The line of Hungarians began to fan out around Vlad. In the tavern porch, Yakub maintained his grip on Elizabetta’s wrist. He could feel her pulse pounding under his fingers.
The leader of the Hungarians shook his head. ‘There are seven of us and one of you. It’s over. Put the sword down and I will make it quick and painless.’
Vlad laughed. ‘You don’t even want to work for your money? You look old enough to have known my father. I should like to be as grey as you one day. But never so slow.’
‘I’m not slow.’
‘Maybe, but you won’t be nearly fast enough. Please, I don’t want to kill you or your men. Let Hunyadi fight his own battles.’
The Hungarian scoffed. ‘You’re a cocky whelp, aren’t you! I’ve beaten better men than you, Vlach.’
Vlad came to a stop four paces short. ‘The man in Sibiu said the same thing.’
It was strange to watch from the tavern doorway. Yakub was simultaneously close enough to see every muscle twinge and cloud of drawn breath, yet utterly removed from the world in which those eight men existed during that long moment of stillness between Vlad’s last utterance and the tightening of Hungarian fingers around sword hilts.
Vlad drew, and all stillness was gone.
Yakub had watched the sparring of janissary before, but this was his first sight of real combat. He had seen blood drawn many times, but never so much with one supple flick of the wrist. He had never seen it run so freely.
Against the languid downward drift of snowflakes, the movements of the men appeared speeded up. The grey-templed Hungarian died before his sword was off his hip, his throat severed by the lightning upward slash of Vlad’s blade. Even as that blow was completed, Vlad’s quick feet moved him beyond his still-falling victim, bringing the arc of the merciless kilij saber down to lop off the hand of the next man.
Beside Yakub, Elizabetta’s hushed voice said, ‘My husband is the fastest swordsman who ever lived.’
‘I think you may be right.’
By the time the words were out, six of the Hungarians were dead or disabled and the last was begging, unsuccessfully, for his life.
It was not just Vlad’s sword which was fast. His feet were its match, seemingly moving him like smoke over the ground. Every step, every blow, every pass had the stamp of a carefully learned dance. Yakub was reminded of a great chess player, for whom an unfolding match was nothing more than a branching series of familiar boards; the opponent’s next move and its counter known even before that man had seen it. Yet it was one thing to perform like that when the battle was with small wooden pieces and when there was time to think and to dredge up lessons from memory. To see something similar done against seven minds with seven death-seeking blades, to see it performed in a whirl as graceful as a dervish and completed in barely the blink of an eye, well it struck Yakub as almost supernatural.
There had been silence for that heartbeat between the end of conversation and first touch of hand to sword. Now, not a full minute later, there was silence once more, save for the wail of wind through bare branches and the light crunch of Vlad’s boots returning across the compacted snow. Behind him the white ground wore his bloody tughra: the long casting line of an arterial spray, a scarlet scrawl among the footmarks, and more on the ground around the ragged dark mounds of the fallen. It spread like vermillion on blotting paper.
As Vlad neared, Yakub could see he had not escaped entirely unscathed. His footsteps through the snow were freckled in crimson.
Yakub pointed to the torn sleeve on one arm. ‘That looks painful. Come inside, I have everything I need to sew you up in my bag.’
A little later, as Yakub cleaned and stitched two deep sword cuts, Vlad shook his head. ‘It was foolish to try and double back here. If we had ridden east from Sibiu, perhaps those seven men would still be alive. Hekim Yakub, you have my undying gratitude. Would you do me another favour?’
‘For a sword as fast as yours I should be glad to do as many favours and earn as much gratitude as I could.’
‘I have a little brother. In the palace school at Edirne.’
‘I see.’
‘He should be eighteen now. Old enough to have fought this summer at Constantinople.’
‘And you would like me to find out if he was among the casualties?’
Vlad nodded. ‘His name is Radu.’
‘I will seek him out.’ Yakub knew the name. ‘Where should I send word to you?’
‘If he is alive, tell him I am too. If he has a care to write, Elizabetta and I should reach Suceava’s palace by Christmas.’
The snow was yet to bury the bodies in the stable yard when Vlad and his wife departed. Yakub watched them disappear into the trees and wondered if their paths would ever cross again.
17.
Wallachia, June 1462
It was not Dracula whom Anna immediately sought out. Instead, moving through the slumbering bodies in the barrack room Anna found the klepht with the thickest black beard and shook him awake. ‘Is it true you were once a monk?’ she asked Rallis. ‘Greek or Latin?’
Bleary-eyed, Rallis stared up at her in confusion. ‘Greek. I was a rassophore at Hilandar, Kyria.’
‘Did you lose your faith in them, or they in you?’
‘The latter I should say. I could only ever manage nine out of ten commandments.’ He sat up and shrugged as if he felt it not a bad score.
‘And which one was your undoing?’ said Anna, her tone sharp and precise.
Rallis got slowly to his feet. ‘The eighth, although in my new profession I have failed at several more.’
‘But you maintain the first?’
‘Yes, most certainly, Kyria.’
‘And you can take a confession. You act as geron to the company, don’t you?’
‘Of a kind, Kyria.’ Rallis scratched his beard. ‘I can listen and keep quiet, but your sins won’t be absolved through it.’
Anna moved towards the barrack room door. There was a small empty chamber along the corridor which she thought appropriate. ‘I’m not looking for reconciliation, just an ear and maybe an argument. You see, the first commandment is the one I’ve had trouble with these past years. I still believe in God, but I cannot summon any hope or love in him.’
Rallis followed her. ‘The Lord tests us,’ he said. ‘He wants to see if our faith is real.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘He knows already. He has a window into our souls which we lack. God always saw the castle of my faith was built on sand, but the only way for me to understand it was for its foundations to be shaken.’
‘Whose foundations were not shaken by the empire’s fall?’ said Rallis. ‘It can only be expected that a survivor should hold doubts, Kyria.’
Anna took a seat in the alcove of the small chamber’s window. ‘I don’t feel doubt, Rallis. I feel anger. Who gave more to Him than us? Who venerated Him and all his saints with the careful ceremony that we did for so long? Yet when the crisis came, when individually and collectively we needed Him most, when we turned to Him for salvation, His gates slammed shut, a lock rattled, and there was silence. I witnessed his abandonment, Rallis - the whole city did- it was not a transcendental, abstract thing, but a physical reality: a discernible flame burning from the spire of Hagia Sophia. The light went up, leaping to heaven, fleeing like a coward; and we were left alone in the darkness to our fate.’
Wide-eyed, Rallis’s mouth flapped open to speak, but it was Anna who continued. ‘Along with that anger I feel a deep sense of guilt because, you must understand, while He abandoned our people, He did not abandon me entirely. He had already sent me a guardian angel, who rescued me from the slaughter, even as those first terrible fires kindled, and saw me to safety. I feel guilt Rallis, because my angel died plucking me from that hell. I feel guilt, because so many others were left stranded in the fiery pit with a legion of Turk demons and no angel of their own. But most of all I feel sorrow. I feel grief. Have you ever lost someone, Rallis? Someone dearer to you than wor
ds could ever express? It is a torture. And this torture, this special, personal anguish, it’s not the work of the kindly God of the book. It’s the cruel, intricate persecution of an altogether older force. It is the hand that hung the fig just beyond Tantalus’s grasp, it is the voice that commanded an eagle to repeatedly claw out Prometheus’s liver. “You have defied me”, it says, “you have dared to love something mortal instead of offering all your love to me. Now you must suffer for it, now you must be punished for stealing love’s fire from Olympus.” And the only escape from this fate is to submit all of one’s love to God, for love is worship and to love another soul is apostasy. That is the hidden meaning of that primary commandment, Rallis. Love thy god. Only thy god. But to do so would be to live closed off from human love, which is to be closed off from human life. That was my first sin. I defied the first commandment. I made another my god by my love of him and I have suffered the furies of grief since his loss.’
‘Kyria, I…’
She was crying now. Not weeping, her voice held steady, but Anna’s cheeks were laced with tears. ‘Can there be a limit to grief?’ she said. ‘Is it merely a winter that will eventually thaw into a new spring of feeling, or does grief salt the soil of the heart and let nothing ever flower in it again?’
‘Are you asking if it is possible for someone to fall in love a second time?’ asked Rallis.
‘I suppose I am,’ Anna said brushing a sleeve across each cheek. ‘The success of my next conversation might depend on such a possibility.’ She could see by the look on his face that Rallis had no answer for her. ‘Thank you for listening to me like this, Rallis. You have lightened my burden. It’s funny that it should take a journey far from home and a near-stranger for me to be able to say these things. I could never speak to my sister in this way.’
As she stood up from the window ledge to leave, Rallis said, ‘What do you believe? Do you think the heart can love again?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, crossing the room to the doorway. ‘Perhaps I shall find out.’
***
Stood gazing out from the battlements, the voivode appeared to have carefully selected the ground for their next encounter. ‘Was it a test?’ he said without turning as Anna stepped out from the tower stairwell. ‘Should I have known she wasn’t you?’
‘No,’ said Anna, approaching. The wall walk was narrow and exposed. The wind’s sudden gusts lifted her hair and flung it about her like a crop of serpents. ‘It wasn’t a test. The same error was made by the girl. Her lover came late.’
‘And drew his dagger when he found us? How fortunate there should be another man so close by to intervene.’ She could not tell if he believed a word of it. Vlad had not looked once in her direction, he continued to stare at the forest canopy below. ‘I realised,’ he said. ‘Almost instantly I knew it wasn’t you. I could have stopped, but I continued. Shall I tell you why?’
‘If you like.’
‘Because I had sung for you. I had called out for you and I had thought you had answered me. When I discovered you had not, the pain felt like death and so I put all my anguish into her.’ He turned and faced her. ‘Will you answer me now?’
He was close enough for Anna to smell the musk of the night still about him. She said, ‘You called to me because you believe I am Elisabetta, returned somehow from beyond death’s dark curtain.’
‘Are you?’ His voice was equal parts agony and hope.
Now, Anna thought. Now is the moment at which Mara would see his vulnerability and lie. Even if Vlad knew in his heart the impossibility of it all, he would gladly swallow the barbed hook for a time. Perhaps I’m no better, she told herself, but at least I will try to manipulate him with truths instead of lies.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I am Anna Notaras. It was Elisabetta you called for in the courtyard last night. Had I beckoned you up instead of my niece, it would have been no less an imitation. I will not play avatar for a ghost.’
She watched his eyes closely, expecting to see the shine tarnish with her admission, but there was hardly a change to be found. His soulful, liquid stare was captivating; she found herself almost lost to it. It was impossible to reconcile this vulnerable, pitiful figure with the tales of brutality.
‘Nor should you,’ he said. ‘It was a shock. The scab on my heart is still raw and the sight of you tore it to shreds. I know Elisabetta will never return to my bed.’ His voice grew soft and rich as carob syrup. ‘Will Anna ever come?’
Anna felt her own heartbeat reduce to an obstreperous judder. It was a question for which she had been prepared ever since Smederevo and yet the airing of it was no less bracing. Throughout the ride across the Hungarian puszta she had asked herself, over and over, whether for the sake of her people and the chance of a kingdom, could she accept Venice’s consolation prize.
During the prior night’s meal she had admitted to herself that, just as Mara had said, the voivode was not unattractive and the prospect a little easier for that, but in the grip of the mandrake’s introversion that night, the face reflected in her heart’s mirror had not belonged to Vlad Dracula.
She said, ‘Like you I loved someone once and then, far too soon, he was taken from me. I know pain. I know anguish. It has felt for a long time as if I should never learn to hold tenderness in my heart like that again. Now, I begin to doubt. Now, I begin to hope that the emptiness in my soul might not be everlasting.’
His voice sang, pianissimo, at her ear, ‘Only give me the chance and I would make your heart my basilica.’ He touched both hands gently to her shoulders and bent to kiss her, but Anna was already pulling back.
‘I will give you the chance to win it,’ she said. ‘But if I am to exorcise Elisabetta, you must do likewise. The man I loved died saving me from the Turks. The wheel of time seems to have come around for me just as for you. Once more the Sultan is marching upon the walls protecting me. My old love could not stop him before. Break the wheel. Kill the Sultan and I will give all of myself to you; mind, soul and body.’
‘Gladly would I make a dower of his head,’ said Vlad. ‘But you overestimate little Wallachia if you think we have the strength to stand against that army. In the face of such floodwater, men can only retreat to high ground and wait for its passing.’
Anna knew she was reaching the dangerous ground of the conversation; trying to turn passion into proposition and not with a Venetian merchant brain but a soul of wild instinct. Disconcertingly, she heard Mara’s words in her head - lust shackled for a purpose. This was her only moment. With his blood still thickened by the spell of Elisabetta’s memory, desire had rendered Vlad’s will to warm clay. His grief was malarial; Anna of all people understood that. She could stand in his shoes and imagine John, seemingly reborn, offering her a chance to undo her mistake. In the throes of such a fever one might do anything to snatch up that chance. She was counting on it. But if the phantasm collapsed, she knew his wrath might prove murderously cruel.
Jutting her chin, she said, ‘Are you just another man then?’
The voivode’s thick brows creased. She had him off-balance as she needed him to be. Did her likeness to Elizabetta extended beyond the outer shell? What if his wife had never challenged him like this? What if every word Anna spoke pushed his impression of her further from his heart’s desire? She wouldn’t know until she had pushed too far, but she needed to push because she needed to move him.
His face had armoured itself once more. All the soulful vulnerability fled from his eyes. Only hunger remained. He took a step towards her and seemed to bring the air like a great beating of wings about them. Raising his voice to compete with the roar of the wind, Vlad said, ‘Am I just another man? In many ways no, but I bleed like any other.’
‘As does Mehmed,’ said Anna. ‘As did Goliath. Do you know David’s trick?’
‘A slingshot?’
‘Surprise. The giant never saw it coming. The Turks are across the Danube, they expect you to run and hide in a mountain cave or flee into exile. T
hey will be gathered around Targoviste, as fat and complacent as a Philistine champion and the one thing, the one thing they will never expect is a missile to strike them right between the eyes. Their army is of titanic proportion, but if you slay the head of it, the body will crumple around you.’
Above his lip, the hedge of whiskers curled. Vlad’s dark eyes, green as malachite, lit suddenly with amusement. ‘Fine words, but it’s clear you are no military strategist. The Turks and Venetians treat war as they do trade - a cold, measured transaction. Your exhortation would sound a poor bargain in their ears.’
He came another step closer, so now they were toe to toe and Anna was consumed by his shadow. ‘There is no merchant like Dracula. I do what my heart tells me to do - in all things. War to me is a passion.’ He placed his hand gently on her abdomen above her womb. Her skin prickled at the feel of his fingers pressing softly on the cloth. ‘I feel it here, within, and when I do, I must act. I must ride and hunt and kill. Perhaps this makes me appear like an animal, but I am what I am. I do what my heart commands.’
‘And what does it say right now?’ The hard lip of the parapet pressed against her back. The spell she had cast was a delicate mummery act; a self-deception as fragile as a soap bubble which must be coaxed gently in her required direction if he were to follow. If she had pushed too hard, if the bubble burst...A fear crept upon her then that he would lift and toss her over the battlement, and she would make the same screaming fall as Elisabetta. She was trembling and hoped he would mistake it for desire.
‘Kill,’ he hissed, and she heard for the first-time what savagery could be kindled from his tongue. ‘There is no well deep enough to contain the waters of my hatred for Mehmed and it is matched, drop for drop by his own loathing of me. He has wronged me and I him, over and over through the bitter years, but there can be no satisfaction, no consolation in small victories. I will take his head and I would hazard my own to achieve it.’
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