by Dan Simmons
O’Rourke sat up so quickly that water sloshed. “For the ceremony…”
“Yes. But which night? And can we get there?”
“We can get close,” said O’Rourke. He reached to the towels on the ledge, dried his hands, and unfolded the map he had carried in from the motorcycle. “Either by heading south and by picking up Highway Seven to Piteşti, then up Seven-C to Curtea de Argeş…or the very long way northeast to Braşov, then way north to Sighişoara, then southwest to Sibiu and all the way down the Olt River Valley to Highway Seventy-three C. That would be… I don’t know…two hundred fifty to three hundred miles on some iffy roads.”
Kate shook her head. “Why would we go that way?”
O’Rourke set the map down and began soaping his beard thoughtfully. “The Jet Ranger left flying to the northwest. If that was its actual route, it might be headed toward any of a million places, but…” He paused to dip his face in the water and came up spluttering. “Sighişoara is that way. About a hundred and fifty miles from here.”
Kate remembered the reading she had done about Vlad Ţepeş. “He was born there.” She frowned. “If Lucian’s right and there are four nights to the Investiture Ceremony and the ceremony celebrates Vlad Ţepeş’ career, wouldn’t they have started at Sighişoara?”
O’Rourke lifted his hands above the soapy water. “What if they were working backward in time? Şnagov is where Vlad was supposed to have been buried. Tîrgovişte is where he ruled…”
“And Sighişoara is where he was born,” finished Kate. “Fine, but what about the fourth and final night? Your Castle Dracula doesn’t seem to fit the itinerary.”
“Unless it was where the next Prince is to be initiated,” whispered O’Rourke. His eyes were focused on something distant.
Kate slumped back in the cooling water, “We’re guessing. We don’t know didley. I wish Lucian were here.”
O’Rourke raised an eyebrow.
“Not this minute,” said Kate, flustered. “But he seemed to know…”
“If he was telling the truth.” O’Rourke shifted his shortened leg. “Turn around and slide back this way.”
Kate hesitated a second.
“I’ll scrub your back and shampoo your hair,” he said, holding up a small vial of shampoo. “It’s not scented and perfumed American shampoo, but it’s probably better for your hair than whatever we picked up crawling through the palace graveyard.”
Kate turned around and sat in the middle of the tub while O’Rourke first lathered her back and then massaged her scalp with strong fingers. The shampooing went on and on, and if she believed in magic she would have asked for three wishes just to keep the sensation going on forever. And never face tomorrow.
“Turn around,” she said, sliding forward and turning. “I’ll do you.”
After the shampoos, after the ritual lathering and rinsing of their bodies, they kissed and even held each other, nude in the still steaming water, but there was no surge of passion, and not just because each was bruised and exhausted. It was as if they were friends as well as lovers, two friends who had known each forever. I’m tired, thought Kate. I’m sentimentalizing this. No, you’re not, said another part of her mind.
“Wherever the site is for tomorrow night’s ceremony,” said O’Rourke, breaking the spell, “we can’t do much tonight. The mountain roads are dangerous at night and police often stop private vehicles. We’d be better off blending in with traffic in the daytime. We’ll flip a coin in the morning to see which way we go.”
“It will be hard getting out of here,” said Kate. The candle was burning low. The air was very cold.
“Once more unto the breach, dear…holy shit it’s cold!” said O’Rourke, who had pulled himself up onto the tiled ledge and swung sideways. His body steamed in the cold air. He began toweling himself rapidly.
Kate stepped out and did the same. It was like going from a sauna to the freezing outdoors. She huddled under the thin blanket. “Tell me we’re going to sleep here together for a few hours,” she said, teeth chattering. “Together.”
“The beds are very much single,” said O’Rourke. He balanced on one leg while he attached the prosthesis.
Kate frowned. “You don’t sleep with that on, do you? I mean, other than in haylofts.”
O’Rourke finished attaching it and stood. Kate noticed that the modern prosthetic looked very lifelike. “No,” he said, “but some consider it undignified to hop to one’s bed.”
“Single bed?” said Kate, shaking now as her body cooled.
“Good blankets,” said O’Rourke. He smiled gently. “And I took the liberty of carrying one single bed in and setting it next to the other in the nearest bedroom.”
Kate lifted her bag and a stack of clean clothes with one arm and slipped the other around the priest. Ex-priest, she thought. Or soon to be ex-priest. “Not to be unromantic about this,” she said, “but let’s get under those good blankets before we freeze our asses off.”
O’Rourke carried the dying candle with him as they found their way to the room.
Chapter Thirty-two
THE day was like a return to early autumn; the blue skies emphasized each remaining leaf in the forests along Highway 71 to Braşov. Kate thought that “highway” was a generous term for the narrow strip of patched and potted asphalt that ran north and east from Tîrgovişte, wound its tortured way through passes in the Carpathian Mountains, and then dropped dramatically again before connecting with Highway 1 south of Braşov.
Rejuvenated by last night’s bath, several hours’ sleep, and the clean new clothes that O’Rourke had found—at least one of the monks at Tîrgovişte Monastery had been small enough that Kate could wear his dark sweater over her last clean, black skirt and look moderately presentable—she was tempted to take off her scarf, tilt her head back, and enjoy the sunlight as she bounced along in the sidecar.
It was not possible. The sense of urgency to find Joshua was too great, the terror at making the wrong decision too deep.
They had not flipped a coin to decide the direction. After looking at the map in the morning light, both of them had lifted their heads and said, “Sighişoara.” On Kate’s part it was nothing but intuition. Something about traveling in Transylvania makes one superstitious, she thought.
“If we’re wrong about where the ceremony is tonight, we have a final crack at tomorrow night,” said O’Rourke.
“Yes,” said Kate, “if Lucian was telling the truth. Our information is shaky, based on hearsay, and generally half-assed. If this plan was a medical diagnosis, I’d sue the physician for malpractice.”
There were few cars this morning but traffic was heavy: heavy semis belching pollution behind them in blue and brown clouds, tractors that looked like they came out of a Henry Ford turn-of-the-century museum, their iron wheels chewing up more of the well-chewed asphalt road, rubber-wheeled horse carts, wooden-wheeled horse carts, painted-wheel pony carts, the occasional Gypsy wagon, herds of sheep standing stupidly in the road looking lost while their herders lagged behind with the same expression, cattle being flicked along by children no more than eight or nine years old who did not even look up at the heavy trucks as they roared past or at the motorcycle as it weaved to avoid hitting cows, bicycles wobbling their way to what appeared to be nowhere in particular, the occasional German car breezing past at 180 kph with a blast of its arrogant German horn, the driver not even glancing at the motorcycle and its occupants, a few Dacias limping along or sitting broken down in the middle of the road, army vehicles evidently trying to race the German cars as they roared and smoked their way down the center of the highway, and pedestrians.
There were many pedestrians: Gypsies with their swarthy skins and loose clothes, old men with white-stubbled cheeks and soft hats that had lost all form, flocks of schoolgirls near the two tiny villages and one small town they had passed through—Pucioasa, Fieni, and Matoeini—the girls’ much-mended but stiffly starched blue skirts and white blouses seeming very brigh
t in the sunlight, the unschooled children tending cattle, both boys and bovine wearing expressions of infinite boredom, old peasant women waddling down the side of the road—there was no shoulder to the highway, only a three-foot ditch filled with foul-smelling water most of the way—and older peasant women being led by tiny children much as the cows were being led, and the occasional ofiter de politiţie standing outside his village police headquarters.
The police did not even look up as the motorcycle rumbled through Fieni, a thoroughly soot-soaked industrial town. O’Rourke was careful to obey the speed limits.
“We’ll need gas in Braşov!” he shouted.
Kate nodded and kept her eyes on the weaving bicycle just visible beyond the horse cart that had pulled out in front of them.
This was no time to close her eyes and enjoy the sunlight.
Once past the mountain village of Moroeni the traffic mysteriously dwindled to nothing, the winding road was empty, the air grew cooler, and few of the trees had retained their leaves. Kate asked if she could drive the motorcycle for a while.
“You’ve done it before?”
“Tom used to let me drive his Yamaha 360,” Kate said confidently. Once, A little distance. Slowly. She was good with machines though, and had been watching O’Rourke closely.
O’Rourke pulled onto the gravel shoulder where the road began its switchback, parked, and stepped off. He left the engine idling. “Watch the clutch,” he said. “It’s a mess. No second gear to speak of.” He limped around to the sidecar while Kate stood stretching.
He’s hurting, she thought. Driving that thing with the clutch pedal and everything has been an ordeal. She mounted the bank, waited while O’Rourke settled in, grinned at him, and started off with a little too much throttle.
The ancient motorcycle and sidecar tried to do a wheelie, O’Rourke let out a single, very strange sound, Kate compensated a bit too fast by squeezing the brake handle hard enough to send O’Rourke’s head into the plastic wind visor and almost toss her off the saddle, she decided to go straight to third gear, missed it a couple of times, got them going again vigorously in first gear, looked up just in time to avoid driving off the cliff edge, took most of the width of the asphalt to recover, then got the machine on the right side, going the right speed, with the right smoothness. Almost.
“I’ve got it now,” she said, ticking up through gears with her foot and leaning forward into the wind.
O’Rourke nodded and rubbed his head.
The highway crossed a high pass above Sinaia, and by the time Kate reached the summit she had worked things out between her and the machine.
“Stop here!” yelled O’Rourke, pointing to a narrow gravel shoulder on the other side of the road.
Kate nodded, swerved, realized that she hadn’t really practiced with the brake yet…where was it?…but found it and applied it hard enough that their skid did not take them over the edge. Quite. The bike had spun around during their deceleration phase, and when the dust and flying gravel dissipated, they were facing back downhill and O’Rourke and the sidecar were hanging out over treetops and rocks.
He took his goggles off slowly and rubbed grit out of his eyes. “I just wanted to admire the view,” he said softly over the idling engine.
Kate had to admit that the view was worth stopping for. To the north and west the Bucegi Range of the Carpathians blended into the snow-peaked Fărăgaş Range which curved south just where the horizon became murky. The highest foothills below the snowfields were spotted with sturdy juniper and dwarf firs, the middle regions glowed green with pine and fir, the lower hills were mottled white with birch, and the valleys miles below were dappled with the dying leaf colors of oak, elder, elm, and sumac. Clouds were boiling in from the north and the west, but the sun was still bright enough to send their shadows sliding down limestone ridges to the tree-filled valleys below. Except for a glimpse of the briefest stretch of road behind them, there was no sight of man. None. Not smokestack or rooftop or smog or aircraft or microwave antenna for as far as Kate could see to the west and south. In a country contemptuous of all environmental standards, this was the first time she had seen the real beauty of the earth.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, hating herself for mouthing the cliché but not knowing what else to say. “What’s that bright green plant up high? Near the juniper trees below the snow?”
“I think it’s called zimbru,” said O’Rourke. He leaned over the edge of the sidecar and looked down. “Say, could you engage the brake, let the clutch out just a little, and ease us a bit forward…toward the road?”
Kate did so. She liked the percolating of the oversized engine and the feel of the motorcycle between her legs. Sunlight glinted off the tarnished chrome of the handlebars.
“Thanks,” said O’Rourke and cleared his throat. He turned and pointed to the southwest. “The Argeş River and Vlad’s castle is out that way.”
“How far?”
“For a bird, maybe a hundred klicks. Sixty, maybe seventy miles. By road…” He chewed his lip. “Probably about eight hours of driving.”
Kate glanced at him. “We’re not wrong, Mike. It’s Sighişoara tonight.”
He looked at her and then nodded. “What do you say we find a better place to park up on the summit, get the bike away from the road, and eat lunch?”
There had been bread and cheese at the monastery, and enough bottles of wine to make all of Transylvania drunk. O’Rourke had explained that the monks still grew vineyards and bottled wine for the local region. It was a way to help pay expenses. Kate had loaded three bottles under the seat of the sidecar and left fifty American dollars in a kitchen drawer.
The cheese was good, the bread was stale but delicious, and the wine was excellent. They had no glasses but Kate did not mind swigging directly from the bottle. She drank only a bit; she was, after all, driving. The last of the sunlight before the clouds won the aerial battle warmed her skin and brought back sensuous thoughts of the previous day and night.
“Do you have a plan?” said O’Rourke, leaning back against a tree and chewing on a tough strand of crust.
“Hmm? What?” Kate felt like someone had thrown cold water on her.
“A plan,” said O’Rourke. “For when we catch up to the strigoi.”
Kate set her chin. “Get Joshua back,” she said tightly. “Then get out of the country.”
O’Rourke chewed slowly, swallowed, and nodded. “I won’t even ask about part two,” he said. “But how do we achieve part one? If the baby is really their new prince or whatever, I don’t think they’ll want to give him up.”
“I know that,” said Kate. The clouds now obscured the sun. A cold wind blew down from the snowfields above them.
“So…” O’Rourke opened his hands.
“I think we can negotiate,” said Kate.
O’Rourke frowned slightly. “With what?”
She nodded toward her travel bag. “I’ve brought samples of the hemoglobin substitute I was giving Joshua. It should allow the strigoi to break their addiction to whole human blood and still allow the J-virus to work on their immune systems.”
“Yes,” said O’Rourke, “but why would they want to go on methadone when they enjoy heroin?”
Kate looked out at the now shadowed valley. “I don’t know. Do you have any better suggestions?”
“These are the people who killed Tom and your friend Julie,” said O’Rourke, his voice very low.
“I know that!” Kate did not mean for her voice to be so sharp.
He nodded. “I know you know that. What I mean is, did you come just to get Joshua, or is revenge on your agenda?”
Kate turned her face back to him. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The medical research…the breakthrough potential of this retrovirus…” She looked down and touched her breast where it ached. “I just want Joshua back.”
O’Rourke slid closer and put his arm around her. “We’re a strange choice for the dynamic duo,” he whispered.<
br />
She looked up, not understanding.
“Caped crimefighters. Superheroes. Batman and Robin?”
“What do you mean?” The ache in her chest subsided slightly.
“You said that you shot that intruder the first time he entered your home in Colorado,” said O’Rourke. “The strigoi. But you didn’t kill him.”
“I tried to,” said Kate. “His body rejuvenated because of—”
“I know. I know.” The pressure of O’Rourke’s arm was reassuring, not condescending. “What I mean is that you haven’t killed anyone yet. But you might have to if we keep going on this quest. Will you do it?”
“Yes,” Kate said flatly. “If Joshua’s life and liberty depend on it.” Or yours, she added silently, looking at his eyes.
O’Rourke finished his bread and drank some wine. For a giddy moment Kate wondered how many times this man…this lover of hers…had said Mass, had prepared the Eucharist for Communion. She shook her head.
“I won’t kill anyone,” he said softly. “Not even to save the person most dear to me in the world. Not even if your life depended on it, Kate.”
Kate saw the sadness in him. “But—”
“I’ve killed people, Kate. Even in Vietnam, where none of the usual reasons made sense anymore, there was always a good reason to kill. To stay alive. To keep your buddies alive. Because you were attacked. Because you were scared…” He looked down at his hands. “None of the reasons are good enough, Kate. Not anymore. Not for me.”
For the first time since she had met the priest…ex-priest…she did not know what to say.
He tried to smile. “You’ve gone on this mission with the worst choice for a partner that you could have made, Kate. At least if killing people is going to be called for.” He took a breath. “And I think it is.”
Kate’s gaze was very steady. “Are you sure these…these strigoi are people?”
His head moved almost imperceptibly back and forth. “No. But I wasn’t sure that the shadows in Vietnam were human either. They were gooks.”
