THE BEAUTIFUL DRACULA

for Julie Todd
I’d been trained to ride since the age of five. I told Mehmed that his artillery would be without worth in Wallachia, since my homeland was dense with forest and swampy marsh. However, as the Sultan had used Urban’s cannon so successfully against Constantinople, my warning fell on deaf ears.
Still, I did not doubt that we would defeat my brother. I led four thousand janissaries, all on horseback. Surrounding us were foot soldiers; behind was the Praetorian Guard, serving as Mehmed’s bodyguard. A cavalry force, recruited from the landed Ottoman gentry in the Balkans, trotted behind us. The advance guard was comprised of slaves, who could ostensibly buy their freedom—should they survive.
At the flanks of the army were the custodians of Mehmed’s weapons. Behind us marched the azabs; fearsome because of the long spears they wielded, mortal in battle. The archers followed. In the centre of the army was the artillery, which handled the cannons: one hundred twenty of them. On either side were the allied European and Eastern contingents, led by their own governors. The engineers travelled with us, to build the necessary roads and bridges, and set up the camps at night.
A motley crew traipsed after us; artisans, wheel makers, ironmongers, tailors, cobblers, musicians and cooks. Mehmed had brought along women (these rode in covered wagons), to service his troops, as well as himself. I’d learnt by now that he did not restrict his buggery to men—or children, for that matter.
On reaching the Danube, we found that Vlad had burnt down all the ports, which rendered Mehmed’s navy—some one hundred fifty ships—immediately useless. I hoped this would mean that my cousin Piotr would ride with me, but Mehmed sent the navy off to attack Bralia and Chilia, and, ultimately, to take the army home.
We janissaries landed in Wallachia first. The Sultan was with us. The rest of the army trudged after us. Once we entered the province, we discovered, aghast, that Vlad had set fire to the towns and villages. He was retreating northward, and had left behind destroyed crops, poisoned wells, and the butchered cattle he’d been unable to take away.
We had also to contend with the burning-hot deserts that had taken the place of the formerly luxuriant forests. More dangerous were the pits he’d had dug and covered with leaves for the unwary to fall into. They had been fitted with erect wooden stakes.
Vlad and his men took to leaping out of the woods ahead of us in order to attack—usually at night—and racing back into the shelter of the trees before we had a chance to defend ourselves. Soon, I discovered that Vlad had even sent men, disguised as Turks—sick with diseased veneries, leprosy, the plague and consumption—to corrupt our troops. I captured one of these men, a gypsy suffering the plague. I commanded him to tell me how Vlad had arranged such sabotage. He sputtered, “My lord promised to give me a hundred ducats if I brung the head-piece of a dead Turk to him.”
I tossed him my hateful turban and sent him scurrying into the woods.
As I rode over to tell Mehmed, the glimmer of an idea began to illuminate my mind. I saw my chance to escape—not only the Sultan, but the extent of his lecherous reach. I immediately sent my most loyal attendants, Wallachian and Romanian hostages of the Sultan Murad, to confer with the remaining members of Wallachia’s boyar, or noble, class. They’d been true to me since Mehmed had set us up in a puppet court at Constantinople—now Istanbul—and I’d promised to return them and their surviving families to their former positions as boyars.
One black night, Vlad entered our camp with thousands of men in tow, and proceeded to slaughter everyone and everything in his way. His target was Mehmed himself. His men mistakenly descended on the viziers’ tent instead. Their screams woke us, and we quickly rode over to defend the Sultan.
Vlad’s men were without armour, though they wielded axes and knives. It was apparent that they were either released criminals or peasants, since Vlad had already exiled or murdered most of the boyar and mercantile classes. They didn’t kill many of our men, who were better armed, but did manage to slaughter thousands of our camels and horses. I shed tears for these innocent beasts.
During the night’s siege, I caught sight of my brother, the self-styled Dragon; seeming so deranged as to inspire fear in me. He was ghostly of skin, and his red-rimmed eyes had sunk far back into his face. His mouth was bloody and twisted in a morbid grimace. When he saw me, he cried, “Sodomite!” I swung my sword at him, but he fled back into the woods, and left me behind to wonder what sort of monster he’d become.
My brother had always envied me, simply because I was more agreeable to the Turks (and therefore punished less often), and fairer. From the time that our father had brought us to Adrianople to meet Mehmed’s father, Murad II, I’d been branded a pretty prince. This hadn’t always been an advantageous title, especially after Mehmed had grown besotted with me. While my brother had been constantly whipped by our Kurdish tutor in philosophy for being stubborn, I was raped by Mehmed for my comeliness at the age of twelve.
Mehmed had kept me at his side ever since; more so after his father lapsed into a sleep so profound that he would never awake. My loathing for the new Sultan had festered like an open wound from the moment he violated me.
After Murad had placed Vlad on the throne of Wallachia—once my father and elder brother Mircea had been assassinated by a man named Hunyadi—he’d not only refused to pay the Sultan’s tribute, but had gone to the length of nailing the turbans to the heads of the Turkish envoys who’d been sent to collect it.
But Mehmed was not interested in vengeance. All he wanted was a path through Romania to the rest of Europe.
Next morning, we rode to Trigoviste, the capital of Wallachia. Making our approach, we came upon a horrendous sight: a forest of impalement. Before us stood a line of corpses, a league or so long, both of Turks and Wallachians, as well as their women and children, that had been set up on stakes. Their bodies were already rotting in the summer heat, and ravaged by crows and other birds of prey from the Carpathians. Some of them had nests in their skulls. Most of these people had been staked through their rear orifices and, finally, their mouths. I, along with many others, vomited at the sight and stench of death.
Though Vlad had certainly not been the first to use such repugnant methods, it was clear to me that he was alone in making a fetish of impalement.
The Turks were horrified. They pleaded with their Sultan to turn back. Even Mehmed’s spirit, for all its arrogance, seemed broken. He gave the order to retreat the next day. He told me that Vlad’s land was not worth the price of its conquest.
By the end of Ramadan, Mehmed had led us to Bralia, where he ordered the port burned in a final act of defiance against Vlad. He told me that we were going back to Istanbul by way of Edirne. Once we arrived at the former Adrianople, I protested, proposing a better strategy: that he leave me behind to win the favour of the surviving Wallachian nobility.
I promised to send him his tribute, already three years in arrears, and asked him to advance me twenty-five thousand ducats, to pay Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, in order that he leave Wallachia to the Ottomans (I kept ten thousand ducats for myself, and gave the rest to Corvinus).
I suggested that he could always find another lover, and disingenuously pointed out the hordes of new hostages I’d seen arrive at Istanbul before we left. “There were some very pretty boys, Mohammed, aged six to fourteen.”
He snarled at me, and then consented, with poorly concealed regret.
I was greatly helped by the boyars that my envoys had recruited, many of whom came in person to Adrianople to plead with Mehmed to replace the Son of the Devil with his less murderous and better-looking brother.
From Edirne I travelled with a contingent of Turkish soldiers to the capital. At the throne I addressed the gathering of boyars; I told them that the Sultan could easily conquer and destroy Wallachia, and proposed instead that we reach an agreement with him, by paying him his yearly tribute. I swore to restore the ancient rights of the land, as well as forbid any Turk to settle on Wallachian soil. Everyone present shouted my name adoringly.
I learned later that Vlad had fled to Hungary to ask Mattias’s help, but that Matthias had imprisoned him instead.
I met with Piotr and told him of the plan I’d conceived upon my encounter with my brother’s plague-ridden man. I confessed that I wanted no part of ruling and would rather roam free, with him at my side. I told him that I would marry, to ensure the allegiance of Corvinus, and to have a child.
He said that it was imperative that I leave a remnant of my beauty in this world. I kissed him, remembering the games we used to play in the woods when he’d arrived with his family after having fled Bulgaria, to seek the shelter of my treacherous father. Since we’d been children, we had loved each other without question.
I told Piotr that Vlad had called me a sodomite. He laughed and answered, “Your brother is the ditch-born son of a slave and a whore. And being a sodomite I is far better than being an impaler.”
I corrected him: “Vlad’s mother was a gypsy whom he had beheaded after she announced herself to him. But my father was a slave—to Murad.”
He stroked my hair. “My heart, our love is so beautiful and natural that it couldn’t possibly be sinful.”
I already had a woman in mind; Maria Despina, beautiful and intelligent, of an old boyar family that had been ousted by my brother. She was eager to marry me in order to re-establish her family as part of the nobility. A year later, she gave birth to our daughter, whom we named Maria as well.
In the meantime, Piotr had been scouring Wallachia and Bulgaria in search of a candidate for my plan. He returned to my palace one night in a coach, a year after Maria’s birth. Having dismissed all the guards, I met him at the gates. My jaw hung when I saw the man he’d brought.
He was my mirror-image. His name was Dmtri.
I set him up in a guest house, and had only very faithful servants attend to him. I had him grow his hair long so as to resemble me even more. I had him fattened up.
Piotr suggested we flee to Italy, which was still out of Mehmed’s reach. He assured me that the Italians would welcome us as refugees; many of them still retained the practices from their Roman past.
I held court for the next three years. I thoroughly spoiled Maria Voichita, as well as my wife, knowing already how briefly our family would exist. In the third year of my reign, I rallied some troops, Wallachian and Ottoman and, with Piotr as my captain, went off to hunt down my brother. He’d been sighted prowling in the Carpathians.
We failed.
Vlad Tepes would not be found for some time.
Peace finally settled over Wallachia. The farms had grown again, and plentifully. When I learned that Stephen of Moldavia was conspiring to dethrone me (of course I’d known that it would be only a matter of time before someone did), the hour of Piotr’s and my departure had come. I told my wife that I’d been exposed to a venereal disease, by a man disguised as a Turk when hunting down my brother. I added that I would rather flee than have my family see me die.
I told Maria about Stephen of Moldavia, and permitted her to marry him, since he would rule over our land. We both wept copiously.
Shortly before Stephen arrived to depose me, I met with Piotr in the guest house where I’d secured Dmitri. He’d been suffering from syphilis for two years. We expected that he’d live two more. I told him that he was to be the new prince of Wallachia, and that, even when Stephen took over, he would not be harmed. I assured him that he would be delivered to a monastery and taken care of the rest of his days.
Having already sent my wife and daughter to a nearby refuge, I installed Dmitri in my place. He fit easily into my garments, and none of the servants could tell the difference. Before I left, I gathered the castle staff and told them that I was stricken with the clap, and would hence avoid all contact with anyone save a doctor and the cook.
Dmtri loved to eat.
Piotr and I departed the following day. Between us, we had collected enough jewelry (Mehmed had always sought to make prettier) and ducats to buy a substantial estate in Italy. For all his thoughtless cruelty to me, the Sultan had been generous. And Piotr had made a handsome sum as the admiral of his navy. We took a coach to the western shore of Yugoslavia, and boarded a ship that sailed to Brindisi. We settled just outside of Naples. We hired many local hands to help us build our farm. The farm prospered and made us wealthy.
In the next two years, news of my own death reached us. I found out too that my former wife and daughter were well loved by Stephen, which relieved me enormously. I’d fretted over them to no end, since learning that Vlad had been placed once more on Wallachia’s throne.
After Piotr and I had explored most of Europe, we prepared to retire on the outskirts of Rome. It was here I heard news of my brother’s death—that he’d been beheaded by one of his own men by accident (he’d been disguised as a Turk). After his head was delivered to Mehmed, his body was buried at a monastery in Snagov. Later, his tomb was discovered empty. Romanian superstition being what it is, my brother devolved into a creature of the night, who fed on human blood to maintain his immortality.
Vlad had been known to drink the blood of his enemies from a golden chalice.
But all of that is so far away now, and I am home at last.