Page 218 of Dragon Slayer

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PRINCE OF WALLACHIA

Vlad III, known as Vlad Dracula, second son to Prince Vlad II Dracul of Wallachia, knelt on the cold flagstones of a Hungarian cathedral and opened his mouth to receive his first communion. The priest set the wafer carefully on his tongue, but showed no signs of recoiling from the tips of Vlad’s fangs, which he felt were visible now, in this moment of conversion, as his heart beat just a hair too quickly against his ribs. On his right hand, he felt the weight and coolness of his new signet ring – his father’s before him, saved from the old prince’s body before he was cremated and interred. The seal was of the ouroboros dragon and the cross, the mark of the Order of the Dragon.

The priest dipped his thumb into a golden bowl of lamb’s blood, and drew the red cross of St. George on Vlad’s upturned forehead. In Latin, he asked, “Do you Vlad, son of Vlad Dracul, so swear your allegiance to the Crusader cause, as your father did before you?”

Vlad answered in Latin as well, “I do.”

Today, Vlad became a Catholic, just as his father had, but it was no normal conversion. Not merely a matter of prayer and confession and kneeling in front of the right kind of holy man. No, this was a commitment to the hushed and sacred Order of the Dragon, an exclusive order established in 1408. Dedicated to the resistance – and the defeat – of the Ottoman threat to Eastern Europe.

An Order that hadn’t accomplished much of anything in the last fifty years. His own father, a member as well as an ancient vampire of legend, had caved, and quibbled, and now occupied a box as nothing more than ashes. Beginning with its founder, Sigismund of Hungary, the Order had been an exclusive club, one full of brave warriors, without question. But ineffectual ones, ultimately.

Vlad meant to change that.

Word had come in June, only a week after the fall, borne by a runner on a half-dead horse: Mehmet had taken Constantinople. Mehmet the Conqueror, the spreaders of the story were calling him. With the aid of massive bronze guns, an inexhaustible supply of troops, and a dozen ingenious schemes, he’d broken through the Theodosian land walls and laid waste to the last defenders of the Roman Empire. The tales of cruelty, of rape, of the burning of holy relics, of the castration, slaughter, and enslavement of the Roman people…they didn’t just turn Vlad’s stomach. Theyenragedhim.

His rage never really went away, though. It lived dormant in his veins, waiting for the next provocation. He felt it now, like fire under his skin, a sustainable, banked blaze that fueled every thought, and every goal.

In the months that followed, word came steadily from the rag-wrapped refugees who filtered into the Romanian provinces, Greeks and Romans fleeing the city, and the destruction wrought by the Ottomans. With them they brought tales of killings, cuttings, and impalements, each story more sordid than the last. Vlad had known of Mehmet’s proclivities, had watched his own baby brother become a plaything, but the stories of lords’ sons being taken as concubines angered him the most.

“Rise, Vlad Dracula,” the priest said, “as a Crusader of the realm.”

Vlad got to his feet, hands curling into fists, signet ring biting into his skin. He bowed his head in thanks to the priest.

“Go forth, my son,” he said in Romanian, speaking the language of Vlad’s birth. “Go forth and save us.”

“I will.” But he needed a throne, first. Hunyadi had promised him one, and the rest of Romania had long-since grown wary of Vladislav’s friendliness with the Turks in Wallachia.

It was time to go home.

~*~

Vlad recaptured his father’s seat, the princely palace in Tîrgoviste, for himself in the summer of 1456. A summer in which a strange light appeared in the sky, a falling golden star that streaked across the underbelly of the heavens, drawing word of sightings from every corner of the world. A portent some said. A sign of good fortune…or maybe a curse.

Vlad didn’t believe in such foolishness. He believed in blood, and force, and the lessons of Machiavelli that he’d learned during his studies in Moldavia: an eye for an eye.

The boyars of his homeland had helped the Ottomans slay his father and brother, and he would have an eye as payment.

His ascension had begun in January.

On the thirteenth, Hunyadi, wrapped in furs to keep the chill out of his old joints, gathered a council of such Eastern lords as were willing to fight. They gathered at Hunedoara: Vlad, Hunyadi’s sons, Pope Calixtus III’s ligate, Juan Cardinal de Carvajal, and John of Capistrano. The last was an anomaly. Seventy years of age, and a Minorite Franciscan monk besides, St. John of Capistrano looked every inch a skeletal old invalid, with sunken eyes, and deep-set wrinkles, and tremulous hands. His voice wavered when he spoke – but that was only age, and not fear, because he was all of conviction. “God wills it that we chase the Turks out of Europe,” he’d said, and had offered a force of peasant crusaders.

Vlad had bitten back a dark laugh; what could this man and his rabble offer to their cause? But he was passionate, and passion wasn’t something to laugh at.

The meeting was held because of Belgrade. Word had come down in fits and snatches, through secret channels, from deserters, and Ottoman court insiders, the way that all information did, that Sultan Mehmet intended to sack Belgrade, and from there proceed to claim Serbia, Hungary, and the Romanian territories for his own. No longer vassal states, but truly absorbed lands of his empire. He was insatiable.

Each man in attendance was given a task. Vlad had the responsibility of staying in Sibiu, where he’d been living since brokering a peace with Hunyadi, and from there guard the Transylvanian passes from invasion. He also had orders to retake his father’s throne when the time was ripe. “Kill Vladislav, and install yourself,” Hunyadi instructed. “But only once the mountain passes are secure.”

Stephen, Vlad’s ersatz cousin and constant companion, had similar orders. He was to stop any potential march by the enemy into his homeland of Moldavia. And, once that was accomplished, slay the usurper Petru III Aaron and reclaim his father’s seat as Prince of Moldavia.

Mehmet’s forces began assembling in June. Ships docking at the river delta; gunsmiths beginning work in Kruševac on more of Mehmet’s bloodthirsty cannons, the same kind that had broken Constantinople.

Movement came later in the month.

Hunyadi sent requests to the West, to the pope, to Italy, and the rest of the continent, asking for aid.

No response came. It never did. Europe had long since abandoned its own east.

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