“Have the metal moved out of here,” said Ragul to the keyman. “It can be forged again and beaten into weapons. This place is too damp to use as a store room, but perhaps some of the women and children can take refuge here in case of—”
At this point Ragul was interrupted by a sound like someone singing which came from the corridor beyond. But it was inconceivable that anyone should exist beyond a locked door in the very bowels of the castle. The keyman turned to run but was restrained by Ragul’s cold steel. Mircea and I were almost equally frightened, but Vlad seemed rapt, as if he drew strength from strangeness and fear.
We listened to the song. It was a repeated refrain sung in the piping tones of an elderly man which went thus:
O, the flowers of the sea,
They grow all beneath my arm;
And where the hedgehog runs
There I will lie, under the shade
Of a throne of trees
Until my tears have quenched the flames of hell.
This ridiculous burden went to a haunting tune which was never quite the same when repeated. We listened to it for quite some time until, eventually, the keyman spoke.
“This is a ghost. We should not be listening to a ghost singing, my lord.” The keyman was one of those men who, if he knew of no rule to apply to a situation, would invent one to comfort himself.
“It comes from those cells over there,” said Vlad, advancing with his torch. We followed him. The corridor which led off the torture chamber was lined with a number of cell doors, one of which, at the very end, was ajar. From this emanated the parchment light of a tallow candle and a frightful stench. Undeterred, we advanced down the passageway, entered the cell and were confronted by an extraordinary sight.
A tall, skinny man sat bolt upright on a pile of fetid straw; his eyes were deeply sunk and red rimmed, his long hair and beard utterly white. At first sight he appeared to be clothed in some soft grey material which shimmered in the light of our flickering torches, a garment which seemed to emanate a faint twittering. Then we saw that he was not dressed at all but, except for his face and hands, entirely covered with a seething colony of rats.
“Welcome,” said the man, who seemed not at all surprised to see us. “You are strangers here, but you may approach and nibble my toes.” None of us made a move to do so.
“Who are you?” asked Ragul.
“I am the Rat King. As you can speak, you may call me your grace. But you may not lick my body as these other rats do until you have proved yourself worthy rats.”
“We are not rats, and we don’t want to lick your body,” said the keyman indignantly.
“Allow me to tell you what you are!” said the Rat King fiercely. “I am the pathfinder and the all-wise. You cannot take away my throne, however hard you try to trick me. I am the mighty lord and I rule all the rats in the world, including you.”
Ragul pointed his drawn sword at the Rat King. “Listen to me, you old sorcerer,” he said. “Mad, you may be, but you must tell us how you came here and how you manage to be alive in this vile den.”
At this the Rat King let out a kind of scream, it was like the squeal of a rat only magnified a hundred times so that it stabbed our ears and seemed to set the whole cell aquiver.
On the instant all the rats which were on his body, in addition to others which were elsewhere occupied in the cell, flew at Ragul. Some crawled up his boots, three leapt onto the sword blade and rushed up it towards his hand. He screamed in terror as he vainly he tried to beat them off. I believe this was the only time I ever saw him afraid—
All of us except Vlad were paralyzed by the strangeness of this event, but he drew his dagger and was beside the old man in an instant, pressing his knife to a soft place under the left ear.
“Call off your vermin, damn you,” said the Prince, “or you die slowly.”
Whereupon the Rat King let out a little high pitched croak and the rats, who had already gnawed a substantial hole in Ragul’s leather jerkin, fell away. There was a moment’s pause while Ragul breathed heavily and recovered his composure.
Our conversation with the Rat King in his malodorous den was protracted, but ultimately significant. Much time was wasted because he still insisted on believing that we were rats and therefore his natural subjects. But the substance of the information he gave us was as follows.
It appeared that he had been condemned to this cell some thirty years before for making unwelcome advances to one of the ladies of the bedchamber. I should point out that they were unwelcome because he was not a Boyar, but merely a useful functionary, assistant pastry maker to the royal table in fact. He was imprisoned in these lower dungeons and his gaoler, a distant relative, allowed him a fair measure of freedom, knowing that he would soon be forgotten in these subterranean regions. Then the gaoler died so that the Rat King, who had been locked into the dungeon by the gaoler the night before he died, was now utterly forgotten.
Fortunately, by following the path of a rat, he was able to find a secret passageway which led out of the castle and into the wood beyond the castle walls. There he was able to forage for food and to prey on lonely travellers, particularly at night. But he always returned to his shelter in the dungeon, because, having spent ten years there, he had become afraid of absolute freedom. He formed a strong attachment with the rats who, apart from the gaoler, had been the only companions of his incarceration. He learnt their language and taught them to hunt for him in the woods. It was a fruitful if mysterious association.
All this information Ragul extracted from the Rat King at the cost of a great deal of rambling and insanity, but the two did achieve some sort of understanding. Ragul reassured him that he was not about to usurp his rat kingdom, promising him both food and privacy; and in return he asked to be shown the way out of the castle which the Rat King had found. The Rat King agreed and showed us to an obscure corner of the torture chamber where there was an iron ring embedded in the wall. When he pulled this ring a part of the wall slid outwards quite smoothly to reveal a descending flight of stone steps. Ragul contemplated this a moment, then turned to the Rat King and most graciously asked him and his rats to guard the entrance and its secret until he had need of it. When the old man heard of the Turks he was delighted, saying that he and his creatures were most anxious to be at them for they enjoyed biting people to death. At this we smiled pleasantly and respectfully took our leave.
On the following day we awoke to find the advance squadrons of the Turkish army encamped about the castle. The atmosphere among us was almost of relief, now that the conflict had begun. The Ottoman forces at once began to build defensive trenches in the open ground beyond our walls. Ragul repeatedly sent cavalry sorties to harass their engineering works and several sharp skirmishes ensued. The Turkish engineers were covered by detachments of heavy Spahi cavalry who, on the whole, had the better of these engagements.
It was a fine day and I was able to watch the actions from the safe vantage of an inner curtain wall. I and Razendoringer had been posted to a reserve detachment which guarded the Queen’s apartments with Vlad in charge.
This was Vlad’s first command and he assumed it with immediate and absolute authority. The senior officer in charge discovered in a very short time that this fifteen year old prince meant to have his way, but there was little for Vlad to do, though he longed to act.
On the following day the main bulk of the Ottoman army arrived. Ragul, accompanied by Vlad and myself, went to watch from a turret which was the nearest vantage point to this extraordinary spectacle. We saw men, horses and equipment unfolding and disposing themselves with exemplary efficiency. It was quite a contrast to the chaos on the bridge at Tchorlu. One thing I noticed about the forces that were arriving, there was no artillery; but Ragul said this was not significant.
“There was no point in going to the labour of dragging their guns up here. They need them to blast cities in the plain. Here they will forge and cast cannon on the spot. And they will be monsters, up to t
hirty feet in length, throwing balls of over a ton.”
I asked if these could breech our walls and Ragul was silent.
Our next diversion came towards evening when there was a frontal assault by the madcaps. Uttering their curious shrieking noises, they threw up ladders and grappling hooks against our walls and swarmed up them. Their wild advance met with no success. Very few of them reached the top of the walls for Ragul had supplied the men with hooks on long poles, like boat hooks, with which they pushed the ladders outwards sending whole lines of crazed warriors toppling to their deaths. The grappling ropes were simply cut. Our men sustained very few losses.
One or two of these feathered madmen reached the top of the walls, but they were cut down almost immediately. I saw one leap from the rampart onto a cluster of soldiers in the courtyard below. He plummeted like a fallen angel cast from heaven, plumes fluttering, and flattened a slow-looking guardsman whose pike went clean through him. These men were fanatics and believed that, by dying in this way, they were going to a Mussulman heaven full of fountains and nightingales and delectable houris. I never saw a man embrace eternity with such eagerness.
Presently these attacks ceased. They had achieved nothing and I wondered what they proved. Perhaps Sokolly wanted an afternoon’s diversion, perhaps he believed that a madman may achieve what a sane man would not even venture, or perhaps he was merely testing our strength; but one thing he proved beyond doubt: that he had both the resources and the ruthlessness to waste his own men.
That evening we all slept uneasily. Our circumstances were now so strange, living as we did trapped by a hostile army: even the most experienced of the soldiers were bewildered by the rapid turn of events and we had not yet acquired that bond of comradeship which adverse conditions can create among fellow sufferers.
It was almost a relief to be wakened at four in the morning to go on a tour of inspection of our section of the walls with Prince Vladimir. The air was fresh and lacked the oppression that the previous day had created. Vlad was at his most eager and intense. He inspected his small detachment minutely and ordered the flogging of one man who was found sleeping on his watch, a punishment which Vlad wished to supervise personally. I excused myself from attending this last event.
I wanted my own company as there are times when solitude is the only medicine for a troubled mind.
We were, as I say, guarding the section of the inner keep adjacent to the Queen’s apartments and I entered them hoping to find some way back to my own room that did not take me past soldiery and the din of war. I began to walk down a passageway — thinking that I knew where I was going and anxious not to encounter anyone — when I heard footsteps. I was so passionately obsessed by the thought of being alone that I looked around for somewhere to hide. Seeing a door ajar, half hidden by a damask hanging, I made for it and before I knew it I was in the royal chapel, a place that I had never seen before.
It was warm there and lit by an astonishing number of candles which cast a thousand soft shadows onto the bossed vaults of the ceiling. I barely had time to take this in before I heard the footsteps stop before the door of my hiding place. Still terrified of being found I looked for somewhere to conceal myself. The seating in the chapel was composed of canopied stalls, boxed in. I made for one of these and crouched down under a misericord of Adam and Eve entwined with the snake under the tree of knowledge. Protected from view on all sides by the wooden screens of the stall I could see nothing. The footsteps entered the chapel and I cursed my luck; they were light and seemed to go up to the altar where they stopped. There was a long silence: evidently the footsteps were not going away in a hurry.
An age seemed to pass during which I dared not move and became rapidly more uncomfortable. The silence was tangible, soft and warm, but it invited alertness, perhaps because it was not empty. After a long while I poked my head fractionally above the stall.
I was situated towards the back of the chapel and to one side, so that I was looking at the altar but from a slightly oblique angle. It had on it two tall candles and was covered by a huge cloth of scarlet damask shot through with gold embroidery whose skirts tumbled down the steps in luxuriant abundance. The folds and coils, almost serpent like in their involutions, stopped on the bottom step where kneeled the solitary figure of the Queen.
Her golden hair, now liberally silvered, hung straight down her back; her feet were bare and she wore a simple gown of blue. She seemed to have come directly from her bedchamber. I could see that she was gazing at the wall behind the altar. On it was painted a crucifixion, the figure of Our Saviour painfully thin and attenuated, the thorn-pierced head bowed in utter dejection. By the light of the two altar candles which flickered in a slight breeze, Christ’s whole frame seemed to be enduring the last quiver of agony before the end of all pain. The Queen’s body by contrast appeared to be monumentally still.
I shifted my position a little more to ease my discomfort, an action which set off a tiny creak in the wood of the stall that seemed to echo round the chapel like the report of a gun.
“Who’s that?” said the Queen. I ducked down into my hiding place. “Is that you?” For several minutes I hardly dared breathe. Silence fell again, watchful and intense. I wondered what the thoughts of the woman at the altar were: holy or profane?
Then I heard another sound, the softer, more mobile creak of a leather boot. A rustle as the Queen turned round; her words, “It is you!”; a rushing together of the rustle and the creak; a frantic babble of whispers smothered by close personal contact.
I ventured my head once again above the parapet of the stall and saw the Queen now standing on the lower steps of the altar among the folds of damask. Wrapping her in his arms was a man in the black robe of the monks of Snagov. The cowl over his head engulfed hers as well so that the pair resembled for a moment a curious aggregate monster of many limbs and one head such as I have seen in oriental statuary. The monk’s habit was evidently no more than a rudimentary disguise for beneath it could be seen black leather boots and the tip of a sword. The cowl fell back to reveal the face of Ragul.
“Only a moment,” he said. “A few seconds of time before dawn and the Turks again.” Indeed, a ray of sunlight was already beginning to penetrate the coloured glass of one of the windows. There were more kisses and senseless endearments and as they snatched at their brief moment together their movements became frantic. Ragul’s hand pulled up handfuls of the Queen’s gown, revealing a slender white flank, his clutches leaving little evanescent red marks on her white skin. Even in these hurried seconds she played at resisting him, but their struggle was only the necessary game before he plunged down upon her body at the very foot of the altar.
“No!” said the Queen breathlessly. “This is unholy!” But in her voice there was the thrill of excitement as well as the pain of remorse. The rest of her speech was smothered in a shower of kisses as they began to roll about beneath the altar, clawing at whatever clothes still barred them from the satisfaction of their desires.
I noticed that their writhings at the altar’s foot had shifted the cloth. The embroidered damask was being inched off the altar, while the two great candles on it were moving closer and closer to the edge as Ragul and the Queen, having at last torn aside all barriers, approached the shrieking climax of their passion. Several times I almost cried out to warn them, but shame held me back. Then the candles toppled.
In their fall one narrowly missed the Queen’s head, the other grazed Ragul’s boot. Falling among the folds of cloth in a shower of tallow, they set light to the material. The Queen jumped up coughing at the smoke, in an agony of shame and dishevelment.
“It is the judgement of God!” she shouted.
“One moment more!” cried Ragul, stranded at the very apex, as it were, of his ecstasy.
“God will destroy us all!” cried the Queen, not wishing to reserve punishment exclusively to herself.
“By Gutruna’s buttock, if God doesn’t, I will!” came a roar from behind me. It w
as King Xantho standing in the doorway of the chapel with a sword in his hand. I shrank back in my stall, though I doubt if anyone there would have given me a second glance.
The scene froze for a moment. There stood the King, huge and half dressed, every feature knotted with rage, and there were Ragul and the Queen standing between two smouldering clots of scarlet silk, the rags of their forgotten passion hanging weakly from them. The Queen’s gown was torn and I saw a tiny scarlet thread of blood trickle down her thigh.
The King began to advance down the aisle. The Queen whimpered while Ragul stumbled about hurriedly trying to arrange his disordered clothing. In doing so he tripped over the fallen candlestick and fell backwards, at which Xantho seized the opportunity to charge at his fallen enemy before he could recover. Ragul had no hope, but at the last moment the Queen interposed herself. The downward thrust of the sword which Xantho had intended for his natural son pierced his wife in the side. She fell heavily in front of Ragul who had now adjusted himself and was beginning to stagger to his feet.
For a moment father and son gazed at the prone figure between them, astonished at the horror they had arrived at, but Ragul was the first to recover. He picked up his sword belt, drew the blade from its sheath and rushed at the King. I heard the clash of swords, once, twice! Then something occurred which was even more astounding than anything I had seen hitherto. There was a crash of glass and a spherical object came bursting through one of the chapel windows striking Xantho full in the chest. Xantho staggered back while the sphere bounced down the altar steps and came to rest beside the wounded Queen. It was about the size and shape of a human head; in fact it was a human head, the features rough and unshaven, eyes glassy and staring.
“We are under attack,” said Ragul. “The time for fighting each other will come later.” With that he ran from the chapel, followed by the King. After a short hesitation, in which my mind came to no sensible conclusion, I followed them.
The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar's Tale Page 27