‘Now. We set off at once. The mountains are dangerous at night, but he’ll have it no other way. Are you still game?’
‘I’ll not disappoint him, now that he’s invited me,’ said Thibor.
‘Very well. But wrap yourself well, Wallach. It gets cold up there.’ The old man fixed him with a brief, bright, penetrating stare. ‘Aye, cold as death . . .’
Thibor chose a pair of burly Wallachs to accompany him. Most of his men were out of his old homeland, but he’d personally stood alongside these two in his war with the Pechenegi, and he knew they were fierce fighters. He wanted real men at his back when he went up against this Ferenczy. And it could well be that he’d need them. Arvos, the old gypsy, had said the Boyar had no retainers; who, then, had answered the mirror signal? No, Thibor couldn’t see a rich man living up there all alone with a mere woman or two, fetching and carrying for himself. Old Arvos lied.
In the event that there was only a handful of men up in the mountains with their master . . . But it was no good speculating, Thibor would have to wait and see what were the odds. If there were many men, however, then he would say that he came as an envoy of Vladimir, to invite the Boyar to the palace in Kiev. It would be in connection with the war against the Pechenegi. Either way, his course was now set: he had a mountain to climb, and at the top a man to kill, depending on conditions.
In those days Thibor had been in a way naive; it had not once crossed his mind that the Vlad had sent him on a suicide mission, from which he was not expected to return to Kiev.
As for the climb: at first the going had been easy, and this despite the fact that the way was unmarked. The track (there was no real track, merely a route which the old gypsy knew by heart) climbed a saddle between foothills to the base of an unscalable cliff, then followed a rising apron of sliding scree to a wide crevice or chimney in the cliff, which elevated steeply through a fissure on to a false plateau beneath a second line of even steeper hills. These hills were wild and wooded, their trees massive and ancient, but by now Thibor had seen that indeed there was a path of sorts. It was as if some giant had taken a scythe and cut a straight line through the trees; their wood had doubtless provided much of the village’s timber, and perhaps some of it had been hauled up into the mountains for use in the construction of the castle. That might possibly have been hundreds of years ago, and yet no new trees had grown up to bar the way. Or if they had, then someone had uprooted them to keep the path free.
Whichever, the climb along the track through the rising woods was fairly easy going, and as twilight grew towards night a full moon rose to lend the way its silvery light. Spying their breath for the climbing, the three men and heir guide spoke not at all and Thibor was able to turn his mind to what little he’d heard of the Boyar Ferenczy from his foppish court contact.
The Greeks fear him more than Vladimir does,’ that loose-tongue had informed. ‘In Greek-land they’ve long sought all such out and put them down. They call such as the Ferenczy “vrykolax”, which is the same as the Bulgar-ian “obour” or “mouphour” – or “wampir”!’
‘I’ve heard of the wampir,’ Thibor had answered. They have the same myth, and the same name for it, in my old country. A peasant supersition. And I’ll tell you some-thing: the men I’ve killed rot in their graves, if indeed they have graves. They certainly don’t bloat there! Or if they do it’s from rotten gasses, not the blood of the living!’
‘Nevertheless this Ferenczy is said to be just such a creature,’ Thibor’s informant had insisted. ‘I’ve heard the Greek priests talking: saying how there’s no room in any Christian land for such as that. In Greek-land they put stakes through their hearts and cut off their heads. Or better still, they break them up entirely and burn all the pieces. They believe that even a small part of a wampir can grown whole again in the body of an unwary man. The thing is like a leech, but on the inside! Hence the saying that a wampir has two hearts and two souls – and that the creature may not die until both facets are destroyed.’