The Historian

The Historian Page 47

My dear friend, My driver was indeed able to take us north to T?rgoviste today, after which he returned to his family in Bucarest, and we have settled for the night in an old inn. Georgescu is an excellent travelling companion; along the way he regaled me with the history of the countryside we were passing through. His knowledge is very broad and his interests extend to local architecture and botany, so that I was able to learn a tremendous amount today. T?rgoviste is a beautiful town, mediaeval still in character and containing at least this one good inn where a traveller can wash his face in clean water. We are now in the heart of Wallachia, in a hilly country between mountains and plain. Vlad Dracula ruled Wallachia several times during the 1450s and '60s; T?rgoviste was his capital, and this afternoon we walked around the substantial ruins of his palace here, Georgescu pointing out to me the different chambers and describing their probable uses. Dracula was not born here but in Transylvania, in a town called Sighisoara. I won't have time to see it, but Georgescu has been there several times, and he told me that the house in which Dracula's father lived - Vlad's birthplace - still stands.

The most remarkable of many remarkable sights we saw here today, as we prowled the old streets and ruins, was Dracula's watchtower, or rather a handsome restoration of it done in the nineteenth century. Georgescu, like a good archaeologist, turns up his Scotch-Romany nose at restorations, explaining that in this case the crenellations around the top aren't quite right; but what can you expect, he asked me tartly, when historians begin using their imaginations? Whether or not the restoration is quite accurate, what Georgescu told me about that tower gave me a shiver. It was used by Vlad Dracula not only as a lookout in that era of frequent Turkish invasions but also as a vantage point from which to view the impalements that were carried out in the court below.

We took our evening meal in a little pub near the center of town. From there we could see the outer walls of the ruined palace, and as we ate our bread and stew, Georgescu told me that T?rgoviste is a most apt place from which to travel to Dracula's mountain fortress. "The second time he captured the Wallachian throne, in 1456," he explained, "he decided to build a castle above the Arges to which he could escape invasions from the plain. The mountains between T?rgoviste and Transylvania - and the wilds of Transylvania itself -  have always been a place of escape for the Wallachians."

He broke a piece of bread for himself and mopped up his stew with it, smiling. "Dracula knew there were already a couple of ruined fortresses, dating at least as far back as the eleventh century, above the river. He decided to rebuild one of them, the ancient Castle Arges. He needed cheap labour - don't these things always come doon to having good help? So in his usual kindhairted way he invited all his boyars - his lairds, you know, to a little Easter celebration. They came in their best clothes to that big courtyard right here in T?rgoviste, and he gave them a great deal of food and drink. Then he killed off the ones he found most inconvenient, and marched the rest of them - and their wives and little ones - fifty kilometers up into the mountains to rebuild Castle Arges."

Georgescu hunted around the table, apparently for another piece of bread. "Well, it's moore complicated than that, actually - Roumanian history always is. Dracula's older brother Mircea had been murthered years before by their political enemies in T?rgoviste. When Dracula came to power he had his brother's coffin doog up and found that the pooor man had been buried alive.

That was when he sent out his Easter invitation, and the results gave him revenge for his brother as well as cheap labour to build his castle in the mountains. He had brick kilns built up near the original fortress, and anyone who'd survived the journey was forced to work night and day, carrying bricks and building the walls and towers. The auld songs from this region say that the boyars' fine clothes fell off them in rags before they were done." Georgescu scraped at his bowl. "I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one."

So tomorrow, my friend, we will set out on the trail of those unfortunate nobles, but by wagon, where they toiled into the mountains on foot. It is remarkable to see the peasants walking around in their native costumes among the more modern dress of the townspeople. The men wear white shirts with dark vests and tremendous leather slippers laced up to the knee with leather thongs, for all the world like Roman shepherds come back to life. The women, who are mainly dark like the men and often quite handsome, wear heavy skirts and blouses with a vest tightly fastened over everything, and their clothing is embroidered with rich designs. They seem a lively folk, laughing and shouting over the business of bargaining in the marketplace, which I visited yesterday morning when I first arrived.

Less than ever do I have a way to mail this, so for now I shall keep it tucked safely in my bag.

Yours truly,

Bartholomew

My dear friend, We have, to my delight, succeeded in making the trek to a village on the Arges, a day's ride through mythically steep mountains in the wagon of the farmer whose palm I crossed liberally with silver. As a result I'm sore to the bones today, but elated. This village is a place of wonder for me, something from Grimm, not real life, and I wish you could see it for just an hour, to feel its immense distance from the whole West European world. The little houses, some of them poor and shabby but most with a rather cheerful air, have long low eaves and large chimneys, topped with the gigantic nests of the storks who summer here.

I walked all around with Georgescu this afternoon and discovered that a square in the center of the village provides their gathering place, with a well for the inhabitants and a great trough for the livestock, which are driven right through town twice a day. Under a ramshackle tree is the tavern, a noisy place where I have had to buy one round after another of unholy firewater for the local drinkers - think of this as you sit at the Golden Wolf with your tame pint of stout! There are one or two men among them with whom I can actually communicate a bit.

Some of these men, too, remember Georgescu from his last visit here six years ago and they greeted him with great thumps on the back when we first went in this afternoon, although others seem to avoid him. Georgescu says it is a day's ride up to the fortress and back, and no one is yet willing to take us there. They talk of wolves, and bears, and of course vampires - pricolici, they call them in their language. I'm getting the feel for a few words of Roumanian, and my French, Italian, and Latin are all of the greatest service while I try to puzzle things out. As we interviewed some of the white-haired drinkers this evening, most of the town turned out to gawk not very discreetly at us -  housewives, farmers, crowds of barefoot small children, and the young maidens, who are on the whole dark-eyed beauties. At one point, I was so surrounded by villagers pretending to draw water or sweep front steps or consult with the tavern keeper that I had to laugh aloud, which made them all stare.

More tomorrow. How I could use a good hour's talk with you, and in my - our  - own language!

Yours with devotion,

Rossi

My dear friend, We have been, to my solemn awe, up to Vlad's fortress and back. I know now why I wanted to see it; it made real for me, a little, in life the frightening figure I seek in his death - or will soon be seeking, somehow, somewhere, if my maps are of any help. I shall try to describe our excursion for you, as I wish you to be able to imagine the scene and as I want a record of it myself. We set out around dawn in the wagon of a young farmer here, who seems to be a prosperous fellow and is the son of one of the old-timers at the tavern. He had apparently received orders from his sire to take us, and didn't much like the appointment. When we first mounted the wagon, in the earliest light of the town square, he pointed up to the mountains a few times, shaking his head and saying, "Poenari? Poenari?" Finally, he seemed to resign himself to the task and gave rein to his horses, two big brown machines pulled from the fields for the day.

The man himself was a formidable-looking character, tall and hugely broad-shouldered under his blouse and wool vest, and with his hat on he towered a good two heads above us. This made his timidity about the excursion a little comic for me, although I certainly shouldn't laugh about the fears of these peasants after what I saw in Istanbul (which, as I said before, I shall tell you in person). Georgescu tried to engage him during our drive into the deep forest, but the poor man sat holding his reins in silent despair (I thought), like a prisoner being led away to the block. Now and then his hand crept inside his shirt as if he wore some kind of protective amulet there - I guessed this from the leather thong around his neck and had to resist the temptation to request a look at it. I felt pity for the man and what we were putting him through, against all the proscriptions of his culture, and resolved to give him a little extra remuneration at the end of the trip.

We intended to stay the night, to give ourselves ample time to examine everything and to try to talk with any peasants we might encounter who live close to the site, and to this end the man's father had provided us with rugs and blankets, and his mother had given us a store of bread, cheese, and apples tied up in a bundle in the back of the wagon. As we entered the forest, I felt a distinctly unscholarly thrill. I remembered Bram Stoker's hero setting off into the Transylvanian forests - a fictional version of them, in any case - by stagecoach, and almost wished we'd departed at evening, so that I too might have glimpses of mysterious fires in the woods, and hear wolves howling. It was a shame, I thought, that Georgescu had never read the book, and I resolved to try to send him a copy from England, if I ever got back to such a humdrum place. Then I remembered my encounter in Istanbul and it sobered me.

We rode slowly through the forest, because the road was rutted and pocked with holes and because it began almost at once to climb uphill. These forests are very deep, dim inside even at hottest noon, with the eerie coolness of a church interior. Riding through them, one is utterly surrounded by trees and by a fluttering hush; nothing is visible from the wagon track for miles at a stretch, apart from the endless tree trunks and underbrush, a dense mix of spruce and varied hardwoods. The height of many of the trees is tremendous and their crowns block the sky. It is like riding among the pillars of a vast cathedral, but a dark one, a haunted cathedral where one expects glimpses of the Black Madonna or martyred saints in every niche. I noted at least a dozen tree species, among them soaring chestnuts and a type of oak I'd never seen before.

At one point where the ground levelled out, we rode into a nave of silvery trunks, a beech grove of the sort one still stumbles on - but rarely - in the most wooded of English manor grounds. You've seen them, no doubt. This one could have been a marriage hall for Robin Hood himself, with huge elephantine trunks supporting a roof of millions of tiny green leaves, and last year's foliage lying in a fawn-colored carpet under our wheels. Our driver did not seem to register any of this beauty - perhaps when you live your entire life among such scenes, they do not register asbeautybut as the world itself - and sat hunched over in the same disapproving silence. Georgescu was busy with some notes from his work at Snagov, so I had no one with whom to share a word of the loveliness all around us.

After we'd driven nearly half the day, we came out into an open field, green and golden under the sun. We had risen quite high, I saw, from the village, and could look out over a dense vista of trees, sloping so steeply downwards from the edge of the field that to step off towards them would be to fall sharply. From there the forest plunged into a gorge and I saw the River Arges for the first time, a vein of silver below. On its opposite bank rose enormous forested slopes, which looked unscalable. It was a region for eagles, not people, and I thought with awe of the many skirmishes fought here between Ottomans and Christians. That any empire, however daring, would try to penetrate this landscape seemed to me the height of folly. I understood more fully why Vlad Dracula had chosen this region for his stronghold; it hardly needed a fortress to make it less pregnable.

Our guide jumped down and unpacked our midday meal, and we ate it on the grass under scattered oaks and alders. Then he stretched out under a tree and put his hat over his face, and Georgescu stretched out under another, as if this were a matter of course, and they slept for an hour while I rambled about the meadow. It was wonderfully quiet apart from the moan of the wind in those boundless forests. The sky rose bright blue above everything. Walking to the other side of the field, I could see a similar clearing rather far below, presided over by a shepherd in white garments and a broad brownish hat. His flock -  sheep, apparently - drifted around him like clouds, and I reflected that he could have been standing there in just that way, leaning on his staff, since the days of Trajan. I felt a great peace come over me. The macabre nature of our errand faded from my mind, and I thought I could have stayed up there in that fragrant meadow for an aeon or two, like the shepherd.

In the afternoon our way led up on steeper and steeper roads, and finally into a village that Georgescu said was the nearest to the fortress; here we sat a while at the local tavern with glasses of that very fortifying brandy, which they call palinca. Our driver made it clear that he intended to stay with the horses while we went on foot to the fortress; under no circumstances would he climb up there, much less spend the night with us in the ruins. When we pressed him, he growled, "Pentru nimica ?n lime," and put his hand on the leather thong around his neck. Georgescu told me this meant "Absolutely not." So obstinate was the man about all this that finally Georgescu chuckled and said the walk was a reasonable one and the last part had to be done on foot anyway. I wondered a little at Georgescu's wanting to sleep out in the open, instead of returning to the village, and to be honest I didn't quite relish the idea of an overnight there myself, although I didn't say so.

Eventually we left the fellow to his brandy and the horses to their water and went on our way with the bundles of food and blankets on our backs. As we were walking along the main street, I remembered again the story of the boyars of T?rgoviste, limping upwards towards the original ruined fortress, and then I thought of what I had seen - or believed I had seen - in Istanbul, and I felt again a pang of uneasiness.

The track soon narrowed to a small wagon road, and after this to a footpath through the forest, which sloped upwards before us. Only the last stretch gave us a steep climb, and this we negotiated with ease. Suddenly, we were on a windy ridge, a stony spine that broke out of the forest. At the very top of this spine, on a vertebra higher than all the rest, clung two ruined towers and a litter of walls, all that remained of Castle Dracula. The view was breathtaking, with the River Arges barely twinkling in the gorge below and villages scattered here and there at a stone's drop along it. Far to the south, I saw low hills that Georgescu said were the plains of Wallachia, and to the north towering mountains, some capped with snow. We had made our way to the perch of an eagle.

Georgescu led the climb over tumbled rocks and we stood at last in the midst of the ruin. The fortress had been a small one, I saw at once, and had long since been abandoned to the elements; wildflowers of every description, lichens, moss, fungus, and stunted, windblown trees had made their ancient home in it. The two towers that still stood were bony silhouettes against the sky. Georgescu explained that it originally had five towers, from which Dracula's minions could watch for Turkish incursions. The courtyard in which we stood had once had a deep well, for sieges, and also - according to legend  - a secret passageway that led to a cave far below on the Arges. Through this Dracula had escaped the Turks in 1462 after using the fortress intermittently for about five years. Apparently he had never returned to it. Georgescu believed he had identified the castle chapel at one end of the courtyard, where we peered into a crumbling vault. Birds flew in and out of the tower walls, snakes and small animals rustled out of sight ahead of us, and I had the sense that nature would soon take the rest of this citadel for her own.

By the time our archaeological lesson was over, the sun hung just above the western hills and the shadows of rock, tree, and tower had lengthened around us. "We could walk back to the last village," Georgescu said thoughtfully. "But then we'll have to hike back up if we want to look around again in the morning. I'd still rather camp here, wouldn't you?"

By then I felt that I had much rather not, but Georgescu looked so matter-offact, so scientific, beaming up at me with his sketchbook in hand, that I didn't want to say so. He set about gathering dead wood from the area, and I helped him, and soon we had a fire crackling away on the stones of the ancient courtyard, carefully scraped clean of moss for the purpose. Georgescu seemed to enjoy the fire immensely, whistling over it, adjusting loose sticks, and setting up a primitive rig for the cook pot he produced from his rucksack. Soon he was making stew and cutting bread, smiling at the flames, and I remembered that he was, after all, as much Gypsy as Scottish.

The sun set before our supper was quite ready, and when it dropped behind the mountains, the ruins were plunged into darkness, towers stark against a perfect twilight. Something - owls? bats? - fluttered in and out of the empty window sockets, from which arrows had flown towards the Turkish troops so long ago. I got my rug and pulled it as close to the fire as I safely could. Georgescu was dishing up a miraculously good meal, and as we ate it he talked again about the history of the place. "One of the saddest tales about Dracula legend comes from this place. You have heard about Dracula's first wife?"

I shook my head. "The peasants who live around here tell a story about her that I think is probably true. We know that in the fall of 1462, Dracula was chased from this fortress by the Turks, and he did not return to the place when he reigned Wallachia again in 1476, just before he was killed. The songs from these villages up here say that the night the Turkish army reached the opposite cliff there" - he pointed into the dark velvet of the forest - "they camped at the auld fortress of Poenari, and tried to bring Dracula's castle down by firing their cannons across the river. They were not successful, so their commander gave oorders for a grand assault on the castle the next morning." Georgescu paused to poke the fire into a brighter blaze; the light danced on his swarthy face and gold teeth, and his dark curls took on a look of horns. "During the night, a slave in the Turkish camp who was a relative of Dracula secretly shot an arrow into the opening in the tower of this castle where he knew Dracula's private rooms lay. Bound to the arrow was a warning to the Draculas to flee the castle before he and his family were taken prisoner. The slave could see the figure of Dracula's wife reading the message by candlelight. The peasants say in their auld songs that she told her husband she would be eaten by the fish of the Arges before she would be a slave to the Turks. The Turks weren't very nice to their prisoners, you know.' Georgescu smiled devilishly at me over his stew. "Then she ran up the steps of the tower  - probably that one there - and threw herself off the top. And Dracula, of course, went on to escape through the secret passageway." He nodded matter-of-factly. "This part of the Arges is still called Riul Doamnei, which means the Princess's River."

I shivered, as you can imagine - I had looked that afternoon over the precipice. The drop to the river below is almost unimaginably far.

"Did Dracula have children by this wife?" "Oh, yes." Georgescu scooped up a little more stew for me. "Their son was Mihnea the Bad, who ruled Wallachia at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Another charming fellow. His line led to a whole series of Mihneas and Mirceas, all unpleasant. And Dracula married again, the second time to a Hungarian woman who was a relative of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary. They produced a lot of Draculas."

"Are there still any in Wallachia or Transylvania?" "I doon't think so. I would have found them if there were." He tore off a chunk of bread and handed it to me. "That second line had land in the Szekler region and they were all mixed up with Hungarians. The last of them married into the nooble Getzi family and they vanished, too." I wrote all this down in my notebook, between mouthfuls, although I didn't believe it would lead me to any tomb. This made me think of a last question, which I didn't quite like to ask in that enormous and deepening darkness.

"Isn't it possible that Dracula was buried here, or that his body was moved here from Snagov, for safekeeping?"

Georgescu chuckled. "Still hoopeful, are you? No, the auld fellow's in Snagov somewhere, mark my words. Of course, that chapel over there had a crypt - there's a sunken area, with a couple of steps down. I doog it up years ago, when I first came here." He gave me a broad grin. "The villagers wouldn't speak to me for weeks. But it was empty. Not even a few boones."

Soon after this he began to yawn enormously. We pulled our supplies close to the fire, rolled up in our sleeping rugs, and lay quiet. The night was chilly and I was glad I'd worn my warmest clothing. I looked up at the stars for a time - they seemed wonderfully close to that dark precipice - and listened to Georgescu's snores.

Eventually I must have slept, too, because when I woke the fire was low and a wisp of cloud covered the mountaintop. I shivered and was about to get up to throw more wood on the fire when a rustling close by made my blood freeze. We were not alone in the ruin, and whatever shared that dark uneven hall with us was very near. I got slowly to my feet, thinking to rouse Georgescu if I needed to and wondering if he carried any weapons in his Gypsy bag with the cook pots. Dead silence had fallen, but after a few seconds the suspense was too much for me. I pushed a branch from our pile of kindling into the fire, and when it caught I had a torch, which I held cautiously aloft.

Suddenly, in the depths of the overgrown area of the chapel, my torchlight caught the red gleam of eyes. I would be lying, my friend, if I said my hair didn't all stand on end. The eyes moved a little nearer and I couldn't tell how close to the ground they were. For a long moment they regarded me, and I felt, irrationally, that they were full of a kind of recognition, that they knew who I was and were taking my measure. Then, with a scuffling in the underbrush, a great beast came half into view, turned its gaze this way and that, and trotted away into the darkness. It was a wolf of startling size; in the dim light I could see its shaggy fur and massive head for just a second before it slipped out of the ruin and vanished.

I lay down again, unwilling to wake Georgescu now that the danger seemed past, but I could not sleep. Again and again - in my mind, at least - I saw those keen, knowing eyes. I suppose I would have dozed off eventually, but as I lay there I became aware of a distant sound, which seemed to drift up to us out of the darkness of the forest. At last I felt too uneasy to stay in my blankets, and I rose again and crept across the brushy courtyard to look over the wall. The sheerest drop over the precipice was to the Arges, as I've described, but there was to my left an area where the forests sloped more gently, and from down there I heard a murmur of many voices and saw a glimmering that might have been campfires. I wondered if Gypsies camped in these woods; I'd have to ask Georgescu about that in the morning. As if this thought had conjured him, my new friend suddenly appeared, shadowy, at my side, shuffling with sleep.

"Soomething amiss?" He peered over the wall.

I pointed. "Could it be a Gypsy camp?"

He laughed. "Noo, not so far from civilization." He followed this with a yawn, but his eyes in the glow of our dying fire showed bright and alert. "It's peculiar, though. Let's go have a look."

I didn't like this idea in the least, but a few minutes later we had our boots on and were creeping quietly down the path towards the sound. It grew steadily louder, a rising and falling, an eerie cadence - not wolves, I thought, but men's voices. I tried not to step on any branches. Once I observed Georgescu reach into his jacket - he did have a gun, I thought with satisfaction. Soon we could see firelight flickering through the trees, and he motioned to me to creep low, and then to squat next to him in the underbrush.

We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men.

They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered. They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. "What is this?" I murmured to Georgescu. "What are they saying?"

"All for the Fatherland!" he hissed in my ear. "Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael." "What is that?" I tried to just move my lips. It would have been difficult to imagine anything less angelic than those stony faces and rigid outstretched arms. Georgescu beckoned me away and we crept back into the woods. But before we turned I noticed a movement on the other side of the clearing, and to my increasing astonishment I saw a tall man in a cloak, his dark hair and sallow face caught for a second by the light from the fire. He stood outside the rings of uniformed men, his face joyful; in fact, he seemed to be laughing. After a second I couldn't see him anymore and thought he must have slipped into the trees, and then Georgescu pulled me along up the slope.

"When we were safely back at the ruin - weirdly, it did feel safe now, by contrast - Georgescu sat down by the fire and lit his pipe, as if for relief. "Good God, man," he breathed. "That could have been the end of us."

"Who are they?" He tossed his match into the fire. "Criminals," he said shortly. "They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and converting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the warld of them." He drew fiercely on his pipe. "We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually."

I described the strange figure I'd seen outside the circle.

"Oh, to be sure," Georgescu muttered. "They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won't be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them."

It took us some time to settle to sleep again, but Georgescu assured me the Legion was unlikely to scale the mountain once they'd begun their rituals. I managed only an uncomfortable doze and was relieved to see that dawn came early to that eagle's eyrie. It was quiet now, still rather foggy, and no wind moved the trees around us. As soon as the light was strong enough, I went cautiously to the crumbling vaults of the chapel and examined the wolf's tracks. They could be clearly seen on the near side of the chapel, large and heavy, in the earth. The strange thing was that there was only one set of them, which led away from the chapel area, directly out of the sunken beds of the crypt, with no sign of how the wolf had made its way in there in the first place - or perhaps I simply couldn't read its trail well enough in the undergrowth behind the chapel. I puzzled over this long after we had breakfasted, made some more sketches, and set off down the mountain.

Again, I must stop for the present, but my warmest regards go out to you from a faraway land -

Rossi