Children of The Night by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_horror
Published: 2011-04-05T06:28:56+00:00

Dreams of Blood and Iron

MY life now consists almost totally of whispers and dreams. The dreams are, of days and enemies long dead; the whispers in the hall and on the stairs and in my very room, as if I were here only as a corpse, are of the recovery of the child for the Investiture Ceremony. The whispers are smug now. They speak of their cleverness in recovering the baby. They do not talk of how the child was lost or which enemies abducted him. They can not imagine or do not seem to remember what terrifying wrath would have descended on them, what terrible tolls of punishment would have been extracted, were I the Vlad of old confronted with such knowledge of my underlings' incompetence.

It does not matter. I am not the Vlad of old. The slow erosion and certain tempering of decades and centuries have seen to that.

But my dreams are memories untouched for several of those centuries, and in my dreams I am seeing myself for the first time. I listen to the whispers as the final details of the Ceremony are planned, as my Family argues amongst itself as to whether their Father can be present in his dying and detached state. But even as I eavesdrop on these whispers, it is the dreams that compel my attention.

Frederick the Ill's poet laureate, Michael Beheim, has written of my encounter in 1461 with three barefoot Benedictine monks: Brother Hans the Porter, Brother Michael, and Brother Jacob. Beheim heard the story from the third monk,

Brother Jacob, and their distorted version has been written, quoted, and retold for five centuries. Poet Beheim's impartiality might be discerned from his original title for the poem as he sang it to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1463:

Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia.

Few have ever bothered to challenge Brother Jacob's account through poet Beheim's pen. None have ever heard the entire account. Until now.

The circumstances were thus: In those days the bishop of Ljubljana, Sigismund of Lamberg, seized on the popular assumption that the monks in the Slovenian abbey of Gorrion in the city of Gornijgard had adopted the outlawed reforms of Saint Bernard, and used that excuse to drive the monks from the monastery in order to make the property his own. Three of those monksBrother Hans the Porter, Brother Michael, and Brother Jacobfled across the Danube north to a Franciscan monastery in my capital city of Tirgoviste.

Even though I was later forced to convert to Catholicism for political reasons, I hated that vile religion then, and I care nothing more for it now. The Church was merely a rival power in those daysand a ruthless onedespite its attempts to cloak its grasping, clutching machinations in the guise of piety. I doubt that it has changed. And the Franciscans were the worst. Their monastery in Tirgoviste was a thorn in my side which I tolerated because the act of plucking it out would cause more political pain than the relief the extraction merited.

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