This effort naturally required that they substitute some other body for my own—the mere disappearance of my corpse would not have been acceptable to the traitors. (Though now that I think back on it, what a delicious superstitious fear it would have provoked among them!) The near obliteration of my face, to the point where my loyal friends themselves had difficulty in recognizing me, made their task considerably easier.
Also a great help to them was the fact that my corpse lay on a recent battlefield, surrounded by fresh candidates for substitution.
A selection was quickly made from among these, and a partial change of armor and clothing was effected, no easy matter in itself—have you ever tried to dress a corpse? Quick cosmetic surgery was performed upon the face of my replacement—his hair and mustache were already an approximate match. Body build was generally similar. Height is irrelevant among those who have become permanently horizontal. And given the muddy condition of the field, one of its occupants tended to look a great deal like another anyway.
To shorten a somewhat lengthy episode, which I am finding increasingly painful to relate, let me say at once that the replacement was a success. When Bogdan and his two close associates came back, they abandoned with scarcely a glance the hacked-up torso and limbs they thought were mine, picked up by its dirty hair the head of pseudo-Drakulya, and at once packed this grisly object away in a cask of salt to start its journey to the Sultan. There was, I suppose, hardly any point in trying to clean the flayed thing up. Much later I heard that the trophy was indeed exhibited upon some palace gate or wall, the head of the dread Lord Impaler, Kaziklu Bey, brought down at last, only to be so elevated among his enemies.
But from that day of my assassination, it was long, long, before the Sultan ever entered into my thoughts again.
Meanwhile my own body, unhappily disjunct, had been conveyed from the field by my friends in greatest secrecy, bundled in its two pieces upon the back of a mule. Darkness had fallen long before the corpse reached a place of sanctuary, where another friend or two appeared to clean it up and lay it out for honorable if secret burial.
This sanctuary where my remains had come to rest temporarily was a farm not far from the battlefield, and also not far from the island monastery of Snagov.
A rough plank table had been constructed, in some outbuilding, for the job that had to be done, and on this my body was laid out supine, head just a little distant from neck stump, a tall candle at my feet and another near my detached head. During the following preparations, these candles took turns in extinguishing themselves, for no good reason that I could see. Perhaps there was more of a draft than I could feel.
Two of the farm women did most of the actual corpse-washing. Meanwhile a handful of other people came and went, to marvel and to grieve.
And, of course, to pray over my dismembered body. The prayers as I recall were for the most part Catholic, for I had been and remained a dutiful convert from the Orthodox faith into which I had been born.
Among the topics of conversation addressed by those preparing me for burial was the fact that my grave would probably be only temporary, that the late unhappy prince would want to be moved someday to a prepared vault hidden beneath a certain castle.
But for the present all concerned would be satisfied, could I but be laid peacefully to rest in some soldier's grave, unmarked and shallow, humble as most such are, and lonelier than most. Somehow I was to be accorded at least the minor dignity of a plain wooden coffin, the best my friends could manage, and the sounds of its construction resounded through the night.
One at least of my mourners had come from the nearby monastery, where, as he said, only he and one other were aware as yet of the fact that my body had been saved, and my funeral preparations were quietly under way. The two who knew the secret would try to keep it, but the speaker considered it inevitable that eventually the story would spread through their ranks.
He also mentioned that Ronay had sought shelter in the monastery for treatment of his wound. I had richly endowed this establishment, as well as several others, whilst I was still capable of breath, and when I heard this it seemed to me ungrateful of its abbot now to thus comfort and encourage my enemies.
Shortly after the monk had spoken of Ronay, the people in attendance on my corpse had a bad few moments, when both candles inexplicably went out at once. Fortunately for their peace of mind, a fire was available—a small one in a brazier, no one wanted to keep a corpse too warm—and the darkness never became absolute. The tapers were easily relighted.
To begin with, the butchered body was stripped of its begrimed and bloodstained garments, the borrowed ones along with whatever items of its proper clothing it still retained. Most of these being hopelessly damaged, they were taken to another room to be consigned to the fire. Parenthetically I may add that I was oddly touched, later, when I heard that a few scraps of bloodstained cloth had been retained, in the manner of holy relics, by some of the humble folk who had considered themselves happy and fortunate under my rule.
A little later, by chance, all of the attendants were out of the room at the same time, probably getting more water and cloths. As the first two returned, they stopped abruptly, and the more timid one smothered a little outcry.
Somehow my head, detached as it was, had in the interval of their absence rolled or shifted its position slightly. I have no good explanation of how such things can happen. The one dark eye still visible amid the mutilations was wide open, its fiery glare directed into nothingness. The bloody jaw now gaped more widely than before, the tattered lips that no longer really formed a mouth hanging in a bloody fringe around that silent, shouting grin. At least one of the breathing onlookers, to judge by a remark he muttered later, got the impression that those jaws were shouting, a great bellowing of breathless defiance.
In fact there was scarcely a sound in the room, save for the quickened breathing of the attendants and a steady, remote dripping. Water, either inside or outside the shed. Outside rain now fell alternately with sleet, making it a dismal night altogether.
Trembling slightly, but firmly confident in the power of their prayers to protect them against the things of night and evil, the corpse-washers examined the body again to make sure that nothing else had changed, and there was no drip of blood. No, the body of Vlad Drakulya was no longer really bleeding at any point. The raw lips of his many wounds were sealed with clots. When presently, in the continued process of washing, most of these blood clots were dislodged, there appeared beneath them the unmistakable signs of pink, fresh scarring, as if some healing process of near-miraculous rapidity had begun before death supervened. One of the attendants made some muttered comment about this; the other one told her to shut up.
But the first woman was not finished. "Now you can see both of his eyes," she remarked when a gory wrinkle of loosened forehead had been tugged and smoothed back into what was more or less its proper position.
There was some difficulty about getting the eyes to stay shut; in itself this is not uncommon with corpses of a fair degree of freshness. No doubt even the observed movement of the head was not totally without precedent. The traumatized jaw muscles, or what Bogdan's sword had left of them, might well have spasmed once again.
"Ought we not to sew up some of these gashes? Would his face look better with stitches in it, or—
"No time for sewing now." The face—if the surface they were contemplating was still deserving of the name—was going to look frightful in the extreme, whatever the corpse-tenders did or did not do.
"I suppose you're right. No time. Wash him, clothe him decently, put him into a box and underground." Afraid that my enemies might finally have tumbled to the trick, or that some informer might betray the substitution of another corpse, they were trying to get it all done, including the burial, before dawn.