An Evening at Joe's (32 page)

 

 

 

 

The miasma of fresh blood hung over the field like a wet woolen cloak. It suffused all it touched—the clothing, the hair. Some claimed you could even smell it on steel. But worst of all, you tasted it each time you inhaled—a sharp, pungent coppery tang that coated the tongue and curdled in the nose and spoke to the more ancient, fearful part of the brain. "Death," it whispered and urged the adrenaline to surge and escape the cause.

Hans Kirschner was, in small part, the cause, and fancied he would not have been able to summon up the juice to make a misanthropic gesture if the devil himself were to appear before him.

Kirschner sat on a small knoll, slumping as much as his breastplate and gorget would allow, feeling every ounce of the fifty pounds—plus of his armour and the less obvious weight of his years. Below him soldiers of Prince Stephan of Transylvania walked casually among the contorted bodies of the fallen; violence rarely conferred the dignity of dying in a comfortable position.

Here and there one would stoop to run a blade across a throat, or poke a misericorde through a helmet's visor, or snag a choice weapon off a belt. Normally, coin-purses would have also hung from these belts for battlefield ransom, but these men knew their enemy. There would be no ransom on this day.

As Kirschner sat watching grimly and mentally cataloging the various aches that were beginning to compete for attention, a tiresomely familiar sensation began to rudely elbow the others aside. It felt to him as though there was an insect trapped under a tankard somehow centered behind his eyes.

Instinctively, his fingers tightened around the grip of his broadsword, which never left his hand while within an arrow's flight of carnage, but loosened as he recognized its source.

"Ritter Hans!" boomed an excessively enthusiastic voice.

"Your Grace," acknowledged Kirschner as he rose with a sigh and a series of muffled clicks as the joints of his harness reseated themselves.

The Duke of Almas and Fagaras strode up beside him, his helm clanking against his side from its suspensor chain. He inhaled sharply, and turned to Kirschner with a wolfish toothy grin.

"Is it not invigorating to smell the blood of traitors? Tell me what could be better?"

Several dozen things came immediately to mind but Kirschner was too familiar with the duke's temperament to give them voice. Instead, he forced his mouth into a shape that was, at least, geometrically speaking, a smile. "It is a great day for your Grace. That which once was yours is yours again."

The duke's grin was humorless and predatory. "Yes. Mine! Fourteen years, Hans. Fourteen years since I was master of this realm, and only two of those years master of my own destiny. Time is the only thing they have robbed of me that I cannot repossess; but what small comfort a throne can afford me, that I will have, and more." Delight had returned to his grin, and it was not a pleasant sight to behold.

If one managed to ignore his disturbing rictus, the duke presented an arresting—some would say startling—physical presence. He was Kirschner's height, about five foot ten, and clad in a fully articulated suit of plate that had been labouriously polished to silver-brightness and trimmed with bands of ornately etched brass. But it was his face that commanded the observer's attention. A long thin pointed nose stabbed towards a wide mouth bordered by thin bloodless lips, both partially hidden by a thick black moustache that drooped to a strong jaw line. His otherwise clean-shaven skin was unnaturally pale, which made his large green eyes stand out like two emeralds set into snow. He had long curly sable hair that, now free from the confinement of his arming cap, cascaded over his shoulders, hiding a thick bull-neck. Encircling his head was a gold coronet with a sunburst in its centre holding a large ruby that sparkled like a malevolent third eye.

"And the smallest comfort I look forward to for now is a steaming tub to wash away the stink of this day's work, and bring some warmth back into these frozen old bones. You and I, Ritter, we are both almost too old for this jouncing about, eh?" He pounded a gauntleted fist on Kirschner's right paulderon, causing the shoulder beneath to momentarily wince with the remembrance of the past five hours' worth of strains and shocks.

Old? thought Kirschner. You're only 45 , you blustering bullcalf— wait until you've been at it for over three and a half centuries, then talk to me about old.

A hot bath though... that thought brought a genuine smile back to Kirschner's face. The duke had wisely wanted to reach and invest his objectives before the first snows fell and they had barely made it. It was now November the 16th, and the ground was hard as rock, the grasses glittered with frost. They had crept an army of 21,000 through the back door of this country over the high-mountain pass at Bran barely two weeks ago. The wind stunned the body like a kick to the kidneys, icicles grew on moustaches like they were eaves, and anyone fool enough to touch metal with a bare hand could look forward to the joys of re-growing skin. Kirschner almost welcomed the prospect of battle, and the brief warmth that violent exercise afforded. Almost...

"Warmth," grimaced Kirschner. "Ah yes, I have a vague recollection of that sensation, or perhaps it's just my dotage come upon me."

The duke uttered a sharp guttural bark that served him as a laugh. "Come then, grandfather. we'll muster the army and march back to the gates of the citadel. By now the burgomaster will have determined from which quarter the new winds blow and instructed everyone to scrape and grovel in an appropriate fashion. It'll all be hollow cant, transparent as ice, but I'll accept it... for now. Besides—bowed heads expose necks. I have lost enough of my life and my honour through treachery. So let them tug their greasy forelocks, bow, and play the lickspittle until their hypocrisy sweats out of them and fills up their boots. If the only homage I'll have for the rest of my days is the puling deference paid a tyrant, then so be it. When once the crown again encircles this brow, the only way they'll get it off is if this head goes with it."

If necessary, thought Kirschner. Time will tell... .

"Come," said the duke as he gestured for his mount. "The sooner we grace these lack-bones with our presence the sooner we warm up and eat."

Kirschner accepted the reins of his palfrey from a guardsman, and swung into the saddle. With his massive war-horse in tow, and surrounded by the two hundred-strong Moldavian ducal guard, he fell into a canter behind his current liege-lord. Before them lay the now-open gates of Bucharest, soon to be the temporary royal residence of the Duke of Almas and Fagaras and Prince-Voevod of Ungro-Wallachia—Vlad Dracula.

 

 

The room was small, but richly appointed. Aromatic woods in the fireplace burned yellow-orange and, together with several brass censers, permeated the chamber with a fragrant bouquet. The flames danced in reflections on the dark and ornately carved wall panels. The furniture was sumptuously carved by a master's hand, especially the large canopied bed. This was obviously a chamber for someone of great consequence.

Prince Vlad and Kirschner sat opposite each other at a small table in solidly timbered high-backed chairs—shields with legs, if the truth be known. The thick oaken door to their left safely barred, the two were enjoying a late supper. The lavish banquet thrown them by the burgomaster was, for Dracula, an expression of his consolidation of power—a feast for the eyes, not the stomach. To have eaten would have been sheer recklessness. In attendance, thinly disguised by laughter and fawning platitudes, were sympathizers or outright minions of Basarab Laiota, the puppet prince installed by the Turks a year ago when Dracula's hated brother Radu the Handsome died. Without doubt there were also agents of Dracula's rival clan, the Danesti, who, for generations, had contested heirdom of the throne. And, of course, the boyars—the noble class—many of whom were recent defectors to Dracula's rising star, leaving Basarab to flounder and flee. The boyars, as a class, had reason to hate Dracula out of sheer principle. In 1456, during his second reign, knowing that those who murdered his father and older brother would number among those who had experienced a certain number of reigns, and having no particular desire to ferret them out specifically, Dracula had five hundred of them impaled. A few years later, ostensibly to remind them of their proper place in Wallachia's political food-chain, Dracula had three hundred of them arrested during his annual Easter celebration. Combining object-lesson with frugality, he then used them as slave labour to reconstruct his castle at Poenari. So neither Dracula nor his captains put morsel to mouth at the evening's fete. Nor did Dracula partake of any wine that did not issue from the pitcher of his personal bodyguard and cupbearer, Ritter Hans Kirschner.

The table littered with half-empty platters and their trencher-loaf plates saturated with the rich gravies of pork and beef, Dracula and Kirschner eased back into the cushions of their chairs and savoured the soporific quality of the spice-laden air and the heady aroma of tankards of warm mulled wine. "You need not perish with heat to preserve my dignity, mien Ritter." Dracula had early on discarded the finery worn to the reception. The heavy ermine-trimmed crimson velvet robe and the russet knee-length hoopelande underdress now regally graced a side-table. He lounged in an embroidered silk-shirt, black hose, and soft leather boots. The ermine cap with the pearl-lined circlet and plume of ostrich feathers caught up in a clutch of blazing diamonds hung casually but significantly over the knule of his chair—a nuance not lost on Kirschner. Hans, by contrast, was still garbed up to the ears. His deep-blue velvet gippon, vertically quilted and falling to just above the knee, was the height of Burgundian fashion. It was also becoming like wearing wet towels in the desert, but he preferred a damp shirt to the revelation of what lay underneath. In addition to the corslet of steel plates set into leather that guarded his lower abdomen and kidneys, the high collar conveniently concealed a padded steel gorget encircling his neck. This last piece of kit had been a nasty and terminal surprise to more than one rival Immortal, and Kirschner had no intention of revealing it gratuitously.

"Your Majesty's dignity needs no help from me," said Kirschner with a deferential bow of the head. "Besides—for the last month I've felt like an icicle in a drain-pipe. I don't intend to take this off until spring."

"Then you will do me the honour of riding downwind till then." The Prince flashed a lupine smile and tipped an ample draught of hippocras down his throat. With a slight raise of his tankard Kirschner followed suit. The two men sat in silence for a moment.

"It is necessary then that we travel to Curtea de Arges?" inquired Kirschner.

"Yes, regrettably," replied Dracula with a slight grimace. "But the church there is the seat of the Metropolitan for the Orthodox faith, and as such, must perform the coronation."

Kirschner wrinkled his brow. "I'm sure he'll be less than enthusiastic to sanctify the ascension of a Prince recently converted to Catholicism."

"The old larded eel! Don't worry about him. If he could grit his remaining teeth to crown a lisping sodomite like my late unlamented brother Radu, or a senile dotard like Laiota, he can damn well find a way to look elsewhere when I genuflect in the opposite direction. If I hadn't converted, Mathias would never have allowed my marriage to his sister, and in all likelihood I'd still be a 'guest' in Solomon's Tower in Visegrad. No—my freedom and my crown are well worth an occasional mass, to say nothing of a son and heir."

Kirschner nodded gravely... the less said about the latter, the better. Dracula had spent twelve years as the prisoner of King Mathias of Hungary, during which time he met, courted and married the King's sister, Illona Szilagy. His conversion and marriage into the Hungarian royal family, coupled with the urgings of his cousin Steven, Prince of Moldavia, finally bequeathed Dracula his liberty, and restored to him the Transylvanian duchies hereditary to his title. After a brief campaign into Croatia with his new royal brother-in-law, he settled in Pest where he, the two Princes (Steven and Stephan) and Kirschner spent the better part of a year engaged in the wrangling, arm-twisting, and sundry political machinations necessary to put together an army consisting of four different nationalities and two major religions, half of whom had absolutely nothing to gain by restoring someone many considered a heretic and mass-murderer to the Wallachian throne.

During this exasperating and often futile year, Dracula's new wife presented him with a son, Mihnea. About nine months previously Dracula had slain a young guard officer who he had found inside his house. The fellow had tried to explain his unfortunate presence by claiming to have been searching for an intruder that, strangely enough, only he had apparently seen enter. Far from speculating on the possibility of cuckoldry, Dracula's excuse to King Mathias for this latest homicide was that "one does not impune the dignity of a Prince by entering his domicile unannounced." Apart from offering a possible explanation for the existence of Vlad's "son," it also taught Kirschner a prudent circumspection when dealing with anything, no matter how small, that might impinge on Dracula's monstrous ego.

"So... one last impotent insolence. You must ride two days through snow and freezing wind so that they may give back to you that which was always yours." Kirschner inclined his head and swirled the contents of his stein. "You have, naturally, given thought of what will happen to your army once the coronation is concluded."

Dracula shrugged indifferently. "We begin to lose men. Prince Stephan and his Transylvanians will be lurching through the gate before the holy oil dries on my scalp, and Mathias' Hungarians with him. The men I will miss for their strength of heart as much as their numbers, but Prince Stephan?..." His eyes glazed, and he sought a metaphor in the depths of his cup. "If we two had in beard what he has in brain, we'd scarce possess a hair to grace our chin. I have pages with more military experience, and my sumpter-horse has better sense of tactics."