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Ioan had gone down to the Dâmbovița River to wash.
The sun had fallen behind the ridge; only faint rays still lingered over the black line of pines. The water ran slow and dark between its stones, cold in the September dusk. Ioan sat on a rock, with his military boots planted on the pebbles, the leather guarding the hems of his trousers. His shirt, stained with the gore of his victims, lay stripped off and tossed upon a bush.
He poured water on his shoulders, his bare back wet and shining. The skin was no longer living, but the marks it bore were as vivid as if the knout had cut them yesterday.
Fifty strokes. They had not faded with death. They would only ease after drinking his victims’ blood. He hoped to find some Russian patrol around Bucharest, reserves who had avoided the Grivitsa massacre he had perished in. Before they’d arrive in Bellu cemetery and lay poor, cleaved Mitica, to rest. Relia, too, upon his final wishes. He had to feel clean for the occasion, at least.
He cupped water in both hands again and let it fall along his shoulders, hissing softly as the cold struck those stubborn welts that never quite ceased to burn.
“So,” said a voice behind him, calm and unmistakable. “The jackals tore onto your hide too, Isacescu.”
Ioan sat up immediately. He snatched up his shirt by instinct, then checked himself and turned, fabric still crushed in his fist.
Kostaki stood a little way up the bank, cloak thrown back, a small earthen pot in one hand. His eyes travelled once, without haste, over Ioan’s body, noting the bullet scar in front from the fatal battle, welts from the long work of the knout, and came to rest on his face.
“You look like a man flayed and then badly stitched up,” he observed. “It is a wonder your body bends at all.”
“It bends enough to drive my teeth into throats,” Ioan answered shortly. “What do you want, Brankovan?”
Kostaki held up the pot.
“The same thing I wanted of Relia Comanescu,” he said. “To put something on those Russian hieroglyphs before they crack you to pieces.”
Ioan’s jaw set.
“Keep it for him. I have no need of your unguents,” he said. “I'm only washing dry blood.”
Kostaki descended the bank without quickening his step.
“And what about comfort?” he asked. “Turn. This is more efficient than those dark waters are.”
“I need no comfort!” Ioan snapped.
Kostaki stopped within arm’s length. In the dusk his face had a stillness which, in him, meant attention sharpened to a point. Only the moon, the stars and their undead eyes shone.
“He told me how it fell, even before you did,” he said. “The laughter, the orders. He showed me the marks when I salved his back. Later, when I asked after them, he said: ‘Ioan has more.’ So I've come to see.”
“He had no right,” Ioan said between his teeth.
“He had every right,” Kostaki replied, a tone louder, “to let me know all that must be avenged. Do you understand?”
Ioan laughed harshly.
“You speak as if vengeance were a new notion to me,” he said. “I was sworn to it when I took my father’s knife to Grivitsa. I carry it in my bones. I do not need a boyar from Moldavia to teach me hate.”
“I do not doubt you hate well,” Kostaki said in an approving tone, folding his arms. “I have seen so. Only I have no patience with needless pain in men who are under my orders and may fail to strike true. Turn, Isacescu. If you will not do it for yourself, do it because Relia is in pain every time he looks at you. Are you blind? He is as torn from your stripes as much as from his own.”
Ioan flared.
“Torn?” he burst out. “He? For that? Me, blind! You think that is all his hurt? They did not just give him lines of leather and a prison, Brankovan. They —”
He stopped dead, as if a hand had clapped over his own mouth. Color had come up under the olive of his skin; his hands, still clutching the shirt, trembled.
Kostaki did not move, but something in his eyes altered. The pupils seemed to widen, as they did when he smelled powder before any shot was fired.
“They...?” he repeated lowly. “Finish your sentence, Isacescu.”
Ioan shook his head, fiercely.
“No,” he said. “What use? You can see well enough. Late. I was too late! And then,” He made a violent gesture, flinging the shirt down upon the stones. “They had him in the next cell. I was against the wall and I could not —”
He broke off again. The words would not pass his teeth; but the horror in his face said more.
The silence that followed was very short, but it seemed to stretch.
Ioan still did not meet Kostaki’s gaze.
“I do not speak it,” Ioan said at last. “You will understand it without my help.” He bit back a curse. “And you already know of my failure to save his life. All while he called me brother… Like my failure to protect Mariora, or Mitica, each and every time.”
Ioan's voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “So do not speak to me of pain. There are marks you cannot salve.”
Kostaki stood very still. His face, if anything, was a statue’s; only the line of his mouth drew tight, as if some old memory had been touched.
“I suspected as much,” he said quietly.
“Liatoukine,” Ioan spat into the river, “he takes everything he can lay his hands on, to all he can grasp. Honor, body, soul! Then he throws you back in the straw and whistles for the gaoler. Only to sacrifice you at his own altar.”
Kostaki watched, until Ioan finally met his eyes.
“And you,” Kostaki said, still in that same level tone, “have walked since then with fifty scars on your back and your father’s knife in your belt, and told yourself that the pain is your harness. That unless you feel each stroke when you breathe, you will forget what has been done and to whom.”
“Yes!” Ioan flung at him. “Yes. Every time it burns, I see their faces. I see Mariora’s ring on his hand; I see Relia stumbling beside me with blood on his coat. If these stripes ever cease to hurt, I shall be nothing but a peasant again, sowing for others to reap. I will not be healed, Brankovan, damn you. I forbid it.”
The last words came out as a threat; he had taken a step forward without knowing it. Man to man, they were inches apart; Ioan’s eyes blazed, his hands clenched as if he meant to strike the pot from Kostaki’s fingers.
Kostaki did not yield an inch. When he moved, it was to hook the pot at his belt, conceding to Ioan’s resolve.
“If they do not impede your aim, then keep them,” he said. “I understand what it is to keep a hurt.”
Ioan’s eyes roamed to the front of Kostaki’s coat and shirt. The sight of the gaping wound there was always abrupt and brutal. Ioan glimpsed, in the hollow beneath the chest, the dark, ugly seam which no balm and no blood had ever wholly closed.
“Then why,” he demanded, more roughly, “do you, still bleeding, come to me with salve and good intentions? Why do you plague me about these?” He flung a hand back to indicate the scars.
“Because there is a difference,” Kostaki said. “This”—he glanced to his own body—“was given me by my own blood. It is sin, mine and his, and generations of curses. Your fifty were laid on you for loving as a man ought to love. There is nothing in them that is shameful.”
Ioan’s anger faltered, surprised by the nakedness of the revelation.
“You would like to think that the pain in your back stands for another’s. It does not. You cannot carry their pain. You can only stand up beside me when the time comes to return it.”
Ioan’s lips drew back from his teeth.
“And you will tell me that you mean to do that?” he said. “That you, a strigoi, a stranger from over the cursed mountains, will avenge all that I could not prevent?”
Ioan’s eyes held what Mariora had once feared to meet too long, “too much black”, a somber depth which fixed on a face or a horizon with the same resolve. When their eyes met, it was two black fires finding the same draft, each feeding the other’s heat, each recognizing in the other a shared darkness.
“I am no stranger,” Kostaki answered. “I have been all too familiar with evil, mine and men’s, enough to raise you both into this non-life. I know your stories. I know that his back is scarred because that dog laid his hands on your Mariora and he had stepped in. You think I do not know what men do to those they mean to dishonor? I was raised in the border-lands, where grand boyars and Turks and Phanariots and Austrians and our imperial ‘brothers’ have been trampling peasants into the mud for a hundred years. In war and in famine, with my father and without, I have seen villages after Sipahis and Cossacks passed alike. Do not call me a stranger to all that is happening, Isacescu. I learned it as a child.”
The last words came out with a sudden hardness that made the hair stir at the nape of Ioan’s neck. For the first time he had a vision, very clear, of what this man might do if ever he were let loose in some St. Petersburg salon where Liatoukine smiled over champagne.
“You swear, then?” he said, through gritted teeth. “By that wound, by whatever devils keep you walking, do you swear that he will pay? For every home he has razed? For Mariora, for Mitica, and for Relia, too?”
“I swear,” Kostaki said. His hand touched his wound. “By my mother’s curse, by my and my brother’s shared grave-earth; I swear I shall see him wiped out for every stripe on your back, for Mariora’s pain, for her brother’s soul, for every hand laid on Comanescu, and for every other home he has ever ruined.”
Ioan had seen oaths sworn before, Cerneanu swearing on the flag, Leganescu on his sword. This was of another sort. There was no appeal to Heaven; only that low voice, steady as a drawn sabre.
Something in Ioan unclenched. The ache along his spine and chest did not abate, but it altered; it no longer felt like the only fire he carried.
“I keep these stripes,” Ioan said at last, more quietly. “They are the rope that ties me to my purpose. And… if you meant to soften the rawest of them so I might stand the straighter when the hour comes, I do not take it as an insult.”
It was as much concession as any man could have wrung from him. Then he picked up his bloody shirt from the rocks and turned his scarred back, to put it back on.
“Why do you not let that be soothed as well?” he said suddenly, not turning his head as he finished redressing. He lifted his hand absentmindedly. “You carry that cut like a martyr carries his own head, not as something to be cured.”
“It cannot be soothed,” he answered. “In my vengeful pride, this is my refusal to lie down where my brother’s sword left me. I walk with it as with an order. You do the same with your fifty, Isacescu.”
Ioan gave a short, grim chuckle.
“A fine pair of ghosts,” he said. “Your lordship and a son of Old Mani, trailing our stripes and gashes on ourselves like banners.”
Kostaki’s hand, for answer, came down once upon his shoulder, firm and almost familial. Ioan stood still, and then his shoulder relaxed before the hand on it withdrew.
The night seemed colder on his chest, but there was a strange loosening in his back, as if the flesh, for all its stiffness, had accepted the balm in spite of his will.
“If he dies by your hand instead,” he said suddenly, teeth setting again, “I warn you, Brankovan, I shall not thank you.”
“Who spoke of robbing you?” he replied. “You have four names to pray under your knife. I have mine. There is enough of that carcass for more than one crow.”
He turned away from Ioan, and stopped.
“Only remember,” he added, “when you lift your hand, you do it not as a beaten dog, but as a man whose wounds have been counted and answered, one by one.”
Ioan bowed his head, listening to Kostaki’s faint retreat. For a moment, in the chill twilight, he let himself feel; not the lash on his back, not the caged helpless fury, but the weight of another’s vow laid alongside his own. His thirst for vengeance had a companion.