Under a Blood Red Sky (43 page)

‘Look,’ he said again.

Had he found the jewels? Her pulse leapt at the thought. The walls were lined with wooden planking coated in pitch that, in places, had been repaired. On one side was an ancient door with heavy iron hinges.

‘It’s locked,’ Pyotr said when he saw her glance at it.

He stretched out the candle and its wavering light revealed that the rear wall was covered with a heavy brocade curtain instead of planking. It was hard to tell its colour in the gloom but Sofia had the impression of a deep purple glimmering among the darting shadows.

‘Is it-’

‘Wait,’ Pyotr whispered. Then, with all the panache of a magician, he swept the curtain aside.

The wall was full of eyes. Sofia felt her stomach sink as she realised it wasn’t the box of jewellery she was seeking.

‘So, Pyotr,’ she murmured, ‘it looks like God hasn’t been driven out of Tivil after all.’

The alcove behind the curtain was a metre deep by about three metres wide and every scrap of birch-lined wall was covered in religious icons and statues and crucifixes. Sad-eyed saints carried the burdens of the world’s sins on their gilded shoulders; hundreds of Virgin Marys gazed with adoration at the soft-faced Child Jesus. Lovingly arranged in groups on the floor were statues of them painted in vivid reds and blues and golds.

Pyotr was staring open-mouthed.

‘So,’ Sofia said, ‘this is where the village hid their beliefs.’ She spoke quietly, as in a place of worship. After a moment she reached up and pulled the curtain back across the alcove. Pyotr flinched, the look in his eyes far away.

‘So shocked?’ Sofia asked.

He rubbed his free hand across his face in a rough gesture and nodded. ‘They’re so…’ His voice trailed away.

‘So powerful?’ she finished for him.

‘
Da
. I didn’t realise.’

‘You’ve never been inside a proper Orthodox church with frescoes and carvings and gold crosses and air so laden with prayers and incense that you can barely breathe it in.’

He shook his head. ‘But it’s just superstition.’ It was meant as a statement but somehow it came out more as a question. ‘Once they realise that, won’t they let it go?’

‘No, Pyotr, they won’t.’ She stopped herself. Now was not the time for saying more. ‘Come on, let’s see what’s in those sacks you piled in a heap.’

‘Just grain and potatoes and swedes.’ He kicked one of the sacks with his foot, spraying dust through the air. ‘Hoarders’ food.’ He said it with disgust.

‘Let me put the candle back on the shelf.’ She pushed him towards the rope ladder. ‘Time to leave.’

He twisted his head to look her full in the face. ‘Sofia, I thought you’d cheated me. When you said there was something here to help my father, I thought you must mean that you’d shut me down here because all I had to do was pray to the Virgin Mary and Papa would be freed.’

‘Oh, Pyotr.’ Sofia leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll never cheat you. What I’m searching for is worth thousands of roubles. In this country roubles will buy you anything if you have enough of them, even freedom. We’ll get him out, one way or another.’ She stroked his damp hair. ‘I promise.’

A light rain was spitting in the wind. Sofia locked the church door and glanced cautiously up and down the street for any sign of Chairman Fomenko but there was none. Two young girls came skipping up the muddy street and waved to Pyotr but he ignored them.

‘Pyotr, one more thing I need from you.’

‘To help Papa?’

‘Yes. And to help me.’

He looked at her expectantly. The wariness seemed to have disappeared from his eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘I want you to take the key to the smithy where I saw you working and…’

‘Make a copy.’

He was quick. ‘Is that possible?’ Or was she asking too much of Mikhail’s son?

He puffed out his skinny chest. ‘Of course. And Pokrovsky the blacksmith will give me help if I need any.’

‘Will he keep it secret?’

‘For Papa he will.’

She grinned at him. ‘Thank you, Pyotr. When it’s done, take the original back to the
kolkhoz
office. Understand me?’

‘Yes.’ He tossed his head and strutted off in the direction of the smithy.

‘Mikhail,’ she breathed, ‘you can be proud of your stiff-necked son.’

Then she faced up towards the far end of the village. It was time to speak to Rafik.

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

Rafik was seated at the rough table when Sofia entered, still wearing his yellow sunshine shirt. His black eyes were half hooded, his olive skin seemed darker and his black hair was hidden from sight under the pelt of the white fox. His shoulders were hunched over like an old man’s. This was not a Rafik she recognised. Her mouth grew dry. The room was dim despite the daylight outside, the air scented and heavy, and the moment Sofia breathed it in she could sense a strangeness in it.

What had he done? Warily she sat down opposite him.

‘So the soldiers at the stable let you go,’ she said.

‘Did you think they wouldn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘I was searching for you up there. I didn’t expect to see the troops. I was worried for you.’

‘It was priests they were seeking today, not gypsies. Next time I may not be so fortunate.’

‘Did the worshippers escape?’

‘Every last soul of them.’

‘And Priest?’

‘He is safe… but not safe.’

‘It’s a miracle that he hasn’t been arrested and put to death before now.’

‘I look after him.’

She understood now exactly what he meant by that: he used this strange hypnotic power of his. ‘So why wouldn’t you look after Mikhail when he needed it? I begged you.’

‘Oh Sofia, don’t look so angry. You have to understand that there were too many troops swarming round him and it was impossible. The time was all wrong, but now… the time has changed. Tonight is the moment when your eyes will open.’

She didn’t know what he meant. There was a strange formality in the way he spoke, his tongue clicking against his teeth. His gaze was distant and she was not sure he was even seeing her at all.

‘Rafik,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you?’

He didn’t answer. The whistle of his breath grew louder in the room and a movement of his hands made her look down at the table where they’d been clenched together. Now they lay apart, placed on the worn wooden surface with fingers splayed like stars, and between them lay the white pebble. It seemed to draw all light from the room deep into itself. Sofia felt her skin grew cold.

The stone was the one she’d found earlier in the chest. Then it had seemed harmless but now, for some unknown reason, it made her nervous. And yet her eyes refused to turn away from it. Her breath quickened.

‘Sofia.’ Rafik’s voice was deep. He reached out and rested a heavy hand on her head.

Instantly her eyelids drifted shut. For the first time in the darkness of her own skull she became aware of a powerful humming sound, a vibration that rattled her teeth. To her dislocated mind it seemed to be coming from the stone.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Do I look ready?’

Pokrovsky had just stepped out of his
banya
, the bath hut behind the forge, with nothing but a towel draped round his barrel waist and a grin on his face. Elizaveta Lishnikova wasn’t sure whether she found the grin or the massive naked chest more disconcerting. The sun was about to dip down behind the ridge but not before it had set fire to the clouds in the west, a flaming red that draped a glowing sheen over the blacksmith’s oiled skin.

‘You’re beautiful,’ she murmured. ‘Like Odysseus.’

‘Like who?’

‘Odysseus. A Greek warrior from…’ she was going to say
Homer’s Odyssey
but changed it to ‘from long ago’.

Pokrovsky laughed unself-consciously, flexing both his arms to emphasise his huge biceps for her entertainment.

‘Like rocks,’ he said.

‘Granite boulders, more like.’

He laughed again and put his muscles away, leaving her wondering what they would be like to touch. Until she came to teach in Tivil sixteen years ago, her experience of men had been limited to waltzing with cavalry officers or walking through the gilded gardens of Peterhof on the arm of an elegant naval captain. Even then she had enjoyed the feel of their hard masculine flesh under their uniforms, but they were as remote from Pokrovsky as the bright orange lizards that darted under his banya were from the grey monster crocodiles of the Nile.

Elizaveta was fifty-three now. Wasn’t it time she stopped this girlish rubbish? It wasn’t as though she’d never been asked, despite being as tall as she was. Three offers of marriage she’d turned down, much to her parents’ anguish. She had even allowed one of the suitors to kiss her on the terrace, a recollection of a bristling moustache and the taste of good brandy on his lips, but she hadn’t loved any of them and preferred her own company to that of fools.

‘Pokrovsky,’ she said in her teacher’s voice, ‘how old are you?’

‘That’s personal.’

‘How old, man?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘Why aren’t you married?’

‘That’s none of your damn business.’

‘I expect you frighten the females with those great granite boulders of yours. You’d crush any girl to death with them.’

‘Hah!’ But the blacksmith was grinning again. ‘The trouble with you, Elizaveta, is that you think you know everything. If you’re so damn clever, tell me, how old are
you
and why aren’t
you
married?’

‘Don’t be so bloody impertinent, Pokrovsky. Go and get yourself decent at once. You’ll be late for tonight if you don’t hurry. Don’t you know that you shouldn’t even be talking to a lady in that rude state of undress?’

He roared with laughter and rubbed a great hand across his neat little beard, then ambled off to his izba. Elizaveta took her time heading into the forge, she didn’t want him to think she was anything other than calm and indifferent to his gibes. But once inside, she poured herself a stiff glass of vodka and knocked it back in one.

Only then did she permit herself a smile and dare to imagine the heroic Odysseus with a chest like that.

The noise of a bell came first, sweet and silvery. Five pure notes in the darkness that wasn’t darkness. It was more an absence of being, and Sofia even wondered if she were dead. Was this her own death knell she was hearing? But the ringing of the bell changed. It expanded and grew and surged and swelled until it was a rich, rounded sound that reverberated all around her, making the air quiver and dance.

Yet the tolling of the bell seemed to arise from inside Sofia’s head, not from outside, and she could not only hear it, she could feel it. The great brass clapper rapping against the delicate inside of her skull, clanging out each bass note in a crescendo of sound that she feared would crack her bones, the way glass will shatter when the right note is hit. And through it all came a voice in her ear, soft as love itself, yet so clear she could hear every word.

‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

She looked down for the first time and discovered that she was high up in the air at the topmost pinnacle of a tall spire. It was attached to no building, just a towering needle of gold that pierced the sky. Like the Admiralty spire in St Petersburg that used to glint like a blade of fire in the sunlight when she was a child.

‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

In one smooth movement she spread out her arms and found they were wings. She stared with astonishment at the fluttering of the feathers, long pearl-white gossamer feathers that smelled as salty as the sea and rustled as she breathed. She moved her wings gently up and down, flexing them, testing them, but they weighed nothing at all. Far below her stretched a wide flat plain full of silver-haired women, their faces turned up to her, thousands of pale ovals, each one with arms raised above her head. All whispered, ‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

Sofia felt the breath of it under her wings and launched herself…

She opened her eyes. She had no idea where she was or how she’d arrived there, just that she was standing upright in the dark, arms outstretched to each side. White figures circled her, four of them. Flickering lights in their hands, candle flames and the scent of cedarwood. Rising from the floor, a mist wove around her. She inhaled, a short sharp breath, and tasted the tang of burning pine needles. It made her look down.

At her feet on the blood red cloth from Rafik’s wooden chest stood a small iron brazier. In it were things she could only guess at but which were alight, all of them crackled and spat and writhed. Her feet were bare. Outside the circle of light all was darkness but she could sense instantly that she was indoors, somewhere cool, somewhere damp, somewhere deep inside the black womb of Mother Russia. The four figures stood silent and unmoving around her, one at each point of the compass, a loose white gown covering each of their bodies.

‘Rafik,’ she murmured to the one directly in front of her.

As she did so she became aware that her own body was draped in a white gown, which rustled when she lowered her arms.

‘Sofia.’

Rafik’s single word was like a cool touch on her forehead.

‘Don’t be afraid, Sofia, you are one of us.’

‘I’m not afraid, Rafik.’

‘Do you know why we have brought you here tonight?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t know how she knew but she did. Her mind struggled to clear itself but it was as if her thoughts were no longer her own.

‘Speak it,’ Rafik said. ‘Why are you here tonight?’

‘For Mikhail.’

‘Yes.’

There was a prolonged silence while words pushed against her tongue, words that didn’t seem to rise from her own mind.

‘And for the village, Rafik,’ she said clearly. ‘It is for the village of Tivil that I am here, to make it live a life instead of die a death. I am here because I need to be and I am here because I am meant to be.’