Much Fall of Blood-ARC (12 page)

"A friend." The piper grinned. "You might say we share some of the same blood." He laughed. It was a strangely infectious laugh. "And now we must flee."

Vlad wavered, torn between the appeal of the man and his native language, and caution. His instincts said to trust the man, in a way they had not with his angelic-looking rescuer, even if logic said otherwise. The piping had unleashed something strange in him. Something deep and powerful.

"Is there danger?" he asked. "And what about the countess? Should we not try and rescue her too?"

For an answer the piper raised the pipe to his lips again and played a brief trill. "It is you they want, Drac. They will chase you. She is safe."

His Vlachs must be more rusty than he had been realized. The man must be referring to the enormous creatures that had driven off the horses.

Well, if he could act as a decoy and draw the pursuit away from his rescuer, that was plainly his duty. It was only the dwarf, and the way that the stranger had treated him, that gave him pause. He still had his boot planted on the dwarf's back, holding him down in the mud.

He stepped uneasily forward. Ficzko kicked out viciously—at Vlad. "I'll kill you!" he yelled, and he was definitely yelling at Vlad rather than at the man who might a gypsy. Vlad was confused. The dwarf must be a traitor!

"Clearly one of your enemies, Drac. We will leave our little foe here," said the stranger, putting the pipe into one of his many pockets. He leaned down, took the dwarf by the scruff of his doublet and deposited him into an empty horse trough. He flung him quite hard. Ficzko lay there and groaned.

The gypsy took Vlad by the elbow, and led him around the corner. Two horses were tethered there.

"You don't think that we should rather go back and rescue the countess?" asked Vlad.

The gypsy shook his head. "Trust me, Drac." He looked very earnest. "I swear by the blood of the old one, if you do not flee with me now, you will be kept a prisoner and die, probably very slowly. And your people need you. Your land needs you. But we must ride now. We will never have this chance again. You will be much more closely guarded, if we fail."

Out of his distant past, Vlad plucked a memory of his mother protesting to his father about the gypsies camping at the foot of the cliff below Poeinari. And his father saying that they might be thieves and rogues but the sons of the Dragon could trust them, even when they could trust no one else.

Vlad mounted. If it was him who was being pursued, then let them follow him. The countess had risked much to free him. Two things were important: that he repay her for that, and that he should stay free.

They rode hard cross-country along a break of trees which screened them from the village. The gypsy rode with casual skill, Vlad with grim determination. As a boy, he had been in the saddle very often. Even if the horses had shrunk he had not forgotten the skills entirely.

Presently, the gypsy slowed his horse to a trot. They came to a small copse left on the age of a field. Two other men in similar bright ragged clothes were waiting, holding two horses that looked rather familiar.

They mounted up. "What took you so long?" asked one, grinning. "We thought the two of you had decided to stop for lunch."

That reminded Vlad of the hunger that he had complained of on stopping at the hamlet. Alas, he had never even tried the "porklot," or anything else.

It appeared that his new escort had no intention of letting him eat, either. They rode on, pushing the horses hard. The route they were following kept along the bottom of a shallow depression and next to a marshy stream. It also kept them away from the skyline. Vlad realized that they must surely be locals to know this area so well. It would be very difficult for anyone to follow them by sight.

But he had little spare concentration for possible pursuit. Lack of practice at riding, and not having eaten since very early that morning were having an effect.

"He's going to tumble out of that saddle soon, Angelo," said one of the other riders.

The dark, gray-eyed gypsy looked at him. "True. We need some shelter, Grigori. Somewhere we cannot be seen too easily."

The man he had referred to as Grigori pointed. "There is a haystack and an old barn just over the lip. Maybe half a mile. Or there was last time I was here."

"And how many seasons ago was that?" asked the third gypsy sardonically.

"About five, I think. But stone barns tend to stay to the same places, although they keep moving the haystacks."

"It's getting across the lip that worries me," said Angelo. "Grigori, let me hold your horse. Go back and see how far back they are."

The lithe, curly-haired gypsy slipped off his horse. The more Vlad had looked at that horse the more he was sure that it was one that had been ridden by one of the outriders. The man loped off with a long-legged easy stride. He looked, to Vlad's blurred vision, almost like some great predatory animal gliding away.

But Angelo did not let the rest of them stop. He pressed on, leaving Grigori to catch up.

Vlad decided, when Grigori caught up with them a few minutes later, that the man must run like the wind. "Can't see them," he panted. "I'd say that they were a good two or three miles back."

He vaulted into the saddle with an ease that Vlad could only envy. "Let's go and find that barn, he said. There was a good place for rabbits close to it."

Somehow, Vlad managed to stay in the saddle until they reached the shabby stone barn. But as they arrived, he felt himself starting to fall.

He could not remember how he came to be lying against the edge of the haystack, with his collar loosened. But there was the delicious smell of cooking meat.

"A stupid idea to light a fire if you ask me," said the gypsy whose name Vlad had not yet discovered. "As well to tell the foe where we are."

"They are not very good at eating raw meat," said Angelo. "And smoke is a clear scent marker to you, Radu, but not to them. Ah. I see the Drac is awake. Do you need your rabbit very well cooked, Lord?"

"I would eat anything right now, cooked in any way, or even not cooked at all." Vlad took the wineskin that Grigori held out to him.

Grigori laughed and punched his companion in the ribs. "We could have given it to him raw, after all. Maybe even with the fur on."

Angelo, in the meantime, was cutting slices off the rabbit which they had been grilling over the open flames of a small camp-fire. He speared them on the end of the knife, and handed it to Vlad. "Eat, Drac," he said encouragingly.

Vlad swallowed some of the wine from the wineskin they held out to him. It was far from the finest vintages. In fact, it was something he would have turned his nose up at a few days ago. Now it tasted powerful and magnificent.

The rabbit flesh was extremely rare, barely more than charred on the outside. Grains of coarse salt clung to it. Vlad did not think he had ever tasted anything finer. He washed it down with some more of the red wine from the wineskin. "My thanks," he said, already feeling better even after the first few morsels.

"Cut him some more," said Grigori. "I have seen a wolf eat slower."

"But not you," said Radu, taking out his knife and cutting some more of the meat to hand to Vlad.

"Eat up and be quick," said Angelo. "We have a way to go before we reach a secure place. Once we are in the mountains we can take things a little slower, but here we are too easy to find. And trust me, Drac, you do not want them to find you."

Very shortly, far too soon and after far too little food, Vlad found himself being thrown up into the saddle again. They had to do that, because he found that his muscles had already begun to stiffen. He still had had no chance to establish just who they were and where they were taking him.

They pressed on, going back down into the shallow valley and riding on into the gathering darkness. The horses were tired now, only able to walk. Vlad was beginning to wonder if they had successfully drawn the pursuit after them and away from Elizabeth. He was beginning to wonder about the nature of the huge creatures he had seen driving off the horses. He was beginning to wonder also about his good-natured gypsy companions, and just where they had suddenly come from and how they had come by the horses.

Most of all, he was wondering just when he would be allowed to get off his horse. By the time they finally stopped, though, he was too exhausted to wonder much at all. All he wanted to do was to rest and to eat. And sleep. Yes, sleep, and he did not care if he had to sleep on the ground—just as long as it was somewhere off a horse.

However, they must have made some allowances for his royal blood. The gypsies found him a haystack to sleep in, which they plainly considered the height of luxury. And that night, do did he.

* * *

In the pale predawn, the gypsies rousted him out of the haystack, and they set off again. Somewhere they had acquired fresh horses. The saddles were still the same, but the horses were not. The gypsies were skilled in choosing cross-country trails that avoided dwellings. The countryside was changing around them. Ahead were ridges spiked with pine trees.

Vlad could not remember very clearly just what his home had looked like. He hoped that Poienari Castle would loom suddenly from one of these ridges, but they seemed too small to be the mountains that he remembered. Perhaps that was like the way horses had shrunk in the time that he had been locked away. The mountains of his memory had definitely seemed both bigger and bleaker than these. Still, the sight of the ridges lifted his spirits, even though it did nothing at all for his aching thighs and sore posterior.

They rode up into a valley and off towards a scattering of rocks. Hidden among these was a narrow cave entrance. "We should be safe enough up here," said Angelo, reining in. "Radu, you take the horses on and let them go a few miles from here. Most likely they will find their own way home."

Vlad was unsure about what was happening to his life, but apparently he had fallen among horse thieves. He deeply and intrinsically disapproved of dishonesty. After he had begun to speak, it occurred to him that this was perhaps not the wisest time to berate the gypsies, but he did not think first.

"Did you steal those horses?" he demanded.

The gypsies looked at him and then began to laugh. "He is the Drac, all over again!" said Angelo.

"Answer my question," he said sternly, feeling faintly foolish, but still determined.

"Well, Drac, it's more like this," said Angelo. "If you needed a horse from one of your tenants, you would use it. By our way of thinking, all of this was our range, and we're entitled to some of the produce, let alone to borrow a horse or two. We had a hard time explaining this to your grandfather, or so the stories say. He made a few grim examples of some of the boyars and German merchants. That made him very popular."

"Made him popular?" Were they being sarcastic? he wondered.

"Yes, with the peasants," grinned Grigori. "And after one or two really good examples, the level of honesty in Valahia improved dramatically. He is a hero still today among them."

That was a very different story from the ones that he had heard from his Hungarian captors. "I thought he was hated and feared."

"By some people, yes," said Angelo. "He was a little mad."

The gypsy made it sound as if that was a positive attribute. Perhaps it was, for ruling a small mountain kingdom. "See those horses get back to their owners," Vlad said sternly. Then it would not really be theft. More of a loan.

They grinned. "They have some extra horses now anyway, better quality than this crow-bait."

Vlad wondered where those horses had come from but decided that he would let it be. "What do we do now?" he asked.

"Rest, eat, and stay away from those who will be hunting for us. Work our way along the mountains until we can get back to the heartland, to the real mountains. To your homeland, Drac."

In terms of raw power, both of intellect and in the actual ability to affect events, it would be hard to have eclipsed the people gathered in a quiet and rather nondescript salon in the Doge's Palace in Venice. Both the doge, Petro Dorma, and Count Enrico Dell'este were more than capable of a display of pomp and finery, if they thought it would serve their purposes. But unlike many rulers, they understood that these were just tools, not ends in themselves.

Besides, they had no need to try and impress the other people present. The Venetian Council of Ten knew them all far too well. Marco Valdosta, and that which walked with him in spirit, were unlikely to even notice finery and rich throne rooms. They both saw far deeper than that. Count Von Stemitz had seen more Gothic splendor in Mainz. And Patriarch Michael, speaking for the church in Rome, had his eyes set on far more spiritual glory. Only Admiral Doria, the duke of Genoa, unfamiliar with the group, was in the least surprised by the lack of ostentation in the quiet private salon.

"Eneko Lopez is not a man to send such news without being very certain of it," said Patriarch Michael, in reply to the admiral's question.

"I have heard of him," admitted the admiral. "He has a reputation for being a somewhat inflexible man. You will pardon my saying so, but the church has for so many years refused to send such communications. Why should it be different now? How can you be sure that this message is a real one? We have always enjoyed much better relations with the Byzantine Empire than Venice has. Our trade with the Black Sea is more extensive than Venice's. We would surely have been aware of any such fleet."

The patriarch nodded. "It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to be absolutely certain that no form of magical interference has taken place. Nonetheless, the clerics in Rome are very skilled, and have the greatest ecclesiastical protections that we have been able to devise, Admiral. They are as sure as they possibly can be that the communication came from Eneko Lopez in Jerusalem. He sent word of a threat to many nations and to the Church itself. That would be why he has decided to do this."

"It is just that . . . Yes, our ships are restricted in their access to certain ports. But we would surely have known from our agents if something of this size was happening. We trade with the Golden Horde too. The Black Sea is something we know well."