Thirteen years later, p.32
Thirteen Years Later, page 32
‘Looking for your keys,’ said Aleksei.
‘You won’t find anything there.’
But Aleksei already had, in one of the drawers: a bunch of five different-sized keys on a large iron ring. They looked medieval compared with the keys of modern locks, but they evidently did their job. He snatched them up and headed back to the door he had come in by.
‘No, Aleksei!’ shouted Iuda after him, but Aleksei was already gone.
He came first to the tattooed monster with which he had spoken. It was sitting down again, but looked up when it heard Aleksei approach.
‘The pain has stopped,’ it said.
‘Good,’ replied Aleksei, but though the word was intended for the voordalak, the sentiment behind it was relief that the tsar must have spoken to Wylie – and that meant the tsar was safe.
Aleksei tried one of the keys in the lock, but it didn’t work. ‘Do you know which one it is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the vampire, shaking its head. Then it leapt to its feet with sudden realization. ‘You’re freeing me?’
‘I’m freeing all of you,’ he said, moving on to the second key. It was bizarre to hear himself saying it. How many voordalaki were there down here? He had seen over a dozen, but there would be more in other caves. Once they had taken their revenge on Iuda – Cain, as they knew him – then they would be free to revert to their normal way of living; living off the blood and flesh of humans. Did he really care? Not enough. They deserved some chance of retribution, but after that they would fend for themselves. If they attacked humans, then humans would destroy them – so it had been through the centuries. Aleksei himself would gladly assist in their extermination, but not today.
The third key did the trick. The door swung open. The vampire stood there, considering its freedom, wary of it and perhaps of Aleksei too.
‘They’ve got Cain cornered in there,’ said Aleksei. ‘But they’re afraid of him.’
‘We were all afraid of him, but not now.’ The creature ran out of its cage. Aleksei instinctively took a step back, but it didn’t seem to notice. ‘We’ll need more help,’ it said.
They carried on down the corridor and soon came to where Aleksei had encountered Raisa Styepanovna. She was sitting in her chair, reading. Aleksei glanced into the mirror again, but saw only the empty cave and its incongruous furnishings. Of the woman whose beauty was so obvious when he looked at her directly, there was nothing. He ran over to her, lifting up her hair to find the fetter around her neck.
‘Sir!’ she exclaimed shrilly. ‘You presume too much.’
Aleksei had already found the small lock. There was only one key in the bunch that could possibly fit it, and she was free in moments. Aleksei rushed on, now with two vampires in tow. He opened the cages of the three voordalaki that had been fed on vegetables, but they seemed even more fearful now that the gates were open than they had been before. Aleksei had no time to convince them of their good fortune.
He could do nothing for ‘Prometheus’. There were no locks on his manacles. They had been forged as single rings of metal. They must have been hammered into shape after his wrists had been slipped inside them.
‘There’s no time,’ said Aleksei.
‘We’ll do what we can later,’ the tattooed vampire told him.
Lastly, they came to the cell of the creature that had attacked him – that had camouflaged itself so effectively against the wall. Aleksei was wary to go near.
The voordalak whose screams had led Aleksei down into this pit in the first place spoke. ‘We’ll deal with it,’ it said. ‘There are many others of us down here. I’ll release them all. Cain will not escape.’
Aleksei looked at the creature. It was absurd to trust a vampire, but if they were not to be trusted then it would be foolhardy to stay. Their hatred of Iuda seemed genuine enough, and that would make their actions over the next few hours pleasingly predictable.
Aleksei nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, then turned and ran back up the tunnel which he had descended scarcely an hour before.
‘Thank you!’ he heard called from behind him, but he did not stop to look back. He didn’t stop to check the tiny scratch marks he’d left to guide his way out; instinct told him the correct path.
Only when he saw the light of day streaming in through the end of the tunnel and finally made it outside – pressing himself against the cliff face to avoid falling from the narrow ledge – did he stop, and take in huge, grateful lungfuls of the cool, fresh Crimean air.
CHAPTER XX
THE ROYAL PARTY HAD LEFT THE CITADEL BY THE TIME ALEKSEI returned to it. It was the right thing to do – Wylie might have been tempted to stay and wait for Aleksei to emerge from the caves, but his duty was to ensure that the tsar got safely away.
They were almost halfway back to Bakhchisaray when Aleksei caught up with them. They had stopped and dismounted at the Uspensky Monastery, which they had passed by on the way up to Chufut Kalye. The previous day the tsar had attended a Mohammedan ceremony in the khan’s palace. Earlier today he had been taking tea with Jews, and now he was going to visit an Orthodox chapel. It was not a reflection of the make-up of his nation as a whole, but the Crimea had had too many masters over the years to settle upon any one god.
The most remarkable thing Aleksei observed was the dutiful calmness with which Aleksandr was continuing his activities. He asked the usual, polite questions of the priests and the monks, and showed great interest in the architecture. Like so much in the area, the monastery was built into natural caves in the rockface. For a moment, Aleksei feared there might be some subterranean path back to Iuda’s lair, but it was unlikely. They were on the other side of the valley from Chufut Kalye, and any tunnel would have had to go around it, or underneath it. It was at that moment that the tsar first caught sight of Aleksei, across the open courtyard. Only a raised eyebrow indicated he had any recollection of the events they had both witnessed that day.
Wylie caught up with him as they were all treated to an impromptu lecture on the history of the building from one of the older priests.
‘You’re all right then, I see,’ he said.
‘Nothing broken,’ said Aleksei.
‘You can imagine my relief when His Majesty returned.’
‘How is he?’
‘He seems perfectly well; a little distracted perhaps. He won’t tell me anything of what happened.’
‘Did he explain his absence?’ asked Aleksei.
‘He just said he’d gone exploring and complained that Colonel Salomka had panicked.’
‘I suppose he wasn’t down there for very long.’
‘You met Cain?’ asked the doctor.
Aleksei nodded.
‘What happened?’
‘Some of his experiments got a little out of hand.’
‘You mean . . . ?’ gasped Wylie.
The priest had taken them to a long flight of steps that led up to the chapel itself. He had begun to ascend. Aleksandr was just behind him, followed by Tarasov and Salomka. Aleksei and Wylie were next.
‘I don’t think Richard Cain will be making any more presentations to the Royal Society. Even so, I’d very much like for us all to be off these damned mountains before nightfall.’
‘Of course,’ said Wylie. ‘Did His Majesty witness any of this?’
‘No, I sent him away almost . . .’
In front of them, Tarasov and Salomka suddenly rushed forward. The priest turned back to see what the commotion was. Aleksandr had collapsed. Tarasov loosened his collar and Wylie dashed forward with a bottle of sal volatile, which he waved under the tsar’s nose. Aleksei felt his own approach was a little more practical. From his pocket he fetched a small flask of brandy, from which the tsar took a grateful sip. The whole incident was over in moments, and the tsar was back on his feet before any but those in the closest proximity to him could even notice what had happened.
‘I really must apologize, gentlemen,’ he said, continuing his climb of the stairs, but stopping almost immediately to catch his breath. ‘I have overstretched myself a little.’
Wylie glanced at Aleksei. ‘A delayed shock, you think?’
‘It’s only to be expected.’ Aleksei thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps it will do us a favour – persuade the tsar to return sooner.’
‘Let’s hope,’ said the Scotsman.
But as the others moved on, Aleksei paused for a moment, standing on the steps at the point where Aleksandr had fainted. Just ahead of him, at the top of the stairway, was a small gatehouse, and to the left of the gate he saw what Aleksandr must also have seen. It was a ubiquitous sight in Moscow, but it was not uncommon elsewhere in Russia either. Only recently, Aleksei had been considering its echoes in a statue in Petersburg. But this was the first time he had suspected that the image might mean to Tsar Aleksandr something akin to what it meant to Aleksei himself.
It was an icon; an icon of a saint on horseback driving a spear into the mouth of a monster. An icon of Saint George and the dragon.
After his collapse, the tsar most certainly did appear to take a more cursory interest in the sights before him. After the monastery they directly began their journey back to Bakhchisaray, with only a few farewell waves to the local people hindering them in any way.
Once they were back down in the river valley that would lead them to the town, Aleksei and Wylie rode side by side in discussion. Aleksei briefly described what had happened. He did not mention his previous meeting with Cain, under a different name. Wylie shared Aleksei’s ambivalence as to how the problem had been resolved. In the end he concurred with Aleksei’s decision – or at least said he did. For him, hatred of the voordalak was not as entrenched as it was in Aleksei, but neither had he seen for himself the piteous specimens in those caves. So though he might have weighed the two sides of the argument differently, in the end he came to the same conclusion. What was most important, they both agreed, was that it was Cain who had been the main threat to the tsar and that he was a threat no longer. Aleksei felt more relaxed than he had riding out along the same road that morning.
As might be expected from a man of science, Wylie showed a keen interest in what Iuda had been trying to discover, if not in his methods. When Aleksei mentioned Raisa Styepanovna and her absent reflection, Wylie began to describe one of the experiments from the notebook.
‘As you said,’ he explained to Aleksei, ‘it seems very selective in terms of what can be seen and what cannot. Why can’t you see their clothes, for example? And in the end you’re right, an intelligent selection is being made – the interesting question is, by whom?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Cain’s thought is – was – that it’s the mind of the viewer that blocks out the image of the vampire. So you do actually see the creature, in terms of the light falling into your eyes, but your brain blots it out. For what reason, he couldn’t tell. The point is, the viewer’s brain isn’t going to be so stupid as to just remove the vampire and leave its clothes standing there empty, or indeed the chain stretching out in the case you described. The brain is trying to protect the viewer in some way, so it presents a coherent picture of the scene – sans vampire.’
‘But how could he test that?’ asked Aleksei.
‘Well, first he thought he’d do it by having people who didn’t know that the creature they were seeing was a vampire look at one in a mirror. If they didn’t know it was a vampire, then why should the brain block it out?’
‘And the result?’
‘Didn’t make any odds. If the viewer was a human or a vampire, informed or uninformed, they still saw nothing.’
‘Concept disproved then,’ said Aleksei.
‘Well, Cain was a bit more meticulous than that. It could be that the information that they’re looking at a vampire is communicated to them by some means other than their prior knowledge.’
‘Smell perhaps?’
‘A possibility, though Cain didn’t get that far. What he did do was sheer, unadulterated genius.’ To Aleksei’s distaste, Wylie didn’t even attempt to hide the admiration in his voice. ‘He got hold of a children’s toy, a diable-en-boîte – a jack-in-the-box we call it in English. You know the sort of thing – you wind it up and then, after a random period of time, a little man pops out and scares the children. The point is though, it’s random. Even if you know it’s going to pop out, you can’t predict when.’
‘I know what you mean,’ confirmed Aleksei.
‘So,’ continued Wylie, ‘he puts the box on a shelf and then lets the viewer – himself in the early experiments, but others later – look at the scene through a mirror. Then the vampire, your lady Raisa Styepanovna, I suppose, walks in and stands in front of the diable-en-boîte. The viewer then describes what they see – of course they don’t see the vampire, they just see the shelf behind with the box on it. Finally Raisa walks away to reveal whether the devil has popped out of the box.’
‘So?’
‘Well, if the viewer had no idea that box was a diable-en-boîte, then universally they never saw it pop open. They looked in the mirror and just saw a box on a shelf. When the vampire walked away, they were surprised when the box suddenly appeared open – most believed it had popped open at that instant. On the other hand, those who did know the box might potentially pop open did sometimes see it do so. But they were wrong just about 50 per cent of the time. Some saw it open when it didn’t, some didn’t when it did. Some got it right. And it doesn’t matter if the viewer is a human or another vampire.’
‘I still don’t see what that proves,’ said Aleksei.
‘It proves Cain’s theory. The viewer couldn’t see the box at all, because the vampire was in the way. So their mind had to re-create the scene behind the vampire from what it remembered before she came in. Thus, if they didn’t know the box could pop open, it just stayed closed the whole time. If they did know, then they subconsciously made a guess as to when it opened, and persuaded themselves that that was what they had seen. And of course, half the time, the guess was wrong.’
Aleksei tried to get his head round the idea. Occasionally he thought he had grasped it, but then it eluded him. ‘I’ll have to think about that a little,’ he confessed. For now, despite that three-word Latin motto, he would take Dr Wylie’s word for it. He had seen Raisa Styepanovna, and her beautiful dress, and the iron ring around her throat and the chain stretching back from it in the mirror, but he had convinced himself he hadn’t.
‘The book!’ he exclaimed, suddenly remembering. Wylie turned and looked at him. ‘When I went back,’ Aleksei continued, ‘when I looked in the mirror, her book was on the table. But when I looked at her, she was reading it.’
‘So your mind,’ explained Wylie, ‘didn’t make the book invisible, or leave it dangling in mid-air, but put it in the sensible place – on the table.’
‘Cain was a very clever man.’ Aleksei had to catch himself – he’d almost said ‘Iuda’.
‘He was about to move on to experiments with silver salts, but then the book ends.’
‘Silver?’
‘Lapis lunaris, that sort of thing,’ said Wylie, as if Aleksei would understand such things beyond recognizing the name. ‘They react to light. I’m not sure what he was planning. The big question in my view is how does the viewer know they’re looking at a vampire even if they haven’t been told? Your idea of smell is an interesting one. And why does it only happen in mirrors? Why aren’t vampires just invisible all the time?’
‘You’re not thinking of picking up where Cain left off, are you?’ asked Aleksei grimly.
‘It might be tempting,’ mused Wylie, ‘but I suspect I might have you to answer to if I did. And I wouldn’t want to end up like him.’ He nodded back the way they had come as he spoke.
Aleksei glanced over his shoulder, and then ahead of them to where the sun, though not yet setting, was low in the west. It would no longer be shining through that hole in the rocks and giving Iuda his cosy shell of protection. And without that protection, there would be nothing to stop the entire horde of voordalaki from having their first decent meal in years. He wished he could have been there to see it.
* * *
‘“Princess, I know the fault not thine
That Giray loves thee, oh! then hear
A suppliant wretch, nor spurn her prayer!
Throughout the harem none but thou
Could rival beauties such as mine
Nor make him violate his vow;
Yet, Princess! in thy bosom cold
The heart to mine left thus forlorn,
The love I feel cannot be told,
For passion, Princess, was I born.
Yield me, Giray then; with these tresses
Oft have his wandering fingers played,
My lips still glow with his caresses,
Snatched as he sighed, and swore, and prayed,
Oaths broken now so often plighted!
Hearts mingled once now disunited!”’
Aleksei recognized the words as soon as he heard them. It was Pushkin – The Fountain at Bakhchisaray, published just the previous year. It was apt in more ways than one. The first was the most obvious; that even as he heard the words, Aleksei was sitting in a courtyard, enjoying the fading warmth of the autumn twilight, sipping at a local vodka of which he planned to take home with him at least a bottle and listening to the trickle of the very Fountain of Tears that had inspired Pushkin when he had visited the town.
But more than that, the subject of the poem itself could not help but suggest comparisons to Aleksei’s own life. Zarema, the former favourite of the Khan Giray, had crept into the bedchamber of his new love, the captured Polish princess Maria. Zarema was begging Maria to reject Giray, in the hope that once his love for this new beauty had proved to be a passing fancy, he would return once again to Zarema.
Would Marfa, if she knew, creep into Domnikiia’s room and beg her to abandon Aleksei, in the hope that he would return to her? Was Marfa Zarema, Domnikiia Maria and Aleksei himself Giray? The comparison broke down on many points. Marfa knew nothing of Domnikiia, nor had she lost Aleksei’s love. And where would Marfa’s new love, Vasya, fit into the analogy? But the biggest difference was that, though Maria did not love Giray, Domnikiia did love Aleksei. For her to abandon him would not be some casual act of indifference, but a dagger to her heart.
