and the tutor gave him a conspiratorial nod. But why would his grandfather hope he’d never be born? The thought of being rejected by a grandfather he worshiped hurt Vlad in ways he’d never experienced.

  “Did the king say what he had against that future grandson?” Michael asked, imitating the abbot’s secretive whisper.

  “I well remember his words. He said, ‘It’s because of him God took away the most precious thing I had.’ Then he cursed the Lord with such vehemence, I expected him to be struck dead on the spot. I knew by then that great mind of his had left him.”

  No, he wasn’t crazy, Vlad wanted to say. Opa was angry with God because of what happened at Satan’s Wrath. “Ask about Oma,” he mouthed at Michael.

  “Did the king mention Mother Ilaria on his deathbed?” Michael said. “And don’t be concerned, Father, Prince Vlad knows the story of his grandmother.”

  “So he does... a most unfortunate case, that.” The abbot blessed himself and mumbled a silent invocation. “Oh, yes, Mother Ilaria was another one of the king’s obsessions. He rode here when he felt his end near. Just to see her one more time and ask her forgiveness for... He blew into his fist and looked at Vlad, seemingly searching for a delicate way to bring Marissa’s tragedy into discussion. “Well... for everything that happened to her,” he finally said with a sigh of exhaustion.

  “But she wouldn’t see him,” Michael said.

  Vlad glanced at Michael, trying to detect whether he knew about Oma’s reaction or had simply ventured a guess. He likely did, Vlad concluded, and his recent disappointment at Michael’s omissions stirred in him again.

  The abbot continued. “When she refused to see him, the king broke into the nunnery and pounded on her cell door. ‘I avenged you on God, didn’t I?’ he shouted. ‘I made Him blot the Son of the Dragon from the Book of Life. What else must I do to earn your forgiveness?’ Utter nonsense, as can you see. Then the king toppled over, unconscious. By the time I was summoned and arrived at the scene, he was dead.”

  Vlad was stunned by the extent of Opa’s rebellion against God, and at Oma’s unforgivingness. He glanced at Michael again, and this time was certain none of this was news to him. The mentor he’d trusted all his life took him for a child from which to hide ugly things.

  “A stubborn woman, Mother Ilaria,” the abbot said. “I could see it in her all these years, by the way she clung to life. She’s outlived many an older sister. But now that her health is failing, her stubbornness is waning too. ‘I’m ready to go, Father,’ she told me only a few weeks ago.”

  Vlad’s anxiety erupted. “Is she dying, Very Reverend Abbot?”

  “We all are dying, my Son,” the abbot said. “Mother Ilaria’s afraid of death, as we all are when so close to it. I told her, ‘Death is the greatest gift, if you’ve made your peace with the Creator.’ And... odd... she said, ‘My peace is made, Father, but I can’t die until my visitor comes.’”

  Vlad’s heart leaped. “It’s me she’s expecting, Father,” he shouted, jubilant. “Tell the abbot, Uncle Michael.”

  Vlad’s outburst startled the abbot and he tucked his head between his shoulders, turtle-like. “No, no, my Son,” he said, squinting at Vlad. “The visitor’s no other than the Angel of Death, who comes for all of us.”

  Michael pulled his chair closer to the abbot’s and cleared his throat a few times. “Begging your indulgence, but isn’t it just possible that a visit from her grandson is what the poor woman might desire before dying?”

  The abbot raised his hands in rejection of Michael’s suggestion. “Mother Ilaria hasn’t accepted a single visitor from outside God’s community in the thirty-three years she’s been a nun. Not even her... He looked at Michael and his fingers wiggled like a crab’s legs, as he seemed to be searching for a delicate term to describe her relati
onship to Vlad’s grandfather. “Not even her king,” he said finally, “or her son. Doesn’t that tell you how she feels about outsiders, Michael?”

  “But Very Reverend Abbot,” Vlad said, jumping to his feet, “didn’t she meet the Old Man of the Forest? Theodore, the blind hermit?”

  The abbot gasped. “How could you know of such a thing? Who told you that?”

  Michael shook his head at Vlad, but Vlad ignored his warning. Since the abbot didn’t deny Theodore’s visit, Vlad knew his guess was correct. “The holy man came to Cozia sometime after I was born in ’28, and brought my grandmother a Bible.”

  “Mother Ilaria’s nobody’s grandmother, young man,” the abbot said, and wagged his finger at Vlad, expression severe. “She’s our Lord’s bride.”

  “But she recorded my birth in her Bible, like any grandmother would,” Vlad said, overheated. He extracted the book from its sack and held it out to the abbot.

  The abbot waved Vlad away. His face turned blue and his unseeing eyes opened wide, glassy. He took his staff with shaky hands and pounded it onto the floor. “The comings and goings of the holy monastery are not a matter to be gossiped about, young man.” The effort exhausted him; his wraith-like frame shrunk as under the weight of an invisible burden.

  Vlad looked at Michael with a surge of panic. He realized he’d done exactly what his tutor worried about: he’d managed to cross the old man with his untimely comments. Yet he felt righteous, not remorseful. Oma had already seen one person from the outside. If one visitor, why not two? And shouldn’t she make that decision?

  Michael glanced at Vlad and pressed a finger to his lips in warning. “Let me handle it,” his eyes said. Then he turned back to the abbot. “Prince Vlad and I don’t wish to interfere with the life of the monastery. We only beg you to convey our well wishes to Mother Ilaria. Perhaps she’d feel comforted in her suffering to know we are praying on her behalf nearby.”

  “That’s something I can do,” the abbot said, regaining his composure. He extracted a brass bell from the pocket of his cassock and rang it, impatient. His face assumed a dark, determined look. “But I’ll hear no more about any visit with Mother Ilaria. I shan’t permit a dying nun to be intruded upon with thoughts of the outside world. What she needs at the moment is peace, to prepare her soul for the meeting with her Maker.”

  Vlad stomped out of the room, disheartened. Throwing a last look behind, he saw Michael kiss the abbot’s hand with more warmth than the situation warranted. The abbot bent over Michael and seemed to whisper into his ear. Then the two of them hugged.

  Judas Iscariots, both of them.

  “I ruined it, didn’t I?” Vlad said when he and Michael were out in the open. He felt pressure building in the back of his eyes. It was hard to believe he’d come so close to reaching his goal, and now the whim of a crotchety monk would thwart him. “What do I do?”

  Michael leaned on Vlad’s shoulder as he hobbled across the courtyard to the guesthouse. He groaned with every step. “If I were your spiritual advisor, I’d say pray,” he said when they reached the door. Vlad looked up at Michael and was shocked to see him smile. “But since I’m not, I’ll just say wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Vlad said, peeved. “Of all people, you know I can’t wait. It’s now or never.”

  “Perhaps you should ask ‘where,’ not ‘for what.’” This time Michael’s smile gave place to a chuckle. “And now I do want my wash and my supper.”

  Vlad followed Michael into their room, prey to a deep resentment against both him and the abbot. Gruya and Lash were waiting with a trencher of boiled cabbage, smoked pork, and a pot of soup, only lukewarm by now.

  “I’m famished,” Michael declared, sitting at the table next to them.

  “All I want is to be left alone,” Vlad said, and threw himself onto his bed. “You can have my food.”

  “Well, I’m already starting to like this monastic life,” Gruya said, attacking the food saved for Vlad. “Good food, good wine, good beds. If we only could stop the monks from making such a noise every few hours with their wooden toy. I hear they bang on it even in the middle of the night. Try to sleep through that racket, if you can.”

  “You mean their calls to prayer?” Michael took a mouthful of pork and moaned with pleasure. “What you hear is called a semantron, Gruya. And it’s no toy. It’s a sacred wooden board the monks strike with a mallet, according to a prescribed ritual.”

  “Well, whatever it’s called, I have a mind to steal and burn it.”

  “I’m sure men have gone to hell for lesser sins than that, Grandson.”

  Vlad covered himself with his mantle and turned to face the wall. His companions fell silent, and he sensed their disappointment at not having his company. When they finished eating, they also lay on their beds without a word, and soon were asleep.

  Vlad tossed in bed while new doubts swirled in his mind. Even if the abbot had said yes, would Oma want to see him? She was a stubborn woman, he’d made that clear. Not even Opa could soften her heart, though he died outside her door, trying. And Opa meant everything to her once, while Vlad was surely nothing to her.

  But Oma called him “Son of the Dragon” in her Bible, as Theodore did in the hut. That said she did feel some connection with him.

  What did Michael mean about waiting? Not “what,” but “where,” he’d said. For a moment he considered waking him up and asking. But he knew Michael was spent from the trip and needed the rest. Anyway, all Michael would do was serve up another silly riddle.

  The ringing of the semantron announced the call to Midnight Office. Gruya cursed under his blanket. In the cot next to Vlad’s, Michael stirred. His chance had arrived. He shook Michael by the shoulder, and the old man gave out a small cry, startled.

  “What did you mean earlier, Uncle? Where should I be waiting?”

  “By your opa’s tomb, of course,” Michael mumbled, then went back to sleep.

  The hand kiss, the whisper, the hug—did Michael finesse the old codger, after all? And to suspect all this time that his mentor betrayed him.

  Vlad sprang from his bed, grabbed his boots, his mantle, and the Bible, and rushed out of the room. In the courtyard, he joined the stream of monks heading for the church. The snow crunched under dozens of wooden clogs, sounding like crushed walnut shells. He followed the monks into the vestibule, and found it lit only by oil lamps that flickered under icons on both sides of the doorway to the nave. The tiny flames barely outlined the holy images, and did little to dispel the hall’s darkness. The monks took turns kissing the feet of the saints in the icons. Then they bowed and crossed themselves three times before they entered the nave. Vlad waited until the last of the monks disappeared before he too venerated the icons. Then he stepped to the corner where Opa’s tombstone lay embedded in the vestibule’s floor. There, out of sight, he could listen to the service and wait undisturbed.

  The priest-monk began by singing a line from the Thrice Holy hymn: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” He repeated it several times, with the chorus of monks chanting “Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy,” in an endless refrain.

  As time dragged on, Vlad began to bite his fingernails, wishing the service over. But the well of hymns appeared bottomless. He fought the desire to pace about and gnawed at his knuckles instead. Did he understand Michael right? Well, he’d been explicit, even if half-asleep. But did Michael understand the abbot correctly? The old monk was a bit of a mumbler.

  More hymns, more chanting of “Kyrie eleison.” When it was finally over, Vlad felt drained.

  The monks filed out of the church, oblivious to his presence. When their footsteps faded, he lit two tapers and stuck them into crevices in the wall. Then he kneeled at the head of Opa’s tombstone.

  Vlad took in the simplicity of Opa’s resting place, and felt proud of him. No imposing mausoleum; no laurel crown; no coat of arms; no carvings of mythical beasts. It was the tomb of a real soldier, not that of a glory seeker. Everyo
ne knew King Justus was fearless and just, so his name in plain letters and the years of his life sufficed to tell his story:

  King Justus, House of Basarab

  1353 – 1418

  Then Vlad remembered with a stab of resentment that Opa wanted him blotted from the Book of Life. Well, that didn’t quite succeed for Opa, did it? What might he say if Vlad carved one attribute on his tombstone? “Great Fornicator.” That thought made him feel better.

  Vlad had no sense of the passing of time, other than the wax dripping off the tapers. He tried not to think about anything, hoping time would move faster. But the abbot’s words regarding Opa’s hallucinations kept gnawing at him: “lions, dragons, falling stars.” He took out Theodore’s amulet and felt the carvings with his thumb, wondering what his opa would make of it.

  “It took me years to carve that amulet for you,” a woman’s voice said.

  CHAPTER 9: You will not Fear the Terror of the Night

  Vlad’s head snapped to the voice that had come from the doorway to the nave. His heart flailed wild, and blood rushed to his face. He wanted to spring to his feet, but his legs didn’t respond.

  “To think that I prayed you’d never come across it.” The voice was tinged with sadness and resignation. “And now, here you are with all your burning questions. I hope you haven’t set your hopes too high.”

  The vestibule light was too weak to let Vlad see more than the black outline of a person draped in a hooded cloak. Around the head, the form was wreathed in the golden light of candles burning behind it in the nave. The ethereal light, much like a saint’s halo, calmed his initial fright.

  “Oma!” The word escaped him louder and more exuberant than he’d intended. Fearing he sounded unmanly, he decided to conceal his excitement behind admiration for her artistry. He held up the medallion. “You made this?”