And then . . . and then … a crimson eye forming in its tip and avidly scanning the ground. The eye dissolving away and a reptilian mouth and jaws taking its place, so that now the tentacle seemed a blind, smooth, mottled snake. A snake whose forked scarlet tongue flickered over the pitiful remains, whose fangs gleamed white and needle sharp, and whose jaws chomped slaveringly until every last morsel was devoured!
Then the swift withdrawal and the spell broken as the pulsing, sickening member was sucked back down out of sight into the naked earth.
A ‘small tribute’, the thing in the ground had called it …
When Dragosani was done with memories and daydreams he drove into the town whose name he bore. Between the railway stockyards and the river on the outskirts of town, he found the trade and barter market which had flourished there on Wednesdays since a time when the town was the merest huddle of shacks; indeed Dragosani might well have sprung up from this marketplace, this meeting place. And more than that, it had been a fording place. Now there were bridges across the river, several, but in olden times the crossing had been by ford.
It was here those long centuries ago that the invading Turk, pillaging and burning as he came from the east, met the river where it flowed down out of the Carpatii Meridionali to meet the Danube. Here, too, the Hunyadi, and after him the Princes of Wallachia, had come down from their castles to call together the fighting men under their banners and set territorial Voevods over them, warlords to defend the lands against the incursion of the marauding Turk. The banner these warlords had fought under was that of the Dragon – immemorial seal and sigil of a defender, especially a Christian defender against the Turks – and now Dragosani found himself wondering if that were perhaps the source of the town’s name. Certainly it was the source of the dragon on the shield in the place of the forgotten tomb.
In the marketplace he bought a live piglet which he took away in a sack with holes for ventilation. He took it back to his car and put it in the boot, then drove back out of town and found a quiet track off the main road.
There he opened the sack a little way, broke a chloroform capsule into the boot, slammed the lid shut and left it that way for a count of fifty. Another ten minutes saw the boot flushed out (he used the car vacuum-cleaner, reversed, to disperse the fumes), following which the unfortunate pig went back inside again. Dragosani certainly didn’t want the animal dying on him. Not just yet, anyway.
By early afternoon he had driven back up out of the low-lying river valley and into the foothills, where once again he parked the car within a few hundred yards of the forbidden cruciform hills. In bright sunlight, but keeping low and sticking to a hedgerow, he made his way to the densely wooded slopes and began to climb. There, under the cover of the frowning pines, he felt more at ease as he toiled towards the secret place. The piglet in its sack was slung over his shoulder, completely oblivious to a world from which it would soon depart.
At the site of the tomb, Dragosani laid the doped animal in a hollow between twining roots, tethered it to the bole of a tree and tossed the sack over it for warmth. There were plenty of wild pigs in the hills; if the piglet came to in his absence and made a commotion, anyone hearing it would believe it to be one of the wild variety. Not that that was likely; just as in Dragosani’s boyhood, the fields were deserted and grown wild for a mile and more around.
At any rate that was where he left the piglet, returning to his lodgings in mid-afternoon, booking an early evening meal, and sleeping through the rest of the day. There was still more than an hour’s light when Use Kinkovsi woke him with a substantial meal on a tray, leaving him on his own to enjoy it and wash it down with a quart of local beer. She hardly spoke to him at all, seemed surly, glanced at him with a sort of sneer. That was all right; indeed it was very much to his liking – or so he tried to tell himself.