That is the true story, although I cannot imagine that anyone cares. Not even the Family, who have forgotten to honor and obey their patriarch, even though most of them are the descendants of the young Vlad I saved from death that night.
My halfdream state is broken by the sound of arriving Family members. In a moment they will come up the stairs to bathe me and dress me in fine linen vestments and drape the chain of the Order of the Dragon around my neck.
One final Ceremony. One final act as patriarch.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Kate and Lucian drove through Sibiu in the failing light: Sibiu where medieval lanes opened onto cobblestone squares surrounded by homes and buildings with sleepyeyed rooftop windows.
They drove down the Olt River Valley as the lateafternoon glow faded to gray twilight. The highway wound along the river between steep canyon walls. One minute the road would be broad, smoothly asphalted, with a gravel shoulder, and the next they would be bouncing through a mile of muddy ruts where some roadwork had been started and abandoned months or even years before.
They skirted the industrial town of Rimnicu Vilcea. The Dacia needed petrol and the only gas station they passed had a line at least an hour long. Lucian said that he knew a blackmarket gas depot on the east edge of town and they stopped to change drivers. Few Romanian women drove cars; if they were important enough to travel by car, they tended to be chauffeured. Lucian slid behind the wheel, left the highway just beyond the city limits, and bought five literbottles of petrol out of the back of a lorry parked near an old tunnel.
Later, Kate was to think of how the simple act of changing drivers sealed their respective fates.
Just beyond Rimnica Vilcea on the road leading southeast to Pitesti, Lucian turned left onto tiny Highway 73C and followed it through a few dimly lighted villages into the darkness of the Carpathians. They encountered the first roadblock fifteen kilometers farther on, right where the road diverged in a village named Tigveni toward either Curtea de Arges to the east or Suici to the north.
“Shit,” said Lucian. They had just topped the rise coming out of the village when he saw the lights, the military vehicles, and two black Mercedes stopped at the checkpoint. Lucian doused the Dacia's already weak lights, made a Uturn, and drove back into the village, turning down a dark side street that was little more than an alley. Tigveni may have held a hundred people in its eight or ten homes, but tonight, even though it was not yet eight P.m., the town was dark and silent.
“What now?” whispered Kate, knowing that it was silly to whisper but doing so anyway. The target pistol was in the low console between their two front seats..
Lucian's face was just visible. “It's another fourteen kilometers to the town of Curtea de Arges,” he said. “Then twenty-three kilometers north up the valley to the citadel.”
“More than twenty- miles,” whispered Kate. “We can't walk from here.”
Lucian rubbed his cheek. “When I worked on the citadel, I had to drive to Rimnicu Vilcea regularly to pick up materials and workers. Occasionally the bridge outside of town here would be washed out by storms.” He slapped the steering wheel. “Hang on, babe.”
With the headlights still out, Lucian bumped the Dacia down a rutted side street, across what appeared to be a meadow, and then settled into two ruts that ran along a river. Kate heard frogs and insects from the darkness under the trees and for a moment she could imagine that summer was coming rather than dying.
The Dacia halted under the trees on a wide stretch of gravel alongside the river and Lucian killed the engine. Two hundred meters to their left, the spotlights of the military roadblock lit the night.
“They're stopping cars at the onelane bridge,” whispered Lucian. As they watched, another limousine approached the roadblock, flashlights flicked on, and Kate could see the gleam of the soldiers' helmets as they stepped up to the car, checked it, and then saluted and let it pass.
“We should have taken the Mercedes,” she whispered.
Lucian grinned. “Yeah. We look so strigoi, don't we? Did you bring your identity papers?”
Kate glanced at her watch. Four hours to go twenty miles. “What next?”
Lucian pointed at the river. It was at least a hundred feet wide here, but it looked shallow. Reflected light from the distant searchlights gleamed on numerous ripples.
“We'll never cross here without them seeing us or hearing us,” hissed Kate. “Isn't there another place? Farther from the road?”
Lucian shrugged. “I don't know of any. This is where the locals used to reroute traffic when the bridge was out.” He looked to his left. “Hear their music? Somebody in one of the trucks has a radio going.”
“Yes, but all they have to do is look this way.”
Lucian cranked his window down and leaned out. “The trees overhang here for most of the way. It's dark near the banks.” He turned and looked at Kate. “You call, Kate.”
She hesitated only a second. “Go.”
Lucian started the car. The fourcylinder motor sounded like a jet engine to Kate. Lucian put the car in first and edged out into the river. Within seconds the water was up to the car's hubcaps, then to the bottom of their doors, then rising along the fender. The Dacia rocked and bumped.
“We're shipping water,” whispered Kate, lifting her feet from the dribbling floorboards. Lucian kept one hand on the wheel and one on the stick shift and jostled them forward.
Suddenly the right front wheel dipped, something smacked the bottom of the car hard, and the engine stalled. They sat there in the middle of the river, the current lapping halfway to the windows, and tried not to breathe too loudly.
The music from the two military trucks was a loud, Gypsy beat. Lucian pulled the choke out and set his hand on the ignition keys.
“No!” Kate said aloud and stopped his hand just as he was turning the keys.
A limousine had glided up to the roadblock. The music stopped. In the sudden silence they could hear the questions of the three soldiers and even soft replies from the car. The beam from one of the bright searchlights atop the truck jostled, lost its focus on the Mercedes, and stabbed out onto the river. A moment later the limousine rolled on, the searchlights were aimed lower, and the music started up again.
Lucian turned the ignition key.
Please God, prayed Kate to a God she had never really believed in, don't let the coil or the spark plugs or the other things Tom used to try to explain to me be wet or broken. Amen.
The Dacia started. Lucian rocked it carefully forward and back, freed the wheel from the hole, and drove on to the opposite bank. Kate felt her skin and muscles beginning to unclench when they were half a mile down the rutted lane and out of sight of the roadblock because of thick trees and the hill. She had not known that one's body physically awaits the impact of bullets.
“OK,” breathed Lucian as he bounced the Dacia back onto the narrow highway. “I don't know what the fuck we'll do when we get to Curtea de Arges, but, hey . . . the name of the game is improvise, right?”
They bypassed Curtea de Arges and two roadblocks they could see in the distance by driving north up the railroad line that ran along the west side of the Arges River. “O'Rourke's idea,” said Kate.
They had a flat which Kate helped change by the light of the few stars now shining between high clouds. The spare was so patched and so threadbare that she could not imagine it getting them much farther. There isn't much farther to go, she assured herself. Fifteen kilometers. This tire will make it.