From that moment on the three of them were certain that they had me. Ronay could afford to retreat, nursing his own hurt. Bogdan and Basarab began to play with me, making sure to keep me between them—though at first it was a cautious game they played, knowing me to be still deadly dangerous.
I fought on, though weakening, ignoring their jibes and insults, saving what breath I had for fighting. But I could not face two skilled opponents at once. One of them would stab me, from behind, and then the other. I suffered at least half a dozen additional wounds before I was no longer capable of resistance.
Bah, I have no wish to dwell upon the grisly scene of my own butchery. Yet still it must be told.
When I fell for the last time, going to my knees, unable to rise again, unable any longer even to raise my weapon in defense, someone struck me with a sword hilt from behind and sent me sprawling. Then someone else's boot kicked at my sword, until it had been knocked out of the reach of my weakening fingers.
More kicks and shoves, with booted feet, turned my bleeding body over so that I lay face upward. I was trying to reach the dagger at my belt, but my knife too was yanked away. Then a sharp blade came stabbing into my unprotected groin; the muscles of my lower body spasmed uncontrollably. Pain fashioned a sound, that I suppose must have been almost inhuman, and drove it upward from my throat.
The body on the ground continued to gasp for breath.
'Hold his head still.' This was the voice of Bogdan, still panting, issuing an order. I could perceive his face, fierce and triumphant, looming over me.
In a moment someone—I thought it was Ronay, come back to savor my last moments—was crouching just behind me, knees vising my head in place. My arms no longer moved; my muscles and my strength were gone; all I had left was nerves and blood.
The point of Bogdan's sword loomed close to my face, approaching my eyes. Elsewhere I have related how my whole life's allotment of fear came to be used up before I was old enough to have a beard. So here, let me say simply that it must have been without fear, with hatred only—say rather hatred glowing with a helpless rage—that I gazed up at him. Perhaps I would not have turned my head had I been able.
'I will not die—' I told him, choking on my fury, and my own blood, and could not find the breath to say the rest.
'Oh, no?' The swordpoint feinted even closer to my eyes, then moved a small handsbreadth away. 'Not yet you won't, good Prince Drakulya. Not this moment. But soon. Very soon.'
I understood that Bogdan had spared my sight because he wished me to continue to see what was happening. Perhaps he craved also to see in my eyes at last some expression of yielding, of despair, at least of fear. In that hope, at least, he continued to be disappointed.
In the next moment I could feel the cold steel of Bogdan's blade slide inside my left cheek, the sensation transforming itself into the heat of fresh pain as the blade ripped its way out.
'What words of defiance now, Drakulya?'
I would have given him some, had I not been choking, more seriously than before, on my own blood.
'The end of your triumphant smile at last, good prince. How I have longed to see it wiped away! And now, why should I leave you a nose, to carry in the air so arrogantly? Half a one will serve you just as well, for the short time of breathing you have left.'
During the course of my next few gasping, gurgling breaths, Bogdan's sword did a fair job of cutting and peeling away a sizable portion of my face. In the background I could hear Basarab laughing.
Suddenly Ronay, speaking in a low voice, pausing at intervals to grunt with the discomfort of his own wound, ventured to suggest that since the Sultan was going to pay them a good price for my head, it might be as well to leave my face at least recognizable.
Bogdan made a sound expressing doubt. The suggestion had come somewhat too late.
Ah, the images fade, true memories blending imperceptibly into the knowledge of things that I could only have imagined, heard later from the lips of some other eyewitness, or reconstructed by logic.
Or—is it possible? Possible that, in some way I still cannot understand, my soul—if it is permissible to use the jargon of modern physics—that my soul, I say, quantum-tunneling the barrier of death, I might have observed every detail of my own butchery, my spirit hovering out of the body though not yet fully detached from it?
I WILL NOT DIE!!!
Pain could no longer elicit the smallest outcry from the body, and it had ceased even to twitch under the ministrations of Bogdan's blade. Presently I ceased even to breathe. Shortly after that, some providential distraction, probably a report that my Moldavians were near, drew my enemies' attention away. (Let me add parenthetically that before succumbing to this distraction, Bogdan, turned back, suddenly suspicious, taking no chances, and cut entirely through my neck.)
The distraction, I say, was providential, because as soon as my enemies were out of sight some of my loyal though humble friends among the camp followers mentioned above, displaying considerable courage in the midst of their grief, made a brave effort to preserve my poor clay from the further indignities that the traitors and eventually the Sultan would certainly have inflicted upon it.
This effort naturally required that they substitute some other body for my own—the mere disappearance of my corpse would not have been acceptable to the traitors. (Though now that I think back on it, what a delicious superstitious fear it would have provoked among them!) The near obliteration of my face, to the point where my loyal friends themselves had difficulty in recognizing me, made their task considerably easier.
Also a great help to them was the fact that my corpse lay on a recent battlefield, surrounded by fresh candidates for substitution.
A selection was quickly made from among these, and a partial change of armor and clothing was effected, no easy matter in itself—have you ever tried to dress a corpse? Quick cosmetic surgery was performed upon the face of my replacement—his hair and mustache were already an approximate match. Body build was generally similar. Height is irrelevant among those who have become permanently horizontal. And given the muddy condition of the field, one of its occupants tended to look a great deal like another anyway.
To shorten a somewhat lengthy episode, which I am finding increasingly painful to relate, let me say at once that the replacement was a success. When Bogdan and his two close associates came back, they abandoned with scarcely a glance the hacked-up torso and limbs they thought were mine, picked up by its dirty hair the head of pseudo-Drakulya, and at once packed this grisly object away in a cask of salt to start its journey to the Sultan. There was, I suppose, hardly any point in trying to clean the flayed thing up. Much later I heard that the trophy was indeed exhibited upon some palace gate or wall, the head of the dread Lord Impaler,
But from that day of my assassination, it was long, long, before the Sultan ever entered into my thoughts again.
Meanwhile my own body, unhappily disjunct, had been conveyed from the field by my friends in greatest secrecy, bundled in its two pieces upon the back of a mule. Darkness had fallen long before the corpse reached a place of sanctuary, where another friend or two appeared to clean it up and lay it out for honorable if secret burial.
This sanctuary where my remains had come to rest temporarily was a farm not far from the battlefield, and also not far from the island monastery of Snagov.
A rough plank table had been constructed, in some outbuilding, for the job that had to be done, and on this my body was laid out supine, head just a little distant from neck stump, a tall candle at my feet and another near my detached head. During the following preparations, these candles took turns in extinguishing themselves, for no good reason that I could see. Perhaps there was more of a draft than I could feel.
Two of the farm women did most of the actual corpse-washing. Meanwhile a handful of other people came and went, to marvel and to grieve.
And, of course, to pray over my dismembered body. The prayers as I recall were for the most part Catholic, for I had been and remained a dutiful convert from the Orthodox faith into which I had been born.
Among the topics of conversation addressed by those preparing me for burial was the fact that my grave would probably be only temporary, that the late unhappy prince would want to be moved someday to a prepared vault hidden beneath a certain castle.
But for the present all concerned would be satisfied, could I but be laid peacefully to rest in some soldier's grave, unmarked and shallow, humble as most such are, and lonelier than most. Somehow I was to be accorded at
