The Restoration Game (30 page)

1.

At the top of a steep dry gully I stopped for breath, and looked back. Far below was the road from Krasnod, curving now around the side of the mountain towards the pass a few kilometres to the west. A kilometre or so in that direction, half hidden in a clump of olive trees, was Andrei's yellow car. He himself was, if all had gone to plan, sitting at a roadside refreshment stall, sipping lemon tea, flipping over pages of a guide to bird life of the Caucasus, and occasionally scanning the mountainside through binoculars. He had my mobile number on his phone, and he was ready to warn me if he espied any patrols in the vicinity.

A couple of kilometres in the opposite direction, back towards the city, a spur from the road led through scrub and trees to the bare rectangle of the former Soviet military base, within whose stockade stood long barracks buildings and above which I could just make out as a tiny green-and-yellow dot the bicolour of the Krassnian flag. Armoured vehicles and squads of drilling soldiers moved about like blocky pixels.

I turned back to my climb. Just up ahead of me and to the right stood a mobile-phone mast, but that wasn't the landmark I was looking for. It should be—ah, yes, there it was: a twisted, ancient oak tree, with a stand of more recent stunted birch and maple covering a few hundred metres of the slope behind it. I emerged from the lip of the gully that had been my staircase and cover for most of the ascent, and scrambled upward across a steep slope of scree, feeling very exposed. Stones rolled and rattled behind and below me. At one point, my boot slipped and I fell on the stones, slithering back a couple of metres until a boulder stopped me. I made up the distance crawling, then resumed my crouched clamber.

At last I arrived at a lip of firm soil and grass. I reached for an exposed root of the oak tree, hauled myself up and over, and darted behind the tree. Another pause for breath, for a swig of water, and to look back—this time, I couldn't see the road, and barely the base, just the sweep of the plain with its neat squares and columns of ranked vines and olive trees and its more complex geometry of field and meadow, bisected by the main road and criss-crossed by small roads and meandering streams, and the city hazy in the distance. The landscape was busy with the crawling dots of tractors, trucks, and trailers, gathering in the harvest or transporting it to town.

Through this sloping woods before me there was supposed to be a path, leading to a large boulder of arguably artificial placement, at which my directions indicated that I should strike off diagonally to the left and up, across the side of the mountain, and into a further declivity which—if I arrived at the correct spot—I could cross easily to climb the other side and find another landmark, a spring that rose straight from a crack in the rock. I unfolded my map, checked my compass, and proceeded into the woods.

Branches above me, bracken and moss-furred roots at my feet. Nothing in sight looked remotely like a path. I stopped and checked the map and compass again, and the GPS. I was going in the right direction, no doubt about that, but not on a path. The GPS gave my location more exactly than the scale of the map warranted—I could be twenty metres out on either side. I took out the copy of Arbatov's book, the original source of
The Krassniad
, and flicked through its pages, looking for lines that Amanda (I presumed) had marked in fluorescent yellows and pinks.

In the wood of the oak stood Duram
by a cleft cliff three-men high
Forward he urged his valiants
onward to the altar of sacrifice
from where heathen smoke rises….

A cleft cliff three-men high? I peered around in the green gloom. The ground to my left seemed a bit higher. I moved cautiously in that direction, stopping every few paces to look back the way I'd come. Five metres, ten, fifteen…. There was a clearing ahead. My foot sank into undergrowth and leaf litter, and I banged my shin on a sharp obstacle. Recovering my balance, I found I'd almost tripped headlong on to a flat expanse of partially grass-covered rock that rose about a metre above the ground. I heaved myself onto it and walked forward on this firmer footing, and then almost stepped into a deep, foot-wide gap between it and a similar flat outcrop of the same size. The gap, now that I saw it, ran clean across the rocky platform.

A cleft. The word came to my mind and stopped me in my tracks.

Was this what a thousand years of worms working the leaf mould could do to a cliff three-men high?

I walked along the side of the cleft, and found at its end, beyond the far edge of the rocky platform, cutting clean through the undergrowth, a stony path. Clear, well-trodden, and narrow, it didn't look like it had been made by human feet. Here and there I noticed cloven hoof-marks in patches where a seep of water had muddied the ground. They might have been the tracks of sheep, or goats, or even deer for all I knew. By now, I knew, I was well into the Zone, and had good reason to think no or few people had walked this way for years.

After about ten minutes I reached another clearing, within which lay an approximately cuboid boulder about three metres by one by two, through a crack in which a lone tree had forced its way over many decades, if not centuries. Triumphant, I paused there, spread my map on this lichen-crusted natural table, checked my direction, and headed off. The woods ended a little beyond the edge of the clearing, and the ground rose sharply. I climbed amid ankle-high, heathery scrub and tough grass, up and across a hillside that sloped at (I reckoned) exactly forty-five degrees.

Up and up, and then down. In the declivity the path I'd followed in the woods seemed renewed, this time as a fortuitous—perhaps—alignment of stones across the scree-covered slopes and floor. I reached the spring, just beyond the far lip of the declivity, about 3:30. I had been on the mountain almost two hours, and had ascended about eight hundred metres. I stooped to scoop water from the spring to my mouth.

Behind me, and out of my sight, I heard scree-stones slip and chime, rattling down the slope I'd just come up. I froze for a moment, then flattened to the ground and crawled on knees and elbows to a shrub at the lip of the rise. Very slowly, I raised my head to look over, and in doing so disturbed a branch above me. The low bush rustled and shook. I heard swift footsteps racing away, in a crunching of gravel and clashing of stones. I rolled sideways from the shrub and raised myself higher. I saw a dark figure just as it reached the top of the far side before it disappeared into the shadows under the trees. The figure was running on two legs and had two arms, and looked about the right size for a small human being. I couldn't be sure it was human, or even whether it was covered in clothing or hair.

I crouched there for what seemed a long while but was actually just a couple of minutes, somewhat shaken. Of course I'd heard (from Nana Krassnia, for a start) about the
almas
, the alleged relict hominid of the Caucasus. At that moment I thought I'd seen one, and that its kind had tramped the paths I'd followed. Looking back, I don't know. I may have seen an adventurous and athletic child, if there are people living on the mountain who evade the soldiers. It's a possibility. In Siberia there are groups in the forest so elusive—they sometimes trade for matches, fish-hooks, and salt—that the Soviet state and the entire bloody twentieth century came and went without touching their lives at all. Some are rumoured not to have heard of the Revolution, and to think the Tsar still rules.

After another bushy incline of a hundred metres or so the mountainside sloped sharply upward again. My path led across a snowfield on that slope to its top, beyond which—according to the map—lay a short walk to the ravine with the secret. It was in a very thoughtful mood that I pressed on.

What I was thinking about, though, wasn't which species of primate—my own or another—I'd just observed, but about what Andrei Melyukhin, aka Fyodor, had told me as he drove me to the mountain. And what I hadn't told him. I hadn't told him that I'd told Ross Stewart about him and the others, mainly because I was fairly sure he had no idea who Ross Stewart was, and because it seemed pretty clear that Ross had said nothing about any of this to the Agency—otherwise, they'd have made sure that my contact in Krassnia wasn't someone who already knew me. (But surely they knew that I'd been at school here, and that Andrei had been at the same school? Perhaps not—putting two and two together like that, or at least putting all the relevant information on the same page or even in the same dossier, has never struck me as one of the Agency's strong points.)

Just before Andrei had dropped me off at the foot of that steep dry gully, we'd talked about what had happened to us in the military base, and neither of us could come up with an explanation—other than that someone in the then-Soviet nomenklatura was interested in the DNA of the Vrai. Andrei was as certain as before that, whatever the gene was, he didn't have it—his parents were from Russia.

“You can't be sure,” I'd told him. “What about your grandparents? People moved around a lot in the thirties, and some falsified their backgrounds, especially if their backgrounds were suspect to the Party.”

He'd just grinned. “Maybe so. I don't want to find out whether or not I have Vrai blood by coming with you.”

So he too believed that story. He might not be Vrai, but he sure was a Krassnian.

I shivered, unknotted the sleeves of my fleece and light jacket from around my waist, and put them on. I shoved my hands in the jacket pockets, found my gloves there, and put them on. Then I set out across the snowfield. There was no way to avoid it: my next landmark was a notch in the skyline, between two prominent rocks, and the snowfield covered the slope below it.

The snow was half a year old, the surface hard and slick from daily melts and nightly freezes. The slope was another erosion pile, forty-five degrees. I made progress by kicking my feet (and sometimes punching my fists) through the ice and into the packed snow beneath, and hauling myself up. It took twenty minutes to climb eighty metres. I remembered the story Yuri had told, about the NKVD expedition, and imagined doing this with a cine camera on my back. I was exhausted when I reached the top. From there I could see some of the way down the mountain—the stony vale, the woods—but not the road and only a part of the plain. The sun seemed to my northerner eyes still high, but it was far on its way down the sky to my right, to the west. The time now was 4:05.

I beat the snow off my gloves and kicked it from my feet. The ground here was dry and stony, sloping gently to a cliff a hundred metres away and about fifteen metres high that barred further progress on this route up the mountain, at least for me. Somewhere ahead of me, in the lower part of that cliff, was the entrance to a ravine, and my destination. It wasn't, now, the cold that was making me shiver.

I climbed that last slope in less than two minutes. The slope was steeper near the cliff face, the stones larger. I hopped onto a boulder beside the cliff and looked around. No opening or gap was obvious. The GPS and map indicated that I'd come to the right place, but as before I could be tens of metres out in either direction. I tossed a mental coin, and headed left and to the west.

The cliff face was irregular, with great buttresses of rock alternating with places where the cliff had eroded farther back. As I worked my way around one such buttress, a flash of light from the rock caught my eye. I stopped, stepped back, and moved my head back and forth until I caught the gleam again. It came from the sunlight shining through a crack in the rock. I tracked the crack upwards, and saw that five metres up it merged with a cleft about a metre wide. I stepped away from the cliff and saw what I had been too close to see before: a series of shelves and ledges that formed natural steps up to that cleft. I didn't stop to consult Arbatov's work and Duram's lays. I climbed.

Hugging the rock, I stepped around the corner from the ledge to the crevice, and then took a step inside. I looked up, and could see the blue sky maybe ten metres above me. Ahead, when my eyes adjusted, I could see a fainter vertical band of sunlight on rock. The floor of rock was solid, except for that tiny crack. An entire wall of rock, it seemed, had become separated from the cliff face. Its sides weren't straight: a few metres ahead the strip of rock floor, and both facing walls, angled to the right. I walked forward, and around that angle. The gap between the rock walls now widened to two metres, then three. I could see a broad band of sky between them, about a hundred metres ahead. Being in this gap was indeed like being in a ravine: a few steps later, I was walking on pale grass that had taken root on the thin accumulation of dust and gravel on the rock. My toe snagged on something, and I almost tripped. Looking down, I saw what looked like a thick insulated electrical cable snaking along in the grass. It emerged from the dirt a few steps behind me, and continued on the surface before me, occasionally disappearing for half a metre or so. The walls went on widening. Ten metres on, they were a good five metres apart. The light from the westering sun struck almost straight into the gap—dim, but quite adequate to see by. I walked along, step by step, looking up and down the walls on either side for anything that might seem unnatural or out of place.

And then I saw, on the outermost of the two walls—on the rock, not the cliff—just ahead of me, what seemed to be an inscription. I hurried forward, keeping to the cliff side of the crevice, partly so that I could see the inscription clearly and partly because I wanted to keep well clear of it. The walls around here were darker and more cracked than elsewhere. I could imagine sacrifices being burned here, and Beria's men caught in the glow.

The inscription began far above my head, and continued all the way down to the floor. Its letters appeared freshly carved and about a foot high. The lines of the text were up to three metres long, and seemed to be in Latin. A typical chunk of it looked like this:

SIC
LOGINQVITAS MINOR QVAM QINQVE STADIA
TVNC
OPEROR COMPVTVS VNVS
ALITER
OPEROR COMPVTVS DVOS
VT PRAECESSI MAIRIBVS QVAM VNVS
OPEROR INSQVEQVO TERMINVS