The door was being struck with the pommel of a sword.
She heard the distant scrape of the door grille, the whining of Old Kristo the gatekeeper, then a low voice, commanding. She could not hear the words. But she knew what they were. She’d always believed she would hear them, one day.
“By order of the Voivode, I am here to arrest…”
The gate was opening and she was rising. There were sheets to dry herself upon, but she barely used them. It was more important to be clothed, concealed. Then, just as she was about to pull the shift over her head, she stopped. For the man whose metal-shod feet were now striking sparks on the courtyard flagstones probably knew who she was. He was coming to ask her about the last man to see her naked, the first to see her wounds. The man whose corpse she had prepared for the grave five years before.
All things end. Nineteen years of life in the convent were over. Nun, Abbess, these were just titles, already in the past with her others—Slave, Concubine, Royal Mistress. She was only sorry that she wouldn’t be there to see her orphans grow stronger; but others would take care of them, sure.
She was not shivering yet. And suddenly she wondered how it would be to see herself again, naked in the mirror of another man’s eyes.
Throwing the shift aside, she picked up the plait woven of rosemary and young girl’s hair. Rosemary, she’d told Florica only that morning, was the herb of remembrance. So now, holding it before her, she remembered everything and turned smiling to the opening door…
—
In the perfect darkness of the dungeon, the knight was hunting.
He did not move. Not simply because he was near blind, that did not matter much there. But every terrain required a different skill, each type of prey a different technique. Some quarry you pursued, some you drew. In the five years he had lived in constant night, he had learned the way of this, his world, as once he had read valleys and forests, deserts and seas. He had shaped it, from what was available to him. The floor reeds had not been changed since the autumn and so were thick with filth; when the temperature rose above freezing, as it had that day, it made them malleable. So he had fashioned passageways from them that a creature, as hungry as himself, might follow. They twisted and bent round the cell, a labyrinth with him at its center. He had not made it too easy, all game was wary; but the starving less so, and there was moldy bread at his feet.
He waited, but not in the dungeon. There was no need for him there. A part of him had to stay to listen but the rest was free to depart, to other hunting grounds, bigger game. He did not just think himself elsewhere, in memory. He went wherever he chose, with whomever he chose.
One was always there. As boy, as youth, as man.
Yes! They are in the Fagaras now, among those peaks, chasing down those valleys. They are boys, barely ten, but still they have left the others far behind, for they have the best horses and the greatest skill in handling them. And they have the desire, not just for the kill. For the beating of the other. Winning is all, for now, for ever.
Their quarry is boar. There is one that they saw and lost in this valley before, a monstrous silverback with tusks like scimitars.
The boar breaks cover. Their spurs redden with blood from their stallions’ flanks as they strive to reach it first. There is a grove just ahead, whose interlocked boughs will not admit hunter and steed, only prey. So they kick in their heels, stride matching stride. It is a long throw, a last chance. He takes it, throws and his steel blade slices over the silvered back, its razored edge drawing blood, slowing, not halting. His companion, his brother in all but blood, has thrown also, but thrown true. The boar tumbles, over and over, until the tree that would have saved it, halts it. It is dying, yet it lives. And for the last moments of its life it is at its most dangerous.
“Don’t,” he murmurs, in sudden fear, as his companion slides from his saddle, another boar spear already in his hand. “Wait till it is dead.”
It was strange. Most faces faded from memory, from dreams. Even the most familiar—parents, children, lovers, enemies. His never had.
He pauses now, looks up from beneath that black hair, with those green eyes. The smile comes. “How many times, Ion,” he says, in that soft voice. “You have to look into their eyes as they die.”
In memory indistinguishable from dream, his friend advances. The boar rises, bellowing, blood pouring from its mouth, the shaft quivering in its side. It charges and the boy plants himself, his spear couched like a lance in the lists. As the beast swerves, the boy steps to the side, thrusts. The leaf-shaped blade takes the animal in its chest but doesn’t halt it. Steel precedes shaft into flesh as the boar pushes the length of the weapon up its body. Only when it reaches the steadying hand, when it has absorbed almost all the wood, does it stop, lay its great head down, lower a tusk onto the hand, gently, like a caress.
“Die well,” says the Dragon’s son, smiling.
Far above, a bolt was shot. It was a whisper of a sound but a shriek in that silence. While he’d been hunting elsewhere, he had heard another beast, snuffling its way out of the sluice pipe. The noise had sent it back. He cried out now in frustration, his chance for fresh flesh gone—all because they were bringing in a prisoner, one destined for a cell far above his own.
Then another door opened and he jerked his face up, as if to see through stone. Rarely did a prisoner make it to the second level. Someone of higher rank perhaps, or more heinous crime? He sighed. At the second level, a grille would be cut high into the wall and though his eyesight was poor now, he’d still be able to see the patch of sky change shade. Better, he’d be able to scent…a hound’s fur wet with snow, applewood burning, mulling wine. Hear…the snort of a horse, the cry of a baby, laughter at some jest.
Then, on the level directly above his, a bolt was worked loose. He was excited now, lost prey forgotten. It was not his feeding day; yet someone was coming. He lifted his eyelids open with his fingers and thumbs to make sure he didn’t blink. The rare flicker of light beyond the opened grille was all that stopped him going totally blind.
He knelt, pressing his lips to the ceiling, moistening them on wet moss. The cell door above creaked open. But then he heard just a single footfall…and cowered down, crying out. For guards always came in pairs. Only a priest or a killer would come alone.
His eyes were wide now without need of fingers, terror in the sound of that one man approaching the round stone in the floor. For if he was a killer and not a priest…
He groped before him for the sharpened bone, clutched it, pressed the sharpened tip into the pulse in his neck. He had seen prisoners tortured to death. He had tortured some himself. He had always vowed that he would not die that way.
Yet he did not thrust. He could have killed himself before, ended this misery. But to do so before he had made his last confession? Then the torments he’d suffered for these five years would last for all eternity. Worse! Unless he was absolved of his sins, the suicide’s fate would be as nothing to his—for the ninth, last and deepest circle of hell, just like the oubliette in the castle of Bucharest, was reserved only for traitors.
He heard the clink of metal. It was not the bolt on the grille being pulled back. It was a bar slipped under a hook. And then the stone, that had not been lifted in five years, was.
The torch flaring above him was like a desert sun at noon. A dark shape held it high. Priest or killer?
He pressed bone tip into flesh. Yet still he could not drive it in, could only croak his one, his ultimate hope. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”
For a moment of silence, nothing moved. Then an arm reached slowly down…
– II –
The Chamber
He reached for her as he always did, just before he woke, as he had every morning for twenty years. For a time, there had been nameless others beside him and, touching their softness, he’d sometimes mistaken it for another’s, woken with joy, one moment of it. But the bitterness of the next moment, when real
ization turned to despair, meant that he had long chosen to sleep alone. Companions were dispatched after they had fulfilled their function, assuaged some need. For ten years, he had not even bothered with that.
Janos Horvathy, Count of Pecs, reached, realized…yet kept his single eye closed. He was trying to see Katarina’s face. Sometimes he could, for that brief instant of reaching, of realizing—the only time he could. He had her portrait, but that showed merely her beauty; nothing of what he truly loved—the feel of her skin, her calmness, her laugh.
No. This morning she wouldn’t come, even so briefly, her features dissolving into a memory of inadequate paint. A breeze flapped the beeswax-dipped cloth in the arrow slit, admitting a little light, making the room even colder. At first he wondered why his servants had not repaired it; and then he remembered that he was not in his own castle in Hungary. He was in another man’s castle, in another country.
And then he remembered why. Remembered that today might be the beginning of the lifting of the curse that had killed his wife twenty years before; that had sent their three children to the family vault, one lost to childbirth, one to battle, one to plague.
A knock at the door. “Yes?” he called.
A man entered. It was Petru, the young Spatar who held this fortress for his prince, the Voivode of Wallachia. He stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, as nervous as he had been when the Count had first arrived the day before. Horvathy understood why. It wasn’t often that one of the highest noblemen of Hungary came to such a remote place with such a purpose. And before he’d arrived, Petru had had to make many arrangements, in the greatest secrecy.
“Is all ready?” Horvathy asked.
The man licked his lips. “I…I believe so, my lord. If you would…” He gestured to the stairs behind him.
“I will. Wait for me.”
The knight bowed, closed the door behind him. Horvathy slid from beneath the furs, sat for a moment on the bed’s edge, rubbing the thick gray stubble of his hair. The bedchamber, despite the breeze, was no colder than his own back in Pecs. Besides, he’d discovered long since that the castle for which he’d traded his soul could never be warmed when no one he loved could survive within it.
He dressed swiftly then went in search of warmth. Not for his body, he’d never really required that. For his soul.
—
“My lord,” the young Spatar said, pushing the door inwards, stepping back.
Horvathy entered. The hall, lit by four reed torches and dawn’s light beyond the arrow slits, was as modest as the rest of the castle—a rectangular stone chamber twenty paces long, a dozen wide, its walls lined with cheap tapestries, its floor strewn with skins, both trying to retain the warmth of the large fire at its top, eastern end and largely failing to do so. It was a functional room at the center of a simple fortress. Ordinary.
Yet what had been placed in the room made it…not ordinary.
He looked around, then at the young man before him. “Tell me what you have done.”
“I have obeyed the orders of my prince, the Voivode of Wallachia.” Petru held up a sheaf of parchment. “To the letter, I trust.”
“And how did these orders come to you?”
“They were left in the night outside the gate, three weeks ago, in a satchel. They bear the Voivode’s seal but…” He licked his lips. “…But another paper warned that the Voivode was not to be contacted further, or acknowledged in any way.”
Horvathy nodded. The Voivode knew as well as any the danger in the game they were playing. “And was anything else left?”
“Yes, my lord.” The younger man swallowed. “The satchel was weighted down with the several parts of a hand-and-a-half sword. A blade, quillons, the pommel. There was an order to re-forge it. I had to send to Curtea de Arges for a blacksmith. He arrived this morning, has begun. Our forge is poor here but he says he has all he needs.”
“Not quite all,” replied Horvathy, reaching inside his doublet. “He will need these.” He pulled out two circles of steel, the size of finger and thumb joined. Their edges were rough, for they had been gouged from the pommel of a sword. “Here,” he said. “These were sent to me, with the summons that brought me here.” His one eye was fixed on the younger man’s two, awaiting the reaction.
It came, in a gasp. “The Dragon!”
“You recognize it?”
“Certainly, my lord.” Petru turned the pieces over in his fingers, wincing as the serrated edges drew blood. “It is the symbol both of the man who built this castle and the sacred Order he led. The man, the Order, both dishonored, disgraced…”
The suddenness of Horvathy’s lunge startled Petru. The Count was a head taller than the knight, bent now over him, “I’d be careful about terms like dishonor and disgrace, Spatar,” he shouted, his scarred face a hand’s width away. “Because I am a Dragon, too.”
He held the stare, his one gray eye gleaming, all the brighter by its contrast with the other puckered socket.
Petru stuttered, “I…I…I meant no offense, Count Horvathy. I merely…repeat what I have heard…”
The stare held a moment longer. Then the older man turned away, spoke more quietly. “You repeat gossip, gleaned from tales of one Dragon—Vlad Dracula, your former Prince. Yet part of what you say is true—it is his dark deeds that have tainted the Order to which he swore his oath. Tales that have all but destroyed it.”
“All but?” Petru said, carefully. “It is destroyed, surely, is it not?”
The Hungarian breathed deeply. “Until it is slain by St. Mihail’s magic lance, a Dragon cannot die. It sleeps only. Sleeps perhaps one day to waken…” Horvathy’s voice faded, behind the hand lifted to his face.
“My lord, I…” Petru took a step towards the Count, his tone cautious. “I was raised to honor the Dragon. I dreamt of becoming a brother. If it could awaken, with honor, I would ride beneath its banner gladly. And I would not ride alone.”
Horvathy turned. Saw the yearning in the younger man’s gaze. He had once had such hunger, such ambition. When he had two eyes. Before he was a Dragon. Before he was cursed.
He breathed deeply. He had also startled himself with his sudden anger. And he knew it should not be directed at the youth before him, but at himself. He reached up, running his finger over the scar where an eye had been. Perhaps this was the day of redemption of all sins, the beginning of hope. Others must have thought so too. Or else, why all these elaborate, secret arrangements?
He turned back to them now. In a calmer voice he said, “Tell me what else you have done.”
The younger man nodded, relief clear on his face. He gestured to the dais, raised before the fireplace, to the three chairs upon it. “We shall sit there, my lord, closest to the warmth. The chairs are the most comfortable I possess. My wife was sorry to give hers up, heavy as she is with our first child…” He cut himself off, flushing, and to cover his embarrassment led the way past the dais to a table beside it. “And here is the best that a humble fortress at winter’s end can provide for sustenance.”
Horvathy looked down at the table which was well-stocked with wine, rough bread, cinder-coated goat’s cheese, herb-encrusted sausage. Then he saw what lay beside the food. “And what are these,” he said, though he knew.
“They came in the satchel, my lord. The Voivode ordered them to be displayed.” Petru lifted the top one. On its front page a crude woodcut depicted a nobleman eating his dinner among ranks of bodies twitching on stakes. Before him a servant hacked limbs, severed noses and ears. “‘The Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman,’” Petru read aloud, then offered the pamphlet. “Do you wish to read, my lord?”
“No,” Horvathy replied, curtly. He had seen them before, many times. “And now,” he said, turning back.
He had avoided looking at them, after the first glance into the hall, though they were the biggest things there. For they spoke, too clearly to his innermost thoughts. To sin. To redemption. To absolution, sought and never found.
The three confessionals stood in a line in the very center of the room, facing the dais. Each was divided into two cubicles, one for supplicant, one for priest. Their curtains were open, and Horvathy could see that they had been adapted for long periods of sitting. There were cushions, wolfskins. “Why these?” he said softly, moving forward, laying his hand upon the dark-stained wood.
“The Voivode ordered them, my lord,” Petru said, joining him. “And this was the hardest command to fulfill. As you know, we of the Orthodox faith do not have them, but are happy to kneel before our priests in plain sight at the altar screen door. So I was forced to go to those damned Catholic Saxons across the border here in Transylvania, who cheated me as is their way…” He broke off, flushed. “I…mean no disrespect, Count Horvathy. I know you are of the Roman faith.”
Horvathy waved him down. “Do not concern yourself, Spatar.” He stepped into the priest’s side of the cubicle. “What’s this?” he said, folding down a hinged table.
“I had them installed. The orders spoke of scribes who would sit there. The…confessions are to be written down, are they not?”
“They are. I have brought the scribes. You thought well.” Horvathy rose swiftly. “And the last?” He squinted to the shadows at the far end of the hall, opposite the fireplace. “What is there?”
“Ah. This is perhaps the only time I have exceeded my orders.” He gestured and Horvathy followed him, to another table. “There is plainer food for the scribes, for the…witnesses.” He swallowed. “But my Latin is weak and I was unsure exactly what the Voivode meant by…quaestio. If some sort of interrogation is planned, I thought…”
He pointed to objects on the table. Horvathy reached down, touched the metal head cage, pressed a fingertip into the spurs within it. He glanced over the other implements—the bone-crushing boot, the thumb screws, the flesh tongs. Hardly a complete set; just what the Spatar traveled with to enforce the Voivode’s will at the local villages, no doubt.