Chapter Text
Outside, rain drops chattered on the mossy stone roof of the Basilica of Saint Sebastian. The sunlight that glowered through the stained glass windows on that Easter morning was sulky and dull.
As on every Sunday, Father Thomas stood with his back to the congregation as he said the words of the Mass. Vlad's eyes were drawn to the statue of Saint Sebastian. The arrows piercing his bleeding body lit by dozens of hopeful candles as the saint's face twisted in ecstatic joy.
His mother put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. He returned to looking at Father Thomas' back. Eventually, Father Thomas held the Eucharist high above his head for all to see as the church bells rang. Deep old Peter and high sweet Agnes.
Everyone in the pews straightened. All the long year, this was as close as they got to the consecrated host. But this was Easter Sunday. This was the day of Communion with Christ.
This was the first Easter that Vlad was old enough to confess his sins and take part in the Communion.
Father Thomas turned. "Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce Qui tollit peccata mundi."
Vlad looked up to the statue of Jesus hanging on the cross over the altar. Painted blood frozen in plaster from the thorns digging into Jesus' face. There was blood from the angry wounds in his hands and feet. Blood from the lash marks upon his back. Blood from the jagged spear wound on his side. The painted blood of Christ glistened in the candle light. The air was thick with the scent of burning tallow and incense, warmed bodies in wet wool, and the rain outside.
His mother guided him forward. Vlad knelt before Father Thomas.
Father Thomas said, "Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen."
He placed the wafer in Vlad's mouth and it was transmutated into the flesh of Christ that he chewed between his teeth. Father Thomas held up the silver sacramental cup to Vlad's lips and it was the blood of Christ in Vlad's mouth. Coppery and sweet. He held that taste and thought, "God is everywhere and sees everything. God is in my mouth." He swallowed not sure if that was profane. He looked to the smiling statue of Mary Mother of Christ, Queen of Heaven, and prayed. Certain that she would intercede if it was.
Three weeks later, Vlad's father sent Vlad to the east to be the Ottoman Sultan's hostage and a janissary in his army with one thousand other Transylvanian boys.
His mother wept over him. "Hold Christ in your heart, and he will watch over you." She gave Vlad a cross of gold to wear always about his neck.
His father put a heavy hand upon Vlad's shoulder, firm to the edge of pain and said, "Remember my son, you are the heir to the Prince of Transylvania and may not always think of your own needs, but must put those of all your people first."
Vlad put on the cross and said, "I will, Mother." He'd looked up to his father wearing the armour of the Order the Dragon, which had been formed to fight the Ottomans and heresies. Though he'd only just turned thirteen, he understood his father's meaning. He said, "I will, Father."
The janissary instructors told them that were going to be remade for the Sultan Murad. Vlad protested and earned the lash. When his instructors made all the boys run in the burning heat of day, when they were denied food and sleep, when the lash fell on them, he tried only to hold Christ in his heart and speak Christ's word. He tried.
But he wasn't as strong as Saint Hippolytus, who was torn apart by horses for faith, or Saint Ignatius of Antioch who was eaten by lions for love of Christ, or Saint Stephen who smiled as he was stoned because he was going into the next life.
In the empire of the Ottoman, neither a Christian nor a Jew was allowed to ride a horse or bear a weapon. Vlad was in the East to make alliances for his people. He could not do that if he did not ride and he did not wield a sword.
He was a prince.
He put on his own armour, still small for his body was yet growing, in the style of the order of the Dragon. He did not say it was red for the blood Christ gave to wash away sin. If his captors, teachers, brothers-in-arms didn't know it, then he had no need to tell them. He took off the cross of gold and buried it in the chest of his belongings. He felt as if he was burying himself with that cross. He felt like he wore a cloak of lead like a Pharisee pacing the Eighth circle of hell for the sin of denying Christ.
He dragged his steps forward. He was the son of a Prince. Leaden steps need not bother him.
He gave himself over to his training without complaint. He studied the Quran, logic, literature, and horsemanship. He ran in his armour under the burning sun and the dull soggy heat of afternoon along the Black Sea. He learned about the Prophet and Allah. He learned about the Malayka, Allah's messengers, beings created from light without will of their own. He learned about Shaytan, for the Muslims did not believe that Satan had once been a Malayka, or angel. They believed Shaytan to be the king of the jinns, beings created from fire, who had as free a will as man, and might help or torment mankind according to their whim.
He saw a jinn while on campaign suppressing a rebellion in Egypt.
Their entire company had been tormented all that day by white sand mites blowing in the hot wind into their faces. No matter how they adjusted cloth across their mouths, the tiny insects found their way through to bite and sting. They seemed a part of his reasonless ache.
They had just come to the ruins of an ancient city. They filed past the ragged remnants of a great statue of which only the black polished stone foot remained. It was being battered at by a whirling column of those same white sand mites. At the centre was a sort of illusion of shimmering heat that almost seemed to be a man. One of the Janissaries, Amad, only a few years older than Vlad, joked, "Egypt had always been a land of rebellion. See, even now the Egyptian fleas attack their betters." He nocked an arrow and let it fly into the whirlwind.
As it struck the whirlwind, it did not pass through. Rather the shimmer of heat within snapped it in half and laughed, high and lilting in the noon day sun.
The column of sand mites shifted away from the great foot and engulfed Amad. At first he merely swatted at them, then as red bloomed about his face and neck from a thousand bites, he screamed from the back of his bucking horse. He clawed at his own armour and fell to the ground as men shouted around him. "It's a jinn." They called upon Allah, while their commander stood frozen.
Vlad called out orders, quite forgetting it was not his place. "Fall back. Out of the city." Men raced away while the whirlwind threw sand in the air, laughing.
A voice called out from behind a stone building, "This way." Another from behind a stone arch said, "No, this way." The men fell out of their ranks. They broke off from the main column and through the remnants of once vast streets.
Sand mites flew in a continuous wind in their faces. Vlad grabbed a red pennanted lance from a much older janissary and waved it in the air. "Follow me." They followed him. They came to a wide plaza before a great stone pyramid and went no further as the horses refused to take a step more.
Laughter echoed through the ruins, and turning back, he saw the shimmering shape walking towards them followed by the whirlwind as a dog might follow its master. Vlad was certain they were for the grave, when a deep voice from below his own feet boomed, "Salt." Then he remembered. They all remembered what they had been taught. They grabbed handfuls of precious salt from what remained of their supplies and tossed it into the wind.
The sand mites dispersed and the wind died away too late to save those already lost. A third of their company rode swiftly out of that haunted place.
That night, as Vlad sat by the campfire watching bats swoop and swirl in quick darts over the flames to scoop up the insects that were attracted to its light, he could only cheer them on and thank God that he had survived.
Vlad earned a commendation for his actions, and the command of that company. While the commander earned the loss of his head. Vlad led his men ruthlessly in the battle of Cairo. He told himself that he was fighting Muslims, so this was a sort of holy war, though the Egyptians were only in rebellion with their Ottoman rulers and some were Coptic Christians besides, but those were heretics and in any case Christian princes waged war on each other all the time. He told himself there was no sin in it. No sin as he caused prisoners to be impaled as Saint Thomas had been impaled. The more ruthless he was, the less likely there would be further rebellion. It was for their own good. This reasoning did not stifle the smell of the forest of bodies he made there. He could hardly breathe for the stench. He told himself that he did not need air, so long as he did his duty.
Vlad rose in rank. He was sent to study in the harem of the Sultan himself, where Janissaries and officials of great promise were given further education.
He slept in the bed next to Mehmet, the son of the Sultan, who was a few years younger than Vlad. They whispered to each other in the dark as boys and young men sometimes do. Mehmet whispered, "My mare, Ayesha, is descended from the Prophet's own horses. She has a white spot on her hind leg. That means that she can run as fast as the wind."
When they snuck out of the dormitory and into the stables, Vlad fed Ayesha carrots. He laughed as she lipped at his hand. He examined the speed inducing spot and said, "She's beautiful." It was a simple truth that he almost thought he'd forgotten.
When they were found laughing, Vlad took the punishment for both of them. He was a janissary officer and Mehmet the son of the Sultan, and heir to the empire. He took his lashes willingly. They weren't the first or the last.
That was when he became Mehmet's brother. Not in battle. That came later.
Vlad was at Mehmet's side a year later when the messenger came into room where Mehmet was studying geography. Mehmet spoke with the messenger behind a screen on the balcony. He came back wide eyed and serious. "My father has abdicated. He has withdrawn to a contemplative life. I am the Sultan." He looked down at the maps of the Ottoman lands and the countries that surrounded them. He said, "When the Hungarian King heard of this, he broke his truce with us and began invading."
This was not fair. Vlad should not have to put aside his cross for his people, while Mehmet's father was able to abandon his people and son to study Allah. Vlad didn't even notice when his hands slapped on the table, rattling the silver and glass decanter of sweet apple tea. He said, "You must write your father a letter and tell him to take back the throne."
Mehmet said, "And say what? He's my father, I cannot tell him what to do. I must honour him."
Vlad glared at his friend, and could not have said where his feeling of suffocation came from. It did not matter. He'd long since learned to do without air to breathe. "You must write to him and say that either he should come back and take the throne and lead the army against the Hungarian King, or you will command him as his sultan to lead your army. Either way, he does not get to give up."
Mehmet, his brother in all but blood, laughed. Sultan Murad took back his throne, and Vlad was sent in Mehmet's place, to be his eyes. The army shed Christian blood at the battle of Varna.
Vlad wielded his sword against the troops of an oath breaker, because that was what the King of Hungary was. Not a Christian, but someone who had broken his promise. Though the spot where the cross should hang about his neck fairly burned him. He did his duty. He was exemplary.
He shed blood for the Ottomans. He shed a great deal of blood. He made a new forest along the border. The higher the rank of the officer, the higher the stake. On the post for each was written in Latin and Turkish, "As Allah is a word, so suffer the last breathes of those who broke their word."
He tried to keep Christ in his heart.
He well earned the name, Kazikli Bey, Impaler Lord. His soul was as tarnished as a silver chalice left untended in the rain. If his fate in the next life was born in his actions in this one, he was surely damned. The armour that he wore for the Order of the Dragon seemed stained in other blood. He was with Mehmet at the fall of Constantinople, the last stand of Christianity in the East. He shed the blood of Byzantium. He was there when Hagia Sophia was made into a mosque.
It had to be enough. His father had died in the winter of the year. His people were as vulnerable as sheep without a shepherd. He cleaned the blood from his sword. He said, "Please, my brother, let this be enough. Release me from my service. My people need me to lead them."
"Of course," said Mehmet, who put his hand on Vlad's shoulder, still plated under red steel. "But you know, I still must require my tithe even from my brother."
Vlad bowed his head and promised. "Your tithe of silver will be paid."
He paid it. He kept the Ottoman content. He felt safe enough to fall in love.
Mirena told him, "The next life is born from this one. If you have but a tear on your cheek and Christ in your heart, you won't be turned away from the gates of heaven. Though," she put her hand upon his cheek and smiled with swift, sweet compassion, "we may need to have a great many masses sung to ease your wait in Purgatory."
He thought he knew what love was. He told her, "The only Purgatory would be to be from your side."
He kissed the crosses dangling from her ears and gave himself over to love. He gave his promises and she gave her vows. Neither of them oath breakers. Upon their wedding night, she kissed the scars upon his back and said, "I'm sorry to see them, and yet am not. They are a sign that you have gone through much and come out the other side."
"Purgatory," he whispered and cupped her face for a kiss. Felt her arms wrapped around him and breathed in peace that night.
On all the Easter mornings that followed, when the priest held the cup to his lips, Vlad had only to listen to the promise of Communion with Christ. "Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea," and taste the blood of Christ in his mouth to feel his tarnish fall away. He was as untarnished as his silver wedding ring upon his finger. As untarnished as Mirena's smile as she held their newborn son, Ingeras, to her breast and gave their child suck.
He felt something fierce, like a lance that was on fire pierce his heart, at the sight. With Ingeras' each tiny breath, it was if that lance was pulled in and out of his heart, piercing his very entrails, leaving him all on fire with a great love that was both painful and sweet. In that moment, he could not even conceive of how his father had sent him to the Ottomans. How Abraham had taken Isaac into the desert to be sacrificed by his own hand.
Perhaps the seeds of what followed came from his choices in those years of peace. Perhaps he failed as a Christian because when he heard word that the witch, Baba Yaga, had been seen north of Castle Dracula, he did nothing. He left her in peace. Perhaps he failed because he did not drive out all the Romney from his lands when that one cursed the miller in Volsa to become a ravenous beast, half man and wolf, who feasted on human flesh during the full of the moon. He hung the one and had the other shot with a silver arrow blessed by the Monks of Cozia Monastery. Perhaps he failed because when the King of Hungary came to him offering him absolution if he joined the Kings of Europe in Crusade against the Ottoman, he turned the oath breaker away.
How else on that Easter Sunday, when the Turks came to demand their thousand boys, and appeals to Mehmet had failed, could he have broken his trust with his people to save his son when he had scorned to break his oaths for Holy Crusade.
How else could he have climbed that crag and given himself over to a monster?
He gave himself over to the night and forsook the day. He could endure three days. He should endure three days as penance for his sins. Christ had endured three lightless tortured days in Hell. He could endure this for his people. For his family.
It was only as he drank the blood of the vampire that he understood. Coppery and sweet in his mouth. It was only as he died that he understood. One life was born from the other.
He saw with the night's eyes. A single owl stooping upon a wood rat. A pack of wolves hunting a deer. Thousands of bats swarming everywhere though the forest, tiny and insignificant. Cracking insects' armour with their sharp teeth. He thought for one moment, "This is how God sees," and would have recoiled at the hubris of his own sacrilege, but he had not the time. Already the candle mark hours of his three days burned away leaving only the pooled wax of hope.
Vlad shattered into tiny bats smaller than his hand. Hundreds of sharp eyes made to catch what little light the night allowed. From every eye, seeing the cloud of bodies that was himself. Hearing the swarm of himself. Hundreds of voices crying short and continuous calls. Each voice within him distinct and separate and connecting the whole with measured time as well as sound. Intoxicating, like sledding down a snowy hill as a boy when that white blanket was a joy and the feast of Saint Nicholas was near. The rush that made him want to go faster and farther until his sled was kindling. Until he was spread across the forest and the mountains and saw everything and was everywhere in his princedom.
He saw the Romany in their camps. They watched him wreathed in silver chains that burned.
He scattered farther still.
He saw a dozen villages strung through the forest clinging to scattered cliffs and stone walls. His people were huddled close to their fires.
He scattered farther still.
He saw the witch, Baba Yaga, in her chicken legged house lurching through the forest. She waved a wooden spoon at him, or the part of him that flew near her. That part of him landed on the spoon and she grabbed him in a wide fingered hand. Her nails pressing ineffectively into his tiny squirming flesh. She said, "What can you father be thinking, sending you out like this?" She held him close to the sags of her face. "Focus, son of Dracul. This is my home too." Then she said words in a language that was not Latin or Greek or Turkish or Transylvanian.
It was almost painful to be snapped back under a single coat of skin. Almost.
Focus. He needed to stay focused.
The heady rush when the Ottomans attacked was an excellent focus. He knew how to kill. Kill and kill and kill. He was very good at that.
He was too good. After the battle, he heard the beat of Mirena's heart like a war drum. The warm scent of her blood just below the surface. The thickness of her skin away. While his own skin had lost the scars of his suffering. He was new made in damnation. He held to the hope that he had but to resist that thirst to regain his scars and save his soul.
He sent her and his people on ahead. He was another wolf to threaten them. He raced after when he could.
Almost not in time. His hundreds of selves swirling through the forest like a spear. Making calls that relied on an intimate understanding of sound and time. He saved Mirena. He saved Ingeras. Whirling and killing in the forest.
When his own people realized what he was and tried to burn him alive, he burned with the sin of wrath. He'd done all this; sacrificed his flesh; imperilled his soul, all for them. Some little voice within him whispered, "That is Pride. That is Wrath. That is the lie of love." He ignored it.
He told himself that they were the lambs for the slaughter. He was not the wolf. He was the shepherd. He clung to that.
The night came when he called. Thousands, upon thousands of tiny lives, swirling and swarming. They could be his right hand. Crack the earth with their calls. They could be his sharp snapping teeth made to crush the armour of insects. The Ottomans were insects. Locusts. An infestation.
He was everywhere and he could see everything.
It was his own pride that had him scatter and leave the monastery to fight the Ottomans. He left Mirena to fall alone from the bell tower. He raced, half man and half flight of bats, but he could not bend time fast enough, for all his myriad selves beat their wings and called.
The clay earth from which all men are descended, broke her. She lay brittle and bleeding in his arms. He'd made her a promise once. He made her a promise again. He'd felt the lance of love pierce his heart. What was a soul to that? But that she'd go to heaven where he could now never go. He drank her blood down, hot and sweet with life.
As she lay empty in his arms, he prayed to her for intercession and mercy, for who else was there left to pray to. For surely, she'd needed no masses to take her straight into the deepest heaven where the saints dwelled. He shrouded what he did on the earth from the sight of the light with a dark blanket of clouds. As if that could shroud the gaze of heaven. At least he was dead now, and had no more need to breathe.
He made an unholy sacrament of his own. He walked among the dying in the monastery and called out, "Who wants vengeance?"
A monk who had called him a demon during the day called out, "Yes!" Dying sisters holding each other said, "Yes!" The dying whispered, "Yes," with their very last breaths. He gave them damnation. He transmutated the lambs into wolves.
He filled the night with them. They filled the Ottoman camp with screams. It was right that the battle with Mehmet was painful. This was his brother. Although, he could not have said which of them was Judas with the river of silver. He killed Mehmet and almost heard an echo of laughter. Perhaps it was the laughter of an djinn that he remembered as he named himself the son of the Devil.
He saw his son Ingeras to safety and he opened the sky to the sun. He tried to die to save the world. To destroy the plague of the dead he himself had let loose. In later years, he came to understand this was pride, just as the vampires who followed him suffered from wrath.
A Romney, Shkelgim, saved him as he burned, and that weakness that had always been in him, was grateful. Shkelgim dragged what should have died into shadow. Vlad suckled at a wrist and his scars fell away. He drank and drank and drank. He who had spent so many years in a soldier's privation, gave in to gluttony. When he saw what he had done, Vlad became mist, dispersing even from the body of sinful clay his creator had given him.
Still even as that cold mist lingering in the thickest trees, he could not stop the feeling of the piercing fiery lance of love.
When Ingeras was crowned, Vlad roosted in the eaves of the church. Quietly enduring the painful incense and the crosses like so many lances in his many bodied sides. He watched his small son take up a heavy crown with hundreds of tiny blinking eyes.
When the crowds had left, and the church stood empty, Vlad lit a hopeful candle of the best beeswax in front of Mary Mother of Christ, Queen of Heaven, and whispered, "I will watch over him."
That was precisely what he did.
Ingeras paid for a year of daily prayers for the good of Vlad's soul using Ottoman silver. The monks whispered that no good could come of praying for the damned, but Vlad noted they took the silver. Vlad could not tell Ingeras that he should have spent those coins on mercenaries. He could not tell Ingeras which boyar to trust and which ones' promises were not worth the breath.
He did what he could. As Ingeras grew, Vlad was a battlefield scavenger at Ingeras' battles. Vlad was the bat that spooked the horse to tip the balance of the battle. He was the plague that took healthy men to their deaths. He was the fading shadow haunting the roads and peaks.
Invaders spoke around their camp fires. "Vampires!" and "Cursed lands!" before spitting on the ground and tossing a pinch of salt or earth over their shoulders. He smiled next to them and raised a cup of ale that he did not drink and joined in their cursing while he picked out his dinner of the night.
The people of Transylvania raised cups to their curse and left furtive offerings of little blood daubed straw figures. Until the local priest found them and had the objects burned. He watched that, too.
The difficulty was not war while Ingeras grew. It was the peace that came when he was grown.
Vlad tried to to resist the hunger that the other vampire had spoken of with limited success. Perhaps if he'd hidden away in a walled up cell as monks were said to do, but he lived in the world watching over Ingeras. At first, he'd fast resisting the beating hearts around him, only to gorge like the very embodiment of gluttony, filling him with a sickness for what he was. He burned the evidence of what he'd done, but failed to try again to burn himself.
He learned to take a little often than to try to resist.
Through the ever speeding years, Ingeras grew and had children of his own. Fought battles. Held a fragile grip between the Hungarians in the west and the Ottomans in the east. Broken when his own son took the throne and Transylvania was washed away under the Ottoman feet. Had Vlad given his soul to save a country, he might have despaired, but he had not.
Ingeras children's children's children married across the kingdoms of the earth. He watched over then.
Vlad didn't forget Baba Yaga's warning though. He did not disperse too far into solitary bats. He did not disperse into a quiet dew. He travelled the earth on fragile wings.
The racing years passed, each one seeming faster than the one before for all his multitudinous calls.
He met the Wandering Jew in Prague.
Vlad went on with no hope of any end but fire.
He saw another jinn in another desert.
Vlad went on with no hope of heaven. Still he lit a candle each Easter and sent Mirena his love in the smoke.
In London, in a pea soup fog that never admitted the sky, he met a dead woman with lightening for eyes and a five fingered Lung dragon for a shadow.
He went on.
Retreating to the ruins of his castle for Lent and lighting his candles for Easter. Employing lawyers as agents to be his eyes. Wealth was easy to acquire. It was after all a root of evil.
One day, he stood in the shadow of the great buildings that humans had made and saw Mirena just as she had been. If his heart could beat, it would have skipped.
They repeated their old poetry to each other.
One life being borne from the next.
After all those years, he felt the hope of heaven. He looked up at the blue sky from the shadows and smiled as if it was Easter morning.