by Dan Davis
Lifting her gnarled hand, she pointed at me again. “You, sir, are a liar. And I do not converse with liars.”
“Very well. You have it right enough. My men must drink blood to stay alive and in good health. But we do not kill innocents. The blood of the living, freely given, sustains us.”
She nodded but was not completely placated. “You deny that you are strigoi also?”
“I do not require blood. But I am ageless, yes. What is this word that you use? Strigoi? What is its meaning?”
“Meaning? It is what you are. You and your men. And it is what those men that came were. And it is what my husband became.”
“Your husband? He was not taken on the road as you said?”
She closed her eyes as she spoke, her voice little more than a whisper. “He was taken, yes. Taken, and bled. Taken away. But not killed. He was turned. He became strigoi.”
My heart began to race. “How do you know this?”
“I thought he was dead. For so long, he was dead. More than ten years, he was dead. But one morning, as the sun rose behind the mountain, I saw him in the trees behind the house. I ran after him but I could not find him. My daughter said it was madness taking me. My friend Anca said it was his ghost and that I had to pour a line of salt across my door and window so he could not enter at night. I told her that I wanted his ghost to enter at night and then she called me mad also, the fat old cow. She is dead now. But my husband returned. I saw him and this time he did not run. I expected him to turn to smoke when I embraced him but he did not. He was real! Solid as this.” She slapped the table top with her palm and closed her eyes as she breathed in a great, happy breath. “Ah, my husband. To feel him again. I wept like a girl.”
She sat, lost in the memory, a smile on her thin lips.
“Where had he been?”
The woman was irritated that I had intruded on her thoughts. “Some things he told me, others he did not.”
“Where is he now?”
“Gone. Never to return. Why would he return to an old woman like me? In the years since, I have prayed and I have asked travellers for stories of the strigoi. I hear things. I hear that you are looking for these things, also.”
“You heard I was looking for strigoi?”
“A man who serves a foreign soldier lord has been seen here and there, asking for stories of strigoi. He has never come here but when I saw your man, I knew it was you. And so I sent for you. Your men are fools. And you have a woman who dresses like a man? You are strigoi but I see now, you are not evil. You are like my dear Petru. Cursed for eternity but not evil. And so I tell you this story, which you have sought, and in return, you will send Petru to watch over his daughter and grandchildren in Domnesti.”
“But I do not know your husband. If I find him… I will tell him what you have said. But I fear yours is the first story of the strigoi that I have heard and I have been searching for years. I had begun to doubt if there were any stories to hear.”
“There are many stories. Many thousands. But none that you shall hear. None but mine.”
“Why should I not hear them?”
“You are an outsider. We cannot speak of such things to foreigners.”
“You did.”
“But I want something.”
“Everybody wants something.”
“Not us. Not Wallachians. All we want is for you to go. You, the Turks, the Hungarians, the Serbs. All we want for us to be happy is your absence. Alas, you all want our land and you want us dead or enslaved. No, none shall tell you these stories. None but the monks.”
That caught me off guard. “The monks? What monks?”
“In the south, there is a lake called Snagov. And there is a village there, called Snagov. And there on the lake there is a monastery named Snagov. The monks, they know. They collect the stories, also.”
“Stories of strigoi?”
“They will tell you the stories and then you will find Petru and tell him to watch over our family. No matter what else he has sworn, he must do his duty to his family. You tell him. Now, you must go.” She held out her hand. “Return to me my cross.”
“I left it beside your pail when I filled your water.”
She scowled and snatched up her bunch of dried herbs and thrashed against my back as I left, before slamming her door behind me.
My men stopped halfway through their conversation to stare.
“Always ends the same way, don’t it, Richard,” Walt said. “You and women.”
“Actually, it went rather—”
The window shutters slammed closed.
“What did she say?” Eva asked as we walked back toward the village.
“It turns out that Serban has not been so useless after all. His questions somehow reached her and then today she saw Rob bleeding a servant in secret.”
“Robert,” Eva scolded, “for the love of Christ, you have to be more careful.”
“How was I supposed to know anyone was looking?” Rob said.
“It matters not. Anyway, she claimed that she somehow knew us for immortals on sight.”
Walt scoffed. “How?”
“She did not say. But she wants me to find her husband, who was turned into an immortal decades ago, in this very village.”
“We been looking for years,” Rob said. “Did she say where to look?”
“Yes. A place where they have collected the stories of immortals. A monastery named Snagov, in the south.”
Rob whistled. “Fancy that.”
“Well, then,” Walt said. “What are we waiting for?”
“Patience,” I said, looking up the valley at the mountain peaks. “The monastery will wait. First, I must finish my business with Vlad Dracula.”
***
“Your forces are growing in strength,” I said to Vlad later as the wine flowed in the cramped hall at Poenari.
The towers were still being built but the central keep had been largely completed and that was where we had dined. It was barely large enough to feast two score men but that was about all who could garrison the entire fortress, as small and incomplete as it was. In time, a separate hall would be constructed in the narrow space between the walls but for now, only his closest companions could join him at the top of the mountain, while the rest of his men, and mine, stayed in the camp below where the workmen and soldiers slept and ate, and fought when they were drunk.
I could well understand Vlad’s preoccupation with Poenari. His life had been in a state of constant change. As a child, he had been sent to Târgoviște to begin his training as a knight, only for it to be interrupted when he was sent first to the Turk’s capital Edirne and then on to a succession of palaces and country estates in Anatolia, surrounded by enemies and assaulted by my brother. When freed by the Turks he had been unable to return to Wallachia which was controlled by his enemies, and so he had fled to Moldavia with his cousin Stephen only for them both to be forced into Hungary by intrigues in Moldavia. The boy and the man had never had a home to call his own, had never known true security or stability.
Târgoviște was not safe, not even the castle within the city. The Saxon and Wallachian merchant burghers of the city had turned on Vlad’s father, executed his brother, and forced the elder Vlad to flee. The young Vlad Dracula could never have forgotten that.
And so he had built himself a modern fortress on the highest, most inaccessible mountain ridge in his kingdom, far from the border with the Turks. And although the Transylvanian border was close, that border was with the Duchy of Fogaras, which was in fact a vassal land under Vlad’s personal possession.
If his enemies, internal and external, ever pushed him then it would be to Poenari that Vlad would turn.
Watching him feasting with his men that night, I saw him converse more than I had at any other place. He even laughed aloud once or twice. If I had not been paying close attention, then I might have assumed that he was drinking more wine than he customarily did but in fact he hardly seemed to drink much at al
l. He seemed simply to be a lord at home with his men.
I took a chance and moved from my place to sit beside him.
“Earlier, my lord, we were about to speak of William.”
It was not a company of men that enjoyed carousing and conversations had quieted as the hour grew late. Vlad glanced around to see if anyone was listening. If they were, they gave no indication of it.
“I imagined, Richard, that you would wish to speak of such things where others cannot hear it.”
“These are your men. Your chosen men, who will gladly die for you. I wonder how many of them know about the blood.”
A couple of them glanced at me and then at Vlad.
“Not all know,” Vlad said, slowly. “And not all who know fully understand.”
“If you are going to defeat William then perhaps it is time that they be made to understand.”
His eyes narrowed as he regarded me. “Perhaps.”
“You said that you sought William’s power. Clearly, he gave it to you. Why?”
Some of them were paying attention now, and Vlad thought for a while before answering.
“The day I witnessed him tear a soldier’s throat out and drink the blood, I was surprised by it. It was a brutal act and a demonstration of inhuman strength, the way he held the man, in heavy mail armour, aloft with one hand as if it were nothing. But the others around us responded not at all. Some wore the hint of a smile. And yet it was as if nothing was out of the ordinary.”
“They were immortals also.”
“Some, certainly. Others were hoping to become so. Under Murad, William had become a lord with great wealth with many estates but every other noble Turk viewed him with suspicion or loathing and they sent assassins with some regularity. William dared not make himself too powerful without the total and complete backing of the Sultan or else he might find himself surrounded by a dozen armies. Even if he escaped such an assault, he would be outlawed and all his work undone. And so he kept the number of his true followers quite small at this time. How many they were, I never discovered.”
“He told you all this?”
“When I told him I wanted his power, he laughed and said I would never be worthy. I knew it was a challenge. That he wanted me to prove myself. And so I did whatever I needed to in order to gain his favour.”
“Such as?”
“He told me he could never give the sacred Gift to one who had never killed a man. And so I snatched the knife from William’s belt and cut the throat of the slave serving our sherbet. His blood soaked into the ice while he died, glaring at me and trying to keep the blood in with his hands.”
“I wager William was pleased.”
“He sneered and said a child murdering a servant was contemptible. He needed soldiers not cowards. And so I waited until I was training in the sword with a soldier I believed I could beat. William was not there but I said to the instructor that I intended to kill him in the next exchange and that he should attempt to do the same to me. He did not believe me until I wounded him across the face and then he did indeed fight for his life. He very nearly took mine. When I came to myself, many days later, William was there. It was then that he began to instruct me in his ways.”
“Ways of fighting?”
“In part. But it was more to do with his ways of moving through the world. His cunning methods for manipulating societies that he had learned in the East amongst the people of Cathay. Particularly, he said, he had grown too powerful and had fought to keep his position. He spoke of successions of weak kings that proved incapable of defending themselves and securing their kingdom. And so he had been determined to make the Turks into a powerful empire while keeping himself in the shadows, coming into the light when he needed to and fading away if that was in the best interests of the great plan.”
“Which is?”
“Do you not know, Richard?”
“To rule,” I said. “To conquer a land and to rule it as a king.”
Vlad nodded. “But not just any land. He expects that all Christendom will serve him. And he will rule as a king like no other. He will be worshipped as though he is an angel descended to Earth, as though he is a pagan god in human form, immortal and all-powerful.”
“He told you this?”
“After he gave me the sacred Gift of his immortal blood. He believes that it ties a man’s soul to his. Why would he not tell me this?”
“He believes those that ingest his blood become tied to him? Through magical means?”
Vlad took a sip of wine. “Is that not how your followers are tied to you?”
Walt had not even been turned by my blood but by the blood of a son of Priskos. And he had been always the most loyal man to ever serve me.
“No. I do not believe so.”
“Then why are they loyal?”
“My closest companions are my friends. My brothers. Why do your friends follow you, my lord? I do my duty. They do theirs. That is all.”
“In many ways, you remind me of William. And in others, you seem to be his opposite. An anti-William.”
“Well,” I said. “Quite. And were you ever his man? Magically or otherwise?”
“His words have a strange power. His eyes seem to posess a kind of magic. I will not say that I felt no temptation to join his cause, in spite of myself. God knows, I felt the pull of that magic for years. But always in my heart, buried deep, I held on to my hatred of him.”
“And he never suspected?”
“He suspected everyone. Always. Unrelenting, he was suspicious. We had been friends and companions for years and I had sworn to obey him and had done many crimes, committed many sins, all for him, when one day I held his gaze a moment too long and allowed a spark of hatred out of my soul and into my eyes. Up until that moment, it had been hidden and I had not known it was coming and no mortal man would have seen it. But he seized me and beat me and had his men carry me away and strap me to a rack. He pulled the levers himself, all the while saying I should admit to my treachery and he would end my life. He cut me and bled me and fed me blood to keep me alive so he could inflict more pain. It was some weeks before he was satisfied.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw some of his men cross themselves.
“And after that William trusted you again?”
Dracula affected William’s tone and accent and wagged a finger as he spoke. “You are lucky that you are so useful, my dear Vlad, or else you would have found yourself returning to Wallachia without a head. I have killed better men than you for less. But you will give me a kingdom and so you will live in gratitude for the life I have allowed you.”
“One way to inspire loyalty is to kill all those around you who do not demonstrate obedience,” I said. “Personally, I would prefer to inspire fidelity.”
Vlad snorted. “He had much to say about you.”
“He did?”
“Especially after you killed my father.”
I glanced at the men around us, all listening intently to every word. They looked back at me, their faces impassive and unreadable in the lamplight of the hall.
“He wished to loose you against me,” I said. “Use you as a weapon to destroy me.”
“I think he was delighted to be able to relay it to me. We both share an enemy now, my dear Vlad. My brother Richard stands in our way. We shall kill him together. Draw him close, pretend to be his friend and isolate him. He is nothing without his companions. Richard is witless, quick to anger, impatient as a child, and filled with mad passions. Never fight him. Be his friend and then betray him.”
My heart racing, I looked again at the men around the hall. They were all armed in one way or another.
“Good advice,” I said, shrugging.
“It was,” Vlad said. “The only allies you have in my fortress are two mortal servants to attend to you. And even they are not here.”
“But I have you,” I said. “My friend and ally, Vlad Dracula.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling at last. “You do. Willi
am is truly my enemy and you have proved yourself to be a friend. More importantly, you are a good Christian who has fought for years to keep the Turk at bay and so you are a friend to all Wallachians.”
I let out a sigh and drank off my wine. “So you played along, no matter the cost, for years. And when the Turks released you, they believed you to be theirs. Do they believe it still?”
“I think that they do, yes.”
“But you mean to fight. And you mean to defeat William?”
“I do.”
“How?”
“He is more powerful than ever. His Blood Janissaries might be impossible to stop. But if I can draw William in, draw him close and away from his men, I mean to surround him and kill him.”
“And how will you do that?”
“Sometimes I imagine filling him with arrows, other times having a hundred hand-gunners shoot him at once, or to blast him in half with a cannon. Whatever is left, I shall cut into pieces and burn.”
“A very pleasant fantasy, I am sure. But how will you isolate him from his… Blood Janissaries, as you called them?”
Vlad glanced at his men. “I wondered if you might consider using yourself as a lure? If he knows where you are, I believe his hatred for you is so strong that he would come for you in person.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“Send men with messages through Turkish territory and have them captured and—”
“That trick may work on a boyar but William would not fall for it.”
“Well, then, there are many ways in which—”
“I have a far better idea,” I said. “William has his immortal Janissaries. The red robed Blood Janissaries. As you say, they will prove almost impossible for mortal men to overcome and I am certain William will never leave their protection. That is why he created them, I assume.”
“He made a personal army that is loyal to him. My intention is to avoid them and to kill William directly. To cut off the head of the snake. After that, they will be unable to replace their numbers and so I can grind them away into dust.”
