‘You think he was reckless,’ said Sphrantzes. ‘You think he brought all that death and fire down upon us for his own pride’s sake. For his own personal glory. It wasn’t that. Take these Vlachs. Even if they fail tonight, they will die trying. That’s worth something. That sort of gesture echoes down through history and gives other men belief to stand up to tyranny.’ He touched her arm. ‘Other men and women I should say. For what it’s worth, I think Constantine could not have hoped for a worthier bride than you, Anna Notaras Palaiologina.’
Anna’s throat became thick. She shook her head. ‘Anna Notaras. That’s who I am. That ought to be enough of a name for anyone.’
***
Without warning, the second wave struck the camp’s southern gate and lost none of its speed as the narrow wedge of riders hurtled between the tent lines. It was a needle of steel with Vlad Dracula at its tip. He left it to the body of men behind him to dispatch the few Turks who sprang into the path of their charge.
The sky ahead held a false dawn from the fires at the northern gate. Petru had done his job. The camp was gripped by a maelstrom of confusion. Uncoordinated torrents of men were flowing, instinctively, northwards. Most assumed the tight column of riders were Turk cavalry galloping to respond. There were even a few cheers raised for them.
At last, the high tasselled ridgepole and canvas alp of the Sultan’s pavilion loomed over the lower tent foothills ahead. They were closing in, carrying death to Mehmed in the wind about their manes.
But the ortas in this section of the camp were dedicated to the protection of their ruler and in response to the battle under the torches to the north, they had done their duty. They had dug in.
A tight ring of four-wheeled wagons had been rolled into place about the pavilion, forming a tabor; securing the Sultan within a fortress of wood and guns. Through the slit of his visor, Vlad could see the white caps above the high-sided wooden walls of the tabor, four to a wagon and every man a veteran.
‘Wallachia!" he bellowed, spurring his mount into a final charge.
‘Impaler Prince!’ the men about him cried.
He saw the first puff of handguns from the wagon-beds and heard the crackle of the volley fizz past.
‘Wallachia! On! On! Make their mothers weep!’
***
The sound of battle came in a low murmur to the Sunset Tower. Smoke clouds dampened the glow of the fires. It was impossible to know how the fighting was going, except that it was still going. So long as it continued, hope remained.
The boyar in command of the third wave of Vlachs had joined the Black Sheep on the rampart. He looked sick with fear. Instead of preparing to lead his men into battle it was clear to Anna that he was dithering. His men were drawn up on the apron of grass beneath the tower. The horses tossing their necks in frustration, sensing the nervous anxiety of the riders on their backs. What was he waiting for? They could hear their comrades fighting and dying.
Anna looked into the commander’s eyes and saw none of the contempt for danger which was ever-present in Vlad. You have chosen poorly with this one, Voivode, she thought. Therein lay Dracula’s great weakness. He could read a swordfight better than any man but was incapable of reading people.
At last the boyar commander descended the tower. He mounted without a word to anyone and led the column out through the gates of Targoviste. North. Away from the battle.
‘Where’s he going?’ Nikolaos said in alarm as the horses clattered towards the foothills.
‘He’s running,’ the Captain said, with no trace of condemnation.
‘He can’t do that! He’ll doom them all!’
Anna put a hand on Nikolaos’s shoulder. ‘I know. You want to ride out there and take his place.’
‘I want to fight our own battles! We could avenge our dead tonight. Even if we joined them in death doing it, it would be worth it.’
‘We avenge them by living,’ said Anna. ‘Every time we light a candle or say a prayer. Every child we teach Greek, every sunset that sees more of us alive than the sunset before. We avenge them in a million little ways.’
Anna turned to the Captain. ‘Perhaps it’s time you completed your contract. How much distance can we put between ourselves and here before dawn?’
‘You’re for running too?’ Nikolaos said in surprise.
‘I’m for living,’ said Anna. ‘We have done our part here. We have set the monsters upon one another. It is possible that ours manages to finish the war with a single stroke, but if he should fail…We must think of the battles to come.’
There were still a pair of sentries guarding the tower staircase, doubtless ordered on pain of death not to allow her departure. Anna approached them and nodded in the direction the boyar and his men had ridden. ‘If you are quick you might catch up with your departing comrades.’
‘Our orders are to await the voivode here. With you,’ replied one of the grim-faced men.
Anna pointed in the direction of the corpse forest. ‘Would you like to be the only living Vlachs around when the Turks reach Targoviste and discover that? If your lord is dead, who is to blame you for seeking safety up in the hills where you might at least help defend your families. If Dracula succeeds tonight, then I shall be the lady of this palace and you will only have obeyed my orders. Now go, before it becomes too late.’
They were brave men, but their confidence in this mad battleplan had always been brittle and without the fearsome, charismatic presence of Vlad Dracula to sustain it, that belief easily cracked. The tower soon emptied. Anna and her escort were not far behind. As they climbed into their saddles and prepared to ride from the deserted palace, a terrible noise rolled up from the Ottoman camp. It was the sound of horses colliding with iron.
***
The earth trembled and the air was filled with a terrible cacophony as brave men and animals were mutilated. The Vlach cavalry wedge had driven itself like a dagger into the tabor and become lodged there.
Riddled with crossbow bolts and lead shot, torn from the saddle by polearms, and bludgeoned by flails, the riders of Wallachia began to die. But the blows which snatched away the lives of his men rang off Vlad’s armour like a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. He found a gap between wagons and crushed the skulls of the men filling it beneath the hooves of his fierce destrier.
‘Be brave, my lads! Hold! Hold for one stroke longer than them!’ Vlad bellowed. ‘Kill! Kill! God save Wallachia!’
Chopping to left and right, he forced his way behind the wagons, then wheeled his mount around and cast death upon the marksmen shredding his comrades. One swing of Vlad’s kilij saber dispatched an archer, the next sent a janissary’s head tumbling into the wagon-bed. That was when the janissary in the next wagon turned their bows onto him. Two arrows struck Vlad in the breastplate, lifting him from the saddle and sending him crashing to the earth.
Around him all was shouting and confusion. A jumble of silhouettes; the glitter of swords, the smoke of arquebus; crashes, rattles and the thud of hooves. The fall from his horse had snapped the strap of one besagew, but his good armour had saved him. The metal of his breastplate was unbroken where the arrowheads had punched, but his ribs throbbed with every breath.
Scrambling to his feet, Vlad seized his saber and charged from the ongoing melee towards the silk walls of the pavilion. Five of his men had managed to follow him through the gap in the tabor. The rest were still fighting and dying outside the ring of wagons. Let them die. They had done their part; he was through and now he would make good their sacrifice with Mehmed’s head.
An almost lazy swipe of his blade gashed opened the pavilion wall. A woman screamed as Vlad stepped through the gap. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the darker interior and then he saw that the tent chamber contained a half-dozen girls clustered together on one side, each wearing the same wide-eyed look of panic. Vlad flipped open his visor. He barely registered the women as he stamped past to the far canvas tunnel which connected this chamber to the next.
The one area of the camp which his earlier reconnaissance could not penetrate had been the interior of the royal campaign tent. Vlad had no idea where the Sultan would shelter. Just as he feared, the structure proved to be not merely a single space, but a canopied palace made up of a great number of connected pavilions.
Beyond the first seraglio of women, Vlad had to cut his way through a crowd of eunuchs who squealed and screamed and clutched at him in an attempt to block his path. ‘Mehmed!’ Vlad bellowed as he parted their souls from their incomplete bodies. ‘Mehmed!’ he called again as he plunged further into the warren of the pavilion. ‘Mehmed you coward, face me like a warrior!’
He sliced open another wall of fabric blindly. The face beyond it was familiar, but it was not the Sultan. Cowering alone on the far side of the chamber, Hekim Yakub wore a look of abject terror. Recognition of the physician stopped Vlad in his tracks. One of the raiding party made to step past and hack down Hekim Yakub, but Vlad placed a restraining grip on the man’s shoulder. ‘No. This one lives.’
Tears sparkled on Hekim Yakub’s cheeks. Vlad moved a step closer. ‘Where is he?’
‘The audience chamber.’ Hekim Yakub gestured to the entrance on his right. ‘By now there will be a dozen guards around him and more joining all the time. Too many even for you.’
‘We shall see.’
Beyond the canvas corridor Hekim Yakub had indicated, Vlad found the heart of the maze: a cavernous audience tent with so many ridgepoles it felt almost like a forest glade. His prey was waiting in the centre of that glade, beyond a solid wall of shields. Dressed in a thin silk kaftan, his hair tousled from sleep, Mehmed’s eyes had the same bewildered look in them as the court whores of that first seraglio chamber.
Blood dripped from Vlad’s gore-slickened armour, pooling on the intricate patterned carpets of the chamber floor. He paused in the chamber entrance, glaring across the five paces which separated him from his nemesis, as if nothing else lay between. Surprise was long gone. There was no sense in rushing. Instead, it was better that they see him; that they all see him. It would send a chill of fear through their veins to slow their sword arms. Vlad snarled, summoning up all his anger; drawing such strength from his hatred. They couldn’t stop him. No one could stop him taking his revenge. The power of that anger filled him, boiling up until he thought his veins would explode; and then he released it, turning all his rage loose at the janissary blockade, his men howling on his heels.
They crashed against the wall of round kalkan shields, and the swords and axes rose and fell like the sweep-wells of the puszta. But rage alone was not enough. The shield wall bent but did not break and Vlad was forced to slide back a pace and consider his next attack.
He could see the white face of the Sultan shining waxen as the moon beyond the protective rank of janissary. And he saw another figure there also, moving past Mehmed and now slipping between the shields, into the cushion-strewn no-man’s land at the centre of the tent.
Femininely tapered about the waist, crowned by a mane of hair almost as glossy as the saber he clasped in his long, exquisite fingers, Radu raised his sword in brief salute to his brother, then, with no further ceremony, sprang into a first attacking advance.
The blade that flashed like an uncoiling cobra was a kilij; the same wide-curving saber as the one that met it in a ceding parry and scraped a long metallic kiss in reply. Both sinuous swords curled slightly from the hilt and then flared into an exaggerated bend towards the tip.
It was the tip which set the kilij apart from the scimitar, for unlike its cousin blade, the less extreme curvature of the kilij allowed it to thrust. Moreover, the double-edged flare of the tip added weight and gave the kilij an axe-like cutting power, which, with a single one-handed swipe, was capable of splintering bone. Lighter than a longsword, it was faster than anything forged by Christian blacksmiths and yet that weighted tip made it capable of lopping off an opponent’s head just as easily. It was a horseman’s sword, the descendant of the fearsome Mongol saber, but in a master’s hand it could be a terrible dueller’s weapon too and in the art of wielding the Turkish kilij - a most Islamic of swords - there were none to be found among Mohammedan ranks to match the virtuosity of the Christian Impaler Prince.
A full blooded Turkish saber duel between well-matched opponents was a dance, a spectacle, a pageant as precious as destiny, and although the fighting continued in the tent around them, more than one man kept a weather eye to the contest in the middle of the carpeted arena.
Not for the saber duel the stiff, straight, knightly blows of Europe, but instead the supple, serpentine slice and slash of the east. Not here and now a grunting two-handed contest of compact strength, but rather, with left arm tucked back or anchored to thigh as counterweight, two agile bodies danced a fearless jig, almost by turn, forwards and backwards into the halo of razored death that was rendered in the space between them. Each pass, as ephemeral as smoke, heralded by the regretful sigh of the blades through the air, ended by the shuddering clang as edge shivered against edge.
Already, a few dizzying clashes in, Radu had survived longer than most against his brother. Had he only the luxury of reflection, Vlad might even have admired the potency of his younger sibling’s technique. He had never credited Radu with such capacity as a swordsman.
There had been no time in the rush from the northern gate to stop and put on armour, so Radu faced his brother in nothing more than his nightshirt. Disadvantaged by this lack of protection, he was forced to be the more wary dueller. His forearm was already half crimson from the nicks and passing blows which, returned, rang harmlessly off Vlad’s metal-sheathed limb. But for all that he was practically naked, Radu held advantages of his own. He was the fresher man, and whilst Vlad’s armour was not overly restrictive, the bruised ribs beneath were rather more debilitating.
The twin blades continued to describe fluid arcs of silvering light through the air. Soft footsteps sprang across the rugged floor with the deftness and surety of two ibexes locking horns on the lip of an alpine precipice, each knowing to stumble was to die.
Within the shadow of the shield barrier the eyes of the breathless Sultan shuttled back and forth in tap, tap rhythm as blow parried blow. Mehmed’s hands balled and uncurled with every supple, delicate, almost caressing snicking of steel; every brief unfurling pass. There seemed no end to the slipping and clipping of razor edges, the slither and tap of binding and beating. Death’s glimmering reflection looked back from the other man’s foible as the duel went wordlessly on, carving whole surahs of qur’anic lettering into the air with each pliant combination of strokes.
It was too raucous a tempo for either to sustain indefinitely. The blur of their engagements became more lucid in equal measure to the increasingly furious intakes of breath. The gaps between passes lengthened. Green and grey eye studied one another for a betrayal of intention. Concussed hands throbbed from the blows. Wrists, half unscrewed by the turn and turn again ordeal, gave out spasmic complaint.
Then came a feint. A rapid elongation of an arm, fast as a whip-crack, but turned and given equal riposte. Vlad, straight-backed, rocked on his heels and slashed downward. Radu, stooping mid-lunge, brought his kilij singing upwards with a flick and caught his brother’s wrist on its upper side as it delivered the falling stroke.
Without gauntlets, it would have been a fight-ending hit of laudable speed. Instead, the heavy glove blunted the severing bite of Radu’s saber and without hesitation, Vlad’s wrist delicately rolled and brought the sword circling over his brother’s straight arm to lick its sharp tongue faintly across the thin, sweat-drenched nightshirt, stitching a new red seam across the garment just above Radu’s breast.
An anguished cry rang out from beyond the shields as Radu staggered and sank down onto one knee.
Now was the opening. Now the chance to press the advantage and finish his tottering rival. But Vlad was here for the Sultan’s head, not his brother’s. Instead he used the heartbeat to glance at the rear o
f the chamber. More conical helmets were appearing through that portal and manhandling their Sultan away from the melee.
‘Stand and fight!’ Vlad shouted over his brother’s rising shoulder. ‘Stand and face me, Mehmed or you prove yourself a spineless recreant!’
Swathed in a cocoon of his bodyguards, the Sultan vanished through the far chamber portal. So close, but Vlad had failed. The chance to end the Sultan’s life was gone. Now all that remained for Vlad was an equally slim chance to preserve his own. He had also seen, in that brief moment’s pause, that all his men lay slain about the tent.
Unsteadily, Radu made to advance once more, but a wordless order had been given by the departing conqueror. Two migfer-helmeted sentinels took firm grip of Radu at each elbow, restraining him while a third stepped past and drove his halberd at the seam of plates on Vlad’s right flank.
He felt the sharpened tip sting through the mail links of his gabardine and put his frustration into a vicious backhand cut that split his attacker’s windpipe and fountained a sheet of black blood across the expensively carpeted floor.
The next slash of the kilij was into the far canvas wall and then Vlad was gone, crashing through three further chambers; opening the silk walls of each without slowing; splintering ridgepoles and bringing down canopies to smother his pursuers in a many-coloured satin net.
A final gash brought him out into the darkness of the night, a quarter turn of the pavilion’s circumference from where the wedge had struck. The section of the tabor ring ahead of him lay empty, the soldiers having rushed to join the fighting. He slid between the empty wagons and vanished past the purple tent of the Grand Vizier like a wraith into the ether.
Porphyry and Blood Page 30