The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

by Lucille Turner

  He rang for the servant and gave the instruction to admit Captain Hunyadi without question. Then he returned to his chair, poured himself a glass of tuica, and waited.

  A cold moon rose. Some sort of bird brushed against the walls of the palace. The deliberate, firm footsteps of the Hungarian captain rang across the courtyard. Now he was at the door. Now he was talking to the servant. Now he was holding his cap in his hand, nervous because he did not, deep down in his gut, like to be the henchman of the Pope. Now he was here.

  ‘Damn you to hell, Dracul!’

  He smiled. ‘I am already damned, Janos, didn’t you know?’

  Janos ran his hands through his mane of hair and looked at his boots. ‘I will ask you one last time. We both know that Constantine has given you the manuscript of the Revelations of the Apocrypha. We both know that you went to Constantinople to acquire them. Do not try to deny it.’

  ‘I do not have the Revelations of John the Greek,’ Dracul corrected, ‘if that is what you mean?’

  ‘Greeks, Hebrews, Romans, what does it matter? I will search the palace.’

  ‘Do so, if it pleases you.’

  Hunyadi glanced at the hall. ‘You have a basement. What is in it?’

  ‘Why not take a look? The key is on the nail beside the door.’

  Hunyadi paced to the window and back, his face crimson.

  ‘I am not a fool, Dracul. If you are hiding something, you are hardly going to leave it on a shelf. You have locked it away somewhere. No doubt well hidden in the depths of some hole or another. I have been informed that you were examining the apocryphal texts in the library very closely and that the Emperor’s brother has vowed to discharge them to you. Therefore you have them already. If you do not hand them over, there will be consequences.’

  ‘Let us say for the sake of argument that I do have them. What would you do with them? Hand them to the Pope, I suppose, along with the hundred thousand Greek lives you have already pledged to him?’

  ‘Very well then, I will order your arrest.’

  Dracul smiled slightly. ‘And what shall be the charge?’

  ‘Heresy, treason against the Church.’

  ‘Of course.’ He removed the ring of his seal from his finger, and placed it on the table. ‘Then I will make it easy for you. I will relinquish the throne of Wallachia to your care, but on one condition. You must put Mircea on it. He has proved his worth and you know it.’

  Silence.

  Dracul grabbed his arm. ‘My son in my seat, Janos.’

  Hunyadi nodded. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘Come back tomorrow; I will be ready.’

  Hunyadi clicked his heels. ‘Until tomorrow then.’

  What a fool he had been, Dracul thought as he watched Hunyadi walk back to his carriage. He had read the scrolls, but he had not learned from them what he should have learned. Constantine had told him about the dragon and Saint George but he had not been listening well enough. The story of Veles and Perun was nothing less than a forgotten account of the legend of Saint George, which the Church had turned to its advantage, as it had with those parts of the Apocrypha it already possessed. Here they were, dragon and wolf, right at the beginning of the story of Zalmoxis, and doubtless at the end of it, in a tale that had yet to run its course.

  He grabbed a flaming torch from the stairwell wall and descended to the basement. He wrenched open the door and pulled out the chest. He held the candle close.

  Two sons, Veles and Perun. One brother feared the dragon; the other one did not…into this world Zalmoxis came, and Veles was his keeper.

  He put down the candle. If Constantine was right, the dragon was never slain; it lived on to rival the pagan spirit of the wolf in Zalmoxis, Wolf-man of the Goths, and in all the generations that came afterwards, including his own. That was the meaning of the emblem of his family, the crest of the Draculesti. It was a prophecy, as the Book of Revelation was a prophecy. But it was a prophecy the Church would use against him, and more importantly, one that it would use against his sons.

  He bound the scrolls of Zalmoxis in a thick piece of hide and tied them. The stairwell was dry and cold. Candle in hand, he climbed up the stairs, deep in thought. Anton had told him that Zalmoxis had found a way out of the darkness. Why could Vlad not do the same? All he needed was a little illumination; all he needed was the scrolls.

  In one day, perhaps two, Hunyadi would return. Time was of the essence. The Monastery of Saint Nicholas was only a short ride away. He knew the road well, even in the dark. Mircea would be prepared; even now he was riding back from Sibiu and a meeting with the Saxon merchants about their duty on trade through Wallachia. He pulled out a rosary, red pearls with a cross at the clasp, and slipped it into the pouch of his belt. Perhaps he had failed in every other way, but he could at least succeed in this one. When the news of his death reached the ears of the sultanate, Murad would have no more reason to detain his sons. The scrolls would have a way forward; the legend of the strigoi would at last be understood for what it was: a test. He entered the salon and pulled aside the drape. The lamplight at the main gate glittered in the darkness. A new moon straddled the clouds. All was quiet.

  Chapter 50

  Vlad pushed up the sleeves of his shirt and looked at his skin. The red marks that had covered his arms had gone. He felt different, too: stronger, calmer. The rage that had taken hold of him at Egrigoz had died down and a new knowledge had taken its place. The seizures, which before had left him exhausted, had become less frequent, and when they did come, he knew what to do. He kept a piece of wood in a pouch around his waist. Whenever his mind hollowed and his skin shook, he bit on the wood and fought against the demon of the trance. He didn’t always win, but when he came to himself, at least he found a man he recognised.

  The Defterdar, the Sultan’s treasurer and spy, had been watching his progress personally. In the mornings when they sent a guard to train with him, the Defterdar sat on the edge of the courtyard and weighed the benefit of his sword against the fealty of his mind. The Defterdar had given him writings from the Holy Book of the Turks, and he had placed them on the desk in his chamber beside the Book of Job and the emblem the dervish had given him. The dragon and the wolf sat uneasily in the middle, deliberating the words of their neighbours from old, pagan eyes.

  ‘Do you pray?’ the Defterdar had asked him.

  ‘I do not need to,’ he said.

  The Defterdar shook his head.

  Instead of the prayer stone of the Muslims, they had given him the sword of the Turks, the kilij. He had always trained with a long sword. The long sword needed two hands, the kilij only one. Nervous as ever, the Defterdar had placed it in his hands with the backing of the Sultan’s private bodyguard, who stared at him with a mixture of disbelief and understanding.

  ‘Do you know what to do with it?’ the janissary asked him, smiling.

  He grabbed the janissary’s arm, twisted it, threw him to the ground and held the blade against his neck. ‘This,’ he said.

  He asked the Defterdar why the Grand Vizier refused to see him. It was not a matter of refusal, explained the Defterdar, but of time. The Vizier was taken up with affairs of empire.

  ‘The Sultan’s son?’ he asked.

  ‘The Sultan’s heir,’ the Defterdar corrected.

  He did not catch sight of Mehmet, but he knew the heir was watching him. Often Vlad would turn to find the shuttered window of the second courtyard corridor quickly closing. Sometimes it was Mehmet, but not always. Today it was someone else.

  The second courtyard could be entered two ways. The first was by the gate, the second by the door of the corridor that linked the third courtyard with his. The door was shut, locked and guarded. Only a member of the Osmani family could gain admittance. There was only one he had heard of who held the singular status of being both a member of the Osmani family and its enemy, and here
she was now in front of him, waiting in the corridor. The servants had whispered about Mara Brankovic, the Serb that had refused the Sultan. It was not right, they said, for a woman like that to turn her back on a man like Murad. She was walking on hot coals; sooner or later she would burn her feet. He ran his eyes over her and saw what Murad wanted.

  ‘Vlad Dracula?’

  He entered the corridor of the second courtyard and pulled Mara Brankovic into safety through the door of his chamber, his throat dry with a new kind of fear. Did she know that if she were caught in these corridors she would be handed to the Bostanji?

  ‘I have the freedom of the palace,’ she said. ‘I can go where I like.’

  ‘Nobody can go where they like once they are in the hands of the Sultan.’

  ‘I am in nobody’s hands.’

  He wiped the perspiration from his neck with a cloth. ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘In these chambers you are in my hands.’ He buttoned up his tunic. ‘If I chose to, I could call the guard in now.’

  She smiled. ‘But you wouldn’t. I saw you training in the courtyard. You are drawing more than one pair of eyes with that kilij.’

  ‘Mehmet?’

  She nodded. She could gain access to his brother, she said. Radu. She had already seen him. She could take a message. Did he not know that his father had all but capitulated and that even Giurgiu was now in Murad’s hands?

  He thought of the Danube and the water crossing; the fort of Giurgiu was an old memory now. ‘They will never take the river. My father will not let them.’

  ‘Your father may not have much choice. And if the river is taken, Belgrade is taken.’

  ‘But as long as you are here, it won’t be.’

  ‘While Murad is Sultan, perhaps. But not afterwards. Not when his heir takes over.’ She moved closer. ‘It is never so simple, Dracula. I know your father’s situation, but do not be fooled into thinking that as a hostage you have sealed a pact. There are no pacts, none that hold. Your father is not the only one who treads a dangerous path between two sides. Soon my father will fall out of favour with the Hungarians. Already there are arguments. What I need is an envoy, a messenger. Someone that can travel north without suspicion.’

  ‘As you can see,’ he said, throwing down the cloth, ‘I am neither messenger nor envoy. Why not try Kastrioti? He is already out there. If you can get past the Sultan’s guard I’m sure you can enlist his vassal to take your letters home.’

  She hesitated. ‘We are all vassals in one shape or another, Vlad Dracula. Even you. I don’t think you understand what is happening outside these palace walls, but one day soon you must. And if I have come here to see you it is because Belgrade is important.’

  ‘But not important enough for you to give yourself to Murad in exchange for it,’ he said, his eyes on the skin of her neck.

  ‘Alright.’ She pushed up her head. ‘Let us talk about your father. He sends his men to Varna, then he loses.’ She paused. ‘And then there is your brother; don’t you know what Mehmet is doing? He is grooming him for your father’s seat because unlike you, your brother does exactly what he wants him to.’

  ‘I do not discuss family,’ he said, his voice freezing over.

  She backed off, her eyes flicking over his shoulders, his hips and his hand. He loosened his fist and turned his face away.

  ‘Then I will say only this. I need someone that holds a sword as you do and is not afraid to use it.’

  He turned back. ‘What makes you think I am not afraid?’

  ‘Mehmet. There are two kinds of people who stare through shuttered windows. The kind that want what they cannot have, and those that are afraid of it.’

  ‘And Mehmet is the second?’

  Her lips parted slightly as she smiled at him again. ‘Mehmet, my dear young prince, is both.’

  Chapter 51

  Azize stared at the Slavic eyes of Mara Brankovic in astonishment. They were flecked with gold and blue like the tile of a mosaic. Her skin, taut across the bridge of the shoulders, washed downwards to her chest in a milky pool of white. ‘What you are saying is that we should set him free, liberate a vassal of the empire?’

  The eyes froze over. ‘If you want an ally who can make a difference; it is the only way.’

  Make a difference to what, she asked her. All she cared about was Djem.

  ‘That’s the trouble with the women in this place,’ said Mara. ‘They only see their own sons.’

  Azize thought on this as she went about her day. She thought on it at the water fountain before prayers; she thought on it while whispering her verses; and she thought on it in the hayat as Djem played in the shade of the trees beside the roses that Murad had planted for his children. What else was there, she wondered. Because she could not think of an answer, she went to find the Valide Hatun.

  The Valide Hatun was busy. Her apartments, which were as far away from Murad’s as architecture and appearances allowed, were humming with chatter and preparations. Servants were rolling out lokum on long trays. Rose petals were being gathered into nets to be dried in the sunshine of the Valide Hatun’s private courtyard.

  What was the occasion, she inquired.

  ‘A marriage,’ said the hatun. ‘Mehmet’s.’

  She sat down on a cushion of the divan, and swallowed a ball of circumspection.

  The Valide Hatun came and sat beside her. Murad was pleased. She was a good Turkic girl. The family was well born. Her brother was a cavalry officer in the army of the sultanate. She was young, but that was how it should be. Mehmet would not want it any other way. ‘The festivities will be three months long, you know,’ said the hatun, as if that would do the trick.

  Azize smiled politely and since there was nothing else she could do, congratulated her warmly. Then she brought up the matter that was nagging at her mind. She had spent the best years of her life bringing on the daughters of their vassals, she said, but she had never even befriended one.

  ‘What do you mean, befriended one?’ said the hatun. They could never be friends with the daughters of vassals because if they were, how would they make the difference between those who were here by effort and those that had been given? How could they make the difference between a woman who had worked her way into the palace on the back of a good name and a dowry, like they had done, and one who had been offered as a slave. That would be an insult. All they could be was rivals. That was how it was here. That was how the seraglio worked.

  ‘The hierarchy of the sultanate is what holds it all in place,’ the hatun said. ‘A strong regent is better than a weak sultan. Even Murad knows that.’

  What did she mean, Azize asked.

  The Valide Hatun scooped out a bowl of dried rose petals. ‘He’s getting old, you know. Even the Kizlar says so. He will abdicate, of course. Especially now the dynasty is certain.’

  She thanked the Valide Hatun, left her with her three-month celebrations and returned to the fourth courtyard stumbling, as though somebody had manacled her feet. She had wanted to mention that if Murad had done what he should have done, and married Mehmet to Mara Brankovic, the Valide Hatun would have a Serb as a daughter and possibly, if the child had fought its way up, a Serb as grandchild too. The empire was growing, whether the hatun liked it or not, and they must either grow with it or stay as they were: rivals for the love of one man, hostages to his will.

  She found Mara Brankovic and told her Mehmet was to be married, and in the world of the Osmani, marriage was the prequel to battle on the field. Murad was cementing Mehmet’s dynasty, and the sooner they had someone fit to counter that dynasty, the better. She would arrange it; she knew Murad. He had already asked for her and she had made excuses. But if she chose her words carefully, she could effect Vlad Dracula’s release anytime she wanted to. She would even go as far as to say that if he were not mounted on a steed, uniformed and outside the palace gates by the time the s
eason was over, it would not be her fault.

  Chapter 52

  Halil Pasha was ruminating on a piece of news. He had just received it from the mouth of one of the sons of Evrenos the Greek, whom he had personally instructed to keep him informed of anything that happened in the Palaiologos court and on the streets of their city. When it came to dealing with their neighbours, Murad was not a gifted man. He had the habit of placing his foot on other people’s toes and grinding it there, irrespective of what it might one day cost him. Varna had been one such case, but there had been others. The governors of Anatolia had been plotting against him ever since Gallipoli, an affair that he personally would have handled very differently. The Osmani solution had been brutal; Murad, usually a sanguine man, had said that while he could accept betrayal from an enemy, he could not stand it from a friend. But this news he had just received would surely be the straw that crippled the camel as far as Murad’s ambitions for his son and his empire were concerned.

  According to the Evrenos clan, Constantine Palaiologos was busy stripping the city of its riches. Certainly a great many of the Greek coffers had already been emptied. He had known for some time that some of the gold that decorated the churches of the city had been likewise removed. But now it seemed that the Palaiologos brothers had decided to leave them an empty library into the bargain. When Murad’s dynasty took the city, it would harvest a number of rats and a family of moths. Father and son would find that they had butchered a hundred thousand people for an empty shell. If that was not the final trinket in the false crown of Osmani rule, he did not know what was.

  He tapped his fingers on the table and wondered what to do. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise? The thought of Mehmet’s hands upon the ancient works of the Babylonian scholars did not altogether fill him with delight, but then again, if they were bound to see this conquest through, as it seemed they must, to do it all for nothing would be folly. And then there was that fly that hovered round his head. Did he have the courage to tell Murad what he knew he must – that either he lost his heir or he must lose his Grand Vizier.