Kate remembered the reading she had done about Vlad Tepes. “He was born there.” She frowned. “If Lucian's right and there are four nights to the Investiture Ceremony and the ceremony celebrates Vlad Tepes' career, wouldn't they have started at Sighisoara?”
O'Rourke lifted his hands above the soapy water. “What if they were working backward in time? ~Snagov is where Vlad was supposed to have been buried. Tirgoviste is where he ruled . . . “
“And Sighisoara is where he was born,” finished Kate. “Fine, but what about the fourth and final night? Your Castle Dracula doesn't seem to fit the itinerary.”
“Unless it was where the next Prince is to be initiated,” whispered O'Rourke. His eyes were focused on something distant.
Kate slumped back in the cooling water. “We're guessing. We don't know didley. I wish Lucian were here.”
O'Rourke raised an eyebrow.
“Not this minute,” said Kate, flustered. “But he seemed to know . . . “
“If he was telling the truth.” O'Rourke shifted his shortened leg. “Turn around and slide back this way.”
Kate hesitated a second.
“I'll scrub your back and shampoo your hair,” he said, holding up a small vial of shampoo. “It's not scented and perfumed American shampoo, but it's probably better for your hair than whatever we picked up crawling through the palace graveyard.”
Kate turned around and sat in the middle of the tub while O'Rourke first lathered her back and then massaged her scalp with strong fingers. The shampooing went on and on, and if she believed in magic she would have asked for three wishes just to keep the sensation going on forever. And never face tomorrow. '
“Turn around,” she said, sliding forward and turning. “I'll do you.”
After the shampoos, after the ritual lathering and rinsing of their bodies, they kissed and even held each other, nude in the still steaming water, but there was no surge of passion, and not just because each was bruised and exhausted. It was as if they were friends as well as lovers, two friends who had known each other forever. I'm tired, thought Kate. I'm sentimentalizing this.
No, you're not, said another part of her mind.
“Wherever the site is for tomorrow night's ceremony,” said O'Rourke, breaking the spell, “we can't do much tonight. The mountain roads are dangerous at night and police often stop private vehicles. We'd be better off blending in with traffic in the daytime. We'll flip a coin in the morning to see which way we go. “
“It will be hard getting out of here,” said Kate. The candle was burning low. The air was very cold.
“Once more unto the breach, dear . . . holy shit it's cold!” said O'Rourke, who had pulled himself up onto the tiled ledge and swung sideways. His body steamed in the cold air. He began toweling himself rapidly.
Kate stepped out and did the same. It was like going from a sauna to the freezing outdoors. She huddled under the thin blanket. “Tell me we're going to sleep here together for a few hours,” she said, teeth chattering. “Together.”
“The beds are very much single,” said O'Rourke. He balanced on one leg while he attached the prosthesis.
Kate frowned. “You don't sleep with that on, do you? I mean, other than in haylofts.”
O'Rourke finished attaching it and stood. Kate noticed that the modern prosthetic looked very lifelike. “No,” he said, “but some consider it undignified to hop to one's bed.”
“Single bed?” said Kate, shaking now as her body cooled.
“Good blankets,” said O'Rourke. He smiled gently. “And I took the liberty of carrying one single bed in and setting it next to the other in the nearest bedroom.”
Kate lifted her bag and a stack of clean clothes with one arm and slipped the other around the priest. Ex priest, she thought. Or soon to be ex priest. “Not to be unromantic about this,” she said, “but let's get under those good blankets before we freeze our asses off.”
O'Rourke carried the dying candle with him as they found their way to the room.
Chapter Thirty-two
THE day was like a return to early autumn; the blue skies emphasized each remaining leaf in the forests along Highway 71 to Brasov. Kate thought that “highway” was a generous term for the narrow strip of patched and potted asphalt that ran north and east from Tirgoviste, wound its tortured way through passes in the Carpathian Mountains, and then dropped dramatically again before connecting with Highway I south of Brasov.
Rejuvenated by last night's bath, several hours' sleep, and the clean new clothes that O'Rourke had foundat least one of the monks at Tirgoviste Monastery had been small enough that Kate could wear his dark sweater over her last clean, black skirt and look moderately presentableshe was tempted to take off her scarf, tilt her head back, and enjoy the sunlight as she bounced along in the sidecar.
It was not possible. The sense of urgency to find Joshua was too great, the terror at making the wrong decision too deep.
They had not flipped a coin to decide the direction. After looking at the map in the morning light, both of them had lifted their heads and said, “Sighisoara.” On Kate's part it was nothing but intuition. Something about traveling in Transylvania makes one superstitious, she thought.
“If we're wrong about where the ceremony is tonight, we have a final crack at tomorrow night,” said O'Rourke.
“Yes,” said Kate, “if Lucian was telling the. truth. Our information is shaky, based on hearsay, and generally halfassed. If this plan was a medical diagnosis, I'd sue the physician for malpractice.”
There were few cars this morning but traffic was heavy: heavy semis belching pollution behind them in blue and brown clouds, tractors that looked like they came out of a Henry Ford turnofthecentury museum, their iron wheels chewing up more of the wellchewed asphalt road, rubber wheeled horse carts, woodenwheeled horse carts, painted wheel pony carts, the occasional Gypsy wagon, herds of sheep standing stupidly in the road looking lost while their herders lagged behind with the same expression, cattle being flicked along by children no more than eight or nine years old who did not even look up at the heavy trucks as they roared past or at the motorcycle as it weaved to avoid hitting cows, bicycles wobbling their way to what appeared to be nowhere in particular, the occasional German car breezing past at 180 kph with a blast of its arrogant German horn, the driver not even glancing at the motorcycle and its occupants, a few Dacias limping along or sitting broken down in the middle of the road, army vehicles evidently trying to race the German cars as they roared and smoked their way down the center of the highway, and pedestrians.
There were many pedestrians: Gypsies with their swarthy skins and loose clothes, old men with whitestubbled cheeks and soft hats that had lost all form, flocks of schoolgirls near the two tiny villages and one small town they had passed throughPucioasa, Fieni, and Matoeinithe girls' much mended but stiffly starched blue skirts and white blouses seeming very bright in the sunlight, the unschooled children tending cattle, both boys and bovine wearing expressions of infinite boredom, old peasant women waddling down the side of the roadthere was no shoulder to the highway, only a three-foot ditch filled with foulsmelling water most of the wayand older peasant women being led by tiny children much as the cows were being led, and the occasional ofiter de politilie standing outside his village police headquarters.
The police did not even look up as the motorcycle rumbled through Fieni, a thoroughly sootsoaked industrial town. O'Rourke was careful to obey the speed limits.
“We'll need gas in Brasov!” he shouted.
Kate nodded and kept her eyes on the weaving bicycle just visible beyond the horse cart that had pulled out in front of them.