The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

by Lucille Turner

  A page drew back the curtain of his chamber. There was one who wished to see him, said the page apologetically.

  ‘Not Azize Hatun?’ he said. He had crossed the path of the third hatun too often for comfort during the past few weeks. She was plotting something, he could tell from the look on her face, but what? Whatever it was, he hoped it would not put Murad out of sorts. He had sat with the Sultan just the other day in the Audience Room along with the Defterdar and a visiting governor. It had been like trying to wring a concession from a slab of marble. Murad had not retreated at Varna, but he was certainly stalling at Edirne.

  ‘No, My Lord. Athazaz of Bursa.’

  He sat back and folded his arms on his stomach. The dervish he could tolerate. He rather liked the company of this unpredictable soothsayer, and admired his verve. He had not forgotten their conversation at the caravanserai of the Via Egnatia, where he had first seen the dervish years before. The old shaman had proved himself then to be an adept conversationalist. He still was, even if he had waded a little too deeply into matters that were best not tampered with, such as Mehmet.

  The dervish stepped through the door of the ministerial apartments with one hand on his chest. The palace grounds, he said, were haunted.

  ‘Haunted by what, exactly?’ asked Halil Pasha, astonished.

  ‘His Highness the Sultan, I understand, has a fondness for parables. There is one I have been thinking of that will amuse you. With your permission, I will relate it.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Halil Pasha, and he settled down to listen.

  ‘It happened, long ago, that the birds and the beasts were at war with each other. It was a long and bitter struggle, and there were many losses on both sides. The birds pecked out the eyes of the beasts, and the beasts waited for the birds beneath the bowers of trees and snapped them up. But there was one creature that was different from both the birds in the air and the beasts on the ground. He was unique, one of a kind. He was the bat. As the war raged on, the bat could not decide which side to take. Sometimes he took the side of the birds, sometimes the side of the beasts. For many long years the bat was neither one side’s friend nor the other side’s enemy. But as the war advanced and death cast its shadow over the world, he became the enemy of both and the friend of none. He came to be known as treacherous, and was cast out. Allah the Great God saw what the bat was like and turned his back on him. Later, when the floods came and all the other animals on the earth turned to God for help, he did not let his servant Nuh give shelter to the bat. And so it was left out in the cold. There were some who took pity on the creature and tried to help it, but they were few. As for the fate of those that did, the bat, driven to starvation as an outcast, took to preying on their flesh. Thus he lived on, in the shadows of the evil that had come, surviving without hope of redemption on the blood of those who had taken it upon themselves to befriend him.’

  Halil Pasha shuddered. ‘There is a bat in the gardens?’

  ‘Not exactly a bat: a nocturnal cousin. Vlad Dracula.’

  Halil Pasha bit his lip.

  ‘Did you know that the guards are having some difficulty containing him at night? I thought it best to tell you, in the light of our recent most interesting conversation.’

  He stood up. ‘What do you mean? Is he not under guard?’

  ‘I wonder,’ said the dervish, as he made free to sit, ‘if he ever has been, in the real sense of the word?’

  Halil Pasha grimaced. ‘He does have a certain ability to slip the reins.’ He rubbed his hands over his face. Once again, the boy was in the path of danger.

  ‘There is something else also. I have discovered he is afflicted by the morbus sacer.’

  ‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ So the dervish had witnessed a seizure. It did not surprise him. ‘How bad was it?’

  ‘I did not see it directly, only on his face as the signs of struggle. Jat-e şeytan, the black light. Then I questioned the guards and found that I was right. I wonder if your hostage realises the gravity of his condition? I think he does not, which is one of the reasons I am here. It is, I would venture to add, also an explanation for this habit he has acquired of wandering through the gardens of the palace during the hours of darkness. The body has a way of protecting itself, My Lord Pasha. Seizure is common at night; the body knows this and it drives the victim to a state of restlessness.’

  He looked at the dervish, worried. The interest of the soothsayer went beyond the demands of service. How far should he let it go? But on the other hand, if Vlad Dracula was somehow slipping past the guard, only trouble would come of it. He recalled the hands of Dracula around the neck of Mehmet, and a pleasant memory of retribution held him in its thrall.

  ‘You are not concerned?’

  He pulled himself together. ‘Naturally I am worried, but I do not see what we can do other than double the guard.’

  The dervish stared, as though he were taking the thoughts from Halil Pasha’s head and setting them out in an order. ‘You find him interesting, do you not?’

  Halil Pasha frowned. ‘I pity him, if that is what you mean.’

  The dervish nodded. ‘He has…a fascinating future.’

  Halil Pasha leaned forward. ‘What kind of future?’

  The dervish smiled. ‘A prophecy is normally only given to its owner.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ he said, ‘although the circumstances here are rather different. Vlad Dracula may be many things, but he is, at the present moment, a hostage of the sultanate.’

  ‘Yes,’ the dervish agreed. ‘At the present moment, he is.’

  ‘Then he will not be much longer? That is what you are implying, I think?’

  The dervish hesitated. ‘My Lord Pasha, I was brought to this palace to give His Highness the benefit of my sight. But that does not mean that everyone may enjoy it.’

  Halil Pasha raised his brow. ‘Fine words, coming from a man who recently informed the Sultan’s heir that he would not conquer the city of the Greeks.’

  ‘The scrolls of the Greeks,’ corrected the dervish. ‘Not their city.’

  A thought crept into Halil Pasha’s mind. ‘Then consider this. I have heard just this day that the scrolls of the Greeks are being removed from the library of Constantinople.’

  ‘I am already aware of that.’

  Halil Pasha paused. ‘The apocryphal texts in particular, or so I’ve heard, are being transported from the city.’

  ‘The Manichean texts?’

  ‘So I believe,’ said Halil Pasha.

  The dervish seemed to turn things over in his mind.

  ‘You have heard of them?’

  ‘Of course. Many were contained in the library of Alexandria before it was destroyed by fire.’

  ‘And removed to Constantinople.’

  ‘Yes. The disciples of Mani wrote a great deal about the two forces that they saw as being at the root of the struggle of humankind.’

  ‘Good and evil?’

  The dervish nodded.

  Something fell into place in Halil Pasha’s head. ‘And you think that these two forces, as you call them, are at work in the person of Vlad Dracula?’

  The dervish asked for coffee. Halil Pasha pulled a cord for it.

  ‘What the Manicheans recorded was echoed in other stories of the age, in the histories of other peoples. One of which was the Goths, the ancestors of the Rumani, whose dynasty stretches back over many centuries and generations, ending as it does now in the person of your hostage prince.’

  Halil Pasha leaned forward, fascinated. ‘But not his brothers?’

  ‘I have met only one of those, and he seems to be made of a quite different fabric.’

  The dervish had seen Radu Dracula in Mehmet’s chambers, as they all had, he considered. He knew he should have stopped it, but he hadn’t. Fear had stilled his tongue, as it often did, he thought
guiltily.

  ‘You see, My Lord Pasha,’ the dervish continued, warming to his subject, ‘there is scripture, holy writ, which is sacred, but there are those who claim that there is also other scripture, which is the reverse of holy, and which may be called profane. This is the substance of the Apocrypha, and the Goths had their part in it.’

  ‘But that does not mean it did not carry an equal weight of truth?’

  The dervish sipped his coffee. ‘If the word truth had meaning then – which it did not, or at least not in the way that we might understand, it was not God’s truth. The story of the Goths began at a time when the profane and the holy held equal sway over the fate of people, who worshipped every god the same, making no difference between them unless it was to ask for favour in whatever realm the god was said to rule.’

  Halil Pasha picked out a fig from the bowl and stared at it. The idea that humankind could fashion the truth that it wanted was not a bad one. But then, who would own it?

  The dervish glanced up. ‘It is a fascinating picture, is it not, My Lord Pasha, to live without the constraints of the Holy Word? To exist freely and without fear. Or at least, that was how things were in the beginning, according to the Goths.’

  ‘But it did change?’

  ‘How could it not, people being what they are?’ said the dervish, putting down his glass. ‘The story of a people is marked by its failures as much as by its victories. And according to the Goths the first of these failures came under the rule of Svarog, when the world became divided up into darkness and light on account of family differences.’

  ‘Family differences?’

  ‘Two brothers, Veles and Perun, were rivals for the kingdom of their father. It happened, although I do not know exactly the details of the story, that the history of the Goths was marked by this rivalry, brother to brother, kin against kin. And that after it, everything changed, nothing was as it had been before. The world broke up, split apart into two separate judgements, two paths of thought: one of which was the path of good, while the other was that of evil. I cannot say to you that before it there was neither good nor evil, that these things, these notions did not exist, for certainly they did. All I can say is that there was not black or white alone, but more of a greyness. Or perhaps it is easier to imagine that there was no day after night, no dark before the dawn, but there was instead a mingling of the two: an obscure lucidity, or a shining gloom. And into this new age of day and night stepped Zalmoxis, legendary ruler of the forebears of the Goths and the ancestors of the Rumani.’

  A memory came into Halil Pasha’s mind of Vlad Dracula’s face as he emerged from seizure. The Devil’s trance did not find its name from nowhere. Some described it as a tunnel of darkness or a tomb of endless night. He shivered slightly. ‘Then this Zalmoxis you speak of, he was a man and not a god?’

  ‘My Lord Pasha, you forget that all gods were, at some point, men. Only the Word revealed that all mankind was, in one way or another, mistaken. Be that as it may, the Word was written, and the Book was made, one for each of the peoples that came afterwards, and thus they took the power of judgement out of the hands of God and into their own.’

  Halil Pasha nodded. The dervish was full of surprises. He had been wrong to think of him as merely a soothsayer. He had the mind of a Greek. It was almost a pity that he had not been better born; he might even have made it onto a seat of the imperial council.

  ‘May I continue?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘So, the people who lived at the time of Zalmoxis had made their home on the banks of the great Danube River, which flows from the northern mountains to what is now called the Black Sea, but which was once called the Sea of Hospitality, after the welcome that was given to every traveller that pulled his boats onto its shores. You wonder why it changed, and I will tell you. The sea took on the name of the god who lived in the lands it touched, and he was the Black God of the Rumani; for, you see, My Lord Pasha, our Iblis, as he is known, has many names, and forms. The Christians call him Satan, but in the writings of Solomon the Wise he is Lucifer, while to the Canaanites he was Moloch. So you see that he prefers disguise and concealment to anything, since temptation is more often achieved by ingenuity and suggestion than by force. Some might even say that, like a sickness of the body, he is always present, waiting only for his moment – and they would not be wrong.’

  ‘May God keep us,’ Halil Pasha murmured.

  ‘Yes,’ said the dervish, ‘but at the time of the story, God had not sent his prophets.’

  ‘Perhaps he was testing us?’ said Halil Pasha. He thought of the Palaiologos brothers of Constantinople and shame stole over him.

  ‘I would say that is exactly true, in view of what came afterwards,’ said the dervish, examining his face. ‘The Danube River flowed, as I have said, from the mountains to the sea. And all along the banks of the river in that country, down the rocky courses of the mountains and across the plains, ran the wolves. Some hunted the plains in packs, others alone. The Goths admired the wolf. They revered its spirit, its loyalty and its cunning; they venerated its strength. They worshipped many gods, not one, as we do, and to these gods they made offerings, sacrifices of the animals they hunted and ate, and whose skins they used for warmth. In the year that the scrolls relate, a child was born that troubled the accord the Goths had founded between themselves and the wolves around them. The birth of the child was set down on record as being a trial, right from the start. He was born at last, one evening in November, a night the Rumani remember to this day.’

  ‘Saint Andrew’s Eve?’

  The dervish inclined his head. ‘The very same. The night that commemorates the birth of Zalmoxis, leader of the Goths, and a night that is much feared and spoken of to this day in Wallachia, although the name of Saint Andrew covers up well the true significance of the occasion.’

  ‘It is known that the Christians rename the feasts of antiquity for their saints.’

  ‘Quite so, My Lord Pasha, but I believe that here the word feast is perhaps not appropriate. For it was, to the Rumani, a dangerous beginning, accompanied by signs in the firmament they barely knew for what they were: portents of an evil they did not yet understand, but which was set down in the scrolls as significant.’

  Halil Pasha shivered. ‘I see. And the child?’

  ‘The child did what all children do: he suckled his mother’s milk and grew up, the trials of his birth forgotten, for a time, although the name ascribed to him was already a marker of what would come to pass. They called him Zalmoxis, the Hidden One, although until he reached the age of knowledge, his life was, according to the scrolls, serene.’

  ‘The age of knowledge, was it nine years?’

  ‘Seven,’ corrected the dervish. ‘The number ascribed by the Babylonians for the seeker of truth.’

  ‘Of course. Seven.’

  ‘Yes, the age set down as a time for a first hunt, or initiation. But it seems that at this moment there was a break in the records.’

  ‘Then there was no initiation?’

  ‘No mention is made of one, as though the hunt did not take place. But what is mentioned is that the child was conversant with the creatures around him as soon as he was five summers old.’ The dervish looked around for a tinderbox. Halil Pasha pushed one towards him. ‘How do you mean, conversant?’

  ‘He had an affinity, a closeness with those creatures that were not mankind, and they with him,’ said the dervish simply. ‘And with the wolves in particular. Which brings me to the second part of the legend. Zalmoxis had become, by this time, a young man of promise in his tribe. He was liked, more than liked; he was surrounded by followers who sang the praises of his courage. But still, he was vulnerable.’

  Halil Pasha looked up in surprise. ‘You mean he was sick?’

  ‘Yes, and no. Sickness takes many forms. A man may be strong of body, but his mind may be like a wisp of willo
w on a wind. But Zalmoxis was no wisp on a wind. Quite the opposite. He was an empty well that no amount of water could fill.’

  Halil Pasha watched as the dervish reached for his pipe. ‘Ambitious then,’ he muttered.

  ‘Exactly so. The making of all great men, and their undoing. Although when Zalmoxis set himself up as the leader of his people, his intentions may well have leaned towards the good.’

  ‘I see no harm in ambition, if he had the spirit for it.’

  ‘Yes, but there is spirit and spirit. That of his own kind was, as ever, inadequate. So Zalmoxis set out to take the wolf’s. For he was convinced that the spirit of the wolf would pass into his own body and give him a power that would make him unconquerable. And in many respects it must be said that he was not wrong.’

  ‘Then he killed the wolf?’

  The dervish slotted the tube of his pipe into its bottle. ‘Not so fast, My Lord Pasha. You forget the beginning of the legend. The wolf was considered sacred; it was not a beast of the hunt. Besides which, Zalmoxis had been kept back from the hunt by his father.’

  ‘Then his father had read the portents rightly.’

  ‘That also may be so. But I believe,’ said the dervish, piling charcoal into the cup of his pipe, ‘that it was the child’s affinity with the wolves that sounded out a warning. After all…’ he paused ‘…no man kills his brother.’

  Unless he is Osmani, Halil Pasha thought drily. The son of Dracul was proving to be even more of a worthy adversary for Mehmet Celebi than he had imagined.

  ‘So, when the moment came, Zalmoxis claimed his wolf. He overpowered it, killed it and took its pelt for himself, discarding the rest. But the killing of the wolf did not pass unnoticed, not by the gods of the Goths, who took offence at the arrogance of Zalmoxis. They declared that if this warrior aspired to the status of the gods, he would have to accept the responsibilities that went with being a god, and now that he had stolen the spirit of the wolf, and subjugated the wolf to his will, there was no going back. So they told Zalmoxis that he would have to pay for the sacrifice in kind.’