The Book of the Dead
Rites of the Dragon: Book One
Vampire the Requiem - Covenant - Ordo Dracul - Rites of the Dragon
The Book of the Dead
Book One: The Book of the Dead
I rose up among the dead, and I was dead with them.The Turks struck by night, damned infidels, coming in a horde like rats, and our gates were opened by a traitor within. We fought, my patriots and I, my bodyguard and I, two hundred men hand-picked by Prince Stephen the Great to defend my royal flesh, and yet it collapsed nonetheless on the thirsty ground.
My enemies paid for their triumph, paid dearly. For every stripe upon me I took a life, and for each of the fallen by my side, two arrayed against me perished. It was good war. It was cold, and mad with noise, and the stink of a man when his bowels are opened, it was all that I was born to do. An arrow struck my shield where it had splintered under a spear thrust, it glanced off upward and transfixed my lip and my nose, the pain was maddening and the blood poured down my throat. Every breath choked me and each shout sprayed crimson.
Then I saw him and I knew him. A thick brute who had curried my horse, grinned and bowed, now dressed in the armor of my enemy. I remembered no name for him but it must have been he who betrayed our position. I saw him and he saw me and we knew each other. In that moment death passed between us and we were married, tied together in hatred. Stronger than the ropes of seed that tie a woman to a man are the chains of blood that tie a warrior to his enemy. Six men, mixed of his and mine, stood between us, and then three, and then one. That last was my loyal friend, yet I shoved him aside, eager for my nemesis.
With no word spoken we locked arms, his pagan sword to my axe, and with cruel joy he shouldered the very arrow in my face, I fell back as he raised his weapon, but the pain had not felled me, the pain had made me fierce. I cut him through at the knee, at the join of his plates and bones, and he fell, but falling, struck. The blade sheared my side through, and now each breath was mixed with blood from above and below. He crashed upon me, face to face in the ardor of combat, he pinned my weapon so I clawed off his helmet and raked him like a cat while he turned his scimitar, ground it within me, like ice and fire shearing in my side. My other hand found his throat as his face eclipsed the moon, his nose and mouth bleeding into me—or was it my own blood, spat upon him, dripping back?—and even as I crushed his throat I felt the spirit in me slip free.
In an instant all was still and clear. I rose up and the fierce cruelty of battle was replaced, transfigured, as if all I beheld was made of shimmering light. Crystal soldiers beneath me gave silent groans and died but I was above it all, higher still, and I came into the luminous presence of the Almighty.
Son Of Wallachia,
said the Lord unto me,
Is your work finished?
“Oh great Lord,” I said to Him, “Return me to the world, that I may smite the unbelievers in Your holy name!”
Are they not my children too?
“They have rejected your Son! They have turned their backs on salvation and deserve only the scourge and the fire!”
As did the beggars and indigent of your nation, whom you lured with kind promise and then burned alive?
“Christ said for the poor come unto him. If any who died were saved, did I not send them to His presence?”
You swore an oath to Me, child of the dragon. Before the altar at Snagov, you swore to show the truth of christ to your people, if only you were permitted your throne.
“I have kept my promise!”
Indeed? In My sight you have tortured and murdered and disgraced the sacred human form, which is in My image.
“I did as You did to Your son! Is any man better than Christ? Do any deserve less than the hurts He suffered? Every cry and groan was a hymn to Your glory! All that I did, I did in defense of Christendom! Ought I have let the Turk take them instead, and show them the tender mercy of Islam? Ought I have left them in indolence, to laze and fatten, to plot and scheme against me?”
I the Lord am Judge of the world!
“By divine right, I the Prince am judge of my people!”
As you wish. Your will shall be your curse, dragon knight.
Instantly, I felt myself gripped once more by the inclining of Earth, plunging toward the battlefield once again.
Take dominion over mortal flesh, but survive enslaved to it. Take command of the beasts, for you excel them in savagery. You, who would be My equal, mete out death to humankind. But know that for your arrogance, I have made you unclean in My sight, and the touch of purity shall henceforth drive you out. Remain in darkness until you learn, or else perish in your ignorance.
The light drained out as down I fell, and at the moment of deepest dark I was myself again. I felt the painof my face, my side, I felt the agony of the world once more and I screamed, I rose up and cried my rage and misery. A black cloud of carrion birds rose and worse than my side, worse than my mouth, was the thirst that burned in every member. My Rational Soul was unseated and in its place the Animal reigned. I fell upon the dead, lapping the dried blood from armor and weapons, cutting my tongue on dirk and spearhead in my eagerness for more. I fed upon Christian and Muslim alike, I plunged my fingers into the mud and sucked at the battle-gore that seeped to fill the holes.
When I returned to myself—what self? Myself as ghul, as monster, as carrion devil!—I howled again, but this time cursing as a man. I cried to the sky my hatred of God, who had thrust this woe upon me. I swore that as He had made me for His enemy, I would be the direst foe He had fought, a worse Lucifer, a greater Judas, a name to blacken the world and a torment for all humanity.
First, however, I would avenge myself upon my slayers. First the soldiers, then the generals, and perhaps in time the great Sultan Mehmed himself. He will rue the day he challenged a Prince of Wallachia! Beside the evils I intend for him, his own blasphemy will seem a hymn of praise, his sodomy a sacrament, and his cruelty the balm of Gilead.
Clutching my axe and an unbroken shield, I made for Snagov monastery—the abbot there was loyal to me. But before I had gone a mile I scented blood and followed its lure.
Creeping through the chill dawn, I spied the Ottoman camp, the very soldiers who had taken me and mine. Like a hound that spies the hare, I could not be restrained. I rose up, I charged on foot, howling. They started and two were struck motionless, unmanned by cowardice, but the other two kept their wits and fired. Arrows pierced my shield and my flesh, but the hurts were nothing next to the call within me, clotted and dead blood calling for fresh. The guards shrieked the alarm as I fell on them and I was sunk in a delirium of lust for them, they were delicious in my sight, the maddening aroma of their life sweet in my nose and each who crowded forward was a new temptation, a new delight, a new delicacy and I the glutton who would taste them all.
Battle is always a red rapture, but this surpassed in sweetness any berserk fit I felt in life. To bite and kill these lowly Ottoman infantrymen gave me nearly the spiritual joy I had felt killing the pretenders Dan III and Vladislav II, who dared cast lecherous eyes on my throne and claim they had taken my fair nation in adultery. As for the physical bliss! It was transcendent.
I was struck a dozen times, a hundred, but with each kill and taste of blood I knit my flesh anew. Death ought to have come to me twenty times that night, but instead I stole the lives of my slayers, becoming stronger with each sanguine draught. I fought my way to their tents and fires and they fell back. My shield was tattered and I dropped it in favor of a severed arm, that I might sip sweet blood from it as I battled. I would have slain every man of the camp, save for an unforeseen peril, the rising of the sun.
I felt an awful sting, I smelled the charring of my flesh as my enemies rallied, arraying themselves with bows, the cowards, but their feathered sticks were nothing beside the agony of the breaking day. Much as I longed for the slaughtering bliss, I could not drive myself at them, into the light. Mad in terror, I cried out for the sky to fall on me, for the earth to swallow me.
The earth obeyed.
When I arose from the sheltering soil, the Turks had fled their campsite and the shelter of darkness again roofed the sky.
I felt the hunger within me but it was less. Greater was the pain of my burns, sores showing where only the faintest bite of sunlight had fallen.
Alone, I had time to regroup my thoughts. Clearly I was far superior to any mortal—as any fit enemy of God must be. Their blood would be my food, as in living days I fed on their toil. So be it. It is fitting that the greater should meet their needs on the necks of the less.
Is this my fate, then? To be a lash on humanity’s back? It is a duty to which I am fit, for I swear my thirst could drain the world, if only I had time enough and the power.
Yet inside the monster is the man, and the man craves revenge. Without aid I cannot be more than a pest, a small nuisance in the hinterlands of my own nation. No, to oppose and offend the Lord in any meaningful way, I need my throne, for even my terrific hate cannot corrupt all the world unaided.
To truly punish the Most High, I should pervert and corrupt that which is best in the world: The Christian Church. Yet while my hate is fierce for the Catholics who despised me in life, and the Christian rulers who betrayed me, like Matthias Corvinus and his father Hunyadi before him, that is nothing beside my loathing for the Turks. They who imprisoned me when only a child, who harassed me, who humiliated me with their threats and demands for tribute. Now Mehmet moves to put his catamite Radu upon my rightful throne, and that I will not stand. Even though it serves God’s purpose for the nonce, I must slay the great Turk. Yes. I shall start my career of evil with the Ottomans. First I reclaim my throne from them, then I slay the Sultan, and then I negotiate with the new Sultan from a position of strength. For whose strength is greater than one who can hide in any patch of soil, who can refresh himself from any man or beast indefinitely, for whom common blood is the sovereign salve of any injury?
Before I could claim my kingdom, and then the world, I had first to reclaim a fortress. I turned my footsteps toward Snagov monastery, hoping to gather loyal troops on the way. To my shock and disgust, it soon became apparent that the triumph of my enemies was nearly complete. I saw few forces I could approach and demand fealty— my loyal soldiers had all perished by my side, Corvinus’ Hungarians had abandoned me, and the fickle mercenaries in my employ had fled like dogs to lick a new master’s heels.
I did encounter one small group of my secret police, but when I revealed myself they fled in terror, having heard accounts of my death. I gave them something to fear, in truth! Half who broke were run down before their companions, and I slaked my thirst upon their cowardly blood before the eyes of those stern enough to stand and fight. Once more I reminded them of their oaths to me, and having seen the might I now possess, they reconsidered their earlier flight.
With that paltry honor guard, I came at last to Snagov and demanded admittance as their rightful lord. The monks who rowed me across to their island fastness were pale and they trembled, perhaps more than they had even when I was their dread sovereign.
I took myself to the chapel to consult my friend the abbot, and there a dreadful thing befell me. As I opened the door and looked upon the holy ikon, a weakness filled my limbs and I was flung back. The abbot saw me fall and, thinking me wounded in body, ran to my side. Then he realized my wounds were altogether more grievous, and he stood back.
“My lord,” he asked. “What has happened to you?”
“God has flung me from death to life. In battle I fell but, like Christ himself, I have returned!”
“No, my Prince. Not like Christ.” He knelt, not as a vassal kneels in subservience, but as one kneels to lift a fallen child. “The punishment of the Almighty is on you. I can see and feel it.”
For his insolence I would have torn his flesh and made his neck my chalice, but he was across the threshold and I could not reach to strike him.
“You have the debt of blood,” he said to me. “Yes? You feel the bottomless thirst? The sun in the sky punishes you?”
“You know of this curse?”
“I have seen it before. You are wampir now, my lord—a sad and twisted parody of the Savior himself. As Christ died that we might live, you now live by the death of others. As His holy blood became a saving sacrament, your unholy blood is a pestilence, corrupting all who partake… and as He rose again at dawn, you shall die again each sunrise.”
“These are only tales to frighten children!” I spat, but in my heart I knew he spoke the truth. I had become a thing of night terrors, existing only to wreck and destroy all that was good.
“Behold,” he whispered. “Even your tears are red.”
“What can I do? What is left for a creature such as I have become?”
“Repent. All is mutable, my lord. That is the last aspect of your Christian perversion. You change not, age not, and die not, but Christ is rebirth and renewal! Any grievous sin can be undone by His intervention. You have chosen this path, to be a human plague, but you can choose to return to the light as well. Admit your wrongdoing, beg the forgiveness of your Lord, and this change worked upon you can be undone.”
For a moment, I gave myself hope, but I have always taken greater strength from truth, no matter how bitter. The abbot was wrong, I could feel it in my bones, in the very curse that seethed within me. Change was for men, as I had changed from an ally of the Turk to his bitterest foe, as my crown and country changed hands with each assassination and betrayal, as my own father bought his freedom from the Sultan with my captivity when I was but twelve years old.
No longer man, I could be only what I am. There is no redemption for me. I will not change, and neither will God.
I left Snagov burdened by bitter truths. I saw in the abbot’s mirror my twisted countenance and I knew the hell-wolf I had become.
This news left me grieving and heavy at heart, but other news fired me again into rage. The monks had news that my own home, Castle Dracula, is infested by the usurpers. Intolerable! Those sacred walls, built by the bloodied hands of dissident Boyars whom I made haul stones until they dropped into the mercy of exhausted death, them and their wives in their Easter finery toiling for my glory. Am I now to let it rest in the hands of sniveling Radu and his Turks? Never!
Yet as I write this, I am cast down. All but three of my vassals are dead at the hands of the castle’s defenders, and those three cower in madness, fit only to slake my thirst as I wander south. I, Dracula, who repelled the great Turkish invasion, have been flung from my home like a common mendicant.
It was by night we came, and disguised as a Turk I gained admission, slaughtered the door guards and raised the portcullis for my own small band, when I heard from behind me a chortle of laughter and a small round of mocking applause.
I turned to see two Turkish women, garbed for the seraglio, but standing in a doorway that opened to the courtyard.
I have faced untold battle terrors, I have supped in a grove of the impaled and slept easily afterward, but the sight of this pair boiled my heart with fright as nothing ever did in my living days. Yet I bit back this fright with the aid of my wrath and pride. If I am to be compelled to a sinful existence, then by my oath I shall choose my sins.
“Look,” one crooned. “A native whelp has come to bark.”
“Speak a Christian tongue!” I shouted in response. Though I could understand their courtly Turkish, I have often found value in an ignorant seeming.
“If you seek to insinuate your woeful self to the governor here, that place is taken,” said the second, this time speaking German. “But here. Pledge us fealty and we shall give you the shelter of Invictus.” With that, she shrugged her breast free and pierced it, letting blood well up like milk.
“I pledge fealty to no God, demon, or man, and least of all to any woman,” I said. “The name Invictus will suit you poorly when I have shown your remains to the sun!”
The first laughed again. “He thinks ‘Invictus’ is your name,” she trilled.
“Who was your sire, whelp?” asked the other. “Who made you a ghul?”
“God himself!”
They laughed again, and I chose that moment to strike.
There is little point in committing to ink exact means of my defeat. Suffice to say that the Turkish strigoi were swifter and stronger than I, though even now the notion of a woman’s blows upon me causes my teeth to gnash. As they hurled me down the steps of my own residence, they spat upon me, told me I did not even deserve to be their slave, and that I should mark well the inevitable triumph of Invictus, the rulers of all the undead.
My surviving servants were those who fled in terror from those harlots of Invictus, whatever that might be. I write this on paper begged from the abbot, as I crouch in the crypt of some long-forgotten boyar.
The abbot said others were as I am, and the pair in my castle affirms it. This explains much. I had never paid heed to legends of ghuls in Turkey and strigoi here, but as I think back on my experience in Sultan Murad’s court, and the nigh-unbelievable prowess of some who defended Sultan Mehmet’s person during my night attack so many years ago… yes, it becomes clear. If such creatures existed, could they rule? Indeed, what force could stop them? Only their own might pitted against each other.
Yea, as in the world of men one king naturally strikes his brother, so in the world of the dead must one monster naturally compete with others of his ilk. I shall have to learn more of this ‘Invictus’. I shall have to learn more of my nature. To do so I needs must follow those two beasts to their source. I must journey to Adrianople, the Ottoman capital.
When I have the answers I need, I shall return here and teach those bitches the abbot’s lesson—that in this realm, all things may change.
It is the year of the Christians’ Lord 1480 and I have returned to reclaim my castle, at least.
How I have learned upon my five years’ journey! The blood inside me cries, in anger or fear, at the sight of another of my damned ilk. By this means I have seen the thin film of ghulkind who float on top of the human herd, like a skin of ice upon winter water. In the slums of Adrianople’s bazaar I have seen them hide and scuttle, and in the depths of the Sultan’s harem they plot and connive.
‘Invictus’ is simply a cabal among them, intervening itself wherever the mortals’ governments have power. They have the Sultan’s ear but not his heart, for his advisors are wise to their tricks and watch him closely for signs of blood madness.
As I peruse my old notes, I see that the abbot referred to this—that my blood would corrupt any who partook. This is literal truth, as my sniveling brother Radu has learned, to his regret. I came to his window in the form of a bat—another power of the blood that I have chiseled from God’s miserly grasp—and forced myself upon him, not after the perverse fashion of Radu’s sodomite master the Sultan, but in a way perhaps more ghastly yet. Now that my blood runs within him, his Reason begins to sway toward my will.
I have given him a month to dread my next visit, a month to hide in fear and sleep in a sealed chamber. Perhaps tomorrow night, or next week, he will let down his guard and a second taste will make love of me a fire within him. With the third taste, he will be a hollow man, living only to fulfill my whim and wish. I will never rule Wallachia again. My death is too widely known, and the secret undead lying in the Sultan’s seraglio know what I have become. Nevertheless, my evil blood shall make puppet Radu dance upon my strings, not those of his turbaned lover.
The enslavement of men is not its sole use. I have learned how our kind beget. It is not through fumbling and uncertain rutting, but by an altogether more reasonable means. Those who die beneath my fangs can, should I choose it, return by my blood. It is hard, deathly difficult, but for one of true noble lineage the difficult is the commonplace.
I have a daughter now.
Or a wife, or a sister in damnation, it matters not. Human words fail for what Mara is to me. I met her in Adrianople, a beauty stolen from Afric shores a nd sold i nto Turki sh b onda ge. Despite her charms and strength she was being sold on the cheap, for she had murdered a sailor who tried to woo her by force. I saw in her eyes a madness and hate equal to mine. Before purchase, we spoke.
“I was baptized into the Christian church,” I told her. “What think you of that?”
Her answer was to spit in my face.
“I have killed many for much less offense than that. Are you afraid to die?”
“I would cherish death,” she said in her broken Turkish.
“Yes, I believe you. If God, or whatever spirit you revere, came to you and gave you the sword of the angel of death… would you pick it up?”
“What mean you?”
“If you had a weapon to slay at will, unconcerned, would you wield it?”
“Who would not?”
“How would you use it?”
She did not answer with words, but her eyes narrowed and her gaze became distant as she looked at the streets about her.
“Would you kill them all? The children and the women as well?”
“The children would only grow to be vile, and the women would only swell and birth more evil.”
“Then if God gave you a vial of pestilence, that could spread across all Europe and all Asia and your own nation, every nation across the sea… would you open the vial?”
She knew. She did not know my nature, but she knew my questions were not idle.
“Are you the Devil?” she asked, and her voice was all hope.
“I have been called his son,” I said, and brought forth gold to purchase her.
I ignored the name she came with. I called her Mara—my little joke on the Sultan’s mother.
Later, she did not sigh in pleasure when I bit her neck, as many do. Nor did she cry out as I became more savage and hacked at her to bring a faster flow, as most do. When I brought her back, she fed like an animal, as she has each night since. She is magnificent and shows no doubt, no regret, no uncertainty over what I have made her.
“Now, being this, the world makes sense,” she says. Together, alone, we returned to my homeland.
I have once more traveled to Tîrgoviste, and once more fed myself to Radu. As planned he becomes more servile. One more taste, for which he now begs, and my grasp on Wallachia will be all but complete. In the meanwhile, I entertain myself with Mara, showing her how to invert our Curse and make it serve us as power. As I taught, she asked me something.
“What is it like, to be a king?”
“It is very much like this,” I said in reply. “You have power, and the right to do with it as you will. You have might and dominion such that no ordinary man can stand against you. Yet at all times you are aware of greater powers yet, which you must always fear and pacify.”
“What powers? Do you mean God?”
“That is a simpleton’s view. I mean popes and emperors, and the powers that support them. Even an emperor can be held hostage in his own home, should the people of his lands have an excess of anger and insufficient fear. Too, there is always another heir, and there are always those with power to gain by exulting that heir in your stead.”
“I thought you killed all your rivals as children.”
“I made a good try of it, but my relatives excel rabbits in fecundity. For rulers less practical than I, there are even more challengers.”
“But who are the challengers to us, the damned of the night?”
This led me to thought. For in truth, if fear is the great ally of a ruler, how can ones so fearsome as we avoid the thrones of the world?
“I believe it is the changeability of the world,” I said at last. “We are, by God’s affliction, immutable. When the world changes, we are left behind, for maintaining power is always a wrestling match. The complacent ruler is not long for his throne. In my mortal days I was enthroned three times and thrice deposed, I first allied with the Turks and then became their greatest foe, I was baptized Catholic, raised Orthodox, converted back to Catholicism to marry, and died blaspheming God’s name. I allied with the man who helped assassinate my father and was later betrayed when I soldiered beside his son against my own brother. By Hell, my brother Radu once defended his honor against Mehmed with sword and dagger, but now claims the throne as the Sultan’s lover.”
“Certainly there is truth to what you say,” she said. “But are we doomed to be left behind by the world’s mutability?”
“Not while our minds retain Reason. It is clear that God has taken half my Rational Soul, for the lusts and hungers of my Animal Soul are held much less in check thereby. Yet I still can learn, and therefore change, and so long as we can change we can hope. You and I, Mara, are drawn tight between our immutable bodies and our capacity to learn and think and begin anew. This tension would madden lesser souls, but we can draw strength and even grace from it, as a musician draws music from the taut string of his harp. We are given decades from which to view the world and learn its secrets, without men’s distractions of aging and daily toil for bread. If we seize our punishment and make it a gift, while clinging tight to what power of thought we retain, we can be greater than any mortal—indeed, greater than any ghul!”
To demonstrate my point, I rose above her as a bat, circling the room before standing before her again.
“But to what purpose?” she asked.
“Must change have a purpose?”
“Indeed,” she said. “Else all is chaos.”
“What troubles you about chaos?”
Her eyes narrowed. “That what we call chaos is, from another perspective, the hidden hand of God.”
Something in her tone chilled me. I sat, and peered into her eyes. “Explain.”
“You were a Prince, a politician. You schemed and connived to alter the deeds of men. Whose actions are easier to mold, the man who is focused and driven, or the man who is confused and uncertain? You have been a soldier on the field. Which enemy is more readily tricked and destroyed, one with discipline and training? Or a muddled rabble?”
Though only a woman, Mara made great sense, and I shall forever be grateful for what I learned from her that night: That change must emerge from reasoned plan. If you move blindly, you are at the mercy of any who see you.
“Mara,” I said. “I believe you have been sent by the Devil himself to aid me.”
Tonight was the climax of all my plans, and it was delightful. Radu was shocked to learn that there were undead within the court his turbaned master sent to “attend” him. After the second drink of my blood, he was more than ready to believe my words about those two devilish concubines. At my direction, he took them by day. The pretty brace of them, upraised on stakes, were his offering to me.
“Ah,” I said, looking upon them. “Is there any form so fair that it cannot be improved with the proper pedestal?”
I was not sure if they could see me, though I had done them the courtesy of cutting off their eyelids.
“I would love, dearly love, to hear what final words you might offer. Some defiant paean to Invictus? Some futile pleas for pity and release, spiced perhaps with promises of service? Would you abase yourself before Christ, or Allah, or some other virtuous deity? I think that perhaps you might be the type to suffer in dignified silence. My curiosity is deep… and yet, not that deep. No. It is petty to risk myself and my companions for such childish satisfactions. It is beneath me. You shall have no final say.” I turned my face to Mara and said, “Mark well that you drink until the final speck is gone.”
In all truth, my sole intention had been to kill them in a physically gratifying manner. Yet when I took the last sweet dram of blood from one, I felt a new stirring within me, the first caress of a new power. Eagerly, I attended it, and knew— knew as a dove knows the sky, as a dolphin knows the sea— that I could go deeper, could extinguish not only life, but that inner spirit which has no form in this world. I knew it would be delicious, that it would nourish me even as blood could not, and the instant I knew it could be mine, I decided it must be.
What does it mean? Can my power be so great that I can devour a soul—a spirit no longer immortal but only grist for my gluttony? It seems that what I felt could be naught else, yet if it is so then there is truly no permanence, even beyond this life! If what I felt was true, then the immortality promised by Christ the Redeemer and Mohammed the Prophet are both equal lies!
Are we truly spirits cast adrift, impermanent, sparks in the void? Have our great saints and leaders lied to us? Do no fires of Hell await the vicious, and is Heaven void of penitent souls? What God could make us so and yet see fit to punish an individual such as myself with perpetual existence?
Perhaps God is crueler than I. Perhaps the justice, promised by defiant monks from their dying stakes, is just an illusion more vicious than any torment I have devised.
Perhaps this world is all that there is. Perhaps God told me one thing but showed me another, spoke lying words to make me weak while giving my blood the tools of eternal strength…
When I completed my feed, Radu humbly beseeched me, that I might gift him again with my sanguine strength. No meek convert ever begged Christ’s blood so prettily.
Who could resist such imploring? Especially since the gift chained a ruler to my will, utterly, mind and heart.
Through my poor weak little brother I sent away the guards and vassals and lackeys. I had tender virgins brought to slake my thirst (though, in truth, after my feast of Invictus I only killed them for the sake of appearances). And I sat upon my throne with my crown upon my brow, while the recognized Prince of Wallachia capered and clowned for my amusement.
My nation knows it not, but the Impaler Prince rules it once more.
Now the time has come to set aside this journal, diverting though it has been. I no longer need to echo my thoughts back at myself, for I have a world into which I can bellow commands. Tonight I fly back to Castle Dracula, to conceal these papers safely. Tomorrow, the return trip to Tirgoviste— and the dawn of a new state.
Not damned, not thrice damned, but four times cursed is the name of Dracula. Who else in history has been condemned to lose his throne not twice, but four times? Surely I am the plaything of God, or the Devil or malevolent Fortune.
I am wroth unto madness, but I am not surprised.
Radu, by himself, was a poor choice to rule. He prefers love to fear, which is wise for a minstrel but foolish for a Prince. His will was weak, as witnessed by the way the Sultan swayed him into unnatural vice, and I swayed him into unnatural service.
Furthermore, the bonds I placed upon him seem, from the perspective of experience, to have strained overmuch his Reason. I gave him wise commands to keep order in the kingdom and ensure the strength of his position, but a Prince must react moment by moment, not day by day (or night by night). He followed the letter of my commands and would have obeyed their meaning, had he only the mind to discern it. Blinded by his fixed and unhealthy love of me, he did not.
If I had a brighter ink than him with which to scrawl my intentions, I might have ruled by proxy. Now Basarab III claims the throne from Radu, with the aid of a fickle Sultan who suspects, no doubt, my unclean hand in this matter. Ah well.
My final and lonesome retreat is here, Castle Dracula, built by my ancestors and, by my command, rebuilt by my enslaved enemies. Through Radu I have ordered it abandoned and the roads to and from it—rough and ill-used at best—to be torn up and left as mud. A winter and a spring will suffice to erase them completely.
Here I can stay. There are several towns and villages close, within the night’s flight of a bat, and I know that the gypsies will come through these mountains whether there is a road or not. I need fear no thirst.
I can rule a nation no longer. I cannot parley with my equals, I cannot mete out justice by daylight, I cannot command an army when the sun holds me frozen like death.
I will not retake my throne, tonight or ever, until the sun in the sky is no longer my foe. Instead, I turn myself to other matters. Before the conquest of the world, I would be well advised to conquer myself. As a man, I had total selfcontrol, but as one of the strigoi, much eludes me. Here, alone in my keep, I will wrestle this beast within and break it to heel like my hunting-dog.
Ah, but first, there is a final matter to be settled and made orderly. I hear the royal carriage arriving. Basarab will no doubt be disappointed that Radu absconded with it…
Radu died better than I would have expected. First he arranged for his honor guard (a mere twenty troops! Even I had more aiding me when I fell) to walk directly into the trap I prepared. I’m delighted to have my larder so readily stocked.
Then he begged forgiveness for failing me, which lightened my anger somewhat. I told him that I would still give him the reward of eternal life (for that is how I have described our condition to him) if he could endure a test to prove his loyalty.
“Anything!” he promised.
Remarkably, he blanched only a little when I showed him the stake.
I have overseen the impalement of over twenty thousand men, women, children, and one donkey. Radu was different from all of them, and not solely because he was also my father’s child. Radu went willingly, if not eagerly, and lasted as long as any. He said he could feel my blood within him, giving him strength, battling against the wounds that would end him. Fascinating. Was this literally true, or only a fancy of his poetic soul? To the very end, I promised him that after he breathed his last, I would restore him, and more, make him better than he had ever been. Mara and I knew the moment he perished— we could tell from the glaze of his eyes but more, his scent in our nostrils was no longer that of fresh prey, but only of a cold and unappetizing corpse. This too is a puzzling quality to investigate.
“Will you restore him now?” Mara asked me.
“Don’t be foolish,” I replied. “Feed of him as you will.”
Type
Journal, Personal
Signatories (Organizations)