The People's Will Read online

  Dmitry wondered just how well he really spoke the language; how thick his accent was. Iuda would be the man to know. He was, when it came down to it, an Englishman – although that had been a long time ago.

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Iuda.

  Dmitry did not want to waste time.

  ‘As you’ll have realized,’ he continued, ‘I need you alive. So tell me – what other traps are there?’

  ‘You’ve seen it,’ said Iuda. ‘There’s the sunlight,’ he attempted to jerk his head upwards, but the strap across his forehead still restrained him, ‘and the guillotine. The guards all used to carry wooden stakes, but one of them got the jitters – tried to kill me out of pure fear. He got close, but I managed to deal with him.’ He grinned and ran his tongue across his teeth to clarify the point.

  ‘So they gave that up?’

  Iuda tried to nod. Dmitry suspected it was a pretence – after so long he should have been used to his immobility. What he thought to gain by it, Dmitry could not guess; anything to unnerve his opponent.

  ‘Yes,’ said Iuda as an alternative to the gesture. ‘They took all the stakes away. They want me alive. The only circumstances in which I should die are …’ he smiled, ‘those in which we now find ourselves. The shutter and the guillotine take more than one man to operate, you see, which makes them safe, but slow.’

  ‘Luckily for you.’

  ‘That, I think, remains to be seen.’ Iuda eyed Dmitry, trying to determine why he was here. Dmitry ensured that his face remained inscrutable. ‘They could have been a little quicker off the mark,’ Iuda continued, ‘but I suppose they saw this as a genuine Russian assault, not a feint to disguise your more personal business. You did well to arrange it.’

  Dmitry gave a brief snort. Iuda was probing. Even so, it wouldn’t hurt to let him know a little of what was going on around him.

  ‘Oh, the attack was real enough. “Is”, I should say – it’s still going on, up there. All part of what you English call the Great Game. We call it the Turniry Tyenyey – the Tournament of Shadows.’ He added the English translation simply to annoy Iuda, whose Russian was perfect.

  ‘Next stop Afghanistan then?’

  ‘For them, perhaps,’ Dmitry nodded towards Osokin, Lukin and the others, ‘but I, and you, have a different path to take.’

  ‘You chose your path a long time ago.’

  Dmitry narrowed his eyes. Was that a hint of reproach in Iuda’s voice? Had he really expected Dmitry to remain by his side once he’d become a vampire? Iuda had groomed him since he was a child, with a foresight that would startle even the most ancient voordalak. As Dmitry had grown into manhood, they had become friends – closer even than that. Dmitry had loved Iuda almost like a father, in some ways more than he loved his true father, Aleksei. Dmitry had found it hard to forgive his father’s infidelity to his mother. Iuda, on the other hand, had always carried an air of sainthood in Dmitry’s eyes. It was laughable, and Dmitry deserved to be laughed at for being taken in. He was different now, and thankful for it; in becoming a vampire he had become a cynic. He’d rarely been fooled since – except by himself.

  But as far as Iuda’s interests had been concerned Dmitry was merely a stepping stone. The real enemy was Aleksei – always Aleksei. Dmitry could not be sure that Iuda had planned exactly the dénouement that had taken place beneath the Kremlin twenty-five years before, but it had been something along those lines. Iuda had wanted to take Dmitry and show him to Aleksei, to dangle the son before his father’s eyes and say, ‘I have taken him. For all you loved him he is mine now.’ It would have broken Aleksei’s heart.

  And for his father’s heart, Dmitry did not care a jot. Since the moment he became a vampire, Dmitry had cared for no other creature but himself – and perhaps a little still for Raisa, his vampire ‘mother’. Down in that low, dank corridor, when Iuda had begun to reveal Dmitry’s fate to Aleksei, Dmitry had felt no pity for his father. Iuda’s words might break Aleksei’s heart, but it would mean nothing to Dmitry – a heart that has died cannot be broken.

  Instead Dmitry had thought of himself. He had been Iuda’s pawn, and he did not like it. He could look back on himself and be amused by his own credulity, but it stung his pride to have been a bit player in the story of his own life. And he was still a mere supernumerary. Iuda, Tamara, Aleksei – they all had their roles to play, but for Dmitry there had been nothing to do but stand there, and let Iuda complete the plan that he had formed as long ago as 1812 when he first set eyes on that five-year-old boy. Dmitry did not care whether the plan succeeded or failed, but this time success or failure would be down to him.

  The thoughts had crossed his mind in an instant, and he’d known that he must act. He would not let Iuda make the final move; would not let him reveal the truth to Aleksei. Dmitry kicked out and, for the first time ever, acted on his own volition. The expression on Iuda’s face as he fell back among his prisoners would have been satisfaction enough, but the knowledge that Dmitry had taken control was what mattered. As he walked away, with the key to Iuda’s dungeon in his pocket, he had been in charge. Later, he might return to release his former mentor, or he might leave him there to rot. In the end he left him, but the decision had been his.

  It was only hours afterwards, when it was too late, that he realized what he should have done. He pictured it in his mind. He would still have kicked Iuda into the cell, still locked the door and taken the key, but he would not have left, not right away. He would have bent down to his dying father, so that Aleksei could see him with his failing eyes, and would have whispered the words, ‘Papa, it’s me, Dmitry. And I have become a vampire.’

  It would have been the best of all: to take control and then to instigate the climax of Iuda’s plan for himself – and it was a wonderful plan, there was no doubt about it. He would even have told Aleksei how he’d left Marfa, his own mother, locked in there with Iuda, just to extinguish any hope for his humanity that might linger in his father’s mind. But he would not cry over a missed opportunity. He had had many opportunities to live his own life since then, and had rarely declined to take them.

  ‘What matters is to have a choice,’ he said, staring down at Iuda, flicking his eyes across the bonds that held his arms and legs and head.

  ‘And you chose to come here?’ replied Iuda. ‘To rescue me?’ Dmitry remained silent, but Iuda did not need to be told that this was no rescue. ‘To fetch me?’

  Dmitry was tempted to turn away, but he knew Iuda was just guessing. Any reaction might tell more than was necessary. He’d find out soon enough, anyway.

  Iuda continued to goad, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Now who on earth would send his minion to fetch me?’

  The answer was obvious, but Iuda was still guessing.

  ‘Where is it?’ Dmitry asked, tired of wasting time.

  ‘Where is what?’

  ‘Ascalon.’ Dmitry whispered the word, afraid to say it in front of so many, even though they would little understand its meaning.

  ‘And what would you want with that?’

  ‘That’s no concern of yours.’

  ‘Nor, I would suspect, of yours. Something else you’ve been sent to fetch?’

  ‘I know you’ve been searching for it. All that time you spent at Chufut Kalye, and you never spoke to the Karaites about it?’

  ‘And you think that since I’ve been searching for it, I must have found it? That’s a very flattering estimation of my abilities.’

  ‘You must know something,’ said Dmitry.

  ‘I might.’

  ‘And you’ll tell me.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because you want your freedom.’ Dmitry was not sure that it was an offer he was empowered to make, but that did not matter; Iuda was unimpressed.

  ‘Such an exchange would require trust between the participants. You lost my trust years ago, Mitka.’

  ‘So who would you trust?’

  Iuda spoke slowly. ‘I’ve lived a very long time. Th
at’s not achieved by trusting.’

  Dmitry paused. He was getting nowhere, just as he’d expected. ‘Perhaps not for much longer,’ he said. It was meant to be a parting shot, but Iuda continued.

  ‘Your father understood trust, of course,’ he said. ‘Faith, if you like. That’s why I could never quite handle him. But it was his faith that allowed him to choose Dominique over your mother. Perhaps it was only one side of his family that inherited it.’

  Such insults meant nothing to Dmitry any more – though they would have cut him deeply when he had been human. But the mention of that side of the family gave Dmitry an opportunity to play one of his few trump cards.

  ‘You’d trust Luka Miroslavich then?’

  ‘Who?’ Iuda’s voice was casual, but he kept his face a little too still in repressing his surprise. Or perhaps that was deliberate. It was Iuda who’d brought the conversation to that point. Had he finessed Luka’s name out of Dmitry? It was too late now to go back.

  ‘My nephew, if you like to call him that,’ Dmitry explained, ‘on the more faithful side of the family. Tamara Valentinovna’s child. She gave him away.’

  Iuda stared at him blankly.

  ‘We know you’ve befriended him … much as you befriended me,’ Dmitry continued.

  But Iuda’s focus was not on his relationship with Luka. A gentle smile played across his lips, smug and victorious. He allowed Dmitry a moment to observe it before offering by way of explanation a single, simple word.

  ‘“We”?’ he asked.

  Dmitry felt his jaw tighten. An anger grew within him that was not entirely his own. He turned away, suspecting that Iuda had learned far more from the conversation than he had. He rubbed his chin angrily. Suspected it? He knew it for a fact.

  It was early in the afternoon, only a day since Geok Tepe had fallen and since they had come into this underground chamber with its strange, solitary prisoner. Colonel Otrepyev had departed soon after his initial discussion with his captive and not returned. He left orders with Major Osokin, but Osokin knew that it was merely out of form, a sop to his status as senior officer. The men that Otrepyev had brought with him seemed well capable of carrying out their duties alone.

  ‘And see if you can find a way to get that roof closed’ had been the colonel’s final instruction. It was an odd preoccupation, but Osokin had noticed the colonel eyeing the clear patch of sky above them for a while. He seemed older now than when he had first arrived.

  ‘I’ll see what can be done, sir,’ he’d replied. ‘Should we allow the prisoner to stretch his legs?’

  Otrepyev laughed heartily, but briefly. He was eager to get away. ‘No. No, I wouldn’t recommend that. I’ll be taking him away before long.’

  ‘I assume we should feed him?’

  ‘Don’t even go near him.’ And with that Otrepyev departed.

  Attempts to converse with the prisoner, even to discover his name, proved unsuccessful. Osokin tried Russian and French, but with no response. He was pretty sure that Otrepyev and the prisoner had been using English when they spoke, but he knew nothing of the language.

  ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ had been his last attempt, as he bent forward, peering closely at the man, trying to judge whether he was even aware of his surroundings. No reply was forthcoming. Osokin stood upright and took a step back, still in close examination of the figure in front of him. There was no point in asking the men; perhaps the lieutenant.

  ‘Lukin!’ he called.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Don’t suppose you speak English, do you?’

  ‘Afraid not, sir.’

  And that was the end of it, but in that brief exchange Osokin had at last noticed some slight reaction from the prisoner, though to which precise words he could not tell. Perhaps he was just reacting to the word ‘English’, presuming it was similar in both languages.

  ‘Any idea how to get through to him?’ Osokin asked the lieutenant.

  ‘Best leave him be, I’d have thought. The colonel seems to know what he’s doing.’

  It was sound if unimaginative advice. Osokin left the chamber. The bullet wound to his arm had been crudely bandaged by one of the men, but it still throbbed uncomfortably. It would be worth getting a field surgeon to have a look at it. And he was eager to see how the battle in the rest of the city had played out.

  It had not been his nation’s finest hour. Granted, they had achieved victory, but many of the men – the commander-in-chief, General Skobyelev, for one – had desired more than that. They had been seeking revenge – revenge for the humiliation of a little over a year before when Russia had first attempted to take the city of Geok Tepe, under the command of General Lomakin. Then there had been no undermining, and the assault had come after too short a period of bombardment. The attackers had been thrown back, and then Turcoman defenders – Teke tribesmen, most of them – had poured out of the city to counterattack. Seven hundred Russians were killed; as many captured. Back home some people had compared it with Khiva in 1717. In Europe the papers called it the Lomakin Massacre.

  But today, for seven hundred, revenge had been taken on seven thousand – perhaps more. Hundreds had died in the initial explosion, for which Osokin felt no guilt. It had achieved its goal and allowed the Russian cavalry and infantry to swarm in. As they had arrived, the Turcomans had fled out into the desert to the north. Some Russians had pursued. Those they caught they killed, but they didn’t catch many. Perhaps that was why they dealt so brutally with those who hadn’t escaped.

  On the other hand, drunkenness was as likely a cause. Osokin had seen enough of it in Bulgaria against the Turks. It was the men, not the officers, but the officers did little to discourage it. Some thought it inspired a foot soldier to be braver, but in truth it just served to quieten their consciences. There was nothing brave about many of the killings that had taken place during the battle. It was not just enemy soldiers; the old, the young, women too – there was no sector of the population that did not have its losses. Some of the women had been raped first – even some of the children.

  And there had been looting, of course. Osokin couldn’t object to that, up to a point. It wasn’t like the old days, when an army had to finance itself as it marched, but any little extra picked up along the way could help. But you couldn’t leave the enemy destitute, otherwise they’d turn to crime and half your troops would be busy just keeping the peace, instead of marching on to greater victories.

  General Skobyelev – the White Pasha, as the Turks called him, thanks to the colour of his charger and matching uniform – decided to take things a step further. On the day after the battle he commanded the women of the city – the surviving women – to hand over all their gold and silver jewellery by way of a war contribution. There was a tradition among the locals that at a woman’s wedding she should be decked with so much jewellery that she could not stand unaided under its weight, so there was plenty to be taken, even from the poor. At first the women resisted, but then they looked at the bodies of their mothers, sisters and daughters.

  Osokin saw the loot for himself. Two large carpets had been laid out to receive the offerings, but had disappeared from sight, obscured by piles of jewellery that stood taller than a man’s height – and still the women came to pay their tributes.

  Some brave staff officer, lower in rank but higher in nobility than Skobyelev, asked what it was all supposed to achieve. Wasn’t victory enough? But for Skobyelev, this was not about war; it was about the permanence of the ensuing peace.

  ‘The harder you hit them,’ he explained, ‘the longer they stay quiet.’

  Osokin had the dressing on his arm changed and then returned to the tunnels and to the strange conical chamber with its solitary captive. At least now the bodies of the dead had been cleared away – particularly the awful headless torso that had lain in the middle of the place. But bloodstains still marked the point at which each man had fallen, and one didn’t need to venture too far along the corridor outside to discover them all,
stacked up, awaiting a mass burial.

  ‘Take an hour or so,’ he said to Lieutenant Lukin. ‘You might as well see what we’ve conquered.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, sir,’ Lukin replied.

  ‘Just do as you’re told!’ The boy – that’s all he really was – didn’t deserve to escape the consequences of what they had done. However brilliant he might be at digging tunnels and laying explosives, he needed to learn that it was about more than just making precise mathematical calculations. He needed to see the result.

  Lukin reluctantly obeyed.

  Otrepyev’s men had achieved little success in drawing the shutter back into place above them. They’d managed to reach the dangling rope, but in pulling it they had only opened the gap a little further. There was no obvious mechanism to reverse the process. The whole contraption had been devised to be used just once – to open the roof, which would never then need closing.

  One of the soldiers had managed to shin his way up the support for the swinging blade that had so efficiently beheaded his comrade the previous day. But its pivot was not close enough to the skylight. He reached out as if expecting his arm to suddenly grow in length and bridge the gap, but it was hopeless. His fingers lost their grip and he fell with a cry, landing at the feet of the prisoner, still in his chair, who glanced down with an expression of contempt. Even if he’d escaped breaking any bones, the fallen man must have been horribly bruised, but he looked up into the eyes that stared down upon him from the chair and in an instant was scrambling away like a startled crab. He huddled against the wall, nursing his aching limbs.

  It was all very peculiar: the prisoner himself, the two strange contrivances – one to open up the roof, the other to behead the prisoner. It was clear that the man was not meant to be captured alive. What reason could there be for that? And if he needed to be killed, why not a simple bullet or a blade? There was one answer that crept into Osokin’s mind, but it came from the past – from childishness and superstition. The Turcomans though were a backward people; a hundred or more years behind Russia. At the time of Empress Yekaterina, might not many of even her most rational subjects have taken such myths for truth? There were tales from as recently as the Patriotic War, of monsters preying on Russians and French alike. It would be the same for the Turcomans today. But if it was just these primitives who believed it, why had Colonel Otrepyev been so keen to cut that rope?