them: his penetrating gaze and lordly mode of speech, his attire and generosity. Obviously, with his dark, wolfish good looks - standing tall and lean as a tree, and equally strong - this was no ignorant, guttural farmer born in the fields but a gentleman landowner, a boyar removed from his own place by those same savage forces that had removed them. And he had gold, and the wit to fashion himself a fortress from a raw crag! His money was of little value now - not in these naked mountains where there was nothing to buy - but it would be when the land was quiet again. As for Radu's cavern: when all of the work was finished and if the winters were hard, then it would provide refuge for all of them. This was his promise.
Oh, Radu knew he shouldn't bring himself into prominence, but up here in the heights that was in any case a near-impossibility.
Who was there to see him or his, or know what they were about? No one but these low persons in their sod-roofed, timber huts. Radu hired them by the dozen, and chose men to watch over them while they turned the great cavern into a lair. When a man joined him, Radu would state his wages and promise him a bonus if he should later decide to go his own way, perhaps back down to his ruined fields to start again.
In that first winter, when the snow lay deep, a good many of them did just that: approached Radu and told him they'd left families in Moldavia, and would now return to see if they survived ... and if so provide for them out of the monies Radu had paid them, and the bonus he stil owed them. For his part, he would always require one last day's work of them before paying them their due, wishing them wel and seeing them on their way in the dusk of evening. But in the dark of night he would send members of his pack loping after them, to make certain no word of him and his works - and none of his money - found its way down out of the mountains.
And because new refugees were arriving day after day, and others trying to leave, there was a steady turnover of workers and no lack of... provisions. (Likewise, there was no gradual trickling away of Radu's funds).
The keep took shape. He would go among the workers directing them, so that every stone was laid in accordance with his design (even as it had been in Wolfsden in Starside in another world). Massive timber lintels for the several 'doors' that he left open, and piled boulders in other holes that Radu desired closed; archways with keystones to bolster the dripstone ceilings where they were eaten with rot, and stone staircases leading to ledges, lesser caves or high 'window' observation ports in the rough outer walls; the levelling of various floors, and laying of an uneven but serviceable paving of slate slabs. And so to the fireplaces and ovens, and the flues to channel smoke to the rear of the crag, there to drift with the mists rising off the lake.
And while all such works were in progress to make the cavern liveable if not 'comfortable,' Lord Radu was not remiss in seeing to its defences:
Outside, between the natural spurs of the crag, he built awesome death-trap gantlets for would-be invaders; on high, he piled rocks behind logs stopped with chocks that were easily knocked away in the event of an invasion. And at last Radu saw that his lair was safe. But in any case these were no puny castle's wals to fal to the first assault of an enemy's battering rams - they were the wals of the mountain itself! And as each external work was completed, so Radu would disguise it as living rock, in imitation of its surrounding formations.
But inside:
In strategic places Radu buttressed certain works of stone with good timber; which would seem odd to some, for obviously the wood could not outlast the stone. But Radu reasoned that when the time came for him to leave his mountain fastness, then by lighting a handful of fires behind him he could easily topple it, or at least reduce it to the original shell. Wamphyri and savagely territorial, he could not bear the thought of another dweling in a place that his hands had wrought! But by the same token