Children of The Night

Dreams of Blood and Iron

My enemies have always underestimated me. And they have always paid the price.

The light coming through the small windows of my bedroom has an autumnal edge to it now as it moves across the rough white walls, across the broad boards of the floor, and onto the tumbled quilt covering my bed. My prison.

l have been dying here for years, for an eternity. The others whisper to each other, thinking that I cannot hear the urgency in their voices. I know that there is some problem with the Investiture Ceremony. They are afraid to tell me about the problem; afraid that it will upset me and hurry my final dissolution. They are afraid that I will die before the Investiture takes place.

I think not. The habit of life, however painful, is too difficult to break after all these centuries. I can no longer walk, can hardly lift my arm, but this accursed body continues to attempt to repair itself, even though I have not partaken of the Sacrament since my arrival home more than a year and a half ago now.

I may soon ask about these whispers and urgent comings and goings. It may be that my enemies are stirring again. And my enemies have always underestimated me.

I began my reign in August of 1456, staging the anointment ceremony in the cathedral at Tirgoviste, the city where my father had ruled. I devised my own title: “Prince Vlad, Son of Vlad the Great, Sovereign and Ruler of UngroWallachia and of the Duchies of Amlas and Fagaras.” After my escape from the Sultan and in recognition of the alliances I had formed with Transylvania's boyar noblemen, John Hunyadi thought it wise to orchestrate the return of a Dracula to the Dracul throne.

At first my voice was soft, conciliatory. In a letter I wrote to the mayor and councilmen of Brasov a month after my ascension to the throne of Wallachia, I used my best court Latin to address them as honesti viri, fratres, amici et vicini nostri sincerior as “honest men, brothers, friends, and sincere neighbors.” Within two years, most of those fat burghers would be writhing on the stakes upon which I had impaled them.

I remember with a joy that not even such oceans of time have been able to dim, that Easter Sunday of 1457. I had invited the boyarsthose noble couples who felt that I ruled at their pleasureto a great feast in Tirgoviste. After the Easter Mass, the visitors repaired to the banquet hall and open courtyards where long tables of the finest food had been set aside for these gentlemen and their families. I allowed them to finish their feast. Then I appeared, on horseback, in the company of a hundred of my most loyal soldiers. It was a beautiful spring day, warmer than most. The sky was a deep and terrible blue. I remember that the boyars cheered me, their ladies waving lace handkerchiefs in their admiration, their children lifted to shoulders the better to see their benefactor. I doffed my plumed cap in response to their cheers. It was the signal my soldiers were awaiting.

The oldest boyars and their wives I ordered impaled on the stakes I had raised outside the city walls while the unsuspecting fools attended mass. I was not the inventor of impalement as a punishmentmy own father had used it occasionallybut after this day, I was known as Vlad Tepes“Vlad the Impaler.” I did not dislike the title.

With the older boyars and their wives still writhing on the stakes, l began marching the ablebodied in the crowd toward my castle on the Arges River, some fifty miles away. The weakest did not survive the threeday march without provisions, but, then, I had no use for the weakest. The survivors, the strongest, I used to rebuild Castle Dracula.

The castle was old and abandoned, even then, its towers tumbled down and its great hall fallen in. I had found it and sheltered there during my flight from the Sultan and Hunyadi and resolved then and there to rebuild it as Castle Dracula, my eyrie and final retreat.

The location was perfecthigh on a remote ridge above the Arges River, which cut its deep canyon from Wallachia through the Fagaras Mountains into the south of Transylvania. There was a single road along the Argesnarrow, dangerous in the best of seasons, and easily defensible once the castle was rebuilt. No enemy, neither Turk nor Christian, could approach me in Castle Dracula without advance warning.

But first it had to be rebuilt.

I had had a kiln built along the river's banks, and the bricks from that kiln were passed uphill from man to man (or woman to woman) in my human chain of boyar slaves. The local villagers were amazed to see such slaves, dressed as they still were in the rags of their boyar Easter finery.

From horseback, I directed the reconstruction of this ancient Serbian ruin. The five towers were rebuilt, two dominating the highest point on the ridge, the three others lower on the northern slope. The thick walls were made doubly thick with brick and stone so as to repulse even the heaviest Turkish cannonade. The battlements were high, eighty feet and more, and they grew out of the stone of the cliff itself so they appeared to be a sheer thousand foot wall. The central courtyards and donjons conformed themselves to the space between the great towers, as well as to the rough topography of the ridge top that was less than one hundred feet wide at its widest. A great earthen ramp was extended out from the southern cliff face, and from that ramp a wooden bridge allowed the only access to the keep. The center of that bridge was always raised, and was designed so that it could not only be lowered to allow entry but could, with the severing of two great cables, be dropped into the chasm below.

In the center of Castle Dracula, I had the few surviving boyar slaves deepen the well so that it fell through solid stone more than a thousand feet to an underground tributary of the Arges. The subterranean river had carved its own caverns in the mountain, and I directed the construction of an escape passage from that well to the caves that opened onto the Arges a thousand feet below. Even today, l am told, the caves along the river there are referred to by the villagers as pivnita, or “cellar.” With its escape routes and deep donjons, its caverns and sunken torture pits, Castle Dracula indeed had its “cellar. “

A few of the boyars survived the fourmonth reconstruction of my new home. I had them impaled in rows on the cliffs overlooking the village.

In the summer of 1457, I crossed the Carpathians at the pass at Bran. Hunyadi was locked in mortal combat with the Turks at Belgrade, but I had other scores to settle. On the plains near Tirgoviste, I attacked the retreating army of Vladislav II, my father's assassin. In single combat I bested him. When he asked for mercy, I ran the point of my short sword up under his jaw, through his brain, and out through the top of his skull. I displayed that skull of the rest of that summer on the top of the highest wall of Tirgoviste. Songs were sung of it. l drank the Sacrament from Vladislav's headless corpse.

My enemies were legion. l knew from the outset that I must command respect and fear from everyone if I were to survive.

That winter the Genoese ambassadors to my court doffed their hats but left on the skullcaps they wore underneath. When I politely inquired as to why they remained covered in my presence, one of the ambassadors answered: “This is our custom. We are not obliged to take our skullcaps off under any circumstances, even in an audience with the Sultan or the Holy Roman Emperor himself.”

I remember nodding judiciously. “In all fairness, I wish to recognize your customs,” I said at last. The ambassadors smiled and bowed, their skullcaps still on. “And to strengthen them,” I added.

I called in my guards, chose the longest nails I could find, and had them driven in a circle through the caps and into the skulls of the screaming ambassadors. I drove the first nail into each one, saying as though in a litany, “Witness, this is the manner in which Vlad Dracula will strengthen your customs. “

The woman was brought before me for defying my court edict that each maiden of the kingdom would preserve her virginity until given permission by her Royal Prince to lose it. The stake was five feet long and I had it heated over the fire until it was red hot. As my dinner guests, including ambassadors from six nearby nations, watched, I had the redhot stake driven through the woman's vagina, up through her entrails, and continued driving it until it emerged through her screaming mouth.

I fortified the island of Snagov north of the village of Bucharest, enlarging and adding to the ancient monastery there. In the central hall, T had laid a tiled floor with alternating squares of black and red. To amuse myself, I would have a group of courtiers scurry around the floor while the court orchestra played a brief tune and the soldiers held their spears inward around the perimeter, assuring that none would escape. The courtiers would each have to choose a tile.

At the end of the tune I would throw a heavy lever and several of the waxed tiles would drop open, the trapdoors sending the screaming courtiers thirty feet to sharpened stakes in the pit below. Almost five hundred years later, in 1932, an archaeologist friend sent me a photograph from the excavations on ~Snagov Island: remnants of the stakes were still visible; the skulls were still stacked in neat rows.

It was three winters after the rebuilding of Castle Dracula that one of my mistresses announced that she was pregnant, thus hoping to gain precedence over my other concubines. Assuming that she was lying, I asked her if she would mind being examined. When she demurred, I had her brought to the main hall while the court was assembled.

She protested her love, her sorrow for her error, but I ordered my bodyguards to proceed. They sliced her womb open from vulva to breastbone and peeled back the walls of muscle and flesh while she writhed, still alive.

“Witness this!” I cried to the whitefaces staring up at me. My words echoed in the stone hall. “Let the whole world see where Vlad Dracula has been!”