by Alex Oliver
At the end of this room, a section of what looked like bookshelf proved to be a last door, cunningly painted and carved, fooling the eye, and even confusing the idle hand a little. Through this, another short flight of steps brought them to the inner sanctum. A round room of chestnut and gold, with a large desk and an indescribable chaos of stacked volumes and scattered papers.
Windows encircled him, and when Frank looked out he saw he was in a turret built out of the edge of a mountain. Only sky and a deep fall in every direction. A hundred feet beyond the glass, direct at his eye level, a gyrfalcon floated on braced wings, gazing with haughty eyes at the tiny scurrying things down on the distant valley bottom.
Radu Vacarescu sat at the desk with a pen in his hand and a large volume of what looked like accounts open before him. His head was propped on his fist and his hair trailed in the ink. He couldn't quite manage to hide the start of coming awake when Anca put the tray of coffee down by his elbow, though he tried.
Frank could see why he dared sleep here. Even with the bookish clutter, stepping into the room was like stepping into a floating bubble of light: clear, clean, all but holy.
Wordlessly, Anca left. Vacarescu gave Frank a slow inscrutable look, and waited for him to speak.
At the level gray gaze, so like the clarity of the room - comforting and bleak all in one - Frank discovered he didn't know what to say. Starting with "So, I hear your family are demons," seemed crass. Starting without it seemed false.
He pulled out one of the heavy mahogany chairs and settled into it with a sigh. Vacarescu set his pen down in its holder and recognized, perhaps, the silent plea for help. "I am glad to see you up and about. Have any memories returned?"
"Some," Frank smiled. Yes, better to work up to it in the course of conversation. "Mostly it's pre-verbal things. Attitudes, things I take for granted. I can feel the rest of it pushing up under the surface like a geyser readying to blow."
Vacarescu returned the smile, and perhaps it was Frank's new knowledge that freed the expression from the layers of irony he had read into it before. Perhaps it was only that this was the first time they had spoken unobserved, and the man felt able to shed one or two layers of armor. At any rate, it was a small and pleasant smile, laced with sympathy around the edges. "Perhaps then, it will be easier on you to tell you this now."
He rose and went to look out of one of the windows, presenting his dull blue back to Frank's gaze. "I'm afraid we've found two bodies in the Olt, which we think are the remains of the other two English scholars. The friends you mentioned. One shot, one the victim of some kind of explosion."
It was better to hear this now, Frank agreed, when he couldn't recall why he should grieve. But the news did jog something free of the log-jam of his scattered thoughts. "Was there a third Englishman?" Flash of tall boulders and a familiar face on the wrong end of a rifle. Smoke as Frank watched him fall. "He would have been among the bandits, in the rocks by the side of the river. I think... I don't know. I have the feeling it was not a random attack."
"We found no other bodies, except for a couple of gypsies washed up further downstream. If the man fell among his comrades, however, they are likely to have taken him away to bury." Vacarescu turned, and leaning back against the windows, light limned by the empty sky, gave Frank a look of sharp interest. "Why would there be an assassin on your trail? Who are you, or what have you done to merit that?"
"I would very much like to know that myself."
An impasse again, as Frank searched for a way of changing the subject gracefully. But there was none. How did you say 'are you a lackey or a prisoner of the things that dwell in your house with you' without causing offense? Frank had forgotten many things, but not the casual strength of Vacarescu's backhand blow. He could still feel it like a fresh graze on his cheek.
He picked up the coffee pot by way of distraction, poured the thick, bitter brew into two small cups. "Shall I be mother?"
The smile again in response, just far enough from being mocking to verge on kind. Vacarescu came slowly back to the desk as if reeled in by a careful fisherman. "What?"
"It's what we say in England if we're going to pour the tea," Frank added sugar to his coffee, and sipped. Horrible. But it kicked him in the chest like a mule and set his heart galloping. Abruptly he was tired of his own cowardice, tired of the invisible restraints of what must have been a suffocatingly polite upbringing. Surely he could allow himself to be rude when his life was at stake?
He waited until Vacarescu was close enough to pick up his own cup, the carved amethyst stone of his signet ring gleaming a purple so dark it was almost black as he curved his fingers around the handle. "Tell me about the strigoi," he said.
Vacarescu did not recoil, but he stiffened, and there was a long pause while he stared at the dark froth of his coffee, his head bent. Frank took the chance to steady his own breathing and congratulate himself on a small victory over his own shortcomings.
The smile had gone when Vacarescu looked up, replaced with the hard-mouthed surly look with which Frank was much more familiar. "Either you have just remembered that word, or the servants have been gossiping. Which?"
"Does it matter?" Frank waved the question away before he could succumb to the urge to answer it. "I am glad to know where I stand. Did you know that one of them attacked me on the way here?"
He couldn't quite interpret the flash of something through those pale eyes. Fury or guilt, it could have been either. Vacarescu said nothing, just watched Frank coolly, waiting for him to come to his point.
So Frank did. "Until last night, I thought it was you. You have the same stature, the same eyes. It was dark, you understand. I only saw glimpses of the creature."
This reaction was a little easier to parse: Surprise and then understanding. "Ah. That explains a great deal. You thought Alaya was protecting you from me, rather than the other way around. What happened last night to change your mind?"
"I saw Constantin. He looks like you."
Vacarescu huffed a silent laugh. "I look like him." He turned to open one of the great glass fronts of the bookshelves, where a series of tall books bound in blue regressed from the jewel-like present to tattered, faded pasts. Taking out one of the older volumes, he laid it - to Frank's distress - flat on the table. No wonder the spine was broken, and loose pages stuck out at angles from segments that had slipped their glue.
When his bibliophile soul had protested long enough, Frank looked down at the page his host had opened for him, and there was Constantin, stiffly drawn in the center of a medieval illumination, surrounded by other stiffly drawn horsemen with long hair and aggressive mustaches and fur hats trimmed with pearls. It was not by any means a wonderful likeness, but the little illustrated man was white clad from head to foot, just as he had been last night. The artist had colored his eyes with sheet silver and they gleamed cold as Russian winters whenever Frank tilted his head.
"He was one of Voivode Dracul's men," Vacarescu sat with the air of one repeating a well-worn story. The ancestry of his house - his own story, in a way - for Frank knew enough about being noble-born to understand how ones ancestors breathed through you with every breath.
"Vlad Dracul? The folk hero?"
"Indeed." A wry look. "A great man, who fought back the Turks and stamped out the corruption of his nobles, and enabled the common folk of Wallachia to live in prosperity, under a law that applied to all."
He angled the book so that he could look at it too, brushed an affectionate fingertip along the illustration. Frank held back a protest at the thought of what the touch was doing to the delicate colors and paper.
"I am named after Dracul's brother," Radu said, unexpectedly, but the softening in his tone ran out, left it cold again. "The useless one. The collaborator who ruled Wallachia as a puppet of the Turks, for a time. 'Radu the Beautiful', catamite of Sultan Mehmet II." He closed the book with a snap. Frank made a little noise of sympathetic pain on its behalf. "It is appropriate enough. Now I rule th
is banat as a puppet of my ancestor, as every son of the line has done since Dracul's day."
Frank understood the feeling of shame—powerless, impotent shame, the inability to be what ones ancestry demanded. He smothered a desire to reach across the desk and curl a hand reassuringly around his host's wrist. Not only would it be in no way appropriate, he wasn't yet convinced Vacarescu was as trapped as he wanted Frank to think.
"Why would Constantin pass the title down? Wouldn't it make more sense for him to keep hold of it?"
Vacarescu snorted with scorn. "Constantin died and was buried. This is a known fact. Dead men may not own property. Dead men may not rule. But if they have children, they can come back and carry on telling those children how to live. And those children ... I do not know how it is in your country, but here, children are brought up to honor their elders. It's not unknown for a fifty year old man still to be ruled by his eighty year old father. Our family's case is only a more extreme version of that."
"Except that the father is a murderer, and the son knows it." Oh lord! Frank's own hypocrisy startled him. Where had that come from? What made him think – when he was dogged by his own unrevealed crime – that he could afford to stand on the moral high ground? When Vacarescu reacted by rising from his seat, grabbing Frank by the collar and dragging him across the desk, scraping his weight across the fragile ancient text as if he didn't care that the pages would tear under the stress, Frank really could not blame him.
"The book!" Frank gasped, terribly conscious of knuckles against his throat, pressing into the beat of the great vein, slowing the pulse of his blood. His head filled with gray fog as he tried to pry the fingers off. "You'll damage it!"
He was dropped sharply. Vacarescu moved away like a man recoiling from temptation. "Of course, the book," he said in disbelief. When Frank caught himself before he could land on it, and carefully replaced the dislodged pages in their places, closing it like a holy thing, he gave again his not-quite-laugh. "What strange priorities you have."
Returning to the window, Vacarescu sighed and bowed to rest his forehead against the glass, a small and weary gesture. "Perhaps you are owed the full story. This is how it is, then. When Constantin died, his young wife sickened and died but a month after, leaving a babe in arms. The child was cared for, during the day, by the family of one of his retainers. At night he was raised by dead parents. He felt all the love for them any boy feels for his mother and father. When he was old enough to command he was glad to accept the duty of protecting them in return.
"As is our custom in this land, they found him a wife. Their first child was a girl, on whom the whole family doted. But then they had a son." He spread both hands on the glass on either side of his head, an oddly cruciform posture that Frank found upsetting. "The family lived until the son was weaned, and then, mysteriously, mother, father and daughter died, leaving the infant child to be raised by his grandparents with no memory of any other carers.
"This is how it has been now for nearly three hundred years. For a thousand generations Constantin and Alaya have been 'father' and 'mother' to each singular son." He turned, his new smile drawn like a dagger. "A tested and satisfactory system indeed, don't you think?"
Frank did not. "All this time they've been terrorizing the county? Why do the people stand for it? I see why your commoners are running away now. I don't see why they didn't do so three centuries ago."
"Have you never wondered why wolves and deer can live in the same forest? Why the deer do not simply go away - why the wolves do not simply eat them all at once?"
"I..." Frank knew about books. He had not a clue about the eating habits of wolves. "No?"
Radu Vacarescu had eyes that gleamed with the same chill as those of his ancestor, hard and faintly inhuman. Raised by monsters Frank thought, and surprised himself by finishing just like me.
"There is a balance," said Vacarescu as easily as if he was discussing partridge shooting season and not murder. "A prosperous community can afford to lose a few of its weaker members a year. Those who are dying of cankers or agues, those whose malice sees them cast out from their villages to wander after dark. Criminals, runaways, bandits, and occasionally willing sacrifices, chosen by lot. Our people have ruled here since before the Romans, and on the whole we have ruled well. Having seen the chaos of other banats, under absentee lords, the occasional cull is something our peasants are willing to endure."
Frank remembered doors left gaping, cold fires and silence while the flowers withered in the unwatered gardens. "Yet now you're losing villages overnight. That's got nothing to do with the fact that their ruling family is two thirds demon?"
"Three hundred years after the fact and they suddenly decide to care?" Scorn. "Hardly."
And like it or not, he had a point. "Then what changed?"
"You may find it hard to believe, but what changed was politics. Do you remember I mentioned that Vlad Dracul disposed of a number of treacherous boyars?"
"Disposed of?"
"Impaled."
Frank was about to protest from the bottom of his gentle English heart, sick at the cruelty, when a memory of a hanging assailed him with the strength of a nightmare - the smells of sweat and righteousness and ordure, the victim choking, kicking, his bowels opening. Jeers among the crowd.
Vacarescu had been watching him mockingly, as one watches a child that cannot bear the cruelties of adult life, but at the look on Frank's face his expression eased. "The surviving boyars did not take this lesson to heart," he said. "We have been under the thumb of the Sultan so long we have lost all our pride, learned simply to scrabble for whatever scraps he throws. We have grubbed for wealth and used it to buy our way to the Voivode's throne - promised loyalty, reneged whenever it suited us, spineless and worthless, fit only to be placed in a locked room and set on fire."
He paused, genuinely angry, with an anger that reminded Frank of another man, of ... hawk face, spindly fingers, iron hair cropped close to go under a periwig. Frank's father, Arthur Carew, Earl Hungerford. A man who regarded the perfect honor of his family as an extension of his own good name.
Oh, Frank put a hand over his mouth to keep this revelation from flying away. He had a name and a family. How about that.
"With our boyars squabbling, we have been easy pickings for conquerors from every nation under the sun," Vacarescu had not noticed the moment of revelation, absorbed in his own concerns, "About twenty years ago, the Ottomans gave us up to the Austrians. Though we might have expected better treatment from fellow Christians, the Austrians regarded us as a convenient source of wealth and squeezed us hard for it, until the peasants had to choose between paying the taxes and feeding themselves. Three years ago, under the Treaty of Belgrade, we were passed back to the Sultan. He decided he could not trust any of our own boyars to rule in his name, and put a Greek slave on the throne.”
He sighed again, bitterly. “If this was supposed to make things better, I'm not sure how. The Turks have left us at the mercy of a foreign prince for whom ruling this country is a marvelous opportunity for getting rich on the suffering of strangers. He put the taxes up.”
He rubbed at his frown with a clenched fist, helpless and angry at it. “Since under this punitive system they cannot work hard enough to feed themselves, there is little else the peasants can do but to leave their homes and either turn to banditry or find another country where they can. Hence the exodus of whole villages into Transylvania, where conditions are better.
"My parents are not stupid. They have been restraining themselves for centuries, taking only what can be supported. We had achieved a balance that was workable for everyone. But with fewer peasants the balance is tipped. With the Turks driving our people away, the strigoi must restrain themselves more, feed less. They are old and proud and famished. They take to being starved no better than anyone else does. This will not end well."
Frank folded his arms around his stomach and held on. He was not cold, snuggled into his borrowed, fur-lined coat as he
was - and that gave him pause, for it was Vacarescu's coat. His clothes that Frank wore. His hospitality Frank had been relying on since the rescue. His nights that had been sacrificed to make it more awkward for the monsters to drain Frank dry.
All of that generosity, and Frank had so far only repaid him with hard words and accusations. He had not yet given Frank an explanation for why he had not rid his people of this blight for good, but perhaps he...
Oh, but he had, hadn't he? 'A single solitary son' in every generation. In every generation, Constantin and Alaya had been mummy and daddy before they had been anything else. Frank looked around the beautiful room a little wildly, searching for something that would take the nausea out of his sudden understanding. Because Frank remembered little save unrelenting disappointment from his own father, and still he didn't believe he could ever bring himself to raise a hand to the man.
Frank thought again of Alaya, with her huge eyes and her practiced, patient sweetness. The charm of her smile. He could see her with a small boy in her arms, both of them poring together over the illuminated histories, while she instilled in him a pride in his own blood. Did Frank really expect Vacarescu to kill his own mother? Whatever she was, otherwise, she was still that.
"I'm sorry."
Astonishment made Vacarescu's black brows twitch like raven's wings. All of his expressions were harsh, and perhaps that was why Frank had been so slow to see him as a man who could be hurt like any other. "About what?"
"You saved my life, and although you joked with me about repayment, you haven't demanded any. My presence in your house has made trouble for you. I may be bringing danger to you - I certainly feel as if I am. All you've done has been to treat me with open-handed kindness, and I repay you with accusations."
Vacarescu’s surprise devolved into astonishment, an oddly lumpen look on a face meant for certainty. Had the man never been apologized to in his life that it took him so aback?
