Vlad: The Last Confession (8 page)

The captain looked up at the rooftops of Edirne. “Five years I spent chained to one of their galley benches. So if I can pay the goat-fuckers back…” He looked back at Vlad. “You say this will hurt them?”

“Yes,” said Vlad. “I think it will hurt them very much.”

“Good. Then get her aboard. And I will collect the other half of my fee from the Dragon’s hoard—or from you when I return.” With that, he stepped back onto his deck, ordering his crew to their tasks.

Vlad, who had not let go of Ilona’s hand, now pulled it, guiding her towards the ramp.

For the first time, she resisted. “You do not come?” she said.

Vlad paused, held by her, by that voice and the first words she had spoken since the snatch. “I cannot. I am a hostage and have given my word. To the Turk. To my father. Also”—he swallowed—“the Sultan is not someone to cross. A few years ago other hostages—sons of the Serbian despot, Gheorghes Brankovic—tried to pass information to their father about the Turk’s war preparations. In the terrible castle of Tokat, Murad had red-hot iron shoved into their eyes. So…please.”

He pulled her again. Again she resisted. “Will you not be so punished? For what you have done today?”

“I do not think we were seen. Even your woman saw us as we are, in Turkish dress, our faces hidden. Only you and the captain know us. And he is good Wallachian, if surly. He will see a country-woman home.”

“And then?”

Vlad took another roll of parchment from his pouch. “Here is a letter written to my father. You will be taken care of.”

“I did not mean that,” Ilona said. “I meant…will I see you again?”

“If Allah wills it,” he replied. “God, I mean,” he added with a smile. “I truly have been among these people too long. But yes, I believe it is my
kismet
to return to my land one day.”

“
Kismet
,” she echoed, finally yielding to the pressure of his hand and climbing the ramp. “Mine changed when I first saw you.”

“
Kismet
doesn’t change,” he replied. “All this was already written.” Handing her onto the deck, he turned immediately, descending, and as soon as he was clear of the ramp, they hauled it in. Lines were cast off, oars slipped into the water. The barge began to drift slowly from the dock.

They were still only an arm’s length apart when the thought came to her. He
hasn’t
seen me! Living always beneath a veil, she was used to observing men through one, never being observed herself. But if he did not see her now, how would he ever find her again?

“Vlad,” she called. And as she did, she reached up, lifted. The length of jangling coins stroked her face as they rose. Then she dropped the headdress onto the deck.

She was still close enough to see the change in his green eyes. “Oh,” he said softly. “Yes. Yes, I see.”

Beside him, Ion stepped up and gasped. All thoughts of tavern girls swept, with one look at her face, from his mind.

But it was Vlad she looked at, only Vlad’s eyes she saw as the barge drifted onto the current. Saw them when his face had become a blur. Saw them still as the ship drifted under a stone arch.

And he still saw hers, and everything else about her.

Warp and Weft

Poenari Castle, 1481

“What is this? A tale of courtly love? If we’d wanted one of those, couldn’t we have hired a troubadour?”

The Cardinal’s harsh words brought them all back to the hall of Poenari Castle, where no one had fully been for a while. They had been in the story, all of them making it, both tellers and listeners.

Ion had been there again, beside Vlad, serving Vlad, knowing Vlad. Ilona, too, telling of what passed between them. They had both been lost in him. Who he had been. Though five years dead, alive in both of them.

The listeners had been fashioning their own Vlad, according to their needs. For Petru it was simple. He wanted the man who built the castle he commanded to be a hero; more, a
Wallachian
hero. He had heard of a time of justice, order, strength in his land. Of the smiting of Christ’s foes. He wanted that time again.

For the Count of Pecs, it was not simple…and he shot forward in his chair at the Cardinal’s outburst, nervously watched the Italian lever himself from his, watched him waddle across to the table. He needed the man to judge well—and favorably. His wish was for a risen Dragon. Not one washed clean of blood. Who could use such a crippled beast? But if it could rise with fury not depravity, power not barbarism…And if Dracula could be forgiven—partly, at least, enough for the purposes of God and Man—then perhaps he could be forgiven, too. Perhaps, the curse that had taken both his eye and his family’s lives would be lifted.

The Cardinal stood at the table, pulling nettle leaves off a round of goat’s cheese, squashing the pungent whiteness onto coarse bread. The Count joined him, poured wine. “Your Eminence?” he said. At a nod, Horvathy filled another goblet and both men drank. Petru, meanwhile, gestured to Bogdan, who took water and bread into the confessionals for both prisoners and scribes. It was not kindness. Petru would have done the same for cattle, keeping them alive for their purpose. Then he joined the others.

The Cardinal lowered his voice. Not everything had to be scratched onto parchment. “Really, Count. This is all quite entertaining. I like a tale on a winter’s day as well as any. But this is not the one we came to hear, surely?” He reached down, picked up the top pamphlet from the pile, read aloud. “‘The Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia.’” He studied the woodcut under the text, bodies twitching on stakes. “You say we are here to disprove this?”

“Not…disprove exactly. Not all of it, anyway.” The Count bit down on a sausage. “To hear a different version. To mitigate the worst, perhaps. To single out the best.”

“To re-write history?”

“Eminence, as you said earlier, that is what we all do with history. Use it for our own purposes.” He lifted another pamphlet. “The men who wrote these certainly did. For profit. For vengeance. History is a tool; more, a weapon. For us. For the Church.”

“For crusade?” The Italian shook his head. “But the banner of crusade, as you know, is the hardest of all to weave—far more complex than these crudities.” He gestured to the tapestries that lined Poenari’s hall. “If the warp of that banner is the pure white of God, the Cross is the red weft—and it is made up of dozens of different threads and shades. My master, the Pope. Yours, Hungary’s king. The princes, nobles…and yes, financiers of Europe, all have to be gathered, carefully aligned in the loom, do they not?”

Horvathy nodded. “They do. But remember, Your Eminence, it is always the Balkans that is the crucible of Holy War, its leaders the front line in the fight against the Infidel.”

“Vital threads, indeed.” Grimani swallowed, frowned at the wine’s harshness, then looked up again into the Count’s one eye. “And you believe you can deliver these leaders, united under the Dragon?”

“I pray so. But prayer is rarely enough, as you know.” He nodded back to the confessionals. “It is the tale we are hearing that matters. And what we can take from it to tell both our masters.”

Grimani glanced, too. “And amusing enough though this tale has been, it has given me little so far to recommend, to judge.” He waved a hand at the tapestries on the wall, the woven hunt in progress there. “So shall we move to the chase? These beaters have driven the game out. Is it not time for the first kill?”

Horvathy drained his goblet, put it down. “Agreed.” He returned to the dais, mounted, waited till the other two had joined him and sat before he spoke. “Enough of a young man’s dreams. Of tournaments and quests and love. Tell us now of cruelty. Tell us of death.”

Silence, for a while. The scribes’ fingers paused over their ink pots. Each narrator had been given a different color. The cripple’s was black. The concubine’s, green. The judges’ questions, when they came, had been noted down in blue. But it was to a fourth pot, the least used so far, that they reached when the silence ended. For it was Dracula’s confessor who spoke now. His voice was still croaky from disuse. Yet it carried into the hall.

“Strange you ask,” he whispered, “for we were just coming to that.”

Red words flowed across the parchment.

The Blacksmith

They came for him before the dawn. It was a week since the snatch and Vlad had just begun to sleep with both eyes closed again.

They arrived in the dark, down the central passage of the
enderun kolej
, slippered feet silent on the polished wooden floor. They passed most of the partitioned classrooms, where each
orta
studied and slept, and not one page woke to their tread. Only when they gathered at a gap in the partition walls, where the hostage
orta
slept, was a single word whispered.

“Now.”

Vlad heard it and awoke, too late to do anything about it. Not that there was much to be done, with two men at every mattress. One to throw back the woollen coverlet. One to press a curved dagger to the throat.

The yelps of terror woke everyone in the
kolej
. The two eunuchs, who lay on raised beds in the middle of the hall, woke screeching to protect their brood. So also the two senior
agha
s, bursting from their latticed chamber at the hall’s end. Yet, when they saw who had come, by the light of lanterns whose gates had now been opened, they cried out only once more, to quiet the boys’ terrified whispers.

Vlad recognized, as all did, the red jackets, bright blue
shalvari
and yellow boots of the Sultan’s bodyguard. For the moment of panicked waking, he thought it might be the
bolukbasi
of the Peyks who stood in the doorway. But then he remembered that unfortunate had been disembowelled in Edirne’s central square, along with his entire company, as atonement for his failure.

The man in the doorway was not going to fail. “Which of these uncircumcised dogs is Dracula,” he bellowed at the eunuch beside him.

The man pointed. Immediately, Vlad was pulled by his hair off his mattress, and dragged across the floor to the entrance. “And the brother?”

“He…he…he is with the younger boys,
effendi
,” the eunuch gibbered. “I…I will fetch him.”

“You will show him to my men,” the captain said. “And you”—he reached down, grabbed Vlad’s arm, lifted him by it, twisting it behind his back—“will come with me!”

With his arm stretched and held high behind him, and the captain’s other hand on his neck, Vlad was marched down the passageway, lined by gaping students, to the main door. There he was joined by a white-faced Radu, held in similar style. Without a pause they were pushed out into the inner court, across it. There was a bunching there, as a frightened gatekeeper fumbled for keys. Finding his head beside his brother’s Vlad whispered, in their own tongue, “Remember what we said! Admit nothing.”

“Silence!” shouted the captain, twisting harder. Vlad could not contain his cry. Then they were through the gate, onto the equestrian grounds, moving fast across them. The gatekeeper had dropped the keys in his panic. Bending to pick them up, he did not notice Ion slip through.

The party made their way to the horse lines.
Beyond them, the gates of the stables were flung wide. Within, under the glare of reed torches, men and horses moved. The prisoners were marched straight in, taken to the right, past stalls, through a place Vlad had spent some time—the falcons’ mews. Bent over, glancing up, Vlad saw sakers, their hooded heads bending to the noise of men, seeking through their blindness. Strangely, he wondered which was Sayehzade, the stake in the
jereed
wager that Mehmet had sullenly failed to deliver. One bird began screaming, wings spread wide, tipping off its perch, held upside-down there by its jesses. He saw legs come forward; someone reached, gathered.

Then they were through the mews; the screams receded but did not cease; another sound came. This was rhythmical, the striking of metal on metal. Only then did Vlad realize where he was being taken; and terror came. He had never thought that the punishment for what he’d done would be death. His only value to the Turk lay in his life—but they were masters of punishments. He had told Ilona of one upon the docks. The hostage sons of the Serbian despot Brankovic had been caught trying to send messages to their father. They had not been killed. Red-hot metal had simply been jabbed into their eyeballs.

The heat of the forge struck him like an open-handed slap. As he was forced onto his knees, Radu beside him, he glimpsed two things, two people: Mehmet, in his brocade jacket and Greek robe, smiling; and beside him, the blacksmith, hooded like a hawk, drawing something glowing from the fire.

Vlad felt his bowels loosen. His
jereed
rival was the one person he did not wish to see there, amidst heating metals. Yet, hating the fear, he reached for his defiance. “You owe me a hawk,” he shouted.

He was slapped, thrown down onto the hard-packed earth before the anvil. He lay there, squinting up, mesmerized by molten red, and wondered, in a flush that brought sweat to every part of his body, if this was the last thing he would ever see. Beside him, Radu wept.

And then Vlad realized that they were not the only ones on the ground; that everyone there was descending, from feet to knees to bellies. Even, finally, Mehmet, allowing his glittering jacket to lie in the dust. Until there was only one man in the forge still standing.

The blacksmith.

He was dressed as any of his trade. A leather apron protected him from neck to knee, his hands were encased in thick gauntlets, and his face in the hood, a slit filled with meshed metal before his eyes. They glowed, reflecting the heated iron he held in tongs, which he studied for a moment, then lowered upon the anvil. A hammer fell, in those rhythmic strokes. Then the metal was lifted, plunged into a water trough. Steam engulfed him, as he laid down the hammer, raising the tongs to the eye slit, turning it.

All Vlad had seen was iron. He had made it into the shape he feared—a poker with a molten tip. Now, in the coolness, he saw its true shape, and what it was: a horseshoe.

With a sigh, the blacksmith laid it down upon a pile of others, immediately lifted another bar of metal, laying it back into the coals. Then he raised the hood from his head, speaking as he did.

“Allah be praised for the worthiness of this work. For his is the skill, mine merely the service.”

The hood was set aside. The man turned. And Vlad saw why everyone was lying before him.

“Murad!” he breathed, not so loudly that any could hear, as the Magnificence of the World, the Beacon of Creation, the Sultan of the Turks stepped down from beside the anvil.