Vlad by C.C. Humphreys

seen her. He didn’t know if she’d seen him.
    As he preceded the palanquin down the street, Vlad smiled. He hadn’t really seen her, of course. Never had. She’d been encased in latticework when they’d talked. She was wearing a metal veil now. He wondered what she looked like beneath it. What if she was hideous? What if that rich voice emerged from the face of an aspiring crone?
    He shook his head. It seemed unlikely. Mehmet’s tastes were known to be peculiar but Vlad had never heard that they ran to the ugly. Besides, how she looked should make no difference to him. She was a lady from his land, in peril. And though he had listened to many wonderful tales in his time with the Turk, it was the legends from his childhood, sung before his father’s fire, that he still loved best. And in the courts of the Christian world it was tales of Arthur and his knights that inspired. He saw himself as Lancelot now, pledged to a Guinevere.
    But would the tale have been different if Guinevere had been a hag? Would Troy have fallen if Helen’s nose had a wart on the tip? It shouldn’t matter. Didn’t. Only his promise mattered, and how he fulfilled it. Nothing else.
    There were two routes to Mehmet’s saray . One obvious, one less so. Vlad needed the palanquin to take the latter.
    The long, twisting Street of Nectar ended in a fork at a fountain. A wider avenue led to the left, though it was somewhat narrowed by stalls on each side and people bunched around them, buying provisions for their suppers. The other way, narrower still, led slightly uphill past a mescid , a small mosque, and, perversely, a row of taverns right next to it. Glancing up that lane, hoping all was in readiness there, Vlad slipped into the throng before the stalls. He had no precise plan, other than chaos. But how to cause it?
    The first stall belonged to a seller of watermelons, whole or by the piece. Tied to it by a rope was a donkey, who stood in the way of such creatures, one rear hoof on its tip, eyes glazed in its lowered head, chewing on nothing. Dull beast, Vlad thought, hearing above the haggling and clink of coin the steady approach of booted men, the cry of, “Make way there!”
    He glanced back, saw the silver headdress and heron plume of the bolukbasi , the guards’ officer, twenty paces away. Biting his lip, he looked before him again, and thought of something. Drawing his bastinado from his belt, he lifted the donkey’s tail and shoved the forearm’s length of stick up the animal’s arse.
    He had his desire. Instant chaos. A flying hoof missed his head by a wing-beat. He leapt back, into the shelter of a doorway,beyond the reach of flailing hooves. He was still hit by the things that started flying—bits of its master’s stall that the donkey destroyed; melon—yet since the beast was tied to the stall, it was also dragging it into the center of the roadway.
    From beneath flung debris, Vlad looked at the guards, halted just ten paces away at the junction. Over the din of braying beast, screaming owner and panicked purchasers, the bolukbasi’s voice still carried: “Clear the road there, dolt!”
    The watermelon vendor—an old man with a humped back—took a pace towards them, bent over, hands clasped before him in supplication. “I will try, effendi , but this animal, cursed of Allah…”
    It was all he could say before the donkey kicked him, catapulting him into the stall opposite, bringing half of it down. His own was dragged further into the street by the raging animal, who finally broke free and went galloping away, the snapped-off strut scything into bystanders.
    Surveying the wreckage, the bolukbasi shook his head and bellowed an order: “This way!” Then he led his men up the other road.
    Vlad let them get twenty paces ahead, then followed.
    “Are you ready?” he whispered.
    —
    “Nothing?”
    Radu shook his head. He’d been down to the junction for the fourth time. Dropping onto the stool beside Ion he muttered,