by Dan Davis
But there need be no wonder for anyone, for she always insisted, no matter how they threatened and mistreated her, that she was guided by the voice of an angel. It is only I who knew that the voice she imagined all those centuries was William’s.
He had abandoned her, and Gilles, and all the other monsters he created, to their fates. And when he sent word of his return, it was too late. The centuries of death and murder had taken their toll on their souls and Joan and Gilles had been driven mad. Driven to consume ever greater numbers of children in order to increase their power, they had succumbed to the relentless damage it had done to their souls.
Gilles would be remembered down the centuries as the beloved captain and companion of Joan but mainly of course for his enormous crimes. He has taken all of the blame when it was equally Joan’s, or perhaps much more so, and so he has entered history as one of the first and greatest serial killers. Some of the other men who share that appellation were the sons of Priskos. Those murderers also I tracked down and killed in the years to come, one near Cologne and the other in Bavaria. But none had the power and the wealth and authority that had allowed Gilles de Rais and his servants to commit the crimes they did, for as long as they did.
In all my long years, I swear I witnessed no crimes so depraved and so evil.
***
Watching her drive that wagon toward Nantes, I knew Ameline’s heart was broken. The loss of her father was too great to be overcome quickly, if at all, and she was alone in the world. I wanted to stay and take care of her but I could not.
“Perhaps I could see her right,” I muttered. “Keep an eye on her for a while. From afar.”
“We must be gone,” Stephen said. “There are too many questions. The Bishop’s warrant for our arrest is still in effect. The Duke’s soldiers are looking for us.”
“Who will look after her if I do not?” I asked him.
“You cannot save everyone, Richard.”
I turned on him. “I do not wish to save everyone. Only her.”
It was my actions that caused her such loss, such pain but I could not undo it. Some deeds simply cannot be undone.
“You have saved her,” he insisted. “We saved everyone in this land from Gilles. From Joan. There will be no more murders and missing children. The weight of the curse has been lifted and the fear will be thrown off. The people will heal, in time. The land can be lived on again, fully lived. Marriages will be celebrated joyfully, and their children will be able to play and grow to adulthood without threat.”
“In time, yes,” I said. “But she needs someone now.”
“She has property,” Stephen said. “Some wealth, an education. She is a beauty. There will be suitors nonstop, now, and one of them will make her a good husband.”
He was right enough but I wished so very much for that husband to be me.
I knew I was not evil and prayed that I would never become so. Perhaps it was in me to turn to depravity, like Gilles and Joan had done, and if I gave in to it then I could become just as deranged and Satanic as they had. Whether it was the nature of William’s blood rather than mine, or if there was something especially rotten in the both of them to begin with, they had over the decades and centuries, turned into demons themselves.
There was only one way that I knew to stop myself from taking the same path. Whether he is a commoner or a lord, a man must strive to live a virtuous life. When confronted with the choice of virtue or sin, one simply must choose virtue. One will not succeed, not always. But as long as one lives, the choice between virtue and sin remains in every act, in every day, and one must wrestle oneself onto the right course. It is simpler for a sinful man to chose sin than virtue but when one is virtuous in his heart, acting virtuously becomes easier every day.
“Come, then,” I said, turning my horse. “Let us be gone.”
“Too right,” Walt said. “If I never see Brittany again, it’ll be too bloody soon.”
Of course I could not stay. For I knew that William had finally returned, just as he had promised he would. It had been almost two hundred years, as hard as it was for me to believe, but he was finally coming. Just as I had both dreaded and longed for all that time.
And he was returning to conquer Christendom at the head of an army of a hundred thousand Turks.
I did not know it then but the only man standing in his way was from a small, mountainous principality called Wallachia. A man who would become a hero of his country. A hero, in fact, for all Christendom, although he is not remembered that way.
He is remembered as Vlad the Impaler.
A man known to his own people as the Son of the Dragon.
They called him Dracula.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Richard of Ashbury returns in Vampire Impaler ~ the Immortal Knight Chronicles Book 6.
Read on…
VAMPIRE IMPALER
The Immortal Knight Chronicles
Book 6
Richard of Ashbury
and Vlad Dracula
1444 - 1476
Dan Davis
Copyright © 2019 Dan Davis
All rights reserved.
1. The Battle of Varna
1444
A hundred thousand Turks faced us across the plain. Banners snapped in the wind coming down from the hills and from the Black Sea close behind us.
It was to be the last battle of the last true crusade. The last time the kingdoms of Europe united to wage holy war on the enemies of Christ in a great battle.
“What do you reckon, Richard?” Walt asked me. “Biggest army you ever seen?”
We sat in the saddle in our armour, with the mercenary company I led around us. A hundred good fighting men, well equipped in steel and riding warhorses, plus their attendant squires, pages, grooms, and other servants which made me a minor though welcome addition to the crusade.
I looked out at the swarming mass of enemy horses and men filling the land from hills to hills and beyond, shining in their riot of armours and colours and raising noise enough to startle Heaven.
Across the plain in front of us, the azab infantry were robed and armed with spears. They were in effect a peasant militia, unmarried men who fought because they had no choice but were no less dangerous for all that. They might have been armed with just bows and spears, but there were many thousands of them that would have to be overcome.
It was not only low-quality men who were arrayed against us on foot, for the Anatolian infantry behind them wore mail with small plates, armed with spears and shields.
Beyond those infantry, in the centre of the entire army, thousands of elite Janissaries massed behind palisades, in their white or yellow robes, holding powerful recurved bows or the new hand-guns, and long, wicked polearms with spear heads, axe blades and hooks all on the same weapon. They also fought on foot but they were the most well-trained, well-equipped forces that the Sultan could deploy. At their sides were slung long, thin, curving swords that could split a man’s flesh to the bone in a single, swift cut. Beneath their robes, they were protected by a light coat of mail, some bore bronze shields with shining bosses and on their heads they all wore tall, white felt hats that made them impossible to miss even from across the battlefield.
The sipahi horsemen from Anatolia and from Rumelia – that is the Turkish-held lands of Europe such as Bulgaria - were heavily armoured, wearing steel turbans on their heads that had mail hanging down to protect their necks and long white feathers trailing from the top. Some wore mail shirts, others wore lamellar armour of hundreds of small steel plates sewn together. Their horses were likewise well armoured in strong, light steel. Their steel shone in the dim light as the masses of cavalry rode this way and that on the two wings of a front two miles wide.
Our great army of Hungarians, a few Serbs, and German and French knights, was far smaller. Vlad II Dracul of Wallachia sent a force of seven thousand men, though he would not join us for the whole campaign and had left us in anger before the battle.
We
were led by King Vladislaus of Hungary but the true commander was a knight and great lord named Janos Hunyadi. His countless military successes against the Turks in the Balkans over many years had so invigorated Christendom that the Pope had called the crusade and so it was Hunyadi, as the best soldier in Christendom, who chose our strategy and our tactics.
“Can we win?” Walt asked.
The eyes of my closest companions, Eva, Rob, and Stephen, also turned to me.
I said nothing.
“One Christian is worth a dozen Turks,” Rob said, raising his voice. Some of the men of my company overheard and called out in affirmation.
“If we cannot win,” Stephen asked, speaking softly as he sidled his horse closer me, “would it not be reasonable to withdraw? Our company, I mean. Richard?”
“I took the cross,” I said. “I am sworn to fight. And so my men, who are sworn to me, are sworn to fight this battle also.” I looked at him. “You included, Stephen.”
“So, then, we fight,” Stephen said, scowling. “Even if our deaths are almost certain?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Nothing is certain,” Eva said, almost speaking over me. “Even our reasons for being here.”
I ignored her barbed comment. We were there because William was there, fighting for the Sultan. It was Eva and Stephen’s agents who had discovered him but she was right that it was not certain. Even so, I felt it in my bones that he was across the field that day. Hidden from my view by the blur of distance and the swirling of the ranks of men and horse, perhaps, yet there all the same.
And the odds were against us in the battle but we had not meant for it to be so.
Hunyadi’s plan for the crusade had been straightforward enough, in concept. We had followed the line of the Danube before crossing it in September 1444 and then westward into Bulgarian lands up to the Black Sea to the town of Varna. Instead of slowing our advance to take numerous, small enemy fortresses we had ignored them.
We knew of a great Turkish army coming to do battle with us but they refused to engage and so our advance to Varna was rapid.
From there, so we planned, we would push south into Turkish Rumelia and throw our enemy from Thrace and Bulgaria. The Turk had been in possession of those European lands for far too long already. And then we would go on, chasing them back across the Bosporus and back into Anatolia.
In all this we would be supported by fleets of Burgundian, Venetian, and Genoese ships who would close the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, denying the enemy the chance for reinforcements. Once we had the Turk on the run, we could pursue all the way to Jerusalem and win back the Holy City once and for all.
That was the plan.
But first, we had to defeat the great army of the Turks, led in person by Sultan Murad II.
We had reached Varna on a bitter day at the start of November and were shocked to discover the entire Turkish army camped just two miles away to the west beyond the hills. It was a failure on the part of our scouts and our leadership but once it was done, it could not be easily undone. Our army found itself trapped with the Black Sea to the east and the thickly forested hills in the north from where we had come. Between the northern hills on our right flank and the sea close behind us was an extensive marshland that meant we could not slip away quickly without being surrounded and destroyed.
“It is victory or destruction,” I said, raising my hand to point at the Turkish centre. “Besides, William is there.”
My companions looked at me once more.
“You do not know that,” Eva said.
“I know it.”
“You wish it,” Eva said. “Because your desire for revenge is so strong that it has overcome your reason. You do not know.”
“Your own agents have said he sits at the Sultan’s ear, whispering that Christendom must be destroyed. And the Sultan is here, and so William is here.” I looked at the vast host. “He would not be elsewhere.”
“We are not certain that the man calling himself Zaganos Pasha is truly William,” Stephen pointed out. “None of us have seen him with our own eyes.”
“They say he is a tall and dark-haired Christian and none knows from where he has come. Some say he is Serbian, others Greek, and others that he is a Frank. It is typical of William to cause such confusion, sewing a dozen stories so that the truth is lost amongst the lies. This Zaganos Pasha has come from nowhere, at no time, and others whisper that he has always been there. He is feared and respected even by his enemies and the other pashas and viziers at the Sultan’s court. Who else could Zaganos Pasha be but William?”
“Even so,” Stephen began, “we are throwing our lot in with this doomed army without certain proof that—”
“You and Eva will retire to the wagonberg,” I said to him.
Stephen broke off and turned to look to our rear. Behind us, the centre of our position was a vast ring of a hundred fortified war wagons, emplaced on a section of higher ground.
“I would rather fight at your side,” Eva said.
“And I would rather that the work of the Order of the White Dagger continue,” I replied. “Should I fall today.”
She wished to argue but for the sake of appearances before my men, she simply nodded and pulled back to the wagonberg. Those one hundred war wagons were defended by hundreds of expert hand-gunners from Bohemia. The combination of war wagons and firearms were a remarkable military innovation by the Hussites that had been proven effective in their repeated victories against the great kingdoms of Christendom in the decade or two prior. An innovation embraced enthusiastically by our Transylvanian-born Hungarian leader Janos Hunyadi.
The wagons had high, solid walls on all sides from which the hand-gunners and crossbowmen shot at the enemy, along with men armed with polearms to protect their fellows should enemy cavalry ever reach the wooden walls of the wagon fortress. The solid wood sides dropped down to protect the wheels and the wagons were joined together by strong chains. I had seen wagons pulled into defensive formation before, indeed the Tartars had been well-known for the tactic, but first the Hussites and now the Hungarians had developed the concept into a sophisticated weapon of war that had proved all-but unassailable in previous battles in central and eastern Europe.
Indeed, the day before, when we had discovered the enemy horde were so close, a council of war was called. By that day at Varna, I had fought with Hunyadi for over a year and ever since I had impressed him in my first battle at his side he had invited me to join him at such councils.
It was the king’s tent, and King Vladislaus sat in a large chair at the high end of it, but it was Hunyadi who commanded proceedings from where he stood, to the side and two paces in front of the King.
Hunyadi was about forty years old at Varna, in the prime of his life, and he had been a soldier for all of that life already. He was no more than middling height, was rather dark, and he had a heavy brow and a magnificently large nose, but he was not unattractively featured for all that. His eyes were shrewd, pits, twinkling with the intelligence of the man behind them.
In his youth, Hunyadi had served as page for a famous Florentine knight, then as a squire for a great Hungarian lord who loved battle, before serving the Despot of Serbia. Because of his brilliance even as a young man, he had been brought into the retinue of Sigismund, the old King of Hungary, who ordered Hunyadi to join the army of the Duke of Milan so that he might learn the modern ways of battle in Italy. Later, Sigismund brought Hunyadi into Bohemia where the young knight had learned to admire the tactics and technology of the Hussites that he would later replicate.
I had arrived in Hungary, still assembling my own mercenary company, just in time to join Hunyadi in his campaign against the Turks. We fought the Turks in a dozen battles and won almost all of them, though we had ultimately failed to break through the Turkish strongpoints in our efforts to invest the Turkish capital of Edirne, which had once been called Adrianople by the Eastern Romans. Still, we had thrashed the Turks three ways from Sunday and I
had been mightily impressed by Hunyadi’s tactics and his ability to lead men.
Still, many of his betters were jealous of his rise above them and they doubted his abilities to lead a crusade, even if it was in the name of King Vladislaus of Hungary.
“We are outnumbered and trapped,” Cardinal Cesarini had said, his eyes wild. He was a tall man, as finely armoured as a prince, and in the prime of his life. “It is not possible that we should win. All we can do is fortify ourselves within a wagonberg and wait for our great fleet to arrive, which surely they must at any moment.”
He was not just a representative of the Church of Rome but was a great lord in his own right, as were the other bishops and Church lords who had come as leaders. Each led their own contingents of powerful knights and other men-at-arms, meaning their words at a war council carried weight.
Many of the nobles in the tent called out their agreement.
Janos Hunyadi looked at each man who spoke and seemed to be fixing each of them in his mind as he did so. One by one, they fell silent. Some hung their heads, as if they were chastised boys.
“But even if it did arrive here, would the fleet be large enough to take all of our men from the coast?” Hunyadi asked. The lords spoke in French, occasionally in Latin, and sometimes in Hungarian. My Hungarian was improving every day but thankfully French was spoken by all lords, even those from the mountains of Thrace.
“God willing,” Cardinal Cesarini said, to general muttering. “Surely, my lords, with the fleets of the Burgundians, the Venetians, and the Genoese, we shall be saved from this disaster.”
“Indeed,” a young princeling said, raising his voice. “Indeed, my lords, we must not engage with the enemy. I will not lead my men into a fight they will not survive. We must withdraw tonight under cover of darkness. By morning we could be away toward the Danube.”