by Dan Simmons
“Iron doesn’t have to be thick.” O’Rourke’s voice was flat. She could see the palest glow where his face was.
“Iron rusts like a sumbitch,” hissed Kate. “Come on, set your legs up…like this…with your knees against it. Yeah, wedge your body like mine so all your weight’s on your back. Okay, on the count of three, we push until it breaks or we do.”
O’Rourke grunted his way into position. “Just a second,” he whispered. There was an almost inaudible muttering.
“What?” said Kate. Her back was already hurting.
“Praying,” said O’Rourke. “All right, I’m ready. One…two…three.”
Kate strained and arched until she felt muscles tearing, and even when she could strain no more she continued straining. She felt rust falling into her eyes and mouth, felt the rough rocks of the tunnel floor cutting through her coat and blouse into her back, felt her neck twist as if a hot wire were being pulled through the nerves…and still she strained. Next to her, Mike O’Rourke was straining even harder.
The grille did not break, it ripped out of the encircling stone and cheap cement like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle. Kate went up and out first, lying on the cool stones and breathing in cool air for a full fifteen seconds before lowering her arm to help O’Rourke up. He had to take off his jacket and rip his shirt, but he squeezed through the irregular hole into blackness.
They hugged there on the floor of the crypt of the chapel, their exaltation slowly changing to anxiety as they waited for black-clad guards to come in to check on the terrible noise of their entry. Although distant sounds of the Investiture Ceremony were audible to them, no footsteps or alarms sounded.
After a moment they rose, held each other steady, and went up stairs and through an unlocked door into the chapel proper.
Torchlight bled colors through a few stained glass windows. Kate looked at O’Rourke, saw his streaked and lacerated face, his tom and smeared clothes, and had to smile. She must look even worse. The chapel was small and almost circular, empty in the way only archaeological sites can be empty, but there was a door with a single clear pane which looked out on Chindia Tower less than fifty yards away. The grass lanes and palace ruins between them and the tower were filled with torches, human figures, the same black guards they had seen at Şnagov Island, and even a parked helicopter and two long Mercedes limousines.
Kate saw none of this. She had eyes only for the dump of red-cowled figures walking slowly past the chapel toward the base of the tower. One of them carried a bundle which might have been mistaken for a package wrapped in red silk. But Kate made no mistake; she had seen the flash of pink cheek and dark eyes by torchlight as the men carried the bundle past the chapel, past chanting clumps of other cowled figures.
O’Rourke held her back, restrained her from ripping open the door and running into the crowded torchlight.
“It’s my baby,” gasped Kate, finally falling back against the priest but never removing her eyes from the door of the tower where the men and bundle had disappeared. “It’s Joshua.”
Dreams of Blood and Iron
I am beginning to believe that I cannot die. It has been almost two years since I have partaken of the Sacrament but still Death does not come. I could refuse food or water, but such an act would be pure folly: my body would cannibalize itself over a period of months rather than die willingly. Even I, who have known more pain in my single lifetime than most generations of families have known cumulatively, even I could not face that torture.
So I lie here in the day, listening to the voices of my Family, much as I lay here during my early childhood. At night I rise and move around my room, stalk the corridors of this old house, and peer from the windows I peered from as a toddler. My muscles have not… will not…atrophy completely.
I am beginning to believe that God’s great punishment to me is this denial of death. Centuries ago, when I was young, the possibility of eternal damnation woke me with a cold sweat in the weak, dark hours of the morning. Now the thought of eternal punishment is the simple fact of being condemned to live forever.
But in the day I doze. And while I lie there, not truly awake and not fully asleep, neither dead nor moving among the living, I dream my memories.
My enemies fell upon me.
Joined by my treacherous brother Radu, Sultan Mehmed II and his legions of azabs, janissaries, Rumelian sipahis, and slant-eyed Anatolians crossed the Danube and sought to dethrone me. Mehmed’s army was much stronger than my own. I did not confuse honor with idiocy. Upon my order, our forces withdrew to the north and left desolation in our wake.
The cities, towns, and villages of my kingdom were put to the torch. Granaries were emptied or destroyed. Livestock which could not be driven north with the army was butchered where it stood. Upon my order, wells were poisoned and dams were built to create marshes where Mehmed’s cannon must pass.
Those are the historical facts of that retreat—what modern strategists would call a “strategic withdrawal”—but it conveys nothing of the reality. I lie here with evening painting the dark wood of the beams above me a dull blood color and I remember the roads swollen with weeping refugees from our own cities and villages, oxen carts and plow horses and entire clans on foot, carrying their meager belongings, while behind us the flames lighted the horizon while the skies darkened with the smoke of our self-immolation. I lay here this winter just past and eavesdropped on the Family housekeepers talking on the stairs and landing—my hearing is still that good when I wish it to be—and they whisper to each other about Saddam Hussein’s war with the Americans and about the oil fires he lit in his wrath blackening the desert skies. They mutter about the fighting in Yugoslavia to the west and shake their kerchiefed heads about how terrible modern war is. Saddam Hussein is a child compared to Hitler and Hitler was an infant compared to me. I once followed Hitler’s retreating army into his heartland and was amazed at the artifacts and infrastructure he left intact. Saddam set fire to the desert; in my day, I took some of the lushest land in Europe and turned it into a desert.
This age knows nothing of war.
We retreated into the heart of the heart of my kingdom, because all Transylvanians then learned at their mother’s breast that the salvation of our people and nation would always be the deepest folds in the highest mountains, the darkest forest in the most remote regions where wolves howl and the black bear roams.
I have read Stoker. I read his silly novel when it was first published in 1897 and saw the first stage production in London. Thirty-three years later I watched that bumbling Hungarian ham his way through one of the most inept motion pictures I have ever had the misfortune to attend. Yes, I have read and seen Stoker’s abominable, awkwardly written melodrama, that compendium of confusions which did nothing but blacken and trivialize the noble name of Dracula. It is garbage and nonsense, of course, but I confess there is one brief, almost certainly accidental passage of poetry amidst all the puerile scrawlings.
Stoker’s idiot, opera-cloaked vampire pauses when he hears a wolf howling in the forest. “Listen to them,” he stage-whispers. “The children of the night. What beautiful music they make.”
In this accidental bit of poetry, something of the Transylvanian and Romanian soul is revealed. It is the wolfs howl—solitary, terrifying, echoing in empty places—which is the music of the Romanian soul. In the forest darkness we find our salvation and rebirth. In the mountain fastness we set our backs to the stone and turn to face our enemies. It has always been so. It will always be so. I have bred and led a race of children of the night.
In that summer of 1462, thousands of my soldiers and many more thousands of my boyars and peasants fled north from the Sultan’s hired hordes. It was the hottest summer in living memory. Where we passed, nothing remained. My spies reported that Mehmed’s janissaries grumbled that there was nothing to loot in the charred cinders of our cities, nothing to eat in the ashes of our farms. I ordered pits to be dug along the only possible line of advance,
sharpened stakes to be planted, and then had them covered over with care. I remember pausing with our rear guard one June evening and listening to the screams of the Sultan’s camels as they tumbled into our pits. It was sweet music.
I led raids against the mass of Turkish swine, using paths and passes known only to a few of my people, surprising them from the rear, cutting out their stragglers and wagon trains of sick and wounded the way a wolf pack cuts out and pulls down the weakest of the herd, then impaling them where the others would find the bodies.
I sent my agents among the desolate leper colonies and into the plague-ridden shadows of my still-standing cities, bringing Turkish clothes for the sick and dying to wear as we sent them into the Sultan’s camps to mingle with the janissaries and Anatolians and sipahis and azabs, to drink from their cups and to eat from their common bowls. I ordered living victims of syphilis, the Black Death, tuberculosis, and the pox to join the Turks, and I rewarded them generously when they returned with the turbans of the men they infected unto death.
But they came on, my enemies, dying of thirst and hunger and illness, afraid to sleep in their own camps at night, terrified of the forest dark and the wolfs howl, but they came on. We left a single path of forage and unpoisoned springs for them to follow, a trail as clear as a line of gunpowder leading to a powder keg.
They turned west to Bucharest and found that town empty of life and sustenance; they swept north to Şnagov, where hundreds of my boyars and troops waited on my fortified island there. Mehmed and Radu could not reduce Şnagov. The lake was too deep for men in armor to cross without fear of drowning. My walls were too high to scale once the lake was crossed. My instruments of war rained down too terrible a punishment on them.
Mehmed followed me north again, leaving Şnagov in his rear and condemning more of his men to night harassment and morning impalement.
Then, on the night of June 17 in the Year of Our Lord 1462, I attacked Mehmed’s army not with a raiding force but with 13,000 of my bravest boyars and their handpicked troops. We scattered the guards, split the garrison, skewered those who tried to stand, and drove through the mass of their camp like a hot sword through soft flesh. We had brought torches and flares soaked in gunpowder, and these we lighted to find the Sultan’s red tent. I fully planned to kill the dog myself and drink his blood before the sun rose again.
We gained the red tent and slaughtered all those inside, but it was the wrong red tent. It gave me little solace to know that we had beheaded Mehmed’s two viziers, Isaac and Mahmud. By the time I regrouped my men, the Sultan’s cavalry was pouring in from three sides. Even then, I could have carried home the attack, for Mehmed had lost nerve and fled the camp, his unmounted men were fleeing and milling in demoralized confusion, but one of my commanders, a boyar named Gales, failed to attack from the west with the second wave as I had ordered. Because of Gales’ cowardice, Mehmed escaped, and my force had to fight its way out of the tightening ring of Ottoman cavalry.
It was there, in the camp of Mehmed, that I took two arrows through the chest. I snapped them off and held them up by the light of torches and flares, rallying my men. The secret healing force which had set me apart from mere men since birth was stronger in me then. And I had partaken of the Sacrament an hour before leading the raid. I heard the cry “Lord Dracula cannot die!” and then my surviving boyars came to my side, we formed a wedge of shields and blades, and we fought our way out of that madness.
The Sultan returned to his army. Some say that he had to be dragged back to the camp by his generals and my brother Radu. I did not drink his warm blood that night.
In my anger, I ordered the coward, Commander Gales, to my command tent an hour before dawn. My guards disarmed him, stripped him, shackled his arms behind his back, and hung him from the iron gimbal ring which I always had brought on our campaigns. Then, still covered with the soot and blood of battle, my chest in great pain, I went to work. My only tools were an awl, a corkscrew gimlet, and my father’s razor of the finest-honed steel in all of Europe. They were enough. I drank from his living body until the sun rose, then slept, arose, gave orders for the march back to Tîrgovişte, and returned to dine and drink from him until sunset that day. It has been written that the Turks forty leagues away heard the coward’s screams that day.
In Tîrgovişte, we prepared for a year or more of siege. The city was closed, the newly rebuilt walls and towers manned, the cannons primed, cattle and chickens driven into the fort, and underground streams were diverted into the city through the secret sewers I had ordered built. Sultan Mehmed’s rabble and the hungry Radu came on.
They stopped twenty-seven leagues from our walls. Mehmed and his men had passed through a hundred forests to reach the foothills of the Carpathians and the doors of Tîrgovişte, but on this morning they encountered a new forest, a forest they paused at before passing through.
In my previous winter of campaigning against the Turks I had killed thousands of my foes. I was eager to keep a precise count of the Ottoman dead, so I had ordered my boyar commanders to cut off the heads of the fallen and carry them home for easy counting. By February, the troops were grumbling: too many heads, too many heavy, leaking bags. At the end of the campaign I had the heads counted, took careful inventory, and then sliced the noses and ears off to send to my friend and sometimes ally, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. He never responded to my letter and gift, but I know that he must have been impressed.
Of course we took thousands of Turkish prisoners during the campaign. By the week in June when Mehmed approached the walls of my capital, our cells and stockades held more than twenty-three thousand prisoners.
Now, as Mehmed’s huge but exhausted and starved army angrily started their morning march a mere twenty-seven leagues from almost certain victory at Tîrgovişte, they stopped at the forest I had ordered raised. A forest of some twenty-three thousand impaled Turks, some still writhing in the morning light. Taller stakes held the bodies of the Sultan’s favorite commanders, friends he had assumed he could ransom, friends such as Hamza Pasha and the legendary Greek, Thomas Catavolinos.
The Sultan’s own toady and chronicler Laonicus Chalcondyles has written of this morning: “So overwhelmed by disbelief in what he saw, the Emperor said that he could not take the land away from a man who does such marvelous things and can exploit his rule and his subjects in this way and that surely a man who had accomplished this is worthy of greater things.”
So said Chalcondyles. But Chalcondyles certainly lied through his rotting teeth. Were we to have been there that morning, and I was, watching from horseback from less than half a league away, we would have seen a demoralized army turning and shoving their way from the stench of death rising from my new forest. And we would have seen their shaken Sultan near to pissing his ballooned, silk pants. And we would have seen him ordering his men into camp within sight of my forest, as if they could not leave or tear their eyes away, and before dark that night they had dug a trench deeper than the Danube around their cowering army and had lit a thousand fires to hold me at bay. I think that I could have walked into their camp and said “Boo!” that night and watched the army flee in terror.
Sultan Mehmed and his band turned away from Tîrgovişte the next morning and began their long march back to Brăila, their fleet, and their accursed homeland. My spies reported then that his army marched into Adrianople at night so that the populace would not see their shame, and that by the time the Sultan returned to Constantinople his once-proud legions of Anatolians, Rumelians, azabs, and janissaries were so much dragged-out dog meat. But the Sultan ordered great rejoicing throughout the land for his brilliant victory over Dracula.
So much for Islamic victories, I think, while I listen to the visiting Family and to busy chambermaids talking of war in desert places.
Chapter Thirty-one
KATE would have rushed out into the torchlit palace grounds after Joshua if O’Rourke had not restrained her. There were at least a hundred cowled strigoi visible in
the courtyards between her and Chindia Tower, where the baby had been carried, but Kate would have attempted to cross that space if O’Rourke had not at first held her back and then just held her.
“We can’t do anything now,” he whispered. There were guards within ten yards of the chapel door. “We’ll watch where they take him.”
Kate had grasped his tom shirt in her two fists. “Can we follow them?”
O’Rourke was silent and she knew the answer herself: it would take too long to crawl back out through the tunnel, they would not know which Mercedes the child had arrived in, and the guards would be checking for anyone following their strigoi masters. Kate pounded her fist against O’Rourke’s chest. “This is so…maddening.” She took deep breaths to avoid tears, then watched the tower, hoping for some sign of her son.
Chindia Watchtower was an eighty- or ninety-foot stone tower, four-sided at the bottom but soon becoming a cylinder with crenellated battlements at the top. Illuminated by torchlight, the tower looked to Kate like a rook that had escaped its chessboard. There were two arched windows on the side she could see, each window taller than a man, and a single stone and iron balcony outside the first window about forty feet up. She noticed a crack running from the broad base to just below the battlements, with clumsy iron rods holding stone and brick together like giant staples.
O’Rourke noticed her gaze. “That’s from the earthquake a few years ago,” he whispered. “The tower’s been closed to tourists ever since. Ceauşescu authorized the funds to fix it, but it was never done.”
Kate nodded absently. She knew that O’Rourke was trying to distract her from thinking about the terrible danger that Joshua was in. What if they make him drink human blood tonight? Perhaps they already had. She had not seen the baby at Şnagov, but there was much she had not seen there.