Vladislav

A Chapter by CousinLymon

Chapter 1

He was floating. He tried to rub his eyes, but his arms would not move. When he tried to look down the air around him was too dark. Swimming through the almost opaque darkness was an offensive green essence that enveloped his body, invading his lungs and washing his mouth with an acrid taste of bile. Perhaps he was dead and this muted coffin would be shaken, this dull black would part on the command of a boatman or demon. Just silence. His rigid body was spinning through the desolate fog.

Then, as he became accustomed to his purgatorial fate, he felt a rumble. The growl’s uncanny sound was more powerful than anything he had ever heard. Fear started from his stomach and crawled upwards. He tightened his brow and narrowed his eyes, trying to pierce the thick smoke.

Finally, a break in the haze revealed a charging storm, emerging from where there would have been a horizon, had the plane not been barren of any geometrical points. The brooding clouds roared as their fierce gases collided; their huge forms rolling like cannon balls, exploding upon impact. The churning mass was becoming bigger; approaching him with what he felt was a hungry intent. He tried to turn, tried to move his arms and legs and gain some distance but a strange gravity kept him moving onwards, involuntarily gliding, only curiosity protecting his sanity. Lightning cracked across his path; the winds tore at the clouds’ black swirls, creating shadowy figures that circled him. Each body of smoke suggested a malevolent motive, and a mouth filled with whirling teeth. His eyes were screaming.

Suddenly, the storm parted. The gale appeared to be acting as a wall, a terrifying shield that encircled a hidden territory. His mind raced with questions, fearful thoughts, but was silenced by the awesome sight that came into view. In front of him lay a city, a city in the sky. The city was built of a strange stone, similar to limestone, but different. It was a substance he had never seen before. It stretched out to the very brink of his vision; he assumed the storm at the very end of his sight was its end. It formed into a huge circle, with layers of primitive housing and massive towers that pierced the heavens.

He realised he was gaining speed, being drawn deep into the outlandish metropolis, passing monolithic cyclopean towers, each colossal wall carved with strange runes. The runes were beyond his understanding, strange pictorial carvings of titanic gods and abominable monsters. Each monstrosity was horrifically peculiar; each distorted to the extent of obscenity. The anatomy of these giants astonished him. Limbs resembling the wings of a bat, the arms of a man or skin like scales of a lizard, but each of these homely associations were distorted by the beasts’ uncanny, alien parts. Each horror an original individual of a hellish imagination. He closed his eyes. This could not be real, this could not be that place. When he opened them again, the city’s complex intersections sped past as he shot through stone corridors that joined thousands of hollowed buildings. The multitude of cubic housing was unbelievable, with a preposterous magnitude of levels, his sight unable to pierce the cavernous depths beneath him. Each hallowed window revealed angular irregularities and strange anomalies in the architecture of the buildings. It pained his head to stare at the walls, at acute angles which on second glance would become obtuse, slanting walls that moved left to right.

He began to see the individual blocks of stone that were the primary material for these buildings, blocks that no man or contraption could move, their size dwarfing his minute frame. He was rapidly drifting, he realised, to a central point in the city. He concentrated his sight on this impending point. He could make out a twisted throne; its gigantic size must have shadowed the buildings a thousand times or more. It had a tinge of dark green, as if covered by a dense moss, and it was surrounded by large pools, shimmering with a mysterious light.

His pulse quickened. Why was he drifting towards this throne? He realised, at the edge of his peripheral vision, towards the edges of the city, there were things out there. They flew around the city’s edge, winged monstrosities. No. Too difficult to see. Too difficult to understand. He kept eyes closed. But then, that sound, that uncanny sound that was more real than anything he had ever heard, reverberated through every inch of his being.

Out of one of the pools a great beast slithered from the water, its gargantuan figure inconceivable. He stared in disbelief, his tongue limply flailing from the corner of his mouth. The thing scratched its way up the throne, perched and opened its wings. And all Vladislav could do was silently scream.

Vladislav was encircled by three agitated and hungry peasants. They rang their hands but jumped hesitantly to each squeal as they watched him roll about on the grassy knoll, eyes white, mouth bubbling. They were debating whether the delirious man was subdued enough to rob, or perhaps the wild convulsions and peculiar speech made him too dangerous to approach. One of them, a thin wafer of a man, approaching his fifties, wearing rags barely fitting his gaunt frame, was trying to work out the strange words Vladislav had been screaming while burying his head into the ground. The old man picked up the goatskin from the flailing man’s side, took a whiff from its opening and placed it in his sack.

The other two, young men who were gauging the prospects of this rich man’s death, both were firing each other up, trying to build the superficial courage that would release them from their aching starvation.

Vladislav’s eyes opened, his face a shape of horror and despair as he gasped and cried, tearing out the grass from its roots. His pupils narrowed. He concentrated on the gritty texture of the soil. Its black and empty form underneath his fingernails. The blades of grass, loose all around him. The cool breeze blowing across the lush green field. He looked up at the three observers, and then examined himself. He had to move. He jumped to his feet, legs stumbling between the hard knots of grass, and laid his coarse fingers upon his sword hilt. With one hand he straightened out his loose clothing, tugging them over his bruised joints. He gathered his thought. There was someone he had to see. He pushed past the desperate men, trying to remember the sense of authority he once knew and headed for the city’s gate.

Vladislav’s dark eyes narrowed as he surveyed the bustling market. Anxiety was boiling in his stomach. The sprint from the field where he had passed out had brought a terrible pain to his chest. He cringed at the sickly taste in his mouth, wiping away the beads of sweat dripping down his untamed beard, catching the droplets with the spidery hairs on the back of his hands. Panting, he smelt his fingers and gagged. His pores reeked of mead.

The breeze lashed back his matted hair, calming the blinding dizziness that had made him sway. He gathered himself together and prepared for the approaching slalom. The heaving stalls were packed with hungry villagers, their awkward constructions barely holding together under the pressure of the huge magnitude of people.

He pressed his shaking fingers against his temples, trying to clear his head. The stalls were formed in the centre of a large street, with derelict hovels facing into the chaos. While war raged in Wallachia, the growing crime and the roaming bandits had left the region desolate, its city walls crumbling into the cobbled streets, the stones stained, the mud overflowing.

Vladislav staggered along the bustling path with a heavy heart. There had been serious changes in Wallachia over the last few years. The Sun’s presence had become a forgotten memory, the heavens empty of birds. The only song in the sky was the deafening crack of thunder, the gloomy clouds often appearing to spiral downwards, the ground moving and groaning, as if the earth itself was crying out in misery. The people were becoming vicious dogs, entranced by the current mobocracy and general anarchy.

Vladislav looked at the women, huddled and shaking under their perishing robes. The tears in the cloth revealed skeletal frames, colourful contusions; their bodies burnt quickly in the ravished city.

A woman was crying out. Her baby had been taken from her. Men grabbed babies from mothers, each body a commodity in the back alleys and abandoned slaughterhouses. Children roamed in gangs, this street particularly infamous for their malicious behaviour, their abandoned predicament feeding their malicious frenzy. Order had departed.

Vladislav was worried about his clothes. Dressed in his Boyar military robes and sabre, he presumed that this official presence should scare off any pickpockets or ramblers that may drift into his path. However, in these desperate times, the policing had become inadequate and Vladislav was apprehensive. He noticed the bodies against the city’s wall. A grey, insignificant, shrivelled mass, sinking into the fortification. He took his concern away from the dead and looked back upon himself. He considered the deathly party, how he may soon be joining that motionless, naked orgy. He kept walking.

His extravagant clothes illuminated him as prime bait; tender meat for ravenous Wallachians, still sore from the years of Ottoman disputes and their raging leader’s sharp whip. Hand-to-hand combat was not an option. His rich living and inherited status had made him fat. His life was a distant island far away from the hardships and hostility of peasant life, the battlefield was no place for a man of his influential stature. His weapon of choice was politics; his sword was always in its scabbard, but his knife was kept innately close to his sleeve. The world of political affairs had made him a keen assassin. His personal gains often produced by the bloody spurts of an unwanted guest or unwelcomed adversary, his blade would shine in the midnight hour.

He scanned the restless peasants. His recent treachery against the throne had placed him on tenterhooks. The prince’s guard could be following him, after what he had found out. The sharp squawk from a nearby crow, feasting on grains dropped from a vendor’s split sack, made him jump. Death lay all around him. All these anxieties, the growing aggression of the people, the ominous spread of disease, the famine and the anger, he must forget. None of these things mattered now: his life, his vices, his needs, their needs. He now truly understood more than he wanted to comprehend. Again, the colour drained from his strained face. His black eyes grew distant, focused to a portion of existence that few had realised, to where he had actually been. And a true fear, more than anything on this plane visited him once more, his true mission revisited.

Vladislav brought his unwashed hands to his eyes, to hide the old repulsion written across his face. He could see the dried blood underneath his nails and tried to scrub it away with the bristles in his beard. The odour brought back some of the memories, memories of a night that had taken him further than he wanted to go. Instinctively, he reached to his cross, yet his hands fed through empty space. He remembered he had thrown it away.

Vladislav kept his head low. The leather straps clapped, complimenting the barrage of noise from the screaming cattle and yelling barterers. The market in Targoviste was turning into an all-out war; food had been scarce for many months. A convoy of wheat and potatoes had been brought in from Hungary, yet already the supplies were thinning.

Vladislav pushed past the beasts scraping towards the stalls, desperate to be fed. None of this meant anything to Vladislav, not now. The screaming, the crying, the pleading. The understanding he had, the knowledge he possessed, brought him a fear that made everything else harmless, invalid. He had only one thought. He needed to reach a man, located in a shack at the other end of the town. He didn’t know much, but what he did know was leading him in this direction, to a person who may be able to help. He knew this was foolish. This man was living in secret, an exile from the Ottoman army, and if found would be torn apart by either side. However, he now lived in solitude, undisturbed and unknown, supposedly possessing answers that burned in Vladislav’s mind.

A dull hum entered his mind. They would come without notice. Bouncing against dirty yarns and sharp shoulders, the hum became a rumble. The villagers turned from their stalls. As if he had rung a bell, the cattle were turning. Vladislav tried to focus on the end of the street, tried to ignore the weariness in his legs, to tear through the strange lethargic miasma that was entering his vision.

The sky was darkening. His sight became unclear, a haze fell upon him. The figures in the street became a blur, a dark mass in the fog. It must be stopped. Someone has to stop this. A rush of desperate villagers fell upon him. Coarse fingers, cold teeth and choking odours. He tried to lift his arms, take his sword from its sheathe, but an unknown gravity dragged them down. Open faces, with only teeth from chin to eyes, came at him, their heavy breath beating like a noise he had heard before, an uncanny roar that made him cry for his mother, whose face he could not remember.

The world turned black. His material essence crumbled like bread. His last thoughts settled on only a distant mantra, strange words that echoed through his very being…

‘UG SHURRUB! UG SHURRUB!’