by Dan Simmons
And while a part of her mind thought that these supplies should stay in Romania to help a few of the thousands of children in hospitals there, a greater part of her mind and heart knew that she would do anything, steal anything, deny anyone anything in order to keep Joshua alive. It was a shock to Kate after almost two decades of service to medical ethics to realize that there were higher imperatives.
She had been trying to call Tom, her ex-husband, since Thursday, but his answering machine in Boulder had rattled off an announcement in his deep, happy, little-boy voice that he was off leading a rafting trip down the Arkansas River and would be back when he got back. Leave a message if you’re so inclined. Kate left four messages, each one a bit more coherent than the last.
Her breakup with Tom six years earlier had been quiet rather than melodramatic, resigned rather than angry. As is true of that one percent or so of marriages, she and her ex-husband became closer friends after the divorce and often had meals or drinks together after work. Tom, just turned forty but as strong as a proverbial ox and handsome in a Tom Sawyerish sort of way, could finally acknowledge that it was true—he had never grown up. His Boulder-based job as river guide, part-time mountaineer, part-time bicycle racer, part-time Himalayan trekking guide, part-time nature photographer, and full-time adventure-seeker had given him—he now admitted—the perfect excuse not to grow up.
As for Kate, she had been able to admit to him in recent months that perhaps she had grown up too much, that her adult-adult medical persona had pushed out whatever childlike fun she had shared with him in the early days. There was no talk of a reconciliation between them—Kate was sure that neither could imagine living together again—but their conversation had become more relaxed in recent years, their sharing of small problems and large confidences less constrained.
And now Kate was bringing home a baby. After reassuring each other for years, each for his or her own reasons, that neither wanted a child in their lives, Dr. Kate Neuman, at age thirty-eight, was bringing home a baby.
Tom caught her at her Strada Ştirbei Vodă apartment on Sunday evening. His raft trip had been a success. He could not believe her message. His voice was the usual blend of boyish energy and Boulderish enthusiasm. It made Kate want to cry.
“I’m scared it won’t happen,” she said. The connection was terrible, suffering from all the echoes, delays, and hollownesses common to most transatlantic calls, with the added fuzz, rasp, clunk, and echoes of Romanian telephonic service.
Still, Tom heard her. “What do you mean it’s not going to happen? Didn’t you say that you had all the paperwork licked? The baby… Joshua…didn’t you say he’s OK right now?”
“He’s stable, yes.”
“Then what…”
“I don’t know,” said Kate. She realized that if it was seven o’clock on Sunday evening where she was…the rich May light lay heavy on the chestnut tree outside her apartment window…then it must be ten o’clock Sunday morning in Boulder. She took a breath. “I just have this terrible fear that it’s not going to happen. That something’s going to…stop us.”
Tom’s voice was as serious as she ever remembered hearing it. “This isn’t like you, Kat. What happened to the Iron Lady I used to know and love? The woman who was going to cure the world, whether it wanted to be cured or not?” The gentleness of his tone belied the words.
Kate winced at the “Kat.” It had been the name he called her during their lovemaking early in their marriage. “It’s this place,” she said. “It makes you paranoid. Somebody told me that every third or fourth person was a paid informer during the Ceauşescu years.” The phone clunked and whistled. Distance hummed in the wires. “Which reminds me,” she said, “we shouldn’t be talking on the phone.”
“Eavesdroppers? Wiretappers? KGB or whatever the Romanian equivalent is?” came Tom’s voice through the static. “Fuck ’em. Fuck you, whoever’s listening. Not you, Kat.”
“Not Securitate,” said Kate, trying to smile, “The phone bill.”
“Well, fuck AT&T too. Or MCI. Or whoever the hell I signed up with.”
Kate did smile. She always had to pay the bills when they were married; Tom had rarely known whom they were paying for what. She wondered who was paying his bills now.
“When do you get into Stapleton tomorrow?” asked Tom. His voice was barely audible over the line noise.
Kate closed her eyes and recited her itinerary. “Out of Bucharest on PanAm Ten-seventy to Frankfurt via Warsaw at seven-ten A.M. PanAm Flight Sixty-seven out of Frankfurt at ten-thirty in the morning, arriving JFK at one-oh-five P.M. Then PanAm Five Ninety-seven out of JFK, arriving Denver at seven fifty-eight P.M.”
“Wow,” said Tom. “Hell of a day for the kid. The mother too.” There was a moment of silence except for line noise. “I’ll be down at Stapleton to pick you up, Kate.”
“There’s no need…”
“I’ll be there.”
Kate did not argue further. “Thank you, Tom,” she said. “Oh…and bring a car seat.”
“A what?”
“An infant-carrier car seat.”
There was the muted sound of laughter and then cursing. “Great,” said Tom at last. “I get to spend my day off hunting for a freaking baby’s car seat. You got it, Kat. Love you, kid. See you tomorrow night.” He hung up with the abruptness that used to take Kate by surprise.
The sudden silence after the conversation was difficult. Kate paced her room a hundredth time, checked her luggage—all packed except for her pajamas and toilet kit—for the fiftieth time, and went through the papers in her Banana Republic safari jacket for the five hundredth time: passport, her visa, Joshua’s visa, adoption papers—stamped by the Ministry and the U.S. Embassy—record of inoculation, record of testing for contagious diseases, a letter of request for expedited treatment from Mr. Stancu’s office and a similar letter from Mr. Crawley at the American Embassy. Everything there. Everything stamped, counterstamped, approved, sealed, and completed.
Something was going to go wrong. She knew it. Every footstep in the hallway or the apartment courtyard was some official with the word—Joshua had died in the hour since she had seen him, sleeping peacefully in his hospital crib. Or the Ministry had revoked its permission. Or…
Something would go wrong.
Lucian had offered to drive her to the airport and she had accepted. Father O’Rourke had business Monday morning in Tîrgovişte, fifty miles north of the capital, but he had insisted on coming by the hospital at six when she was scheduled to pick Joshua up. Everything was timed, arranged, and packaged…she had even had Lucian help her figure out schedules on the Orient Express to Budapest in case PanAm and Tarom Airlines suddenly quit serving Bucharest…but Kate was sure something was going to go wrong.
At ten P.M., Kate got into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, set her alarm clock for 4:45, and got into bed, knowing that she would not sleep. She stared at the ceiling, thought of Joshua sleeping on his stomach or lying on his back, the i.v. still attached to give him that final strength for tomorrow’s ordeal, and Kate began the vigil of the long night of waiting.
Dreams of Blood and Iron
I watched from these windows…these small windows which shed such thin light upon me now… I watched from these windows as a child of three or four as they led the thieves, brigands, murderers, and tax dodgers from the cramped jail in Councilmen’s Square across the street to their place of execution in the Jewelers’ Donjon. I remember their faces, these prisoners, these condemned men: unwashed, eyes red-rimmed, faces gaunt, bearded and wild, casting their gaze about them in desperation as the knowledge descended on each man that he had only minutes left before the rope would be set around his neck and the executioner would tumble him from the platform. Once I remember there were three women who had been kept separate in the Councilmen’s Tower lockup, and I watched on a brisk autumn morning as they were led in chains out of the Tower and across the square, from the square to the street, and then down the cobblest
oned hill out of sight of my eager eyes. But oh, those seconds of pure sight as I knelt here on the couch in my father’s room which passed as both court and private chamber…oh, those endless moments of ecstasy!
The women were dressed in filthy rags, like the men. I saw their breasts through the tatters of rotted brown. The women were streaked with dirt from the Tower’s jail and with blood from the guards’ rough treatment of them. But their breasts were pale, white, defenseless. I saw glimpses of their streaked legs and pale thighs; I saw the darkness between those thighs when the oldest of the three women fell, legs spread and sliding on cobblestones as the jailer dragged them squealing and wailing on the long length of chain. But it is their eyes that I remember most…as terrified as those of the male prisoners I had seen, so wide that the whites showed around the dark irises, like the sliding eyes of mares being forced forward after smelling fresh blood or the presence of a stallion.
That was the first time I felt the excitement—the rise of thrill in my chest as I watched the sure knowledge of death descend on these men and women—the excitement and the throbbing purity of sensation. I remember falling, legs too weak to support me, on my father’s couch at this very window, heart pounding, the images of those straining, doomed men and women burning fresh in my consciousness even as their actual cries echoed and diminished on the cool air wafting in through father’s open windows.
My father, Vlad Dracul, had sentenced those people to hang. Or rather, he had confirmed the sentence with no more than a nod or flicker of his hand to a subordinate. Father had created and now enforced the laws which had condemned those women, those men. It was Father who had brought that great terror down upon these people, Father who had summoned that palpable, throbbing of Death’s wings in the square below.
I remember lying there on the couch, feeling my heart slowly return to normal, feeling the first flush of embarrassment at the strange excitement… I remember lying in this room and thinking, Someday I shall have that power.
It was in this room when I was four that I first drank from the Chalice. I remember every detail. My mother was not present. Only Father and five other men I had never seen before, all robed and cowled in their green-over-red Draconist ceremonial garb, were in attendance that night. I remember the bright tapestry behind Father’s throne, set out for this night only—the great dragon curling in a circle of gold scales, its terrifying mouth open, its wings widespread, its mighty claws curved into grasping talons. I remember the torchlight and muttered ritual of the Order of the Dragon. I remember the presentation of the Chalice. I remember my first taste of blood. I remember the dreams it brought me that night.
It was in this room when I was five, in the Year of Our Lord 1436, that I heard my father declare his intention to the court of seizing the land and title of his dying half-brother Alexander Aldea, thus making Father the first full prince of Wallachia. I remember the sound of horses’ shod hooves on the winter air beyond my nursery window, the creak of leather and death-hollow clank of iron against iron as the cavalry passed our windows that December night. I remember how I loved the richness of the imperial city of Tîrgovişte, I remember the sensuous feel of the Italian, Hungarian, and Latin words I learned there, each new syllable as rich as the taste of blood in my mouth, and I remember the excitement behind the dry history taught to me by my boyar tutor and the old monks there. And I remember how short that wonderful time was to be.
I was twelve years old when my father gave me and my younger half-brother Radu as hostages to the Turkish Sultan Murad. Perhaps he had not planned to do it as we rode to Gallipoli to meet the Sultan, for Father was also seized by the Sultan’s men only minutes after we had reached the city gates. But Father later swore an oath on the Bible and Koran not to oppose the Sultan’s will, and our continued role as hostages was part of that oath. Radu was only eight and I remember his tears as the escorted wagon bore us away from Gallipoli toward the fortress of Egrigoz in the province of Karaman in western Anatolia.
I did not weep.
I remember how cold that winter was, how strange the food, and how the manservants who looked after our wants also locked the door to our apartments when the early twilight settled on that mountain city. I remember the shock of the Sultan’s people when the Ceremony of the Chalice was explained to them, but they accepted it as just another barbarism of the Christian faith. Their jails were filled with criminals, slaves, and prisoners of war waiting to be disposed of; so finding donors was not difficult. Later we were taken to Tokat, and later still, to Adrianople, where we lived, ate, traveled, and grew into manhood in the Sultan’s company.
The Sultan Murad was a cruel man, but less cruel, I think, than Father had been. He treated us more like sons than Father ever had. I remember once the Sultan touching my cheek after I had excitedly shown him the sweep and soaring pounce of a falcon I had helped train. His surprisingly gentle touch lingered.
By the end of my six years there, I was thinking in Turkish more often than in my own language, and even now, as strength ebbs and consciousness dims, it is in Turkish that I form my half-waking thoughts.
Radu was always handsome, even as a young child, and was beautiful by the time he showed the earliest signs of manhood. I remained ugly. Radu licked up to the philosophers and scholars who tutored us. I resisted their efforts to instruct us in Byzantine culture. Radu abandoned the Chalice even while I found need to drink from it weekly rather than monthly, then daily rather than weekly. Radu gained the awards and caresses of our jailors and tutors; I suffered their whippings. By the time he was thirteen, Radu had learned how to please both the women in the seraglio and the male courtiers who came to our apartments late at night.
I hated my half-brother, and he returned the hatred with added contempt. Each of us knew that if we survived—and each of us, in our own way, was filled with full determination to survive—that someday we would be enemies and rivals for our father’s throne.
Radu followed his path to the throne by becoming the minion of Sultan Murad II and harem boy to his successor, Mehmed. He stayed in Turkey until 1462; at twenty-seven, Radu was still beautiful, but could no longer be considered a harem boy. Promised my father’s title by the Sultan, he found it claimed by someone more daring and resourceful. He found it claimed by me.
I remember the day—I was sixteen—when word of my father’s death reached us at the Sultan’s court. It was in the late autumn of 1447. Cazan, my father’s most faithful chancellor, had ridden five days to Adrianople with the news. The details were few but painful. The boyars and citizens of Tîrgovişte had revolted, urged on by Hungary’s rapacious King Hunyadi and his Wallachian ally, the boyar Vladislav II. Mircea, my full brother, had been captured in Tîrgovişte and buried alive. Vlad Dracul, my father, had been hunted down and murdered in the marshes of Balteni, near Bucharest. Cazan informed us that Father’s body had been returned to a hidden chapel near Tîrgovişte.
Cazan, his old man’s rheumy eyes moistening more than usual, then presented me with two objects Father had asked him—asked as they fled toward. the Danube with the assassins on their trail—to give to me as my legacy. This legacy consisted of a beautiful Toledo-forged sword presented to Father by Emperor Sigismund in Nuremberg on the year that I was born, and also the gold Dragon Pendant that my father had received upon entering the Order of the Dragon.
Setting the Dragon Pendant about my neck and holding the sword high above my head, the bright blade catching the torchlight, I swore my oath in front of Cazan and Cazan alone. “I swear upon the Blood of Christ and the Blood of the Chalice,” I cried, my voice not breaking, “that Vlad Dracul will be avenged, that I will personally drain and drink the blood of Vladislav, and that those who planned and committed this treachery will lament the day when they murdered Vlad Dracul and earned the enmity of Vlad Dracula, Son of the Dragon. They have not known true terror until this day. So I swear upon the Blood of Christ and the Blood of the Chalice, and may all the forces of Heaven or Hell come to my a
id in this solemn purpose.”
I sheathed the sword, patted the weeping chancellor on his shoulder, and returned to my quarters to lie awake and plot my escape from the Sultan, my vengeance on Vladislav and Hunyadi.
I lie awake now, realizing that as blades of Toledo steel are forged in the furnaces and crucibles of flame, so are men forged in the crucibles of such pain, loss, and fear. And, as with a fine sword, such human blades take centuries to lose their terrible edge.
The light has failed. I will pretend to sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
THE Colorado extension of the Centers for Disease Control occupied a structure set in the foothills above Boulder on the greenbelt just below the geological formation known as the Flatirons. Locals still referred to the complex as NCAR—pronounced En-Car—because of its twenty-five-year stint as the National Center for Atmospheric Research. When NCAR had finally outgrown the complex the year before and moved into its new headquarters in the town below, CDC had been quick to recycle the center for its own use.
The building had been designed by I. M. Pei out of the same dark red Pennsylvanian and Permian conglomerates that had formed the great, tilted slabs of the Flatirons which dominated the foothills above Boulder. His theory had been that the sandstone-like material of the structure would weather at the same rate as the Flatirons themselves, thus allowing the building to “disappear” into the environment. For the most part, Pei’s theory had worked. Although the lights of the CDC were quite visible at night against the dark mass of the greenbelt forest and foothills, in the daytime a casual glance often left tourists thinking that the building was just another strange sandstone outcropping along this dramatic stretch of the Front Range.