20.
Smederevo & Istria, July 1462
News made its way as it pleased across the map: through broad-leaf forests on the tongues of tinkers; over the sun-burnished sea in the cargo-filled holds of the summer muda; along hoof-beaten roads under the waxy seals of hurried dispatches. A grain trader put in at Venice late in June with a rumour, gleaned in Ragusa, of a battle under torches far to the east. In Swabia, tales began to spread, borne on the lips of a meistersinger, about a horrific forest of flesh in Wallachia and the toppled, murderously cruel voivode whose rule the Vlach boyars had gladly swapped for that of a more reasonable brother. Mid-summer emissaries to Rome brought word of Vlad Dracula from the Hungarian court. Somehow, he had survived and was hiding in the mountains, begging Hungary’s King Corvinus to march south and help him resurrect his throne for a third time. Shortly afterwards, Cardinal Bessarion was seen hurrying with his household on the road which led to Bologna and beyond there, to Venice.
News arrived swiftest of all to the fortress of Smederevo - swifter even than to the Ottoman court at Constantinople. The messenger, dusty and exhausted, was ushered immediately before the Valide Hatun who took the cyphered note - a page of precise detail written in a physician’s spruce hand - and perched herself among the cushions and good light in the wide recess seat of a double-arched window.
Below, the glassy Danube made its lugubrious way as she studied the message and then, still grasping the paper tightly, turned her gaze to the distance. A smile had flickered briefly at the corner of her mouth.
‘Something of significance?’ asked Vuk, her burly nephew. Smelling intrigue, he had followed on the heels of the messenger. He knew his aunt well enough to read her moods and he knew enough of the plot against Wallachia to guess the likely subject of the cypher, but it was impossible in that moment of silence, as Mara Brankovic ignored the question and remained lost in deep thought, to tell if the news she had received saddened or pleased her.
He was about to prompt her again when Mara’s eyes flicked back from the window and met his own. Her mouth drew itself into a wide smile and with a voice rich in satisfaction she said, ‘A signal. It is a signal.’
Her nephew frowned with exasperation. ‘A signal of what?’
She wanted to be rid of him then. She wanted to spring from the window and demand the room cleared. She wanted nothing more than to be alone with the meditative lap of the water and her own deep current of contemplation; to begin right away the spinning, the weaving, the entwining of plans as intricate as Burano lace.
Passing the note across, Mara said, ‘Competition. It is a signal of worthy competition, at long last.’
***
Far to the west, some weeks later, the flaming July sun poured all its power down upon the undulating stone walls of a modest Venetian-held castle. The eagle’s nest view from San Servolo took in the full sweep of the Istrian coast from Pirano around to Trieste. Tearing the eyes from the panorama that morning, a backward glance across the scrub and pine forest on the landward side would have revealed the approach of a company of riders, changed in their makeup since passing through this region earlier that summer, and changing still.
At San Servolo the Black Sheep said goodbye to Erasmus Lueger with jokes and embraces and invitations to go hunting - for beasts or booty – in the country around Predjama, should the air of Venice grow intolerably stale. Then with nothing but a story to show for his two-month absence, the Austrian poet-knight, strangely happy, set off down the Trieste road.
He reserved no special farewell for Eudokia, and she hardly noticed his departure as she bent over and retched into the bushes. It had become a routine occurrence those past days and it did not take an astrologer to read the sign.
For Anna, who had felt guilty enough at Poenari, the sight of her niece’s condition made it hard to live with herself. The practical half of her mind had already laid out the necessary steps to be taken upon reaching home. Eudokia could move to the island convent at Sant’Angelo di Contorta, where the nuns would help her through her confinement, then take the baby in. Anna would make a suitably generous donation to see the child was raised appropriately. It could be done, and had been done by others, many times before. Sometimes it even remained hidden from social gossip. Certainly, Anna and Helena’s hopes of finding a good match for their niece rested on that being the case this time.
Anna half-wondered if Helena would not immediately strangle her upon their return. The rest of her brain turned itself over, as it had since Poenari, trying to find the words that would go some way towards healing the rift with her niece. Trying and failing.
Eudokia was not the only member of the party who had avoided speaking to Anna on the journey home. Ambassador Sagundino had been equally aloof, but his frostiness intruded not a bit upon Anna’s conscience, and she made no plans at all towards mending fences. Now back on Venetian-held soil, the Ambassador used his authority to commandeer the upper floor of San Servolo’s drum tower and then sent the castellan’s wife with a summons for Anna to come up the dark spiral for a meeting.
She arrived at the top of the staircase mentally armed and armoured for a contest. She did not imagine he was about to beg or plead and he did not disappoint. Yet the velvet manners of the plenipotentiary were the very marrow of his soul and even at his most duplicitous he was the model of courtesy. Standing ramrod beside the room’s fireplace, he offered her the only chair.
‘Tomorrow you shall reach Capodistria and a short voyage later, the lagoon,’ he said. ‘It is the end of this journey. I thought you and I should make sure we understand one another beforehand.’
His voice was calm and steady, but his eyes were of flint. He had washed off the filth and fatigue of the road and gathered himself up in his best doublet. He had probably planned the confrontation for days, having chosen his ground like a good commander, but after her own encounters with Mara Brankovic and Vlad Dracula, the prospect held no dread for Anna.
‘Do we not already understand one another well enough, Ambassador?’ she said. ‘I certainly feel I have your full measure.’
He shook his head. ‘I undertook this embassy as a favour for the Republic. When we return, I intend to spend my final years in retirement, enjoying the fruits of my long and faithful service to Venice. I do not believe I could enjoy those fruits while a sword hung suspended by a horsehair above my head.’
‘You hung it there,’ she replied tartly.
‘Perhaps I did, although you’ve no right to sit in judgment on that. Whatever you were told, or half guessed, you cannot know my reasons or the pressures I have been under.’ His voice had launched itself an octave higher, but he mastered it quickly.
‘Are you about to try and make me understand?’ Anna said. ‘Messer Sagundino, it has been a long journey and I find myself spent of all charity at its conclusion. I am also uninterested in your motives or any threats or bribes you wish to produce to ensure my silence. I already know the Venetian Senate will refuse me the commune. You have nothing to offer in that regard.’
‘Oh, I have something to offer,’ he said. ‘Something very similar to what I seek in return. Silence for silence.’
For a moment Anna did not follow his meaning. Then, as it had done so often in recent days, the image of her niece floated into Anna’s mind. ‘Eudokia?’ she whispered.
‘Indeed. You have no proof against me, but I am the first to admit that idle gossip and slanderous talk about oneself is best avoided. I am sure your sister and niece would agree. A good reputation takes a lifetime to build and a moment to destroy.’
She resisted the urge to lurch, fingernails first, at his face. She bit down her anger and in as calm a voice as she could muster, Anna said, ‘It is a strange offer, Ambassador. Silence for silence might sound equal, yet my sword shall dangle over your head for however many of your life’s years remain, while the threat to Eudokia’s reputation has an incubation of mere months.’
He smiled. ‘You plan to have your niec
e birth in secret, then give the child up to a nunnery. I assumed you would. I propose something different that is better all around.’
‘Better?’ she arched a brow. ‘I must admit I can think of no outcome which might be.’
‘A marriage,’ he said. ‘Swiftly announced upon our return. The birth shall come early, and a few minds will make guesses, but the father will acknowledge the child his own and your niece’s reputation shall remain pristine. Improved even. You would be pleased I think with this outcome. Preferable to a nunnery for everyone.’
‘That would depend on a great many things you have left unsaid, but more importantly I fail to see how this gives you any security. I need to see all the workings of your device or I shall assume a trap and take my chances with the nuns.’
The Ambassador gave out a single, sardonic grunt of amusement. ‘How much wiser you have grown over these past months, kyria Notaras. Were I a bolder man, I might claim some credit for that. Very well, my security is this: your niece is carrying a claimant to the Wallachian throne in her belly. Oh, Vlad Dracula may be dead or at the very least finished as a threat to the Valide Hatun and the Sultan, but they are not ones to leave anything to chance. You know that I have the means to communicate matters in Venice back to them. You see, it is not Venetian society that you should really fear getting wind of this. I want the child to remain with its mother because then I shall always be able to have assassins directed to Eudokia’s door, should the rough hand of the state ever come to my own. I should warn you that the Turks would have no spiritual qualms about crossing a nunnery threshold if you instead insist on that route. The marriage and mutual silence is the better outcome for everyone.’
‘The marriage,’ Anna repeated quietly. ‘You are fond of matrimonial pantomimes! And just who is to play the husband in this one? I hope you are not about to suggest yourself for the role.’
An unpleasant smile flashed across his face. ‘No, my courting days are done. I had Captain Spandounes in mind. I believe your sister saw him as a suitable match even before we set out. In the condition your niece now finds herself in, Eudokia could not hope for better. I took the liberty of securing his participation before you came up here.’
‘I cannot think what you must hold over the Captain to have him agree to this,’ said Anna.
‘That I’m afraid is not a device whose workings I am prepared to share.’ The Ambassador opened both palms. ‘There it is. The choice is yours. For the small price of your silence, your niece can marry the Captain and remain a healthy matron of polite Venetian society, or else you can try your luck at ruining me before I can blacken her name around the lagoon and bring Turkish killers to her nunnery cell door. It is your choice kyria Notaras.’
‘It is no choice, Messer Sagundino, as you well know. But there is still the small matter of my niece’s acceptance. You would have to be blind not to see she will have nothing to do with this if she suspects my hand in it. The Captain will have to propose to her and be careful not to show the knife at his own back.’
‘That would be the right approach, I agree,’ the Ambassador said. ‘He is suitably motivated. You may also be assured that it is not a scheme that is altogether unpalatable to him. His soldiering days are drawing to a close. A comely enough wife from a good family - a Greek family? No, I think he shall count it a small hardship. His knightly heart might even leap at the thought of rescuing a damsel in distress.’
Her distaste must have shown on her face. The Ambassador’s mouth cracked open with amusement. He said, ‘You think it a sordid business, I can see. Here we are selling the lives and happiness of two others to cover up our own mistakes, but this is diplomacy my dear. The scale is grander and the mistakes more obscene, but this is the market trade of nations. If you insist on taking up the charter of your own sunken empire, then there will be deals to come that shall feel far dirtier than this mess.’
Standing, Anna smoothed out her gown. ‘Well then, if that is all?’
‘Yes,’ said Ambassador Sagundino. ‘That is all. Goodbye, Madonna.’ He escorted her to the door and as he held it open, added, ‘I shall not be coming on to Venice tomorrow. I’m sure you understand why I feel it unwise to risk a boat journey with yourself and the Captain at this time.’
She swept away without a word and paced the floor of her appointed chamber while later that day, in another room of the castle, Matthew Spandounes stammered out his intentions to a whey faced Eudokia, who consented to become his wife. A barrel was produced from the stores - the bounty of the local vine-trellised slopes - and soon the walls of San Servolo rang with song and celebration.
Next morning, goaded by the intermittent bawl of a cockerel, the sun began to surmount the eastern hills and once more take up its duty. Bit by bit the light crept warming fingers over the rocks and rooftops of San Servolo and glinted from satin and steel as the Black Sheep rode down to the Adriatic shore to find a boat across the waters to the city which for now remained a mere blemish upon the horizon. Venice.
It would be a different Anna Notaras that returned there. Still pursued, perhaps, by the dark rider of her doubts, but armoured now with new resolve and armed with an ambition that extended beyond the mere survival of her faith, culture and people, and began to take on the equally dark guise of vengeance.
Epilogue
Another short journey was made by water that day, far to the east. A boat out of Gallipoli touched lightly on the sands of the Anatolian shore. The disembarking party, dressed in their finery, patiently waited and were grateful for the bracing onshore wind, which took the sting from the high summer sun even as it tried to rip their streaming pennants to tatters.
Among them was Hekim Yakub, keenly observing, as ever, on behalf of his mistress. He stood silently composing his notes in his head as the grandest member of the party disembarked. Newly returned from the near disaster in Wallachia, Sultan Mehmed had decided, for reasons he deemed unnecessary to share with others, to make a pilgrimage to the ruins of Troy. And so here the imperial court stood, amid the bowing scrub and billowing sand, while Mehmed walked his gouty frame among the ruins, flanked by a pair of pet historians who pointed out what they took to be the tomb of Achilles, the Scaean gate, the temple of Athena Ilias.
Then, with the sun at its zenith, the Sultan found a spot he must have felt most august and declaimed to the crumbling stones that he had avenged them. That he had ravaged the cities of their enemy and made a Mysian prey of their riches. That it had fallen to him to collect the debt of boundless Greek hubris which they had contracted, time and again, upon the peoples of Asia.
‘The Greeks are gone!’ his voice rang out, borne up by the coastal zephyr, to reach all corners of the ghost-haunted Trojan wasteland. ‘Their lands, their leaders, their hope. I have vanquished them all, utterly!’
But in this, Hekim Yakub knew, he was wrong.
Author’s Note
In 1897 Bram Stoker introduced the fictional character of Count Dracula to the world & a global cultural icon was born. Perhaps fittingly for a vampire, Stoker’s Dracula was a reanimated version of a real historical man and over the century and more of his existence the undead count has continued to drain attention, like blood, from the historical Dracula, so much so that outside his native Romania, the 15th century voivode has become almost divorced from his own patronym.
Stoker’s Dracula did not materialise from thin air. Much of the vampire folklore in his novel drew directly on Wallachian traditions and I have tried to make use of some of these too. The ruins of Poenari - the real castle Dracula - can still be visited in Romania today. The river that runs beneath those precipitous battlements is called the Lady’s River and the name stems from the local legend of Vlad Dracula’s wife throwing herself from the battlements having received false reports of her husband’s death in battle.
Most other elements of Vlad’s story in this book are based on real events in his life. He and his brother Radu spent their childhood as Ottoman hostages at Egringoz and the
n went separate ways. Radu fully embracing the janissary life while Vlad spent time as an exile in Moldavia where he helped fight off a Polish invasion before avenging his father’s murder and retaking Wallachia. Headstrong and unflinching, he provoked the Turks into the failed ambush by Hamza Bey and then burned great swaths of the Danube in retaliation, including the fortress of Giurgiu. Hamza Bey and his men were not the first enemies Vlad had publicly impaled, but the impalement of an entire army, perhaps as many as twenty thousand, before the Wallachian capital’s walls, is probably the moment ‘Vlad the Impaler’ earned his gruesome moniker. In answer, Mehmed invaded, setting up the night raid on the 17th June 1462 which is perhaps the most celebrated battle in Romanian history.
Accounts of the chaotic battle unsurprisingly vary wildly. It is hard to understate how unconventional a tactic a night raid was for that era, much less one launched against overwhelming enemy numbers. Dracula’s all or nothing attempt to kill the sultan may well have been inspired by the success of a Serb assassin in the aftermath of the battle of Kosovo which Mara Brankovic refers to.
How close did Vlad really come? That is disputed. Most contemporary Turk chroniclers wave it off as a complete failure. An eyewitness diary by a Serb-born Janissary suggests a high degree of confusion in the ranks and fighting inside the camp. Some accounts say Vlad managed to hit his targeted tent but had mistaken the Grand Vizier’s for the Sultans. He is also reported to have dressed as a Turk and scouted inside the camp in the hours beforehand.
Ultimately Vlad’s daring attack did not kill Mehmed. The conquest of Wallachia swiftly followed and Vlad’s brother Radu took the throne. Comparatively little is known of Radu except that it seems the Wallachian boyars found him more reasonable than his fiery brother. He did command the only cavalry company in the janissary corps during the invasion of Wallachia. Turkish chronicles called him Radu ‘the handsome’ and reportedly he was the sultan’s beloved.
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