Still, the Wallachians had the momentum, the shock, the terror. Those who had not fled, who tried to rally, were swept aside. The first of the charging enemy were smashed into, driven back. Then the Turk’s main body arrived and the mêlée swirled into hundreds of individual fights. All Ion could distinguish, amidst the mass of men in hide and wool and steel, turning snow to mush and mud under their hooves, was the Dragon dipping, jerking, rising again to fall, until finally it was thrown high, caught and held, and Ion glimpsed the Dragon’s Talon, Dracul’s sword, aloft for just one moment.
Then a new body of the enemy, all heavily-armored sipahis, charged straight in from the side, making for the standard. They carved a way through the crowd, felling friend and foe, aiming straight and, in the widening gap, Ion could see that their leader was a huge Turk swathed in white, from his turban helmet and face scarf down to his spurs. He was holding a giant war axe, and he drove at the black-armored figure, suddenly alone under the Dragon banner. Axe met sword, knocking it down, but Ion saw Dracula thrust back, up. Then something happened to the blade, it slipped under the arm of the white-clad warrior, who twisted horse and body around and wrenched the weapon free. For a moment, Ion saw Dracula, unarmed, looking up at an axe raised on high. Yet even as the axe began its fall, the mêlée closed again, snatching away sight, banner, Prince and all.
“No!” Ion screamed. In a moment he had mounted and was charging down the slope. He had not even stopped to pick up his sword. He did not have the time.
He got close, fast, because he did not pause to swap blows. And the fringes of the fight were already thinning, as Wallachians who had seen the standard fall began to flee, those that could; those that were not unhorsed now, on their backs, squirming as four soldiers held each one down and thrust daggers through their visors.
He got close. But then men were turning to him, one had his horse’s bit, using his weight to drag it down. Someone else sliced at his mount’s legs and she crumpled with a scream, fell, throwing him forward. He hit the ground, his helmet, which he had not had time to secure, pitched off and a Turk struck down with a halberd; but Ion was still rolling and the blade missed him. But the haft didn’t, wood hitting hard, driving him face down into mud and mush. He knew he was going, could see that same halberd raised again, waited for it to fall, the cutting edge this time, in a world turning to shadow…
…and then, beyond it, he saw something else, something that held him in consciousness, someone…Dracula, rising from the earth, long black hair like a veil over half a face, the half that was smashed. The other half was clear, unblemished, its one eye wide, gleaming, green, staring; staring straight at him. And then the rest of him came in sight, the little there was—a neck, a bloody line across it; nothing more. And as the light faded, as the halberd fell again through the gloom, Ion saw one last sight…Dracula’s head thrust down upon a stake, then hoisted high.
– FIFTY –
The Shroud
She was dreaming of him. He was touching her, gently, as was his way…and she felt the ache for him she always felt. But she wanted him to be rougher. In the house on the Street of Nectar she’d been taught ways to deal with that, a role to play, tricks to increase her master’s pleasure. But she knew that if she did them right, they would increase hers, too. She did not want his sadness now; she did not wish to be anyone’s sanctuary. She wanted to be taken hard, fast and cruelly, to fill her emptiness, her yearning. She wanted him to turn her, spread her legs, pull her head up by the hair, bend to bite her neck as he barged into her. If she could she’d nip his hand, his wounded hand, give him pain for pain, and then decide which, of a thousand and one tricks, she’d try next.
A cry woke her. Not of pleasure, nor of pain selectively applied. It was a whimper of terror, and Ilona, instantly awake, thought that perhaps she had attacked her bed companion again. It happened rarely, but often enough for some to protest that they did not want to share her bed—for the nuns doubled up in winter or they would freeze to death in their cells. In her instant wakefulness, Ilona realized it was Maria beside her—chatty, chubby Maria—and she hoped she had not hurt her. She was fond of her. And the laughing farm girl was the warmest in the convent.
Maria was not laughing now, but whimpering. Caught in a dream herself perhaps. Ilona reached out to gentle her. “What is it, child?” she whispered.
“Did you not hear it, Sister Vasilica?” The girl’s skin was covered in goosebumps and her voice quavered.
Ilona listened. The storm had passed; the wind no longer shook the trees outside the convent’s walls, nor whistled in the chimneys. She heard nothing now but the muffled silence, knew that the world beyond was shrouded in white. This first, late, huge snowfall had sealed them up completely. They would live on the little they had till the road to Clejani opened again with the first thaw.
And then she heard what Maria had heard and flushed cold, too.
Three blows struck upon the convent’s great oak door. And when the silence came again it was not total. Both clearly heard the snort of a beast.
“Varcolaci!” Maria wailed, thrusting her head under the covers.
Ilona petted her, murmuring gentle words. Some of the other young nuns had been whispering terrifying tales, after prayers, of the night stalkers—the undead who sleep in their graves with eyes open and walk under a full moon to steal babies from their cribs and suck their blood.
It was not that Ilona did not believe in those who walked at night. But there was something in the rhythmic quality of the knocking that made her think it was made by a living human, not one risen from a grave. The convent was remote, even without the snow. Only those in great need sought it out on the clearest of days. For someone to come through a blizzard, at night…
Need touched her. It always had.
“I will go and see,” she said, sliding from under the thick wool blankets.
“Shall I come?” Maria’s voice still quavered.
Ilona smiled. “No, child. Keep the bed warm.” Lowering her feet upon the flag-stoned floor, she reached for her habit.
—
Old Kristo, the gatekeeper, and the only man who dwelt within the walls, was standing before the oaken doors. His eyes were filmy with sleep and the effects of plum brandy. “I told whoever is out there to go to the stables and wait till dawn, Sister Vasilica,” he mumbled, his toothless mouth thick with saliva, “but he made no reply and…” He gestured, as the measured knock came again.
“How many?” She pointed at the grille in the door.
“One. I only saw one. But others could be hiding.” He scratched his stubbled chin. “Shall I wake the Abbess?”
Ilona shook her head. Mother Ignatia was old and hard to waken; also, she was deferring decisions more and more to “Sister Vasilica.” “No,” she said, stepping up to the grille, pulling it open, “I will, if I have to…”
The face halted her words, stopped her breath. Stoica had grown older in the fourteen years since he had delivered her to her first convent, his eyebrows now gray, the lines of his face multiplied. But the blue eyes and the bald head were exactly as she remembered. As was the way he nodded as he also recognized her, despite her own great changes.
She slammed the grille shut, leaned her forehead against it, welcoming the searing chill of slatted metal on her skin. It was real, the pain, unlike all the thoughts that hurtled though her mind. The convent was remote but news came to it eventually. She’d learned he was married a year after the event; knew he’d become a father, too. When he’d invaded Wallachia earlier that year, defeated his rival in battle, sat again upon his father’s throne, requiems were sung in his praise, even at the Convent of Clejani. Before the snow began to fall, a woodcutter had brought news with his logs—that the usurper was coming again at the head of a Turkish army, that the Voivode would ride out to meet it. She had said her own prayers then. For him. For herself. For somewhere in those whirl of thoughts a tiny hope had lingered. He would not need a mistress. Her glorious au
burn hair had long-since been scythed to gray stubble, she walked stooped from her scars, and all the flesh that was not cut now sagged. He would not look at her and see a trace of the young concubine, not even of the mistress he’d kept in Targoviste. But he had always called her his sanctuary. Perhaps, beset by so many enemies, he would need her for that again? And Stoica being there? It could only mean that her prince still knew where she was, had kept track of her as she was moved from convent to convent, till all who knew her as anything other than Sister Vasilica were left behind. No one ever saw her scars. But he had remembered them…and her.
Taking a breath, filling with air and sudden hope, she gestured at Kristo to open the doors. He shot the bolts, lifted the heavy bar, laid it aside, bent to pull. It opened, and knee-high snow tumbled in. She did not need the torch the old man proffered, for the full moon rode high in a sky newly clear of snow clouds. Hitching her habit, she stepped eagerly over the snow mound.
Stoica had bowed and stepped aside, his arm passing before him to point her towards what waited—a donkey, standing up to its withers in snow. Her heart beat faster as she thought how she could not come this moment, in the night. There were supplies to get for the road, furs to put on against the cold. And yet, perhaps his need was so pressing…
Then she saw the donkey’s burden.
It was a cone of hide and cloth, lashed to the saddle. She stopped. “What…” she whispered.
Stoica passed her, peeled back the icy canvas. She saw the naked feet, blue, stiffened. There was stone trough before the gate, its water frozen within it. She sank upon it and the ice creaked but did not crack. “Is it him?” she said softly, then remembered that Stoica was mute and looked up.
He nodded, once.
“Did he ask…” She swallowed. “Did he ask that I prepare his body for the grave?”
Another nod.
It only took a moment for her to realize that her wish had been granted. Her prince did need her, one last time. “Then that is what I shall do,” she said, wiping the water from her eye, her joints creaking as she rose and beckoned Stoica through the gate. He halted her with a raised hand, pointed to the far side of the animal, led her there, raised the stiff cloth again.
The first severing was the hand, the left one, the one that should have had just three fingers—taken, no doubt, for the Dragon ring that would have been upon it. The second was worse, of course, because one of the last things she’d hoped to do was to kiss his lips, however cold. But the head was gone, the ragged hole there a mass of congealed, frozen blood.
“Oh, my love,” she sighed and laid her hand upon the shoulder, her fingertips on a scar she thought she remembered. Then Stoica took the bridle and together they walked Dracula’s corpse into the convent.
—
She tended to him alone. Stoica had gone as suddenly as he’d arrived, leading the donkey back into the night. Other nuns, when they heard of the body they assumed to be one of Sister Vasilica’s relations, offered to help. She let them boil water in a vast cauldron and bring it to an empty cell close to the kitchen, allowed them to tear sheets into a hundred cloths. But then, she sent everyone away. She had dreamed so long of being alone with him again. Now she would be.
His body was a little different than she remembered it to be, aside from the freezing of both winter and death. But it was fifteen years since she had held it; she knew how she had changed in that time.
There were scars she recalled, ones she’d once traced with finger and tongue-tip; new ones that had come. A life of struggle carved onto flesh. Ended now.
He was curved like a bow, rigor mortis holding him in the shape he had taken over the donkey’s back, so she had to leave him on his side. As she dipped the first cloth in the water, as she touched it to his bloodied skin, she began to sing. In Edirne, she had been taught a thousand and one songs to please a man. But this was a song from her childhood, from the village of her birth; a doina, lullaby and lament.
She took her time, starting from his feet, working slowly up, wiping, singing. Remembering the time when she was washed, the day he came to steal her. Turning him was hard but, for all her age and ills, she was still strong. When all the blood was gone and the cauldron’s cooling water rosy pink, she began to sew, closing the slashes that covered him, drawing the flesh together as well as she could. The gaping wound of his neck she covered with a linen cap, stitching it into the shoulder. Then she took an oil fragranced with sage and bergamot and rubbed the length of his body again until he glistened in the lamplight. He’d been anointed as prince and now he was anointed again, for death.
She was tired by the time a square patch of pale winter daylight was falling upon him. But there was a last thing to do, a last effort. She took a sheet and, after a struggle, managed to roll him onto it. Then she folded over the edges and, with thick twine, sealed him into his shroud.
She stepped away from the table, rubbing at the small of her back. The murmur of voices had been building at the door. Now she would accept help.
“Come,” she called.
—
They sang prayers as they bore him back through the gates, Ilona preceding, six of the younger nuns following with him behind, the rest of the convent trailing. There was a tree a little way along the path, down the hill, and the men from the gardens and stables stood underneath it, shovels to hand. They had cleared away the snow, lit a fire to warm the earth, though only the surface had been frozen solid, such was the suddenness of winter’s coming. A hole had been dug, and she saw that it was longer than required for he was never the tallest of men and now…she couldn’t help her smile. It was the sort of joke her prince would have appreciated. She almost heard him then, that rare laugh, so doubly wondrous when it came.
They laid him down at the hole’s edge. She could see acorns in it, for the tree was a red oak. She knew he would like that, dissolving into the soil of his Wallachia. From him, other trees would grow.
As the plainsong grew stronger around her, she knelt and laid a hand on his chest. His head may have been missing, but his heart was still there, she knew. “Rest in peace, my love,” she whispered. Then, alone, she reached beneath him and tipped Dracula’s shrouded body into his grave.
– FIFTY-ONE –
The Shriving
Poenari Castle, 1481
It was told, the last of it, for her at least. It ended when the body was covered in earth. No marker was ever raised. She always knew exactly where he lay, for a red oak did grow from one of the acorns that lay with him. It was five times the length of a man’s forearm now, one for each year. Soon, she knew, the younger tree would be striving for space with the elder from which it sprung. It was the way both of trees and of men. She had no doubt that, with her prince’s blood to feed it, the sapling would prevail.
All this Ilona thought but did not say, as the quills traced her last words, and Dracula’s last fall, in ink upon the parchment. Then there was silence within the hall, though beyond it the noises of the day came. The storm that had come, bringing the last big snow, had gone. Sun had returned to the land, warm enough to start the melting. All in the room stayed silent for a while, listened to the drip, heard a huge icicle drop from a turret and shatter on the rocks beneath the walls.
It was the Count who broke the silence. He turned to the Cardinal, seeking some reaction, some hope. But the Italian’s jowly face was as impassive as ever. Horvathy swallowed, made sure his voice was even before he spoke. “Is there anything more you need to hear, Your Eminence?”
“Dracula is dead,” the Cardinal replied. “It was interesting, though, to hear what became of his body. But perhaps I can give the last detail required for the record?” He smiled. “His severed head, as all know, was sent to Mehmet. I heard it was the one time the Great Turk was delighted to receive something other than an exotic plant for his gardens. So much so that he kept it beside him for a week before he allowed it to be spiked and placed on the walls of Constantinople.” He rose, stretching his
back. “So now—his last confession is over. Though I must confess to being a little curious—and the scribes need not note down my curiosity—of how our three witnesses survived. And how they have lived these five years since.”
Silence again, till Petru leaned forward and shouted, “Answer!”
Ilona spoke again. “You know, because it was your men that brought me here. Where I was a sister, now I am Abbess of the Convent of Clejani.”
“And what secrets our habits conceal, eh, Reverend Mother? Though your scars are perhaps more interesting than my own.” The Cardinal turned to face the confessional on the left. “And Dracula’s friend? We could only assume from your tale that you’d been killed. Yet, obviously not so. What became of the worthy traitor?”
Ion’s mind, which had drifted like a leaf ever since he spoke of the last stake, drifted back now at the word. “Would I had been killed. But such was not my fate. Mine was to become Laiota Basarab’s prisoner, buried at the same time as Dracula—but buried alive, as his brother once was! Yet, unlike Mircea, with air to breathe and so allowed the barest form of life. Forgotten in my living grave until this day. And would that I had been forgotten there still.” His voice broke and he sobbed, “And if there is any mercy in you, you will return me there now, and torment me no further with these memories!”
Count Horvathy, impatient now, faced the last of the confessionals. “And you, his confessor? We have heard little enough of you this last hour. Can you satisfy His Eminence’s curiosity and let us leave this place?”
The hermit’s voice rasped clearly. “What was there for me to tell? I was left behind in Pest. And Dracula left for war without seeking absolution. So I heard nothing of his final thoughts.”
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