One by one, the servants completed their tasks and left, till there remained just the three of them: Hibah, who would sell her; Tarub the merry, who would accompany her as far as the prince’s divan, and Ilona.
She stood again in neutral stance, eyes downcast, as Hibah walked around and around her, commanding a touch more paint to lips that truly needed none, exchanging one silver toe-ring for another, making sure each bell on her belt gave out a complimentary chime. All except one, which was silent.
Hibah fingered it. “You can find this? In the dark?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“Close your eyes and show me.”
The belt was laid on the floor. Eyes closed, Ilona bent, searched with her fingers, found the tell-tale ridge, placed a painted nail under it. “Shall I open it, mistress?”
“And risk staining your veils? Foolish girl! No. As long as you remember to do it before you sleep. By dawn’s light men like to see that they’ve had a virgin. So if you have no blood of your own, which you may not, then use the pigeon’s blood within. Rub it on yourself, but especially on him. Daubing the scimitar in gore, eh?” She cackled, then turned to Tarub. “Have we missed anything?”
Tarub smiled. “My Lama sheds the pure light of the morning star, as ever.”
“Hmm!” Hibah grunted. “Purity may be fine in daylight. But men want something different at night.” She turned to Ilona. “You will remember all we have taught you?”
Ilona’s mouth had gone dry. She swallowed, nodded. “I…I think so, mistress.”
“Think?” Hibah replied sharply. “You must know. Be prepared for anything. All men are different in their desires—and Mehmet is said to be more different than most…and as changeable as the Levant wind! He may wish to write poetry to you and worship you as an eastern star, bending before you to pray…here!” She slid a finger down Ilona’s belly to rest on her pubis. “He may wish to take you like a boy…here!” The finger moved on, pressed, and Ilona felt her guts twist. “He may want your tears, your laughter or one after the other. Are you prepared to give him anything he desires?”
Fear came again now, the fear that the day’s slow preparations had distracted her from. Fear…and something else. “Do I have a choice?” she snapped.
Tarub gasped at the outburst. Hibah raised a hand then lowered it, unwilling to mark the merchandise. “Stupid girl! Where do you think you are? Your only choice is in the reading of his desires!” She turned to Tarub. “Veil her!”
Tarub went to the stand, bending to lift the headdress off it, such was the weight of the silver and bronze coins that dangled from its brow. It was an unusual request from Mehmet’s emissary, for coins were usually either dowry—or worn by prostitutes to show their wealth and thus their skill. Hibah had snickered that it was perhaps an indication of the role Ilona would be required to play—wife or whore. Perhaps both. The leather cap within had been fitted to Ilona’s head before and sat snugly now. The length of coins hung down, obscuring what was before her. Hibah was a shape, stepping back, appraising.
“Good,” came her voice at last. “Go, Lama of the Dark Lips. Make us proud. May Allah bless you in your enterprise and reward you for your skill.”
As she entered the main corridor of the house, sighs and whispers greeted her. She could only see glimpses through the swinging veil but she could hear and recognize the voices of the girls she’d lived with for these last four years. She’d never see them again. Tears started and she wrenched them back, reaching for the anger she’d felt a moment before. Her eyes were painted…and she must not spoil the merchandise, either. This was her fate, this day, the night to come. Written. Unalterable. She had no choice.
And then she gave a little gasp. For she remembered what the day of activity had made her forget. Someone else talking of choice. Offering her what she had never been given before.
As the door swung shut on whispered farewells, as she waited for the one that gave onto the Street of Nectar to open, she felt her surprising anger return. What right had this Dracula to raise any hope in her? What could he do? A hostage! Little better than a prisoner himself, one up from a slave. A slave was defined by having lost the right to choose. She would be borne in a palanquin to Mehmet’s saray. He would take her any way he wanted. She would break a vial of pigeon’s blood over him if she did not bleed enough. She would choose nothing for herself.
The front door of the house of the concubines swung open. The chair was a squat shape before it, glimpsed through her swinging veil. Six men from the palace guard stood there, armed with halberds. Four others, bare-chested, huge, stood at the poles, coming in and out of her vision. She felt dizzy, swayed. Tarub’s hand clutched her elbow, steadying her, guiding her as she would every step of the way. Till the last.
She took one now, descended the stairs. Then, halfway down them, something made her pause. She looked up, over the roof of the litter, across the narrow street, into the doorway opposite, half a dozen steps away. In it stood a man. Veiled, too, a scarf wound around his head, covering his face. Only his eyes showed. And though she had only seen him the once, through latticed wood and thus not clearly, she knew him.
She turned her head sharply to try to see him better. The coins swung again, hid him. When they swung back, the doorway was empty. So she could remember him only in that one glance. Remember eyes as green as a spring hillside in Wallachia. Remember the look in them, the heat in them; the smile.
She smiled herself, at herself. At her anger, snatched away like a pigeon snatched suddenly by a hawk.
– SEVEN –
The Snatch
He’d seen her. He didn’t know if she’d seen him.
As he preceded the palanquin down the street, Vlad smiled. He hadn’t really seen her, of course. Never had. She’d been encased in latticework when they’d talked. She was wearing a metal veil now. He wondered what she looked like beneath it. What if she was hideous? What if that rich voice emerged from the face of an aspiring crone?
He shook his head. It seemed unlikely. Mehmet’s tastes were known to be peculiar but Vlad had never heard that they ran to the ugly. Besides, how she looked should make no difference to him. She was a lady from his land, in peril. And though he had listened to many wonderful tales in his time with the Turk, it was the legends from his childhood, sung before his father’s fire, that he still loved best. And in the courts of the Christian world it was tales of Arthur and his knights that inspired. He saw himself as Lancelot now, pledged to a Guinevere.
But would the tale have been different if Guinevere had been a hag? Would Troy have fallen if Helen’s nose had a wart on the tip? It shouldn’t matter. Didn’t. Only his promise mattered, and how he fulfilled it. Nothing else.
There were two routes to Mehmet’s saray. One obvious, one less so. Vlad needed the palanquin to take the latter.
The long, twisting Street of Nectar ended in a fork at a fountain. A wider avenue led to the left, though it was somewhat narrowed by stalls on each side and people bunched around them, buying provisions for their suppers. The other way, narrower still, led slightly uphill past a mescid, a small mosque, and, perversely, a row of taverns right next to it. Glancing up that lane, hoping all was in readiness there, Vlad slipped into the throng before the stalls. He had no precise plan, other than chaos. But how to cause it?
The first stall belonged to a seller of watermelons, whole or by the piece. Tied to it by a rope was a donkey, who stood in the way of such creatures, one rear hoof on its tip, eyes glazed in its lowered head, chewing on nothing. Dull beast, Vlad thought, hearing above the haggling and clink of coin the steady approach of booted men, the cry of, “Make way there!”
He glanced back, saw the silver headdress and heron plume of the bolukbasi, the guards’ officer, twenty paces away. Biting his lip, he looked before him again, and thought of something. Drawing his bastinado from his belt, he lifted the donkey’s tail and shoved the forearm’s length of stick up the animal’s arse.
He had
his desire. Instant chaos. A flying hoof missed his head by a wing-beat. He leapt back, into the shelter of a doorway, beyond the reach of flailing hooves. He was still hit by the things that started flying—bits of its master’s stall that the donkey destroyed; melon—yet since the beast was tied to the stall, it was also dragging it into the center of the roadway.
From beneath flung debris, Vlad looked at the guards, halted just ten paces away at the junction. Over the din of braying beast, screaming owner and panicked purchasers, the bolukbasi’s voice still carried: “Clear the road there, dolt!”
The watermelon vendor—an old man with a humped back—took a pace towards them, bent over, hands clasped before him in supplication. “I will try, effendi, but this animal, cursed of Allah…”
It was all he could say before the donkey kicked him, catapulting him into the stall opposite, bringing half of it down. His own was dragged further into the street by the raging animal, who finally broke free and went galloping away, the snapped-off strut scything into bystanders.
Surveying the wreckage, the bolukbasi shook his head and bellowed an order: “This way!” Then he led his men up the other road.
Vlad let them get twenty paces ahead, then followed.
“Are you ready?” he whispered.
—
“Nothing?”
Radu shook his head. He’d been down to the junction for the fourth time. Dropping onto the stool beside Ion he muttered, “Maybe they’ve already passed the other way.”
“No. Vlad would have come to get us. He knows we have little time.” Ion looked again at the mescid beside the tavern. The muezzin had ceased his call to prayer only a few minutes before. Because it was a Friday, hostages were allowed to remain in town till prayers were over. Stay beyond that, and they would feel more than a touch of an agha’s bastinado.
It was not only the hardness of the stool that made Ion shift. He turned and looked through the bobbing heads of the tavern’s occupants to see Aisha, the-yet-to-be-attained, with a wisp of brown hair damp upon her forehead. He watched as she wiped it with a red kerchief, saw a man grab the cloth from her and ostentatiously suck it, to hers and others’ laughter.
Ion groaned, and Radu mistook it. “I know! If he does not come will these not answer the muezzin’s call and go to their devotions?”
“These?” Ion forced his gaze away from his beloved. “These are Bektashi. They have other devotions.”
“I thought they were janissaries?”
“They are.”
“And all janissaries are Moslem, are they not?”
“Yes. Wherever they are from, to join the ortas they have to come to Islam.”
Radu frowned, staring. “And doesn’t the Qur’an forbid the drinking of spirits and wine?”
“It does. Your brother could quote you the verse. But that does not stop many drinking. They say that even the Sultan, Murad, is given to bouts of over-indulgence. And many janissaries belong to the Dervish cult of Bektashi. Moslem but different. These of the…” He squinted at a bare calf muscle, the elephant tattooed there. “…Of the 79th orta have adopted Bektashi ways. Unveiled women.” He glanced sourly at the laughing Aisha. “Unbound hair. Drinking.”
“But…?”
Ion raised a hand. Allow the flood of Radu’s questions to begin and it would never stop. “Go to the crossroads again.”
“But I just came back.”
“Go!”
“Who is the prince’s son here?” Radu grumbled, but rose.
Ion glanced into the tavern again but couldn’t see Aisha. Gone to fetch more raki probably. He had bought several jugs—“tinder for the flames,” Vlad had said. He had a plan for everything, from winning at dice to stealing fledgling hawks from a nest. But Mehmet’s concubine was not a baby bird up a tree, to be taken just after its first moult. Ion could only hope that what had been planned would happen soon, before prayers he could hear being sung in the mescid next door ended, and the first stroke of the bastinado fell on their upraised Christian backsides.
Then he saw Radu running up the street. Behind him a silver heron’s plume bobbed above the crowd. Rising, he did as Vlad had told him.
“Look,” he shouted, “here come some of Mehmet’s arselickers!”
—
Vlad, ten paces behind the palanquin, heard the shout, saw the first of the tavern’s clientele spill out from under its awning—and smiled. The rivalry between the janissaries and the palace bodyguards was intense. Both were elite troops, the Sultan’s chosen. But the peyk—halberdiers of the guard—were nearly all Turks and freemen; the janissaries were all Christian converts and still slaves, despite their status. This worsened the enmity between the groups and would, he hoped, help his cause.
He moved till he was within one donkey-length of the covered litter; till, through the folds of his headscarf, he could see the bolukbasi of the peyk in profile. The man was straining to ignore the comments on his manhood, his parentage and his predilection for bestiality. Vlad knew he had his orders, could not allow himself to be drawn into the tavern brawl Vlad needed. He also knew that if one did not start on its own, he would have to start it.
The guard marched forward in step, lowering their halberds at a snapped command. For a moment, Vlad thought they might escape with nothing but insults, until a huge man stepped into the roadway…and lifted up his shirt.
“See how smooth my skin is!” he called. “See the luxuriance of my hair.” He ran his fingers up a thick blond mat, from groin to chest. “Show us yours, effendi. Let us compare beauties!”
Vlad knew the man. His slave name was Abdulkarim, “Servant to the Powerful.” But he was known to all by his name and the land of his birth: Sweyn the Swede. No one knew by what byways he had come to be the Sultan’s soldier and slave. But all knew what this baring of skin meant. For Mehmet, in his two years as sultan, had adopted Greek customs as well as their dress. To surround himself with men who were happy, he had their spleens cut out; thus removing, from those who survived the operation—and many did, the Persian surgeons were so good—the very seat of moroseness.
It hadn’t seemed to work for the bolukbasi. “Out of the way, intemperate dog!” he bellowed, grasping the hilt of his sheathed sword. “Before I remove your spleen and half your guts with it.”
“Oh, terror!” cried the Swede, fanning himself with his raised shirt. “But tell me! Could you not also remove a few hemorrhoids?” With that, he turned about and bared his arse.
More jeering. More laughter. For a moment, Vlad thought that the bolukbasi was going to draw his sword and thrust it up the tempting target. But then the Swede straightened, robed and, to great cheers, began to move out of the roadway. The officer turned, and gestured his men forward.
Vlad looked around, desperately seeking he knew not what. He saw that some of the younger janissaries were still clutching three-legged stools, willing the fight. Even as he watched, though, these were being reluctantly lowered.
So Vlad bent and snatched one up. He too had seen the tattoos of the orta that held the tavern. “Elephants!” he cried, and hurled the stool straight at the bolukbasi’s head. He saw it come, ducked enough so it thumped into his helmet not his face. But the sound of wood on metal rang like another battle-cry. A wave of stools, mugs, jugs came crashing over the guards. Many struck the palanquin, which had been hastily dropped by men protecting themselves. Screams came from within it.
“To me!” yelled the bolukbasi, blood running from the blow to his head. His men rallied to him, halberds swatting aside thrown wood, points lowering towards the janissaries.
Vlad had moved to the shelter of the far side of the litter. Ion and Radu joined him there.
“What now?” Ion shouted.
They were on the opposite side to the door. Vlad peered through the lattice. He could see two shapes within. “This,” he said, drawing his dagger, plunging it in just below the roof.
Screams came from one woman inside, but were suddenly cut off as if smo
thered. Ion joined in the cutting on the other side, sawing down through the thin wood. By the time he reached the bottom, Vlad was already cutting along the edge of the roof. When he reached Ion’s cut, the three jabbed their fingers in to the gap, and pulled.
The wall of the litter gave with a loud rip. And there, on its floor, crouched a masked and painted houri, her hand clamped across the mouth of a servant. Through the veil of coins, eyes glittered.
“Come,” said Vlad, speaking Osmanlica, “swiftly now. And you…” he added, looking at the prone maid, touching the hilt of his dagger back in its sheath, “…silence or death!”
Clasping Ilona’s hand, he drew her from the wrecked palanquin.
Beyond it, the peyk had begun to march into the tavern. Wood had been surpassed by steel, bruises by blood. All were focused on the fight, on surviving it, so none saw the four shrouded figures slipping away.
—
Nestled beside the new stone bridge that Murad had built over the River Ergene was a sprawl of jetties, flat-bottomed barges bumping against them. With night falling, and workers drawn to mosque or tavern, few observed their passage to a certain pier.
“You’re late!” called Alexandru, the captain. “I was just about to cast off.” He looked at the veiled woman. “This her?”
“Yes.”
“Then get her aboard, so we can be gone. It’s dangerous enough what you have been about, Vlad Dracula. And my ship has orders to sail from the port of Enez in two days, with or without me.”
“Here is what I promised you.”
The captain weighed the bag in one hand. “Seems light.”
“It is. Half what I promised you.”
“Half? Now, wait—”
“My father will give you the other half when you deliver her…and this letter.” He handed over a sealed roll. “Besides, you say you do not do this only for silver?”
The captain looked up at the rooftops of Edirne. “Five years I spent chained to one of their galley benches. So if I can pay the goat-fuckers back…” He looked back at Vlad. “You say this will hurt them?”
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