Thirteen Years Later (48 page)

‘Is there anything you can do?’ asked the tsar.

‘It looks grave,’ said Tarasov. Again, Wylie could only concur. There was blood all over the major’s face, and a concave impression in his skull, just in front of the right temple. But he was breathing, albeit in shallow, desperate gasps.

‘I put him in your care, Doctor,’ said Aleksandr. ‘Do whatever you can.’

‘What happened?’ asked Baron Diebich.

‘I was in the carriage behind him,’ explained the tsar. ‘My coachman and I both saw him fall. We called for them to stop.’

‘We hit a huge hole in the road,’ explained the driver of Maskov’s coach. ‘It must have been full of mud or clay – I didn’t see it. It knocked him clean out of the door.’

‘Unlikely.’ The voice belonged to Colonel Danilov, who had only just arrived at the scene.

‘It looks like it to me,’ said Wylie, but a glance at the colonel reminded him not to take what he said lightly. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at what Danilov had in his hand.

‘It’s Maskov’s sword,’ he replied. ‘I found it back there; a long way back.’

Wylie instantly grasped the implication. Maskov had had reason to unsheathe his sword, and had lost possession of it some moments before he himself fell from the carriage.

Aleksei, Tarasov, Wylie and Diebich together lifted Maskov and manhandled him back into the coach, laying him on the floor between the two rows of seats. Aleksandr stood back, looking on with a mixture of concern and unease. Soon they had him in the coach, and Tarasov clambered in after.

‘It looks like the impact knocked down all the luggage too,’ he said, looking around at the mess inside. Danilov merely glanced at the chaos into which his own luggage had been hurled. He seemed more concerned with a minute inspection of the carriage’s doorframe.

Then the tsar spoke. ‘Let’s be on our way.’ Then he turned to the driver of Maskov’s coach, ‘And for God’s sake, man, drive more carefully.’ The coachman bowed his head in acknowledgement, happy to accept the unwarranted rebuke rather than face greater punishment.

Wylie made his way back to his own carriage and was about to remount when he felt a hand on his arm. It was Danilov.

‘I’m going back,’ he said.

‘Back?’ asked Wylie.

‘To Chufut Kalye.’

Wylie felt his own cheeks whiten at the implication. ‘But why?’

‘That was no accident.’

‘You can’t be certain.’

‘I saw a man,’ said Danilov sternly. ‘Running from the other side of the carriage. You were all distracted by Maskov.’

‘A bandit,’ asserted Wylie. ‘That’s no reason to go back.’

‘He was searching my bags – searching for the book. Do you still have it?’

Wylie reached into the carriage and picked up the notebook,
still wrapped in paper, from where he had left it on the seat. ‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘It’s safe.’

Danilov took it from him, somewhat brusquely, and put it into his knapsack. ‘I’ll be back as quickly as I can,’ he said, and then turned, heading down the road, to where his horse was waiting.

‘It’s a wild goose chase!’ shouted Wylie after him, but he knew in his heart that Colonel Danilov was not a man to pursue shadows. A whip cracked, and he saw that Maskov’s coach was about to start moving. He held his hand out to stop it for a moment and went to the door. Inside, Tarasov was leaning over Maskov’s unconscious body, listening to his shallow breathing. He turned to Wylie and shook his head grimly.

But that was not the information Dr Wylie was here to obtain. Instead, he looked at the frame of the door, at the same spot which Danilov had found so fascinating – fascinating enough to send him all the way back to the citadel of Chufut Kalye.

It wasn’t much, but it was certainly new and clean enough that it could be connected with what had happened to Maskov. The wood had been cut away by a jagged knife. There were two notches, side by side, about the width of two fingers apart. The only thing of note about them was their alignment. They were perfectly parallel.

It would be their last night before getting back to Taganrog. Aleksandr could not tell if he felt better or worse. He had now consumed all the quinine that he had taken from Tarasov. It tasted foul. He had exaggerated it at lunch the other day, but it was still not pleasant. How could he know if his current frailty wasn’t due to the cure itself, rather than to the affliction he hoped it was addressing?

Orekhov was not a large town, but they had all been able to find accommodation. Beds were usually made available for the tsar and the whole of his retinue. If need be, lesser guests would be turfed out, awake or asleep, to make room. They would be happy to make such a sacrifice for their sovereign. And if they
weren’t happy – well, then they hardly merited the comfort of a soft bed.

Tonight the man most in need of comfort was Maskov. Seeing him lying there on the muddy road, Aleksandr had felt a deep sympathy for him, of a kind that had not touched his heart for many years. Even so, he was no fool; he could see there was little hope for the major. But Tarasov would do his best, even if his prognosis was rose-tinted.

There was one thing the tsar himself could do for the man – not save his life, but at least give some slight purpose to it. He picked up the wad of dispatches. Regardless of Maskov, they would take Aleksandr’s mind off other matters. He sat down in front of the warming fire, wrapped in a robe. There was nothing of enormous interest in them. Despite what had happened at Chufut Kalye, his concern was the issue of potential revolution. Maskov had brought reports from many of the tsar’s sources in Petersburg, but none of them was as close to events as Colonel Danilov. Rationally, he would feel safer if Danilov were back in the capital, where he could feel at first hand the mood in the barracks. In his heart, it felt comfortable to have the colonel in his presence.

There was a knock at the door. Aleksandr glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was just after midnight. It could only be bad news. He called out, and Dr Tarasov entered. Aleksandr could see Baron Diebich hovering in the background. He rose to his feet, perhaps faster than he had intended. He felt a moment of dizziness, but asked the question that seemed suddenly more urgent than any.

‘How is Maskov?’

Tarasov hesitated for a moment, but the tsar was not a man who needed to be shielded from bad news. ‘Dead, Your Majesty. His skull was split. I think he was probably dead when we got here.’

‘What a tragedy,’ replied the tsar. ‘I so pity the poor man.’ Aleksandr hoped it did not sound like a platitude. So much that he said was taken to be such, perhaps rightly. Aleksandr turned
away from the doctor, afraid to show his face. He heard the door close as Tarasov left.

Aleksandr returned to his chair, dropping the dispatches to the floor beside him. There were so many other things he had wanted to say about Maskov, but none of them would sound sincere. What he really wanted to know was what in Heaven the Lord could have intended for Maskov. Why kill him in such an inconsequential manner? Could he not have died at home, bathed in the love of his family? There was nothing in the dispatches that was worth sacrificing a life to deliver – nor had Maskov died in attempting to deliver them; it had come later. It made God seem cruel, but Aleksandr knew enough to understand that, if he believed that, it was a fault in his own nature, not in the Lord’s. It was a fault that would take time to rectify – time and seclusion.

He felt a sudden pain in his stomach, a burning that spread out to his arms and legs. This was worse than anything he had experienced before, though each time the pattern was the same. Sometimes it began in his stomach, sometimes – he suspected – in his heart. He stood painfully and turned out the lamp on the table.

It was dark now, but he knew the way to the bed. He lay down, and the agony began to recede. His breathing slowed and he felt the sweat on his skin cool. The pain was not gone, but it was tolerable once again. Aleksandr knew it would return. Deep in that cave beneath Chufut Kalye, Cain had told him so.

Aleksandr opened his eyes. His body ached, but he could tell that the shaking he now felt was not caused by the convulsions of his own body, but by the coach itself. They were travelling more slowly now, partly out of consideration for the tsar’s delicate condition, but also with regard to the awful accident that had killed Major Maskov. They had buried him quietly in a cemetery in Orekhov, not very far from where he had fallen. The heavy local clay had been hard for the men to dig through. Aleksandr
had begun a letter to his family, but had not been able to finish it before the fever had overcome him.

Aleksandr still felt cold, although he was sweating. They had piled blankets and furs over him, but it did little to help. His greatest fillip was that soon the journey would be over and they would be back in Taganrog, though he would hate for Yelizaveta to see him like this. He forced himself to sit up and look out of the window.

The view outside was very familiar. They were closer to home than he had imagined, though it was easy to lose sense of time as he slipped between consciousness and an unconsciousness that was sometimes sleep and sometimes a thing far deeper and more disturbing. They were already in the outskirts of Taganrog. He recognized some of the buildings, especially the churches. It would be less than a quarter of an hour now before they were home.

The coach turned on to the coastal road that ran along the length of the town, and Aleksandr immediately felt more comfortable. It was not as familiar a place as Petersburg, but it brought to him the same sense of contentment, with few of the pressures. Little had changed. Perhaps, if he thought carefully about it, he could notice that the leaves on the trees, golden when he left, had mostly fallen to the ground. It had been a gradual process, and one he had observed all through his journey. Even that one yacht was still anchored out to sea. He really should send someone over to see if its passengers were people of any note.

The ship had, he observed, moved a little since he had last seen it – of that he was sure, despite the numbness that seemed to grip his memory. It was unlikely there would be need for so small an adjustment to its position. Perhaps it too had made a sojourn that had coincided with the tsar’s own. Where might it have been, he wondered.

It did not matter. The carriage clattered to a halt and the door opened, revealing the kind but concerned face of Prince Volkonsky. Aleksandr forced himself to his feet and stepped down from the carriage, ignoring Volkonsky’s proffered arm for fear
of showing weakness. In front and behind, the other carriages were disgorging their occupants, and he could see Wylie, Tarasov, Diebich and others stretching their limbs and appearing happy to be somewhere that was a little more like home. But turning his head anxiously from side to side, he confirmed that the one man he most desperately wanted to speak to was not with them. Colonel Danilov was nowhere to be seen.

A
LONE AND ON HORSEBACK, IT ONLY TOOK ALEKSEI FIVE DAYS
to get back to Chufut Kalye. It was mid-afternoon when he finally made it to the cliff top. He noticed the weather cooling all through his journey back and, although there was still no snow, the place felt wintry. He saw groups of Karaite men talking in the streets, but he didn’t make contact with them. If a host of vampires had suddenly escaped the cave system beneath them, then the neighbours of those men might well have become an immediate source of nourishment. Aleksei didn’t feel inclined to stand there and look into their eyes if that had been the case. He made his way to the rocky hilltop from where he had first entered Iuda’s lair, over a week before. He scrambled down to the cave mouth and peeked inside.

It was not what he had expected – certainly not what he had seen the last time he was here. The tunnel was impassable. The roof had collapsed, and rocks filled the way. He could see a few small gaps, but none that would be enough for him to get through. He could possibly dig his way in, but he had no idea how deep the cave-in went. He traversed the hillside and found two other tunnels, similarly blocked. Others seemed passable, but it was a superficial appearance. One had caved in just a little further into the hillside, whereas two more were undisturbed but led nowhere, terminating naturally without ever connecting to the underground labyrinth Aleksei had explored.

It was all very contrived; only those tunnels which might have led deeper had collapsed – those that had never led anywhere were spared. These were not the results of some random earthquake. The question was, had the vampires, once they had fled their former prison, caused this collapse so as to bury all memory of what they had endured there? Or had the tunnel roofs given way with the
voordalaki
still inside, and now unable to escape?

Aleksei climbed back up to the rocky plane above. There was one way of finding out, though it was not guaranteed. He sat on a boulder and opened up his knapsack. Inside was the book. Aleksei’s initials were still there on the paper in which Kyesha had wrapped it before giving it to him in Moscow. It seemed like years ago. He folded a corner of the paper to one side, and the skin once again began to smoulder in the sunlight. He listened carefully. The wind was blowing strongly, and it was difficult to differentiate the sound of a scream from its whistling between the rocks.

He went over to the edge of the cliff, just above the tunnel he had gone down on his first visit, and pulled the paper aside again. This time he was sure he heard nothing. He got on to his hands and knees to be closer to the cave mouth, but still there was only silence. He knew, though, that there was more than one tunnel that led down to those cells, and any one of the openings around there could be an entrance.