The Historian (59 page)

Georgescu led the climb over tumbled rocks and we stood at last in the midst of the ruin.

The fortress had been a small one, I saw at once, and had long since been abandoned to the elements; wildflowers of every description, lichens, moss, fungus, and stunted, windblown trees had made their ancient home in it. The two towers that still stood were bony silhouettes against the sky. Georgescu explained that it originally had five towers, from which Dracula‘s minions could watch for Turkish incursions. The courtyard in which we stood had once had a deep well, for sieges, and also—according to legend—a secret passageway that led to a cave far below on the Arges. Through this Dracula had escaped the Turks in 1462 after using the fortress intermittently for about five years.

Apparently he had never returned to it. Georgescu believed he had identified the castle chapel at one end of the courtyard, where we peered into a crumbling vault. Birds flew in and out of the tower walls, snakes and small animals rustled out of sight ahead of us, and I had the sense that nature would soon take the rest of this citadel for her own.

By the time our archaeological lesson was over, the sun hung just above the western hills and the shadows of rock, tree, and tower had lengthened around us. ―We could walk back to the last village,‖ Georgescu said thoughtfully. ―But then we‘ll have to hike back up if we want to look around again in the morning. I‘d still rather camp here, wouldn‘t you?‖

By then I felt that I had much rather not, but Georgescu looked so matter-of-fact, so scientific, beaming up at me with his sketchbook in hand, that I didn‘t want to say so. He set about gathering dead wood from the area, and I helped him, and soon we had a fire crackling away on the stones of the ancient courtyard, carefully scraped clean of moss for the purpose. Georgescu seemed to enjoy the fire immensely, whistling over it, adjusting loose sticks, and setting up a primitive rig for the cook pot he produced from his rucksack. Soon he was making stew and cutting bread, smiling at the flames, and I remembered that he was, after all, as much Gypsy as Scottish.

The sun set before our supper was quite ready, and when it dropped behind the mountains, the ruins were plunged into darkness, towers stark against a perfect twilight.

Something—owls? bats?—fluttered in and out of the empty window sockets, from which arrows had flown towards the Turkish troops so long ago. I got my rug and pulled it as close to the fire as I safely could. Georgescu was dishing up a miraculously good meal, and as we ate it he talked again about the history of the place. ―One of the saddest tales about Dracula legend comes from this place. You have heard about Dracula‘s first wife?‖

I shook my head.

―The peasants who live around here tell a story about her that I think is probably true. We know that in the fall of 1462, Dracula was chased from this fortress by the Turks, and he did not return to the place when he reigned Wallachia again in 1476, just before he was killed. The songs from these villages up here say that the night the Turkish army reached the opposite cliff there‖—he pointed into the dark velvet of the forest—―they camped at the auld fortress of Poenari, and tried to bring Dracula‘s castle down by firing their cannons across the river. They were not successful, so their commander gave oorders for a grand assault on the castle the next morning.‖

Georgescu paused to poke the fire into a brighter blaze; the light danced on his swarthy face and gold teeth, and his dark curls took on a look of horns. ―During the night, a slave in the Turkish camp who was a relative of Dracula secretly shot an arrow into the opening in the tower of this castle where he knew Dracula‘s private rooms lay. Bound to the arrow was a warning to the Draculas to flee the castle before he and his family were taken prisoner. The slave could see the figure of Dracula‘s wife reading the message by candlelight. The peasants say in their auld songs that she told her husband she would be eaten by the fish of the Arges before she would be a slave to the Turks. The Turks weren‘t very nice to their prisoners, you know.‗ Georgescu smiled devilishly at me over his stew. ‖Then she ran up the steps of the tower—probably that one there—and threw herself off the top. And Dracula, of course, went on to escape through the secret passageway.― He nodded matter-of-factly. ‖This part of the Arges is still called Riul Doamnei, which means the Princess‘s River.―

I shivered, as you can imagine—I had looked that afternoon over the precipice. The drop to the river below is almost unimaginably far.

―Did Dracula have children by this wife?‖

―Oh, yes.‖ Georgescu scooped up a little more stew for me. ―Their son was Mihnea the Bad, who ruled Wallachia at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Another charming fellow. His line led to a whole series of Mihneas and Mirceas, all unpleasant. And Dracula married again, the second time to a Hungarian woman who was a relative of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary. They produced a lot of Draculas.‖

―Are there still any in Wallachia or Transylvania?‖

―I doon‘t think so. I would have found them if there were.‖ He tore off a chunk of bread and handed it to me. ―That second line had land in the Szekler region and they were all mixed up with Hungarians. The last of them married into the nooble Getzi family and they vanished, too.‖

I wrote all this down in my notebook, between mouthfuls, although I didn‘t believe it would lead me to any tomb. This made me think of a last question, which I didn‘t quite like to ask in that enormous and deepening darkness.

―Isn‘t it possible that Dracula was buried here, or that his body was moved here from Snagov, for safekeeping?‖

Georgescu chuckled. ―Still hoopeful, are you? No, the auld fellow‘s in Snagov somewhere, mark my words. Of course, that chapel over there had a crypt—there‘s a sunken area, with a couple of steps down. I doog it up years ago, when I first came here.‖

He gave me a broad grin. ―The villagers wouldn‘t speak to me for weeks. But it was empty. Not even a few boones.‖

Soon after this he began to yawn enormously. We pulled our supplies close to the fire, rolled up in our sleeping rugs, and lay quiet. The night was chilly and I was glad I‘d worn my warmest clothing. I looked up at the stars for a time—they seemed wonderfully close to that dark precipice—and listened to Georgescu‘s snores.

Eventually I must have slept, too, because when I woke the fire was low and a wisp of cloud covered the mountaintop. I shivered and was about to get up to throw more wood on the fire when a rustling close by made my blood freeze. We were not alone in the ruin, and whatever shared that dark uneven hall with us was very near. I got slowly to my feet, thinking to rouse Georgescu if I needed to and wondering if he carried any weapons in his Gypsy bag with the cook pots. Dead silence had fallen, but after a few seconds the suspense was too much for me. I pushed a branch from our pile of kindling into the fire, and when it caught I had a torch, which I held cautiously aloft.

Suddenly, in the depths of the overgrown area of the chapel, my torchlight caught the red gleam of eyes. I would be lying, my friend, if I said my hair didn‘t all stand on end. The eyes moved a little nearer and I couldn‘t tell how close to the ground they were. For a long moment they regarded me, and I felt, irrationally, that they were full of a kind of recognition, that they knew who I was and were taking my measure. Then, with a scuffling in the underbrush, a great beast came half into view, turned its gaze this way and that, and trotted away into the darkness. It was a wolf of startling size; in the dim light I could see its shaggy fur and massive head for just a second before it slipped out of the ruin and vanished.

I lay down again, unwilling to wake Georgescu now that the danger seemed past, but I could not sleep. Again and again—in my mind, at least—I saw those keen, knowing eyes.

I suppose I would have dozed off eventually, but as I lay there I became aware of a distant sound, which seemed to drift up to us out of the darkness of the forest. At last I felt too uneasy to stay in my blankets, and I rose again and crept across the brushy courtyard to look over the wall. The sheerest drop over the precipice was to the Arges, as I‘ve described, but there was to my left an area where the forests sloped more gently, and from down there I heard a murmur of many voices and saw a glimmering that might have been campfires. I wondered if Gypsies camped in these woods; I‘d have to ask Georgescu about that in the morning. As if this thought had conjured him, my new friend suddenly appeared, shadowy, at my side, shuffling with sleep.

―Soomething amiss?‖ He peered over the wall.

I pointed. ―Could it be a Gypsy camp?‖

He laughed. ―Noo, not so far from civilization.‖ He followed this with a yawn, but his eyes in the glow of our dying fire showed bright and alert. ―It‘s peculiar, though. Let‘s go have a look.‖

I didn‘t like this idea in the least, but a few minutes later we had our boots on and were creeping quietly down the path towards the sound. It grew steadily louder, a rising and falling, an eerie cadence—not wolves, I thought, but men‘s voices. I tried not to step on any branches. Once I observed Georgescu reach into his jacket—he did have a gun, I thought with satisfaction. Soon we could see firelight flickering through the trees, and he motioned to me to creep low, and then to squat next to him in the underbrush.

We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men. They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered.

They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. ―What is this?‖ I murmured to Georgescu. ―What are they saying?‖

―All for the Fatherland!‖ he hissed in my ear. ―Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael.‖

―What is that?‖ I tried to just move my lips. It would have been difficult to imagine anything less angelic than those stony faces and rigid outstretched arms. Georgescu beckoned me away and we crept back into the woods. But before we turned I noticed a movement on the other side of the clearing, and to my increasing astonishment I saw a tall man in a cloak, his dark hair and sallow face caught for a second by the light from the fire. He stood outside the rings of uniformed men, his face joyful; in fact, he seemed to be laughing. After a second I couldn‘t see him anymore and thought he must have slipped into the trees, and then Georgescu pulled me along up the slope.

―When we were safely back at the ruin—weirdly, it did feel safe now, by contrast—

Georgescu sat down by the fire and lit his pipe, as if for relief. ‖Good God, man,― he breathed. ‖That could have been the end of us.―

―Who are they?‖

He tossed his match into the fire. ―Criminals,‖ he said shortly. ―They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and converting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the warld of them.‖ He drew fiercely on his pipe. ―We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually.‖

I described the strange figure I‘d seen outside the circle.

―Oh, to be sure,‖ Georgescu muttered. ―They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won‘t be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them.‖

It took us some time to settle to sleep again, but Georgescu assured me the Legion was unlikely to scale the mountain once they‘d begun their rituals. I managed only an uncomfortable doze and was relieved to see that dawn came early to that eagle‘s eyrie. It was quiet now, still rather foggy, and no wind moved the trees around us. As soon as the light was strong enough, I went cautiously to the crumbling vaults of the chapel and examined the wolf‘s tracks. They could be clearly seen on the near side of the chapel, large and heavy, in the earth. The strange thing was that there was only one set of them, which led away from the chapel area, directly out of the sunken beds of the crypt, with no sign of how the wolf had made its way in there in the first place—or perhaps I simply couldn‘t read its trail well enough in the undergrowth behind the chapel. I puzzled over this long after we had breakfasted, made some more sketches, and set off down the mountain.

Again, I must stop for the present, but my warmest regards go out to you from a faraway land—

Rossi

My dear friend,

I can‘t imagine what you‘ll think of this weird and one-sided correspondence when it finally reaches you, but I‘m compelled to continue, if only to make notes for myself. We returned yesterday afternoon to the village on the Arges from which we began our journey to Dracula‘s fortress, and Georgescu has set off for Snagov, with a hearty embrace and a squeeze to my shoulders and the wish that we may be in touch again someday. He has been a most genial guide and I shall certainly miss him. At the last moment I felt a pang of guilt at not having told him everything I‘d observed in Istanbul, and yet I couldn‘t bring myself to breach my own silence. He wouldn‘t have believed it anyway, and so I should not have been sparing him any mishaps by trying to persuade him of it. I could imagine all too well his hearty laugh, his scientific shake of the head, his dismissal of my fantastic imagination.