Lucian had jogged across the street while she was making the turn. Now he put both hands out the way she had seen hitchhikers do in Mediaş. He switched to an upraised thumb as she came up to the sooty stop sign.
“Thanks, babe,” he said as he slid into the passenger seat. “I thought I’d never get a ride.”
Kate held the pistol in her lap. “Don’t try to stop me, Lucian.”
He held up three fingers. “I won’t. I swear. Scout’s honor.”
“Then why—”
He shrugged and settled back in the tattered seat, his knees high. “Hey, Kate, did you know that before we shot Ceauşescu we tried to electrocute him?”
Kate started to speak and then realized that this was one of Lucian’s dumb jokes. “No,” she said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah,” said Lucian, “but even though we pulled the switch a dozen times, the electricity never hurt him. Afterward, while the firing squad was hunting for bullets, we asked him why the electricity didn’t work. You know what he said?”
“No.”
“Látjátok, mindig is rossz vezető voltam.”
Kate waited.
“He said, ‘You see, I always was a bad leader/conductor.’ Get it? Vezető means leader, but also, like, semiconductor. Get it?”
Kate shook her head. “You don’t have to go with me on this, Lucian.” He spread his fingers and settled lower in the seat. “Hey, why not. It’s easier to follow. I always was a lousy vezető.”
Kate turned right onto Highway 14. Black letters were just visible on a gray-sooted sign: SIBIU 43 KM. RÎMNÍCU VÎLCEA 150 KM.
Once out of the smoke and soot of Copşa Mica, Kate turned off the wipers but had to turn on the lights. Despite the early hour, it was getting dark.
Dreams of Blood and Iron
If there is any fate more ignominious than to be a patriarch without power in the grip of one’s own family, I do not wish to imagine it. Events proceed, although it is apparent that my final act for the Family shall be styled as mere ceremonial pawn in the power machinations of Radu Fortuna.
Radu. I think of my brother Radu, the boy with the long lashes who became the beloved of more than one sultan. The boy who grew up to wrestle the throne from me through treachery and guile. The people called him Radu the Handsome and welcomed his soft ways after my stern years as their liege lord.
The idiots.
I knew Radu as the brainless, spineless little Sodomite he was. Sultan Mehmed had no difficulty controlling Wallachia and Transylvania with Radu as his puppet: God knows that the Sultan had had his hand up this particular puppet enough times.
I, Wladislaus Dragwylya, had beaten the Turks more decisively than any Christian ruler in history, had sent the Sultan cowering back to Constantinople, and had won the liberty of my people. But my people deserted me.
The Sultan had left his play toy, Radu, in Wallachia to woo my boyars away from me, to undermine their liege oaths. At this, Radu was successful in the dark closets of diplomacy where he and the Sultan had failed on the daylight battlefields. Now that I had vouchsafed the freedom of the Seven Cities through the spilling of my own blood, the boyars of these German strongholds turned against me and made secret pact with the serpent Radu.
By midsummer of 1462, my position had become, as the politicians now phrase it, untenable. I had beaten the Turks everywhere I had found them, but behind me my army had melted away like sugar in the mouth of a child. I took my few and most loyal boyars, my fiercest and best-trained troops, and fled. I fled to my castle keep on the Argeş River.
Here is the folk legend that tells of my final hours at Castle Dracula.
The Turks were approaching by night, setting up their cannonades on the high fields near the village of Poenari on the bluffs across the Argeş. In the morning they would storm my citadel. Then, as the folktales have it, a certain relative of mine who had been taken by the Turks years before, remembering my many kindnesses to him and his love of family, climbed to a high spot and fired a warning arrow through the only lighted window in my tower. Legend has it that the arrow was so well-aimed that it snuffed the candle by which my concubine was reading.
She was alone in the room, goes the tale. When she read the appended warning of the Turkish attack, she woke me, told me in hysterical tones that she would rather have her body eaten by the fish in the Argeş than be touched by the Turks, and then threw herself from the battlements to the river a thousand feet below. To this day, the river there is known as Rîul Doamnei—the Princess’s River—in tribute to this tale.
This false tale.
In truth, there was no relative, no warning arrow, and no selfless suicide. Here is the truth:
We had watched from the citadel for two days as Radu and the Turks advanced to Poenari and to the bluffs beyond. For another two days we had suffered their cannonade, although their cherrywood guns did little damage; I had ordered the towers rebuilt with too many layers of brick and stone to fall to such a minor pounding.
Still, we knew that on the morrow Radu’s cavalry would cross the Argeş and swing up the valley to the hills behind the keep, while the Turkish foot soldiers, stupid and stolid as ambulatory tree trunks, would die by the hundreds while ascending the cliffs to the citadel walls. But they would win. Our forces were too small, the keep too isolated on its crag to allow any eventual outcome except the defeat of Lord Dracula. That night I was deep in preparations for my escape when my concubine, Voica by name, demanded my time to have an argument. Women have no sense of timing; when they wish to argue, they must argue, and it does not matter what events of real importance are taking place.
Voica and I walked the darkened battlements while she went on in a tearful voice. The issue was not the attacking Turks nor the threat of my treacherous brother Radu, but the future of our sons, Vlad and Mihnea.
I should say here that I loved Voica, at least as much as it is possible for a leader of men and nations to love a woman. She was small, dark of eye and skin but usually light of heart, and she did my bidding in all things. Until this night.
Of our two boys, Mihnea had been born normal enough, but his one-year-old younger sibling, Vlad, had the wasting sickness that had plagued my father and me. Vlad had received the secret Sacrament only days before. His health shone now in his eyes and I knew that the boy would be like his father in requiring the Sacrament throughout his life.
It was on this night, of all nights, that Voica chose to protest that our child would be brought up this way. I pointed out that neither the babe nor I had a choice in the matter: if he were to survive, he would have to drink. This upset Voica. Her mother had been a secret drinker. Indeed, her mother had been tried and destroyed as a witch, and I first met Voica when she was brought before my court to face a similar fate. But Voica had never tasted the Sacrament. Instead of ordering her burned or impaled, I took her into my palace, gave her my affection, and allowed her to bear my children. And now she thanked me by striding the battlements, on the very night the campfires of Radu and the Turks were visible across the black river valley, and demanding that young Vlad be allowed to grow up without the Sacrament. She called it blasphemy. She called it witchcraft. She called me strigoi like her mother.
I reasoned with her for several minutes, but the hour was drawing near when we would have to leave. I pronounced the conversation finished.
Voica had always been an overly emotional and dramatic woman. It was probably that as much as her mother’s habit of drinking the blood of corpses which had brought Voica to my court in chains. Now she surrendered to her sense of drama and leapt to the parapet, threatening to throw herself and our two babes in her arms into the void below if I did not give in to her wishes.
Tired of her histrionics, in a press to leave before the moon rose, I jumped to the top of the low wall and wrestled the children away from her. She lost her balance then. For a second I thought it was part of her melodrama, but then I saw the true terror in her face and, shifting Vlad to the arm wh
ich held Mihnea, I held out my hand to steady her.
Our fingertips touched. She fell backward without a sound, disappearing into the darkness of the chasm like a mermaid diving to greater depths. One of her slippers remained behind on the wet stone. I kept that slipper for three centuries, losing it only when I had to flee a burning building in Paris during a minor revolution.
I took the children that night and left everyone else in the castle behind. Their loyalty meant nothing to me. They meant nothing to me.
One of the reasons I had chosen Poenari Citadel for my own was that it was built atop two faults in the rock which led down more than a thousand feet to the cave which held the underground river. The first fault was only ten inches wide, but it served as a well for fresh water even during siege. The second fault was, with a little help from artisans who died with the boyars who rebuilt Castle Dracula on that long-ago Easter Sunday in 1456, large enough for a man to descend, hanging on to iron cables and rungs as he did so.
Below, in the secret cave that ran out to the Argeş more than a mile above the citadel hill, the seven Dobrin brothers were waiting with horses shod backward to confuse those who would track us. The Dobrins took me up the trackless valley, then led me across secret passes and dangerous snowfields of the Făgăraş peaks to the north. If it had not been midsummer, even that retreat into Transylvania would have been closed off.
When I descended into Transylvania proper in the mountain wilds south of Braşov, I called for a rabbit-skin parchment and deeded all the land north and west, as far as our eyes could see, to the stolid Dobrin brothers. None of the rulers who followed me in Wallachia, Transylvania, and now Romania have defied that order. Even Ceauşescu, with his collectivization and systematization frenzy, left this one parcel of private land untouched by his socialist madness.
That is the true story, although I cannot imagine that anyone cares. Not even the Family, who have forgotten to honor and obey their patriarch, even though most of them are the descendants of the young Vlad I saved from death that night.
My half-dream state is broken by the sound of arriving Family members. In a moment they will come up the stairs to bathe me and dress me in fine linen vestments and drape the chain of the Order of the Dragon around my neck.
One final Ceremony. One final act as patriarch.
Chapter Thirty-seven
KATE and Lucian drove through Sibiu in the failing light: Sibiu where medieval lanes opened onto cobblestone squares surrounded by homes and buildings with sleepy-eyed rooftop windows.
They drove down the Olt River Valley as the late-afternoon glow faded to gray twilight. The highway wound along the river between steep canyon walls. One minute the road would be broad, smoothly asphalted, with a gravel shoulder, and the next they would be bouncing through a mile of muddy ruts where some roadwork had been started and abandoned months or even years before.
They skirted the industrial town of Rîmnícu Vîlcea. The Dacia needed petrol and the only gas station they passed had a line at least an hour long. Lucian said that he knew a black-market gas depot on the east edge of town and they stopped to change drivers. Few Romanian women drove cars; if they were important enough to travel by car, they tended to be chauffeured. Lucian slid behind the wheel, left the highway just beyond the city limits, and bought five liter-bottles of petrol out of the back of a lorry parked near an old tunnel.
Later, Kate was to think of how the simple act of changing drivers sealed their respective fates.
Just beyond Rîmnícu Vîlcea on the road leading southeast to Piteşti, Lucian turned left onto tiny Highway 73C and followed it through a few dimly lighted villages into the darkness of the Carpathians. They encountered the first roadblock fifteen kilometers farther on, right where the road diverged in a village named Tigveni toward either Curtea de Argeş to the east or Suici to the north.
“Shit,” said Lucian. They had just topped the rise coming out of the village when he saw the lights, the military vehicles, and two black Mercedes stopped at the checkpoint. Lucian doused the Dacia’s already weak lights, made a U-turn, and drove back into the village, turning down a dark sidestreet that was little more than an alley. Tigveni may have held a hundred people in its eight or ten homes, but tonight, even though it was not yet eight P.M., the town was dark and silent.
“What now?” whispered Kate, knowing that it was silly to whisper but doing so anyway. The target pistol was in the low console between their two front seats.
Lucian’s face was just visible. “It’s another fourteen kilometers to the town of Curtea de Argeş,” he said, “Then twenty-three kilometers north up the valley to the citadel.”
“More than twenty miles,” whispered Kate. “We can’t walk from here.”
Lucian rubbed his cheek. “When I worked on the citadel, I had to drive to Rîmnícu Vîlcea regularly to pick up materials and workers. Occasionally the bridge outside of town here would be washed out by storms,” He slapped the steering wheel. “Hang on, babe.”
With the headlights still out, Lucian bumped the Dacia down a rutted sidestreet, across what appeared to be a meadow, and then settled into two ruts that ran along a river. Kate heard frogs and insects from the darkness under the trees and for a moment she could imagine that summer was coming rather than dying.
The Dacia halted under the trees on a wide stretch of gravel alongside the river and Lucian killed the engine. Two hundred meters to their left, the spotlights of the military roadblock lit the night.
“They’re stopping cars at the one-lane bridge,” whispered Lucian. As they watched, another limousine approached the roadblock, flashlights flicked on, and Kate could see the gleam of the soldiers’ helmets as they stepped up to the car, checked it, and then saluted and let it pass.
“We should have taken the Mercedes,” she whispered.
Lucian grinned, “Yeah. We look so strigoi, don’t we? Did you bring your identity papers?”
Kate glanced at her watch. Four hours to go twenty miles. “What next?”
Lucian pointed at the river. It was at least a hundred feet wide here, but it looked shallow. Reflected light from the distant searchlights gleamed on numerous ripples.
“We’ll never cross here without them seeing us or hearing us,” hissed Kate. “Isn’t there another place? Farther from the road?”
Lucian shrugged. “I don’t know of any. This is where the locals used to reroute traffic when the bridge was out,” He looked to his left. “Hear their music? Somebody in one of the trucks has a radio going.”
“Yes, but all they have to do is look this way.”
Lucian cranked his window down and leaned out. “The trees overhang here for most of the way. It’s dark near the banks.” He turned and looked at Kate. “Your call, Kate.”
She hesitated only a second. “Go.”
Lucian started the car. The four-cylinder motor sounded like a jet engine to Kate. Lucian put the car in first and edged out into the river. Within seconds the water was up to the car’s hubcaps, then to the bottom of their doors, then rising along the fender. The Dacia rocked and bumped.
“We’re shipping water,” whispered Kate, lifting her feet from the dribbling floorboards. Lucian kept one hand on the wheel and one on the stick shift and jostled them forward.
Suddenly the right front wheel dipped, something smacked the bottom of the car hard, and the engine stalled. They sat there in the middle of the river, the current lapping halfway to the windows, and tried not to breathe too loudly.
The music from the two military trucks was a loud, Gypsy beat. Lucian pulled the choke out and set his hand on the ignition keys.
“No!” Kate said aloud and stopped his hand just as he was turning the keys.
A limousine had glided up to the roadblock. The music stopped. In the sudden silence they could hear the questions of the three soldiers and even soft replies from the car. The beam from one of the bright searchlights atop the truck jostled, lost its focus on the Mercedes, and stabbed out onto th
e river. A moment later the limousine rolled on, the searchlights were aimed lower, and the music started up again.
Lucian turned the ignition key.
Please God, prayed Kate to a God she had never really believed in, don’t let the coil or the spark plugs or the other things Tom used to try to explain to me be wet or broken. Amen.
The Dacia started. Lucian rocked it carefully forward and back, freed the wheel from the hole, and drove on to the opposite bank. Kate felt her skin and muscles beginning to unclench when they were half a mile down the rutted lane and out of sight of the roadblock because of thick trees and the hill. She had not known that one’s body physically awaits the impact of bullets.
“OK,” breathed Lucian as he bounced the Dacia back onto the narrow highway. “I don’t know what the fuck we’ll do when we get to Curtea de Argeş, but, hey…the name of the game is improvise, right?”
They bypassed Curtea de Argeş and two roadblocks they could see in the distance by driving north up the railroad line that ran along the west side of the Argeş River. “O’Rourke’s idea,” said Kate.
They had a flat which Kate helped change by the light of the few stars now shining between high clouds. The spare was so patched and so threadbare that she could not imagine it getting them much farther. There isn’t much farther to go, she assured herself. Fifteen kilometers. This tire will make it.
If you’re not planning on coming back, another part of her mind answered.
A kilometer farther and the rail line diverged west through tunnels into the Făgăraş Mountains. Kate went out on foot until she found two overgrown ruts in the darkness and they bounced east down the old access road until they reached a two-plank bridge over the river and Highway 7C that ran past the citadel.
Lucian got out of the car and Kate joined him. The highway was quiet here but they had seen traffic earlier. To the east and west, foothills rose to mountains lost in the night and clouds. To the north, the valley visibly narrowed until it made Kate think of a narrowly opened door. Into darkness.