I felt what they were doing. In four and a half centuries and more I had learned to recognise the fall of a leaf from a tree, the timid landing of a woodcock’s feather. They put a blanket across two leaning slabs, forming a shelter. They lit the lamp to see each other, also for warmth. Hah! Szekely? They didn’t need a lamp to be warm.
They . . . interested me. For years I had called, for centuries, and no one came, no one answered. Perhaps they were kept away by priests, by warnings, by myths that had grown into legends down the long years. Or – perhaps in life my. excesses had been . . .
You have told me, Dragosani, how many of my greatest deeds are now accorded to the Vlads, and how I am reduced to a ghost for frightening children. More than this, my very name will have been stricken from the old records, for that was their way in those days. If they feared something they destroyed it and pretended it had never been. Ah, but did they think I was unique of my sort? I was not – I am not! I was one of a few who once were a great many. Aye, and word of my plight must surely have found its way to the others? For hundreds of years it had angered me that someone had not come to release or at least avenge me! And when at last someone did come . . . gypsies, Szkeleys!
The girl was frightened and he could not calm her. I calmed her. I crept inside her mind, gave her strength to face her fears, whatever they were, and to meet him in a hot collision of flesh. Ahhh!
Yes, and she was a virgin! Her maidenhead was intact. I might have died again, in my grave, from lusting after it! A maidenhead, intact! To quote an old, old book of lies: how are the mighty fallen! I had broken two thousand in my day, one way or another. Ha, ha, ha! And they called young Vlad ‘the Impaler’!
So . . . they were lovers, but not yet in the fullest sense of the word. He was a boy – a mere pup, and never breached a bitch – and she a virgin. And so I got into his mind, too. Ah! – and I bequeathed the night to them. I drew strength from them and they from me. One night they had from me, just one, for before the dawn they left. After that – (a mental shrug) – / know no more of them . . .
‘Except that she bore me,’ said Dragosani, ‘and left me on a doorstep to be found’
The answer to that was a while in coming, sighing in a wind little more than a breeze now. The old one in the ground was tired; he had little more of strength left in him, not even for thinking; the earth held him in its hard-packed womb and turned on its inexorable axis and lulled him. But at last, sighingly:
Yesss. Yes, but at least she knew where to bring you. She was a Gypsy, remember? A wanderer. And yet when you were born she brought you back here. She brought you . . . home! She did that because she knew your real father, Dragosani! You might say that of my whole life, which was bloody beyond measure, that one night was a true labour of love. Aye, and my only tribute a single splash of blood. The merest drop, Dragosaaaniiii. . .
‘My mother’s blood.’
Your mother’s, splashed on the earth where I lay. But such a precious drop! For it was your blood, too, and runs in your veins even now. And then, as a child, it brought you back to me.
Dragosani was quiet, his head full of thoughts, visions, pseudo-memories evoked of the other’s words in his head. Finally he said, I’ll come to you tomorrow. We’ll talk more then.’
As you will, my son.
‘Sleep now . . . father.’
A last gust of wind rattling a loose tile, and with it a long, last sighing.