Fred Saberhagen Vlad Tepes 04 Thorn

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empty barn just across the road from my borrowed house. There were a lot of
empty barns in the country now. And now I wondered if I would have recognized
Perugino had I seen him. My memory could no longer give me a clear image of
what he had looked like, and anyway he might well have changed.
Helen spoke again, in the dead voice that was now hers. "We have been on the
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move almost constantly. We have run from the soldiers, yours and others, and
we have looked for work. Artisan's work, peasant's work, anything. From Rome
to
Venice, even to Milan. There I saw Sforza once, by accident. We were quite
close, but he looked right through me without seeing, as if I were a ghost.
Then
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we moved back to Venice again. Then out here. We have been living the next
in village down the road." Suddenly she put out a hand to grip my writing
table's edge; she looked pale, as if she might be about to topple from her
chair.
"You will need some food," I said. And instead of calling in a servant, whose
presence I did not want just then, I got up and began to look around for some
myself.
"Yes, some food please. I need some. It was not easy for me to come here,
Vlad.
Vlad? I ask you to let him go."
In a rucksack I found some bread, and brought it to her. It was dark bread,
and stale as I recall, having been for some time left in the pack forgotten.
We soldiers had enough. Helen took a couple of bites with animal hunger.
Evidently her teeth were still good. I sat down again and watched her eat.
Whatever vengeance I
decided to pronounce upon her and her lover, it would have been foolish to try
to gloat over her with it as she lay on my floor in a dead faint.
Chewing, she asked: "The hostages are all going to be hanged, aren't they?"
"So it would seem. No one has yet come to us with the names of those who
killed the mayor."
"Is that why the hostages were taken? We did not even know."
"Bah. You really expect me to believe that?"
"We in the next village, I mean. That is where Perugino and I have been
living.
The soldiers just came through, rounding up all the men that they could
catch."
I looked at Helen closely, decided that she was telling me the truth, and made
a small sound of disgust. The village I was in, now that I thought about it,
did look small to have provided so many hostage bodies. I was going to have to
take some disciplinary action, hoping to instill in my squad leaders some
glimmerings' of intelligence.
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Helen went on: "There is always hanging, butchery of some kind, going on in
these villages. I wonder that the people manage to grow any food at all." When
I
did not answer, she was emboldened, and pressed on: "You could let him go. It
will not matter to you, will it, if there are twenty bodies hanging, or only
nineteen?"
I thought to myself that it was hardly going to matter if there were twenty or
none at all. Except of course to the twenty themselves, and to their families.
And to leave the men alive might work a benefit to the land at large. But my
words through some bitter perversity followed a different path than my
thoughts.
"Maybe," I said, "I will be doing them all a favor by hanging them now. If I
let them go, they will have a few more years of suffering in this Godforsaken
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country and then die anyway. Will Perugino be better off or worse off if I let
him go?"
"I don't know, Vlad." And I believed that she did not. But then she began to
weep, sobbing so that she had to stop chewing on her bread. "I don't know. But
let him go. Please, please, let him go on living."
"You still ask me not to hang him."
"If you put it that way then you are going to do something to him even more
horrible. Oh, I knew it, I should never have come to you." Yet hunger made her
try to bite the bread again; she choked on it and went off into a fit of
coughing. I
got up from my chair again, to dipper some water for her from a pail.
"And suppose just suppose that I should let him go, entirely free? What would
you do then? Assuming that for some reason you were given a choice."
Helen drank, and choked again, and drank a little more, and put off answering.
Later she was to tell me that at this point in our interview she felt sure
that I was only playing with her, mocking her, that at any moment the horrors
would be announced, that I would call out for the torturers to enter. But I
was not playing. I
was much less certain than she was of what was going to happen next.
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It occurred to me that what I really ought to do was hang Perugino, who was
demonstrably guilty of something, and let the nineteen innocent clods go free.
But then the guilty man's troubles would perhaps be over a church-painter like
him would be sure to make his peace with God before he reached the
gallows whereas the nineteen would be doomed to who knew how many more years
of suffering. Well, that was the kind of mood that I was in.
The reader doubts, perhaps. I have and had a bloody reputation. How is it
possible to prove today that I did not torture a certain wretch to death in
1467?
Well, can the reader himself prove himself innocent of all crimes committed in
that or any other given year? But, the reader protests, in 1467 he was not yet
born. Let him prove that, too, say I. If I can live so long, then why not he
or she?
Forgive me, gracious Mina. I am overwrought, with reliving things that have
more power over me than I guessed they would, when I sat down to write.
Let me put it this way. Though it was claimed even then that I had ruled too
harshly in my own land, I had never gone so far as to hang nineteen men who
were not even suspected of any crime. And if, in the time when I was Prince,
some officer of my realm had reported to me that he was carrying on an
investigation in such wise, depopulating my land of healthy industrious
peasants to no purpose, his own carcass might soon have been observed in a
position higher and more uncomfortable than that afforded by any ordinary
scaffold.
Something in my face must have inspired Helen to new hope. "Vlad," she burst
out suddenly, "I know that I have already made wedding vows with you, and
broken them. But they were forced and I did not consider that they bound me. I
will make them again, if you would have me still. The position you hoped to
gain can still be yours- you will be the brother-in-law of a powerful king if
you will let Perugino go free. I will never see him again. I will, I swear it
to you by whatever you like, be a faithful wife to you, whatever you choose to
do to me."
Now it seemed to be an effort to think about her at all. I rubbed my face, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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