Kate shook her head. “You don't have to go with me on this, Lucian. “
He spread his fingers and settled lower in the seat. “Hey, why not. It's easier to follow. I always was a lousy vezeto.”
Kate turned right onto Highway 14. Black letters were just visible on a graysooted sign: SIBIU 43 KM. RIMNICU VILCEA 150 KM.
Once out of the smoke and soot of Copsa Mica, Kate turned off the wipers but had to turn on the lights. Despite the early hour, it was getting dark.
Dreams of Blood and Iron
If there is any fate more ignominious than to be a patriarch without power in the grip of one's own family, I do not wish to imagine it. Events proceed, although it is apparent that my final act for the Family shall be styled as mere ceremonial pawn in the power machinations of Radu Fortuna.
Radu. I think of my brother Radu, the boy with the long lashes who became the beloved ®f more than one sultan. The boy who grew up to wrestle the throne from me through treachery and guile. The people called him Radu the Handsome and welcomed his soft ways after my stern years as their liege lord.
The idiots.
I knew Radu as the brainless, spineless little Sodomite he was. Sultan Mehmed had no difficulty controlling Wallachia and Transylvania with Radu as his puppet: God knows that the Sultan had had his hand up this particular puppet enough times.
I, Wladislaus Dragwylya, had beaten the Turks more decisively than any Christian ruler in history, had sent the Sultan cowering back to Constantinople, and had won the liberty of my people. But my people deserted me.
The Sultan had left his play toy, Radu, in Wallachia to woo my boyars away from me, to undermine their liege oaths. At this, Radu was successful in the dark closets of diplomacy where he and the Sultan had failed on the daylight battlefields. Now that I had vouchsafed the freedom of the Seven Cities through the spilling of my own blood, the boyars of these German strongholds turned against me and made secret pact with the serpent Radii.
By midsummer of 1462, my position had become, as the politicians now phrase it, untenable. I had beaten the Turks everywhere I had found them, but behind me my army had melted away like sugar in the mouth of a child. I look my few and most loyal boyars, my fiercest and besttrained troops, and fled. I Died to my castle keep on the Arges River.
Here is the folk legend that tells of my final hours at Castle Dracula.
The Turks were approaching by night, setting up their cannonades on the high fields near the village of Poienari on the bluffs across the Arges. In the morning they would storm my citadel. Then, as the folktales have it, a certain relative of mine who had been taken by the Turks years before, remembering my many kindnesses to him and his love of family, climbed to a high spot and fired a warning arrow through the only lighted window in my tower. Legend has it that the arrow was so wellaimed that it snuffed the candle by which my concubine was reading.
She was alone in the room, goes the tale. When she read the appended warning of the Turkish attack, she woke me, told me in hysterical tones that she would rather have her body eaten by the fish in the Arges than be touched by the Turks, and then threw herself from the battlements to the river a thousand feet below. To this day, the river there is known as Riul Doamneithe Princess's Riverin tribute to this tale. This false tale. In truth, there was no relative, no warning arrow, and no selfless suicide. Here is the truth:
We had watched from the citadel for two days as Radu and the Turks advanced to Poienari and to the bluffs beyond. For another two days we had suffered their cannonade, although their cherry wood guns did little damage; I had ordered the towers rebuilt with too many layers of brick and stone to fall to such a minor pounding.
Still, we knew that on the morrow Radu's cavalry would cross the Arges and swing up the valley to the hills behind the keep, while the Turkish foot soldiers, stupid and stolid as ambulatory tree trunks, would die by the hundreds while ascending the cliffs to the citadel walls. But they would win. Our forces were too small, the keep too isolated on its crag to allow any eventual outcome except the defeat of Lord Dracula. That night I was deep in preparations for my escape when my concubine, Voica by name, demanded my time to have an argument. Women have no sense of timing; when they wish to argue, they must argue, and it does not matter what events of real importance are taking place.
Voica and I walked the darkened battlements while she went on in a tearful voice. The issue was not the attacking Turks nor the threat of my treacherous brother Radu, but the future of our sons, Vlad and Mihnea.
I should say here that I loved Voica, at least as much as it is possible for a leader of men and nations to love a woman. She was small, dark of eye and skin but usually light of heart, and she did my bidding in all things. Until this night.
Of our two boys, Mihnea had been born normal enough, but his oneyearold younger sibling, Vlad, had the wasting sickness that had plagued my father and me. Vlad had received the secret Sacrament only days before. His health shone now in his eyes and I knew that the boy would be like his father in requiring the Sacrament throughout his life.
It was on this night, of all nights, that Voica chose to protest that our child would be brought up this way. I pointed out that neither the babe nor I had a choice in the matter: if he were to survive, he would have to drink. This upset Voica. Her mother had been a secret drinker. Indeed, her mother had been tried and destroyed as a witch, and I first met Voica when she was brought before my court to face a similar fate. But Voica had never tasted the Sacrament. Instead of ordering her burned or impaled, I took her into my palace, gave her my affection, and allowed her to bear my children. And now she thanked me by striding the battlements, on the very night the campfires of Radu and the Turks were visible across the black river valley, and demanding that young Vlad be allowed to grow up without the Sacrament. She called it blasphemy. She called it witchcraft. She called me strigoi like her mother.
I reasoned with her for several minutes, but the hour was drawing near when we would have to leave. I pronounced the conversation finished.
Voica had always been an overly emotional and dramatic woman. It was probably that as much as her mother's habit of drinking the blood of corpses which had brought Voica to my court in chains. Now she surrendered to her sense of drama and leapt to the parapet, threatening to throw herself and our two babes in her arms into the void below if I did not give in to her wishes.
Tired of her histrionics, in a press to leave before the moon rose, I jumped to the top of the low wall and wrestled the children away from her. She lost her balance then. For a second I thought it was part of her melodrama, but then I saw the true terror in her face and, shifting Vlad to the arm which held Mihnea, I held out my hand to steady her.
Our fingertips touched. She fell backward without a sound, disappearing into the darkness of the chasm like a mermaid diving to greater depths. One of her slippers remained behind on the wet stone. l kept that slipper for three centuries, losing it only when I had to flee a burning building in Paris during a minor revolution.
I took the children that night and left everyone else in the castle behind. Their loyalty meant nothing to me. They meant nothing to me.
One of the reasons I had chosen Poienari Citadel for my own was that it was built atop two faults in the rock which led down more than a thousand feet to the cave which held the underground river. The first fault was only ten inches wide, but it served as a well for fresh water even during siege. The second fault was, with a little help from artisans who died with the boyars who rebuilt Castle Dracula on that longago Easter Sunday in 1456, large enough for a man to descend, hanging on to iron cables and rungs as he did so.