Dreams of Blood and Iron

l am beginning to believe that I cannot die. It has been almost two years since I have partaken of the Sacrament, but still Death does not come. I could refuse food or water, but such an act would be pure folly: my body would cannibalize itself over a period of months rather than die willingly. Even 1, who have known more pain in my single lifetime than most generations of families have known cumulatively, even I could not face that torture.

So I lie here in the day, listening to the voices of my Family, much as I lay here during my early childhood. At night I rise and move around my room, stalk the corridors of this old house, and peer from the windows I peered from as a toddler. My muscles have not . . . will not . . . atrophy completely.

1 am beginning to believe that God's great punishment to me is this denial of death. Centuries ago, when I was young, the possibility of eternal damnation woke me with a cold sweat in the weak, dark hours of the morning. Now the thought of eternal punishment is the simple fact of being condemned to live forever.

But in the day I doze. And while I lie there, not truly awake and not fully asleep, neither dead nor moving among the living, I dream my memories.

My enemies fell upon me.

Joined by my treacherous brother Radu, Sultan Mehmed II and his legions of Arabs, janissaries, Rumelian sipahis, and slanteyed Anatolians crossed the Danube and sought to dethrone me. Mehmed's army was much stronger than my own. I did not confuse honor with idiocy. Upon my order, our forces withdrew to the north and left desolation in our wake.

The cities, towns, and villages of my kingdom were put to the torch. Granaries were emptied or destroyed. Livestock which could not be driven north with the army was butchered where it stood. Upon my order, wells were poisoned and dams were built to create marshes where Mehmed's cannon must pass.

Those are the historical facts of that retreatwhat modern strategists would call a “strategic withdrawal”but it conveys nothing of the reality. I lie here with evening painting the dark wood of the beams above me a dull blood color and I remember the roads swollen with weeping refugees from our own cities and villages, oxen carts and plow horses and entire clans on foot, carrying their meager belongings, while behind us the flames lighted the horizon while the skies darkened with the smoke of our selfimmolation. I lay here this winter just past and eavesdropped on the Family housekeepers talking on the stairs and landingmy hearing is still that good when I wish it to beand they whisper to each other about Saddam Hussein's war with the Americans and about the oil fares he lit in his wrath blackening the desert skies. They mutter about the fighting in Yugoslavia to the west and shake their kerchiefed heads about how terrible modern war is. Saddam Hussein is a child compared to Hitler and Hitler was an infant compared to me. I once followed Hitler's retreating army into his heartland and was amazed at the artifacts and infrastructure he left intact. Saddam set fire to the desert; in my day, I took some of the lushest land in Europe and turned it into a desert.

This age knows nothing of war.

We retreated into the heart of my kingdom, because all Transylvanians then learned at their mother's breast that the salvation of our people and nation would always be the deepest folds in the highest mountains, the darkest forest in the most remote regions where wolves howl and the black bear roams.

I have read Stoker. I read his silly novel when it was first published in 1897 and saw the first stage production in London. Thirty-three years later I watched that bumbling Hungarian ham his way through one of the most inept motion pictures I have ever had the misfortune to attend. Yes, I have read and seen Stoker's abominable, awkwardly written melodrama, that compendium of confusions which did nothing but blacken and trivialize the noble name of Dracula. It is garbage and nonsense, of course, but I confess there is one brief, almost certainly accidental passage of poetry amidst all the puerile scrawlings.

Stoker's idiot, operacloaked vampire pauses when he hears a wolf howling in the forest. “Listen to them, “ he stagewhispers. “The children of the night. What, beautiful music they make.”

In this accidental bit of poetry, something of the Transylvanian and Romanian soul is revealed. It is the wolf s howl, solitary, terrifying, echoing in empty placeswhich is the music of the Romanian soul. In the forest darkness we find our salvation and rebirth. In the mountain fastness we set our backs to the stone and turn to face our enemies. It has always been so. It will always be so. I have bred and led a race of children of the night.

In that summer of 1462, thousands of my soldiers and many more thousands of my boyars and peasants fled north from the Sultan's hired hordes. It was the hottest summer in living memory. Where we passed, nothing remained. My spies reported that Mehmed's janissaries grumbled that there was nothing to loot in the charred cinders of our cities, nothing to eat in the ashes of our farms. l ordered pits to be dug along the only possible line of advance, sharpened stakes to be planted, and then had them covered over with care. I remember pausing with our rear guard one June evening and listening to the screams of the Sultan's camels as they tumbled into our pits. It was sweet music.

I led raids against the mass of Turkish swine, using paths and passes known only to a few of my people, surprising them from the rear, cutting out their stragglers and wagon trains of sick and wounded the way a wolf pack cuts out and pulls down the weakest of the herd, then impaling them where the others would find the bodies.

I sent my agents among the desolate leper colonies and into the plagueridden shadows of my stillstanding cities, bringing Turkish clothes for the sick and dying to wear as we sent them into the Sultan's camps to mingle with the janissaries and Anatolians and sipahis and azabs, to drink from their cups and to eat from their common bowls. I ordered living victims of syphilis, the Black Death, tuberculosis, and the pox to join the Turks, and I rewarded them generously when they returned with the turbans of the men they infected unto death.

But they came on, my enemies, dying of thirst and hunger and illness, afraid to sleep in their own camps at night, terrified of the forest dark and the woks howl, but they came on. We left a single path of forage and unpoisoned springs for them to follow, a trail as clear as a line of gunpowder leading to a powder keg.

They turned west to Bucharest and found that town empty of life and sustenance; they swept north to Snagov, where hundreds of my boyars and troops waited on my fortified island there. Mehmed and Radu could not reduce Snagov. The lake was too deep for men in armor to cross without fear of drowning. My walls were too high to scale once the lake was crossed. My instruments of war rained down too terrible a punishment on them.

Mehmed followed me north again, leaving Snagov in his rear and condemning more of his men to night harassment and morning impalement.

Then, on the night of June 17 in the Year of Our Lord 1462,1 attacked Mehmed's army not with a raiding force but with 13,000 of my bravest boyars and their handpicked troops. We scattered the guards, split the garrison, skewered those who tried to stand, and drove through the mass of their camp like a hot sword through soft flesh. We had brought torches and flares soaked in gunpowder, and these we lighted to find the Sultan's red tent. I fully planned to kill the dog myself and drink his blood before the sun rose again.

We gained the red tent and slaughtered all those inside, but it was the wrong red tent. It gave me little solace to know that we had beheaded Mehmed's two viziers, Isaac and Mahmud. By the time I regrouped my men, the Sultan's cavalry was pouring in from three sides. Even then, I could have carried home the attack, for Mehmed had lost nerve and fled the camp, his unmounted men were fleeing and milling in demoralized confusion, but one of my commanders, a boyar named Gales, failed to attack from the west with the second wave as I had ordered. Because of Gales' cowardice, Mehmed escaped, and my force had to fight its way out of the tightening ring of Ottoman cavalry.