Under a Blood Red Sky

45

‘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.’

She barely recognised her own voice. It was low and resonant and each word vibrated in the cool air. She shivered beneath her gown, but not with fear. She gazed round at the four figures, their eyes steady on hers, their lips murmuring silent words that drifted into the mist, thickening it, stirring it, causing it to linger as it brushed Sofia’s cheek.

‘Pokrovsky,’ she said, turning her eyes on the broad bear of a man, whose wide shoulders stretched the white robe to the edge of its seams. ‘Blacksmith of Tivil, tell me who you are.’

‘I am the hands of this village. I labour for the working man.’

‘Spasibo, Hands of Tivil.’

She lowered her eyes from the blacksmith to the slight figure with the full lips and bold gaze. ‘Zenia, who are you?’

‘I am a child of this village.’ The girl’s voice rang clear and strong out past the flames and into the darkness beyond. ‘The children are the future and I am one of their number.’

‘Spasibo, Child of Tivil.’ Sofia swung round further to face the figure in place to the east of her. ‘Elizaveta Lishnikova, schoolteacher of Tivil, tell me who you are.’

The tall grey woman, with the nose like a bird’s beak, stood very straight. ‘I am the mind of this village. I teach the children who are its future and bring knowledge and understanding to them the way the dawn in the east brings each new day to our village.’

‘Spasibo, Mind of Tivil.’

Finally Sofia stepped round to look, once more, deep into the intense black eyes that burned with their ancient knowledge.

‘Rafik,’ she asked, softly this time, ‘who are you?’

Ten heartbeats passed before he spoke. His voice was a deep, echoing sound that made the flames shimmer and sway to a different pulse. ‘I am the soul of this village, Sofia. I guard and guide and protect this small patch of earth. All over Russia villages are destroyed and trampled by the brutish boot of a blood-addicted dictator who has murdered five million of his own people, yet still claims he is building a Workers’ Paradise. Sofia,’ he spread his arms wide to include all the white robes, ‘the four of us have combined our strengths to safeguard Tivil, but you have seen the soldiers come. Seen the food stolen from our tables and the prayers clubbed to death before they are born.’

‘I have seen this.’

‘Now you have come to Tivil and the Pentangle is complete.’

Sofia observed no signal, but the four white-clad figures stepped forward out of the shadows as one, until they were so close around her that when they each raised their left arm it rested easily on the shoulder of the person to their left. Sofia’s heart was racing as she felt herself enclosed inside the circle. Rafik scattered something into the brazier at her feet so that it flared into life and the mist thickened into a dense fog. She could feel it crawling far down into her lungs every time she breathed. She swayed, her head growing too unwieldy for her neck. A pulse at her temple throbbed in time with her heartbeat.

‘Sofia.’ It was Rafik. ‘Open your eyes.’

She hadn’t realised they had closed. Their lids were heavy and slow to respond to her commands. What was happening to her?

‘Sofia, take the stone into your hand.’

He was holding out the white pebble to her and without hesitation she took it. She expected something from it, some spark or sign or even a pain shooting up her arm, but there was nothing. Just an ordinary warm round pebble lying in the palm of her hand.

At a murmur from Rafik the circle sealed itself tighter and a slow rhythmic chanting began. Soft at first, like a mother crooning to her infant, a sound that loosened Sofia’s limbs and stole her sense of self. But the chanting rose, the language unknown to her, until it was a rushing wind that tore at her mind, ripped out her conscious thoughts and swept them away until only a great echoing chamber remained inside her head. Only one word leapt out of it.

‘Mikhail!’ she cried out. ‘Mikhail! ’

Hands touched her head and she started to see things and hear things that she knew were not there.

A small room. A small desk. A small man with a small mind. Long rabbity teeth and pale cheeks that looked as though they’d never seen the sun. His elbows on the desk, his thoughts on the prisoner in front of him.

The prisoner angered him, though he kept all sign of it from his face. He shifted the lamp on his desk to angle the beam more into the prisoner’s eyes and had the satisfaction of seeing him wince. One of the prisoner’s eyes was swollen and half shut, his jaw bruised, his lip as split and purple as an over-ripe plum, yet still the prisoner clung to the wrong attitude. Hadn’t he learned that it didn’t matter whether he was guilty or not guilty of the crimes he was charged with?

Wrong attitude.

That was his real crime, that he still believed he could pick and choose which bits of the Communist creed he would adopt and which ones he would reject.

Wrong fucking attitude.

The prisoner’s mind was a danger to the State. Time to change what was in it or discover that the State could break the strongest of wills and the strongest of minds. The State was expert at it and he, the interrogator, was an instrument of the Soviet State.

There would be only one fucking winner.

‘Mikhail,’ she breathed.

‘Mikhail,’ the circle echoed.

The white stone in Sofia’s hand seemed to grow chill. Or was that just her own skin? She wrapped her fingers tighter around it, dug her nails into its cold hard surface as though they could gouge out the eyes of the man with rabbits’ teeth.

‘A curse on you, Interrogator,’ she hissed.

The flames in the brazier surged as if they fed on her hatred.

‘Mikhail,’ she intoned into the shadows. ‘Come to me.’

‘Why me?’ Sofia asked.

The clouds were low and there was no moon. The night felt heavy and cloying despite the breeze that rustled up from the river, fretting under the eaves of the izbas and stealing Sofia’s words from her lips.

‘Why me?’ she repeated.

‘Don’t you know?’ Rafik asked in a low voice. He was pacing with a smooth unbroken stride over the uneven tangles of roots and soil, skirting round the fringes of Tivil. ‘Don’t you know now who you are?’

‘Tell me, Rafik, who I am.’

‘Feel for it, Sofia, stretch your mind back to the beginning and to before the beginning. Reach deep into yourself.’

A bat flitted out of the night sky, circling jerkily above their heads. It was followed quickly by another, and the shadow of their wings seemed to press on Sofia’s mind. Something stirred inside her, something unfamiliar. She experienced again that sense of being high up on a golden pinnacle with the silver-haired figures below her, sending their breath to lift her wings. She shook her head but still the image wouldn’t go away. It lodged there.

Rafik did not push her, but he gave her time. Together they were pacing out the circle that the gypsy trod nightly around Tivil. Through the fields, past the pond and round the back of each izba, weaving what he called a protective thread. When he led her out of the ritual chamber she was not surprised to discover the mysterious ceremony had taken place inside the church, not in the main hall but in the old storeroom at the back of the church, where the lock still bore the marks of her knife.

‘Now,’ Rafik had said with his hands on hers, a prickling sensation growing between their palms as if they were being stitched together, ‘now you shall tread the circle with me.’ His eyes probed hers and she was certain he could see clearly even in the moonless night air. ‘Are you ready, Sofia?’ He’d wrapped a hooded cloak around her shoulders and tied it securely at her throat.

‘Yes, I’m ready.’

Her blood was pounding in her ears. Ready for what? She didn’t know, but without anything being said, she understood that this was the bargain she had struck with Rafik. His help with the safety of Mikhail in exchange for her help with the safety of the village. But it was all so strange. She had a feeling that the cost of this bargain to both could be high.

‘I’m ready,’ she said again.

Suddenly he smiled a gentle smile and softly kissed her cheek. ‘Don’t fear,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘You are strong and you have the power of generations within you.’

More bats came. In ones and twos at first, then a steady trickle of beating wings pursued them. Until finally a swirling black cloud of the creatures swooped down from the mountain ridge, rising out of the depths of the forest and hurtling in a screaming, screeching, scratching wall of eyes and teeth and sharp scything claws, towards the point where Sofia was pacing the circle. Rafik walked an arm’s length ahead of her.

She lashed out at them but there were too many. The dense black shadow fell on her like a net and instantly they were in her hair, nipping and tearing. Tiny leathery wings squeezed under the cloak, furry bodies burned hot against her skin, their razor-sharp teeth cutting strips from her throat and her shoulder blades, slicing into her cheeks, hooking their dagger-claws into her eyelids.

She fought them in the seething dark. She swept them from her body, scraped them from her face, dragged them out of the air and ripped off their wings. She stamped on their evil little distorted faces, attacking them with her hands, her elbows, her feet and even her teeth. Fending them off her eyes…

As suddenly as they came, they were gone. A great susurration of wings and then nothing. There was total silence, not even the wind in the trees. That was the moment she realised that the plague of bats had left Rafik untouched. They had descended on her, but not him. Why? And why had Rafik offered no help? She was shaking violently and raised a hand to her face. No blood, no scratches, no pain. Had it all been in her mind?

Rafik nodded, raising his eyes to where the moon was hidden behind the ancient boughs of the cedar tree at the entrance to Tivil. ‘I told you,’ he said.

‘Told me what?’

‘That you are strong.’

‘I poured you a drink.’

It was far into the night when Sofia slid gratefully into the big armchair that was Mikhail’s. She wondered how long the drink had been waiting for her on the table.

‘Thank you, Pyotr. I certainly need it.’ She tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry I’m so late.’

The boy, clothed in a pair of cut-down pyjamas, picked up the glass of vodka and handed it to her. His brown eyes were so pleased to see her that she risked a light reassuring brush of her hand against his. His skin felt wonderfully warm and alive, like skin should feel. Not like her own. Her own was drained of moisture, dry as paper to the touch, as though everything of worth had been sucked out of it tonight, sucked out of her. A pulse throbbed behind her eye.

‘I couldn’t find you anywhere tonight, Sofia. I thought you’d decided to-’

The cuckoo in the kitchen clock called twice. Two o’clock in the morning.

‘Pyotr, I’ll never run away secretly. If I leave, I’ll tell you first. Believe me?’

He smiled tentatively. ‘Da. Yes. But where were you? In the forest?’

Sofia threw the slug of vodka down her throat and felt it kick life into her exhausted body. ‘Not the forest, but somewhere just as dark.’

Without comment he refilled her glass, wiped a drip from the neck of the bottle with a grubby finger and licked it off with his tongue. Sofia experienced such a sense of relief at the normality of the boy’s action that she almost told him what had happened to her tonight. The words wanted to spill from her mouth so that she could hear Pyotr say, No, Sofia, don’t be silly. You fell asleep in a field and had a bad dream. And then they’d laugh together and everything would be back to normal.

She drank the vodka.

‘I was with Rafik. We were… trying to find out more about what’s happening to Mikhail.’

‘I’ve been helping, too. Look, I made the key.’ He extracted from his pyjama pocket a large iron key that was a rich purple-black metal, shiny and new. He held it out to her. ‘And I took the old one back to the office, like you said.’

Sofia dragged herself out of the comfort of the chair and hugged the boy close.

‘Thank you, Pyotr. You are as clever as you are brave. We can’t search the hall now in the dark, as any candle would show at the windows and attract attention. So we’ll start on it tomorrow. ’ She grimaced. ‘Today, I mean. It’s not far off morning already.’

Pyotr nodded, but she spotted the flicker of unease in his eyes.

‘Pyotr, what is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Chairman Fomenko came here.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He was looking for you.’

Sofia froze. Not now. Don’t let him take me now. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I didn’t know where you were. It was the truth.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t have to lie to him. Don’t worry, I’ll speak to him tomorrow. Now go and get some sleep or you’ll be dead on your feet in the morning.’

He continued to stand there for a moment, his face in shadow, half boy, half man. ‘You too,’ he said at last and left.

Sofia collapsed back into Mikhail’s chair and rested her head on the place where his head had rested. But she didn’t sleep.