‘Would you walk on earth, and breathe, and slake your thirst again, old one? Would you slaughter your enemies and drive them back as before — as your ancestors before you — and this time as your own man, not merely a sellsword to ungrateful Dracul princelings? If you would, then trade with me. Tell me of my parents.'
Sometimes a bargain sounds more like a threat, Drago sani. And would you threaten me? The voice hissed in his head like ice on the strings of an ill-tuned violin. You dare speak to me — you dare remind me — of Vlads, Radus, Draculs and Mirceas? You call me a sellsword? Boy, in the end my so-called 'masters' feared me more than the Turk himself! Which is why they weighed me down in iron and silver and buried me in this secret place, in these same cruciform hills which I had defended with my blood. For them I fought, aye — for the sake of their 'Holy cross', their 'Christianity' — but now I fight to be free of it. Their treachery is my pain, their cross the dagger in my heart!
‘ A dagger which I can draw for you! Your enemies have come again, old devil, and none to drive them out save you. And there you lie, impotent! The crescent of the Turk is grown into the sickle of another, and what he cannot cut down he hammers flat. I am a Wallach no less than you, whose blood is older than Wallachia itself. Nor will I suffer the invader. Well, and now there's a new invader and our leaders are puppets once more. So how is it to be? Are you content, or would you fight again? The bat, the dragon, the devil — against the hammer and the sickle!'
(A sigh, whispering with the wind in the rafters.) Very well, I will tell you how it was, and how you … became.
It was… springtime. I could feel it in the soil. The growing time. The year… but what are years to me? A quarter-century ago, anyway.
'It was 1945,' said Dragosani. 'The war would soon be at an end. The Szgany were here, fled into the mountains for their refuge, as they've done right down the centuries. Refugees from the German war machine, they were here in their thousands. And the Transylvanian plateau shielded them, as always. The Germans had been rounding them up — Szgany, Romany, Szekely, Gypsy, call them what you will — all over Europe, for slaughter along with the Jews in the death-camps. Stalin had deported many minority peoples, alleged "collaborators," from the Crimea and Caucasus. That's when it was, and that's when it stopped. Spring 1945, but we had surrendered more than six months earlier than that. Anyway, the end was in sight, the Germans were on the run. By the end of April, Hitler had killed himself
/ know only what you have told me of that. Surrender, you say? Hah! / am not surprised. But 1945? Aieee! More than four and a half centuries, and still the invader came — and I was not there to drink the wine of war. Oh, yes, you stir old yearnings in me, Dragosani.
Anyway, it was springtime when these two came. I suspect that they were in flight. Perhaps from war, who can say? Anyway, they were very young and of the old blood. Gypsies? Aye. In my day, as a great Boyar, thousands such had worshipped me, owed me allegiance more than the puppet Basarabs and Vlads and Vladislavs. And would they worship me still? I wondered. And did I yet have influence over them?
My tomb was broken down then just as it is now, unvisited since the day I was interred — except in the first half-century, by priests who cursed the ground where I lay. And so they came, one night as the moon rose over the mountains. Young ones, Szekely, a boy and a girl. It was spring and warm, but the nights were cold. They had blankets and a small lamp with oil. Also, they had fear. And passion. It was that, I think, which stirred me from my slumbers. Or perhaps I had been half awake anyway. After all, engines of war were rumbling, and their thunder was in the earth. Perhaps it was that which stirred these old bones…
I felt what they were doing. In four and a half centuries and more I had learned to recognise the fall of a leaf from a tree, the timid landing of a woodcock's feather. They put a blanket across two leaning slabs, forming a shelter. They lit the lamp to see each other, also for warmth. Hah! Szekely? They didn't need a lamp to be warm.
They… interested me. For years I had called, for centuries, and no one came, no one answered. Perhaps they were kept away by priests, by warnings, by myths that had grown into legends down the long years. Or — perhaps in life my. excesses had been…
You have told me, Dragosani, how many of my greatest deeds are now accorded to the Vlads, and how I am reduced to a ghost for frightening children. More than this, my very name will have been stricken from the old records, for that was their way in those days. If they feared something they destroyed it and pretended it had never been. Ah, but did they think I was unique of my sort? I was not — I am not! I was one of a few who once were a great many. Aye, and word of my plight must surely have found its way to the others? For hundreds of years it had angered me that someone had not come to release or at least avenge me! And when at last someone did come… gypsies, Szkeleys!
The girl was frightened and he could not calm her. I calmed her. I crept inside her mind, gave her strength to face her fears, whatever they were, and to meet him in a hot collision of flesh. Ahhh!
Yes, and she was a virgin! Her maidenhead was intact. I might have died again, in my grave, from lusting after it! A maidenhead, intact! To quote an old, old book of lies: how are the mighty fallen! I had broken two thousand in my day, one way or another. Ha, ha, ha! And they called young Vlad 'the Impaler'!
So… they were lovers, but not yet in the fullest sense of the word. He was a boy — a mere pup, and never breached a bitch — and she a virgin. And so I got into his mind, too. Ah! — and I bequeathed the night to them. I drew strength from them and they from me. One night they had from me, just one, for before the dawn they left. After that — (a mental shrug) — / know no more of them…
'Except that she bore me,' said Dragosani, 'and left me on a doorstep to be found'
The answer to that was a while in coming, sighing in a wind little more than a breeze now. The old one in the ground was tired; he had little more of strength left in him, not even for thinking; the earth held him in its hard-packed womb and turned on its inexorable axis and lulled him. But at last, sighingly:
Yesss. Yes, but at least she knew where to bring you. She was a Gypsy, remember? A wanderer. And yet when you were born she brought you back here. She brought you… home! She did that because she knew your real father, Dragosani! You might say that of my whole life, which was bloody beyond measure, that one night was a true labour of love. Aye, and my only tribute a single splash of blood. The merest drop, Dragosaaaniiii…
'My mother's blood.'
Your mother's, splashed on the earth where I lay. But such a precious drop! For it was your blood, too, and runs in your veins even now. And then, as a child, it brought you back to me.
Dragosani was quiet, his head full of thoughts, visions, pseudo-memories evoked of the other's words in his head. Finally he said, I'll come to you tomorrow. We'll talk more then.'