Read The Historian for Free Online

horizon. From that direction the Venetian ships had come, bringing war or trade, their red and gold banners restless under the same glittering arc of sky. Waiting for my father to speak, I felt a stirring of apprehension far from scholarly. Perhaps those ships I imagined on the horizon were not simply part of a colorful pageant. Why was it so difficult for my father to begin?

Chapter 4
    As I‘ve told you, my father said, clearing his throat once or twice, Professor Rossi was a fine scholar and a true friend. I wouldn‘t want you to think anything different of him. I know that what I made the mistake, perhaps, of telling you earlier makes him sound—
    crazy. You remember that he‘d described to me something terribly difficult to believe.
    And I was deeply shocked, and filled with doubt about him, although I saw sincerity and acceptance in his face. When he finished speaking he glanced at me with those keen eyes.

    ―What on earth do you mean?‖ I must have been stammering.
    ―I repeat,‖ Rossi said emphatically, ―I discovered in Istanbul that Dracula lives among us today. Or did then, at least.‖
    I stared at him.
    ―I know you must think I‘m insane,‖ he said, relenting visibly. ―And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.‖ He sighed. ―In Istanbul there is a little-known repository of materials, founded by Sultan Mehmed II, who took the city from the Byzantines in 1453. This archive is mostly odds and ends collected later by the Turks as they were gradually beaten back from the edges of their empire. But it also contains documents from the late fifteenth century, and among them I found some maps that purported to give directions to the Unholy Tomb of a Turk-slayer, who I thought might be Vlad Dracula. There were three maps, actually, graduated in scale to show the same region in greater and greater detail. There was nothing on these maps that I recognized or could tie to any area I knew of. They were labeled mainly in Arabic, and they dated from the late fifteenth century, according to the archive‘s librarians.‖ He tapped the strange little volume that I told you resembled my own find so closely. ―The information in the center of the third map was in a very old Slavic dialect.
    Only a scholar with multiple linguistic resources at his command could have made head or tail of them. I did my best, but it was uncertain work.‖
    At this point, Rossi shook his head, as if still regretting his limits. ―The effort I poured into this discovery drew me unreasonably far from my official summer research on the ancient trade of Crete. But I was beyond the reach of reason, I think, sitting in that hot, sticky library in Istanbul. I remember I could see the minarets of the Hagia Sophia through the grimy windows. I worked there, with those clues to the Turkish view of Vlad‘s kingdom resting on the desk in front of me, toiling over my dictionaries, taking copious notes, and copying the maps by hand.
    ―To make a long research story short, there came an afternoon when I found myself closing in on the carefully marked spot of the Unholy Tomb, on the third and most puzzling map. You remember that Vlad Tepes is supposed to have been buried at the island monastery on Lake Snagov, in Romania. This map, like the others, didn‘t show any lake with an island in it—although it did show a river running through the area, widening in the middle. I had translated everything around the borders already, with the help of a professor of Arabic and Ottoman language at Istanbul University—cryptic proverbs about the nature of evil, many of them from the Qur‘an. Here and there on the map, nestled among roughly sketched mountains, was some writing that at first glance appeared to be place-names in a Slavic dialect but that translated as riddles, probably a code for real locations: the Valley of Eight Oaks, Pig-Stealing Village, and so forth—
    strange peasant names that meant nothing