And now they were short of materiel. Mothers around Sárvár were hiding their children or sending them to distant relatives. Erzsébet had ridden through villages filled only with glowering old women and white-bearded ancients, no fit subjects for her work. So she had come to Csejte hoping that memories would have faded and the promise of service would draw new girls in, but the same stories were whispered here. She had to rely on travellers ambushed on the roads, on girls kidnapped from further afield. She had even made clandestine overtures to the Turk in the hope that they would have Christian captives to sell at their slave markets; yet here she was, in direst need, and the cells below the castle were empty.
After the drained girl was found, she knew, if she were not to be hounded out of her last sanctum, that she must turn and face the huntsman. Unwilling to flee, and knowing that to be caught on the road would be fatal, she had chosen the fight. Even now Dorottya, Katarína and Fickó were out with some thugs, taking by force what would not be offered willingly. Once they were back, Erzsébet would wield the knife herself, painting the whole castle with blood if she needed, to overpower the Dragon and banish him yet again.
She heard them return as evening was drawing in, and stormed down to castigate them for dragging their feet. There would barely be time to effect their preparations, and he would even now be stirring in whatever hole he had dug for himself, surrounded by the soil that fed his strength.
When she found them, still kicking the mud off their boots, she realized the late hour was the least of their worries.
Dorottya’s grim look confessed to their failure from the start as she hobbled to stand before her mistress. Katarína was bruised, one eye swollen where a stone had struck her, and Fickó was nursing an injured arm. Erzsébet felt the urge to just beat them all herself, to scream at them for their failure. Don’t you know what you might have cost me? But she needed to know what had happened. Never had her people returned empty-handed.
“There was a priest,” Dorottya spat, leaning on her cane as she lowered herself to sit. “Magyari, his name was. He had them all riled up against you, my lady. He was preaching that you were the Devil’s willing servant, and that you would be cast down like Jezebel.”
“And why have you not brought him here for punishment? Or just his head?” Erzsébet demanded.
“Countess”—Dorottya’s voice was an exhausted whisper—“he had the people of three villages together, with fire and staves and axes. Many of your men are dead. We only escaped because Katarina slung me over her shoulder and Fickó can run like a dog. He knows, my lady. This preacher has heard the stories, and seen what you have done.”
“What I have done?” Erzsébet demanded. “I am the Countess Erzsébet Báthory. These are my lands. They are my people. They are mine. If their blood will make me strong, or young, or merely happy, then that is their place in the world! They cannot tell me no!” Her eyes widened, the rant dying almost before it had begun. “But for this to happen now, when he is close… He has set this preacher in motion. He has spread word against me.”
“The preacher said…” Dorottya visibly considered the wisdom of her words before soldiering on. “He said he had written to the Emperor to denounce you.”
Erzsébet laughed scorn at that. “And will Emperor Rudolph come from Prague to sit in judgment on me? Will his nephew, that spendthrift Matthias, take the part of these ignorant peasants against one of his own? I shall have this Magyari flayed alive. I shall make an exception and bathe in a man’s blood this once, and see if his precious sanctity rubs off on me. I shall…” And the words dried up, because she heard Ferenc’s voice, still roaring drunk but singing no longer. He was hailing someone out of the window, just two rooms away.
“Come in, come in, fine fellow!” they heard him shout. “The house is yours, my honoured guest! Come in!”
“No!” Erzsébet shrieked, but the words were lost in the boom of the castle door being thrown open. She stared at her followers with manic eyes. “Fetch the cook, fetch the stable boy, the last of the maids, all of them! Open their damned throats and drain them to the last drop. He is here, and we have not the strength, we have not the strength to keep him out!”
A chill wind seemed to gust through the castle, as of the passage of some great, cold thing through the halls, heading upwards, ever upwards.
“The nursery,” Dorottya cursed, and they heard Ilona cry out in terror.
By the time Erzsébet had struggled up the stairs, it was too late. He had not even given her the courtesy of staying to gloat at her expression. Ilona lay senseless in a corner, and in the little bed lay her son, her seven-year-old boy, eyes open but never more to see. Frost lay on his skin, dusting his eyelashes and hair with white, just like the girls Erzsébet had left out for the winter. His blood was all still in him. That was the ultimate insult; the blood of her son had not been a vintage that he had deigned to sample.
Erzsébet stared down at the slight, frozen body for precisely three heartbeats, as Katarína and Fickó caught up with her.
“Bring them,” she instructed, no feeling in her voice at all. “The stable boy, the maids, all of them. Bring them and make them ready.”
“But… it’s too late?” Fickó asked hesitantly, looking past her at the still form.
Erzsébet slapped the hunched dwarf hard enough to knock him off his feet. “It’s not too late!” she screamed at him. “Bring them now! Bring them and empty them! And bring ice from the cold rooms, all the ice we have!”
Letter from György Thurzó, Sárvár, to Prince Matthias of Habsburg, Governor of Austria, Prague, 1604
My right worthy and worshipful Prince, I write under the most dolorous circumstances and recommend us all to the Lord’s mercy.
I shall be sure that no messenger out-speeds my own, for it is my solemn duty to report the death of the Black Captain, Ferenc Nádasdy.
I have kept you appraised of the malady that has long touched my friend and your loyal commander, and since his return from his home and the death of his son, it has reached new heights. In times of peace simply walking, standing, sleeping has been beyond him. With battle and bloodshed at hand, his actions were such that the dread he was held in, by the Turk and the Transylvanian rebels both, only grew with every skirmish. All things must pass, however. In this last clash, his conduct was above and beyond the call of valour as he plunged his destrier in amongst the enemy, ahead of the vanguard of our forces, ready to rout them alone.
At the peak of his charge he gave out a great cry, heard across the field, and toppled from the saddle. When his body was recovered to Sárvár, there was no wound or mark on him that might have been dealt by the enemy, not even a scar upon his armour. Instead, and I almost fear to recount it, his body was strangely wasted inside his mail, as though all the strength that had sustained him over these last hard years had been abruptly withdrawn.
I will mourn my friend, but I feel that I lost him some years hence, and the expiry of his mortal shell was only the post-script. I pray that the Lord has mercy on him for the services he has done for Christendom, and forgives those actions that, in themselves, were less than Christian.
Perhaps Ferenc had premonition of his fate, for the night before, he called notaries before us both, with documents to the effect that, should anything befall him, the care and keeping of his surviving children were to be mine, and these documents I enclose herewith. He was emphatic that his wife should have no control over them and, in those last moments before he retired, he seemed a man in utter mortal dread for his soul.
Your Highness, I have served you well both in the war and outside it, and you will recall the many services I have done for you and your brother the Emperor in pursuing the truth of matters obscure and unnatural, when my sword was not being bloodied against the Turk. In the name of this service, I ask a boon. I have many times given Ferenc audience on the matter of his wife, and have spoken with the priest Magyari, who made such alarming accusations. I beg you now, grant me your
writ to follow these rumours and dispel them if I may, or else to bring to light what lies hidden, for I am more and more convinced that when so many tongues wag of such deeds, there may be a very dire cause.
Your servant and soldier ever on this the 5th day of January in Our Lord’s Year 1604
G
VIII.
Prague, 1605
ERZSÉBET HAD COME this far on a path of gold, favours, threats and one actual murder—a court official of minor family who had felt that neither a full purse nor the gratitude of the Báthory family was sufficient to let him bend his duty. Well, for all that his was a weightier corpse than any number of mere peasants, Erzsébet had buried it deep, and priggish gadflies of the court were a pest that swarmed in any season.
She had risked a great deal. She had travelled to the heart of Empire almost without retinue, desperate to move fast. Now, crossing the threshold of Emperor Rudolph II’s most private library, she had only Ilona with her. Dorottya was too crippled to leave Csejte these days, and neither lumpen Katarína nor odious little Fickó could read a word.
There was a curious quality to the air within the library, as though all that convoluted lore had folded it like a piece of paper, giving the high-ceilinged, shelf-lined room a sense of vast unseen realms packed away at every turn. Opening the shutter of her lamp, Erzsébet cast its beam about ranks of books, each of them a select volume of occult knowledge hunted down by Rudolph in his mad desire to know. Erzsébet had met the man on state occasions, when his attention was plainly anywhere but on the business before him. He closeted himself with alchemists and sorcerers and artists while his brother Matthias slowly extended his hand towards the reins of state. Wise heads claimed Matthias would be Emperor sooner rather than later, as Rudolph’s eccentricities tried and taxed every part of the Empire, and perhaps that would be to Erzsébet’s advantage. Matthias owed fortunes to the Báthory line, a veritable king’s ransom; when he was king, she would have him by the throat with a cord of gold. By then, though, this library would likely be beyond her reach or scattered across Europe. She needed the mystical Rudolph, not the debtor Matthias.
Ilona had a list of works reputed to be in the Emperor’s private collection, and they had some small space of time in which to search. They lit the half-melted candles they found there and set to untangling Rudolph’s idiosyncratic shelving.
They had been at it for perhaps twenty minutes, efficient and silent as seasoned thieves, with one volume already located and set aside. Then Erzsébet heard a long, drawn-out breath, and realised they were not alone.
She and Ilona turned in concert. In a shadow alcove, surrounded by stacks of bookmarked tomes, sat a long-faced man with a tangled beard, wearing a nightgown, once bright Chinese silk of incalculable worth, that was now faded and worn. For a long while, Erzsébet stared, before finally sketching a jerky, reluctant curtsey to their host, Rudolph II, King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, and Holy Roman Emperor.
His gaze showed only a tentative acknowledgement of reality, but then he sniffed ostentatiously as though Erzsébet or Ilona had brought something in on their shoe, and said, “I know who sent you.”
Perhaps she should have bluffed, then—pretended to be some menial and shirked responsibility for what she was about—but that was not in her nature. “Nobody sent me,” she told him icily. “I am Erzsébet Báthory, and I go where I will.”
His next words chilled her. “I can smell him on you. You’ve come at his command.” His voice was ragged with misery, and the way he pronounced ‘he’ matched her exactly, when she spoke of the Dragon.
She crossed to him immediately, heedless of place and propriety. “Your Majesty, I know of him. He is my enemy, as surely as he is yours. You are the greatest scholar of hidden lore in the world. Surely you have found a way to overcome his power—or to duplicate it, to fight off death…” Under his melancholy scrutiny her words tailed off, for if this old, sad man could have achieved any such thing, would she be meeting him in such circumstances?
“He always wins,” whispered Rudolph, leaning close to her. “He promised he would teach me, if I made war against the Turk he hates so much; against another of his kind—a ‘brother,’ as he puts it—who he believes orders them as he directs me. But now the war has exhausted my Empire and all I know is how much I do not know. And he goes on, my child. He always goes on.” One frail hand took in the ranked spines of the library, or perhaps all the books there ever were. “Read any of them, read them all, there’s nothing in them that will let you go where he has gone. Shadows, all of it. Cobweb and shadows.”
“No, Your Majesty, no,” Erzsébet hissed, but he stared through her, not consenting to her existence, as though she was one more shadow that a movement of the candles might dispel.
Letter from György Thurzó, Németkeresztúr, toPrince Matthias of Habsburg, Governor of Austria, Prague, 1606
My Most High Prince, I write this day from the Báthory holdings at Németkeresztúr.
Glad I am to do my duty by you, my Prince; less glad in the particulars, for my investigation has for some time now been work that would daunt the strongest of men.
The impasse that I had been at with certain of the Nádasdy has at last been circumvented. The application of money and your recent peace treaties have conspired to permit me access to the apartments and chambers used by him and his wife when they were present here, as I was able to in Pozsony. As there, I have uncovered cells and chambers not to be encountered by a casual visitor. As the Countess is absent, these were untenanted, but I found plenty of circumstantial evidence to back up the claims of the people hereabouts. I would guess that, at their height, the secret prisons here could have held a score of souls altogether, and there are also alchemical paraphernalia and certain tomes which your brother Rudolph would doubtless twitch to lay his hands upon, for their subject matter was nothing less than pure witchcraft and the darkest magic.
I have accumulated a considerable body of evidence from here and Pozsony and, as I understand the Countess is to return to Csejte in the New Year, I shall attempt a similar discovery at Sárvár while she is away from it. My informants tell me that the rumours of her practices have not lessened at all with her husband’s death, and indeed her activity suggests some single-minded project consuming her notice so that I may gather my evidence undetected.
I will provide my fullest report when all is ready, and I know you will have faith in my diligence from my similar services to you in the past. You will recall, perhaps, the werewolf of Rusovce or the supposed witches of Eichbüchl, and how the tale had grown so much in the telling, though in truth there was hardly a mad dog in the one nor a single malevolent crone in the other. This is not such a case, and what I have uncovered already overshadows the worst that any tattling tongue has spoken, for each of those complainants saw only a small part of a work that has been conducted across the Empire wherever the Báthory coat of arms has been displayed.
I shall write again once I have conducted my inquisition at Sárvár.
I am your man and ever will be, by the grace of God, which ever have you in his keeping.
Written this 2nd of December in the Year of Our Lord 1606 by your servant
G
Letter from King Matthias of Hungary, Pozsony, to György Thurzó, Sárvár, 1608
To my loyal György,
Your congratulations on my coronation are duly welcomed, though I would as lief be without the clutter of ceremony that so impedes the ability to accomplish any good act. Likewise your condolences on my brother’s infirmity and retreat from many aspects of governance. I write to you with good news, that wheels are set in motion to confer upon you the mantle of the Palatine of Hungary. I anticipate my own eyes will be more turned towards Prague and Vienna as my brother’s support amongst the families wanes.
Your further report from Sárvár I commend in its meticulous detail. You must find excuse to bring your investigation to Csejte, even though the Tigress seems ensconced in her lair
there. You have herewith my writ to take whatever steps you must to dispel this great shadow from our land.
Given at the court of Pozsony on the twenty-seventh day of the month of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and eight, by Matthias, second of that name, King of Hungary and Croatia and Archduke of Austria.
IX.
Csejte, 1609
“I BEG YOU, Countess, do not attempt this.” Dorottya Semtész’s voice was weak. She was weak, an old, old woman all crumpled up by time, eaten away by pain. Erzsébet brushed past her as if she were no more than cobwebs and shadows, ascending to the high tower room with a sweep of her gown while the witch had to conquer each step one after another, her dire predictions fading to echoes.
Up in the high room—once a nursery, but there were no more children here, not any more—everything was being brought to readiness. There was a great stone bath there—Katarína and five strong men had hauled it up with block and tackle. There were eleven girls taken from the villages by Fickó and those same men, all whimpering and naked and shackled, awaiting the knife. Their weeping would have stirred a passion in Erzsébet once, but now she was all desperate purpose. Time enough for pleasure later, when her task was done.
Time, her enemy. He had been right about that. Time that sunk its claws into her—almost fifty years, now, and if the glass showed her younger than she was, still it did not show her young. Time, that had loomed like a monster over her every day since he had taken András from her.
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