by A D Seeley
“Yes, sire.”
“Attach them to every horse.” Then, with more energy than he’d had since arriving home, he asked, “Now where are my wife and son?”
“That’s…um….”
Catching fear and pity in the servant’s voice, he asked, “What?! Are they well?”
“Your son is, sire.”
“And my wife?”
“She was the one to receive the message about Radu’s army. She didn’t want to be their prisoner for fear of what they would do to her in response to what you’ve done to them….”
“And?” he pressed, snarling in the servant’s face when he didn’t go on.
“She killed herself, sire. She threw herself from the window to the river down below.”
Cain felt a flitter of sadness. Nadia had been a good wife. Unlike Quintillia, she hadn’t nagged, as well as she’d left him to his work.
He nodded. “Thank you.” Then, hardening again, he said, “Now get to work. We don’t have time to stand around.”
Only an hour or so later he stood by the castle gates, lifting his infant son Mihnea into Seneslav’s hands.
“You take care of him,” he told his man. “If I don’t come back….”
“You don’t need to worry, sire. I’ll defend him with my very life.”
Cain nodded and stood back as everyone but him left the castle, the hoof prints perfect replicas for cow hooves. Then, after burning anything the Turkish armies could use, he jumped on Idimmu and rode through the damp dirt roads covered in fragrant pine needles.
“Hyah!” he yelled, heading in the opposite direction to Transylvania to ask the Hungarian regent for aid.
As he pushed the horse hard, another storm began brewing, always at his heels. Eventually, as his steed tired, it caught up to them, making the trek as miserable as the one he’d taken when God had first banished him from His presence.
“Tell Cornivus that Vlad Draculea is here to see him,” he announced as he jumped off his steed in the Hungarian regent’s courtyard.
“Yes, sire,” one of the guards replied.
Cain shook out his long dark hair, trying to lose some of the excess water from his thick waves before entering the throne room—he didn’t want to be disrespectful when asking for help.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” the regent asked, looking Cain over as though he was a fly in his soup. Cain had dried himself as best he could, but days of rain had gone beyond soaking him.
“Radu’s army has allied with the Wallachian nobles I haven’t yet killed. They’re planning to depose me. I need more gold to pay my men so that I can annihilate them.”
The eighteen-year-old regent leaned forward, his glassy eyes catching the light. “I’m sorry,” he said, picking at his acne, “but I don’t have the resources to help you.”
Cain laughed, though it was angry and humorless. First, to have to ask this kid for money in the first place was embarrassing. And now he would apparently have to beg…. Maybe he should just announce right out his true identity so he could watch the kid squirm. Already, the sultan thought him to be brilliant at war. If they knew who he really was, their continued loyalty would be ensured, for he could say that he was testing them and that they had failed miserably. He decided against it just now. He could always do so later if he became truly desperate.
“Don’t lie to me, boy. I know you’re getting funds from both the pope and the Mokolios. Surely the funds that you’re receiving for the very purpose of fighting the Turks could go to me to do just that,” he practically spat.
The boy’s eyes instantly became hostile. His lean chest rising and falling quicker, he stood, his face now a blotchy purplish-red.
“Arrest him!” he yelled in his squeaky voice.
Cain tried to fight the horde of professional soldiers that surrounded him, but the truth was, he was just too tired. It had been days now since he’d had any real rest. Yes, he may not need as much as mortal men did, but he still tired. He was immortal, not invincible.
Only once he was in a solitary cell did he find out what was his supposed crime. The regent accused him of siphoning off funds given to him by the pope, evidenced in a forged letter where Vlad pledged loyalty to Mehmed II, as well as promising to strike an agreement to give Wallachia to the sultan. Apparently, as Cain was sure the real story went, the pope had wanted proof of where his money was going, but the regent couldn’t provide it because he was using it for his own pleasure.
He tried to escape—he could have easily picked a lock or pulled away the hinges—but the metal door had only a small flap for food, and an even tinier window for the guards to peer in, all of which was made quite solidly. When having given up on the door, he then climbed the stone walls to the miniscule window high above. But it was really a tiny shaft that reflected light like the tombs he’d devised in ancient Egypt had. Cain knew the light wasn’t for his benefit, but so the guards could see him without need of entering the room. Still, he was pleased he’d have some sort of light source, no matter how minimal it was—it was only bright enough for him to see just barely more than the outlines of the stones.
What began as an angry mishap, being jailed, Cain was surprised to find enjoyable. Where many men would be driven mad from so much solitary time, he found it blissful, for he was already crazy, and where else could he go but up?
Each day of quiet brought back a small piece of his sanity. Each hour that consisted of the peace one had when not manipulating and ruling the world brought comfort to his restless soul. As it was, a part of him wanted to remain there forever, in the endless dark, for here he wasn’t Cain the Cursed, or Vlad the Tyrant, or even the Merciless One. Here he wasn’t any of the aliases he had gone by over the years. Instead, he was who he thought he could have been had his parents loved him. A content and calm man who stopped to appreciate the little things in his life. At least it was that way until she came and woke a bit of Aemuth from the recesses he’d been hibernating in.
Cain was standing in a corner, smiling at the ray of sunshine streaming from the window shaft. As he did daily, he had climbed the stones of his cell—as worn as they were—and was letting the rays warm his skin when he heard the peephole slide open, metal grating upon metal. It was loud. Perhaps because it reverberated off the walls. Or perhaps because he didn’t hear real sound very often. Whatever the reason, he could feel it in his bones.
He jumped down and turned, crouching, surprised to see a large pair of feminine eyes staring back at him, lit with the orange light of a fire.
And, just like that, manipulations took over his mind, pushing all peace from it.
“Hello,” he said with a smile, tilting his head like a praying mantis watching its prey. “And what’s your name?”
“Ilona,” a whisper of a voice replied, fear and interest fighting for dominance in both her eyes and tone.
“I’m C—”
“Vlad,” she interrupted, surprising him because he’d been about to tell her his real name. “I know.”
“You seem to know me, but I don’t know you. Just what is a delicate flower like yourself doing down here in a filthy dungeon?”
“I hear stories,” she said, looking away from his steady gaze. “I wanted to see if they were true?”
“And?” he asked.
“And I believe they are.”
With a grin that he hoped would speak of what he thought the stories said and how her belief in them only pleased him, he asked, “And just what do they say?”
Shyly, she said, “That you’re not a man, but a rabid demon.”
He threw his head back and laughed, a guttural sound he hadn’t made in…years? How long had he been held captive here?
Once finished, he turned his gaze back on her.
“I may look like a demon, love,” he said, momentarily putting a hand to the disgustingly greasy and filthy hair on both his head and face. “But I clean up nice. I assure you.”
“We shall see,” she said before closi
ng the peephole and leaving him alone to his thoughts.
He was surprised when, a few hours later, his cell door opened to let a maid and barber enter, bringing along with them beautiful light. After getting a bath and a shave, he was given fresh clothes and taken to a new, cleaner cell for nobles, instead of the undesirables area he’d been in before—which was where they put people they wanted to forget about. It seemed that Ilona had power. Power he could use to get out of there for, now that he had murdered the gentle man he’d become in prison, he was once again motivated to finish what he’d started in Wallachia.
Ilona came back day after day until he had made her fall in love with him. She was pretty, a delicate thing resembling spun glass by the way light emanated off her pearly skin and golden hair, so he didn’t mind courting her. Plus, the deeper her love grew, the more freedom he was granted—he was even released as long as he stayed in the home he’d made with his new bride—until the day he was finally allowed to return to Wallachia, prince once again.
As he rode toward the castle with his wife and their two sons ages eleven and ten, the people cheered until a procession followed as far as he could see.
“They certainly love you,” Ilona said in that meek voice of hers.
“I saved them. Before me, Wallachia was corrupt and starving. The princes only cared about being in either the sultan’s or Hungary’s pocket.”
When they rode into the courtyard of Poenari Castle, he was pleasantly surprised to find Seneslav, as loyal as ever, his titanic hand on the shoulder of a boy fourteen or so years of age.
“Mihnea?” Cain asked, a large smile on his face. When his son gave him a hesitant grin in reply, Cain opened his arms. He couldn’t believe that the babe he had barely had a chance to hold was now on his way to becoming a handsome young man, large like his father.
With a nudge from Seneslav, the boy walked into Cain’s arms, crying what he hoped were tears of joy.
After introducing Ilona and their sons to Mihnea, they went into the castle to have a feast.
“How is it you still look so good?” Seneslav asked with a grin even scarcer of teeth than before. His skin was now leather, thick lines carved into his forehead and around his eyes. “You look as though you haven’t aged a day, and yet it’s been fourteen years.”
With a chuckle, he clapped the burly man on the back, announcing, “Perhaps I haven’t!”
Life settled into a routine as he oscillated his time between tyranny and family, though he was still on the front lines, battling Radu’s forces, more often he was at home.
It was only a couple of months since he had returned when he was in the midst of an intense battle that he felt an explosive heat through his chest. He looked down at it, at the sword being pulled from it. He had been stabbed in the exact place where he had forced his own sword through the real Vlad.
“Sire!” he heard Seneslav yell as he began to lose consciousness. Cain looked up at him, a halo of light around his man’s bald head as he felt his body’s warm liquid pour over his fingers clutching at his wound. But, before he could reply, the darkness overtook him.
When he woke up, he found that he had been buried alive. They had assumed that he was dead. They did not know that, because of who he really was and the “curse” God had placed upon him, he could not die.
When he escaped his grave, he hid himself under traveling robes, hearing stories about Vlad Draculea everywhere he went. People said that his head had been cut off and was in a jar of honey in the sultan’s palace, or that it had been displayed on a spike in Constantinople to prove that he was indeed dead. Such nonsense. Nonsense like his life had been. His years living as only a husband to Ilona, and father to their two sons, had tamed the lunacy that had driven him to live his blood-laden life as Vlad the Impaler.
He was ready to start a new life; one far away from Vlad. And nobody would even recognize him if he went far from anywhere he’d recently warred with. He had been smart to have portraits painted of the long-dead prince in his stead, which he’d commissioned so that nobody in the future would know who he was, as well as, once done with that life, he could easily move on to a new one. After so much war, he was spent and needed solace. He coveted a new life. One far from soldierdom. Being Vlad, responsible for tens of thousands of his own men’s deaths, and even more civilian lives, had tired him of bloodshed. As much as he had loved it at the time—and with it he had certainly proven to God how evil he indeed was—he was ready for some peace and quiet.
But because his plans had backfired when Alberto had apparently passed on many years before, the Turkish sultan had indeed taken over Cain’s large Ottoman forces and would no longer answer to him. The sultan’s men were loyal to the sultan because they didn’t know that they had really always been under the thumb of a much different man. All of this forced Cain to fight to recover his lost forces, the peace and quiet he wanted so desperately far beyond his reach. And then, as the Mokolios worked hard to reacquire the Earth, a new mission came to him when he heard whisperings about a prophecy….
Chapter Nineteen
***
Inac woke up to find everything dark around him. An odd and unpleasant sensation swirled in his stomach, and an acidic taste was rising in the back of his throat. Desiring fresh air, he unzipped the sleeping bag and untangled himself from Hara. He needed it so desperately that he didn’t even take the time to throw on his shoes as he got up and left the tent.
The moment he was outside, he tore off his tank top drenched with sweat. He usually slept in the nude, but he knew Hara wouldn’t have that, so he’d thrown on some cotton pants that tied on at the waist, as well as a tight wife-beater tank top that showed off his muscular arms and chest in hopes that it would help woo Hara.
The air felt cool on his wet, overheated skin, but it didn’t give him relief for long. The visions from his dream were too vivid in his mind. He felt as if he had just relived all of his years as Vlad. But, unlike the first time, now it made him nauseous.
His stomach tightened, shooting a pain throughout his abdomen as he vomited into the bushes over and over again as his body attempted to rid itself of Vlad’s psychopathic tortures. Once he felt like he was finished, he swept the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I didn’t know you get sick?” Tracker whispered from behind him, offering him a tube of toothpaste.
Inac looked up at him, trying to give him a small smile as he took the paste. “Yeah, well, I am human, you know. I’ve never had a fever, but I have thrown up from other things.”
Tracker didn’t say anything as Inac walked over to the camp’s water spout to rinse out his mouth, as well as to wash his chest and back. The minty toothpaste was the perfect way to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth.
“So what made you puke then if you’re not sick?” Tracker asked so quietly that Inac wondered if he knew he’d said it out loud.
Inac looked him over. It was odd how much he wanted to be honest with the kid.
“Is Hara still asleep?”
“Yeah. She sleeps through everything,” he said with a smile. It must be because she was so innocent that she slept so well. There were no demons to keep her up at night….
“Then let’s go have a seat by the fire. It’s dead, but I can build us a small one.”
Tracker followed, staying silent until there was a small, crackling flame. The faint light made the world appear as though it was only five feet in circumference, and it worked to purge the icy disgust from Inac’s soul that his dream had brought about.
“So, you were gonna tell me why you threw up?”
Inac sighed before looking Tracker straight in the eye. “Have you ever done something you’ve been ashamed of?”
He expected Tracker to scoff, to do anything but remain serious.
“Of course. Who hasn’t?”
“I never did. I may have tired of things, but I never before really cared about what I’ve done.”
“But now you do?”
He nodded. “I’ve been having dreams…but they aren’t really dreams. Just now, I relived my time as Vlad Draculea. Did you know that he was a real person?”
Tracker shook his head. “Once The Order brought me in, They told me the lives you’ve lived. I just assumed that he was another figment of your imagination.”
“No, he was real. He was a nice guy who had been a victim for years. Even after all of that, he still didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
“So he would have made a good prince then….”
“No. He would have been dead within days had I not killed him first.”
Tracker looked surprised, but he didn’t seem to be judging Inac for the murder of the prince. “Why did you kill him?”
“It was time for me to find a new life. His seemed like a perfect opportunity.”
“So you just killed him? You didn’t even hesitate or care?”
Inac sighed. “Tracker, life was different back then. People killed each other all the time. Besides, he wouldn’t have made it. He was a weak man. Too weak for Wallachian—Romanian—politics.”
Tracker didn’t say anything for a few minutes. When he did, he seemed almost hesitant. “So what are you ashamed of then?”
“All those people…” he said, swallowing the acid that had made its way up the back of his throat. If he hadn’t lost the Ottoman Empire with his gamble, then he’d still own the Middle East today instead of just a fraction of the oil. So, really, it wasn’t only about those who had died during his life as Vlad the Impaler, but every life that had been cut short since because of his gamble. Still today people were feeling the consequences in that region. And, since he was a part of the fight to get the land and oil back, he still felt bad about it. Nobody should die over stupid oil. To make a point—like Hara’s death would achieve—yes, but not for a stupid natural resource.
“Lately,” Inac said, “the faces of anyone dead because of me, they’ve been getting to me. But I’m a different person now. I’m no longer Vlad the Impaler. I can’t even imagine it and, yet, it really was me. I did those things. And to my own people. I thought that it would help me take Wallachia as my own if I fought the Turks, who were secretly also my people. But it only ended up with me losing the empire I had owned since creating the Akkadian Empire more than four thousand years ago.
