Sweet Love, Survive (26 page)

He rode with animal grace, his hair gleaming silver pale against the sleek black of his tunic in the spring morning light. His weapons, thoughtfully added outside to save Kitty alarm, bristled from his large body: double cartridge belts were crisscrossed over his broad shoulders; a carbine was slung behind his back; pistols were holstered on his hips; his cavalry saber lay conveniently scabbarded near his right leg. The two
kinjals
stuck into his belt didn’t show from the vantage point of the terrace.

The troop’s array of weapons was quite complete. Their mounts were the finest of mountain-bred horseflesh; they were well equipped with supplies and money. Each man was hand-picked by Apollo and Iskender-Khan. The weather was pleasant. Now all they needed was an enormous amount of luck to ride five days across enemy territory, pluck out the general from his well-guarded retreat, kill him, and find their way back to safety.

    At the point where sentry posts guarded the narrow pass into the valley, Iskender was waiting to bid his great-grandson good-bye.

“Do you have enough men?” he asked Apollo.

Apollo nodded. “Plenty.”

“If you decide you need more, send back a messenger.”

“Too many will only attract attention. Even now we might have more than we should.”

“We’ll watch for you after ten days.”

“It’ll be closer to two weeks, so don’t begin to worry.”

“Take care. I know you want to do this yourself, but no Red swine is worth the sacrifice of your life.”

“I’ll be careful, Pushka. Karaim’s my voice of reason.” Apollo grinned at his companion, who was lounging in the saddle alongside him.

Karaim only snorted through his hawklike nose. He’d ridden bodyguard to Apollo since Apollo was old enough to mount a horse and to the best of his recollection his advice had usually gone unheeded.

“Until a fortnight.” Apollo raised his hand in casual salute. “Good-bye, Pushka. You have my letter to Kitty?”

“I do.” The old man’s eyes took in the splendid, rangy form of his great-grandson and he prayed he’d never have to deliver it.

“Take care of her if need be … and the child.” Their eyes met, old and young, and understanding passed between them like a living thing.

“She’ll have the honors due your woman, and the child those of your heir. My oath on it.” Iskender lifted his hand in benediction. “Allah travel at your side.”

Apollo loosened his grip on the reins and Leda sprang forward. The riders moved out, tunics fluttering, fringes swaying, passing by their chieftain Iskender-Khan. His dark glance swept the score of men turned out in battle array, selected for their courage, fearlessness, and savagery. “Protect him with your lives,” he quietly said to them in passing, and each dark, fearsome warrior nodded mutely in acknowledgment.

    Kitty tried to keep herself busy after Apollo left, but the day was endless. She paced, she tried to read, she walked up the mountainside to a glen she and Apollo had favored. But with nightfall her melancholy only deepened, and with it the shattering fear, poised and menacing, crept closer.

Without Apollo her loneliness was appalling. She felt a stranger in the mountain aul. Unfamiliar with its customs, unused to the limited role allowed women, unaccustomed to the language, she was painfully aware in Iskender’s presence that she was only here on his sufferance—as though he were delaying judgment until some certification was accredited. He was never impolite, only reserved. It was daunting to be alone
here, pregnant and alone, with Apollo on some undisclosed raid. Alone, with no family, no friends, no other home left in Russia; alone amidst luxury; alone in a palace staffed by hundreds.

She had been a princess in her own right, born to wealth and privilege, had married and added to her fortune. Now none of that remained. She was destitute, entirely dependent on Apollo, not only for her physical existence but emotionally dependent as well. The change in her status, in her life, brought with it a turbulent chaos of uncertain feelings. The adjustment from supreme independence to one of dependence was not easily reconciled.

Still, she was bound to Apollo by more than love; she carried his child. And while the growing child gave her joy, it had, by its existence, sapped her self-reliance. It had necessitated her subjugation to the general—a sore point still not entirely rectified between Apollo and herself—but, more than that, it physically limited her ability to fend for herself. When Apollo left, she could no longer follow, and she despised the feminine feebleness cast upon her suddenly. Forced now into a docile waiting role, she chafed at its awful limitations.

She found herself restlessly wandering around the huge palace trying to recapture Apollo’s presence: sitting in his library for hours, picturing him lounging in the worn leather chair near the window; walking out to the pond in the garden where they used to lie in the sun; straightening his clothes in his dressing room; touching his ivory-handled brushes on the lowboy; remembering him shaving, standing tall and tanned before the oval pedestal mirror, carefully drawing the gold razor down his lean cheek.

She spent long hours in his mother’s sitting room, surrounded by family photos scattered atop tables, desks, consoles, gracing the liberty print walls, arranged haphazardly on the grand piano. She especially liked the one of Apollo as a boy of ten, tall already, his eyes bright with youthful mischief belying the seriousness of his face. He’d been dressed in full mountain regalia, the rugged Caucasus range as background. Even then a duplicate of Leda was standing beside him, the
reins held in his small gloved hands, the wind ruffling golden hair and mane alike. Apollo’s father, Prince Alex, as amateur photographer had captured the barely suppressed excitement underneath the outward show of maturity. It was his first full-sized thoroughbred, Apollo had told her, the day he had left childish ponies behind. Kitty would have liked to have known him then, to have been a part of his life and memories. She knew so little about him, only fragments of his life depicted in these photos—his mother and father, his sister … the glorious day he bought his own airplane.

That photo Kitty had moved to her bedside table while Apollo was gone. Splendid in high leather boots, jodhpurs, and a leather aviation jacket, he stood, one hand possessively on his airplane, smiling that heart-stopping, boyish smile of his. The sunlight was caught in his hair, his eyes looking straight at the camera, and Kitty felt when she saw it that he was about to make some typical teasing remark. Between the photo and his few things scattered about the room Kitty kept the feeling of him close.

She hadn’t moved the riding boots carelessly tossed half-under the chair the night before he left—and she wouldn’t allow the servants to move them, either. It was silly, but who was there to notice, and it gave her the illusion of Apollo’s nearness.

Please, Apollo, Kitty silently prayed during those lonely days, come back safely. She refused to even consider what would happen if he didn’t return.

By the morning of the third day, Kitty decided she simply must “do” something rather than mope around. Her attempt at managing the palace met with quiet but determined resistance. The servants were quite capable of directing the palace functions and indeed had done so, with a minimum of interference, since it had been built. Apollo’s father thought households ran themselves, while his mother, Princess Zena, though aware of the error in this assumption, was more interested in her husband and children’s company or her newest research project than in any chatelaine duties. As a result, the entire staff was stubbornly autonomous.

With the housekeeping activities denied her, Kitty turned to the outside, to aspects of farming which truthfully were much more appealing. Luckily Apollo’s steward didn’t guard his prerogatives as jealously as the inside servants, and when Kitty approached him about taking a hand in some agricultural project, Edyk was more than happy to oblige the Falcon’s companion. He immediately took Kitty around the acres of fields, explaining their methods, producing, and harvesting. He showed her the experimental plots for short-season wheat, the hybridized vineyard, the pear orchard where grafting was systematically producing a better, sweeter, larger pear. Kitty was instantly in her element, and while the fear and loneliness remained there were moments in the days that followed when they would be pushed aside briefly. Edyk was her savior.

    Sochi was close to paradise this time of year, warm, sunny, all the semitropical vegetation in bloom.

General Beriozov relaxed on the cushions of the chaise located near the balustrade on the sunlit terrace of the mansion overlooking the sea. After the fall of South Russia and the conclusion of mopping-up operations against odd fragments of the White Army, he had taken a vacation at Sochi, a resort community formerly serving the aristocratic classes of the empire. He was occupying, and had for two weeks now, the former residence of Grand Duke Vladimir. The general was amusing himself in his usual manner with drinking and women, but since the abrupt departure of Countess Radachek he hadn’t found a proper replacement. Only transient females came and went in the mansion by the sea.

Snapping his fingers for a fresh vodka, he shaded his eyes against the saffron glow of the setting sun, gazing down the endless expanse of beach lying at the foot of the steep, grassy incline running down from the many terraces of the villa. Lemon groves were planted on the distant hills; tea plantations skirted the town and the fragrance of bougainvillea attested to the semitropical nature of the climate.

The general’s musing of late—and today was no exception—often dwelt on the retribution he intended to exact
from a certain pseudo-Colonel Zveguintzev and Countess Radachek when they were apprehended. His patrols were out, and had been since the morning he’d awakened to discover his paramour gone. It was possible the pair had escaped on one of the numerous ships embarking for Europe, but then again … perhaps they hadn’t. In any case, he intended to find them eventually. Escape to Europe would merely cause a delay in picking up their trail on the continent. The general was determined. No one had ever bested General Dmitri Beriozov and lived to tell the tale—and the ersatz Colonel Zveguintzev and devastatingly tantalizing Countess Radachek were not about to become the first. He was a patient man. It was simply a matter of time. The only fretful grievance in his rather persistent musing was the possibility that disease, starvation, or the subzero temperatures might have cheated him of the pleasure of personally killing the colonel and countess.

Memories of Kitty absorbed him. He thought of her often—too often for his own peace of mind. It wasn’t just her beauty. She was more than beautiful. Beautiful women he could find anywhere. She carried about her a purity … there was no other word for it. Like some
jeune fille
, she had an enduring innocence, the fresh bloom of early summer roses. Perhaps it was her enormous misty green eyes, heavily lashed, framed by downy eyebrows, ragged like an urchin’s. No one else had soft, drowsy eyes like that. Her straight nose, that opulent lower lip, the small, fragile curve of jaw and throat—all youth, all tender, sinless delicacy. The long golden hair falling in sinuous arabesques, even that was uncommonly chaste, like honey from hybrid white lilacs, pale, only lightly kissed by the glitter of the sun.

Each time he looked at her he had wanted her, a virginal child-woman—and she had been his. He knew the innocence had been only a physical illusion; her mind was that of a very competent young woman, and her tongue occasionally indistinguishable from that of a hardened shrew, but he wanted that physical presence, the virginal innocence, because it fired his blood like no woman before or since.

When he found her again, maybe he
wouldn’t
kill her. In
the back of his mind he knew very well he wouldn’t. But this time he’d bind her tighter. Make the cage stronger. This time his pale golden nymph would stay.

That evening followed a pattern that had become routine at the Black Sea villa. Several women were brought in after dinner and the general selected one or two, always mentally measuring them against Kitty—always disappointed in the results, but always making a selection nonetheless. His physical needs required attention on a daily basis, and even the countess’s absence didn’t transform a carnal man into a monk.

Tonight he felt like two. The rest were dismissed and the general and his companions retired to the large bedroom occupying the west wing of the seaside mansion.

    To ride cross-country from Dargo to Sochi was a life-threatening feat now that the Reds were in control; to make it less risky, Apollo and his small party traveled by night, intent on avoiding large bodies of cavalry or troops. The hand-picked men rode with silence and speed, pounding northwest almost too fast for caution in their race against discovery. Twice they were spotted by patrols. The first they prudently outdistanced, since they were badly outnumbered, but they slaughtered the second. The odds were only two to one—by mountain standards, easily manageable. The fewer reports of a troop of mountain men traveling north, the better.

They entered Sochi late one night in a thick fog. By twos and threes they found accommodations for themselves, after agreeing to meet west of town the following day. The information needed was that of the location of the general’s home and, if possible, some idea of the number of soldiers guarding it.

Karaim, Sahin, and Apollo arrived early at the arranged rendezvous in order to reconnoiter potential access to the beach fronting the villa requisitioned by the general. His life-style made his whereabouts common gossip in Sochi; even in an era of unprecedented license, General Beriozov’s proclivities for amusement tended toward excess.

The three men were six versts northwest of the general’s
retreat and had scoured the surrounding shoreline thoroughly. The land abutting the sea near Sochi was picturesque and delightful to the eye. High, jagged limestone bluffs rose majestically from the crashing sea, bordering pale beaches narrowing almost out of existence in some areas, then broadening to smooth silky ribbons rimming an ultramarine expanse of water. The general’s villa was situated above a superb length of chalk-white beach extending over a mile in both directions.