Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (9 page)

'Which means . . .' Senda gasped and her throat worked
slackly. '. . . that when they find out we're missing . . .'

'I'll kill that bastard first!' Schmarya growled. He jumped
to his feet and clenched his fists at his sides.

Senda clung to his legs and pulled him back down, out of
sight. 'No, Schmarya,' she said softly. 'You won't. You'll only
get yourself killed.'

'So what?' he retorted bitterly. 'Everyone else is dead. Why
shouldn't I die too?'

'Why?'
she whispered vehemently, shaking him with quiet
fury. 'I'll tell you why. If we die too, then nobody will ever
know what happened here. We have to live to keep the story
alive. Besides, if we die too, then who's to mourn the dead?'

His shoulders sagged. 'I suppose you're right,' he mur
mured. Then he reached out and embraced her. They clung
to each other for meagre comfort. Once again Senda felt as if each of her senses were heightened, only this time she did not
smell the moist freshness of the earth or hear the singing of
the birds. The birds and the whirring insects were still. The foul stench of blood and excrement assaulted her senses. She could almost taste the coppery, metallic aftertaste of blood in
her mouth. Death hung in the air.

Oily black plumes of smoke billowed skyward. Soon there
would be nothing left of the village, only piles of ashes and
scorch-scarred earth.

The Cossack leader burst through a wall of smoke on his
horse and looked about with grim satisfaction. 'Well?' he
bellowed to the collector, who had finished his inventory. 'Did
all the Jews get what they deserved? Are they all accounted
for?'

Senda held her breath, waiting to hear Schmarya's death
notice—and her own—pronounced. This was the moment of reckoning, she knew. For she understood that if the Cossack
learned that they'd escaped, the countryside would be
searched until they were found and killed.

The collector consulted his ledger and then looked stonily
around him. He was dumbstruck by the holocaust. His throat
throbbed, and his face was ashen. Suddenly he bent over and retched noisily. When he finally finished, he wiped his mouth
with the back of his hand and looked up at the Cossack. He
nodded weakly. 'They're all accounted for.'

Only after the Cossack turned his back did the collector
quickly mark off the names of the two villagers unaccounted
for on the list.

So there had been enough death. Even for him.

Senda let out a sigh of relief.

The Cossacks regrouped, the collector swung himself up on
his horse, and the leader raised his sabre high. Then he
brought it down, signalling their departure.

The sabre no longer gleamed. It was matt brown with dried
blood.

The scourge rode off as noisily and swiftly as it had come.

As the pounding hoofbeats receded, Senda felt Schmarya grip
ping her arm. 'All right,' he said wearily. 'Let's go.'

'Where?'

'Anywhere, as long as it's far away from here.'

She shook her head. 'We can't,' she said. 'We have to bury
and mourn the dead.'
'No.' He shook his head. 'We must leave everything as it is.
If they return and see that somebody . . .' His voice trailed
off, leaving the unfinished threat hanging heavily over them
both.

Senda pursed her lips. Finally she nodded. He was right. If
they stayed to bury or burn the dead, then Wolzak and his Cossacks would know some villagers were left alive. Horrible though it was to leave the victims lying scattered, it was their
only hope to escape alive. Overhead, a shadow had crossed
the darkening sky. Senda glanced up and shuddered: a flock of black carrion birds wheeled around, already attracted by
the prospect of a feast.

She nodded at Schmarya. Her eyes were awash with tears,
but a peculiar hardness had come into her face, a strength
which had never before been there. 'Let's go,' she said quietly.

And she never looked back.

Chapter 3

Prince Vaslav Danilov relaxed comfortably on the forward-
facing velvet seat of his barouche. It was one of forty carriages he owned in St. Petersburg alone, but one of only seven he had
ordered converted into a sleigh so that the coach slid easily
over the hard-packed snow and ice on smoothly polished gold-plated runners and swayed ever so gently on its well-mounted,
shock-absorbing springs. This particular barouche, its sides
emblazoned with the gilded coat of arms of the Danilovs, as
were the thirty-nine other carriages, was pulled by his six finest
matched black horses, and His Highness's privacy from the prying eyes of curious commoners was assured by brocade
curtains drawn tightly across rolled-up windows. Outside, the
early afternoon had already become nighttime, and an icy
Baltic wind whipped through the city, lashing at anyone unfor
tunate enough to be caught out-of-doors. But Prince Vaslav,
unlike his driver and footmen, who were exposed to the bitter elements, was well protected from the Russian winter. He was
warmly dressed and draped with a thick bearskin rug, and the
little coal braziers built into the sides of the barouche glowed
with heat. A compact custom-made silver samovar, filled with
hot tea, was strapped to the narrow burl-wood shelf behind
the facing seat, as were crystal decanters of vodka and kvass
and crystal glasses and cups engraved with the Danilov coat
of arms.

Prince Vaslav was happiest when he rode in any of his multi
tude of sleighs or carriages, or when on horseback. For him,
half the pleasure of going somewhere lay in the method of
transportation, and he believed that there was nothing as
elegant, enchanting, or indubitably Russian as horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Never mind that one wing of the great
Danilov Palace on the Neva had recently undergone conver
sion to accommodate his fleet of motorcars. It had been his
wife's idea, and he had bowed to her wishes. The Princess
Irina was not one to let any of her social competitors—each of
whom owned garages full of cars—outdo her. Were it up to
him, he would banish the imported Mercedeses, Rolls-
Royces, Citroëns, Bentleys, and Hispano-Suizas from the
streets and stately boulevards of St. Petersburg forever, and
the sooner accomplished, the better. But he was realist enough to know that motorcars were here to stay, whether he person
ally liked them or not. There were some things even a prince
was powerless to change.

With his forefinger he moved the curtain aside a crack and
glanced idly out of the coach as it made a sweeping turn and sped across the Neva on the lamplit Nicholas Bridge. A con
fectioner's delight, the bridge never failed to remind him of
Paris. Ah, Paris . . . Like the
bon ton
of the City of Light, the
aristocrats of the Prince's Paris of the North waltzed through
endless months of operas, ballets, concerts, banquets, official
receptions, private parties, and extravagant midnight suppers.
Even cultured Paris, resplendent though it was, lacked the magic that was St. Petersburg, the staggering elegance and riches which he had so enjoyed since the moment of his high-
placed birth. True, the palaces here were more reminiscent of
those in Venice than Paris—many of them Mediterranean in
style, thanks to the Italian influence from the armies of archi
tects and artisans imported over the centuries—but even this
Italianate dominance had its decidedly Russian twists.

He smiled. In no building was this more true than in his own
daunting palace, which he had just left. The Danilov Palace
itself sprawled over four square blocks and was decidedly
baroque in style, beautifully designed like a colossal capital C,
with the open end becoming a masssive circular courtyard and
the closed side looking down upon the stately Neva, frozen
hard as steel during this and every winter. Its five storeys were
painted, plastered, and ornamented in yellow and orange, and
it boasted three massive square towers, two at each end of the
C and a third at the colonnaded curve facing the Neva. Each
tower culminated in a splendid cluster of five gilded, spired
onion domes. What magnificent buildings did Paris have to
compare with this, especially when viewed, alternatingly, in
the sun- and water-dappled summers, the swirling snowstorms
of winter, or on those particularly prized, though rare, winter
days when the oppressive, monotonous gloom was broken and
the sky became silvery blue, causing the snow-shrouded palace to glare so brightly in the sun that one had to shield one's eyes?
Or, as now, with the incredibly iridescent vertical fires of the
aurora borealis hanging like a coral-and-amythyst necklace
suspended above it in the premature darkness of the Arctic
sky?

Nothing. Nothing on earth could compare with St. Petersburg
, especially not now, in January, when the 1914 'season'
promised to be a glittering one. The season had begun a week
earlier, on New Year's Day, and would continue until Lent.

He was about to withdraw his finger and let the curtain fall
back into place when the coach suddenly slid to an abrupt halt,
jolting him.

He sat bolt upright and made a mental note to admonish his
driver once they arrived at their destination, which would be
the jewellery emporium of Carl Fabergé. With its solid soaring
granite pillars and rich atmosphere of Byzantine opulence, it
was a thief's paradise of glittering gold, sparkling gems, dazzling silver, and gleaming enamel. The Prince had decided to
pick up his wife's birthday present in person. Her birthday was
in two days' time, on the ninth, and now that she had daringly
taken up smoking long, thin black Turkish cigars, he had ordered her an exquisite custom-designed cigarette box of
translucent dusty-rose enamel, its edges on both sides lined
with rows of fiery pink diamonds. But her gift was not the only
reason he had decided to take the opportunity to honour the shop with his presence: he had decided to buy a little ready-
made something—a diamond bauble, perhaps, or an emerald
or ruby bracelet—for his mistress, Tatiana Ivanova.