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 which 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. l 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 Poienari 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 longago 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 Arges 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 Fagaras peaks to the north. If it had not been midsummer, even that retreat into Transylvania would have been closed off.
When l descended into Transylvania proper in the mountain wilds south of Brasov, I called for a rabbitskin 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 Ceausescu, with his collectivization and systematization frenzy, left this one parcel of private land untouched by this 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 halfdream 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 sleepyeyed rooftop windows.
They drove down the Olt River Valley as the lateafternoon 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 Rimnicu Vilcea. 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 blackmarket 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 literbottles 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 Rimnica Vilcea on the road leading southeast to Pitesti, 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 Arges 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 Uturn, and drove back into the village, turning down a dark side street 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 Arges,” 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 Rimnicu Vilcea 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 side street, 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 onelane 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.