It was there, in the camp of Mehmed, that I took two arrows through the chest. I snapped them off and held them up by the light of torches and flares, rallying my men. The secret healing force which had set me apart from mere men since birth was stronger in me then. And I had partaken of the Sacrament an hour before leading the raid. I heard the cry “Lord Dracula cannot die!” and then my surviving boyars came to my side, we formed a wedge of shields and blades, and we fought our way out of that madness.

The Sultan returned to his army. Some say that he had to be dragged back to the camp by his generals and my brother Radu. I did not drink his warm blood that night.

In my anger, I ordered the coward, Commander Gales, to my command tent an hour before dawn. My guards disarmed him, stripped him, shackled his arms behind his back, and hung him from the iron gimbal ring which l always had brought on our campaigns. Then, still covered with the soot and blood of battle, my chest in great pain, I went to work. My only tools were an awl, a corkscrew gimlet, and my father's razor of the finesthoned steel in all of Europe. They were enough. I drank from his living body until the sun rose, then slept, arose, gave orders for the march back to Tirgoviste, and returned to dine and drink from him until sunset that day. It has been written that the Turks forty leagues away heard the coward's screams that day.

In Tirgoviste, we prepared for a year or more of siege. The city was closed, the newly rebuilt walls and towers manned, the cannons primed, cattle and chickens driven into the fort, and underground streams were diverted into the city through the secret sewers I had ordered built. Sultan Mehmed's rabble and the hungry Radu came on.

They stopped twenty-seven leagues from our walls. Mehmed and his men had passed through a hundred forests to reach the foothills of the Carpathians and the doors of Tirgoviste, but on this morning they encountered a new forest, a forest they paused at before passing through.

In my previous winter of campaigning against the Turks I had killed thousands of my foes. I was eager to keep a precise count of the Ottoman dead, so I had ordered my boyar commanders to cut off the heads of the fallen and carry them home for easy counting. By February, the troops were grumbling: too many heads, too many heavy, leaking bags. At the end of the campaign I had the heads counted, took careful inventory, and then sliced the noses and ears off to send to my friend and sometimes ally, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. He never responded to my letter and gift, but I know that he must have been impressed.

Of course we took thousands of Turkish prisoners during the campaign. By the week in June when Mehmed approached the walls of my capital, our cells and stockades held more titan twenty-three thousand prisoners.

Now, as Mehmed's huge but exhausted and starved army angrily started their morning march a mere twenty-seven leagues from almost certain victory at Tirgoviste, they stopped at the forest I had ordered raised. A forest of some twenty-three thousand impaled Turks, some still writhing in the morning light. Taller stakes held the bodies of the Sultan's favorite commanders, friends he had assumed he could ransom, friends such as Hamza Pasha and the legendary Greek, Thomas Catavolinos.

The Sultan's own toady and chronicler Laonicus Chalcondyles has written of this morning: “So overwhelmed by disbelief in what he saw, the Emperor said that he could not take the land away from a man who does such marvelous things and can exploit his rule and his subjects in this way and that surely a man who had accomplished this is worthy of greater things.”

So said Chalcondyles. But Chalcondyles certainly lied through his rotting teeth. Were we to have been there that morning, and I was, watching from horseback from less than half a league away, we would have seen a demoralized army turning and shoving their way from the stench of death rising from my new forest. And we would have seen their shaken Sultan near to pissing his ballooned, silk pants. And we would have seen him ordering his men into camp within sight of my forest, as if they could not leave or tear their eyes away, and before dark that night they had dug a trench deeper than the Danube around their cowering army and had lit a thousand fires to hold me at bay. I think that I could have walked into their camp and said “Boo!” that night and watched the army flee in terror.

Sultan Mehmed and his band turned away from Tirgoviste the ,next morning and began their long march back to Braila, their fleet, and their accursed homeland. My spies reported then that his army marched into Adrianople at night so that the populace would not see their shame, and that by the time the Sultan returned to Constantinople his once proud legions of Anatolians, Rumelians, azabs, and janissaries were so much draggedout dog meat. But the Sultan ordered great rejoicing throughout the land for his brilliant victory over Dracula.

So much for Islamic victories, I think, while I listen to the visiting Family and to busy chambermaids talking of war in desert places.

Chapter Thirty-One

Kate would have rushed out into the torch lit palace grounds after Joshua if O'Rourke had not restrained her. There were at least a hundred cowled strigoi visible in the courtyards between her and Chindia Tower, where the baby had been carried, but Kate would have attempted to cross that space if O'Rourke had not at first held her back and then just held her.

“We can't do anything now,” he whispered. There were guards within ten yards of the chapel door. “We'll watch where they take him.”

Kate had grasped his torn shirt in her two fists. “Can we follow them?”

O'Rourke was silent and she knew the answer, herself: it would take too long to crawl back out through the tunnel, they would not know which Mercedes the child had arrived in, and the guards would be checking for anyone following their strigoi masters. Kate pounded her fist against O'Rourke's chest. “This is so . . . maddening.” She took deep breaths to avoid tears, then watched the tower, hoping for some sign of her son.

Chindia Watchtower was an eighty or ninety-foot stone tower, foursided at the bottom but soon becoming a cylinder with crenellated battlements at the top. Illuminated by torchlight, the tower looked to Kate like a rook that had escaped its chessboard. There were two arched windows on the side she could see, each window taller than a man, and a single stone and iron balcony outside the first window about forty feet up. She noticed a crack running from the broad base to just below the battlements, with clumsy iron rods holding stone and brick together like giant staples.

O'Rourke noticed her gaze. “That's from the earthquake a few years ago,” he whispered. “The tower's been closed to tourists ever since. Ceausescu authorized the funds to fix it, but it was never done.”

Kate nodded absently. She knew that O'Rourke was trying to distract her from thinking about the terrible danger that Joshua was in. What if they make him drink human blood tonight? Perhaps they already had. She had not seen the baby at Snagov, but there was much she had not seen there.

Slowly the crowds of redcowled figures moved away from the chapel and the palace ruins and gathered at the base of Chindia Tower. There was music, as if a band were playing, and then Kate saw the portable tape unit, amplifiers, and speakers not far from the grounded helicopter and parked limousines. The music was vague, soullesssome Eastern European state anthem, perhapsbut then the tempo changed, chords rose in triumph, and Kate realized that the speakers were blaring the theme from Rocky. She shook her head. If this was all a nightmare, it had just gone from the surreal to the ridiculous.