The fire threw its blaze in red shadow across his skin and shone in his eyes as they widened in realisation. Vlad gave a low chuckle. ‘I see. You are concerned what I might say to Mahmud Angelovic. How many janissary do you suppose a seven-year-old secret pays for?’
‘Fewer than you imagine,’ she said without flinching.
‘I believe the Sultan is very fond of his impressive Grand Vizier,’ said Vlad. ‘They have a lot in common. They are military men who both write poetry. Their children are playmates. How is young Şehzade Mustafa?’
‘A strapping boy, with his mother’s beauty and his father’s eyes,’ said the Valide Hatun. Then, rising from the fireside, she added, ‘Secrets fester with age. I was away these past months in Eğrigöz. I believe you once called that place home for a year.’ Yakub saw the voivode stiffen. The Valide Hatun continued, as if it had been nothing more than a casual remark, but that falsehood was clear from Vlad’s face. ‘In any event,’ she said, ‘I have something that may be of interest to you, if you would follow me this way.’
The door she moved towards, at the rear of the audience chamber, led into the harem. Hekim Yakub read the growing panic in the eunuch’s eyes. Springing like a cat after her, Yakub said, ‘Not that way, surely Valide Hatun.’
Would she really? He wondered, but he knew she was capable of anything. A seven-year-old memory lay fresh in Yakub’s mind and in Vlad’s too, to guess by the smile of anticipation on his lips.
‘Certainly, this way,’ she said. ‘It appears I must find something equal in value to an army. You may come along, Hekim Yakub, if you feel a contractual witness is required.’
They entered the stone corridor which led to the Valide Hatun’s private chambers. It appeared to have been emptied of odalisques and other servants. The two men followed illicitly through, then up a staircase with both eunuchs trailing dumbly behind. The Valide Hatun stopped on a landing outside a closed door. She lounged negligently against the opposite wall which ran in long slats of lacquered wood. A glimmer of mischief lay on her full lips and in her eyes.
‘And whose turn is it to be this time?’ Vlad glanced at the doorway, then moved up to the Valide Hatun. ‘Yours?’ he placed an arm insolently about her waist. ‘Why not? I’m more respectable than last time. My rank has improved. Shouldn’t my bed-mate also?’ He planted a kiss lightly on her neck and ran his free hand over the rumpled folds of her entari and under the heavy hemisphere of her breast.
Hekim Yakub and both eunuchs took a pace forward but were checked by a flick of the Valide Hatun’s right hand. To their mounting horror, they could do nothing but watch the Vlach voivode begin to loosen the button-fronted entari. Tranquil as an Eleousa icon, the Valide Hatun breathed no word nor made a move to stop him. Beneath the parting robe, Hekim Yakub could see that she wore no gömlek, no don, nothing but the crimson şalvar trousers. For a heartbeat, the lantern hanging over the closed door winked its light over the soft flesh of an exposed breast before the voivode’s black head closed over it. The placid expression on the Valide Hatun’s face began to falter. Hakim Yakub saw her eyebrows twinge and realised for the first time that he was watching her endure rather than enjoy this ordeal. Then her lips parted and teeth clenched. Her next breath came in a short, stifled grunt and as the voivode’s head retreated back up to her neck, Yakub saw the rose ring of blood about her nipple.
Hashem yishmor! He’s bitten her!
Again, the eunuchs moved to restrain him. Again, the Valide Hatun’s right hand checked them. A bead of blood wept from her breast as the voivode’s hand pawed at it. His mouth pressed itself fiercely against her neck and Yakub feared he might bite her there also. Eyes closed, the Valide Hatun wound the fingers of her left hand gently into the curls of his black mane. Hekim Yakub’s eyes tracked the other feminine hand which had dismissed any rescue and was now reaching down and down, onto a small lever in the wall. The placid smile had returned as his lips crept along the pulsing vein of her offered neck. Vlad’s mouth reached her ear and whispered, ‘What would the Sultan say if I got a baby on his mother?’
A sigh came from deep inside the Valide Hatun and in a voice thick with pleasure she said, ‘Why not ask him for yourself? Although, just now he is also preoccupied.’
Her hand pressed down on the lever and the slats in the wall at her back turned on their axis, revealing a gallery window.
Two steps from the interlocked bodies of Vlad and the Valide, it was impossible for Hekim Yakub to see past and into the room below.
With his head held in place by the fingers interwoven in his hair, it was impossible for Vlad to see anything else.
It took several long seconds before the voivode shook himself free of her grasp. As he sprang from the gallery window, his eyes had a wild madness in them. He thrust Yakub violently aside and staggered away, back along the corridor.
Unsure of their duties, and receiving no direction from the Valide, the eunuchs elected to follow the Vlach trespasser and ensure he left the harem.
The Valide Hatun gave a long exhale, rested her head on the panel beside the gallery window and beckoned Yakub to come and peer down. He had a fleeting sense of history repeating as he pressed his eye up to the gap.
Yakub had already guessed what sight might ferment such horror in Dracula. The view was uninhibited down into the intimate chamber on the lower floor. Ranks of candles pooled their light from their alcoves across a wide divan where two male bodies heaved against one another. The figure of Sultan Mehmed was hard to recognise from this high, rearward angle, but his lover, braced on all fours, was far easier to make out.
The long hair, which the cresset fires of the jereed field had painted to silver, shook with every rapturous moan from the throat of Vlad’s younger brother, Radu.
By degrees, the slats turned themselves shut as the Valide Hatun lifted her hand from the lever and began to rebutton her entari. Still studying the ceiling, Mara Brankovic said, ‘Eğrigöz was where my husband Murad sometimes kept the child hostages of his vassals. My own brothers were held there for a time. Fourteen years ago, it hosted two imprisoned sons of the Vlach voivode for a year. You can guess who they were.’
‘I can,’ said Yakub. ‘You went there to find out more about Vlad Dracula. The moment he retook Wallachia in August you anticipated this visit?’
‘It pays to prepare.’ For the first time since they had left her audience room, she looked him straight in the eye. ‘Ally or adversary. One can never have too much information on someone.’
Yakub felt a cold spasm run down his spine. ‘And what did you discover in Eğrigöz? That Vlad Dracula abhors sodomy?’
‘More than that,’ she said. ‘They say the old jailer in Eğrigöz had a weakness for boys. When the Draculesti children were sent there, the elder one cut a deal to protect his younger brother. You can imagine the price.’
‘And you just showed him that the cost was endured in vain,’ said Yakub. ‘He will hate you forever.’
‘Not as much as he will hate his traitor brother and Mehmed I’ll wager. Given the voivode’s demons, I should say remaining an Ottoman friend, or even keeping tomorrow’s appointment, has now grown suddenly impossible.’
Once more she was proven prophetic. Next morning the Grand Vizier, Mahmud Angelovic, waited without success for his guest from Wallachia to appear. When a search was made, his men could find no trace of the voivode or his wife, the auburn-haired eidolon.
15.
Wallachia, June 1462
Barbo waited at the foot of the stairs like a cinder-eyed demon, trapping Anna in this underworld. He was clearly enjoying her terror and his own feeling of control. ‘I feel it is high time that we spoke, don’t you? What a bad affianced wife you have been.’
As slowly and calmly as she could manage, Anna moved behind the sarcophagus, in hope the stone island might shield her somehow from whatever malevolence he intended.
‘I am not your affianced wife, Paolo,’ she said firmly. ‘Our betrothal was annulle
d.’
‘Greek whore! You always thought yourself above me. Me! A Barbo!’ He took a pace forward from the steps.
‘That’s not true either,’ she said. ‘I just had no interest in marrying you.’
Paolo Barbo’s voice rang around the vaulted ceiling as his anger boiled over. ‘It was never your place to decide, you arrogant trull!’
He took another pace forward. For a moment, Anna thought he might move far enough from the steps that she could bolt around the coffin and out of the door before he grabbed her.
‘You insulted me at every turn; keeping away when I came to your house to speak with your father; parading yourself in the taverns and brothels of your city; letting any man who wanted have his pleasure between your thighs.’
‘I did no such thing.’
‘You bare faced vixen! You still think you can trick me. All you whores think you can trick me, but I saw you! I saw you with my own eyes! You and that Scottish brute, rutting like animals in the ruins. You’re a whore. You were then, and you still are now. Venice’s whore, brought here to pleasure the voivode so he doesn’t see the knife.’
‘You have no idea…’
‘I’ve no idea? Ha! It’s pathetic to watch you.’ Barbo came closer still. ‘A conceited whore who mistakes herself for someone of importance. You think the world revolves around you! You think we travelled all these miles for your cause! You’re nothing more than a key, my wayward bride, and now we are inside Poenari you can be tossed away like the midden spoil that you are.’
He took another step and Anna knew it was her chance. She feigned to dart left and then, as fast as she could, sprang down the right side of the sarcophagus, desperately hoping he would be wrong-footed, and she might reach the stairs before him.
For a moment she thought she would make it; but he was a lithe and agile man and even as she moved past the stone coffin, he was lunging across her path.
Her arm was grabbed tightly by his crushing hand. He swung her around like a straw doll, making her stumble and crash against the side of the sarcophagus.
He struck her, backhanded across the mouth with all his strength, splitting her lip and causing her to stagger. Then, even as she registered the first tang of her own blood, he took her by the throat and his face, contorted into a terrible mask by his fury, was uncomfortably close to her own.
‘You’ve been a bad luck charm for me since the day I set eyes upon you,’ Barbo hissed. ‘You ruined my life!’ His voice had become a moan of deep sorrow and his eyes were a mixture of tears and wild anger.
‘He’s mad,’ she thought. ‘He’s utterly mad and now he is going to kill me.’
She grabbed and pulled at the hands which were steadily tightening around her throat, but his grip was like iron. He raised her off her feet, bending her backwards almost over the lid of the coffin, adding more of his weight to the crushing pressure on her throat. ‘I’m going to die,’ she thought, ‘right on top of my double. The wheel of time repeating in its own sick way.’
The grip around her neck was unrelenting. She would lose consciousness soon. Her arms flailed back instinctively to try and steady herself and her right hand brushed through soft filament. She felt her fingers slide over the strands of hair, clotted with dust, and then touch against something harder.
The candlelight was dimming now as the last air in her brain became stale. It was almost on instinct that her hand snatched up the brass butterfly hairpin from its deathbed and in a single, violent movement brought it springing from the grave to plunge and plunge again into the neck of the man bending over her.
Instantly the grip on her throat released. Barbo staggered backwards with both murderous hands now pressed to his own neck. Anna coughed in a lungful of stale crypt air and rolled upright from the coffin lid.
With a clatter he lost his feet and crashed to the floor. The mad anger was gone from his face and had been replaced by a look of absolute shock. Even in the poor light she could see his skin paling as the blood bubbled out from the double puncture wound in his neck. His fingers were dark and sticky as they tried to stem the flow.
She touched a hand to her burning throat and then up to the swollen lip. The other hand still gripped the dripping hairpin. Barbo seemed to be trying to ask for help, but she could find no pity in her heart for him. She watched, eyes locked onto eyes, as the minutes beat to the pulsing tempo of his punctured artery.
While the last spasms of his legs slowed and finally halted, Anna moved around the sarcophagus and with some effort managed to slide the stone lid fully away. The mouldering skeleton gazed hollow-eyed up at the brass butterfly standing proud from another head of dark auburn hair. Having wiped it on her gown, Anna had lodged the pin in her own piled tresses.
Gingerly, she went over to the body of Barbo and gave him a kick to be sure he was dead. It felt wonderfully cathartic, so she gave him another before dragging him by those malevolent arms across the floor to the sarcophagus. Then she wrestled his body up and over the stone lip and let it slump in an ungallant pose atop the skeleton.
There was little she could do to disguise the pools and smears of blood on the floor, but they were half hidden in the dark shadows and there were few people remaining in the castle who might frequent this chapel. Perhaps only one.
The stone lid was heavy and unwieldy, but she managed at last to lever it up and back onto the sarcophagus. She had just wrestled it into position and lay half slumped over it, breathing long croaking breaths, when the door to the crypt opened and the pad of footsteps came to a sudden halt on the stairs with a gasp.
***
He had returned, hot and tired from the gallop up the valley. Preparations were almost complete. The strategy was clear, as it had been from the moment the first Turkish boats had run their prows up Calafat’s muddy Danube bank.
Southern Wallachia, the bountiful flat farmland on the river’s alluvial floodplain, had been burned. Every half-mature crop destroyed, every water well poisoned, every town emptied of life. The Vlach people - his people - were streaming with whatever they could load aboard their wagons and ox-drawn carts, up the canyons and passes, up the steep ravines, up, up from the great Turkish flood, towards the safety of higher ground.
Wallachia was pulling back, giving the Turks everything before the mountains without a fight, husbanding all its strength for battles in the highlands where the outcome might prove less certain.
The Turks would find even Poenari, his proud mountain fortress, empty. He knew the power of those infernal cannons. It would take more than stone walls to ward off their fire, it would take a mountain.
He had come only to say goodbye.
While he dismounted in the outer courtyard, his castellan had come running with some business about visitors, but he had waved it all away. It could keep. It could all keep until he had said his prayers beside Elisabetta. He had paused only to clip a fresh rose from her garden before moving along the covered passage. He removed his hat as he opened the chapel door and then Vlad Dracula looked down upon a sight which froze his heart.
Elisabetta was before him, clear as day. Freshly risen from the coffin, she was clinging to it like a weak-kneed, new-born deer. Her hair, her glorious auburn hair, piled like a bronze coronet, was set in place by a familiar pin. The gown he had made her so happy with, grimy with grave dust, heaved about a chest struggling to re-accustom itself to the drawing in of breath. There was blood about her lips and down her gown, and more across the floor tiles. His mind was flooded with childhood folktales of black rites and resurrections; of blood-drinking immortals.
‘My love!’ he said in shock and almost sank to his knees.
Her eyes were wide and wild, her face pale and blotched with dust. ‘I’m sorry,’ she croaked - in Greek of all tongues - with a dry voice that seemed to echo like a sepulchre. She began to stagger towards him and his nerve, which he would stack against that of any man, snapped. He fled from the unholy apparition, up the steps and back into the daylight.
Anna watched the voivode go. It was not hard to imagine his state of mind. Slowly, she followed him out of the crypt. The sky had mellowed to a warm enamel of molten blue and tangerine as she emerged from the passage and paused at the goldfish pond. She bent and splashed the dust from her face with its water, then scooped a handful more to her bruised mouth and pressed her wet palm gently against her throat to try and soothe its throbbing. She looked about but saw not a soul as she scuttled up the tower stairs.
In the quiet sanctuary of her room she closed the door and lent against it as if something might try to follow her inside. After weeks living on her nerves it was over. She was here and the threat, the sinister, personal, long standing threat was no more, but her hands were still shaking.
With difficulty, she stripped off the bloody gown and stuffed it into a tall cupboard. Then she began to shiver as the shock of Barbo’s assault started to overcome the last traces of her courage. She curled up on the bed but every time she shut her eyes the hollow stare of Barbo confronted her. Pressing her face against the pillow, she cried out the anguish and fear which she had managed to keep bottled up until then.
Twilight had started to fall outside her window. The vesper bell began to toll. Mircea would be calling them to supper shortly and she supposed it was then the Ambassador would spring Venice’s bad news about the commune to her and propose an alternative.
She sat up and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She had to decide now what to do. Barbo’s words lingered half-remembered at the back of her mind as she got to her feet and removed the butterfly pin from her hair. She laid it down on the table, took up the bottle of aloeswood from beside it and dabbed a little of the scent on her skin. She brushed her hair clean of dust and then examined the remaining two borrowed gowns, selecting the damask one for its high collar which would hide the dark bruises on her throat.
Porphyry and Blood Page 24