Dracula Sequence - Thorn Part 1

Thorn.

by Fred Saberhagen.

Prologue.

The runaway fled gracefully through the smooth white tunnel, her small bare feet moving with quick darting strides. Her slight, girlish body, completely naked, was splashed by a quickly s.h.i.+fting disco spectrum of fantastic light that followed her from the room she fled. Music, loud rock music, followed too, throbbing with the light. Like the light, it lost its violence only partially and slowly as it increased its distance from its origin.

As if the music had caught up with her in midstride, the girl's graceful run changed abruptly, halfway through the tunnel, into a dance, but a dance that still carried her rapidly forward into the large, white room at the tunnel's end.

It was a long room, like something out of a museum almost, and the windowless white walls were angled and rectangular. The white carpet was immaculate and thick. On the walls hung many paintings, drawings, prints, and all of them were hard to see in the bewildering, reflected disco rainbow that came through the tunnel to provide the only illumination. There were carvings hanging on the walls too, and statues large and small stood everywhere. The girl's dance moved her in and out among them, as if she might be looking for another way out. But the tunnel was the only entrance, and the only exit visible.

The girl's dance was a performance meant for no one but herself. Her face was a lovely mask, utterly unlined, looking very young, and looking too calm to be a dancer's face. Around it, long brown hair swung wild and dark, dirty and uncared for. Her dark eyelids were half closed, the full lips parted levelly over white, slightly uneven teeth. The skin of her body was childishly smooth, and gleamed lightly in the strange changing light, as if she might be sweating despite the coolness of the air.

Her feet were tiny and arched, grained here and there with dirt, and she set them precisely and silently down in the thick whiteness of the floor.The driving music had less and less to do with the dance as it continued. Its movement s.h.i.+fted to a slower rhythm, becoming almost courtly. Then halfway through a pirouette the girl's eyes opened wide. Her balance, perfect through all the movements before this one, abruptly broke, and she went down on one knee on the rich ivory carpet, stunned into awkwardness by something she had seen.

She stared with wide eyes for a long moment into the dimness straight ahead.

Then, bare shoulders heaving with a great sighing breath, she slowly turned her head. Hardly did she dare to try to see again what she had seen a moment earlier.

It hung there on the wall, amid the hundred other paintings. Conflicting emotions struggled in the girl's face; and then presently her face became tranquil again, but on a different level. She was gazing outward now, away from self. She stayed crouching there on one knee, almost exactly as she had fallen, becoming almost as motionless as one of the surrounding statues. Now even her breathing appeared to stop.

"There you are." The voice of the approaching man was slurred and gleeful, and it contained hostility. The light coming through the curious white tunnel was modulated by his approaching shadow. He moved into the girl's range of vision now, but she ignored him completely. He was as naked as she was, and looked to be a few years older. Perhaps he was twenty-two or twenty-three. Reddish hair with a tendency to curl fell damply to his muscular and freckled shoulders. He was only a few inches taller than the girl. And he was breathing heavily, as if he too might just have finished a dance or some other physical exertion.

The girl was still down on one knee. She had regained grace in her pose, but otherwise had not moved since turning her head to look back over one shoulder. She had not yet taken her eyes from the sight that had made her fall.

The young man followed her gaze for a moment. Nothing but a row of old paintings, mostly in wood frames, hanging on the white wall and, like everything else in the room, hard to see in the odd pulsing light. He was not really interested; he was used to being around people who stared at nothing. He walked toward the girl until he was standing close beside her, but still she gave no sign of being aware of him at all. Not even when he buried the fingers of one strong hand in her wild hair and tugged.

"Hey," he said, trying to turn her face toward his body. As he spoke the music in the other room cut off abruptly. Still the mad light continued to pulsate through the tunnel.

Abruptly the girl thrust out one slender arm in a graceful shove. The young man, who had no dancer's balance, went staggering back. He reeled helplessly into a towering marble statue, which rocked on its base and settled back. Mumbling something, the man tried to recover, clawed at a wall, then sat down on the white carpet with a soft thud.

Again the multicolored light wavered with approaching shadows. Another naked man was coming from the far room. The legs that bore him round the white curve of tunnel were moving trunks of bone and muscle, well designed for his great weight.

The torso above the legs had once been heroic, but now sagged grossly with advancing age. Still the clean-shaven face, its chin held high, was alert, controlled, imperious. Only a fringe of hair, all white, remained around the ma.s.sive head; and gray hair grew matted thickly on the chest and belly and on the heavy, still-powerful arms.

This man advanced a little way into the room and halted, looking with displeasure at the scene. "There are some very valuable things in here," he announced in a ba.s.s voice, "and both of you are evidently crazy, or completely freaked out, or whatever the word for it is this year. Therefore I am not going to let you make this your playground. Got that?"

The last words trailed off just a little. The aging man had at last taken some notice of the extreme rigidity of the girl's gaze and the strangeness of her frozen posture. The arm she had used to shove the youth away was still extended. Her head was still turned, eyes looking back over her left shoulder.

The only sound in the room, besides the violent music, was the labored breathing of the young man. He still sat on the floor, and now he was glowering angrily at the girl.

The old man said, in his ba.s.s voice: "If that on the wall really strikes your fancy, little girl, then you have good taste. Better than some people who have entered this room fully clothed and supposedly in their right minds. Well, I have good taste too, and you doubtless don't know what you're staring at anyway, and I appreciate your round little a.s.s. In fact, out of all the orifices available tonight, I may just choose to end my evening there. But I want to do it back in the other room. So get up."

Now through the tunnel behind the old man three more naked figures were approaching, pus.h.i.+ng before them an extensive interplay of shadows. Slightly in the lead there walked a leanly muscular man of about thirty-five. His suntanned body was marked with the pale outline of absent swimming briefs. Just after the man came a boy who appeared to be in his mid-teens, small and slightly built, pale- haired, blinking lost eyes at the world. The boy supported himself every few steps by leaning a frail arm against the white curve of the tunnel wall. When he emerged from the tunnel into the room and the wall flattened, he stopped, leaning his back against it for support. A step behind the boy, another dark-haired girl strolled in casually. In size, and build, and coloring, she fairly closely resembled the girl who had been dancing. The brown eyes of this newly-arrived girl were keen with interest-but they were focused on the empty air an arm's length before her face. She paid no attention to anyone else. Her full lips mumbled soundlessly, then smiled.

The red-haired man who sat on the floor ignored them all, all except the girl who had danced. Now in his throat a low murmuring of rage and humiliation had begun, and grew in loudness. On the second try he struggled back to his feet. His right hand went out to a small white cube, and from its flat surface he grabbed up a small but heavy artifact of silvery metal. Raising this, he lunged straight for the crouching dancer as his right arm swung the lethally compact weight straight for her skull.The old man's was the only voice to cry a warning, and his yell did no one any good. It sounded simultaneously with a sharp, dying scream.

The thin young boy still leaned back tiredly against the flat white wall. His blinking eyes, completely lost, were looking somewhere on the far side of the dim room. The dark-haired girl who had come with him through the tunnel stood quietly beside him now. She was thoughtfully probing with one finger inside her own mouth, as if intent on making sure her teeth were all still there. She took no account of what had happened to the white carpet just a few feet away.

The athletic man, who was alert and could move very fast, was already a step in front of the huge old one. But there he halted his swift advance, warily astonished; his move had obviously come too late, and he had no wish to step into the fresh blood.

The huge, gray old man was astonished too. Then, because he was no stranger to sudden violence and it did not particularly upset him, and because he possessed a quickly penetrating mind, he was immediately struck by circ.u.mstances even more amazing than the mere fact of abrupt murder. Inspiration of a magnitude extremely rare grew swiftly behind his clear blue eyes. Slowly he put out a ma.s.sive hand, to take his wiry companion by the shoulder.

"Gliddon," the old man said. He used the careful tone of one who wishes to wake a sleeper gently, not to startle.

"What?" The attention of the wiry man was still warily absorbed in the scene before him. h.e.l.l of a mess to be cleaned up, at best, he was thinking. The killer was now standing, swaying, as if dazed. The silver artifact lay on the floor, near something else.

"Gliddon. These two kids behind me. I want you to get them out of here. They're both stoned blind, and I don't think this has made any impression on them at all. I doubt that they'll remember seeing a thing-but anyway we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now get 'em out of here and put 'em down to sleep somewhere. I want to deal with this." He nodded at the red spectacle before them.

"But."

"Oh, you can take charge of the cleanup later. But right now just get those two put away." The old man, an expression in his eyes befitting the discoverer of a new continent, was moving forward slowly, his gaze s.h.i.+fting from the dazed, spattered killer to the demolished victim, and back again. "I want to handle this, alone. I have my reasons."

Chapter One.

In my opinion I owe the breathing legions of humanity no explanations of any of my affairs, no apologies for any chapter of my life. And I consider this judgement to apply with particular force to my role in the events surrounding the recent and much-publicized disappearance of one of the world's n.o.blest works of art. Let those breathing folk who in financial anguish claim rights to the painting recover it if they are able, or get along without it if they are not. Nor do I consider that it is up to me to interpret for them those strange and violent events, mystifying to so many, which like red parentheses enclose the painting's vanishment. By the standard of objective justice it is rather I who deserve an accounting from the breathing world, I who am ent.i.tled to some reparations . . .

Bah. At my age I should know better. And in fact I do. I press no formal claim.

Only this much do I insist upon: you will understand that almost my sole purpose in setting down this history is to please myself. Almost, be it noted. Mina, my true great love, my delight now for almost a century, accept these pages from me as my humble effort to explain some things you must have wondered at; and be a.s.sured, my dear, that none of the breathing women mentioned here could ever begin to mean as much to me as one look from your eyes, one touch from your sweet hand. In addition, I would like to think there are a few other readers who will be able to appreciate the story, as a story, as I tell it on my own terms, in my own way. And part of my pleasure shall be to use my informed imagination to create for those discerning readers some scenes at which I was not present and could play no role. I warn you-if it is not already too late-that in these scenes it amuses me sometimes to be accurate and deceptive at the same time. You may accept those portions of the story or not, just as you choose. Indeed-do I need to say it?-you may think what you like about the whole business.

It is my decision to begin upon a certain warm spring night, not long ago. It was a night through which the smell of orange blossoms spread, to bless the Arizona air.

More than five hundred years had pa.s.sed between that night, and the last time I had seen my treasure. Time had marked my long-sought masterpiece, and I too was changed . . . very much changed. And yet, merely seeing it again awoke in me such things . . . one look and I was back in the City of Flowers, where winters are too cold to tolerate orange trees and palms but where nevertheless the pungent summer atmosphere bore and still bears the blended fragrance of a thousand blooms . . .

This is she, Signore Ladislao. An excellent likeness, if that is what you wish.

From this you may know her. Pray Jesus and San Lorenzo that you may bring her safely out . . .

An excellent likeness; oh yes indeed. When at last I stood before that panel of polychromed wood again in Arizona, I could feel its craquelure of centuries like a net of painful scars on my own skin. I thought for a moment that my eyes were going to fill with tears. And who will believe that of me, now, no matter how solemnly I write it down?

But this history is so far getting off to a very rambling start.

Consider Phoenix, Arizona. Consider wealthy suburban Scottsdale, to be precise, as it was upon that recent warm spring night. Palm trees of all sizes and several varieties mingled everywhere with the ubiquitous orange. At dusk the streets were busy, in part because of the natives' habit, bred into them by their summer temperatures, of putting off, as much as possible, business and pleasure both till after sundown. One tourist who was present on the evening we are talking about found himself in particularly hearty agreement with this practice. He was registered at his downtown Phoenix hotel as Mr. Jonathan Thorn, permanent address listed as Oak Tree, Illinois.

At sunset a taxi took Mr. Thorn from Phoenix to Scottsdale. The street where he debarked from his taxi was wide, not too busy, and lined on both sides with expensive shops. The shops' signs were all small, discreet. Rows of expensive vehicles were parked diagonally in front of the low buildings. The plank sidewalks, partially blocked from the street by imitation hitching posts made of real, weathered wood, were roofed with more planks against the summer sun. Beyond these wooden cloisters, the low-built expensive shops were modern, though constructed in part of real adobe brick.

The building that Mr. Thorn approached was typical, being grilled on all its doors and windows with thick bars of black wrought iron. The front door was intermittently open to the plank sidewalk, admitting a trickle of people in elegant but open-throated warm weather attire. As he pa.s.sed the hitching post in front, Mr.

Thorn took note of an incongruous old Ford sedan, inscrutably battered and unrepaired, waiting there between a Mercedes and a new luxury model Jeep. He took note, I say, but only barely; at that moment he had other things to think about.

Just inside the door, a security guard in business suit and tie took note of Mr.

Thorn, cla.s.sified him as acceptable, and offered him a light smile and a nod. Thorn found himself in a moderately large, efficiently cooled room where a dozen or so folk, mostly middle-aged and prosperous, to judge by appearances, milled slowly about or sat in folding chairs. Under bright lights at the front of the room, high wooden tables already held some of the lesser items from the Delaunay Seabright collection on display. The overall decor was determinedly Southwestern, with the ma.s.sive, rough- hewn ceiling beams exposed and Navajo rugs hung on the white, rough-plastered walls. Set up to face the front of the room were many more folding chairs than seemed likely to be necessary. In theory this pre-auction viewing was open to the public, but it appeared that few of the public were going to intrude upon what was in fact a pastime of the rich. A month earlier, and the notoriety attendant upon the killings of Delaunay Seabright and his stepdaughter would probably still have drawn something of a crowd. But the auction had been well timed. By that spring night, the spectacular murder-kidnapping was already fading from the popular memory.

There were only two people present, a couple, who looked as if they might be thrill-seekers. Quite proletarian in appearance, they were being watched with vague, discreet apprehension by the auctioneers, smooth men in business suits who looked as if they might just have flown in from New York. Mr. Thorn, catching a little of that watchfulness, observed the couple too.

At one end of the rear rank of folding chairs sat Mary Rogers. (Thorn was not to learn her name until a little later.) Mary's long hair was sand-colored, somewhat curly, and usually disheveled. Her age was twenty-one, her face freckled and attractive, her disposition choleric. Her body was all shapely strength, superbly suitable for work and childbearing, and would have made an ideal model for some artist's healthy peasant-though Mary would not have made a very good peasant, or peasant's wife, or, for that matter, a very good artist's model either. She planned to use her strength in different ways, in a dedicated lifelong selfless service of humanity.

She always visualized humanity as young, I am quite sure, and as eternally oppressed. Well, there are billions of youth in the world, after all, more or less oppressed. Probably cases exist even in Scottsdale. But in that auction room, alas, were none at all; Mary had to have some other reason to be there.

The auctioneers, as I have said, were a bit uneasy about this young, comparatively poorly dressed couple. What bothered them was not the fact that Mary wore blue jeans-so did a couple of other women in that small crowd. But Mary's jeans were probably of the wrong brand, and their fadedness suggested not some manufacturer's process, but utilitarian wear. Successful experts in the world of fine art can be amazingly sensitive to subtle differences in color and texture, not only in the merchandise but in the customers.

But mainly I think it was that the faces of Mary and her escort stood out in that little gathering. Their countenances were not filled with thinly veiled greed for the treasures (so far only quite minor ones) displayed, nor with calculation as to how to bid on them. Oh, it was evident enough from Mary's face that she had some keen purpose in that room-but what could it be? That she might try to buy anything seemed highly unlikely, considering the prices that were certain to be asked and bid.

If she and her companion were really wealthy eccentrics who simply enjoyed dressing in the style of the non-wealthy, then who belonged to that old Ford out front? Anyone who drove that car out of eccentricity would probably be staying at home anyway, in rooms filled with piled garbage and a thousand cats.

Whatever apprehensions the auctioneers may have developed regarding Mary- that she might be contemplating some mad attempt at robbery, or an even more hopeless effort at social protest-these doubts must have been at least somewhat allayed by the face and att.i.tude of the young man seated at her side. He was a bearded young man, with his arms folded in his not very expensive checked sports s.h.i.+rt. His look was not one of fanaticism, but of uncomfortable loyalty. He was bracing himself, perhaps-but not for bullets, only for boredom or embarra.s.sment.

Also present, to define the opposite end of the auctioneers' spectrum of respect, was Ellison Seabright. When Seabright entered the front door, a few minutes after Mr. Thorn, the salesmen gave him the warmest welcome they could manage without seeming to be effusive about it, without drawing possibly unwelcome attention to his presence: the greeting for a celebrity, but one who temporarily has more attention than he wants.

Seabright was about fifty years old. In general appearance, he reminded Mr.

Thorn strongly of Rodrigo Borgia. Mr. Seabright weighed about three hundred pounds, Thorn judged, and if the tales of the family wealth were anywhere near accurate he might have balanced himself in gold and had enough left over to purchase any painting or sculpture that he might desire. According to the publicity that had begun to appear since his brother's kidnapping and strange death, it was a family trait to desire a good many.

Ellison Seabright, from where he stood in quiet conversation with the auctioneers, once or twice shot a hurried, grim glance in the direction of Mary Rogers-as if he knew her, which was interesting. Mr. Thorn, from his chair in the front row, could not tell how the young woman in the rear reacted to these glances, if at all.

The other potential bidders in the room all glowed in their not very distinctive auras of material wealth. The auctioneers, when they conferred privately (as they thought) among themselves in the next room, had voiced hopes that a local record was going to be set. They were daring to compare themselves tonight with Christie's, with Sotheby Parke Bernet. This time, even leaving aside such relatively minor treasures as Mimbres bowls and Chinese jade, this time they had a probably genuine Verrocchio to put on the block.

Mr. Thorn was doubtless among those they were counting on to run the bidding up when it officially began tomorrow night. Although they had never seen or heard of him before, it was surely apparent to such artistically expert eyes that Thorn's dark suit had been tailored at one of the best London shops, and that his shoes were a good match for the suit. He wore, on the third finger of his right hand, a worn-thin ring of ancient gold. His general appearance was at least as elegant as that of Mr.

Seabright.

The height of the two men was about the same, somewhat above the average.

Thorn's weight was considerably less-though not so very much less as it appeared to be. He looked to be Seabright's junior by ten or fifteen years, but that comparison was deceptive too. Their faces were both striking, in different ways: Seabright's for ma.s.sive arrogance, Thorn's-in a way not nearly so ma.s.sive. As for their relative wealth-but Mr. Thorn had not really come to Scottsdale to bid and buy.

"No, I'm sure it's going to go to Ellison," Mary Rogers was whispering to her dour young companion with the sandy beard. "The old b.a.s.t.a.r.d probably has more money than all these others put together. And he wants it, I know how he wants it. After what he's done already he's not going to let mere money stop him."

There were several rows of chairs between Mary and Mr. Thorn. The room was abuzz with the noise of other conversations. And her whisper was really more discreet-that was the key word of the evening, up to now-than her misfit appearance promised. So Mary's words could be heard only by her friend seated beside her, and by Mr. Thorn, whose ears were wonderfully keen. Also it is a fact that Thorn was const.i.tutionally unable to ignore either of the two women in the room he found genuinely attractive.

The second genuinely attractive woman was dark and slender, somewhere in her mid-thirties, and sheathed in a gown that you might think had been designed expressly to wear while inspecting expensive art. She was physically young for her years, but not as young as she wanted to be or tried to be. Probably to no one's surprise, she was clinging to Ellison Seabright's right arm. Certain subtleties of body language in her pose suggested to Thorn that she was clinging there in order to avoid having to swim elsewhere. At the moment her ma.s.sive escort was standing at the right end of the front row of chairs, in conversation with the head auctioneer, and with one who must be a fellow collector, a bearded elderly gentleman wearing another New York suit. Seabright was turning his ma.s.sive head, looking round him in irritation. "Where's Gliddon?" he was inquiring of the world in general, though his voice was hardly more than whisper-loud. A voice not in the least Borgia, but thoroughly American. "Got as far as the front door with me, and then . . ."

A bodyguard even taller than Seabright, and almost as wide, stood nearby teetering on his toes. He was not very obtrusive, handling at least the pa.s.sive aspects of his job quite well. The dark woman clung to Seabright's arm, smiled brightly, and seemed to attend closely to his every word, meanwhile wistfully wis.h.i.+ng that she were somewhere else. Mr. Thorn could tell. He had hopes of soon discovering her name.

"Then you might as well give up, hadn't you?" the young man at Mary Rogers's side was whispering into her ear. His tone was quietly despairing, that of one who knows full well that argument is folly, but feels compelled to argue anyway. "You think he's going to listen to any kind of an appeal now?"

"No." Mary's monosyllable was quietly ominous.

"Then why the h.e.l.l did we come here? I thought . . ."

At that point every conversation in the room trailed into silence.

Through a curtained doorway at the front of the room, between the two large tables, two armed and uniformed men came into view, rolling a mobile stand between them. The stand was draped with a white cloth, completely covering the upright rectangle that was its cargo. The rectangle was about the size of the top of a card table, somewhat larger than Mr. Thorn had been expecting. Then he remembered the frame. According to the news stories and the sale catalogue, a frame had been added to the painting, probably sometime during the eighteenth century.

With the stand positioned on the dais between the tables, the two armed men stood still, alert, on either side of it. An auctioneer came to join them, placing his pale hand on the white cloth. He let his showman's hand stay there, motionlessly holding the cloth, while in a low voice he made a brief and scrupulously correct announcement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, as most of you know, Verrocchio has signed this piece.

But in the time and place in which he worked, such a signature often signified no more than a master's approval of work done by an apprentice. What we can say with absolute certainty is that this painting is from Verrocchio's workshop, and that it is in his mature style. The minimum bid tomorrow night will be two hundred thousand dollars."

With one firm twitch, the showman's hand removed the cloth.

Mr. Thorn forgot even the live and lovely flesh of the two genuinely attractive breathing women in the room. He rose from his folding chair and like a man in a trance stepped forward, closer to the painting. It of course shows Magdalen, not as she came to Christ, but as she must have looked when rising from His feet with sins forgiven. Yes, of course, painted in the mature style of Verrocchio. But by an imitator-though transfiguration would be a better word than imitation for what the creator of this painting had accomplished. How could they all fail to see the truth?

And of course at the same time the face is that of the model who posed for it, that young runaway girl of more than half a thousand years ago. An excellent likeness, if that is what you wish . . .

Incipient tears in the eyes of Mr. Thorn were stopped by harsh cries of alarm.

Another sort of liquid, flung from behind, struck him on the shoulder, and scarlet droplets spattered past his ear to mar the cheek and hair of Magdalen.

He turned with a snarl. The girl in unfas.h.i.+onable blue jeans was on her feet, holding in one hand a small plastic bag almost emptied but still drooling red on the expensive carpet. Vindictive triumph ruled her face. Closer at hand, Ellison Seabright had been incarnadined from head to foot, Rodrigo Borgia skinned alive, standing in stunned disbelief. His bodyguard, galvanized too late, came pus.h.i.+ng forward in a fury. Men and women in uniform, springing from the walls and woodwork, were all around the triumphant girl, about to seize her. You are under arrest, they cried, and in a moment they would manacle her wrists . . .

Chapter Two.

Quite early in the game, long before our long marching column approached Buda, the chains of hand-wrought iron were unlocked and taken from my wrists. At the same time, my ankles were untied, and I was given a better horse to ride. To my thinking all this served as an early confirmation of my own good judgement in deciding to throw myself upon the mercy of King Matthias. Of course with the Turks close at my heels and the remnants of my own outnumbered army fast dissolving, there had been little real choice.

The king, when he accepted my surrender, had been angry with me-mainly as a result of certain false accusations, lying letters planted by my enemies for him to intercept, a whole devious chain of circ.u.mstances that I do not mean to go into here.

But evidently His Majesty soon realized the truth. I did not have another chance to talk to him during the march to Buda, but his officers must have been given orders to treat me well. When we reached Buda they put me into a cell high up in the fortress, a stone chamber better ventilated and cleaner than many of the free houses of the time.

My food also was good, by the standards of the time and place, and plentiful enough. This was, you understand, more than twelve years before I fell under the treacherous swords of would-be murderers, stopped breathing, and acquired my present idiosyncrasies of diet. And when cold weather arrived I was allowed a fire.

Guards took me out each day for exercise in a courtyard. There I sometimes walked under the noses of papal legates-I recognized Nicholas of Modrusa once- amba.s.sadors from here and there, some other important men and curious ladies whom I could not identify. None of these ever spoke to me, but observed silently, from balconies where they usually chose to remain half concealed. Even then, you will understand, my reputation was under construction, by German enemies who employed Goebbelsian thoroughness in their attempted destruction of the truth. Now, for important folk visiting His Majesty at Buda, the in thing to do was evidently to ask to see the monster caged. Well, at the time I enjoyed my walks despite observers, and perhaps I should now think more kindly of them. Some were doubtless sympathetic to my cause, and they may have expressed their feelings to Matthias. Still, I spent a year in that first cell.

From time to time I was given brief audience by the king, who limited himself for the most part to looking at me keenly and inquiring how I was. Matthias was then only twenty years of age, but had already spent four years on the throne of Hungary.

He had come to power by what amounted to popular acclamation; and time had already begun to vindicate the confidence thus shown him by his people.

At the end of a year I was suddenly moved about fifty kilometers up the Danube to Visegrad Palace, where Matthias was currently spending a good deal of his time. A good deal of money, also, which he extracted mercilessly from the wealthy landowners of his realm, and not all of it was going to feed and equip his formidable army. Scholars and artists from across Europe were beginning to a.s.semble there at his invitation. Already they had started to put together the magnificent library that would be known as the Corvina, and only a few years later the palace would house the first printing press in all that region of Europe . . . but I am beginning to stray from my story.