by Alex Oliver
Surely they must guess? Yet the footman had not had the dead-eyed look of the castle's inhabitants, had seemed on the contrary well pleased with his sinecure of a job. If the family had not visited their townhouse for centuries, he was probably the first generation of staff that had ever had to do anything to earn their pay. He would learn soon enough.
The thought of the Vacarescu family maintaining all these useless servants, all these empty houses, made him feel better about being one more financial burden. They had money enough to swim in - why shouldn't Radu spend it on a penniless friend, if he pleased?
With this thought uppermost in his mind, he hunted down his host, found him in the entrance hall scowling between two halberdiers. A man in Turkish dress stood before him, with a white turban, a rose-colored robe and a long, curved sword at his side. "You will come now," this gentleman was saying, "as you are."
"I have only just arrived." Radu looked shocked, his gray eyes steely with outrage and confusion. "I should be permitted to open my house, prepare myself in peace. For the Voivode's own honor I should not be dragged before him travel-stained and ragged as a beggar."
The halberdiers, trying to maintain a dignified air while hiding the fact that they were sympathetic, succeeded only in seeming anxious and apologetic. The official, in his long pink coat, was as blank faced as a statue. He turned a cool look on Frank. "Who is this?"
"This is Mr. Frank Carew," Radu paused long enough for Frank to wonder what was coming next. "My secretary."
Secretary, eh? He could live with that, and request a salary to match. Though he would have to mentally downgrade the requirements of his wardrobe and his toilet. A secretary did not dress like an earl.
"He will come too."
"He will not!"
The pink coated official stroked his beard. "My lord, do not trouble yourself with shouting at me. I am but the messenger. I cannot change the order I have been sent to relay. You must take it up with the prince, unless you wish to begin your acquaintance with disobedience?"
"He has begun his acquaintance to me with discourtesy." Radu's scowl deepened, but he motioned for a servant to retrieve his outer coat and suffered it to be put on. He beckoned Frank to his side, and together they followed the little official, having to walk slowly because of his short strides. Hemmed on each side by the halberdiers, they crossed the Vacarescu's private bridge - a creaking, slippery thing of old wood - through clouds of droning mosquitos, to the firmer ground where the city rose up on its swell of hill.
By London's standards it was quaint, but beautiful. They meandered on cow-paths along the bank of the river, and the noon sun shone bright on irises and waterfowl and the intricate knotted gardens full of bright flowers of the great houses to their left. After a little while the path swung westerly. A larger road crossed the river on a bridge sturdy enough for carriages, and the river had depth enough to slowly turn the wheel of a prosperous watermill.
A little way beyond this, they passed through a gate in the city walls, and the road beneath their feet firmed and gained a welcome bounce. Frank looked down with astonishment, rubbed a circle clear of its thin coating of mud and saw that the carriageway was made of planks - a road made like a ballroom's sprung floor. "Oh, that's very fine. Are all the roads made like this?"
"Just this one." Radu unsheathed a smile for him, straightened his shoulders, and began to walk once more as though the tip of his hat was all that held the sky up. Frank had long suspected that some of his arrogance was feigned to cover the knowledge of his powerlessness, but he still liked to see it. "This is Mogosoaia Bridge. The great prince Constantin Brancoveanu built it to connect the palace of Bucharest with his summer palace at Mogosoaia, which he also built. His reign was..." the smile softened a little. He had brought this little tidbit of information out as a weapon, but now it became personal.
"A golden age for our country. He was a statesman, a scholar. A great builder. You see that..?" He pointed uphill at something. Frank couldn't pick out the exact building in the meringue of white walls and cupolas, the pink and gray and green arched roofs. "That's the hospital he built, and that is the monastery that Bishop Ivireanu built in imitation of him. He had a vision of us as a nation, and he turned that vision into architecture - influenced by the West, your people, the French, the Saxons - rooted in the history of Byzantium, but with our own particular style. Dignified. Forward thinking."
He waved sideways at a large, crisply built square building, whose lower story of columns about an inner room reminded Frank of Greek temples, but for the fact that the brick of which it was built was a ruddy pink, the color of sunset in the mountains. The second story repeated the arches of the columns in a decorative band of white pilasters. An overhanging roof of verdigrised copper was topped with a tall cupola pierced with a lantern of windows. "That is the institute he built for our scholars to begin the study of natural history. Pretty, yes?"
"It is," Frank agreed, although 'pretty' wasn't quite the word. 'Elegant' would be better. Elegant would convey the feeling of restraint, if not the reassuring solid strength of the style.
"The scholars never got through the door," Radu went on, with a sidelong glance to make sure Frank was getting the point. "It's an inn now. Much like the palace of Mogosoaia. Brancoveanu was denounced to the Turks, and he and all his sons were executed in Istanbul, his property seized by the state."
"He was a traitor." The official paused between one footstep and the next, cast the observation over his shoulder very mildly for all its force. "The sultan crowned him, and he repaid that trust by promising his support to the sultan's enemies. But I should know better than to expect a boyar of this country to understand anything about loyalty."
Radu stopped in the middle of the street, and the Jews, who had their stalls in this part of the city, looked up with a well-honed instinct for trouble, and stepped back into their doorways.
"The only reason I am not killing you for that insult is that you are beneath me."
The official raised the ends of his lips in an unimpressed smile. "My lord," he said, "I meant no insult. You must know that, from one horizon to the other, the inconstancy of the boyars is a well-known fact. If you can teach me otherwise, I will hear you."
Frank remembered what Radu had told him about Vlad Dracul - that his first move in establishing his power as Voivode had been to kill off his nobles. He wasn't surprised, therefore, when Radu could only muster a sullen "And that has always been our right," in defense. No Magna Carta here, eh? Or at least not one that stuck. What a country!
They walked in silence after that, passing monastery walls and gates. The roar of city bustle - wagons in the streets, horses and oxen hard driven, iron wheels on hollow timber, street-seller's shouts and distantly a folk song underscored by a wailing violin - went on beneath a ringing of bells. Here and there, plain chant rolled from an open door as great-bearded clergymen in black returned like crows to the roost.
~
The palace was in the old style, built like a fortress out of stone. It seemed very medieval, for all the gilding and the out of place, spindly Versailles furniture. There was history in every flagstone underfoot, a history that spoke of long ages of warfare. Used to the well-proportioned, airy buildings of Cambridge and London - enlightenment buildings that spoke of reason and balance - Frank found the heavy arches claustrophobic, and the low, white painted stone walls uncomfortably brutal.
This building was a machine of war, but it was also a theater. As they entered the final room, Radu nodded to him to indicate that he should fall deferentially behind. He slumped, trying to de-emphasize his height, to hold himself as if he was invisible.
It worked. When they came out onto the floor of the great, bare warehouse of a room, the gazes passed over him indifferently. He watched them all fix on Radu as though the leading man in a well-rehearsed drama had just walked in. The impression was reinforced by the fact that the room was divided, as by a stage, by a dais that ran all the way down one of
the narrower walls and angled at the end to occupy some part of one of the longer. At that angle sat a golden throne, in which sat a youngish man with a smooth, round face, a square fur hat and a coat of heavy velvet so stiff with gold embroidery it might have served for armor.
A low divan in the Turkish style ran down the short wall, and there sat the boyars who were part of the Prince's counsel, all of them agleam with jewels and fat with self-satisfaction.
On the floor, in what might be the audience pit of the room, the second rank of aristocracy was drawn up in almost military lines: men without a position at court, men who didn't have the right to wear a beard. They too were a hot house full of butterflies, their silken kaftans contrasting strangely with their beaverskin hats. Next to this world of opulence, Radu's travelling clothes, though they were of fine green wool, lined with wolf-fur, looked so out of date, so aggressively abstemious, that they might have been an intentional insult. More than one onlooker stiffened at the sight of him as though they had been personally rebuked.
Radu reacted to this sudden metaphorical chill by standing up so straight he could have been used as a caryatid. He strode to the foot of the throne and looked up, silver eyes as cold as his reception. Oh, don't. Frank thought, when the pause stretched on long enough to make it seem doubtful whether Radu would kneel at all. Was he here to destroy his family in the easiest way possible? To go out in a blaze of defiance and take the Vacarescus with him?
The prince raised a bushy eyebrow. Whispers hissed from the far corners of the room. Frank tried not to think too hard about what being impaled would feel like. And then Radu knelt, very correctly, as though the excellence itself was a rebuke.
The faces around Frank had all iced over, motionless, thoughts as unseen as winter seeds waiting beneath the snow.
"You were not present at our coronation," said the prince, in a light, dry voice. He looked soft, physically, rounded and comfortable, but his eyes were sharp as the strigoi's fangs.
"No, your highness."
"We received your gift and your apologies by proxy, and under advisement from our council, we allowed this."
"Your highness is most gracious."
"I am." Prince Mavrocordatos gave a wry smile. It was, Frank thought, looking at the two of them, very much like a meeting between past and present, and Radu was past. His was the old, feudal style of the 15th Century, passed down directly from those who had lived in it. Mavrocordatos, though, was a clever man, a man of intellect, a politician, soft spoken, insinuating and thoroughly in charge.
"You were told you could make your obeisance to me at your earliest convenience. That was in 1737. It has taken you five years to find it convenient."
"Yes, highness."
The prince leaned forward, elbow on his knee. Light hit more of the back of the golden chair and threw a halo around him. "In fact the only reason you are alive at all is that you did not come to the coronation of Mihail Racoviţă either, nor my father, nor that of Ştefan Cantacuzino. You are not partisan, at least, in your neglect. What have you been doing up there in your mountains that was more important than your duty to the Porte?"
Some of the frozen faces on the dais twitched, with an emotion Frank couldn't read. Was it possible they knew? That they too were complicit in hiding the monsters, learning to get along with them?
"I have been containing a plague, highness."
"And now the plague is cured?"
Radu returned the urbane smile. On him it looked less like a scalpel, more like a sword. "After many years, it has finally left our region. That being so, I took the chance of leaving too."
Perhaps it was the hint of a lie that made the prince's smile broaden - perhaps it was that Radu was really not very convincing at all, and Mavrocordatos had learned to appreciate a vassal so easily read. He raised his head and clapped for a servant.
"Very well. I will accept your fealty. You will stay here and make yourself available. If, by the end of the year, you have not proved false, we will find a small position for you to fill. In the meantime..."
The servant put a small carved chest into the prince's hands. From the clink and slither, and the servant's braced muscles, the way he straightened up afterward, relieved, it held quite a weight of coin. Then he hinged back the lid and the burst of light was the color of his throne. "Take it."
Radu scrambled off his knees with a hiss. "I don't need to be bought!"
It took the prince's laughter to set free the guffaws that were being held in check all over the room, but when Mavrocordatos sniggered, a howl of amusement rolled across the chamber, leaving Radu bright red with humiliation in the middle of the floor.
"Please do not think," the prince's soft words silenced the amusement as if he'd waved a hand and cut it off with their heads. "That you can raise the price by some pretense of principle. I know you people better than you know yourselves. Take the bribe. You will not get more."
The servant lifted the chest from the prince's hands and held it out to Radu, whose color slowly paled as he stood, eyeing it the way another man might eye the gift of a poisonous snake. Frank pitied him, at that point. Raised to be lord of all he surveyed, raised to think himself above the normal run of humanity as a predator is above prey, the only things above him placed there by gods or demons beyond the knowledge of Man, only to come here and to be so cruelly reminded that he was but an inexperienced pawn in a game of greater men? He was proud, but he clearly didn't know what to do.
As Frank watched the reactions of the courtiers on the dais, one of them caught his eye, slid a look over at the still tableau where Radu had still not taken the money, and made a tiny shooing gesture with the tips of his fingers. Frank thought it was good advice, and though it went against his every instinct to be the only one to move in that petrified crowd, someone had to. He took a deep breath, pushed himself off the drop - walked forward a step and leaned down to whisper in Radu's ear. "He's ordered you to take it. If you don't, it will be an obvious act of disobedience."
From the tightening of the corner of Radu's mouth, he understood this part well enough. And Frank, though he had little pride of his own, had lived with his father long enough to know how it worked. He changed tack. "He's not bribing you... not really. He's testing you. Do you know how to take an order from your prince? Thank him. Take it - you can throw it away later."
Radu looked up at this, and met the prince's interested gaze with a clearer look. Then he smiled—coldly, but then all his smiles were cold. "Your highness is most generous."
He took the money, and when waved away stalked out still holding it as though it burnt him. Frank found himself breathing as if he had been fencing more literally than metaphorically, both of them collapsing to a seat in the first empty anteroom they came to.
"I don't think I've ever been more humiliated," Radu said at last. "You are a visitor to my country. I should not have bared her secrets or her shame to you."
"I am your secretary," said Frank, rather stung by this. "I may not have been born in this country, but she's been kinder to me than my own. I intend to love her for your sake."
Radu sighed and sat up straighter, rested enough, ready to go on. "I said 'secretary' off the cuff, because I could not think what else to say. But if you want the position, it's yours."
Frank laughed, half release of tension and half a feeling that he had been floating downriver for a long time and had finally come to shore. "I saved your life in there, you know."
Radu bowed his head, but there was a wariness in his expression that showed he had begun to recognize when Frank was not being entirely serious. "You did."
"So can I be your librarian too?"
A soft exhalation as Radu laughed in return and they were left grinning at each other. Recovered, mostly. "You value my life remarkably little."
This, Frank thought - though he found it as difficult to judge Radu's sense of humor as Radu did his - was meant as a joke. He treated it as one. "If I could spend the rest of my life repai
ring and translating old books, I would think I was in paradise."
"Your ambitions are as commendably small as your actions are wise," the sonorous voice from the doorway startled them both. A man round as a fool's bladder came in preceded by his stomach, trailed by a cloak of sky blue silk, lined in sable. It was Frank's friend from the dais, his expression now open and kindly. He had cut his beard into a severe square, and his homely face was lopsided, with two curving dueling scars puckering one cheek, slicing the end off his right eyebrow. His eyes were the same color as his cloak.
Despite his air of friendliness, Frank and Radu both rose automatically at his aura of authority and bowed without thought or regret.
"Decebal Sterescu," he introduced himself, "By God's grace Stolnic to this court. Come, let us walk a little."
He punctuated this request by taking Radu by the arm and steering him out of the door, leaving Frank to follow. Outside, it was a surprise to find late spring. Sterescu walked quickly for such a large man, guiding them down flagged paths into a walled garden of knot work and cedars centred on a mirror-smooth pool with a wide lip of silvery-grey stone. There he puffed to a halt and sat, making ripples in the reflective surface with his fingertips. "You made quite an impression, young man."
Radu looked for a seat and, unable to find one, settled for leaning against one of the statues of the four seasons that marked the garden's cardinal points. Frank supposed he was not entitled even to this amount of comfort, so simply folded his hands and tried to blend in with the brickwork.
"I'm aware," Radu grimaced. "I would be glad to be banished back to my banat and told never to show my face at court again."
"Oh," Sterescu smiled. "What's even better is that apparently you don't know what that impression was."