by Brian Lumley
Radu and his small band stole a ship and sailed north for the land of the Lombards, landed and loped east for Bulgar territories, and down to the Danube which he knew so well—
—And at once up into the Carpathians, when he discovered how fierce were the Bulgars! Ah, but the Drakuls had discovered it, too, as the “myths and legends” of Bulgar grandams at their hearth-fires were wont to confirm:
How two hundred years ago, brave ancestors had sought out the obours, the wampyrs in their mountain castles, and hounded them from the land. The obours were blood-sucking creatures who lived on bairns and virgins, and could shape themselves as bats to flee into the night. Though some of them had escaped in this fashion, their thralls and odalisques had been discovered in hiding. Hissing like snakes, they had been crucified and burned to ashes. And the castles of the obours had been razed to ruins …
Well, good! But in his heart of hearts Radu knew that the Drakuls themselves were still alive. Their power may have been destroyed—for the moment, at least—but they had survived. For there was a pain in him which would not go away until they had suffered the true death. Preferably at his hands …
When times were quiet he sent out spies to learn the way of things, and as always he stayed alert for word of the worst of his olden enemies, the Ferenczys—for he assumed that Waldemar would produce offspring. Huh! It would be a further fourteen decades before he heard of him and his again …
And meanwhile, as ever, the world was in flux …
It seemed no time at all (but in fact was seventy years) before Magyars occupied the fertile western plains. Since they were horsemen, the dog-Lord felt safe in the mountains …
Safe and bored! But while the Magyars were on the plains Radu would stay in the heights—until sixty years later, when in a dream he saw the next great battle, in which these savage horsemen would suffer their most decisive defeat. If it should come to pass, the plains and horseshoe mountains, and the Danube itself, would be up for the taking! And still Radu considered these lands his own, as he had from the beginning.
It was sufficient to send him and his pups north to skirt the plains, then west into Germany, where they joined Otto the First’s forces at Lechfeld in the year 955. Then Radu’s oneiromantic dreams were seen to be accurate in every detail. Loaded down with loot, their mounts exhausted, the Magyars were swatted like flies. Offering little or no resistance, their blood mingled with their spilled gold on a steaming field of battle. And when the fighting was over, their leaders were executed to a man.
Radu and his band were mercenary foot soldiers. Paid off—but remembering other payments, not to mention harshly enforced re-payments—he retreated at once back into the east, back to the mountains …
… Where a few years later he learned of a “great Boyar” with a castle in the Khorvaty north of Moldavia, a man called “Valdemar Fuhrenzig!” Now surely this must be that same Waldemar who had fled from the Romans, or from Radu, in Africa; that son of Belos Pheropzis, and grandson of Nonari “the Gross” Ferenczy? Aye, and Radu’s immemorial enemy—and a blood-oath still outstanding!
But … in the Khorvaty, east of the mountains? A friend of Kievan Russia, then, this “Valdemar,” with an aerie within its borders? A Boyar, he would have land and men and probably the protection of the Russian Prince. And what was Radu but a bandit in the hills? And if the dog-Lord had knowledge of this Valdemar, presumably Valdemar had knowledge of him. Damnation!
There was no putting it off: it was time Radu was on his way again.
Piracy! It had had its good points, and could have again. Anyway, the Saracens were in Radu’s debt—a debt of blood—and it was high time he collected. When he learned from travellers how men of Western Christendom (chiefly freebooters out of Pisa and Genoa) were fighting Saracens on what the Arabs now considered their own “great lake,” in Ligurian and Tyrrhenian waters, the dog-Lord was finally decided and knew what he must do.
A further hundred years of sea battles …
… Radu was with the Byzantines when they took back Crete and Cyprus from the Saracens …
… He was a pirate out of Pisa when Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearics fell …
He was rich on Arab gold beyond dreams of avarice, and a legendary seawolf … when, in 1118, fortune went against him and his boat was attacked by the Saracens off Syracuse. Fished from the sea burned, gouged, and half-drowned—taken hostage by the Saracens, who had learned to respect him—he was held for ransom in Ascalon for five of his longest years. But who was there to pay for his freedom? No one knew or would accept him; eventually his jailers must weary of feeding him and simply dispose of him. Also, his prison was thought to be inescapable, and in any case he was in no fit state to even try for an escape. Thus he spent the time healing himself—
—Until the Venetian naval victory of 1123, when in the panic and hysteria of the time he finally broke jail.
Having learned the Muslim tongue, and indeed looking like a long, loping Arab (and thus fearing to approach the Venetian crews where some of their ships had landed), Radu, a man alone now, took to the deserts and the high ground and made his way north … .
… For years he fished the Sea of Galilee …
… He became a “holy man,” a seer who read the future in dreams, in the Monastery on the Great Peak at Talat Musa …
… Eventually the real holy men were no more; Radu had a new lair and by night was leader of a fine pack; while in the daylight, thick monkish robes kept him from the sun …
… For long and long his leech continued to heal him. He had suffered that time off Syracuse, and his convalescence had its ups and downs …
… Time sped by. As ever, the whole world was at war. The Fourth Crusade came and went, and became part of the past however recent …
Territorial as every Lord of the Wamphyri before him, Radu had “adopted” Arabia, and “adapted,” as best possible, to its arid climate. With the coming of the Mongols, however, it was time for him to shuck off his ill-fitting monkish robes.
Again the dog-Lord went to war, this time for two reasons. One: the Mongols were a threat; certainly if they succeeded in their expansion, he would be uprooted again. And two: with the extermination of the Assassins and the fall of Baghdad in 1258, rumour and evil dreams had forewarned of at least one Wamphyri mercenary among the Asiatics fighting for Hulegu. His name—
—Was “Fereng the Black!”
Fereng? Ferenczy, more likely! But who? Waldemar? It seemed unlikely for by Radu’s lights he was a coward—if he was still alive! Some blood- or egg-son then? But what matter? He was a Ferenczy, and that was all that mattered! Yet Radu’s dreams had hinted of more than one Lord, and in more than one dream he had seen a bat-like figure falling out of the sky towards the field of battle. What, a Drakul? A Ferenczy and a Drakul, together on the side of the Mongols? Well, why not; it had happened before, more than a thousand years ago in Starside. And then as now the pact had been sealed in order to face down an even greater foe, Shaitan the Unborn. Or … perhaps this time it was to gang up on a weaker one.
Radu tried to work it out:
What if this Ferenczy and this Drakul had both been established in the Wallachian mountains, as they were known now? News of Mongol attacks and overwhelming victories in the east would have reached them even as it had reached Radu. And the brilliance—the sheer ruthlessness—of the Mongol cavalry armies would have seemed to make them invincible. Surely the best way to ensure survival must be to join with them, at least until the tides of war had once more swept by?
Thus (he reasoned) Fereng the Black and this unknown Drakul had themselves reasoned. But he knew they had got it wrong! Radu’s oneiromancy had forecast a turning point in Mongol fortunes which would be realized—at Ain Jalut!
In Cairo the Mameluke Sultan was massing his well-trained army. Radu joined them near Jerusalem, and in the last days of August 1260 marched north with them on Ain Jalut …
V
RADU: THE REST OF HIS HISTOR
Y … HIS AWAKENING
THE BATTLE AT AIN JALUT! BUT THERE ARE FIGHTS AND FIGHTS—AND THERE are massacres. The Sultan, Qutuz, was totally committed. Earlier, receiving a Mongol envoy who demanded his submission, Qutuz had flown into a rage and had the envoy executed. Now he must win, else disembowelling were the least of his torments.
The Mongol forces were split between several fronts many hundreds of miles apart. Their cavalry army riding south on Ain Jalut numbered “only” ten thousand. Led by Kitbuga, a Christian Turk, it was outnumbered more than ten to one by the Mamelukes. Moreover, the Mamelukes had knowledge of the Mongol advance and of the territory; they set up an ambush in foothills flanking a fertile plain. The plain was an historic invasion route not far from Nazareth; to ensure that the Mongols would come this way, a party of Berbers was deployed on camels to attract their attention and so lure them into the Mameluke trap.
“Ain Jalut,” the Egyptian commander of Radu’s group told them where they hid in the evening-shadowed hills looking down on the plain. “‘The Spring of Goliath.’ Goliath was a giant of a man, a warrior who was brought down by a stripling boy. This time we reverse the process. This time we are the mighty, and the stripling—in the shape of these Mongols—is the pagan enemy of the faith. But this time he shall not prevail.”
The trap worked. Where the valley narrowed between steep hillsides, the Berbers dismounted behind ditches and old earthworks, turned and defended themselves with bows and long spears. Meanwhile the Mamelukes came swarming down out of the foothills and engaged the Mongols from the flanks, and a reserve group of cavalry and infantry as strong as the entire Mongol force came sweeping from behind the hills to cut off any retreat.
Radu and his “monks,” despite that they were on foot in the lower foothills, were among the first to engage the milling Mongol army; which was work they might have been born for! To hack and hew among that mêlée of reeling, astonished flesh! The raging, the shouting and screaming! The blood of hamstrung horses and skewered men! The scarlet deluge erupting into the green valley, to turn it red …
The last rays of the sun were striking the western mountains as the Mongol army fell before the Mameluke onslaught. In the twilight before the night, when the sunlight had faded entirely, Kitbuga’s screams were his last when he was captured and quartered. After that—
—No birds sang over that field of blood, only a cloud of kites on high, biding their time, and wolves (but true wolves) in the hills, waiting. Which was when Radu and his party went among the fallen.
It was the same as in Africa that time; Radu knew what he was looking for, and wasted no time. His men found life in bodies where there should be no life, and stilled it with fire and steel. And aye, there were a good many thralls—even a lieutenant or two—among the “dead.” Then, a strange thing, though not so strange to the dog-Lord. In a gulley between steep-sided spurs of the hills on the northern flank, a pocket of mist … where no mist should be! He sent out a vampire probe, his mentalism, into the mist and felt its texture, the way it clung—and knew it for what it was …
The sun was down now. Radu took two lieutenants, two pups, with him into the gulley, into the heart of the mist, and found it already thinning. But sensing a fierce presence, he climbed a rock above the level of the vampire mist and looked up. There on the sheer wall of the cliff, moving like a lizard toward the high rim, a manlike figure. Except, adhering to the naked rock in that weird fashion, this was no ordinary man. Wamphyri!
But who? Not a Drakul, surely? For since the sun was down a Drakul would have transformed himself for flight. A Ferenczy then—“Fereng the Black”—fleeing the consequences of a lost cause. Cowardly, treacherous spawn of Nonari the Gross! Treacherous, aye, like all of them before him.
Then, in the next moment:
“Radu!” a lieutenant called to him, cautiously out of the thinning mist. The dog-Lord had been on the point of hurling a question after the climber: WHO? A question the Ferenczy would not have been able to resist; it would have surprised him, and Radu would have read the answer writ large in the confusion of his mind, doubtless confirming his suspicion. Cursing, because that time was past and the stranger had vanished over the rim, Radu got down from the rock and loped to his men gathered near the foot of the cliff.
“What is it?” he barked—then stood in stark amaze, for it was obvious what it was. “Treacherous,” he’d called the fleeing Ferenczy, and now the full extent of that treachery could be seen.
A body—a “man,” all bloodied and broken, but not dead—lay in a cluster of rocks, where tomorrow’s sun must doubtless find him … if Radu had not found him first. And the dog-Lord knew him, remembered him at a glance, of course—Karl Drakul! An original Starside Lord no less than Radu himself. But less than Radu now, certainly.
He lay in an ungainly tangle, sprawled on his back like a spider struck by a stone. And even as Radu watched, so the unconscious Drakul’s naked body commenced a complex metamorphosis. Thick webs of rubbery grey flesh like the hairy, membranous airfoils of a bat—which joined his arms to his trunk down to his thighs, and also formed an elastic “V” between his legs—shrank back into him! And as his pipestem limbs thickened, so his body firmed out and put on a little extra weight.
And oh, this was Karl all right. The fleshy lips and bald dome of a head; the purple orbits of his deep-sunken eyes; the squat nose, showing only too clearly its convolutions. And in the lolling cave of Karl’s mouth, the split tongue of a lying Lord of the Wamphyri. And those teeth, and those hands like a beast’s claws.
Radu’s lieutenants had seen something like this before—in their master, at that—but never to this extent. One thing to instantly develop the aspect and mannerisms of a great wolf, but another entirely to emulate a great bat! They drew back a pace, muttered and glanced at each other. But Radu stepped forward and, snarling, said: “He was preparing for flight when the other bastard struck and cut him down. So much for pacts!” And with an oath and a kick he turned Karl Drakul face-down in the bloodied dust.
Then the worst of it was seen: the sword slash along this undead creature’s spine, and the ragged flaps of flesh wrenched aside to expose the knuckles of the spine itself. They were ribbed, warped, notched, those bones, with grooves and small drilled holes where something had clung like an alien organ. Karl’s vampire leech, Radu knew—which Fereng the Black had torn out and probably eaten!
“One has escaped,” Radu told his men then. “I saw him on the cliff face, climbing like a lizard. The pair of them, Drakul and Ferenczy, they came together to side with the Mongols and join the bloody butchery. For the hell of it? Possibly. To befriend this marauding Asiatic scum, and save their own miserable skins? Probably. Because they knew I was at liberty in the so-called ‘Holy Land’? … Ah, very likely! But when the battle went against them they tried to make their escape. The Ferenczy … maybe he was injured and unable to transform? But he could not bear the idea of being left behind while the Drakul made a clean getaway! Or perhaps they had argued? Whichever, while the Drakul was preparing for flight, Fereng the Black cut him down and tore out his leech. Good, for it saves me the trouble!”
Karl Drakul’s shirt, breeches and cloak were nearby. Radu brought them together and piled them on the shuddering shape of an ex-vampire Lord. But when he would have struck fire, Karl’s no longer scarlet eyes snapped open. Turning his head this way and that, he saw his predicament. And:
“So,” he gurgled, his forked tongue flopping in his mouth. “It is you, Radu. Well, better you than that other dog, the one who brought me to this.”
“Time is short,” Radu told him. “Doubtless there’ll be an uproar when you burn. The Sultan’s troops could find us at any time, and I would not want them to see …”
The Drakul managed a ghastly sharp-toothed grin. “Anonymity is synonymous—”
“—With longevity,” Radu nodded. “But mine, I fear, not yours.”
“Will you make it—ah! Ahhh!—quick?” Karl squirmed a very little,
then lay still, panting.
“If you’ll answer me truly.”
“Ask away, but quickly. I’m a husk, drained … I have no leech … I hold my pain at bay, but not for long. It is quite … unbearable. My screams, such as they would be, would doubtless attract attention.”
Radu nodded in his grim fashion. “But if you do scream it will be quicker still. Very well, let’s get to it. Who is he?”
“Now? Fereng the Black,” Karl answered. “Before that his name was Faethor. Great-grandson of Nonari the Gross Ferenczy. And … he’s a one to watch out for.”
“That seems obvious,” Radu said. “How many of you remain?”
“Wamphyri?”
“Drakuls. First Drakuls.”
“Myself only.”
“Liar! What of Egon?” Radu looked deep into Karl’s eyes, and when he would turn them away grabbed his large fleshy ears to hold his head still. Karl could not resist him: Radu’s eyes penetrated into his very mind, even his soul, if he’d had one. And: “Ah! He lives!” Radu let go Karl’s ears, sat back on his haunches. “But no egg-sons, nor bloodsons—not yet, at least. Perhaps when he learns of this—”
“—He will, in the moment of my passing.”
“You will … communicate?”
“He will know. We Drakuls are special that—ah! Ahhh!—that way.”
“Now the Ferenczys,” Radu growled. “How many?”
Karl’s eyes were starting out and grey sweat oozed on his face and bald head. “I think I want to die now,” he said.
“I am in total agreement,” Radu answered. “But I want to know how many Ferenczys. Do you not want me to know? For after all, it was a Ferenczy did this to you. He could have finished it, but left you to fry in tomorrow’s noon sun. And even these rocks would not have sheltered you then.”
