Kate nodded her understanding. “Get out of the car, Lucian. I don't know who to trust or what to believe anymore, but I know that I'm grateful for what you did an hour ago. He . . . they . . . “ Her hand started to shake and she steadied it on her knee. The muzzle of the pistol was still pointed at Lucian's chest. “If you promise not to come after me, I'll just leave you here. You go on to Hungary.”

Lucian opened the door and stepped out. The road was empty except for a Gypsy wagon rumbling by. The swaybacked black horse pulling the black wagon may have been any color under the soot that coated him. The children's faces staring out from under the dark gray canvas were streaked with sooty rivulets where tears had muddied the grime on their cheeks. Their hands were black.

“Kate,” said Lucian, his voice sad, “why?”

“Don't worry. You said yourself that when they catch me they'll just make me part of their Ceremony. They won't take time to interrogate me. At any rate, I could stand anything until . . . when? Twelve twenty-five?”

Lucian gripped the top of the car door. “But why?”

Kate lowered the pistol. “I don't know. I just know that I'm not leaving Joshua or O'Rourke there. Goodbye, Lucian.” She slid over, closed the door, put the car in gear, and made a Uturn on the empty highway to head back to the intersection where Highway 14 ran south to Sibiu. The windshield was already so dusted with the rubber ash and soot in the air that she had to turn on the windshield wipers. They clawed back and forth with a sound of fingernails on glass.

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 Media. 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 Ceausescu 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.”

“Latjatok, mindig is rossz vezeto voltam. “

Kate waited.

“He said, `You see, I always was a bad leader/conductor.' Get it? Vezeto 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 vezeto.”

Kate turned right onto Highway 14. Black letters were just visible on a graysooted sign: SIBIU 43 KM. RIMNICU VILCEA 150 KM.

Once out of the smoke and soot of Copsa 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 ®f 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 Radii.

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 look my few and most loyal boyars, my fiercest and besttrained troops, and fled. I Died to my castle keep on the Arges 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 Poienari on the bluffs across the Arges. 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 wellaimed 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 Arges 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 Riul Doamneithe Princess's Riverin 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 Poienari and to the bluffs beyond. For another two days we had suffered their cannonade, although their cherry wood 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 Arges 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 oneyearold 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.