‘Well?’ Lishka says. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Ready?’
‘To face the
veche.
They want to see you now.’
‘Ah …’
Lishka crouches. I feel his breath on my cheek as he whispers to me. ‘Otto? Why don’t you use your guns?’
To get through this – to do the very best I can for her – I must be hard of heart and pretend she matters less to me than she really does, for these men feed upon weakness, and if they were to know how much I love her, they would use that as a weapon against me.
I wait outside the gate to the compound as they search my pack.
‘What’s this?’ one of them asks, pulling out the
staritskii
.
‘It is a pepperpot,’ I say. ‘From far Cathay.’
The guard makes a face, then shoves the gun back down into the pack before handing it back to me. ‘Go through,’ he says gruffly. ‘Master Talyzin awaits you.’
‘Master Talyzin? But I thought—’
But the guard says nothing more, just gestures for me to cross the space between the gate and the council lodge.
Talyzin is alone inside. He sits at the far end of that huge table, drumming his fingers on the surface as I approach. His face is hard, unkind. He never much liked me, and it seems he likes me even less now that Podnayin is dead. His small, bird-like eyes spit malice at me as I stop and bow my head.
‘We have a problem,’ he says.
I say nothing. I want him to spell it out. But I’m also disappointed. I was expecting them all to be here, along with Katerina. Now I have no plan, if you could ever call shooting my way out of Rzhev a plan.
He speaks quietly, but his dislike of me colours every word. ‘Were it a simple case of wounding we might come to an arrangement. But a man is dead. The law demands punishment.’
‘They drugged me. Tried to rape my wife.’
‘So you say.’
‘You think she would attack them without provocation?’
‘One would think it most unlikely. Only she did.’
‘You take Ilyushkin’s word?’
‘Over hers? Yes. You, I understand, were drunk.’
‘
Drugged
.’
‘So you say.’
He interlaces his fingers, tries to stare me out. Only I’m angry now. Angry that liars and rapists should be believed before Katerina.
‘So when is the
veche
to meet?’ I ask.
‘The
veche
has met. We have already decided.’
‘You can’t. You haven’t heard what happened.’
‘We’ve heard enough.’
‘I wish to make a counter-claim. For
mestnichestvo
.’
The old man’s eyes narrow angrily.
Mestnichestvo
is an insult to honour, yet unlike its commoner form –
beschest’e
– it refers only to society’s elite. By claiming it, I am elevating Katerina beyond the status they have thus far given her as my wife.
‘Ridiculous!’ Talyzin says.
‘Her father is an important man. A boyar and a member of the
veche
in Novgorod. When word gets to him of what has happened here …’ I calm myself and say the words quietly but with great authority. ‘I am certain he’ll appeal to Prince Alexander himself.’
Talyzin answers me angrily, almost coming up out of his seat. ‘It has been decided—’
‘Then I appeal against that decision.’
Talyzin bangs the table with his fist. ‘You wish to join her?’
I almost smile at that. ‘Where is she?’
‘In a safe place.’
‘She is unharmed?’
‘Meister Behr. I do not have to answer your questions.’
But I’ve had enough of talking. It’s time to act. Pulling my pack from my back, I dump it on the table and reach in.
The
staritskii
feels good in my hand, and as I walk round the table towards Talyzin, I am aware of the trouble I am storing up for myself by doing this.
If
word gets out.
If
Talyzin or any of the others survive this.
I hold the gun out, aimed at his head, as if threatening him with a piece of branch.
‘Take me to her.’
Talyzin laughs, then goes to get up and call for help.
‘Sit down!’ I say, quiet but threatening, and to make my point, I aim the weapon at the desk beside his hand and burn a neat round hole through the wood.
Talyzin’s eyes bulge. The smell of burnt wood is overpowering.
‘Okay,’ I say, reaching out and grasping his to pull him up. ‘The next one goes straight through your head unless you take me to her.’
I give Lishka the Kolbe and tell him not to squeeze the trigger unless he really wants to kill someone, then, thanking Dmitri, slip out into the darkness.
No one knows anything, yet. But it won’t be long before they find them, and then …
Katerina follows me, stooping low as we run across the space between the back of Dmitri’s inn and the palisade wall. She’s discarded her skirt and is dressed in men’s clothes. Lishka is last to come, wheezing a little, but happy now that we’re going.
Ilyushkin is dead. Kilik I couldn’t find, else he too would be dead, but the rest – including Talyzin – are bound and gagged. I would have killed Talyzin, too, only his villainy was of a lesser order. Besides, the thought of travelling on to Moscow with the death of Rzhev’s
posadnik
attributable to me made little sense. We are in enough trouble as it is.
Lishka wants to go back to get the cart, but I persuade him against the idea. But even though we’ve freed Katerina and got some vengeance on the bastards, he’s still unhappy that they’ve robbed us.
Note that
us
. For Lishka has definitely become family. He would die to defend our honour or stop us being cheated. Like a brother he is. That is, if all brothers were half-crazed maniacs.
Right now, however, getting away is the priority. We need an hour, maybe more, to make good our escape.
We follow the palisade until we’re in the shadows, twenty feet from the gate. There’s only a single guard on duty, and he’s crouched beside a small fire, making soup. Seeing that, Lishka grins and moves past me silently, keen to despatch the man.
As he draws out the Kolbe from his belt, I find myself wanting to shout out to him, to tell him not to use the weapon, when I note that he’s reversed it, to use as a club. The savagery of the blow makes me wince, but Katerina, beside me, is expressionless. After what she’s been through, she wouldn’t care if all the soldiery in Rzhev were burned alive.
We drag the body behind a hut, then slip outside, following the north course of the palisade, keeping close to it to avoid being seen. But as we’re passing the northern compound, there’s a whinnying sound and Lishka turns to me. ‘It’s little Nepka,’ he whispers. ‘We have to get her.’
Nepka is his horse. I’m about to say no, that we have to move on and how, anyway, are we to lift the horse over the fence, when he begins to climb the stout wooden barrier.
‘
Lishka
!’
But it’s no good. He’s gone, and I hear him drop the other side and run off. A moment later he is back, the unmistakable sound of a horse’s hooves accompanying his voice.
‘Otto, help me breach this thing.’
I curse him, then, trying to get my fingers between two of the poles, try to heave it towards me. Only it’s tightly wedged, and won’t budge even a fraction. It would take us hours to loosen enough of these massive poles to make a gap.
Yes, but there is the
staritskii.
It’s mad, but it might just work. The forest, after all, is only two hundred yards away, to our north, and by the time they work out just what’s happened and who’s responsible, we’ll be deep inside the trees.
‘Lishka!’ I hiss urgently. ‘Stand well back!’ And I draw the gun.
I count to ten, then aim at the bottom of one of the poles and squeeze the trigger. The result is a great flare of incandescence in the darkness and a thunderclap of sound. Lishka, vividly revealed through the sudden gap, is grinning in the brilliant light, one hand holding tight to Nepka’s reins as she bucks, her eyes terrified.
I fire again, and then a third time, shattering the palisade, then turn to Katerina. She’s looking on, no emotion in her face, but when I tell her to run towards the trees, she runs.
Behind the burning palisade, in the town itself, there are now shouts and screams and a fearful moaning. People are running about and staring at the gap in the palisade and at the burning timbers and are wondering what in God’s name has happened. But we are busy running, Katerina, Lishka and I, and Nepka, who cannot get away from there fast enough.
It’s two hours before we finally stop and make camp. I think we’re lost, but Lishka says he’ll know where we are when the morning comes, and anyway it doesn’t matter because we’ll hit the river at some point. And he’s so pleased to have his horse, that I don’t moan at him or tell him what a stupid thing he did back there.
And besides, we’ll need a horse. To pull the cart.
While Lishka builds a fire, I take the tracker from my pack and activate it. For a moment I stare at it in disbelief, and then I turn to Katerina and laugh. ‘It’s here. We’ve walked straight to it.’
Lishka looks up, inquisitive. ‘What’s here?’
‘Come. Come and see.’
I follow the tracker’s signal until we’re directly above it. We’ve walked barely thirty paces from where we stopped. When I turn to look, I can see our camp directly behind us, Nepka tethered to a tree.
Bending down, I begin to clear away the branch and leaf cover, until I’ve revealed what looks like a massive wooden door in the ground. Lishka stares at it amazed, then crosses himself.
Katerina, too, is puzzled.
I look to Lishka. ‘Give me a hand.’
The cover is heavy, but between us we lift it and throw it back, to reveal the pit, and in the pit …
‘God help us!’ Lishka exclaims. ‘What sorcery is this?’
In the pit is the copy cart, fully loaded, the sled tied on the back.
I grin, then reach down and press the switch to activate the platform. At once there’s the noise of hydraulics and the cart begins to rise up towards the surface.
Lishka gives a little cry.
‘It’s okay, Lishka. This is friendly magic.’ And I look to Katerina and see the hint of a smile on her lips – the first since we left Rzhev – and thank Urd that she’s come to no great harm.
Lishka examines the cart in amazement, then turns to me again. ‘But how …?’
Then he shrugs and, accepting it all in an instant, begins to laugh until his laughter fills the space between the trees.
‘Oo-oh,’ he says finally, wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘I would love to see their faces when they find it missing. I would dearly love to see their faces …’
‘I like it,’ Katerina says, stroking the week’s growth on my chin. ‘It makes you look distinguished. And
very
Russian.’
I grin. ‘That’s the idea.’
But Lishka merely shrugs. We have been travelling ten days and seem to have made little progress. Tver’ is still some distance and the weather is getting worse by the day. Autumn has come with a vengeance and already half the trees are bare, such that we trudge through great drifts of golden-brown leaves, and when it rains they seem to coat themselves to everything, adhering with a layer of mud for good measure on whatever surface is free.
Lishka, however, is happy with our progress. He’s used to travelling at this snail’s pace and chides me when I grow impatient. We will get there when we get there is his attitude.
Katerina, by now, is speaking German fluently. That is, what German she knows. Daily her small stock of phrases grows, and even Lishka now and then chimes in with something – proof that, for all he pretends not to, he is listening to every word we say.
‘
Danke
,’ he says, in answer to almost everything. ‘
Danke
.’
Not that it matters. I would trust Lishka with my life. Yes, even with Katerina, come to that. The only difficulty is the nights, for Katerina and I are noisy lovers, and poor Lishka has his own demons to contend with. But somehow we get through. Somehow it works.
We are making our way down a long slope, a low range of hills to our left, a river to the right. And as we go, so we sing, a little song I’ve taught them both, one I first learned in the Garden, long years ago – a fragment of Hölderlin’s nature poem, ‘Autumn’, written some five hundred and thirty years in the future:
Das Glänzen der Natur ist höheres Erscheinen,
Wo sich der Tag mit vielen Freuden endet,
Es ist das Jahr, das sich mit Pracht vollendet,
Wo Fruchte sich mit frohem Glanz vereinen …
Lishka stops suddenly, the song faltering on his lips, and we fall silent too, listening, trying to make out what he’s heard. And then we hear it too.
The sound of an axe, somewhere ahead of us, in the forest.
Lishka looks to me and after a moment I nod. It’s been some while since we slept under a roof.
The village is typical of its kind, nestled in a large clearing amid the trees. The villagers move on every few years, using a method of farming known as slash and burn. They choose an area of the forest and cut deep into the bark of the trees and leave them to die, then – when they’re dry – they burn them. The ash adds the necessary nutrients for two or three years’ harvesting – and then they move on again, preparing a new site even as they farm out the old.
Their huts are in the centre of that huge, cleared space – crude, single-room affairs on low stilts to keep them off the damp ground – the nearby storage pits lined with birch and pine bark. As for the ground itself, they tend it with crude rakes they call
sokha
, and sickles and scythes, letting their animals – pigs, sheep, goats and poultry – graze and scavenge. They are a clan, a
miry
, sharing common pasture land and meadows, using traditional skills to get the best out of the short growing seasons and the grey, infertile soil. A way of life that has lasted a thousand years and more.
Lishka goes in first, arms raised, hands empty, hailing them heartily, a big smile on his face. They’re suspicious of us, naturally, but once they see Katerina, they greet us cheerily, and children are sent out to the fields and work suspended for the day, the villagers milling about us and touching our clothes, anxious for any news from the outside world.