Vlad: The Last Confession (10 page)

The words were defiantly spoken, perhaps harsher than he intended. All tensed, waiting for retribution. But Murad’s voice was soft when it came. “The boy has courage, Hamza. Is he as gifted as the one he serves?”

“No. Not close. But then, few are.”

Mehmet stepped forward. “He was one of those who conspired to hurt me upon the
jereed
field, father. And a spy must be silenced. Give him to me…”

A raised hand halted the words. As if he hadn’t heard them, Murad continued, “It would seem a pity to extinguish such a spark. And he may be useful to us.”

“How so,
enishte
?”

“Does he know what they do at Tokat?”

Hamza nodded. “All know. At night, at the
enderun kolej
, they frighten each other to sleep with tales from those dungeons.”

“Good.” Murad smiled. “Our message to the Dragon will be better delivered by one of his own people. This boy can tell him what is happening to his sons. He will guess what Mehmet intends for Radu. He will know what lessons the elder will learn at Tokat. He will tell of our restraint in punishing them…for now.”

The Sultan reached again into the pouch at Hamza’s waist. Pulling out more meat, he fed it to the bird still resting calmly on his fist. “Mehmet, see that everything is provided to our messenger for his journey. It is time Hamza and I tested the mettle of this bird. To the hunt!”

He moved to the doorway. Guards enfolded him on each side, the one archer joining from the shadows, arrow ever notched on bowstring. At the entrance, Murad paused, looked back at his son who had taken a step towards the prone Ion. “Remember, Mehmet. The messenger I send must be alive to speak.”

With that, he was gone, Hamza and most of the guards with him. Leaving just the two who held Ion. And Mehmet.

Ion stared up into Mehmet’s brown eyes. The shape was the same as his father’s. But in Mehmet’s there was not a trace of humor or compassion. He raised a hand now as if to strike, then slowly lowered it, finally grasping Ion’s hair, moving it gently away from his face.

“Your life is spared, dog. So you can bark your message to your master.” He smiled. “But that does not mean the message must only be in words.” He looked everywhere around the forge. Finally, his gaze settled on the burning coals. “Hold him tight. By the head,” he snapped.

He was obeyed. As the men pulled a struggling Ion forward, Mehmet went and searched among a rack of iron rods. Then, with a cry of joy, he pulled one out, shoved it into the fire. Donning a pair of gloves, he spoke. “You know, dog, that each Sultan has his
tugra
—a unique symbol to affix to documents, like the seals of your princes. Well, sometimes we need to burn our mark on our property—our sheep, our camels, our horses. I thought that when my father took back the throne from me, he got rid of my brand.” He turned the iron in the glowing coals, then lifted it, blew on its end, which glowed a deeper red. “It appears that he did not.”

There was nothing Ion could do. The hands’ grip was unbreakable. He could only close his eyes, pray that the fate of Brankovic’s blinded sons was not now to be his own. Murad had said that he must be able to speak. But to see?

It was the relief of a moment when the heat came to his face, when he heard and smelled the crisping hair. Only that one moment though before the agony came as Mehmet scorched his
tugra
into Ion’s flesh.

Tokat

In a world forever dark, Vlad had no way to mark the passing of time. The enclosed wagon that had brought him to Tokat had admitted some light. He’d seen seven dawns through its slats. But they had blindfolded him when they’d taken him out, carried him along stone corridors, down endless flights of stairs. And there was not the slightest chink in the walls of his cell. He knew it only by touch, an exploration that had taken mere moments. It was a sloping cylinder of rock, twice his height deep. Halfway up it, a shelf of sorts jutted out on which he could perch, just able to lie upon it to sleep if he curled his knees up to his chin. But if he did sleep, sooner or later he’d fall off, wake to the scraping of his flesh on rough stone, feet or hands plunging into the filthy straw that lined the stone floor and held all his excrement.

There was no way to count the days by his feeding. It could have arrived at the same time every morning or only twice a week. It did not vary. The thinnest of cold barley soup, strings of what could have been meat floating in it; a piece of stone-flattened bread on which he could smell the mould. He ate it all anyway, drank the mug of rank water that came with it. It was too little but he had to keep as strong as possible for whatever lay ahead. He knew the stories of Tokat, of the torture cells. Starving would not help him survive.

He never saw who brought the food or even heard footsteps, just the circular trapdoor opening fast, the food banging against the walls as it was lowered in a net, the door slamming shut. He’d shout, plead, threaten. There was never a response. He’d sink upon his shelf and shiver. He still wore only what he’d slept in at the
enderun kolej
, and the cold was the dark’s constant companion.

The only thing he’d sometimes hear, in the brief moments the trapdoor was open, were distant screams.

Once, in his fury, he scooped a handful of his own shit from the floor, waited, more patiently than he’d ever waited for the most elusive of quarry. When the door opened, he hurled it with a great shout. The cry it provoked was as gratifying as the cry Mehmet had given when Vlad’s
jereed
took him in the back. But the net was snapped up, the door replaced. And he was able to mark the time in one way at least—by the ravenous hunger that grew and grew.

In the perfect darkness, light only came in dreams indistinguishable from wakefulness. Then, one day or night, voices began to emerge from the harsh brightness, speaking a language he didn’t understand, like the twittering of starlings. He squinted against the glare, tried to make out faces through his tears. He never could.

Until, one day or night, into his dream came the shuffle of a chain, the scrape of wood on stone. Light, dull real light, not vision light, the shape of a head before it. A word spoken, one he understood.

“Come.”

Hands reached, hauling him up. He crouched, the two men on either side supporting him because he’d been unable to stand straight in the time he’d been below the ground. He squinted up at them, eyes half-closed against the glare of reed torches. He was dragged, toes scraping the uneven flagstones, trying to push off against them, to get some feeling into his feet. He did not know what awaited him down these dank corridors. But he wanted to stand and face it.

Yet the first thing he faced was water. His guards—thin-faced, turbaned, with fingers of bent steel—flung him into a cell. At its center was a stone trough. The silent men stood back, arms folded, waiting.

Vlad stumbled forward, dipped a hand. The water was barely warm, but it felt to him like the hottest of
hamams
after the frigid world he’d inhabited. There were kese mitts, too, of rough woven cloth and not of the first use or cleanliness, but when pressed against his skin…ah! Peeling off the rags his
shalvari
and shirt had become, Vlad began to wash. The water turned brown from his shit, pink from the blood that came from the scores of scabbed-over flea bites. But the blood reassured him. It meant he was alive, which he’d often doubted in his cell. And being clean meant he was a man again. Sometimes he’d doubted that, too.

When he was done, a thick wool
gomlek
was thrown at him, the knee-length tunic joyously warm after his summer rags. Sandals, too, which he slipped onto his tattered feet. Then, like the teeth of a millwheel turning, he jerked his body up piece by piece until he stood straight for the first time in an age of darkness. As soon as he did, the silent men were on him, gripping his arms, pulling him down the corridor to another low doorway. Bending, they flung him into the room. His weakened legs made him stumble, fall to his knees. It was darker there too, airless, almost like his cell. But there was light and his gaze went to it. To the red glow of a brazier.

When his eyes had adjusted, he looked around, saw that he was in a windowless vault, large enough so that the ceiling was lost to shadow…though not what dangled from it: pulleys, chains, nooses. More things were piled against walls—metal rods, tongs, a rack of knives. There was what looked like the frame of a divan, tipped up on its legs. Beside it stood the skeleton of a suit of armor.

His gaze went back to the brazier. Two shapes had appeared behind it, one large, one smaller; or perhaps they’d been there all the time. As he looked, the larger shape moved, thrusting a metal bar into the coals. It caused an eruption of sparks, a sudden increase in light, and Vlad saw that the two shapes were men.

One stepped forward. “Welcome, princeling. Welcome to Tokat.”

It was a surprisingly deep voice, considering how small the speaker was. As Vlad’s eyes adjusted, he could see that the man wasn’t a dwarf, had none of a dwarf’s swollen features, but wasn’t far above one in height. He was like any other man, but in miniature, with a hooked nose, and eyes that sat under heavy lids as if he craved sleep. He wore a thick wool jacket, buttoned high to the neck. It was covered in colored threads, sewn in elaborately stitched patterns that looked, at a glance, like a stag hunt.

The second man had bent into the red glow. He was as big as the other was small, his naked stomach a dome under a vast and muscled chest. Both were elaborately tattooed with creatures from myth and life. A Basilisk chased a Manticore into his armpit. A tiger emerged from the cave of the belly hole. There was writing across his huge head, which was bald. Indeed, there was no hair anywhere; though, strange amidst the strangeness, two red lines were painted where eyebrows should be.

“His name is Mahir,” came that deep voice, “and it means ‘skilled one.’ And he is very skilled, as he will show you. He will not tell you, though, for he cannot speak. Show him why, Mahir.”

The man leaned forward over the brazier. He opened his vast mouth. The teeth in them were white, almost excessively so. Perhaps that was because they were set against such a dark, empty cavern. The man had no tongue.

“It was not the first thing Mahir lost,” the other man said, chuckling. “For he was a eunuch at the
harem
in Edirne for many years. Then he saw something he shouldn’t have, began to speak of it and…phish!” He flickered his tongue out, snakelike. “They made him chew it off himself. Can you imagine that? Perhaps you’d like to try? No?” The dry laugh came again. “Anyway, Mahir was wasted, chattering his life away at the
harem
. He lost his tongue and found other skills. As you shall soon learn.”

The warmth Vlad had felt fled. He knew now what he had chosen not to see before. Every item in the chamber was an implement for the infliction of torment. And he was about to learn what each was for. Punishment for his father’s sins against the Sultan. He tried to speak, to protest, perhaps to beg. But his voice wouldn’t work.

The tiny man spoke again. “And I am called Wadi. It means ‘the calm one’…” He broke off. “But why do I keep translating for you? You speak our language well, do you not?”

Vlad managed words. “Well enough.”

At them Mahir, who had kept his mouth wide open, snapped it shut, and moved to the brazier. He began to place metal instruments upon a rack suspended above the coals.

“You are modest,” continued Wadi, “for it is reported that you were one of the most proficient of students at the
enderun kolej
. Well,” he said with a smile, “you are at a different
kolej
now. Your studies will be different, too. More…” He gestured at the heating metal. “…Practical in nature. And we are not like those
agha
s who taught you before, Mahir and I.”

With that, he suddenly clapped his hands. Just once, and it startled Vlad like an explosion of gunpowder. It begins, he thought. He wanted to run, to flee the chamber. Maybe to grab a metal rod and fight. But he found he could not move his legs. Even when the door opened and half a dozen youths of about his own age came in. Yet they did not rush him, pin him, throw him to the floor. They formed in a semi-circle, dropped to their knees, lowered their foreheads to the stone.

Wadi inclined his head. “Your fellow students,” he declared. “Not the quality of
orta
you are used to. Peasant boys these, unable to read, write, quote the Holy Qur’an, debate the poets. But they are strong and quick to learn. And in their own field they will become as gifted as any other graduate, though their talents will not lie in engineering, administration or languages. They will travel as widely perhaps, be as necessary to the success of our Sultan in the Abode of War as any soldier. For as you know—or, if you don’t you soon will—every society needs its torturers.”

He returned once more to the brazier. “So, students,” he continued, “let us welcome a new addition to our
orta
. He has some catching up to do but I am sure that you will all help him in his studies. And we are honored, for he is the son of a prince of Wallachia. Never heard of it? Never mind, few have. It is a minor land, owing everything to the indulgence of Murad Han, Asylum of the World, may Allah keep his kingdom. It is the Most Blessed who wills that we teach the princeling our ways. So we obey.”

With that, the small man clapped again. Immediately, the thin men appeared in the doorway, clutching another man between them. This man was weeping. Wadi smiled.

“So welcome, Vlad Dracula. Welcome to your new school.”