A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (ebook pc reader TXT) 📕

smile at last, good prince. How I have longed to see it wiped away! And now, why should I leave you a nose, to carry in the air so arrogantly? Half a one will serve you just as well, for the short time of breathing you have left.”

      During the course of my next few gasping, gurgling breaths, Bogdan’s sword did a fair job of cutting and peeling away a sizable portion of my face. In the background I could hear Basarab laughing.

      Suddenly Ronay, speaking in a low voice, pausing at intervals to grunt with the discomfort of his own wound, ventured to suggest that since the Sultan was going to pay them a good price for my head, it might be as well to leave my face at least recognizable.

      Bogdan made a sound expressing doubt. The suggestion had come somewhat too late.

      I will not die!!

      (There is a pause on the tape.)

* * *

      Ah, the images fade, true memories blending imperceptibly into the knowledge of things that I could only have imagined, heard later from the lips of some other eyewitness, or reconstructed by logic.

      Or—is it possible? Possible that, in some way I still cannot understand, my soul—if it is permissible to use the jargon of modern physics—that my soul, I say, quantum-tunneling the barrier of death, I might have observed every detail of my own butchery, my spirit hovering out of the body though not yet fully detached from it?

      I WILL NOT DIE!!!

* * *

      Pain could no longer elicit the smallest outcry from the body, and it had ceased even to twitch under the ministrations of Bogdan’s blade. Presently I ceased even to breathe. Shortly after that, some providential distraction, probably a report that my Moldavians were near, drew my enemies’ attention away. (Let me add parenthetically that before succumbing to this distraction, Bogdan, turned back, suddenly suspicious, taking no chances, and cut entirely through my neck.)

      The distraction, I say, was providential, because as soon as my enemies were out of sight some of my loyal though humble friends among the camp followers mentioned above, displaying considerable courage in the midst of their grief, made a brave effort to preserve my poor clay from the further indignities that the traitors and eventually the Sultan would certainly have inflicted upon it.

      This effort naturally required that they substitute some other body for my own—the mere disappearance of my corpse would not have been acceptable to the traitors. (Though now that I think back on it, what a delicious superstitious fear it would have provoked among them!) The near obliteration of my face, to the point where my loyal friends themselves had difficulty in recognizing me, made their task considerably easier.

      Also a great help to them was the fact that my corpse lay on a recent battlefield, surrounded by fresh candidates for substitution.

      A selection was quickly made from among these, and a partial change of armor and clothing was effected, no easy matter in itself—have you ever tried to dress a corpse? Quick cosmetic surgery was performed upon the face of my replacement—his hair and mustache were already an approximate match. Body build was generally similar. Height is irrelevant among those who have become permanently horizontal. And given the muddy condition of the field, one of its occupants tended to look a great deal like another anyway.

* * *

      To shorten a somewhat lengthy episode, which I am finding increasingly painful to relate, let me say at once that the replacement was a success. When Bogdan and his two close associates came back, they abandoned with scarcely a glance the hacked-up torso and limbs they thought were mine, picked up by its dirty hair the head of pseudo-Drakulya, and at once packed this grisly object away in a cask of salt to start its journey to the Sultan. There was, I suppose, hardly any point in trying to clean the flayed thing up. Much later I heard that the trophy was indeed exhibited upon some palace gate or wall, the head of the dread Lord Impaler, Kaziklu Bey, brought down at last, only to be so elevated among his enemies.

      But from that day of my assassination, it was long, long, before the Sultan ever entered into my thoughts again.

      Meanwhile my own body, unhappily disjunct, had been conveyed from the field by my friends in greatest secrecy, bundled in its two pieces upon the back of a mule. Darkness had fallen long before the corpse reached a place of sanctuary, where another friend or two appeared to clean it up and lay it out for honorable if secret burial.

      This sanctuary where my remains had come to rest temporarily was a farm not far from the battlefield, and also not far from the island monastery of Snagov.

      A rough plank table had been constructed, in some outbuilding, for the job that had to be done, and on this my body was laid out supine, head just a little distant from neck stump, a tall candle at my feet and another near my detached head. During the following preparations, these candles took turns in extinguishing themselves, for no good reason that I could see. Perhaps there was more of a draft than I could feel.

* * *

      Two of the farm women did most of the actual corpse-washing. Meanwhile a handful of other people came and went, to marvel and to grieve.

      And, of course, to pray over my dismembered body. The prayers as I recall were for the most part Catholic, for I had been and remained a dutiful convert from the Orthodox faith into which I had been born.

      Among the topics of conversation addressed by those preparing me for burial was the fact that my grave would probably be only temporary, that the late unhappy prince would want to be moved someday to a prepared vault hidden beneath a certain castle.

      But for the present all concerned would be satisfied, could I but be laid peacefully to rest in some