The headman approached, holding a wooden cup with both hands. The Ambassador was about to politely refuse the drink when Brother Michael quickly intervened. ‘He is offering a bond of friendship,’ the monk explained. ‘It is a ceremony never to be slighted. There is a small bone cross at the bottom. Next he will offer salt and bread to seal your bond.’
Ambassador Sagundino nodded and accepted the cup. ‘My thanks to you, Brother Michael. You have given us good counsel.’ He grimaced as the liquid burned his throat but he managed not to cough it back up. Passing the cup back to the headman, he said, ‘It is kind of you to put on this show in Venice’s honour.’ He spoke in slow, loud Latin and repeated it in Greek, hoping the combination would be close enough to the Vlach dialect to convey his meaning.
The headman shook his head and pointed at Anna. Then in his corrupt tongue which Sphrantzes could hardly follow, he seemed to say, ‘Not for Venice. For her.’
It only confirmed a growing suspicion to Sphrantzes, but before he or anyone else could press the headman further, the drum of hoofbeats caught all their attention.
Heads turned back up the village track to a line of approaching horsemen. On instinct, a few villagers bolted at the sight of steel glimmering in the daylight.
The headman began running towards the horsemen, waving his arms. Other villagers were shouting and pointing towards the Black Sheep. It was impossible to discern what they were saying, but it gave Sphrantzes a feeling of great unease. The Captain, dashing across, seemed to share that discomfort. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ he said. His men were already forming a protective cordon between the pig pens and the mounted Vlachs.
‘Do they mean us harm?’ said Anna.
‘I don’t think we should wait to find out,’ the Captain said. He bustled Anna towards the horses and pointed at the tree studded hillside. ‘Poenari lies just over that ridge. Bua and Rallis will lead you there. The rest of my men and I will deal with things here.’
‘The pig wrestle was a distraction,’ said Nikolaos as he helped Anna into her saddle. ‘They wanted to delay us while someone fetched the local brigands.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Sphrantzes but as he mounted, he glanced nervously at the line of Vlachs with their axes resting pointedly on sheepskin shrouded shoulders. They didn’t look in the least friendly.
‘Follow me,’ yelled Peregrino Bua, thundering past on a bay mare. While the Captain screened the track with the remainder of the Black Sheep, eight further horses shot from the village. Sphrantzes and the Ambassador, Anna and Eudokia with Nikolaos hot on their heels. Behind them, Rallis wheeled about to watch his comrades clash with the Vlachs and found two more horses joining their escape.
‘It’s not my fight or my company,’ called Erasmus Lueger as he galloped by.
‘No?’ said Rallis. ‘And what’s your excuse?’
Paolo Barbo reined in beside him. ‘He’s my excuse,’ said the quartermaster with a nod towards the vanishing Lueger. ‘Captain was worried for the safety of the ladies with him around and just the two of you to watch over them.’
Rallis scoffed. ‘As if you could stop Lueger.’
‘Of course not,’ said Barbo. ‘No. Captain said you were to keep Lueger in check. I’m to remain very close to kyria Anna.’
An hour’s hard climbing later, the tarn still twinkled in the sunlight below them, but the mantle of green made it impossible to know what had happened down in the valley. ‘Those men are going to die,’ Eudokia muttered as they picked their horses’ feet over the boulder-strewn slope.
‘They’ll do no more than they’ve been paid for,’ said Anna without turning.
‘You’re a cold one,’ hissed Eudokia. ‘How can your heart not burst at what is happening back there? How can you turn away so calmly, knowing brave men will die?’
‘Practice.’
They crested the summit and looked down into a jack-knife river canyon. Rocky drumlins, swathed in hardy beech and alder, spread down it like rumpled velvet and on the highest of the ridges, like a raptor scanning the valley for its prey, sat the dark towers and craggy battlements of a castle.
There seemed not a flat sod of earth to be found near Poenari. As soon as their horses completed the steep descent of the canyon, their hooves were planting upslope, and the track began to unwind itself towards the castle in easy rising loops through the trees.
Leaning low over the mane of his horse, Sphrantzes turned his cheek towards the rider beside him and called out, ‘How do you suppose the men in the gatehouse will react to unfamiliar horses bursting out onto their ridge line?They might take us for Turks and pick us off from the walls. I’d trade every horse for a herald!’
The sky widened in the clearings of each bend and the bolder horsemen, lifting their eyes from the path to glance upward, could see the pointed turrets swelling with every turn. Equally, any watchmen in those towers would not miss the flash of helmets and horse tack, rising like quicksilver bubbles through the green-leaf canopy.
The general pounding of hooves hid from Sphrantzes the sound of one horse being spurred to greater effort. It was only when the ground to his right kicked up in a spume of leaf litter that he became aware of it. The horse, neck outstretched, nostrils flared, flanks already heaving, lengthened its stride from gallop to full tilt and before eight widening sets of eyes, the lone rider broke from the front of the pack.
The gap grew with every stride, until the leading horse reached the final turn, bringing it out from the tree cover onto the bare summit ridge. Fully exposed, the wind played havoc with a cap of hair, black as a throuba olive, then began to toy and tug at the square of fabric which the rider, taking a hand perilously from the reins, unfurled. Lashed to a wooden cane, the makeshift banner was thrust upward and held aloft for the watchers on the wall to see clear against the cerulean sky.
‘By all heaven’s angels!’ groaned Sphrantzes. ‘Has that soft-brained child been keeping it ready all this way?’
The brilliant, heavenly mountain light ran like water over the golden cross and the lettering - four betas, back-to-back - lifting them from their crimson field. It was a banner Sphrantzes had thought gone for all time. Now it was raised once more, appropriately enough at the end of a cripple’s walking stick. His own flag. Byzantium.
14.
Wallachia, June 1462
As the nine horses clattered over the drawbridge and into the castle’s main courtyard, the grey stone walls sheared up and plunged them into deep shadow. It felt like the bottom of a well. Still, they had been admitted; Nikolaos’s gamble that the archers would hold fire at the sight of that symbol of imperial authority - if only from curiosity - had earned them a chance at least.
But inside the gates the expected archers were nowhere to be seen. There was no phalanx of bloodthirsty defenders ready to chop them down, no nerve-chewing garrison fearful of a Turkish trap. There were only a couple of young grooms to take the reins of their horses and a dour-faced man in a doublet, studying them from beneath the sloping roof of the ward’s covered gallery.
‘We are friends of the voivode!’ the Ambassador called out. ‘We have ridden far to bring a message of Christian brotherhood from Venice.’
‘The lord is not here,’ said the man in the doublet and Anna’s heart momentarily stopped in her breast. Surely they had not come all that way in vain. ‘I am Mircea, castellan of Poenari,’ the man added. His face, which had been studying each new arrival in turn, stopped its passage abruptly and remained fixed on her own. His voice, catching in his throat, grew faint. ‘You are welcome. Most welcome.’
Mircea tore his eyes away from her and, through a forced smile, said to the Ambassador, ‘The voivode will return before sunset. There is trouble to the south which requires his attention, but we are good hosts at Poenari. He will expect of us a fine supper for his guests.’
The mounts were led away and Mircea, descending from the gallery, took them across the cobbles of the yard to an iron postern and through t
o a second, smaller courtyard. A tiny goldfish pond lay at the centre, boxed in by wooden benching. There were trellises lashed up the far wall drooping roses in tangles of cream and crimson and coral; a perfect rose garden. The perfume of the roses was bottled up by the narrow space of the yard, softening this part of an otherwise grim castle.
The two ladies were given adjoining chambers, with large shuttered windows that looked down into the courtyard. There were rooms in the tower for the Ambassador and Sphrantzes too, while Lueger, Nikolaos and the three stratioti were sent to the gatehouse barracks, which proved to be deserted.
Indeed, the entire castle seemed almost empty of life with the fighting-age men gathering further south and most of their families already hidden in the maze of highland caves and mines.
Anna lay down on the soft bed in her room and enjoyed the luxury of it after so many weeks on the road, but almost as soon as her head touched the pillow there came a knock at the door.
She opened it, expecting Eudokia, but instead it was the castellan, Mircea, standing in the antechamber with a bundle of fabric piled over his arms. ‘May I come in, Kyria?’
She nodded and stepped aside, and he began to meticulously lay out the contents of his arms onto the bed. They were dresses. Three fine gowns in watersilk, trimmed with fur and lace. Mircea straightened, and his naturally dour face softened into a smile. ‘I thought you might make use of one of these for tonight’s dinner. I think the fit should be good but if not, I can have them adjusted.’
After weeks of hard travel and an arrival in a grim fortress on the brink of war, the sight of these items of delicate, feminine luxury were nothing short of astonishing. She ran the patterned collar of one gown between her fingers and said, ‘You must be a conjurer to make such fine clothes suddenly appear in a place like this.’ Then a realisation struck and froze her stiff. She knew with perfect clarity the origin of these clothes. ‘Ah, I see. Were they her dresses, Mircea? I heard that the voivode’s wife had...had passed.’
‘Yes, my lady, they were hers. I hope that doesn’t give you offence. You bear quite a resemblance to my lord’s late wife.’
She thought of the village and the looks she had received there. It made sense now. A great deal made sense now. ‘What sort of resemblance do you mean? In height? Colouring? In features?’
‘In all these ways, Kyria. If I may be so bold as to say so, it’s as if the lady has risen from the grave.’
She picked up another dress and began to examine it. ‘Will you tell me about her, Mircea? How did she die?’
‘Badly. It happened two years past. There was a pretender to my lord’s throne with the support of Hungary and the Saxons of Transylvania. He raised an army at Brasov and marched into Wallachia. The two armies met at Rucar. My lord won the day, but a few traitors slipped clear of the field and rode to Poenari. My lord had left Elizabetta here for her protection. The castle was almost empty, just as you see it now. A messenger brought us a twisted story that the day belonged to the usurper; that my lord had been captured and beheaded. The usurper’s army would supposedly be at Poenari within the day. When she heard this news, the lady flung herself from the castle window down to the river below rather than suffer captivity.’
‘And the voivode?’ Anna said.
‘Returned triumphant the next day. He had his revenge in time on those responsible. I saw the dread in the eyes of your men when they arrived. You have heard stories, perhaps even seen sights. Perhaps someone has told you Vlad Dracula is a monster - a creature of evil - the devil incarnate even. There are sights to be seen, Kyria, I don’t deny it, but he does not murder out of caprice. My lord gives as he receives, measure for measure. Where they have shown him cruelty, he has reciprocated, but where they have shown obedience, this too he has reflected, in greater sum. Public order in these lands has never been firmer than under his stewardship. A Vlach farmer now may leave his daughter and his gold by the side of the road from dawn until dusk without either being molested. The weakest peasant can bring even a boyar to the voivode’s justice if his case has merit. To one from Constantinople, these perhaps seem small goods weighed against many crimes, but in our history these goods are as rare as diamonds and the crimes as commonplace as salt.’
Anna thought of the village and wondered what had become of the Captain and the rest of the Black Sheep. Mircea’s description of public order did not match the waylaying of strangers for brigandage. That had been Nikolaos’s guess at what had happened, but now she began to see fear and not greed lay behind their actions. The villagers had thought a spectre was loose among their homes and sent for help. She touched Mircea gently on the arm. ‘There can be no better advocate for him than you when his soul seeks its final judgement.’
Mircea has tears in his eyes. ‘Kyria,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in the circle of time? It feels to me something like this. As if we are caught in an eddy of fate which has swirled us backward to relive what has happened before. You are her, Kyria - the lady’s mirror reflection - and you have appeared at the very same castle, just as my lord is set to ride out once more and face an invader.’
Anna smiled. ‘One way or another,’ she said, ‘the circle will be broken this time.’
After some hesitation, she accepted the gift of the dresses. Mircea departed and Anna returned to lying down on the bed, but after a month of constant travel, time spent becalmed inside high castle walls dragged. Eudoxia slept through the warm meridian hours but Anna found her turbid mind gave her no rest. Instead she tried on the dresses and chose an ivory one, pleated and beaded with pearls. It was an eerily good fit. Then she wandered down to the courtyard and drank in the intoxicating perfume of the rose garden.
The blooms hung heavy from the trellises; their broad corollas spread open in soft invitation to any passing insect. The scent hung thick in the airless courtyard. It was a small oasis of delicacy in a desert of grim stone.
She sat for a time on the pond bench, trailed her fingers through the crisp water and was lost in her thoughts. Then suddenly Anna became aware of how she must appear, sat in this garden, which had almost certainly been created by the voivode’s dead wife, wearing her gown. If he returned now it would bring a dreadful shock to him. Anna had no wish to needlessly twist the knife of his grief. She left the bench and sought refuge in the quiet interior of the castle.
The castle covered every inch of the narrow clifftop, bending its shape to match the contour of the land. The twin courtyards and their bastillions took up most of the summit, with the complex containing the great hall and main tower budding off on an outcrop to the side.
A long, covered passage ran from the hall along the castle’s precipice edge, linking it to the rose garden courtyard. Broad, open arches caught the gusts of wind funnelling down the river valley and made it a cool spot to stand and inspect the river’s silvery contour snaking away, far below, through the green, boulderous country. It was then Anna realised that this must be the spot the voivode’s wife had jumped from. Shuddering at the thought, she moved along the passageway and came to a heavy oak door. She found it open and beyond it lay a short set of stone steps descending into a compact, roughly hexagonal crypt chapel.
The light from dozens of candles forested the alcoves in floating conifers of flame and dappled the propped-up boards of linden wood onto which a gallery of saintly faces had been gilded. The roof was vaulted and corrugated like a monstrous ribcage and the compactness of the flagstone floor was made all the smaller by the island of a large sarcophagus marooned in its centre. The stone coffin’s lid was bedaubed by more devotional candles, and among their magma flows of wax lay a single red rose, freshly clipped, she guessed, from the courtyard trellises.
Anna made her way down the steps and turned a slow circle about the coffin, running her finger along its polished marble lip. It was not hard to guess who lay at rest within.
The more she thought of it the chillier she became. There could be no coincidence in any of this, but unlike Mircea, Anna
saw a human hand not a celestial force behind the wheel of time’s revolution. Someone had calculated it all.
Suspicion initially might rest with Venice. It explained their confidence that their bridal offering would please the Vlach leader. Yet as Anna stood in the dark chapel and thought on it, she could not get past a feeling that this all had the mark of Mara about it.
Throughout the ride from Smederevo a question had floated, unanswered, at the back of her mind: Why risk it?
Having detected and intercepted the mission to Wallachia, all Mara need do was hold them there to foil Venice’s plan. Instead she had helped speed them on their way, trusting, on the face of it, that a single night’s persuasion was enough to turn Anna against Venice’s interests.
It seemed to Anna a reckless, hazardous gambit and quite out of character compared to the meticulous planner of Plethon’s tales. There had to be another angle to Mara’s game and now Anna began to see just what it must be.
Standing over the tomb of her double, a second question hung in the crypt air. Who could possibly have known of the resemblance between a dead voivode’s wife and an exile living in Venice? She felt that answer was clear enough: Niccolo Sagundino, diplomat and professional observer.
He had previously been to Wallachia on Venice’s behalf and also spent time in the Ca Notaras. He could hardly have failed to notice the resemblance as Anna laid out her dream of a commune. Yet, not once had he spoken a word of it to her, even after their course to Wallachia was underway. Why?
For all that he had protested innocence on the steps of the ducal palace, he had to have been the architect of this whole endeavour. But not on the Republic’s behalf.
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