Much Fall of Blood: Chapter Thirty Eight

    King Emeric was no rural hill shepherd who could track errant members of his flock by the smallest hoof indent. But the tracks here did not require that. The wagon had cut deep grooves in the turf next to the trail. He could see exactly where it had stopped. The fat merchant Kopernico Goldenfuss had definitely not lied about that. Of course, being a merchant he had probably lied about nearly everything else. Kneeling and shaking visibly before his king now, he probably wished that he had stayed there, or fled over the mountains, or done anything but return to report on the enemy’s camp and how successful he’d been, and cheerfully demanded the reward he’d been promised.

    “I swear Your Majesty. I swear they were right here. And they wanted that drink. They were paying me three times its price . . .” he plainly realized suddenly that this was perhaps not what he should be telling his overlord. “Dear God! It’s their Prince. He’s the devil. He even looks like the black spy. He stopped them buying and drinking it. I swear it must have been him who made your plan fail. I did exactly as you bade me.”

    “Except to sell them liquor from my stores at an extortionate price. Which you somehow omitted to tell me,” said Emeric coldly. He detested merchants. Chaffering scum. They always cheated him of his due. Well, sometimes it was important to remind them that a nobleman took at the sword’s point.

    “Honestly, Your Majesty, I had to do that,” he babbled. “They would have known I was a spy otherwise. Any merchant would have done what I did. I swear it. Asked anyone. Ask my apprentice, he was there. They suspected nothing. They would have been insensible with the drink . . . please Your Majesty. I did my best.”

    “Except to steal from me. And fail me,” said Emeric, putting his hands on the man’s shoulders and letting pain arc through the merchant. The man screamed. “No Your Majesty, aaagh! I never brought back any silver. Truly, I would have given it to you. All I got was the script of the Prince.”

    “Which you failed to tell me about. And Prince Vlad saw through you, knowing you to be a thieving merchant.” Emeric let the magical gift of his aunt’s flow through his hands again. The man writhed in agony and then slumped, and toppled over sideways. Emeric had this happen before, particularly with older men. He’d even had a few cut open to find out why. It would seem that their hearts were not equal to the burden the magic placed on them. He walked away, looking up the green valley, where, if this now dead merchant was to be believed, Prince Vlad of Valahia had quartered his little army. Well, short of necromancy he’d get no more from the merchant. But the man had mentioned his apprentice. Emeric had known that two of them had gone up. But he had not thought about questioning Goldenfuss’s apprentice. He clicked his fingers. An officer-aide appeared as if by magic. Knowing that not to do so was a capital offense had worked so well with his aides. “Find me that merchant’s apprentice,” said Emeric, waving a negligent hand at the dead body. “And have that strung up as a warning. They’ll not know he was dead first.”

    The officer left at to run, glad to find a task within easy reach, no doubt. He came back a few minutes later, sweating more than could be justified by the heat. “Your Majesty . . . it appears that the apprentice has run away. With his master’s strongbox.”

    Emeric stared at the officer. “And how was this allowed to happen?”

    “Your Majesty, it appears that the fellow took off when the merchant went to you to ask for his reward. Er. The man was not guarded at that time. He didn’t even wait for his master to get in to see you.”

    “I see. You will find out who should have been guarding the wagon and the apprentice. Have them reduced to the ranks, and given 20 lashes.”

    Emeric looked in frustration at the empty valley again. It had been such a good, elegant plot. It must have been that accursed apprentice who betrayed it. It would appear that he had killed the wrong man. Emeric shrugged. They were plenty more where that one came from. Vlad had escaped him this time, but he could not hope to continue to do so. He was under-armed and sooner or later would be drawn out into open conflict. Then the superiority of Emeric’s cavalry over some peasant irregulars would make the young fool rue the day he’d fled his quarters in Buda castle.

    The Smerek cousins had ridden through the night, luckily — and, in large part due to the intervention and wariness of their poacher escorts — had had no need to use Stanislaw’s collection of pistols. Stanislaw had one in each boot — boots that had been specially modified to take them — three in his waist-band, and in a double bandolier had been made to fit under his loose cotte, a further four. He knew it was a way of compensating for being unable to do anything when he had had to watch the others die. But it would never happen again. He would start shooting first.

    Now, at last, it seemed as if he would have help doing it. And if he had his way it would not just be nine of the bastards that died. His cousin — and indeed the whole family — wanted revenge. But they also dreamed of a place they could have and hold, of a lord to whom they could be as loyal as he was to them. Stanislaw only dreamed of shooting as many as possible. It had been the family — and principally Józef — that had persuaded him out of taking his arsenal of pistols and heading straight back to Buda. That would have killed all of the family. But now . . . well it would seem he’d found both revenge and man to who he could feel loyalty, and who would protect his family.

    Riding through the dark on a tired horse, Stanislaw cried properly for the first time since the trip to Buda. It was as if a great weight had been lifted, and he had found that there was a God after all. He wanted to find a chapel, pray and make his peace, something he had been unable to do since Edward’s death from blood loss and festering wounds after the beating.

    Back in Harghita the family had met behind closed doors to discuss the news that Józef and Stanislaw had brought back from the mountains. It was not hard for them to meet behind closed doors, after all, there was no business anymore, and the very neighbors shunned them, as if in fear that Emeric’s enmity would somehow contaminate everything they touched. Across Valahia, no Smerek gunsmith was selling anything. Cousin Anton, who had shocked the family by going into the casting of bronze, instead of sticking to firearms, was the only member still selling his goods. For the rest of them, sitting with storerooms full of stock, they had been committing slow economic suicide. The potential buyers still brave or foolhardy enough to be interested had known that. Known that the Smereks would eventually become desperate enough to sell their businesses and stock at any price.

    The question that now faced the emigres was whether even that situation was not better than the risk they now faced. But when Emeric had chosen to kill one of the Smerek patriarchs on one of his cruel whims, he had pushed the family beyond the limits of the caution they had always exercised as refugee settlers. The entire punishment had had the opposite effect from that which Emeric could have desired.

    A week ago they had been discussing the possibilities of abandoning their holdings, going south and seeing if they could somehow escape to Venice. When the family had fled Galicia, they had come with little more than ten sons, their tools and their lives. It had been a long, hard struggle. It had seemed almost impossible that they would have to abandon all they had built. Now that they had been offered an alternative, loyalty for loyalty, which two of the boys assured them that they at least accepted unconditionally, the entire extended family moved towards open rebellion. They had plenty of fuel for it.

    The murders had been the match put to the fuse, but there had been problems long before this. Before the King’s disastrous expedition to Corfu the family had been offered the opportunity to make arquebuses for the levy of infantry raised here in Valahia. It had been their first ever military order. The Smerek family had gone to it with a will. They wished to prove that their weapons were superior, that they were reliable as gunsmiths to produce goods on time. Then, in the fashion of military procurement under King Emeric, the order had been abruptly withdrawn. The family had been left with storerooms full of arquebuses better suited to military use than their normal hunting market. And then . . . when they had been attempting to stave off bankruptcy, King Emeric had added the final blow. He had probably thought it would be a fatal one, though why he would want to destroy them was a mystery.

    He had not reckoned with the spirit that lay beneath their stolid faces.

    A thousand arquebuses waited for a better purpose. The Smerek family were delighted to give them one, even if they were only paid in a promissory note. But they were not unaware of the possible consequences. Sooner or later King Emeric would find out just where those guns came from, and then there would be hell and blood to pay.

    They were willing to pay that, so long as they got a good return in the same coin from King Emeric. But very few of them were willing to let their women and children pay it for them. Some of the men would be returning to the mountains, with their tools, and a great deal of black powder. Others, the old, the young, the women and the infirm would be going south. Cousin Anton was not obviously connected with the family. Corona was far from the unrest. And it was far closer to flee from there to either Venice, or even possibly into Mongol lands.

    Long before morning, firm plans had been made. Travelers set out, going south. Men remained, packing wagons, loading every weapon from their storerooms and display cases. They set out at dusk, having paid suitable bribes to get out of the town gates. There were too many bandits for most travelers to wish to be aboard at night. The Smerek men hoped that it would be bandits that they met, and not King Emeric’s patrols. They did have men on good horses riding ahead, ready to pass through any checkpoint, and then ride back across country to give them warning. But they had also had help from Vlad’s poachers.

    Back in the town of Harghita few had noticed their absence. A neighbor. A man who had hoped to buy a gun, illegally, for a quiet and nasty act of revenge. Neither were telling anyone. Instead the town was buzzing with another, related story. The story of an apprentice who had fled his master’s wagon . . . and gone to give warning to the Prince of Valahia that his master had been on a mission from the King of Hungary. He had arrived on foot — at a deserted camp, not long before the Magyar. He’d hidden just in time, and seen his master die at the King’s hand, and be hung for the crows and ravens. He’d sought refuge in the mountains with the Prince . . . been recognized by the men. And been told that Prince Vlad had known of the treachery . . . and yet still had planned to honor his debt.

    The story spread across Valahia, growing, like the tales of Vlad’s vengeance, and his conquest of the Magyar.

    Vlad lay with her in his arms. She was soft, warm and curved, and pressed against him. But when he asked, she pulled away. “I don’t think I want talk, Drac. If you want to talk I will go elsewhere. There are plenty of men who do not want to talk. Do you not want me?”

    “Very much. I had not known how much before . . . You have given me something very precious. I had never known a woman before you, Rosa. But . . . I have lived in a tower since I was a little boy. With menservants and an old priest and older tutor. I don’t understand so much. And you are the only person I can ask.”

    She was silent for a while. “Drac. You really are a babe in woods pretending to be a bear. I think that frightens me because I also want you to be a bear. Very well. I will tell you how I came to be a whore in your army’s tail. And if you condemn me . . .”

    “I will not do that. Not now. Not ever,” he said gently.

    She looked at him, considering. “You could be a bear in the woods, you know.”

    “But I need to be a dragon. And to do that I need to understand.”

    “I was sixteen when my father married me off to an old knight on a neighboring estate. We were freeholders, but not rich . . . Mother told me that I would have to accept that it was a woman’s duty to lie there and accept what men wanted and did. It was a woman’s burden, she said. She said it hurt and I would hate it, but I would at least have the consolation of children.”

    Rosa was silent a while. Vlad waited. “She was wrong. She was wrong about all of it. But no one will own me. Not ever again.”