‘You are the perfect model of a prince,’ confirmed Beheim. ‘But my lord, Richard is a prince too, if only according to his title. It would be as well, I think, if at the end of this campaign the two of you can stand together, to show the world that the vampire princes of Gaul and Walachia will act as one to put down these rebellions.’
The voivode sighed, acknowledging that his servant had the right of it. No matter how much he despised Richard, and no matter how monstrous it was that the Norman should presume to despise him, the battle had still to be fought, and the demonstration to be made. He finished drying himself, and stood naked for a moment, examining his body.
Dragulya’s form was huge and powerful, massively muscled, as befitted a fighting man. Many vampires, satisfied with their immunity from pain and wounding, did not trouble to work their muscles overhard. Though they never grew fat, they often grew soft, less strong than they might have been. Dragulya had never yielded to such temptation, for his strength was an obsession with him, and he despised all weakness. His father, Vlad III, called Dragul, had set his son a fine example in that respect, until the rebels had murdered him. But if this Vlad were to perish, he knew that he would be succeeded by his brother, Radu the Handsome, who was a man of very different kind. Radu was soft, more like the Norman Richard than Vlad his brother, both in appearance and in character.
Thought of Radu made Dragulya scowl again, as it always did. The Khanate was overfull of younger brothers and ungrateful sons, resentful that they had not power and must wait for centuries to get it, careless in their preparation to receive and use it. Was the world really worth preserving, he wondered, for the likes of Radu?
‘What truly preserves our empires,’ growled Dragulya, ‘is the fact that they have so many enemies without, against whose menace we can close our ranks. Enemies within can only hurt us, even if we can destroy them.’
Beheim did not have to ask him what he meant. The empire of Walachia was united in hatred of the Turks, and in the constant need to fight them. That common enemy not only distracted attention from rivalries between the princes of the East, but offered hope to the two groups of men who might otherwise have been unduly troublesome: the most powerful commoners, who could hope to distinguish themselves in that conflict and earn conscription to the vampire ranks; and the vampires who had elder kinsmen, whose hope of succeeding to positions of power and privilege lay in the warlords’ exposure to constant danger from the alien foe. Enemies within were far more likely to seduce those groups to their own causes than to encourage loyal sentiments.
While his master dressed, Beheim poured wine from a flask into two crystal goblets, and waited patiently. He wondered whether Blondel de Nesle might at that very instant be making a similar offering to Richard. But if rumour were to be believed, the Norman prince preferred a different offering, and rarely drank wine if he could have blood instead. Dragulya seemed to find no pleasure in taking blood – except when he took it with a sword. While other vampires made an indulgence of necessity, Dragulya was plainly resentful of the need which made him in one small way dependent on those of weaker nature than himself.
The voivode took the goblet from Beheim’s hand, and stared moodily into its depths.
‘No gift from the pope, I assure you,’ murmured the minstrel. The pope’s experiments in the use of poison as an instrument of the art of diplomacy had made his name notorious.
Dragulya raised the vessel as if to make a toast, and then hesitated. He looked at his faithful minstrel, as he always did when he required inspiration in matters of ironic propriety.
‘To the frustration of the enemies of Walachia?’ suggested Beheim. ‘Or perhaps we should rather offer up a prayer that God might guide the arrows of Richard’s ridiculous bowmen?’
Dragulya managed only the thinnest of smiles. ‘To the frustration of the enemies of Walachia,’ he said, with a snarl. ‘And let the arrows fly where they will, to wreak such tiny havoc as they may!’
TWO
Richard, deposed Prince of Grand Normandy, was in no better temper than Vlad Dragulya when he left the council of war. He went likewise from the conference to his lodgings, and likewise summoned his friend, the minstrel Blondel de Nesle. He also sent for his astrologer.
Blondel was of greater importance to Richard than Michael Beheim to Dragulya. Richard would have said that it was because he was a warmer man, who knew the true value of friendship; Dragulya might rather have observed that it is more difficult for a prince to find a mirror for his nobility of spirit than a mirror for his ferocity.
The popular account had it that Blondel de Nesle had become Prince Richard’s most trusted confidant because he had helped to secure his release when he was briefly imprisoned in Walachia following the Third Crusade, but in fact the story was false, invented by Blondel himself as part of a romance whose main function was to conceal the true reason for that imprisonment. In Blondel’s version, Richard had been imprisoned by the Walachian Archduke Leopold because Leopold was jealous of his successes in fighting against Saladin. As Blondel had made the story famous, Richard would have recaptured Jerusalem had it not been for the perfidy and faintheartedness of certain Walachian allies, whose imprisonment of the Norman prince simply set the seal on their betrayal. In fact, the Walachians had been angered by the fact that Richard, exhausted by his long and fruitless campaign, had made a treaty with Saladin and set forth to return home, abandoning the war against the Mohammedans to the armies of Attila. Over the years, Blondel’s version had come to be accepted as truth in Gaul, where the heroic reputations of Charlemagne’s princelings were carefully maintained in song and celebration.
Blondel’s myth-making had created for Richard a past altogether more glorious than the real one, giving an uplifting account of his appointment to the throne of Grand Normandy which glossed over the bitter disputes which had led to his brother Geoffrey taking control of French Normandy and Anjou. Blondel was already planning an account of the present campaign according to which the contrite Walachians begged the Lionheart to take part, regretting their past ingratitude, and in which Richard’s answer to their plea was a gesture of magnanimity quite without parallel. In truth, Charlemagne still held Richard partly responsible for the bad feeling which had soured relations between Gaul and Walachia for several centuries; and the fact that the so-called Lionheart had surrendered the Tower of London to the revolutionary army without a fight had placed the Prince of Grand Normandy still further from the light of royal favour. This new crusade was to be a last chance of redemption, an opportunity to heal the breach between the empires and open the way for Walachian troops to come to the aid of the beleaguered warlords of Gaul.
In view of all this, Blondel was not in the least surprised to find Richard in a state of high anxiety following his encounter with the Impaler.
‘The man is a monster,’ Richard told him. ‘An upstart barbarian brute with shaggy hair and oaken limbs. He poured scorn upon my bowmen, who have served me faithfully for nigh on five hundred years. The man is hardly more than two centuries old, and yet he professes himself an expert in all the arts of war, as if firepower were everything. When I told him that I had brought the finest knights of Christendom to this crusade he begged leave to correct me, and said that I had only brought the oldest!’
The prince removed the last of the chain-mail armour which he had worn for his historic meeting. He was perspiring freely, unused to the Mediterranean sun which blazed above in the cloudless sky. ‘This Dragulya is a butcher, not a warrior. I had hardly believed that he could have earned the foul reputation which has preceded him, but now that I have seen him I would credit the worst account of his brutality. He affects to despise me for what happened in London, though he has no notion what it is to be on an island, cut off from allied armies by a vicious sea. He seems to blame me, too, because this petty alchemist of Malta was Norman by birth, and because I nursed his father as a mechanician in my court. There are no traitors in his own land, since he cleared t
hem out by spitting them all on wooden stakes, and he wonders that the rest of the world will not deign to follow his black example! As if I had never put a traitor to death!’
‘The world knows well enough how you deal with traitors, my lord,’ purred Blondel. ‘Even the naughty English celebrate your fortunate escape from assassination by burning Guy Fawkes in effigy, on every fifth of November.’
‘It is a custom which they are unlikely to continue now,’ retorted the prince, and added: ‘more’s the pity.’
‘We will restore it,’ said the minstrel. ‘And we may, perhaps, set aside other days for celebrating the fall of your enemies. We’ll let the commoners burn effigies of Cordery, too, and the popinjay Digby who calls himself Lord Protector of the English race. We’ll see them all in Hell, and make carnivals of the anniversaries of their deaths. That way, my lord, we’ll make the people rejoice in our salvation and our justice, and give thanks for our preservation. When the day comes that you return to London in triumph, and England’s mortal youth has been eaten up by war, then the new vampires will be revealed for what they are – usurpers infinitely more wicked than the good men they have briefly displaced. The commoners will sing in the streets to welcome you home, when you return. And if they sing not loudly enough – why, I’ll swear that they did, and time will make it true in the hearts and memories of your mortal subjects.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Richard, bitterly, ‘but first we must board these cursed galleys, and trust their captains to batter a way past the pirate fleet, and force a path across this cursed island – not fighting mere Mohammedans, mark you, but vampires who no more feel pain or fear injury than we do. This will be a harder fight, my friend, than any we have seen before.’
Blondel de Nesle was too careful a man to ask whether his master was afraid. He knew the answer, anyhow. Richard was afraid, and in extremity desperately so. The days were long gone when the prince was young, when he had fully deserved the fame of his boldness and recklessness. There had been a time when he was quite fearless in battle and truly expert in the arts of war. His elevation to immortality had given him such zest, and such an enormous appetite for battle, that he had readily earned the reputation for fierceness which made him Charles’s favourite for a while. But as time had gone by, in the Holy Land, Richard had come to realise how precarious his immortality really was. Two severe wounds had brought home to him the fact that he could be killed, and might live forever if and only if he successfully avoided destruction.
By the time he had turned back from Jerusalem, Richard was a changed man, who no longer had the heart for a real fight. That had become obvious on the journey home, when the prince had fallen prey to the common vampire anxiety about being at sea. Few vampires could bear to have the ocean beneath them for long, but Richard had conceived a special anxiety which haunted him still, and which made the prospect of the coming campaign an ordeal indeed.
Richard was still a mighty man in pretended fighting; there was none better in the tournaments of which he was so earnestly fond. With a weakened lance, and safe in the knowledge that no one really intended to kill him, he would throw himself into the conflict as if he really believed that he was the legendary Lancelot reincarnate. But in his heart of hearts he was, like so many other vampires, a coward. The rewards which vampirism had bestowed upon his body had made him all the more anxious not to lose the precious gift of life.
In Blondel’s most secret opinion, Vlad Tepes had every right to despise the Norman prince, provided only that men spoke the honest truth when they claimed that Dragulya had retained the full measure of his own courage. Blondel had never seen the fierce Walachian, and he knew too much of the power of minstrels to trust entirely the image which Beheim had built for the voivode. For all he knew, the tales of Dragulya’s battles were as inflated as the tales of Richard’s. He was not impressed by the bloodcurdling accounts of the Impaler’s actions in the aftermath of his victories. Impaling the defeated by the thousand – especially when so many were women and children – did not require bravery. If anything, such an appetite for blood was more likely to signify fear.
Despite this opinion, Blondel did not, on his own account, despise his master. He understood only too well the way that Richard saw the world. Blondel was a vampire too, and knew how great a coward he was himself, though he would never have confessed the fact. He always gave himself parts in his own songs and stories which implied that he was nearly as fine a hero as his master.
Richard’s astrologer Simon Melcart joined them, then, full of news about the terrible state of the city of Naples – a fever pit, he said, such as only rude Italians could bear. Melcart did not have to consult the stars, it seemed, before advising his master that they should all return forthwith to Cagliari. Alas, that was no part of the plan which the Walachian warlord had hatched. Richard’s ship was to sail with that part of the armada gathered in the Bay of Naples, to meet his own ships and join those now lodged near Palermo only when the whole fleet was gathered for the approach to Malta.
‘Tell me,’ said the prince to Melcart, in a tone more threatening than imploring, ‘what you have calculated regarding the outcome of the battle.’
‘A victory!’ proclaimed the astrologer, seating himself opposite the prince. ‘No doubt of it. A great victory!’
The prince looked for water to drink, but there was none on the table. As Melcart had said, Naples was afflicted at the present with an epidemic of fevers, and its water was not considered safe to drink by the physicians. He called instead for ale, and Blondel heard a servant scurrying upon the stair, made anxious by the petulant tone of the cry.
Blondel curled his lip slightly as he watched the two men sitting together at the table. The astrologer was very confident, it seemed. His kind were usually more cautious in their prophesies, not liking to commit themselves too far lest they be wrong. Richard was not the kind of man to kill a messenger simply because he bore bad news, but he was not inclined to be generous to bearers of good news who proved to be incorrect. This astrologer was new, his predecessor having fallen fatally from favour by failing to warn his master of the impending coup which had driven the vampires from Grand Normandy.
That sin of omission had not weakened the prince’s faith in the reading of the stars; it had merely made him lament all the more the loss of his dear John Dee, who had possessed – as Richard believed – all kinds of arcane and secret knowledge which he had failed to tell to the prince only because of his unfortunately treasonous sympathies. Richard, like most of the vampire princes in Charles’s empire, had an insatiable appetite for news of the future, and was far more enthusiastic to count the successes of his seers than their failures. He had maintained a perfect fascination for the strange experiments carried out in the Martin Tower by that wizard Earl of Northumberland who was once his prisoner. For his own part, Blondel had been far more impressed by the mechanical wizardry of Simon Sturtevant and the elder Cordery.
‘What of my own fortunes?’ growled the king.
‘Secure,’ Melcart assured him. ‘You will distinguish yourself in the field, as ever before. A good star stands watch over your sword, and Mars in Sagittarius promises that your archers will give the finest possible account of themselves. Arrows will determine this conflict, I declare, and the glory must be yours, for the Walachian prince has only muskets and cannon.’
‘A tragedy it is,’ murmured Blondel, ‘that the zodiac has no musketeer, to lend heavenly assistance to Dragulya’s artillery. We might need those guns against the vampires of St. John, and not a constellation in the sky may bless their aim!’
Melcart favoured the minstrel with a dire look, but ignored the interruption. ‘I have cast the horoscope of the rascal Cordery, which I am able to do most accurately because we know the hour and place of his birth. That horoscope is full of darkness. Death’s shadow reaches out to claim him, and there is fire for him, on the earth and in Hell.’
‘Oh, aye,’ said Blondel. ‘The pope took cognisance of th
at, no doubt, when he ordered that Cordery be brought to Rome for the Inquisition, even though the pontiff is a holy man and not a black magician.’
‘There is naught that is black in my art,’ said Melcart, stiffly. ‘God made the stars as he made the earth, and there is meaning writ in his entire Creation, if we have the wit to learn the signs.’
‘And are you sure that you have more wit than Noell Cordery, Master Melcart? After all, ’twas he who learnt the magic of making vampires, though no doubt ’twas written in the stars that his elixir would not cure his own mortality.’
‘His magic is not the one which God gave to us,’ retorted Melcart, ‘It is black, and against nature. Had he known how to read the stars he would most certainly have known that he had traded away his soul in return for his vile elixir, and that the devil would brook no delay in reclaiming the debt.’
‘’Tis a mercy, then, that the pope intends his inquisitors to break the alchemist’s spirit and to save his soul,’ said Blondel, in a lower voice. He said no more than that; it was not for him to speculate as to which of the two magics for making vampires might be against nature. And who was he to complain, when he surely owed his own immortality to the pleasant aspect which had caught the Lionheart’s lustful eye? Blondel was not a modest man, but knew that he did not owe his high position to his poetic skill. He knew how easily he might have been replaced by such a wordsmith as Master Shakespeare, had the play-wright only had a greater fairness of countenance to supplement his flattering histories of vampire aristocracy, and his dark and bloody tragedies of common mortality.
‘’Tis a mercy indeed,’ said Melcart, not entirely sincerely.
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