Vlad: The Last Confession (39 page)

The sword slipped from his grasp. He could only stagger forward, brace himself against a tree, watch the men of Wallachia ride silently out to join their Voivode on the slope. He looked down into the valley, saw a Turk glance up, look down again, look sharply up, cry out.

“Kaziklu Bey!”

Then the Impaler raised his bow, one of near five hundred that rose. “Shoot!” he cried and loosed, a little before the rest. Found his mark, the first Turk to acclaim him, falling, trying to pluck an arrow from his eye. Then the gray sky was further darkened with shaft and feather, the bows pulled and loosed until quivers were empty and men and beasts wailed as one upon the valley floor.

“Swords!” yelled Dracula, dropping his visor over his face, as his son did beside him. But he himself did not draw, just leaned to the side and snatched up a boar spear standing butt-end in the earth. Cloth was folded around its length, yet with five great, two-handed swirls he unwound it, the wind off the Danube spread it, and the Dragon flew once more.

“Dracula!” he cried, echoed by his men. Then he spurred his horse down the hill.

Most on the valley floor, those that lived, were trying to flee towards the hilltop camp. But men were pouring down from it, too, and many fugitives escaped death only to meet it under their comrades’ hooves. The enemy was ready. And though they charged down in separate squadrons, Ion could see that they came in their thousands.

Still, the Wallachians had the momentum, the shock, the terror. Those who had not fled, who tried to rally, were swept aside. The first of the charging enemy were smashed into, driven back. Then the Turk’s main body arrived and the mêlée swirled into hundreds of individual fights. All Ion could distinguish, amidst the mass of men in hide and wool and steel, turning snow to mush and mud under their hooves, was the Dragon dipping, jerking, rising again to fall, until finally it was thrown high, caught and held, and Ion glimpsed the Dragon’s Talon, Dracul’s sword, aloft for just one moment.

Then a new body of the enemy, all heavily-armored
sipahis
, charged straight in from the side, making for the standard. They carved a way through the crowd, felling friend and foe, aiming straight and, in the widening gap, Ion could see that their leader was a huge Turk swathed in white, from his turban helmet and face scarf down to his spurs. He was holding a giant war axe, and he drove at the black-armored figure, suddenly alone under the Dragon banner. Axe met sword, knocking it down, but Ion saw Dracula thrust back, up. Then something happened to the blade, it slipped under the arm of the white-clad warrior, who twisted horse and body around and wrenched the weapon free. For a moment, Ion saw Dracula, unarmed, looking up at an axe raised on high. Yet even as the axe began its fall, the mêlée closed again, snatching away sight, banner, Prince and all.

“No!” Ion screamed. In a moment he had mounted and was charging down the slope. He had not even stopped to pick up his sword. He did not have the time.

He got close, fast, because he did not pause to swap blows. And the fringes of the fight were already thinning, as Wallachians who had seen the standard fall began to flee, those that could; those that were not unhorsed now, on their backs, squirming as four soldiers held each one down and thrust daggers through their visors.

He got close. But then men were turning to him, one had his horse’s bit, using his weight to drag it down. Someone else sliced at his mount’s legs and she crumpled with a scream, fell, throwing him forward. He hit the ground, his helmet, which he had not had time to secure, pitched off and a Turk struck down with a halberd; but Ion was still rolling and the blade missed him. But the haft didn’t, wood hitting hard, driving him face down into mud and mush. He knew he was going, could see that same halberd raised again, waited for it to fall, the cutting edge this time, in a world turning to shadow…

…and then,
beyond it, he saw something else, something that held him in consciousness, someone…Dracula, rising from the earth, long black hair like a veil over half a face, the half that was smashed. The other half was clear, unblemished, its one eye wide, gleaming, green, staring; staring straight at him. And then the rest of him came in sight, the little there was—a neck, a bloody line across it; nothing more. And as the light faded, as the halberd fell again through the gloom, Ion saw one last sight…Dracula’s head thrust down upon a stake, then hoisted high.

The Shroud

She was dreaming of him. He was touching her, gently, as was his way…and she felt the ache for him she always felt. But she wanted him to be rougher. In the house on the Street of Nectar she’d been taught ways to deal with that, a role to play, tricks to increase her master’s pleasure. But she knew that if she did them right, they would increase hers, too. She did not want his sadness now; she did not wish to be anyone’s sanctuary. She wanted to be taken hard, fast and cruelly, to fill her emptiness, her yearning. She wanted him to turn her, spread her legs, pull her head up by the hair, bend to bite her neck as he barged into her. If she could she’d nip his hand, his wounded hand, give him pain for pain, and then decide which, of a thousand and one tricks, she’d try next.

A cry woke her. Not of pleasure, nor of pain selectively applied. It was a whimper of terror, and Ilona, instantly awake, thought that perhaps she had attacked her bed companion again. It happened rarely, but often enough for some to protest that they did not want to share her bed—for the nuns doubled up in winter or they would freeze to death in their cells. In her instant wakefulness, Ilona realized it was Maria beside her—chatty, chubby Maria—and she hoped she had not hurt her. She was fond of her. And the laughing farm girl was the warmest in the convent.

Maria was not laughing now, but whimpering. Caught in a dream herself perhaps. Ilona reached out to gentle her. “What is it, child?” she whispered.

“Did you not hear it, Sister Vasilica?” The girl’s skin was covered in goosebumps and her voice quavered.

Ilona listened. The storm had passed; the wind no longer shook the trees outside the convent’s walls, nor whistled in the chimneys. She heard nothing now but the muffled silence, knew that the world
beyond was shrouded in white. This first, late, huge snowfall had sealed them up completely. They would live on the little they had till the road to Clejani opened again with the first thaw.

And then she heard what Maria had heard and flushed cold, too.

Three blows struck upon the convent’s great oak door. And when the silence came again it was not total. Both clearly heard the snort of a beast.

“
Varcolaci!
” Maria wailed, thrusting her head under the covers.

Ilona petted her, murmuring gentle words. Some of the other young nuns had been whispering terrifying tales, after prayers, of the night stalkers—the undead who sleep in their graves with eyes open and walk under a full moon to steal babies from their cribs and suck their blood.

It was not that Ilona did not believe in those who walked at night. But there was something in the rhythmic quality of the knocking that made her think it was made by a living human, not one risen from a grave. The convent was remote, even without the snow. Only those in great need sought it out on the clearest of days. For someone to come through a blizzard, at night…

Need touched her. It always had.

“I will go and see,” she said, sliding from under the thick wool blankets.

“Shall I come?” Maria’s voice still quavered.

Ilona smiled. “No, child. Keep the bed warm.” Lowering her feet upon the flag-stoned floor, she reached for her habit.

—

Old Kristo, the gatekeeper, and the only man who dwelt within the walls, was standing before the oaken doors. His eyes were filmy with sleep and the effects of plum brandy. “I told whoever is out there to go to the stables and wait till dawn, Sister Vasilica,” he mumbled, his toothless mouth thick with saliva, “but he made no reply and…” He gestured, as the measured knock came again.

“How many?” She pointed at the grille in the door.

“One. I only saw one. But others could be hiding.” He scratched his stubbled chin. “Shall I wake the Abbess?”

Ilona shook her head. Mother Ignatia was old and hard to waken; also, she was deferring decisions more and more to “Sister Vasilica.” “No,” she said, stepping up to the grille, pulling it open, “I will, if I have to…”

The face halted her words, stopped her breath. Stoica had grown older in the fourteen years since he had delivered her to her first convent, his eyebrows now gray, the lines of his face multiplied. But the blue eyes and the bald head were exactly as she remembered. As was the way he nodded as he also recognized her, despite her own great changes.

She slammed the grille shut, leaned her forehead against it, welcoming the searing chill of slatted metal on her skin. It was real, the pain, unlike all the thoughts that hurtled though her mind. The convent was remote but news came to it eventually. She’d learned he was married a year after the event; knew he’d become a father, too. When he’d invaded Wallachia earlier that year, defeated his rival in battle, sat again upon his father’s throne, requiems were sung in his praise, even at the Convent of Clejani. Before the snow began to fall, a woodcutter had brought news with his logs—that the usurper was coming again at the head of a Turkish army, that the Voivode would ride out to meet it. She had said her own prayers then. For him. For herself. For somewhere in those whirl of thoughts a tiny hope had lingered. He would not need a mistress. Her glorious auburn hair had long-since been scythed to gray stubble, she walked stooped from her scars, and all the flesh that was not cut now sagged. He would not look at her and see a trace of the young concubine, not even of the mistress he’d kept in Targoviste. But he had always called her his sanctuary. Perhaps, beset by so many enemies, he would need her for that again? And Stoica being there? It could only mean that her prince still knew where she was, had kept track of her as she was moved from convent to convent, till all who knew her as anything other than Sister Vasilica were left behind. No one ever saw her scars. But he had remembered them…and her.

Taking a breath, filling with air and sudden hope, she gestured at Kristo to open the doors. He shot the bolts, lifted the heavy bar, laid it aside, bent to pull. It opened, and knee-high snow tumbled in. She did not need the torch the old man proffered, for the full moon rode high in a sky newly clear of snow clouds. Hitching her habit, she stepped eagerly over the snow mound.

Stoica had bowed and stepped aside, his arm passing before him to point her towards what waited—a donkey, standing up to its withers in snow. Her heart beat faster as she thought how she could not come this moment, in the night. There were supplies to get for the road, furs to put on against the cold. And yet, perhaps his need was so pressing…

Then she saw the donkey’s burden.

It was a cone of hide and cloth, lashed to the saddle. She stopped. “What…” she whispered.

Stoica passed her, peeled back the icy canvas. She saw the naked feet, blue, stiffened. There was stone trough before the gate, its water frozen within it. She sank upon it and the ice creaked but did not crack. “Is it him?” she said softly, then remembered that Stoica was mute and looked up.

He nodded, once.

“Did he ask…” She swallowed. “Did he ask that I prepare his body for the grave?”

Another nod.

It only took a moment for her to realize that her wish had been granted. Her prince did need her, one last time. “Then that is what I shall do,” she said, wiping the water from her eye, her joints creaking as she rose and beckoned Stoica through the gate. He halted her with a raised hand, pointed to the far side of the animal, led her there, raised the stiff cloth again.

The first severing was the hand, the left one, the one that should have had just three fingers—taken, no doubt, for the Dragon ring that would have been upon it. The second was worse, of course, because one of the last things she’d hoped to do was to kiss his lips, however cold. But the head was gone, the ragged hole there a mass of congealed, frozen blood.

“Oh, my love,” she sighed and laid her hand upon the shoulder, her fingertips on a scar she thought she remembered. Then Stoica took the bridle and together they walked Dracula’s corpse into the convent.

—

She tended to him alone. Stoica had gone as suddenly as he’d arrived, leading the donkey back into the night. Other nuns, when they heard of the body they assumed to be one of Sister Vasilica’s relations, offered to help. She let them boil water in a vast cauldron and bring it to an empty cell close to the kitchen, allowed them to tear sheets into a hundred cloths. But then, she sent everyone away. She had dreamed so long of being alone with him again. Now she would be.

His body was a little different than she remembered it to be, aside from the freezing of both winter and death. But it was fifteen years since she had held it; she knew how she had changed in that time.

There were scars she recalled, ones she’d once traced with finger and tongue-tip; new ones that had come. A life of struggle carved onto flesh. Ended now.

He was curved like a bow, rigor mortis holding him in the shape he had taken over the donkey’s back, so she had to leave him on his side. As she dipped the first cloth in the water, as she touched it to his bloodied skin, she began to sing. In Edirne, she had been taught a thousand and one songs to please a man. But this was a song from her childhood, from the village of her birth; a
doina
, lullaby and lament.

She took her time, starting from his feet, working slowly up, wiping, singing. Remembering the time when
she
was washed, the day he came to steal her. Turning him was hard but, for all her age and ills, she was still strong. When all the blood was gone and the cauldron’s cooling water rosy pink, she began to sew, closing the slashes that covered him, drawing the flesh together as well as she could. The gaping wound of his neck she covered with a linen cap, stitching it into the shoulder. Then she took an oil fragranced with sage and bergamot and rubbed the length of his body again until he glistened in the lamplight. He’d been anointed as prince and now he was anointed again, for death.

She was tired by the time a square patch of pale winter daylight was falling upon him. But there was a last thing to do, a last effort. She took a sheet and, after a struggle, managed to roll him onto it. Then she folded over the edges and, with thick twine, sealed him into his shroud.

She stepped away from the table, rubbing at the small of her back. The murmur of voices had been building at the door. Now she would accept help.

“Come,” she called.

—

They sang prayers as they bore him back through the gates, Ilona preceding, six of the younger nuns following with him behind, the rest of the convent trailing. There was a tree a little way along the path, down the hill, and the men from the gardens and stables stood underneath it, shovels to hand. They had cleared away the snow, lit a fire to warm the earth, though only the surface had been frozen solid, such was the suddenness of winter’s coming. A hole had been dug, and she saw that it was longer than required for he was never the tallest of men and now…she couldn’t help her smile. It was the sort of joke her prince would have appreciated. She almost heard him then, that rare laugh, so doubly wondrous when it came.

They laid him down at the hole’s edge. She could see acorns in it, for the tree was a red oak. She knew he would like that, dissolving into the soil of his Wallachia. From him, other trees would grow.

As the plainsong grew stronger around her, she knelt and laid a hand on his chest. His head may have been missing, but his heart was still there, she knew. “Rest in peace, my love,” she whispered. Then, alone, she reached beneath him and tipped Dracula’s shrouded body into his grave.