An Evening at Joe's (36 page)

The Prince's eyes snapped open and blazed like green gems held before a fire. His mouth gaped, and the sharp intake of air drove his shoulders into the snow and caused his back to arch.

Kirschner sighed resignedly. "Your penchant for bad timing has all but ruined what was shaping up to be a not unfulfilling day."

Dracula rolled his head wildly first right, then left. "Kirschner! What... ah, of course. So you got the churl that laid me low. Excellent. I'd..." His hands went to his chest, he looked down at his arms. "My harness! What has hap..." He stared with alarm at the dead man beside him. "Kirschner! What in the name of God do you think you are doing?"

Hans held up Dracula's back-plate. "Calm yourself and listen carefully. Do you see this hole? Do you remember the pain? Now feel your gambeson over your right kidney. This bastard here put four inches of a rondel spike into you. Think you a normal man could have survived such a wound?"

Dracula fumbled a gloveless hand to the area. He inserted a finger into the hole then held his hand before him, staring hypnotically at the bloody digit. "This cannot... well, obviously it did but break the skin. A superficial wound that..."

Kirschner seized up the pole-axe that lay nearby and held the head in front of Dracula's face. There was blood staining more than half the length of the cruel eight-inch spike. "Look you! Does this appear to have come out of a superficial wound?" Kirschner knelt beside the Prince and threw the axe to one side.

"My Liege," he implored in a low, even voice, "a miraculous thing has happened to you as it happened to me many years ago. I shall explain all when time serves us better, but at this moment it is essential for our safety that we leave here in haste and undetected. Your army shall soon be informed of your death. Leaderless, they will retreat to the Citadel, and the Turk will return. And when they do, they must have a body to find. This man, with his moustache and long black hair, will serve their purpose as well as ours."

"What?" exclaimed the Prince indignantly as he struggled to stand. "You would try to pass this base-born whore-hound off as me?" Dracula fairly bristled with pique. "This is insufferable! I shall return to the head of my army—with you!—and we shall grind the Turk under our heel!"

Kirschner placed a restraining hand on the Prince's chest. "You cannot. You were seen to be killed. Damnation, I saw you killed! When have I ever given you cause to doubt me? We are not as other men! A whole new realm of existence has opened up to you. All this I shall make known unto you, but not here, not now!"

Dracula almost visibly trembled to contain his mounting rage. He struck Kirschner's hand aside and spoke with rising volume, in a voice that grated like steel on a rock. "Friend or no, you shall not speak to me in such a preemptory manner—
or
touch my person thus! I am the Prince, damn you, and I..."

"... have not the time for this," concluded Kirschner. Then, obtaining the final word in a crude but effective manner, he hauled off with a fortuitously ungauntleted fist, and delivered a mighty lick square to the centre of Vlad's forehead. Three and a half centuries of wielding weapons with this arm made a convincing impression on Dracula. His head snapped back, his eyes rolled up into their sockets, and the ex-Prince of Wallachia instantly lost all interest in the proceedings that followed.

It is said that history is written by the winners. This homily tends to ignore the times, unpropitiously frequent, that it is written by losers scrabbling to salvage the slightest shred of credibility from an otherwise humiliating debacle. When it becomes impossible to pretend that you won, solace can be had in the overly-enthusiastic proclamation that you didn't lose completely.

In the realm of empire-building it is largely unacceptable, strategic disadvantages notwithstanding, for an experienced army of over 20,000 to get their brains slapped out by a motley force of barely 4,500. Therefore, when the body of the Warlord was discovered after the Wallachians inexplicably quit the field, there was much rejoicing among the Turkish host. Or at least as much as the less than 10,000 survivors who had just been flogged within an inch of their lives, and now faced the prospect of freezing to death, could muster under the circumstances.

And so the head of the unfortunate corpse was taken and, along with its insignia of the Order of the Dragon, returned in triumph to the Sultan in Constantinople.

The Sultan received the gift with a combination of stately enthusiasm and guarded skepticism. After all, what had he? A head with the appropriate type and colour of hair, whose finer features had been somewhat inconvenienced by Kirschner's mace and more than six weeks' travel. Added to which, the Sultan had never actually seen Dracula in person, although he had observed several portraits that drew the eye to a distinctive feature. When the court had cleared, his majesty donned a glove and gingerly raised an eyelid on the withered trophy.

Oh dear... they were brown.

Now, this was inconvenient. To date, the Sultan had lost well over a quarter of a million men against the Impaler; a long hunt and no coon-skins on the wall, so to speak. Conversely, although this was plainly no princely pate, he had received no word that Dracula had reappeared to claim the Wallachian throne. Afloat in a sea of contradictions, the Sultan did what most statesmen throughout history do when faced with the prospect of continuing to fight without winning. He declared victory, and sat back to see if anyone were imprudent enough to contradict him.

The alleged prize was placed on a stake high over the gates of the city. Quite high, in point of fact. A casual observer might look up to behold an object that looked like nothing so much as a cannon-ball in a wig. However, since the official proclamation held this to be the dreaded Vlad Tepes, well... One of the distinct advantages of being an absolute ruler, however benevolent, is the preponderance of people who are tactfully content to give you the benefit of a doubt.

Kirschner bestowed the body upon the monks of the monastery of Snagov, which occupied an island by the same name in the middle of a large lake in the heart of the Vlasie forest. Dracula and his forebears had all made generous grants and endowments to the monastery, to the eternal gratitude of its order. At Kirschner's suggestion, the brothers interred the body in an unmarked grave to thwart desecration by Vlad's myriad enemies.

Meantime, Hans slowly but surely achieved a meeting of minds with his irate and uncooperative captive. However, although Dracula's ego was substantial and accustomed to obeisance, yet he possessed a keen and logical mind. After a few graphic and often painful demonstrations, it became obvious that he and Kirschner were, if not immortal, certainly different from normal men. As far as eternal life were concerned, Vlad finally acceded to remain open to the possibility.

"Ask me again in fifty years," replied Dracula in his usual ironic fashion.

"We'll see," rejoined Kirschner, proferring his hand.

Dracula regarded it for a moment, and then, for perhaps the first time in his life, clasped another's hand as equals.

The man astride the roan palfrey was barely recognizable as the Dracula of old. His shoulder-length jet locks had been cut back several inches and cosmetically streaked with grey. The broad, droopy moustache that dominated his lower countenance was now gone, changing considerably the overall shape of his face. His skin, which previously possessed a startlingly blanched appearance, was now brown and weathered, the result of an application of stain made from the crushed shells and leaves of walnuts. His armour was subdued and nondescript. Culled from a quantity of corpses to achieve an acceptable overall fit, its mismatched parts bespoke a class of person who had to scavenge his finery. The only visible remnant of his former self, annoyingly undisguisable, were his eyes, green as Venetian glass.

With their war and sumpter-horses trailing on long leads, Hans and Vlad paused in their journey atop a wind-swept promontory and looked back at the receding lights and chimney smoke of Bucharest.

"So—no more to be Prince Vlad," said Dracula, meditatively. "Or Vlad at all, for that matter." His voice, surprisingly, contained no note of bitterness or remorse.

Hans regarded him carefully but without suspicion. "Have you decided on a new name?"

Dracula thought a moment. "Ladislaus, I think." He smiled at Kirschner. "Yes, I know it is both Germanic and Hungarian for Vlad. Is it necessary to give up an entire life in but a fortnight?"

"Wiser, perhaps," said Kirschner, with a raise of his brows. "But what is a name that a man does not make of it? To begin again, tabula rasa—that is one of the greatest parts of the Gift. Through it we learn to write our lives in sand, not carve them in stone. Anonymity is our ally; notoriety, our foe." He turned to Dracula. "To give up a kingdom..." He shook his head. "That is beyond my experience. But to my eyes, you sit taller in your saddle now than you did before." -

"Indeed," chuckled Dracula, "to wear a crown is to bear a kingdom about your brows. It is surprising to me to admit how little of it I shall miss. Hollow pomp and empty ceremony, obsequious, fawning sycophants, and lickspittle liars. Do you have any idea what it's like to live your life wondering which of your own guards will be the one to drive the knife into your back, or which of your relatives will poison your evening's posset-cup? To suspect virtually everyone of ulterior motives, simply to survive another sunset? No, friend Hans. I have gone disguised among the common man too often to pretend to myself that the simpler life has no virtues." His smile turned briefly wicked. "No, it is over for me. Let my wife's bastard take up the sceptre. If there's any justice in this world, he'll smack her with it."

"Well," said Kirschner, ruffling the fur of his riding cloak up about his neck against a sudden gust of wind, "one of the few genuine consolations of princeliness was wealth. We may travel and live simply but comfortably on my hoard for a time, but come spring I'm afraid we must find employment."

"Which I suppose means selling the use of our swords," mused Dracula. "I killed sufficient to keep one despot in power. I am disinclined to extend the favour to anyone else. No, I was just thinking— seeing as we are traveling in the right direction anyway—that we should make a short pilgrimage to Snagov Lake."

"You must know that you cannot possibly visit the monastery."

"Oh, not the monastery," grinned Vlad. "I was thinking more of a particular spot near the shore. Fourteen years ago, while fleeing deposition by my disgusting brother Radu, I had the monks, whose loyalty I'd scrupulously cultivated, deposit in the shallows a couple of sealed chests for future contingencies."

Kirschner stared silently with reverential expectations.

"I'm afraid it's not a king's ransom, but"—he paused to savour the moment—"it'll do for an ex-prince and a knight. Several years, I should suspect."

If Kirschner had worn a hat he would have removed it. As it was, he stood mutely, worshipping in silence. Dracula's laughter pealed forth for them both.

Hans gathered in the reins of his mount. "Well then, my student, companion and coin-purse; to Snagov."

"And then...?" queried Dracula as he brought his horse aside Kirschner's.

"You Wallachians have a marvelously vague expression—perhaps you've heard it? 'Mai la munte.'"

"A little further up the mountain..." nodded Dracula with an amused smirk. "Of course, as we all know, once you reach the top of one mountain you are most likely to simply see the next, then the next, and so on."

"Exactly," replied Kirschner, smirking back. "Had you made prior arrangements for the next century or so?"

Laughing, the two men rode together into the snowy night.

Dawson left off worrying the keyboard of his computer and stared expectantly at his companion.

"And...?" He drew the word out like a fishing line, making impatient little circles with his hand.

Methos pulled a shirt sleeve over his palm and mopped absentmindedly at the wet ring his beer bottle had made on the uppermost of one of the many stacks of documents that festooned the coffee table like crennelations on a castle wall. "I don't know, Joe. I wasn't a Watcher back then. Hell, I'd never even been to Romania until the communist government collapsed."

"No, but you were in research for years. You must have run across
something
in the archives—I mean, we're talking about
Dracula
, fer God's sake!"

"Yes and no," said Methos, holding the empty bottle up to the light. "Dead soldier..." He rose and ambled into the kitchen.

"What do you mean yes and no?" retorted Dawson, swiveling his chair.

"Well... you're talking about the Dracula who's famous for being someone he never was, and doing things he never did. I'm talking about a real man who was a Slavic prince who died, at least for the first time, in 1476." Methos reappeared in the doorway with a fresh bottle applied to his lips.

"And he never had a Watcher?"

"Again, yes and no. It was Kirschner's Watcher that discovered Dracula's immortality, but he apparently lost them both that winter while trying to follow them through the Carpathian Alps. His successor finally picked up on Kirschner over thirty years later, but by that time he and Vlad had separated. There was a Watcher assigned to Dracula, but it was mainly contingent on finding him. According to the records, they never did." He flopped back onto the leather sofa, which gave vent to a long, insolent hiss.

"So," said Dawson, drumming on his knees, "one of the most infamous warlords in history just up and vanishes off the face of the earth?"

"Mmmm... well..."

"If you say 'yes and no' one more time, you're gonna wear this cane home."

Methos held up his hands in mock consternation. "What I mean is, there are several strange and peculiar reports in the archives attributed to Dracula resurfacing from time to time, although none of them could be officially authenticated." He scanned the table-top briefly for a safe place to deposit his bottle, shrugged, then clenched it in his teeth as he shuffled through several foothills of paper.