Porphyry and Blood

by Peter Sandham

  She judged herself as presentable as possible when a knock came on her door. It was the Ambassador, right on cue. He too had worked hard on his appearance after the long journey, a freshly unpacked silk doublet, a shave and pomade applied to his hair. ‘Kyria, you look radiant.’

  ‘There’s no need to say what you are about to say, Ambassador,’ Anna said, raising her palm. ‘Come, let’s not keep the voivode waiting.’ She breezed past him and found Eudoxia there, looking perhaps a little drab in her own creased gamurra next to Anna’s elaborately patterned costume.

  As she walked beside the Ambassador through the courtyard, she detected a nervousness in him. He must suspect Mara Brankovic had told her something, but clearly was not sure how much of his own role remained hidden. She was suddenly glad of the intrigues. It kept her mind from dwelling on what had taken place in that sunken chapel. She had little chance to relive the hands about her throat or recall the stare, which had reached deep into her own, as the embers of a life dimmed forever.

  A long table had been set in the wood panelled hall. Seated around it, alongside Mircea and a smattering of Vlachs, were the Black Sheep. The Captain rose from his seat beside Bua and Rallis and she saw Crocodile’s hollow smile among the faces watching her approach. A rapid count suggested three or four missing, including of course Paolo Barbo.

  ‘I’m happy to see you made it, Captain,’ Anna said, taking her seat.

  ‘We’d be a poor excuse for a mercenary company if a few peasants could get the better of us.’ He might have said more, but another figure came through the hall’s doorway and the table rose respectfully to its collective feet. Mircea announced the castle’s lord: Vlad, voivode of the Vlachs, son of the dragon.

  ‘Come freely, go safely and leave something of the joy you bring,’ said Vlad in a voice that seemed to echo around the rafters, clear and rich as malmsey wine. It was not a benediction with which Anna was familiar.

  He was not an overly tall man; stocky and bull necked, with a pair of broad shoulders that were brushed by dark, curling locks. His face was thin and sallow, with long lashes that framed large, deep-set, eyes of green. His aquiline nose swept down to a pair of swollen nostrils. A bushy moustache, Turkish in style, obscured the entire upper lip. The lower lip was plump and blood red and the square jaw beneath clean shaven.

  In many ways, it was a curious face: somehow both deeply masculine, yet in other ways almost womanly. Simultaneously cold and terrible, but also vulnerable, and perhaps even more than a little handsome.

  He had no Italian but his Greek was not bad and she gathered he spoke both Turkish and Hungarian. He addressed the Ambassador first, but his eyes returned to her again and again as Sagundino briefly recounted their journey. ‘So, Ambassador,’ said Vlad with a predatory smile. ‘Venice has sent you to see if Dracula is an athlete of Christ or a Turkish puppet.’

  ‘My lord, Venice has no doubt that the Turk is your enemy. We would be allies with you.’ The Ambassador glanced across at Anna. ‘We would like to formalise this alliance and seek to co-ordinate our efforts in the coming war.’

  Dracula laughed. ‘The Turk is already over the Danube. The war has commenced, so far as Wallachia is concerned. But I understand your senate’s doubts. I can put myself in their velvet slippers.’ He sat back and toyed the end of his moustache between his fingers. Then he turned his face fully to Anna and she saw how deep those soulful green eyes could penetrate. ‘What do they see when they look at me?’ He asked.

  What indeed. The voice of Mara rang in her mind. He is not unattractive, she had said, and Anna had to admit that had been no lie. Could I give myself to this man? For my people, for my dream? Could I surrender my freedom, my body, my life to him for the chance to turn Wallachia into a resurrected Byzantium?

  Vlad had turned back to the Ambassador. ‘When they look at me, they see a man who owes his crown to Ottoman troops. A man schooled at the Turk palace beside Mehmed. A man with as many Christian enemies as Moslem friends. You don’t trust me. I understand. But you know so little of me.’

  ‘My lord...’ the Ambassador began.

  ‘Worry not. I do not intend to nail a turban to your skull. I cannot begrudge Venetian doubts, even though I have been in conflict with Mehmed longer than any man alive.’

  Anna felt a stir in her heart at his words, for if the dream she held of re-founding Byzantium was a light and virtuous one, she possessed another - its dark twin. She longed to see death come for the man who had destroyed her city and butchering her family. She wanted Sultan Mehmed eradicated and when she looked at Vlad, she saw a kindred soul.

  ‘The Sultan is a vampyr,’ said the voivode. ‘Do you know of those creatures?’

  The Ambassador wore a slightly pained grin. ‘We have recently been enlightened on the subject.’

  ‘I speak metaphorically,’ said Vlad. ‘Mehmed feasts upon others. He drains children – a people’s lifeblood - from his victims to swell the ranks of his janissary. He would be nothing without the fall of Constantinople. Like those undead demons, he is defined by nothing, save the destruction of others. What does one do with a ruler like that? Live with him? Pay him off with child tribute and sycophantic words? That is what some do. It is what the Despot of Serbia tried. Others make themselves his creatures and grow rich from the devil’s bargain. Some Greeks, some Jews. Florence. Even Venice for a time.’

  ‘My lord…’ the Ambassador began once more, but Dracula had no interest in debate.

  ‘I won’t abide him,’ he said. ‘Mehmed knows that. He knew it before I began killing his child-collecting envoys and he certainly knew it after I burned his Danube towns. I brought this war upon Wallachia, but when one is faced with such a threat, the only just course of action is to resist it with every fibre that we possess.’

  ‘Emperor Constantine believed the same,’ said Sphrantzes with a nod of approval. Anna swilled her wine. Sacrifice over salvage.

  A little later, as the food was brought out, Vlad turned back to Anna, his soul in his eyes, and said in his deep, rich voice, ‘Kyria, you intrigue me, tell me about yourself.’

  She spoke then with surprising ease of Constantinople and its fall, and she saw how Vlad’s gaze grew liquid as he listened.

  Then, in return, Vlad told the tale of his own life. Of the unhappy childhood among the Turks, of how the boyars had murdered his father and buried his brother alive. He told her of his return, yes, with Turkish help, he admitted - he would have worked with the devil to obtain that revenge. In a steady voice he recounted finding his brother’s grave with the tell-tale claw marks under the coffin lid. The stories of his cruelty, the fright tales of bloodlust, these he explained stemmed largely from the purge - the decimation - he had brought upon the many treacherous boyar clans and the war, two years past, with the Danesti pretender out of Brasov.

  He was articulate and erudite and never once mentioned his dead Elizabetta.

  16.

  Wallachia, June 1462

  Later, with the meal cleared and the company gone to the barracks, the Ambassador escorted both ladies back to the tower with the broadest of smiles. ‘Well that went extremely well,’ he said. ‘The voivode seems a most educated and refined man of grace and, if I may say, he seemed quite enrapt with you Kyria Anna.’

  Anna kept her face pointed ahead. It seemed he had chosen to play the waiting game and see if she would tumble into the voivode’s bed willingly without the need for blunt truths.

  Alone in her chamber, Anna stripped off the gown and collapsed onto the bed, but her mind was too wrought to allow sleep to take over. She kept seeing the crypt and the blood and the look on the voivode’s haunted face. Lying awake, listening to the complete silence of the night, she kept thinking of Sneberk and Venice and Smederevo. To these she added the half-remembered words of Barbo in the crypt and all the other tiny thoughts and suspicions which, arranged together across the marble of her mind, laid out an increasingly clear mosaic. It was not a pretty picture.

 
There was a jug of wine on the room’s wooden table. She poured herself a cup and sat for a time, swilling it in her hands as if the answer might come floating to the surface. Then her eyes seemed to draw themselves to the candle’s wavering reflection in the surface of the small silver container.

  Spooning a quantity of the white powder into the wine, Anna drained the cup in one draw and, blowing out the taper, lay down in the darkness to await the same dreamless, restorative sleep she had found at Smederevo.

  She could not be sure how long she lay listening to the night. The mandrake wine made her feel drowsy, but she still could not seem to breach the threshold of sleep. The hoot of a faraway owl echoed across the valley and then another sound came to her ear from nearer the window. She rose from the mattress and stood where she could gain a view down into the rose garden courtyard. With her own room in darkness and the ward dimly lit by a single cresset it was possible to make out the shape of the pond and perhaps the outline of a figure sat on the bench. She thought she heard the ripple of a hand through the pond’s water and then a voice, deep and musical, called out softly.

  ‘Elizabetta.’

  He almost sighed the word out. The rest was said in a tongue she did not know, but the tone was such that his emotion was clear.

  ‘Elizabetta,’ the voice came again, but when it continued this time it did so in Greek. ‘My love, have you come back to me? How I burn for you, my love!’

  A shadow, black against black, moved by the goldfish pond, then stretched itself lithely against the pillar of the far colonnade.

  Her skin had grown hot and flushed. She told herself it was just the mandrake. She closed her eyes and heard him call once more. There was a kingdom to be won here, she need only reach out and take it. She need only sacrifice herself to gain for her people something they so desperately needed. She felt the pull of possibilities and knew that her younger self would not hesitate for a moment. That girl would see only the potential and none of the danger; Anna was sure of that. She was also sure that the grieving ghost of the last nine years was not capable of rousing itself, mandrake or no, as she was roused now. The journey had changed her in more ways than one.

  Moving back to the table, she poured another cup of wine, spooned in a generous heap of powder and drained the lot in one gulp. Almost at once, Anna began to feel an ache inside. She felt like Odysseus, struggling at the mast. The siren call of his voice came once more and was matched by Mara’s words echoing around in her head. ‘Embrace your desires. Rekindle your ambition. Become fully the Empress you always wanted to be. You can bring great solace to your unhappy, displaced people. You may make of your life a chaste vigil for one Scottish ghost. But it is time to realise, Anna, that you cannot do both.’

  She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the mandrake.

  ***

  Trailing a long finger through the rippling cool water, Vlad looked once more up from the blackness of the pond to the blackness of the castle wall and found it was no longer in full darkness. A candle had been lit in one of the windows, tracing its soft golden print around a woman’s silhouette and delicately glinting from an ornamental hairpin.

  He sang to her, his voice tender and full of the longing and sorrow that had blackened his days for the two long years of her absence. He sang with all his heart and felt it almost burst as a hand reached out and beckoned for him to come up. When he rose from the bench, he saw that the candle had been extinguished.

  He was half out of his clothes before he reached the unlocked chamber door. Beyond it the shutters remained open, letting the moonlight fall across the small room with its table and its bed, its faint scent of alloeswood and the gown thrown carelessly over a chair. The phosphorescent light rimmed a snail’s footprint of quicksilver along the calves, the thigh, the naked spine of a feminine body on the bed, turned from the doorway to hide its modesty. Vlad felt himself overcome with a hunger and, without a word, fell upon her like a beast.

  ***

  Anna’s eyes flicked open. Her head swam in the same drug-induced fog she had known at Smederevo, but it had not been a dreamless sleep this time. Quite the opposite. She felt startled for a moment, the clarity of the dream’s lingering memory: the dark-haired figure sliding up over her reclined body; the half-forgotten warmth of skin pressed against skin; the mounting pleasure and sudden pain as the mouth at her breast bit down. Anna could still picture the face turning up from her chest, plump lips rouged with her blood. ‘They’re perfect.’ The shocking deviancy of what followed. It was frightening to even acknowledge her mind capable of conceiving such acts.

  The blackness beyond the window was no lighter now than when she had first lain down. She could hardly have slept at all. The dream, the vivid, soul scorching dream had thrown her back to consciousness. The ache of it remained inside her still.

  She reclosed her eyes and recalled fragments of the dream. Her hands glided up her thighs, tireless as a snake uncoiling. They were soft and confident in an act they had not practiced for so long. She hardly recognised them as her own as they moved with purposeful tenderness. A moan crept from her lips before she could catch herself. She squeezed her jaw tight. ‘I must be out of my mind,’ she whispered aloud even as her moist fingers slid higher, pulled back, pressed again. She pictured the face from her dream, with its large, expressive eyes, and bit her lip - afraid she would cry out as her body stretched itself taut.

  She heard herself moan aloud once more, accompanied by an incongruous male grunt, but even as her distracted mind tripped over the noise, her hands continued to move as if possessed by another. Her body arched, and the ache came out of her all at once. Sighing out her cares, Anna gazed up at the ceiling and then sat up abruptly because the sounds, which surely had only been in her head, continued. The muffled carnal duet came unmistakably from beyond the door to the adjoining chamber. Eudokia!

  Now the sudden, cold remembrance of the voivode down in the courtyard sent her spilling from the mattress. She was halfway to the door, furiously relighting the taper, when the mounting noise of intimacy was cut off by a scream.

  Flinging the door open, the lit taper’s glow caught a haul of four bodies in its net. The two on the bed were naked; the voivode, hip to hip with Eudokia, whose eyes widened further in horror with every racing heartbeat. The two on the floor were clothed. His head turning towards her, mouth agape, Erasmus Lueger looked in a state of utter shock. Lying between Lueger and the bed, Peregrino Bua looked dead.

  It was Vlad who moved first, an expression of deep amusement lighting his face. He raised himself up off Eudokia and calmly set both feet onto the rug beside Bua’s unmoving body. He seemed on the verge of speech when the chamber’s other door burst open and Nikolaos came surging in from the landing under the bright burning besom of a torch.

  ‘It begins to get over-crowded in here,’ Vlad said to no one in particular. ‘And I appear to be the victim of a joke. A quite deadly one.’ He glanced back at the bed where Eudokia had gathered the sheet around herself. ‘The girl too perhaps.’ Then without another word, or care for his modesty, the voivode strolled out of the room.

  For a moment the four living bodies in the chamber remained as silent as the corpse. Then, with the sound of the voivode’s footsteps receding, Anna spoke, ‘Would you go and wake the Ambassador and Captain please, Nikolaos. Then bring them here. I think it’s time for a little honesty.’

  ***

  The dark sky had lightened to bottled ink as dawn made its intentions known beyond the mountains and the inquiry began in Anna’s room. Although not invited, George Sphrantzes had shuffled after the others when Nikolaos fetched Spandounes and Sagundino. No one had objected and so he remained in the room’s corner beside Nikolaos, from whom he had received a brief and lurid description of the earlier scene.

  ‘I’ve had most of the story from Eudokia,’ Anna began. Her niece’s presence amounted to the occasional sound of muffled sobbing from the adjoining chamber. Peregrino Bua’s body had been dragged
out into the hallway. ‘She has been a fool, and in good company in that regard. It transpires that, having discovered kyr Lueger’s earlier romantic interest in her was nothing more than riverside sport, she decided to punish him. He came here tonight in false hope, drawn by Eudokia’s counterfeit letter in which I apparently confessed myself fallen for his charms.’

  A glance at the hangdog expression on the Austrian’s face was all Sphrantzes needed to confirm it.

  ‘A dark chamber laced with the perfume and other items she had stolen from mine; a bed and a half-seen naked girl. I think, kyr Lueger, by the time you guessed otherwise it would have been too late. She would have cried rape and damned you.’

  ‘But instead the voivode was the one mistaken,’ said Sphrantzes. ‘Did she send him a letter too?’ From the corner of his eye Sphrantzes saw the Ambassador shift his weight from foot to foot.

  Anna pursed her lips at the heavy implication. ‘No. Kyr Lueger did not wish for his ardour to appear over-keen. He was deliberately late. The voivode was in the courtyard. As to why, well, we shall speak on that later. Eudokia mistook the shadowy figure lingering beneath her window and beckoned him up.’

  Sphrantzes nodded. ‘So kyr Lueger arrived to find his place taken and took offense.’ He turned to the Austrian. ‘How then did poor Peregrino Bua find himself skewered upon the jealous blade?’

  ‘It was his own knife,’ said Lueger. ‘I knew something was wrong the moment I reached the landing. You could hear plainly what was going on in there. I’ll admit I had smelled mischief in the note from the moment I read it. Someone is having fun at your expense, I thought. Then I saw the door was ajar and so I took the chance to spy. A herd of Burlina cattle could have come lowing through the chamber and the two on the bed wouldn’t have noticed. Bua already had the dagger out. He looked back and saw me in the doorway and then we were wrestling.’