A Matter of Taste

Chapter 2

And the damnable machine is running now. Recording properly, I trust. At last. The miracles of modern electronics.

(The sound of a deep breath.)

Let me begin the narration of this particular segment of my life upon the day of my assassination. That momentous event took place in early winter, toward the end of the year of Our Lord 1476. The scene was a cold and soggy battlefield not many miles from the city of Bucharest, an arena of snow and mud freshly littered with the bones of brave men—these being in the circumstances indistinguishable from those of some men not so brave.

Wet snow had fallen on that morning, and here and there across the trampled field the whiteness of new snow still persisted on the ground, shreds and untouched spots of purity amid a mire of horse manure, something like a warrior's virtue. The picture was enriched with mud and blood, and speckled with the blackness of crows, that old Corvinus symbol, who were attending in considerable numbers to see that good food was not wasted. Also contributing to the visual composition of the scene were the dun and silver of the scattered bodies of men and horses and their equipment—some of both species had been armored. Here and there the brightness of a fallen banner caught the slowly declining light of a gray winter afternoon.

(Another deep breath, almost a sigh.)

To tell the story that concerns me here, I need describe neither the devices of those banners, nor the causes which they represented. Suffice it to say that the battle in which those men and banners fell had been an honest one, as battles go. It might not be strictly honest for me now to claim victory for the side that I commanded. But many of us had survived, and we had been left in possession of the field.

Against the treachery that followed, however, I was not so successful.

As the scene I intend to describe opens, the forces loyal to me—save for a handful of frightened camp followers, unwilling to do anything but watch—had already been drawn away, by deliberately falsified reports. And three traitorous officers, reinforced by a handful of men-at-arms they had suborned to their cause, had caught me alone, away from my Moldavian bodyguard. With drawn swords those three had surrounded me and set upon me.

At the last moment I was not completely taken by surprise. More than one of the attackers felt the bite of my own blade before I was disabled, and at least one of my chief opponents—his name was Ronay—was rather seriously hurt. Oh, I was good with the sword, yes, but not that good. Much of the credit for my prolonged survival against such odds was due to the reluctance of the common soldiers to attack me. Those men were still almost too much afraid of me to be of any use to traitors.

Alas, at three to one the odds were still too great. Let me name the foul three here: they were Ronay, Basarab, and Bogdan, the last-named the chief instigator and leader of the plot. In my capacity as Prince of Wallachia I had trusted all three of these vile men, had treated them as my comrades on the field of battle. All had been loaded with honors and with material rewards.

Nay, I will go further. Almost, my attitude had been that of a father or an uncle toward them. The traitorous trio were all young, and I was well over forty. But when they came to kill me, they had no easy time of it, for all that.

Even as I fought, grunting and gasping for breath, my feet slipping in snow and mud, I made a silent, mighty vow—nay, it was more than a vow—that I would never die until I had avenged myself upon these three for their treachery.

… and now, more than five hundred years later, trying to tell my story, trying to grapple with my own beginnings, I relive as in a dream that struggle to the death upon that field of fading light. Peering toward those distant figures through the haze of centuries, nay, through the fog of death itself, I am no longer able to say with certainty which of that day's far-off events I observed with my own eyes, and which I have come to know of only through the words of other witnesses.

The first serious wound I suffered on that day was made by Basarab's sword, when his point came into my left side, under my cuirass.

From that moment on the three of them were certain that they had me. Ronay could afford to retreat, nursing his own hurt. Bogdan and Basarab began to play with me, making sure to keep me between them—though at first it was a cautious game they played, knowing me to be still deadly dangerous.

I fought on, though weakening, ignoring their jibes and insults, saving what breath I had for fighting. But I could not face two skilled opponents at once. One of them would stab me, from behind, and then the other. I suffered at least half a dozen additional wounds before I was no longer capable of resistance.

Bah, I have no wish to dwell upon the grisly scene of my own butchery. Yet still it must be told.

When I fell for the last time, going to my knees, unable to rise again, unable any longer even to raise my weapon in defense, someone struck me with a sword hilt from behind and sent me sprawling. Then someone else's boot kicked at my sword, until it had been knocked out of the reach of my weakening fingers.

More kicks and shoves, with booted feet, turned my bleeding body over so that I lay face upward. I was trying to reach the dagger at my belt, but my knife too was yanked away. Then a sharp blade came stabbing into my unprotected groin; the muscles of my lower body spasmed uncontrollably. Pain fashioned a sound, that I suppose must have been almost inhuman, and drove it upward from my throat.

The body on the ground continued to gasp for breath.

"Hold his head still." This was the voice of Bogdan, still panting, issuing an order. I could perceive his face, fierce and triumphant, looming over me.

In a moment someone—I thought it was Ronay, come back to savor my last moments—was crouching just behind me, knees vising my head in place. My arms no longer moved; my muscles and my strength were gone; all I had left was nerves and blood.

The point of Bogdan's sword loomed close to my face, approaching my eyes. Elsewhere I have related how my whole life's allotment of fear came to be used up before I was old enough to have a beard. So here, let me say simply that it must have been without fear, with hatred only—say rather hatred glowing with a helpless rage—that I gazed up at him. Perhaps I would not have turned my head had I been able.

"I will not die—" I told him, choking on my fury, and my own blood, and could not find the breath to say the rest.

"Oh, no?" The swordpoint feinted even closer to my eyes, then moved a small handsbreadth away. "Not yet you won't, good Prince Drakulya. Not this moment. But soon. Very soon."

I understood that Bogdan had spared my sight because he wished me to continue to see what was happening. Perhaps he craved also to see in my eyes at last some expression of yielding, of despair, at least of fear. In that hope, at least, he continued to be disappointed.

In the next moment I could feel the cold steel of Bogdan's blade slide inside my left cheek, the sensation transforming itself into the heat of fresh pain as the blade ripped its way out.

"What words of defiance now, Drakulya?"

I would have given him some, had I not been choking, more seriously than before, on my own blood.

"The end of your triumphant smile at last, good prince. How I have longed to see it wiped away! And now, why should I leave you a nose, to carry in the air so arrogantly? Half a one will serve you just as well, for the short time of breathing you have left."

During the course of my next few gasping, gurgling breaths, Bogdan's sword did a fair job of cutting and peeling away a sizable portion of my face. In the background I could hear Basarab laughing.

Suddenly Ronay, speaking in a low voice, pausing at intervals to grunt with the discomfort of his own wound, ventured to suggest that since the Sultan was going to pay them a good price for my head, it might be as well to leave my face at least recognizable.

Bogdan made a sound expressing doubt. The suggestion had come somewhat too late. I will not die!! (There is a pause on the tape.)

Ah, the images fade, true memories blending imperceptibly into the knowledge of things that I could only have imagined, heard later from the lips of some other eyewitness, or reconstructed by logic.

Or—is it possible? Possible that, in some way I still cannot understand, my soul—if it is permissible to use the jargon of modern physics—that my soul, I say, quantum-tunneling the barrier of death, I might have observed every detail of my own butchery, my spirit hovering out of the body though not yet fully detached from it?

I WILL NOT DIE!!!

Pain could no longer elicit the smallest outcry from the body, and it had ceased even to twitch under the ministrations of Bogdan's blade. Presently I ceased even to breathe. Shortly after that, some providential distraction, probably a report that my Moldavians were near, drew my enemies' attention away. (Let me add parenthetically that before succumbing to this distraction, Bogdan, turned back, suddenly suspicious, taking no chances, and cut entirely through my neck.)

The distraction, I say, was providential, because as soon as my enemies were out of sight some of my loyal though humble friends among the camp followers mentioned above, displaying considerable courage in the midst of their grief, made a brave effort to preserve my poor clay from the further indignities that the traitors and eventually the Sultan would certainly have inflicted upon it.

This effort naturally required that they substitute some other body for my own—the mere disappearance of my corpse would not have been acceptable to the traitors. (Though now that I think back on it, what a delicious superstitious fear it would have provoked among them!) The near obliteration of my face, to the point where my loyal friends themselves had difficulty in recognizing me, made their task considerably easier.

Also a great help to them was the fact that my corpse lay on a recent battlefield, surrounded by fresh candidates for substitution.

A selection was quickly made from among these, and a partial change of armor and clothing was effected, no easy matter in itself—have you ever tried to dress a corpse? Quick cosmetic surgery was performed upon the face of my replacement—his hair and mustache were already an approximate match. Body build was generally similar. Height is irrelevant among those who have become permanently horizontal. And given the muddy condition of the field, one of its occupants tended to look a great deal like another anyway.

To shorten a somewhat lengthy episode, which I am finding increasingly painful to relate, let me say at once that the replacement was a success. When Bogdan and his two close associates came back, they abandoned with scarcely a glance the hacked-up torso and limbs they thought were mine, picked up by its dirty hair the head of pseudo-Drakulya, and at once packed this grisly object away in a cask of salt to start its journey to the Sultan. There was, I suppose, hardly any point in trying to clean the flayed thing up. Much later I heard that the trophy was indeed exhibited upon some palace gate or wall, the head of the dread Lord Impaler, Kaziklu Bey, brought down at last, only to be so elevated among his enemies.

But from that day of my assassination, it was long, long, before the Sultan ever entered into my thoughts again.

Meanwhile my own body, unhappily disjunct, had been conveyed from the field by my friends in greatest secrecy, bundled in its two pieces upon the back of a mule. Darkness had fallen long before the corpse reached a place of sanctuary, where another friend or two appeared to clean it up and lay it out for honorable if secret burial.

This sanctuary where my remains had come to rest temporarily was a farm not far from the battlefield, and also not far from the island monastery of Snagov.

A rough plank table had been constructed, in some outbuilding, for the job that had to be done, and on this my body was laid out supine, head just a little distant from neck stump, a tall candle at my feet and another near my detached head. During the following preparations, these candles took turns in extinguishing themselves, for no good reason that I could see. Perhaps there was more of a draft than I could feel.

Two of the farm women did most of the actual corpse-washing. Meanwhile a handful of other people came and went, to marvel and to grieve.

And, of course, to pray over my dismembered body. The prayers as I recall were for the most part Catholic, for I had been and remained a dutiful convert from the Orthodox faith into which I had been born.

Among the topics of conversation addressed by those preparing me for burial was the fact that my grave would probably be only temporary, that the late unhappy prince would want to be moved someday to a prepared vault hidden beneath a certain castle.

But for the present all concerned would be satisfied, could I but be laid peacefully to rest in some soldier's grave, unmarked and shallow, humble as most such are, and lonelier than most. Somehow I was to be accorded at least the minor dignity of a plain wooden coffin, the best my friends could manage, and the sounds of its construction resounded through the night.

One at least of my mourners had come from the nearby monastery, where, as he said, only he and one other were aware as yet of the fact that my body had been saved, and my funeral preparations were quietly under way. The two who knew the secret would try to keep it, but the speaker considered it inevitable that eventually the story would spread through their ranks.

He also mentioned that Ronay had sought shelter in the monastery for treatment of his wound. I had richly endowed this establishment, as well as several others, whilst I was still capable of breath, and when I heard this it seemed to me ungrateful of its abbot now to thus comfort and encourage my enemies.

Shortly after the monk had spoken of Ronay, the people in attendance on my corpse had a bad few moments, when both candles inexplicably went out at once. Fortunately for their peace of mind, a fire was available—a small one in a brazier, no one wanted to keep a corpse too warm—and the darkness never became absolute. The tapers were easily relighted.

To begin with, the butchered body was stripped of its begrimed and bloodstained garments, the borrowed ones along with whatever items of its proper clothing it still retained. Most of these being hopelessly damaged, they were taken to another room to be consigned to the fire. Parenthetically I may add that I was oddly touched, later, when I heard that a few scraps of bloodstained cloth had been retained, in the manner of holy relics, by some of the humble folk who had considered themselves happy and fortunate under my rule.

A little later, by chance, all of the attendants were out of the room at the same time, probably getting more water and cloths. As the first two returned, they stopped abruptly, and the more timid one smothered a little outcry.

Somehow my head, detached as it was, had in the interval of their absence rolled or shifted its position slightly. I have no good explanation of how such things can happen. The one dark eye still visible amid the mutilations was wide open, its fiery glare directed into nothingness. The bloody jaw now gaped more widely than before, the tattered lips that no longer really formed a mouth hanging in a bloody fringe around that silent, shouting grin. At least one of the breathing onlookers, to judge by a remark he muttered later, got the impression that those jaws were shouting, a great bellowing of breathless defiance.

In fact there was scarcely a sound in the room, save for the quickened breathing of the attendants and a steady, remote dripping. Water, either inside or outside the shed. Outside rain now fell alternately with sleet, making it a dismal night altogether.

Trembling slightly, but firmly confident in the power of their prayers to protect them against the things of night and evil, the corpse-washers examined the body again to make sure that nothing else had changed, and there was no drip of blood. No, the body of Vlad Drakulya was no longer really bleeding at any point. The raw lips of his many wounds were sealed with clots. When presently, in the continued process of washing, most of these blood clots were dislodged, there appeared beneath them the unmistakable signs of pink, fresh scarring, as if some healing process of near-miraculous rapidity had begun before death supervened. One of the attendants made some muttered comment about this; the other one told her to shut up.

But the first woman was not finished. "Now you can see both of his eyes," she remarked when a gory wrinkle of loosened forehead had been tugged and smoothed back into what was more or less its proper position.

There was some difficulty about getting the eyes to stay shut; in itself this is not uncommon with corpses of a fair degree of freshness. No doubt even the observed movement of the head was not totally without precedent. The traumatized jaw muscles, or what Bogdan's sword had left of them, might well have spasmed once again.

"Ought we not to sew up some of these gashes? Would his face look better with stitches in it, or—

"No time for sewing now." The face—if the surface they were contemplating was still deserving of the name—was going to look frightful in the extreme, whatever the corpse-tenders did or did not do.

"I suppose you're right. No time. Wash him, clothe him decently, put him into a box and underground." Afraid that my enemies might finally have tumbled to the trick, or that some informer might betray the substitution of another corpse, they were trying to get it all done, including the burial, before dawn.

And now a priest—he was not the first of his calling to do so on this night—came into the presence of the body from which, all onlookers were quite certain, the soul had permanently departed. Again prayers were recited for the repose of the departed spirit. For a man of notably bad reputation, even for a prince, even in this notably wicked time and place, this one seemed to have no lack of friends who wished to help him—as soon as he was gone. Perhaps some of those who prayed for his soul were afraid not to do so. Ah, would that they had all been so brave and industrious in his defense before he ceased to breathe—but perhaps my protests, particularly at this late date, are churlish and unfair.

Meanwhile, as we have mentioned, other hands had been at work in the hasty construction of a coffin. The torso with its limbs, garbed in some crude but decent cerements, was now laid reverently within. The coffin-makers had calculated the length to a nicety, avoiding any need to lay the prince's head in his lap or under his arm like a pumpkin. The severed member fit into its proper place, albeit a trifle snugly, just above the neck.

My dagger had been picked up on the field and brought along, and now, along with some jewels of moderate value and a crucifix, was put into the coffin. Someone quickly and quietly removed the jewels again, at the last moment before the lid was put on. The wrists were crossed upon the breast, the dagger rested near the hands, and it seemed to one of the attendants that the right hand and arm had shifted position slightly, doubtless because of the bumping around and shifting that the box was getting, and that the lifeless fingers were curving, even tightening noticeably, around the hilt.

A man's voice, beginning to grow ragged with strain and tiredness, announced: "His eyes have come open again; the lids popped back as soon as I took the coins away."

"Well, let them be open, then." The elder attendant was more phlegmatic—and not about to send off any real coins for burial. "It will not matter to the soul. Or to the body, either, at the Last Trump. And I tell you we have no time. Bogdan's men may have discovered that they're sending the Sultan the wrong head. It's not impossible they'll come here searching for the right one. We must have the burial completely finished before dawn."

"And I wish we could do something to reattach the head." One of the younger conspirators, quite a worrywart, still fretting, reached to clasp the skull with both hands to readjust its position slightly. He tugged, and blanched, and snatched his hands back. He opened his mouth to remark on what he had discovered, but then changed his mind, closed his lips firmly, and forebore to say a word.

Small wonder he kept silent. It wasn't really possible that head and neck could have knitted themselves together. Instead it was possible, quite possible—in fact it was much more likely—that he was going mad.

No one else repeated his discovery, or shared his mad delusion. In a few more moments, the last loyal farewells were said, the last formal prayers muttered, and the lid nailed more or less adequately onto the coffin. Then the silent burden was hoisted on shoulders, carried outdoors, shoved into a wagon, and borne joltingly away.

The journey in the wagon took much less than an hour, and yet the small clearing in a woods where the coffin was unloaded seemed a completely isolated place, quite out of sight of any road or human habitation.

Two men had been here for some time, digging by the light of a shaded lantern, and the grave by general consent was pronounced deep enough as soon as its intended occupant arrived. The last of the diggers climbed out hastily. The lowering of the box into the grave and the shoveling in of earth were the work of only a few moments; a great deal more time was spent in tamping down the earth, scattering the inevitable remainder of loose soil, and in general concealing the fact that here an interment had taken place. The next snow would hide the remaining traces of disturbance, probably until spring; and doubtless by then the likelihood of a search would be remote.

But the gravediggers, having taken careful note of certain landmarks, assured themselves that they would have no trouble in finding the grave of their beloved prince again, once things had calmed down and it became feasible to think of moving him to the secret place beneath his castle.

That relocation was eventually to be accomplished. But not by those who planned it on the day I fell.