Thirteen Years Later (16 page)

There was still no sign of Kyesha, but the clock on the Saviour’s Tower said that it was barely half past eight. Aleksei walked on towards Saint Vasiliy’s, revelling in the new openness of the square. He had entered from the north, and the moment he had done so, the cathedral had called to him across the vast empty space, in a way it never could have when the area was built up. The Kremlin itself was ubiquitous, looming over the entire length of Red Square, but Saint Vasiliy’s was like a beacon, small in the distance, but never insignificant, and ever growing as it was approached. Aleksei had seen Notre Dame in Paris. He had been inside and had climbed its towers. It was massive and beautiful, but it could never be as compelling as this ornate, garish symbol of all that it meant to be Russian.

‘I never could work out quite where in Red Square you planned to meet.’ Aleksei could not see where Kyesha had come from. It did not matter.

‘It doesn’t seem to have caused you any trouble,’ he said.

‘Are you ready to play?’

‘Of course. Where shall we go?’

Kyesha looked around, then nodded towards the only object that interrupted the surface of the square between the cathedral and the statue of Minin and Pozharskiy – the Lobnoye Mesto. It was a round stone dais from which, traditionally, the ukases issued by the tsar had been announced. They climbed the steps up to it. The platform itself was more than a man’s height above the square, and surrounded by a stone wall that came up almost to Aleksei’s shoulders. It would not have been easy to attract attention when making a proclamation, but at the very centre of the large circular platform was another, smaller podium. Aleksei
presumed it would have been on this that the herald actually stood.

But it was not Aleksei and Kyesha’s intention to be seen by the people in the square, few of them though there were that evening. Once they had sat down, their backs against the outer wall, they were invisible to anyone who did not actually climb the steps and look inside. Even if someone had done, they would have had to look closely to see the two men through the darkness of the moonless night. But the dark would be an equal problem for them if they intended to play knucklebones. Kyesha had come prepared. He lit a candle. Its dim light didn’t even reach the far wall, but it was sufficient. He took the bones from his pocket again and placed five of them on the stone floor between them.

‘How shall we do this?’ asked Aleksei. He was sure Kyesha would have worked out the details.

‘The question is the bet,’ he replied. ‘You announce the question and the number of bones, and if you succeed, you’re given an answer. We’ll forget about doubling.’

‘And if you don’t succeed?’

‘Then you lose control of the bones. We keep playing till we fail – then the other one gets a go.’ He pushed the bones towards Aleksei. ‘You start.’

Aleksei threw the five bones on to the ground. He didn’t need to worry about catches on the back of the hand, and again he chose the largest to throw into the air. Then he had to think of a question.

‘When was your brother’s birthday?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

‘I’d have thought you’d know that already,’ said Kyesha, ‘but I’ll accept.’

Aleksei did know it already. It wasn’t that sort of question. He threw the bone in the air and picked up two easily.

‘13 April 1788,’ said Kyesha. Aleksei still found it very doubtful that this was indeed Maks’ brother, but he had done his homework. He threw the stones down again, perhaps a little too hard. They bounced wildly and spread further apart than usual.

‘What’s your mother’s patronymic? For two.’

Kyesha accepted. It was a harder pick-up, but Aleksei managed it.

‘Malinovna,’ said Kyesha. ‘But that was too easy, Aleksei; it was in the letter I gave you.’

Aleksei had realized that almost as soon as he’d asked the question. He threw the bones again. ‘Your father’s?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

‘I don’t accept,’ said Kyesha. Aleksei smiled. It seemed that his opponent’s research had not gone very deep after all.

‘For three?’

‘OK.’

The way the bones had fallen made three tricky. Aleksei threw the one in his hand higher than he had before. He picked up three from the ground easily enough, but had to reach out to catch the one in the air. He smiled as he felt his fingers grip it, and then looked Kyesha in the face, waiting for an answer.

‘Our father’s name was Sergei.’ He paused, as if unsure, but Aleksei guessed now that he was merely teasing. ‘Sergei Ilyich Lukin.’

He was right. It meant nothing except that he had come well prepared. Aleksei tried a change of tack. He threw the bones down again.

‘Have we met before? For two.’

‘No,’ said Kyesha.

‘We haven’t?’ asked Aleksei.

‘I mean, no, I don’t accept the bet.’

‘For three?’

Kyesha shook his head.

‘For four?’

Kyesha considered for a moment, then nodded. It did not really matter. Aleksei knew Kyesha would not have tried to avoid the question if the answer had been ‘no’. His very resistance implied – though he might well have been bluffing – that they had met.
Aleksei had thought his face familiar that first evening in the theatre, but he still could not place it.

The large bone hit the stone platform with a gentle click just as Aleksei’s fingers reached for the third one to pick up. He did not mind about not having his question answered, but it did mean that he lost control. He handed the bones over to Kyesha.

‘I have no personal questions for you, Aleksei,’ he said, throwing the bones down. ‘I trust that you are who you say you are.’ Aleksei noted, not for the first time, how Kyesha’s calm and confidence appeared out of keeping with his youth.

‘When did my brother die?’ he asked. ‘For two.’

Aleksei accepted. It was an easy bet, but Aleksei had no objections to answering the question. In fact, he realized, he would probably learn more from hearing what Kyesha had to ask than from any answers he might give to Aleksei’s questions. Kyesha had no trouble picking up the knucklebones.

‘28 August 1812,’ said Aleksei. It was a date he would never forget.

‘Was he a traitor? For two.’

Aleksei nodded his acceptance of the bet even as he considered what his answer would be. Again, Kyesha had no trouble snatching up the two bones, but Aleksei did not answer his question.

‘Well? Was Maksim a traitor?’

‘He was a French spy,’ said Aleksei. ‘He confessed that much to me himself.’ The words were carefully chosen, and Kyesha did not press for a more direct answer. Instead, he cast down the bones again.

‘Did you kill him? For one.’

Aleksei would have answered that question for none, as Kyesha had clearly guessed with the simplicity of the challenge, but they followed the routine.

‘No, I did not,’ he answered when the time came. The direct answer disguised more than it revealed.

‘Did Dmitry? For two.’

For a brief moment, Aleksei felt a horrible pang of concern at the
sound of his son’s name on Kyesha’s lips, but he quickly realized that the object of the question was not Dmitry Alekseevich, but the long dead Dmitry Fetyukovich. Aleksei pictured the abandoned farmyard where he had last seen Dmitry – not the last time he had seen him alive, nor indeed the first time he had seen him dead. It had been the spring of 1813. At the first sign of a thaw, Aleksei had headed back to the burnt-out farmhouse north of Yurtsevo where he had left Dmitry’s frozen corpse. Even then, the ground had been hard to dig – but easier than it would have been in the winter, when Aleksei had first found the body. It did not matter how hard it was; Aleksei had made a promise to himself. Dmitry was the third and last of the three comrades he had lost during Bonaparte’s invasion. He had witnessed none of their deaths, but had buried them all.

‘For three then?’ asked Kyesha, misinterpreting Aleksei’s silence. Aleksei nodded, and Kyesha collected the bones without trouble.

‘No,’ said Aleksei. ‘Dmitry didn’t kill Maks either.’ It was as accurate as the answer he had just given concerning himself.

‘There was a famous Dmitry died at this very spot, wasn’t there?’ said Kyesha. Aleksei said nothing, surprised by the change of subject. He glanced down at the knucklebones. Kyesha misread the gesture. ‘You’re not going to make me play for an answer to a question like that, are you?’

Aleksei smiled. ‘I suppose not. You’re right. That was 1606. The first “False Dmitry”.’

‘There was more than one?’

‘There were three – each claiming, falsely, to be the missing heir to the late tsar, Ivan IV. All in the Time of Troubles. He didn’t last long. When the mob had finished with him, they left his body here.’ Aleksei was a little surprised that Kyesha didn’t know all this, but Maks too had had surprising gaps in his knowledge of Russian history. On the other hand, Kyesha might just have been playing dumb. ‘You know why they call this thing Lobnoye Mesto?’ he asked.

‘“
Ee, preedya na mesto, nazivayemoye Golgofa, shto znacheet: Lobnoye Mesto . . .
”’ Kyesha recited the words in a monotone, as if he had learned them by rote, long ago, as any good Christian should have. ‘Matthew 27:33,’ he added.

‘And they came to a place named Golgotha, which means: the Place of the Skull . . .’ At least, that was how the French described it, presumably from the Greek. The literal meaning of the Russian term ‘Lobnoye Mesto’ was closer to ‘the Place of the Forehead’, though that sense was usually forgotten. It was now a phrase that, in reality, meant simply ‘the Place of Execution’. Either way, it was just a description of a rocky outcrop near Jerusalem two millennia before which had a passing resemblance to a human skull, and whatever the etymology, this place represented to the Orthodox Church and to many Russians the spot upon which Christ was crucified.

Aleksei suddenly felt uncomfortable, sitting in the dark in this holy place, gambling with knucklebones, even if they weren’t playing for money. ‘Can we go?’ he said.

‘Just one more round,’ said Kyesha. ‘Look – I’ve already cast.’ Four bones lay on the stone floor, and Kyesha had already picked up the fifth, ready to throw it. ‘Who did kill Maks? For two.’

Aleksei shook his head. He had no reason not to answer the question, but he felt a sudden urge to make life difficult for Kyesha.

‘For three?’

‘For four,’ said Aleksei.

Kyesha considered for a moment, then nodded. He threw the bone into the air, no higher than he had done for earlier rounds. His hand moved at tremendous speed across the stone slabs as it picked up the other bones, faster than Aleksei could have managed – faster than any human could have managed, and the implication was not lost on Aleksei. Kyesha had plenty of time to pluck the last, falling bone from the air before it was anywhere near the ground.

‘So . . .’ he said.

‘Maks was killed by six Wallachian mercenaries, from a group that at the time numbered nine in total. We called them the Oprichniki, as a joke.’ Aleksei could not recall a moment when it had been funny. ‘Originally there were twelve of them, but Maks had handed three over to the French, who executed them. That’s why the others wanted revenge.’ There had been a time – a very brief period – when that was essentially the story as Aleksei himself had believed it, before he had discovered that all but one of those mercenaries were in fact vampires. He doubted whether Kyesha would have gone to all this effort if his concerns were not in some way related to that fact – it was more than conceivable that he was a
voordalak
himself; Aleksei had never seen him in daylight. But that sort of information could keep until Aleksei was more certain of its value.

‘What were their names?’ asked Kyesha.

Aleksei pushed the knucklebones towards him. ‘That’s another question,’ he said.

Suddenly, the dais in which they were sitting was filled with light. They both looked towards it. Aleksei’s eyes adjusted, and he saw that its source was no more than a lantern.

‘You can’t sleep here,’ said a voice emanating from behind the light. Aleksei was taken back for a moment to the French occupation, when enemy soldiers had constantly harassed him and other Russians who had remained in the city. But this voice spoke in Russian, not French. It was one of the guards from the nearby Saviour’s Gate of the Kremlin. Aleksei rose to his feet. He would have needed only to show the guard his identification papers for the man to be running back and forth between the Kremlin and the Lobnoye Mesto, bringing them tea and vodka and anything else they might ask for, but he preferred to let the evening end there.

He walked down the stone steps, back into Red Square. Kyesha followed him. The soldier stood above them, at the entrance to the platform, waiting to see that they left.

‘Until tomorrow,’ said Kyesha. He gave a half-hearted salute
and then turned away, heading down the hill towards the river. Aleksei’s journey took him north. When he was halfway across the square he glanced back and could see the glimmer of the guard’s lantern as he stood waiting at the Place of the Skull. The next time he looked, the light had gone.

Domnikiia was not asleep when Aleksei slipped into bed beside her. He had kissed Tamara lightly on the forehead as she slept, and she had not woken.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Domnikiia.