Twelve

CHAPTER XVIII

IT WAS A SUNDAY WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN MOSCOW. I WAS GLAD to have seen the city at its worst, for now, although it was still in a sorry state, I could at least see that there was some improvement. For those like Domnikiia and most of the populace, who had left before the French had even arrived, the contrast with now must have been heartbreaking. They had last seen a city still at the height of its physical splendour, still with the lifeblood of its people flowing through its streets, even though at that time they were flowing out of the city. When I had last seen Moscow, two-thirds of it had been razed by fire, a fraction of the population remained and the streets were filled only with occupying French soldiers.

Today, two-thirds of the city was still destroyed by fire. No surprise for me, but a horror to many others who returned, particularly if they returned to find it was their home that had been destroyed. Today, there were no French in the city, neutral for those who had never seen the French, but an improvement for me, who had. Today, the population was still small, but larger than at its worst and increasing all the time. For those who had seen it full, the city was still empty. For me, it was not yet full, but at least it was filling.

Thus I must have cut an eccentric figure that day. While most of the returning Muscovites wore faces of haggard shock and shuffled around contemplating the enormity of the task of rebuilding – both personally and civically – that lay before them, I strode about with the evident pleasure of a voyager revisiting a beautiful town that he has not seen for many years.

Even so, my face must have become indistinguishable from those around it when I first laid eyes on the horror that had befallen the Kremlin. It had been spared the fires of the first days of Bonaparte's occupation, thanks largely to the efforts of the French themselves to protect it as the richest jewel in the crown that they had captured. But on his departure, Bonaparte had instructed that the citadel should be mined and destroyed so that we could not reclaim that which he could not keep. There could be no military justification for it, as there might possibly have been for the fires that dogged the French when they first took the city; it was mere petulance.

Luck, however, having chosen that autumn of 1812 to desert Bonaparte, had deserted him completely. The Kremlin was not destroyed. Perhaps his subordinates had been half-hearted in executing so churlish an order. Perhaps the rain had dampened the fuses. Whatever the cause, few of the charges had ignited. But whatever relief Muscovites might have felt that the Kremlin was saved, it was still a misery to see the damage that had been done. Facing Red Square, everything between the Arsenal and the Saint Nicholas Tower was gone, along with several other towers stretching down towards the river. Venturing within, I saw that the Palace of the Facets had collapsed. Worst of all, the great golden cross that had once topped the Ivan the Great Bell Tower was gone. It had not been destroyed in any explosion, but dragged to the ground and carted off as part of Bonaparte's plunder.

Sad though it was to witness the mutilation caused by the departure of the French, I counted myself as fortunate to have missed the brief trough of anarchy into which the remaining population of Moscow had descended in the twenty-four hours after the French had left. What I heard of it was disheartening enough. A crowd had marched on the Foundlings' Home, where there were no longer to be found orphans, but hundreds of French wounded who were too weak to be moved. Few survived the wrath of the mob, though their deaths were quicker than those of many of their comrades who had been able to walk out into the slow, freezing mortality of the Russian winter. Had the mob's only actions been those of vengeance, then they might have been attributed to some misplaced sense of patriotism, but, so I was told, looting had become more rife than ever. Those supplies that should have been eked out between all Muscovites were grabbed by the strongest and most selfish. Fortunately, there were Russian troops under Prince Khonvansky near to the city, waiting for the French to leave, and so the period when no law – neither French nor Russian – reigned was mercifully brief. By the time I returned, civilization – if not civility – had long been restored.

The inn in Tverskaya where I usually stayed (when I wasn't frequenting stables and crypts) had at least in part survived the fires. Flames had consumed much of the block, and as many as half of the rooms had been destroyed, but its proprietors had already returned and were attempting to resurrect their business using those few rooms that remained habitable. I chatted to the innkeeper as he led me up to a dispiritingly humble room. (The set which I used to occupy was no more – the stairs that had once led up to it now led only to a precipice overlooking a wasteland of detritus and rubble.) He asked after Vadim, Dmitry and Maks. I told him they were all well, finding it easier simply to lie about Maks, but I gathered that he had not seen Vadim any more recently than I had.

There was little I could do to track down Vadim. When the French arrived he, like me, had gone underground. His skills at hiding himself from view might not have been the greatest in the world, but in a city the size of Moscow, there was nowhere I could even begin to search for him. All I could do was attend the same daily meeting points that we had arranged weeks before. It was a dim hope, but that was the last plan of action we had. However slim the chance, it was the best I had of finding him. On top of that, there was also the possibility that one or more of the Oprichniki might show up – a prospect that I viewed with some ambivalence.

Sunday's meeting place was the Church of Fyodor Stratilit, beside Menshikov's Tower, east of the Kremlin. I took a slight detour to revisit the place where I had spent my last night in the city, in Boris and Natalia's tiny dwelling within the shantytown. When I got there, nothing remained of it – a few possessions of little value were strewn about, and I could see the remains of the homemade tents that the people had built. I even managed to find the precise spot where, I estimated, Boris and Natalia's particular compartment had been. They had left nothing of value. A broken bottle stuck half out of the mud. Whether it had been the one I had drunk from, or one of those I had given them, or some other stray, discarded bottle, I could not tell.

Asking around, I heard that the encampment had been broken up by the French only a few days after we left. There had been no bloodshed – the people there had simply dispersed to other locations in the city. There was little hope that anyone would know where a specific cobbler and his daughter had gone. I carried on to the meeting which I hoped Vadim would attend.

He was not there when I arrived, a little before nine. It took me but a moment to find the message I had left for him, scratched against the soft stone on a low part of the wall. My heart beat faster in the anticipation that he might have followed it up with a subsequent message in response, but there was none. I waited for an hour, but Vadim did not come. I headed back to my bed.

The following morning, I made a tour of the six remaining meeting points, much as I had done on my last day before leaving Moscow. My purpose was, as it had in part been at the church the previous night, to check whether Vadim had left any responses to my messages. Most of my messages remained intact. One of the chalk ones had vanished completely, presumably washed away by rain, and another had been half rubbed off, but was still essentially legible. However, at none of them did I find any corresponding reply from Vadim. I even checked the burnt-out tavern, where I had not left anything at all, in case Vadim had written a message there, but there was nothing.

If he had read any of the messages, he would surely have replied. Even if he had decided instantly on joining us in Yuryev-Polsky, he would have at least indicated that he had been at the rendezvous. It was, of course, possible that he had been at the place but not seen the message but, on the other hand, I had put them in conventional places – places where Vadim, with his years of experience, would certainly have looked. I could only conclude that he had not attended any meeting since we had last seen him, under the archway at Saint Vasily's. Like us, he must have left the city soon after. But even then, wouldn't he have left messages for us as I did? The other possibility was that he had never left the city and never would.

It seemed increasingly likely. If Iuda had realized that Vadim was following him, he would have had no qualms about ridding himself of his pursuer and indulging in a good meal at a single stroke. Vadim would have put up a good fight, but his scepticism was obvious even at the mention of the word 'voordalak', and so he might not have been as wary as he should. Moreover, it was Iuda, not Vadim, that I had seen more recently. And who was to know that they hadn't run into one of the other Oprichniki, and then Vadim would have been beyond hope. It was an irony and a very small comfort that, if this was the case, Iuda himself had perished only hours later in the inferno of the cellar.

But though I feared, I did not know. It was just as likely that Vadim had fled Moscow. If that was the case then, with the city coming back to life, now was the time when he would be most likely to return, just as I had. All I could do was turn up at the appropriate place at nine o'clock each evening and hope.

That afternoon, I paid a visit to Degtyarny Lane. I hadn't completely abandoned hope on Domnikiia, but if she was lost to me, then I at least wanted it to end on an amicable footing. I also wanted to throw myself at her feet and tell her I loved her, but she was well aware of that – saying it wouldn't change anything.

I was not entirely surprised to find that the brothel had not only survived the fires, but was already open for business – although business did not yet seem to be booming. That the building had survived the flames could only be put down to good luck, but Pyetr Pyetrovich was a man who knew how to be lucky.

Domnikiia was not in the salon. The other girls sat around languidly, tired already of waiting for clients who did not arrive. None of them came up to me; they knew my face well enough to know whom I had come to see. On the stairs, I met Margarita.

'Oh, it's you,' she said inhospitably.

'I've come to see Domnikiia.'

'I can't stop you,' she replied, and continued down the stairs.

'Sorry the nursing job didn't work out,' I muttered, just loud enough for her to hear.

I knocked on Domnikiia's door and entered on her reply.

'Oh, it's you,' she said, in a tone with far less passion – of any kind – than that with which Margarita had just uttered the same words.

'Yes,' I said. 'I wanted to see you.'

'Well, you know me, Aleksei. A job's a job and I won't refuse a man with money.'

'That wasn't what I came to do.'

'So what did you come to do?'

I thought about it for a moment, and found that I didn't know. I knew full well what I wanted to achieve, but I had no real plans for how to achieve it. I realized there was one thing that needed to be said whichever way I was to leave her – be it as her lover or as her former lover.

'I came to say I'm sorry,' I said.

'Sorry for what? For shouting at me when I said I wanted to be a vampire?' She spoke dismissively, as if such an apology could have little importance.

'No,' I replied, knowing that only complete honesty would suffice. 'I was right to do that. I'm sorry for not accepting your apology afterwards.'

'Why didn't you?' Her voice was suddenly full of humility. I could boast about my sensitive appreciation of the subtleties of the female heart, but in reality it had been only by luck that I had stumbled upon saying what she wanted to hear.

'I didn't think it needed saying. It was obvious.'

'Was it?' She spoke almost in a whisper now. 'Why?'

'Because…' But I didn't have an answer. It was obvious because I knew exactly how my mind worked and how I felt about her. She did not.

She took a step towards me. 'Is there anything else obvious that you haven't said to me?' she enquired tantalizingly, standing so close that she had to crane her neck upwards to look at me. I leaned forward to kiss her. She held her fingers to my lips to stop me. 'Uh-uh,' she said, shaking her head. 'You have to say it.'

'Isn't it obvious yet?'

'Say it, Lyosha!' she murmured, more mouthing than speaking.

I bent down to her ear and whispered it to her. Straightening up, I saw in her face a smile even more radiant than that I had seen on Natalia's when Dmitry had remembered her name day. I bent forward to kiss her and this time she offered no objections. I pushed her towards the bed, but now she did stop me.

'Not here,' she said. 'Not if we don't have to. Where are you staying?'

'At the inn, where I used to.'

'It will have to be late; maybe after midnight.'

'That's all right.'

'If I can come at all.'

'It would be easier for me to see you here,' I told her.

'No, I don't want that. I want it to be like it was in Yuryev-Polsky – like when I was a nurse.'

'OK,' I said and kissed her again. Then I left.

I waited again for Vadim that evening. It was Monday and so the venue was Red Square. I paced about for an hour or so. Autumn had given way to winter and I had to keep walking just to keep warm, my hands buried deep in my pockets. The square was far from bustling and those who were there walked across it briskly and purposefully, not wanting to spend any more time than necessary in the cold night air. Vadim was not among them.

I returned to the inn. I had told the innkeeper that a lady might be visiting me, and so a raised eyebrow to him as I entered was question enough for him. A brief shake of the head was his reply. But it was still early.

I had fallen asleep by the time she entered my bedroom. It wasn't until I felt her cool, naked body press against my back and wrap itself around mine that I knew she was there. I rolled over to face her.

'Do I need to say anything now, Domnikiia?' I asked her softly.

'No,' she whispered, with a smile I could not see. 'It's obvious.'

The following morning, I walked her back to Degtyarny Lane. It was almost midday. We had lain in bed for a long time – neither of us having occupations in which early rising was a requirement – talking about very little.

Then I was free until my appointment – and how I wished that I could really use a word that gave it such certainty – with Vadim. I found myself some lunch and then wandered around the streets, judging the degree to which Moscow was recuperating from its occupation.

It would, I believed, recover. Petersburg had become our capital only a hundred years ago. Nine years before that, it had been a swamp. It had taken the determination of a great man, the greatest in our history, Tsar Pyetr the First, to build the earliest structures on that swamp and then to make it his capital within so short a space of time. Today, there was no man alive that was his equal, not just in Russia but in the whole world. Bonaparte had aspired to inherit those laurels, but long ago he had proved himself unworthy of them. His retreat from Moscow was the final evidence of his failure to attain such status.

So today, we had no Pyetr to rebuild our city for us, but we had thousands – hundreds of thousands – of Petrushkas; little Pyetrs, who by themselves could no more raise Moscow from the ashes than I could raise the dead from their graves, but who together could restore it to its former greatness, so recently lost. And they did not even have to build it from nothing. They had their memories and, despite what had been lost to the fires, they still had the essential shape of the city. You can burn buildings, but it is harder to burn streets. Thus the plan of a city may survive.

And, of course, a third of the city had survived intact. I was walking down one of these undamaged streets when I noticed three cobbler's shops, huddled next to each other as one often sees with rivals in the same trade, sharing each other's warmth, but envying each other's custom. I peered through the window of each one. Not seeing what I was looking for, I went into the third and spoke to the shopkeeper.

'Have you ever come across a shoemaker by the name of Boris Mihailovich?'

'Boris?' replied the man. 'Yes, I know him.'

'Is his shop around here?'

'No. No, it's not.'

'Do you know where it is?' I asked.

'It's not anywhere. It was burnt down on the first night of the fires.'

'But he survived, I know that. Have you seen him recently, or his daughter?'

'Ah, so it's Natalia you're interested in, is it? Well, I saw them both about a week ago – after the French had gone – but not since.'

'Maybe they've disappeared,' suggested his assistant, who had been sweeping up around us, 'like the rest of them.' He emphasized the word 'disappeared' as though it were new to him, or had taken on a new, more specific meaning.

'"Disappeared"?' I asked.

'People have been coming into the city, but not staying,' explained the shopkeeper without much concern. 'I think they've just decided that there's no business to be had here and have gone off somewhere else. Oleg Stepanovich, the baker from up the street, is the only one I've known personally. Came back to Moscow, opened up his shop, closed it in the evening and didn't open it the next day. I reckon he's gone chasing after the army because they'll pay more for his bread, but he didn't tell his wife, so it may be more than just the army he's chasing.'

'I reckon Bonaparte's left some of his men here, hidden, to pick us off one by one as we come back,' suggested the assistant, leaning on his broom.

'Well, if they pick you off, Vitya,' said the cobbler, 'it'll be a long time before anyone notices much difference round here.' The sweeping was quickly resumed.

I thanked the men and went on my way, knowing from what they had said that the Oprichniki were still in town. What had been said was vague, but it was also chillingly similar to the stories that had emanated from wherever the Oprichniki happened to be. It was, of course, an assumption to suggest that that was what had happened to Boris and his daughter, but I knew then that, for them and for anyone else, the city was not safe.

That evening's rendezvous was at the Church of Saint Clement. As I waited outside, I recalled the last time I had been there, exactly six weeks before, and my encounter with Ioann and Foma. Ioann was now dead, I knew – deader even than he had been when we had met – but I still felt the dread that Foma might return that night to take his revenge. By now they must have been aware that four of their fellows had died within the space of a few nights. It would take little genius – and they didn't have much, particularly now there was no Iuda to do their thinking – for them to deduce that I might in some way be responsible. But whatever they had deduced, none of them showed up. Neither did Vadim.

To make matters worse, Domnikiia did not visit me that night. It is remarkable how quickly one can become accustomed to not sleeping alone.

In one way, Domnikiia staying away had been a good thing. The next morning I received a letter from Marfa. It was dated over three weeks earlier, but in the confusion of the French occupation and retreat, it was a miracle that it had made it through to me at all.

While in Yuryev-Polsky, I had sent her several letters, but they had evidently crossed with this one. Her concern for my safety showed between every line she wrote. She told of the news that they were hearing in Petersburg and of the fear there that Bonaparte would soon be marching towards them. Marfa felt reassured that as long as the tsar stayed in Petersburg, they would be safe. Ostensibly, the implication was that Aleksandr would protect them, but her real meaning was that, as soon as he scarpered, then they'd know they were in trouble. Her understanding of politics was, as ever, remarkably clear-sighted, certainly for a woman.

Dmitry Alekseevich had been a little unwell, but was better now. He had been asking when I would be coming home. I resented being told that. I felt that Marfa was using our son to voice her own desires. Not that it was untrue that Dmitry wanted me home, nor was it unreasonable that Marfa did as well. I just resented the way that she impinged on my desire to have it all. Strange that I resented only Marfa, not Dmitry, but then I did not have a rival son here in Moscow.

She did not write very much on the matter of Maksim's death, but the little that she did put managed in its own way to express much the same feelings as I had. Marfa's approach was simply to ignore the reasons that had led to Maks' execution. She could describe her sorrow without ever facing the unpleasant fact that Maks had been a traitor. She would have written the same words if he had died by a French sword at Borodino. It was of unspeakable comfort to read her words about Maks, as if he had died a decent soldier's death. She was spared, in her mind, the embarrassing subtext of his treason, and I was momentarily spared my own condemnation for my abandonment of him.

The final piece of news was that Vadim's daughter, Yelena, had given birth to a baby boy on 6 September. He had been born a little earlier than expected, but was completely healthy, and was named Rodion Valentinovich. Marfa anticipated that I knew all this already, since I would have heard it directly from Vadim, but I could tell she was hoping that that would not be the case and that not only would she have the pleasure of being the first to tell me, but I in turn would have the pleasure of being the first to tell Vadim.

It would have been a delight to be the two hundredth to tell Vadim, just to have had the pleasure of seeing him at all.

I wrote a quick response to Marfa, saying very little except that I was safe and back in Moscow. I said nothing of Dmitry or Vadim, since to say only that Dmitry was safe would imply that Vadim was not, and I saw no sense in raising undue alarm. For all I knew, he could have headed straight back to Petersburg and be doting over his beloved grandson, cradling him in his arms at that very moment.

I went to Degtyarny Lane to find out what had happened to Domnikiia the night before. When I arrived, I was told she was occupied. I knew she was still working, but the reality of it remained nonetheless unpleasant. That, I suppose, is why she had said we should not meet there. I went back outside and truculently began to throw pebbles up at her window. Soon, her head popped out. I immediately felt concerned that I was intruding on her territory, that she would brusquely send me away, much as I would have done if she were to interrupt me on the battlefield – a bizarre image.

Her face, however, was a portrait of delight at seeing me.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

'I'm wonderful, Lyosha. How are you?'

'What happened to you last night?'

'Things just got busy. I'm sorry.' She pulled a sorry face as she said the word.

'I wasn't complaining. I was just concerned.'

She smirked. 'You're scared of me, aren't you?'

'Scared of losing you. I wish you didn't seem so happy.'

'Charming! Shouldn't I be happy to see you?'

'So you were miserable until you opened the window?'

'Wretched,' she grinned.

'Good. Now I'm happy.'

I heard the call of a man's voice from within her room. 'I have to go,' she said.

'I'll see you tonight?' I asked.

'I'll try.' With that she was gone.

That evening, I went to the Stone Bridge, still clinging on to the receding hope of seeing Vadim. Even over the three days that I had been back in Moscow, it was already just perceptible that more people were returning to the city. Like the complexion of a man drained of almost all his blood, but not quite to the point of death, the colour was beginning to return to Moscow's cheeks. Although the hour was late, the bridge was still busy, busier even than in happier times as the amount of work that people found themselves faced with increased the hours that they put into it.

As I stood there on the bridge, it began to snow. This was the first real snowfall of the winter; heavier than we had seen in Yuryev-Polsky and still scarcely settling, but a portent of what was to come. It was another sign that winter was to be early that year, but Muscovites – and all Russians – are well prepared and would take the winter in their stride whenever it came. In retreat, out to the west, the same could not be said of the French.

I waited for over an hour, inspecting every face that passed me, but Vadim's was not among them. I headed north, back to my bed and, I hoped, to Domnikiia. I was just gazing up at the towers of the Kremlin when I heard the voice of someone very close behind me whisper in my ear.

'Murderer!'

I turned, but saw no one near. A few steps away from me, I saw the back of a tall, shabby man who was marching directly away. It could only have been he who had spoken. I followed him. Although he never had to run, his long legs carried him with enormous pace, forcing me to break into a trot. As we headed on to the Stone Bridge, I found my pursuit of him hindered by the crowd, bumping into them in my rush to keep up. For him, the crowd offered no such obstacle, seeming to open before him like the sea before the bow of a ship as he strode purposefully across the bridge.

We were across the river and the Vodootvodny Canal before I caught up with him. I put my hand on his shoulder and he offered no resistance in turning to face me. He was tall and pale, with many small scars on his face. His shoulder-length hair was loose and unkempt. His dark, black eyes looked towards me, but seemed to see nothing. There was no specific reason for it, but I knew in my heart that I was standing face to face with a vampire – moreover, a vampire that was not one of the Oprichniki. I had thought that my task had been reduced to having just five more of these creatures to face, but now – as my grandmother had told me they could, and as I had hoped she had made up – the vampires had bred. And if they had produced this one offspring, then how many more might there be? They would become unstoppable.

The creature looked fixedly into my eyes for a few seconds and then turned away and continued his journey. I stood in shocked immobility for a moment, considering the prospect of the number of vampires that I might have to face; considering that I had helped to introduce them into a city where they might now stay for ever, neither noticing nor caring that the language spoken by their food supply had changed from French to Russian. The monster that I had been following might be just one of dozens of innocent Muscovites, picked at random, who had not only been denied life, but subsequently denied a true death as the hideous plague spread.

And yet somewhere at the back of my mind, I recognized the face into which I had just been staring. It was certainly not one of the Oprichniki, nor anyone that I knew very well. It was someone that I had previously seen in Moscow. Then it hit me; a corpse that did not decay. Weeks before, when the dead and wounded of Borodino had been arriving in the city, I had looked briefly into those same dark eyes to verify that the grenadier was indeed dead. The priest had declared it to be a miracle that the body did not putrefy, but I knew now it was no such thing. The corpse did not decay because the body had survived the death of the soul. Presumably one of the Oprichniki, during our first foray out to the west, had transformed him into one of their own. The process must take some time. When I had seen him, he was somewhere between the two states of existence – dead as a human but not yet alive as a vampire. But now he was fully a voordalak.

I continued my pursuit of him, but now more stealthily, reenacting how I had pursued Foma, Matfei and then Ioann. This vampire displayed little of their discretion, walking openly down the streets without any show of fear. Indeed, what was there to fear? The city was free again. He had no need to worry about being stopped by French patrols and he could walk about without obstruction, as free as any other Russian. I, too, was in a better position for the French having left. I could once again wear my sword which, though it gave me some comfort, I knew was not the best weapon at my disposal. Tucked inside my coat was the wooden dagger that I trusted would be of far greater use. I reached in and grasped it firmly, reassured and emboldened by the texture of the chiselled wood.

His indirect meanderings about the city might have been put down to his unfamiliarity with its geography, but it seemed to me more that he was merely trying to pass the time. It wasn't until the early hours of the morning that he finally reached his destination and went up to the doorway of a particularly grand house, certainly owned by one of the wealthier families in the city. It was not far from the cellar where I had left Iuda and Ioann to burn so many weeks before. This residence appeared strangely unravaged in comparison with those around it. The area had not been molested by the fires, but no street in Moscow had been left unmolested by looters, be they native or invader. All along the street, windows were smashed and doors kicked in. Rejected booty – and times were harsh enough that only the most impractical of items (books, paintings and so forth) were counted so valueless as to be rejected – lay strewn outside. But this house had its windows intact, its door still a barrier. Even the street outside, though not clean, was at least clear of the debris that lay outside its neighbours. It was as though some faithful servant had remained behind in the house and had – out of habit and oblivious to the tumult around him – kept the building in the tidiness that befitted it. And yet in the chaos that had befallen Moscow, no amount of diligence alone could have maintained such order. A terrifying strength would have been required. The absence of refuse around the house was reminiscent of the absence of insects around the dark corner of a room in which a spider lurks.

The soldier unlocked the door and went inside without fear of encountering the true owner of the residence. Although the rich and the powerful had not yet begun to return to Moscow in any great numbers, many had at least sent servants ahead to reoccupy their property. Perhaps the owners of this place had done so too. Any servant arriving to open up the house would be little expecting to find it infested with vampires and would be quickly dealt with.

Despite the sanitary atmosphere that hung around the building – for which the explanation was all too easy to imagine – I could not in all certainty be sure that this was where the creature planned to sleep. It was still some time until dawn and so I waited a while to see if he re-emerged. After about an hour, no one had come out of the house and no one else had entered. Despite knowing what I might encounter within, there was little debate in my mind that I had to go inside.

I went up to the door and tried the handle. He had not locked it behind him. Inside, the hallway was dark, but on a table I found an oil lamp, which I lit and carried with me. It was a large house of many rooms – the vampire could be hidden in any one of them. I drew out my wooden dagger and grasped it firmly, knowing that at any moment I might be called upon to use it.

I went first into the cellar, having learned from experience that that was where a voordalak would make its nest, but I found nothing untoward. The only thing of note was that the cellar wall had been roughly knocked down, so that it connected to the cellar of the next building. I glanced briefly in there, but saw nothing. A faint smell of sewage greeted my nostrils. I realized that the street outside must be close to the Neglinnaya, the tributary of the Moskva into which many of the city's sewers flowed. In Moscow's good times – when people were plentiful enough and nourished enough to make the sewers full to overflowing – the stench would have been far stronger, but still somewhere beyond the broken-down wall was an underground path to that public drain.

The rooms on the ground floor too were empty, though they were surprisingly well furnished; surprising in contrast with other houses I had seen in the city. Those houses that had not been cleared out by their departing owners had been cleaned out by the invading French, but this place remained disquietingly habitable; almost homely. It all fitted in with the image that the building was somehow 'blessed' – protected from any who would dare to despoil it. Indeed some of the rooms seemed to have too much furniture, as if it had been shifted here to make space in other rooms elsewhere in the house. The only sign of serious upheaval – somewhat incongruous – was that in a number of rooms the floorboards had been removed, adding a challenge for me to pick my way between the joists.

I was suddenly reminded again of my grandmother's house. These rooms, like many of hers, were unlived in, but no serious attempt had been made to close them up or to either protect or remove their contents. For my grandmother, it would have been an admission of her decline to formally abandon the unused rooms of her home. For the occupants of this house, it was probably more a case of laziness than pride. Here, I guessed, as in my grandmother's house, there would be one or two rooms at the heart of the building where its residents dwelt. But unlike another visitor to another grandmother's house – from a story which my own grandmother had told me – it would not be a wolf that I would find living there, but something far worse.

I began to climb the stairs. The shadows cast by my lamp through the balustrade made strange shapes on the walls of the upper hallway as I ascended. Suddenly I heard a rustling noise and something scuttled across the hall into a corner. I held up the lamp and peered in the direction it had gone. It was a rat, frozen in the corner, looking almost pitifully scared, its beadlike eyes reflecting the lamp's flame. Glancing around, I could see by similar reflections that there were dozens of rats up here, each marked out by the same two tiny points of light. This struck me as odd. I had seen no rats on the ground floor, or even in the cellar. Why should they all have chosen to congregate here on the first floor? What, I wondered, had those staring, shining eyes struck upon up here that they could not find down below?

It was then, as I continued to climb the stairs and my head rose above the level of the floor, that I noticed the smell. It was the smell of a charnelhouse. I thought instantly of the stench of Zmyeevich's breath, which I now knew to be the stink of the raw, decaying human flesh and blood that rose from his stomach. Holding back the rising need to vomit, I followed the smell into a room to the left of the stairs. I heard the scampering of the rats as they fled out of my way. As I stepped into the room, the stench was stronger and its source was immediately revealed to me. On the floor were laid out ten corpses – all in assorted French uniforms, or those of their allies. They were in various stages of decay. On some, no human features remained recognizable. On others, the telltale throat wounds that betrayed both the manner and the motivation of their deaths were still clear. In between, the wounds had begun to vanish into a formless sponge of decomposing flesh.

I didn't inspect any of the bodies very closely. The light of the lamp was faint, and bending down close was not a pleasant experience. I looked around the rest of the room. In addition to the door through which I had entered, there was another that led to an adjacent room. Before I went through, I glanced back and noticed how, in contrast to the careless way in which the bodies had been desecrated by the vampire's fangs, their actual positioning was rather orderly. The ten bodies were neatly placed across the room in two rows, as though they were in a hospital ward. It was no different from a dining table in a grand house such as the one in which I stood. The crockery and wine glasses and cutlery are laid out with punctilious consideration, but little attention is given by the diner to the messy carcass of the chicken left on his plate once he has eaten.

Here I could see why some of the downstairs rooms had been over-furnished. Space had to be made up here to store these mementos, much as a man might overcrowd one room with paintings to leave room in another for the stuffed heads of wolves and bears that he has hunted, oblivious to the protestations of his wife about having such ugly things in the house. Those stuffed beasts would always be placed in poses so much more terrifying and aggressive than the true state of the creature when it was killed. The same could not be said of the bodies laid out here in so orderly a fashion. If anything, it was their defencelessness, not their majesty, that was emphasized in the display. The Oprichniki saw no nobility in their prey, nor did they have wives to moderate their sense of décor.

The orderliness of the layout revealed something else to me. There were only ten corpses in the room because it had reached its capacity. The doorway to the next room beckoned. As I stepped through I heard behind me a rustling sound as the rats returned to the activity from which I had disturbed them.

The next room was larger and had a few vestiges of furniture left in it. In one corner was a high-backed armchair and near it a folding screen of oriental appearance. Elsewhere a table, chairs and a stool all made this room appear a little more 'lived' in, though the very word brought a grimace to my lips. A second door led back out on to the landing. The windows, like the windows in all the rooms I had been in, were hidden behind thick, heavy curtains. Again there were bodies in here, but the room was not yet full. Only two of them were in French uniforms and both were less decayed than any in the other room. The bodies next to these were very different. They were shabbily dressed in ordinary clothes. By this and simply by their faces, I could tell that these were Russian. Like an archaeologist, I had found a division between strata which I could use to mark a precise date; the date when the French had left and the Oprichniki had chosen not to follow them, but to remain and enjoy an alternative, plentiful food supply.

There were seven Russian bodies in the room. The soldiers had naturally all been men, but once the Oprichniki had switched to civilians, they demonstrated no discrimination over sex. One of the bodies was small, scarcely bigger than a child. Its head, covered in tight curls of black hair, lay on one side, facing away from me, causing the foul lacerations in the throat to gape open even more. For an agonizing moment, I believed it to be Natalia. I bounded across the room and turned her head to look at her face, the wounds on one side of her neck closing up as I did so. It was not her. It wasn't even a girl, but a boy of about Natalia's age. I stood up, relieved that the suffering of grief was not, in this case, to be felt by me but could be transferred to others elsewhere in the city who knew and loved this boy.

I went over to the oriental screen and pulled it to one side. Behind it, a figure stood upright, its awful, contorted face staring directly into mine. I smelled the reeking stench of decay stronger than ever and I threw myself back, knocking the screen to the ground.

I had been mistaken. The figure was not standing; it was hanging – hanging like a coat casually thrown on to a peg. A long nail had been hammered into the wall behind and the body had been thrust upon it so that the head of the nail could just be seen sticking out of the neck under the chin. It was in a position that would not have much hindered the Oprichniki as they ate. The body was old and almost as decayed as some of those in the other room, but it wore no French uniform, just regular clothes. The wounds in the neck had long ago begun to putrefy, to such an extent that it was surprising it still had the integrity to support the weight of the body from that single nail. Most of the flesh of the face had begun to decay, but the full beard still remained, as did the eyes.

And so, despite the darkness and the hideous putrefaction of his face, the body was not unrecognizable. His clothes and his beard and his eyes – especially his eyes – all gave him away.

It was Vadim.

So it became clear that Rodion Valentinovich would never be held in his grandfather's arms; that their lives had overlapped by only a few hours or days, if at all. Vadim could never even have known of his grandchild's existence, and neither I nor anyone else would have the pleasure of telling him. I could not weep. I had known for a long time that Vadim was dead; known since I had seen Iuda arrive at that house in Kitay Gorod without Vadim in tow. Every time I had tried and failed to meet up with Vadim since, I had felt a little fear and a little sadness and suspected that his failure to appear hinted at his utter inability so to do. And so seeing his body now was more of a confirmation than a revelation. Still I wished, as I had done and still did with Maks, for the chance then to say a proper goodbye and the opportunity now to mourn.

I turned away and my foot knocked against something hollow and wooden. Vadim's corpse had not been the only thing hidden by the screen. I had also found what I had come into the house to look for. It was a coffin, but again, like those of Matfei and Varfolomei, not purpose-built; merely a crate of the conveniently correct size and shape.

I pulled it away from the wall, towards the middle of the room, and prised open the lid. Inside was the soldier whom I had so long ago seen dead but not decaying, whom that night I had followed to the house where he now slept. His eyes were closed and his hands lay across his belly. I raised my hand, firmly grasping my wooden dagger high above my head, ready to bring it down on the sleeping monster's heart with all my strength.

His eyes flicked open. He engaged me in the same dead stare that I had seen in him before and once again hissed the only word I had ever heard him utter.

'Murderer!'

CHAPTER XIX

I WASTED NO TIME IN THROWING MY ARM DOWN TOWARDS THE creature's chest, but a hand grabbed my wrist, and I could not reach my target. Another pair of hands took hold of my left arm and I was dragged away from the coffin and over to the wall. The Russian soldier climbed out of the coffin and approached me.

The two men who had grabbed me relaxed their grip, and the one on my right said to the soldier, 'Hold him.' It was a voice I knew and should not have been hearing; the voice of a creature that I thought I had seen annihilated in a burning cellar many weeks before. It was Iuda.

The soldier pressed his hand against my chest, revealing a tremendous strength, and I found myself unable to move. Iuda and my other captor – as he stepped into the light, I saw it was Andrei – walked to the middle of the room.

'You're surprised to see me, I think,' said Iuda, with the tone almost of a bonhomous host.

'A little,' I replied.

'It must be so irksome,' he continued, 'when you think that you've murdered four of your comrades – men who have willingly come at your invitation to your country to fight on your side – it must be so irritating to find that one of the four has survived.'

I didn't respond.

'It's the same mistake your friend Maksim made,' said Andrei, making none of Iuda's faux effort to hide his loathing.

'So how did you get out?' I asked.

'Can't you work it out?' asked Iuda. 'My good friend Dmitry Fetyukovich rescued me. By the time you arrived, he had already awakened me and helped me to safety.'

'Safety where? You couldn't go out into the daylight.'

'No, of course not, but in these big blocks of connected buildings one can move from one house to the next without ever going outside. Having a little greater strength than living humans helps too. It allows us to knock through the odd wall here and there between houses.'

I had seen examples of these creatures' strength weeks before, and I felt it in the hand that pinioned me against the wall. I wondered what other powers they might possess, and moreover what their weaknesses might be. 'And that's it?' I asked, 'Your strength? Is that the only thing you creatures have that gives you an advantage over us?'

Iuda laughed; I had been very obvious. 'Perhaps you'd like a written list? Three dozen ways that vampires are better than humans? Well, it won't help you, Lyosha. No, our strength is nothing. I think it's just a side effect of the diet. What makes us superior is not something that we have; it is something that we lack. We lack conscience. When we act we are not bound by any rules of what is wrong and what is right. We have no fear of recrimination either on earth or in hell. We can achieve things that you could never dream of because our dreams are not haunted by doubts about our righteousness and concerns for others.'

'And what have you achieved?' I asked him, scornfully.

He chose to ignore the question. 'I can do things of which you would never be capable. When I caught Vadim Fyodorovich following me' (he nodded carelessly towards Vadim's hanging corpse) 'my scruples might have told me to let him go, but I didn't. When he told me he had just been curious to see how I worked, I might have believed him, but I didn't. When he begged me for mercy, telling me about the wife and family that he loved, I could have felt pity, but I didn't. Instead I hung him up on that nail over there, just to shut him up, not so as to kill him; otherwise we wouldn't have been able to taste the fresh blood that we all so much prefer.

'Could you have done that, Lyosha?' Iuda continued. 'Of course not – you wouldn't want to. But you'd like to do it to me now, wouldn't you? And yet still you couldn't. I could just beg you for mercy; tell you about my terrible upbringing in the Carpathians and you'd lose all stomach to do it.'

'So that's why you're so hard to kill?' I said, straightening up. The soldier, listening to Iuda, had relaxed his pressure on me a little. 'It's not your strength, but our weakness?'

'Exactly. We are certainly quite easy to kill. Sunlight. Fire.' He nodded down towards my wooden dagger, which had fallen to the floor. 'A stake through the heart. Decapitation. They're all ways that I've seen it happen. Maybe there are others too. I can't say I'm an expert.'

'You mean you don't know?' I asked. I was surprised, but also attempting to goad him.

'Why should I know? You're not a doctor, are you? You don't know every detail of how your body works, nor do I of mine. We're not going to carry out experiments to find out new ways of killing ourselves.' He smirked suddenly, as if he'd just thought of something very funny. If he had, he did not share it.

'Why not?' I asked. 'You're easy enough to replace.'

Iuda raised an inquisitive eyebrow. 'Easy?'

'Like your friend here,' I said, indicating the soldier who had by now, relaxed by my utter defeat, completely forgotten to restrain me. 'Just a quick bite and it's one less human and one more vampire.'

Iuda chuckled. 'If only it were that easy, but unfortunately we remain a very exclusive group.'

'You have a long list of membership rules, I suppose, to keep out the riff-raff.'

'We have but one criterion. The individual in question must want to become one of us. One would imagine that most organizations offering such a relaxed admission would be inundated with applications, but we are not. For us, self-selection is the ideal approach. You, for example, would not wish to join us, would you?'

'No,' I said, needing no special effort to inject absolute conviction into my voice.

'And so we would not have you. In fact, this gentleman is the only recruit we've had since we arrived in your deeply pious country. Not that we have the opportunity to ask on every occasion.'

'And what happened to him?'

'He ran into Varfolomei. That, by the way, is why he has a particular dislike for you. We're all upset that you murdered Matfei and Ioann, but he regards Varfolomei as something of a father figure. Anyway, there he was, fleeing from – deserting if you will – the field at Borodino and whom should he meet but Varfolomei? They have a little chat and he decides that yes, a life of immortality would be preferable to being a ryadovoy in the Russian army, to be sent to his death at the whim of cowardly officers such as yourself.'

'And so just by wanting to be a vampire, he became one?'

'No, no. There's a mechanism. First Varfolomei drank some of his blood, just enough so that he would die, but not straight away. He then willingly – and it has to be willingly, I'm told – drank some of Varfolomei's blood. It's traditional to drink from a cut to the chest, but I don't think that matters.'

'So you understand that much of how your body works,' I commented. 'How you're created, but not how you are killed.'

He smiled. 'We have an advantage over you in that we can remember the moment, and therefore the process, of our own conception. It makes it so much easier for us the first time we come to do it ourselves, rather than all that messy fumbling about that humans go through.'

'So how many vampire offspring have you produced in your time, Iuda?'

'None,' he replied and then quickly added with a smile, 'that I know of. And I would know. What I have just described could not very well happen by accident. Some of us are different, but I am very like you humans. I like the chase and I like the kill, but I don't want to be concerned with any long-term consequences.' He thought for a moment. 'It's much the same as you feel when you're with that young lady – Dominique. You love the physical experience of her body, but you'd be appalled if your congress with her ever produced a child.' He looked into my face enquiringly and then raised his eyebrows. 'Or maybe not.'

He turned away and the eyes of the other two vampires in the room followed him. I took my chance. I raced across the room towards the window, brushing aside the relaxed arm of Varfolomei's 'offspring' and playing hopscotch over the pitiful corpses which were lined up across the floor. My best guess was that by now it was dawn outside. I grabbed hold of one of the curtains and wrenched at it, pulling it away from its fixings high above me at the top of the window. Andrei took a step towards me as I tugged, but he was too late. The curtain rail gave way and the curtain came tumbling down over my head, blocking my sight completely, but revealing the window behind it.

I quickly wrestled the heavy material off me, the darkness of its covering giving way to the still dim, lamp-lit room. Around me stood the three vampires – two of them utterly impassive at the futility of my action, Iuda with the trace of a mocking smile on his lips. I turned back to the window to see that, behind the curtains, it had been boarded up with the floorboards that had been taken from downstairs. Through the occasional chink I could see that outside it was just daylight, but not enough of it could get inside to do any harm to my captors.

In happier times, parties held in a house such as this would have carried on long into the night and on to the following morning. Sometimes the zealous host would ensure that the windows were shuttered and the clocks stopped so that no guests would realize that dawn had broken and spoil the atmosphere by considering that it might be time to depart. My hosts – the new, undead occupants of this house – had a similar desire to obscure the light of the new day, but with very different motivation.

With a flick of his head, Iuda indicated to the soldier that I should be held fast once again. The soldier pushed me back against the wall and pressed his hand firmly against me.

'So,' I said, feeling the depressing reaction to my failed action sweeping over me, 'I suppose you're going to kill me now.'

There followed a brief conversation between Iuda and Andrei in their own language. I think that Iuda wanted me to die there and then, but Andrei disagreed. He mentioned Pyetr a number of times. It was odd that they referred to him as Pyetr even amongst themselves. Did they not know his real name, or were they taking caution to the extreme – making sure that no one could ever find out who they were and use that knowledge to track them down? From their discussion, I presumed that they were waiting for Pyetr to arrive. Any delay was a moment more for me to enjoy life, and any moment was time for me to think how I might escape.

'It's going to be a bit cramped for the three of you all sleeping in that one coffin, isn't it?' I said.

Iuda looked away from his conversation with Andrei to answer me. My attempt to escape seemed to have knocked his earlier good humour out of him. He was now quite dismissive in his mood.

'We don't need coffins to sleep in, any more than you need beds. How do you suppose we spent all those days out there on the Smolensk road?'

It was a good question. 'How did you?' I asked.

'We'd just dig a hole and bury ourselves in it. All we need is to keep the sun off. It doesn't need to be very deep.'

Before I could reply, we heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. The door to the landing opened and in walked Pyetr. He was quickly followed, to my consternation, by Dmitry.

Pyetr and Iuda began talking furtively in their own language. Dmitry spoke directly to me.

'You shouldn't have killed them, Aleksei. I know we couldn't help Ioann, but Matfei and Varfolomei – that was just murder.'

'I suppose you told them about Matfei and Varfolomei,' I said.

'I told them you followed Matfei. They knew he was dead. It didn't take much to work it out.'

'How did Pyetr get here?' I asked. 'It's light outside, isn't it?'

'We came underground. The sewers run right under this street. With a bit of work you can get into any of the cellars. It's dark as night down there.'

'I presume they've agreed to spare your life,' I said bitterly.

'And yours, Aleksei. They have no quarrel with us. They understand you killing them. If we'd told you the truth from the start, you wouldn't have over-reacted.'

He was utterly deceived; deceived by himself as much as by the Oprichniki into the conviction that because their cause – our cause – was right then they themselves must be righteous; deceived into the belief that because they were righteous, anything that they did to support our cause must be to the good. And yet through it all, the thought popped into my head that there was something I had been meaning to tell him next time I saw him. It wasn't relevant, unless Dmitry was in an even greater state of self-delusion than I could possibly believe, but there was little else to discuss.

'Did you hear that Yelena Vadimovna has had a little boy?' As I spoke, my thoughts went to Marfa and an idea began to form.

'That's nice,' said Dmitry. 'Vadim will be pleased.' I was shocked that he did not know, but also relieved that his present attitude was based upon ignorance.

'You have no idea, do you?' I said to him, as I slipped my hand inside my shirt.

'What do you mean?'

'Vadim Fyodorovich is just over there,' I said, gesturing towards where the rotting corpse hung, as yet unnoticed by Dmitry. 'They…'

Iuda had been listening and interrupted me. 'We have decided what we are going to do,' he announced loudly.

We never heard his plans. As he spoke I withdrew my hand from my shirt with a jerk. I felt the chain snap around my neck, leaving me free to pull out the icon that Marfa had given me. I held it up to the soldier's face and ominously shouted at him, 'Keep back!'

In the face of the Saviour's image, the voordalak's entire strength began to wither away. He released his grip on me and covered his eyes, backing away from me across the room.

The reaction of the other vampires was quite different.

'You fool!' shouted Pyetr at the terrified creature.

'Don't be so damned superstitious!' added Iuda. Pyetr gave a brief hand signal to Andrei, who marched across the room and, without fear, grabbed the icon from me and cast it into a corner. Evidently, there was nothing real for them to fear in the religious symbol, but the young, inexperienced vampire believed that there was, and that was enough to make him afraid. Fortunately, the moment's distraction gave me time to place my hand on something which could have a very real effect on them.

As Andrei turned back towards me I grasped my sword and, with a single backhand motion, drew it and struck him across the front of the throat. Ever since Iuda had mentioned it, I had been itching to try decapitation as a method for despatching one of these creatures. It was not, as I knew from battle, an easy thing to achieve. The blade slipped over the top of his Adam's apple and, severing his windpipe, buried itself about halfway through his neck. With a swift tug I extricated it. The wound was not fatal. Andrei bent forward, his hands clutching at the long, deep gash in his throat as a torrent of blood flowed out between his fingers. He was incapacitated, and his death was not my immediate concern. I dashed towards the window once again, this time stepping first on to the seat and then the back of the armchair that stood near to it and leaping as high as I could. I thrust the tip of my sword hard down into the wooden planks to give me a little more upward momentum. My left hand just grasped the top of one of the floorboards that covered the glass and with my two fingers I hung there above the room for five or even ten seconds, viewing the scene beneath me.

On one side of the room, Dmitry, Iuda and Pyetr stood stock still, not in shock, but unable to make any move until they could see what would happen next. On the other, Andrei stood quite upright with his back to the wall. His left hand pressed against the wall behind him for support, while his right was held ineffectually across his throat, having little effect on the flow of blood from it. Near him crouched the soldier, covering his head in fear – fear either still of the icon, or of the horrific injury I had inflicted upon Andrei.

My entire weight was held on my two fingers, and they began to scream at me that they could not hold on. Beneath me, Iuda and Pyetr were almost licking their lips in anticipation of my fall. I felt my body gradually begin to descend. But it was not my fingers that had given way, it was the board itself. With the screeching sound of nails being drawn out of wood, the floorboard I was holding yielded. As its tip etched out a quarter circle across the room, moving horizontally at first and then smoothly bending round to its final, rapid, vertical descent, I fell with it.

I landed on my feet, but immediately fell on to my side, managing to keep hold of my sword. Where the wooden plank had been, now sunlight could penetrate as a beam which sliced across the room, bisecting it with an area of light about the thickness of a brick wall. For the vampires, it was just as impassable. I had landed on the wrong side of the division, being at the feet of Iuda and Pyetr, but for me the barrier was as impenetrable as mere air. I rolled across to the other side of the room and got to my feet.

Iuda was enraged. He leapt towards me with a look of unutterable malevolence on his face, and it took the combined strength of both Pyetr and Dmitry to keep him from crossing through the intrusion of light that would so certainly have meant his death.

I smashed the hilt of my sword into Andrei's stomach and he doubled up in pain, his hands leaving his throat to clutch at his belly. The back of his neck was now fully exposed to me and I brought the blade of my sabre down on it with the strength of both hands. Still it was not enough to sever it. I could feel my sword trapped tightly between two vertebrae, unable to move forward or backward. I flicked my wrist and gave the blade a sharp sideways twist. I heard the popping sound of whatever ligaments remained to hold Andrei's head upon his shoulders and felt the blade come free.

Andrei's head was dust before it ever hit the ground. His body straightened up and his hands went to where his face had once been. They too never made it, desiccating and then crumbling to nothing as his body fell to its knees. It was a falling motion that was never stopped. By the time he had reached his knees, his whole body was no more than a fine powder which settled, rather than fell, to the floor. At some moment during the descent his coat, his shirt and his breeches ceased to be carried down by his body and began to fall of their own accord as a heap of laundry – as a marionette whose strings had been suddenly cut.

The looks of horror on the faces of Pyetr and Iuda were nothing compared with that of Dmitry. Theirs were angry and vengeful. His was a genuine shock to see his friend Andrei slaughtered before his eyes and to see his friend Aleksei carrying out the butchery with such evident satisfaction.

'Take him, Dmitry Fetyukovich!' growled Pyetr. 'You're the only one who can.'

Dmitry approached the wall of light, but even he seemed reluctant to cross it. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke.

'Why, Aleksei?' he said. 'You of all people are an enlightened man. You don't have to wallow in the prejudices and superstitions of our grandparents. They came here to help us, to fight against our enemies as though they were our brothers. Throughout their lives they've had to face the hatred of the ignorant and now you – even after they helped us to throw out the French – even you can offer them no thanks but death.'

He drew his sword and took a step towards me, standing in the middle of the very barrier that split the room, his face and his scars and his tears illuminated by the sunlight.

'Kill him, Dmitry!' snarled Iuda from behind.

'I don't want to fight you, Dmitry,' I said, dropping my sword to my side, but not being so foolish as to sheath it, 'but I will if I have to, and if I do, I will win.'

'I don't believe you would kill me, Aleksei, but having seen what you did to Andrei, what do I know of you?'

'Take a look around you, Dmitry,' I insisted. 'Look at the corpses on the floor. They're not French; they're Russians – innocent Russians. These creatures don't kill to help liberate our country. They kill to eat, and they'll eat whatever they find there is the greatest supply of.'

Dmitry began to look about him, taking in the truth of what I said. Almost beneath his feet lay the body that I had briefly mistaken for Natalia. With his boot, he turned its head to one side so that he could see its face. If he had suspected it was Natalia, he showed no sign of relief on seeing that it wasn't. Perhaps like me he realized that it might just as well have been.

Behind him, Iuda came to the conclusion that Dmitry was losing the argument. He took a step towards Dmitry, but at the same time Dmitry took a step forward and entered my side of the room.

'We have to live, Dmitry,' Pyetr called plaintively after him. 'These few peasants were just so that we could survive until we left the city.'

'And what about Vadim?' I called out to Pyetr.

'Vadim?' asked Dmitry.

'Over there,' I said with a jerk of my head.

Pyetr and Iuda could find no more words to say as Dmitry inspected the remains of his commanding officer, comrade and friend. He put a hand to Vadim's face and let out a cry of deepest sorrow. Vadim's dead eyes stared back at him and offered no forgiveness.

Dmitry raised his sword and began to advance upon the two vampires who stood on the other side of the room from us. I restrained him before he could cross back into their half.

'You promised you'd control yourselves this time,' he said, addressing Pyetr, whom he had known longest.

'I did,' replied Pyetr ambiguously.

'It's too late to pretend to be surprised, Dmitry,' said Iuda in a more determined tone. 'You chose to sup with the Devil. You knew what we are – what we do.'

I think his words were directed more at me than at Dmitry, and I agreed with them. If the reality of the deaths of innocent Russians and of Vadim had come as a surprise to Dmitry, then he had only been fooled by himself, not by the Oprichniki. It could never be said that Dmitry was one to see only the good in people, but in this case he had only seen the benefit to himself, and to his country, that could be gained from working with them.

However, if Iuda's words were intended to make me mistrust Dmitry, it was also clear that Dmitry would no longer be wise to trust the Oprichniki. They might have had better reasons to kill Vadim or to kill me, but if he stuck with them, Dmitry's time would eventually come.

'I'm sorry, Aleksei,' muttered Dmitry. It was hopelessly inadequate, but it was all that could be said.

'I think you had better go,' I said, addressing the two vampires.

'Go?' said Pyetr. 'Why should we go? It's you that's trapped.' This was ostensibly true. The two doors to the room were both in their half. While they could leave if they wanted, we would not be able to reach an exit without crossing the divide and risking attack from them.

'All we have to do is wait until it's dark again,' continued Pyetr. Iuda, however, was glancing nervously around at the narrow window, at the ray of light and at the doors.

'I'm not sure,' I said, 'whether you creatures still believe that the sun revolves around the earth or that the earth revolves around itself. Either way, the sun travels from east to west once a day. And that means that that beam of light is going to travel from west to east – towards you. By noon, you'll only have one door to exit by. By mid-afternoon, you'll have none. You'll slowly be backed into the corner, until the sunlight hits the corner, and then you'll be gone.' Unless, of course, it turned cloudy. I didn't know whether the indirect sunlight of a cloudy day would be enough to kill them. That's why I played my card then, hoping to force them to leave, rather than risking the scenario being played out.

'Or we could just pull down all the other floorboards from the window right now,' suggested Dmitry. It was practical, but somewhat less elegant.

Either way, it was enough to persuade the Oprichniki. Pyetr was already out of the room. Iuda clicked his heels together and gave a mocking formal bow. 'We shall meet again, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said, and then left.

Dmitry made to pursue. 'We had better wait a little,' I told him. 'Give them time to get out.' Dmitry nodded. 'Let's get some more light in here,' I suggested, going over to the window.

Before we could start work on any of the remaining boards, we both heard a whimpering noise emanating from underneath the oriental screen that I had knocked over. I drew my sword and used it to lift up the edge of the screen and flick it aside. Underneath was the crouched figure of the soldier-vampire, curled almost into a ball, his hands covering his head. He was shaking with fear. He had been there all the time, forgotten by us and, had he been capable of it, he had been in a position to reach out and kill us. Perhaps Iuda and Pyetr had been counting on that, or perhaps they, like us, had forgotten him.

I poked him with my sword and he looked up, his eyes showing that he was still inexperienced enough as a vampire to remember the sensation of terror.

'What's your name?' I asked him.

'Pavel,' he stammered. In his eyes I saw a new emotion; hope – the vaguest conception of the possibility that this day might not be his last.

Iuda, it turned out then, was correct. I did have scruples which held me back from killing. If Pavel had resisted, or simply remained bravely silent, I might have had the stomach to kill him. But now, though I knew him to be a vampire, he had such shades of his recently lost humanity about him that I found myself incapable of any action against him.

The decision was taken from me.

With a whoosh of displaced air, my wooden dagger came down upon Pavel's curled back, driven by Dmitry, who clutched it with both hands. The dagger buried itself deep between the vampire's ribs. Pavel let out a gasp and knelt upright, his hands reaching behind him to try to pull out the weapon. Dmitry gave it another thrust and then twisted it. The wooden blade broke in two, leaving Dmitry with only the handle. A trickle of blood appeared at Pavel's lips and his eyes became glassy as he slumped forward.

I nudged the body with my foot. It still felt like flesh and blood. Unlike the others, there was no instant collapse to ashes and dust.

'He hadn't long been a vampire,' said Dmitry, reading my thoughts. He evidently knew, as I had already deduced, that a vampire's body could only decay to the extent that it would have if he had never become one.

'What shall we do now?' I asked.

'Pyetr told me they would be leaving Moscow.'

'Back the way they came?'

'No. Just like the French, they won't retreat by the same lines that they advanced along,' explained Dmitry.

'So which way will they go?'

'South-west. Pretty much the same way that Bonaparte is going – at least for a while. It will give them a food supply of French soldiers.'

'Or Russian,' I added. Dmitry did not reply. 'Do you believe what Pyetr said about them leaving?' I asked.

'I think so. It's what I would do.'

'So we follow them?'

'I suppose,' said Dmitry, nodding thoughtfully, 'or just let them go.'

I went over to the corner of the room and bent down.

'What are you doing?' asked Dmitry.

'My icon,' I said. I tied a knot in the broken chain and put it back over my head. It felt a little unusual, resting against my chest slightly higher than its accustomed position, but I would quickly get used to it.

I turned again to Pavel's body. Though slower than in the other vampires I had seen, his body's decomposition was still quicker than that of any human. As we had been speaking, he had decayed enough to be indistinguishable from one of the older corpses in the adjacent room, whose deaths must have occurred only a short time after his. Only the untidy placing of his body distinguished him from them.

We went down into the cellar, carrying Vadim Fyodorovich's body with us. The broken-down wall into the next cellar I now realized, and Dmitry confirmed, was part of the route that he and Pyetr had used to get to the building without venturing out into the daylight. It was then also the exit through which Pyetr and Iuda had left. I peered through and once again caught the polluted stench of the sewer below, a stench which I now realized consisted of not just a miasma of human waste, but also that of bodily human decay. I could just hear the sound of water flowing somewhere down there, but the darkness was total. It was the habitat of the Oprichniki and I chose not to follow them.

Fear begged me to just leave Vadim's body where it was and get out into the light as soon as I possibly could, but that would not have been decent. He needed to be buried and this cellar was as good a place as any. Even so, we worked quickly, and as we first dug and then filled in the grave, it was with a wary eye over our shoulders towards the dark breach in the wall, in case the vampires returned the way they had left.

CHAPTER XX

WE RETURNED TO THE INN. THE INNKEEPER WAS, IN KEEPing with the hospitability of his profession, overjoyed to see Dmitry. He showered him with questions as to where he had been and what he had been doing – questions which I too hoped soon to have answered. Dmitry's responses were noncommittal.

'Oh, Captain Danilov,' called the innkeeper after me as I made my way up to my rooms.

'Yes?' I replied.

'Your young lady was round last night. I had to tell her you weren't here.'

'What time?'

'Gone midnight, sir.'

'Did she say anything?'

'Nothing, sir. She just went home again.'

'Thank you.'

I was abominably tired and my first thought was that a few hours' delay in seeing her would not be too significant. I continued up to my room and lay on my bed. My head had scarcely hit the pillow when I realized what Domnikiia must be thinking. She knew what creatures I was up against and that I was out looking for them. Coming here to find I wasn't back at that late hour, she would have concluded either that I had found them or that they had found me. (I still wasn't too sure myself exactly which had been the case.) The longer I delayed seeing her, the more worried she would be that they had been the victors. I hauled myself off the bed and set out to find her.

It was still early, and the brothel was not yet open for business. I hammered on the door and it was answered by Pyetr Pyetrovich.

'We're closed,' he told me.

'I've come to see Dominique,' I said, pushing my way in.

'Oh, it's you,' he said. 'This is a place of business, you know. You can't just call when you please. Not without paying.'

I walked past him, pulling my coat to one side to make sure he got a clear view of the sword I was wearing, and headed up the stairs.

'If you like Dominique so much, we could come to some more permanent arrangement,' he called after me.

Domnikiia was still in bed, but awake. She sat up as I entered. I sat on the bed beside her. She looked intently at my face, but said nothing, her eyes searching my expression for some clue as to what had been happening.

'We found Vadim,' I told her.

'Really?' She sounded pleased. For a moment I didn't realize how ambiguous I had been.

'No, it's not like that. He's dead.' I rested my head on her shoulder and tears ran down my cheek, though I just about managed to keep my voice steady. 'Dead since just after I last saw him.'

She stroked my hair and murmured soothing words. Though it had not been my intention when I entered the room, I pushed her down on to the bed and made very selfish love to her. There was little pleasure in it for me, and less for her, but it fulfilled in me merely the need to obliterate for a moment every higher thought and every human emotion, to descend to the level of an animal where nothing but the moment matters. Considerations of the future, of my responsibilities, of those around me, all could be forgotten just briefly – all too briefly. It was the way a soldier screws a woman he has never met before and knows he will never see again. He might pay for it – he might not have to. Although I had paid Domnikiia many times before, I had never had such disregard for the person beneath me. It was not about her. It was about allowing me to forget her along with everything else.

For her part, I can only suppose she was used to such things, though, I hoped, not from me. I think she was happy enough to perform it as a service for me, as a wife might prepare her husband's dinner or wash his clothes. For me, it had nothing to do with her, and any woman in the building could have taken her place. But she would have seen that as a betrayal, much the same as if a husband got another woman to make his dinner or wash his clothes – a betrayal not of the heart, but of the partnership.

'What's to become of us, Lyosha?' she asked a little while afterwards.

It was the question every faithless husband must dread.

'I've no idea.'

'Neither have I,' she said. 'That's the problem.'

'Is it a problem?'

'Not at the moment.'

'There's still a war. I could be dead tomorrow.' I decided to give myself a little leeway. 'Or the day after that.'

'I know. That's why it's not a problem, but one day it will be.'

'Only if we both survive,' I said with a mirthless laugh.

'Or if the war never ends.'

'So you want an unending war, with us both under the threat of death, but never actually dying, just so we can stay together without our consciences bothering us?' I asked lightly, though the very mention of conscience almost made me shiver at the memory of a different, recent conversation.

'That would just about do it,' she said with a grin.

'I'll have a word with the crowned heads of Europe, then. See if they'll help us out.'

'They seem to be doing pretty well already.'

It was a silly conversation, as trivial as many we had had before, allowing us daily to forget reality, but today it could do little to lift our mood.

I sat up on the side of the bed and glanced towards the table. On it was a letter. I could not see the content, but the single word of the signature screamed out at me: Iuda.

'What's this?' I asked, picking up the letter.

'Ah, yes,' said Domnikiia. 'I was going to tell you about that. Very mysterious – especially from a man you told me was dead.'

'You should have mentioned it,' I snapped.

'I was going to,' she insisted, upset by my tone, 'if you'd given me the chance. Polya – one of the girls – found it when she opened up this morning. It was slipped under the door, addressed to me. Read it. It's more for you than for me anyway.'

I opened the letter and read it silently.

Mademoiselle Dominique,

As I am sure you will have heard from our mutual friend Aleksei Ivanovich, our mission in your country has not gone according to the plans that were originally conceived. It is to my utmost regret that this has led to deep misunderstandings arising between myself and Aleksei Ivanovich, for which I must immediately acknowledge my share of blame. Sadly, affairs have come to such a state between us that it is now impossible for us even to communicate the simplest of requests to one another and, as I'm sure you will readily comprehend, this is no basis from which we can easily find any remedy to the situation.

I therefore entreat you, Mademoiselle Dominique, as Aleksei Ivanovich's close friend (and, I dare to flatter myself, as mine) to act as an intermediary, that you might help to heal this melancholy rift between two formerly hearty and successful comrades. If you would desire to help in this matter, then my simple request is that you convey to Aleksei Ivanovich my petition to meet with him at seven in the evening on the twenty-eighth day of October at the crossroads to the south of the village of Kurilovo. He will know this location better, perhaps, as U4, although I shall not bore you with details of why it is so designated.

Please express to Aleksei Ivanovich the utter sincerity of my wish to meet with him and my fondest hope that with a few minutes of conversation, we can resolve any confusion that may have led to the distressing rift that now exists between us. If Aleksei Ivanovich cannot or chooses not to attend, then please assure him of my continued devotion to both him and his country, and please also, Mademoiselle Dominique, appreciate the heartfelt affection that I hold for you personally.

Your devoted friend,

Iuda.

'He does gush,' I said scornfully.

'I think it's nice that he makes the effort.'

'You are joking, aren't you?'

She put her chin on my shoulder and I felt her arms around my waist. 'Yes, Aleksei Ivanovich, I am joking.'

'I mean you only met him once, and that was for five minutes.'

'Absolutely,' she said in heartfelt agreement. 'And of course on top of that, he is a vampire.'

'Are you teasing me, Mademoiselle Dominique?'

'Well, you sound like a jealous husband going through my correspondence.'

'When did you get this?' I asked.

'I said, this morning, when Polya got up.'

'When was that?'

'About ten o'clock. We work late here.'

'And when did you close up last night?'

'Around two.'

'So this could have arrived any time between two and ten?'

'Yes,' she replied, with emphasized patience. 'Does it matter?'

It mattered a lot. If Iuda had delivered it before our meeting the previous night, then that presented a number of possibilities. Our encounter that night might not have been as premeditated as it had seemed, at least not on Iuda's part, or it might have been that he had all along expected me to escape. A third possibility was that the letter was not intended for me at all, but was solely for the benefit of Domnikiia, to whom, after all, it had been addressed. Could this be to persuade her to attend the meeting in my place? It seemed unlikely. Could it be to give Iuda a veneer of innocence in Domnikiia's eyes once my death was discovered? That was more believable.

On the other hand, if the letter had been delivered this morning, after I had seen him, then it would make more sense, but since Iuda would have been unable to travel in daylight, he must have had human assistance in delivering it. Was this some errand boy he had simply hired for a few copecks, or did he have human servants of a more devoted nature? The obvious suspect would have been Dmitry, but Dmitry had been with me all the time.

'Are you going to go to the meeting?' she asked.

'I think so.'

'Won't it be dangerous?'

'I'll have Dmitry with me.'

'You mean Dmitry's in Moscow? I thought he went back to the army.'

'No, he had other things to do.'

'Do you trust him?'

'I do now.'

'You mean you didn't before?' she asked.

'I did before, but I was wrong.'

'And now you're right?'

'Dmitry's run out of options.'

She paused for a moment before asking, 'How far is Kurilovo?'

'Not far,' I replied. 'We'll set off the day after tomorrow. I'd better go.'

We made our goodbyes and I left, taking Iuda's letter with me. I went back to the inn and slept for most of the afternoon. Early in the evening, there was a knock at my door. It was Dmitry. I showed him the letter.

'Well, you're not going, are you?' he asked dismissively.

'Yes, I think we are.'

'We?'

'Yes, Dmitry, we.'

'But it's so obviously a trick,' he insisted.

'Do you know the crossroads he mentions?'

'No, I don't think I do.'

'It's a very good place to meet someone you don't trust. There's a clear view all around. We'll easily be able to see if he's brought anyone with him.'

'Do you think he knows that?'

'Possibly,' I replied. 'They may have come that way as they made the last stretch of their journey here from Tula. I think he's chosen the place so that we'll both feel safe.'

'You think he's afraid of you?' asked Dmitry, betraying by the edge in his voice the fear he felt for the Oprichniki – a fear which had been in him all the time, but which only gained substance when he discovered they had become his enemies.

'I hope he is,' I replied.

'I still don't think it's a good idea. They've left Moscow and soon they'll have left the country. Enough of them have died so that they won't come back. Let someone else deal with them. Let the French deal with them.'

'You think they won't come back?'

'Why should they?'

'Revenge. Look what they did to Maks. He'd killed three of them. I've killed four – even you've killed one.'

'They're practical – not spiteful.'

'Most of them maybe, but why would Iuda try to entice us into this meeting if his only plan was to get away? If we don't go, then he'll just have to come back here. He's already suggesting that Domnikiia might be at risk by sending the letter to her.'

'I suppose,' replied Dmitry contemplatively.

'Have you tried to track down Boris and Natalia at all?' I asked, ostensibly changing the subject.

'I went back to where they were staying,' said Dmitry, 'but the French had torn it all down.'

'I found out that their shop burnt down on the first day of the fires.'

'I know,' he said. 'Boris told me.'

'But I met someone who has seen them since Bonaparte's departure.'

'Really? Where?'

'Just around.'

'In that house this morning, I thought that one of the bodies might be…' Dmitry could not bring himself to say it.

'I know. I thought so too for a moment.'

'So when shall we set out for Kurilovo?' asked Dmitry, after a moment's pause.

'We'll leave the day after tomorrow, on the twenty-sixth. That will give us two days to get there.'

Domnikiia did manage to join me that night. On my instructions, her arrival was soon followed by that of the innkeeper, who brought us some supper and a bottle of wine. We sat at the small table in my room and talked of things of little consequence. Eventually, there was no option but to raise the subject of my journey to Kurilovo.

'So what time will you and Dmitry be setting off?' she asked.

'First light. We should be there by Sunday and then we'll have a whole day to check things out before the meeting on Monday.'

'Do you mind if I don't come over tomorrow night then?'

'Why? Don't you like the idea of being woken up so early?' I joked.

'I don't like the idea of waking up to see you go – or to find you gone.'

'OK,' I said, though the prospect struck me more harshly than I would have imagined.

'It's selfish of me, I know.'

'It's all right. If you were here, I probably wouldn't be able to leave.'

'You can have me all day tomorrow, though. I'm not going to work.'

'Can you? Just like that?'

'I can do what I like. Pyetr Pyetrovich is terrified of you.'

'Really?' I was surprised. 'I've barely ever spoken to him.'

'Yes, but I've said a few things, about what a great soldier you are and so forth – all exaggeration, of course.'

'Thank you.'

'Anyway, he needs me on his side. I'm his most popular girl.'

I felt a knot in my stomach as I was presented with a reality of which I was already fully aware.

'Is that meant to make me feel good?' I asked, trying to keep it lighter than I felt.

'Don't you deserve the best?' she smiled.

I stood up and started to clear the things from the table. Then I noticed her face drain of its colour. I followed her gaze to the replacement wooden sword that I'd been working on, lying half-finished on the desk in the corner of the room.

'What happened to the other one?' she asked.

'Dmitry broke it,' I said.

She sensed my desire not to give her any more detail, and did not ask. 'They must break very easily,' she said simply.

'It's never a problem to make a new one,' I told her.

We spent the following day wandering around the city. It was below freezing and a layer of snow coated the ground – nothing compared with what was to come. We both wore heavy coats to keep warm.

'I hate to see Moscow like this,' said Domnikiia after we had been walking for a little while. 'So devastated – so empty.'

She didn't see it as I did. Although I saw the burnt-out houses and the empty streets, what stood out for me above that was the appearance of growth. Like the first green shoots of spring, it was not obvious, but for those who had eyes to see it, it was ubiquitous and unstoppable. At every turn, someone was repairing some damage to their home or reopening a shop. Even the winter cold could not spoil my optimism. Recovery would take time, but it would inevitably come.

We had come to a churchyard in Kitay Gorod that I knew well.

'This is where we stayed after the fire,' I said to Domnikiia, 'with Boris Mihailovich and his daughter.'

'That reminds me. One of the girls at work knows her.'

'Knows Natalia?'

'Yes, I was going to tell you.'

'Tell me now. Are they all right?'

'Yes, yes. She saw her a few days ago.'

'Have they found somewhere to live?'

'They're sharing with another shoemaker on Ordynsky Lane, in Zamoskvorechye. Shall we go and see them?'

'No,' I replied. 'Not today.'

'You'll tell Dmitry about them, though?'

'Yes, yes.' But I wouldn't tell him straight away.

We said goodbye outside her door in Degtyarny Lane. The square was covered in snow and I couldn't help but be reminded of the scene the first time I had laid eyes on her, just under a year ago. I scooped up a handful of snow and made a snowball, which I hurled across the square at no particular target. She smiled, remembering, and held my hands.

'My saviour,' she said, but then she became more serious. 'How long will you be gone?'

'Two days out there – two days back.'

'You will come back then?'

'Of course I will,' I smiled.

'Straight back?'

'I can't promise that. It depends what happens. But I will be back.'

'And then we can be together for ever?' She smiled wistfully as she spoke, knowing that the dream was unrealizable. My only answer was to kiss her. As I walked away, I looked over my shoulder and saw her watching me all the way to the end of the street.

The following day, at dawn, Dmitry and I mounted our horses and rode south, out of the city. It was not difficult to be reminded of another departure from Moscow, months before, when four of us had set off with our hearts full of optimism that the then twelve Oprichniki with whom we were working would help us to rid Russia of the French invaders.

Now there were only two of us and there were five of them – their losses, as a proportion, marginally greater than ours. If we continued at the same rate, then we would be the victors, but only just – and at what cost to ourselves?

As we rode, we talked.

'So tell me, Dmitry,' I asked him, 'what were you doing after you left Yuryev-Polsky?' It was asked innocently enough, but he knew as well as I that it was a debriefing, if not an interrogation.

'Well, obviously I didn't go to join back up with the army. I skirted round Moscow to the south and then went in to find Pyetr.'

'They're not easy to find if they don't want to be.'

'Pyetr and I had made some other arrangements. The meetings with you were more for show as far as they were concerned.'

'I see.' I had suspected as much. 'But why should they be concerned about us at all?' I asked. It had been puzzling me for some time. Their whole motivation for travelling to Moscow still evaded me.

'You may not accept it, but they genuinely believe in the cause. Zmyeevich does, anyway, and they're all afraid of him,' explained Dmitry. His mood swung, almost sentence by sentence, between self-pity and self-justification.

'They seem to believe more in satisfying their own hunger than in any cause,' I said.

'They're like any soldiers. Like you and me. They like to fight, but they like the idea that they have a just cause to fight for.' I snorted in disagreement. 'Oh, come on, Aleksei,' continued Dmitry. 'Would you be fighting this war if it wasn't for something you believed in? They're the same.'

'They've made it very clear that they are not the same as you and me. For them, killing comes above all things. You can't persuade me that they're just a gang of latter-day Don Quixotes looking for a noble cause for which they can employ their knightly skills. Have you forgotten what we saw in that room?'

'No, I haven't,' said Dmitry, sombrely. 'There are two factions amongst them – Pyetr versus Iuda. The ones I knew before – Ioann, Andrei and Varfolomei – all stuck with Pyetr. Now that there's only Pyetr left, I think he's pretty much fallen in with Iuda.'

'As easily as that?' I asked.

'None of them has the strongest of personalities, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think the self-selecting nature of vampires tends to prevent that. Pyetr was under Zmyeevich's thumb for a while, now he's under Iuda's. I don't suppose seeing his last ally so ably decapitated by you in front of him would have done much for his independence of spirit.'

'And so it was only Iuda who made them turn on innocent Muscovites?'

'I like to think that.' But he had reached the limits of his own credulity. 'I would like to think that,' he added, 'but I don't.' It marked the end of a prolonged transformation in his view of the Oprichniki that had begun back at the house in Moscow where he had first seen the mutilated corpses of his fellow countrymen. Perhaps – I hoped, though I had seen no sign of it – it had started even earlier.

'So, what happened when you met Pyetr?' I asked.

'They had already pretty much worked out that it was you who killed Matfei and Varfolomei. Pyetr explained to me what happened in the fire – when you locked me in.'

'I didn't know you were there,' I said, more apologetically than was really necessary.

'No, I know that – despite the way that Iuda tried to tell it.'

'So Iuda saw the whole thing?'

'Apparently.'

'Apparently?'

'He had already gone by the time I got there. His coffin was empty. He must have hung around to watch.'

That was not the story that Iuda had given me, in the house in Moscow as I stood beside Vadim's rotting corpse. It was interesting that Iuda should choose to lie on so minor a point. Perhaps it was to make me doubt Dmitry. On the other hand, perhaps it was Dmitry who was lying. If I thought that, then clearly Iuda's plan was working.

'Why didn't he help?' I asked.

'It was Ioann. Iuda's position was better without him.'

'So what else did Pyetr say?'

'He said he thought that they could probably let you get away with murdering two of them. It wasn't like with Maks, he said. Maks killing them was treason. With you, it was just instinct.' Or perhaps Maks' instincts were better tuned than mine.

'And you believed him?'

'It was what I wanted to hear,' Dmitry explained with uncharacteristic self-awareness. 'I'd have killed Maks, but I wouldn't have killed you.'

'How comforting.'

'Pyetr said they'd get you to a meeting somehow where we could talk it out. He came and found me that night – told me that they'd managed to persuade you to talk to them. So I went with him.'

'But he must have known,' I said, thinking aloud, 'or at least worried, that seeing those Russian bodies – and seeing Vadim, for heaven's sake – you wouldn't stay on their side for long.'

'The location was all worked out by Iuda. He must have wanted me to see that.'

'To test you?' I wondered.

'Maybe. Or maybe his plan was exactly how it all turned out. He got rid of Andrei, after all.'

It was the same thought that had occurred to me earlier, when I first read Iuda's letter. Beyond that, though, Dmitry was pretty much allowing himself to be duped. There may have been disagreements within the Oprichniki, but I could not give credence to the idea of there being noble vampires and ignoble vampires. Pyetr and Andrei had survived for over two weeks in Moscow after the French had left. What, I wondered, were they supposed to have been eating in that time? Borshch?

More worrying to me than any of the details of what had taken place, was the new light in which I had to view Dmitry's character. That he could be ruthless and that he judged himself superior enough to make his own decisions on moral issues – such as whether it was conscionable to work alongside the Oprichniki in order to get rid of the French – I had never doubted. But that he could be so blinded by his own desire for success as to not see the truly malevolent nature of the Oprichniki and be so gullible as to believe what they had told him – that was the surprise. On the surface, he portrayed himself as the most hardened cynic of us all, but every cynic must, as well as doubting the motivations of others, always doubt their own.

By the afternoon of our first day of travel, we had come to a village that I had known we would pass through, and I suspected that Iuda must have known it too when he chose the rendezvous. From Dmitry, however, I saw no sign of anticipation.

I dismounted and tied up my horse outside the familiar woodsman's hut, from which leaked a stench that I could not distinguish as being real or part of my guilt-ridden imagination.

'What town is this?' asked Dmitry, still utterly ignorant of where we were.

'Desna,' I said, conveying by both tone and look the significance of what I was saying.

He pulled a face to indicate that the name meant nothing to him, but he saw by my expression that he should think more deeply. Then it dawned on him.

'Oh, I see,' he said, respectfully.

We went into the hut. Little had changed since I had last been there, two months before. The French had been this way on their retreat, but the hut had nothing inside that would be of use to them. The stove still stood against the far wall. The chair that had been in the middle remained as well, knocked over on one side.

Maks' body was slumped in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall as if he sat, wearily, his head tilted back, watching Dmitry and me as we looked around. Whether it had been placed there or fallen like that by chance I could not tell. His legs were bent almost up to his chest and one arm rested upon his knee; the other hung loosely by his side. Thankfully, his body was too far decayed to leave any clear residue of the wounds that had been inflicted at his death, although I was now familiar enough with how the Oprichniki operated to be able to make a pretty good guess. The cloth of his breeches hung close to his shin to give a hollow impression of what remained of the withered flesh beneath. Only his hands and his head could be seen outside his clothes. His hands were shrivelled and old. His face was decayed beyond recognition. Unlike Vadim, Maks had had no beard to remain after the rest of him had rotted away. Only his spectacles gave any evidence that confirmed for me what I knew to be true – that this was Maksim Sergeivich. They hung off his nose and one ear – the other having long since lost the integrity to support them – the metal rim sinking into the yielding, dead flesh of his cheek.

We stood in silence for a few moments. More than once I sensed that Dmitry was about to speak, but each time he thought better of it. He was wise to do so.

'We should bury him,' I said at length.

'Yes,' said Dmitry in a way that expressed strong agreement, where none was needed. 'I'll see if I can find some tools.' He walked away, leaving me a few more precious seconds with my abandoned friend. Moments later he gave out a hushed shout.

'Aleksei! Look at this.' He was kneeling down looking at the wall just by the doorway, an area that would be covered when the door was open. I knelt beside him to see what he was looking at. It was textbook positioning for a message. A shaky hand had scratched the following into the wood:

Maks had been here and left this mark on the evening of the twenty-seventh of August. I had known as much – that had been only the day before I had met him here. The 'П' was, however, the more interesting part of the message. 'П' meant that, somewhere nearby, Maksim had hidden a letter.

CHAPTER XXI

IT DIDN'T TAKE US LONG TO FIND THE LETTER. THERE WERE NOT many places where it could be hidden in such a rudimentary structure. Maks had slipped it between one of the beams supporting the roof and the wooden roof itself. One had to be looking for it to find it.

It was addressed to me – dated the twenty-seventh, the same as his scratched message. There were about half a dozen sheets, covered on both sides with Maksim's small, precise handwriting. I read it aloud.

'My dear Aleksei, 'If you are reading this letter, then I must apologize for not having waited longer for you to arrive. As you will understand once you have read this, I am very much in fear for my life and perhaps for even more. In communicating the circumstances specifically to you, Aleksei, and (I hope soon) in committing myself to your custody I intend at least to ensure that I die with some vestige of my reputation intact and also to die by a method whereby my soul might be saved. I can see your expression of surprise to learn that either of these should be of concern to me, but let me assure you that the former always has been. The future of my soul is a question that I have only recently begun to realize is worth asking.

'I shall remain here for four days. I have told Dominique where I am and she will, I hope, tell you and only you. If you have not arrived within that time, then I shall be forced to move on. The possibility that either Dmitry or the remaining Oprichniki should find me here is too dreadful to risk. I shall head south to Tula and on then to my mother's. You know where she lives. I shall not write here where that is in the hope that my omission may protect me from any others who might read this. Once I have seen her and, with luck, my sisters, then I shall attempt to leave the country for ever. I shall not be happy to make my home in France. It has become less and less the country I thought it to be.

'You are, I know, well aware of my interest in the republics of both the United States and France. We have happily discussed the matter often and I know that, at least on general principles, your views and mine have often coincided. Where I am certain that you will find no sympathy with me is that as a result of these principles I decided some years ago to make an active effort to support republican France. It was when I was captured at Austerlitz that I first began to work for France. I see the cynical curl of your lip, knowing that you would tell me that at that time the republic was no longer a republic since by then it had an emperor. Though Napoleon had indeed become emperor, though Austerlitz was fought on the anniversary of his coronation, I still believed that he and those around him did what they did for the sake of enlightened, republican ideals. Even today I still believe it.

'After my capture I was persuaded – willingly persuaded – by, in particular, a French colonel (whose name is best kept secret), who convinced me that by helping them, I could ultimately be helping Russia itself to become a republic as great and as powerful as France or America ever could be. I was returned to Russia as though I were a freed prisoner-of-war. In reality it was an act not of liberation, but of infiltration.

'So you see, Aleksei, for almost the whole time that I have known you, I have been a French spy, but believe me, that is the only matter on which I have deceived you. You may regard that as small consolation, if consolation at all, but in everything I have ever said to you, in every matter of opinion, of strategy and of friendship there has been no veil of pretence between us, nor between me and Vadim or Dmitry. The Maksim you have known has been the true Maksim in all aspects except this one tiny issue of allegiance. Men of different political colours and even of different nationalities do not have to be at war with each other, and even when they are they become enemies not out of choice but out of circumstance. Their friendship can be rekindled once the smoke of battle has cleared. If I had been born French then, although we might not have become the friends we once were – that I hope we still are – I would at least have retained your respect. That is not to say that I am blaming my treason on an accident of birth. I would not choose to have been born French rather than Russian. My affiliation has always been to ideas rather than to states. My hope was to take an idea born in France and see it flourish in Russia.

'Whether I have in practice been of very much use to France, I have to doubt. The only work of significance that I have undertaken has been alongside you, Vadim and Dmitry. I count my allegiance to you three higher than any and so I could never have handed over any information that would have directly put you in jeopardy. As to the more general picture of the state of our armies which I have conveyed, I doubt whether any of it has been of much assistance.

'I write this not in any attempt to exonerate myself or to make some plea for clemency that may help me avoid my execution as a traitor. I will attempt to avoid death by flight, but not by denial of what I truly believe. I write it simply in the hope that, though you may rightly condemn me in your own heart to death, you will at least regret that it had to be so.

'However, I would have no scruple that urged me to tell you the truth about myself had it not been for the fact that you most certainly already know the entire truth. It is of the circumstances of how this truth came to be revealed that I must give you every detail I can recall, in the hope that what I tell you may help in some way to defeat these despicable creatures whose war on humanity casts into unmistakable relief the petty squabbles of petty nations.'

'So he did know about them,' I said, half to myself, half to Dmitry, though I had been convinced of it almost from the start.

Dmitry did not respond. He sat with his back to the wall, almost mirroring the posture of Maks' lingering remains. The two sat at opposite corners of the same wall, like naughty schoolboys who have been told to sit apart. Neither, for very different reasons, could raise his eyes to look at me as I continued to read.

'When we returned to Moscow from Smolensk, I had had no opportunity for several months to make any report back to my superiors in the French camp. (By the by, when you see Vadim, tell him that in the French army I also carry the title of major, so he can no longer pull rank on me. To be honest, I think they bump up the ranks of agents just to flatter them. I hope that, despite what I have done to him, Vadim will be able to smile at this. I know I have no right to be flippant, but I cannot tell you how much I long for just five more minutes of the times when we used to sit beside the Moskva and drink vodka and tease one another – but mostly tease Vadim.)

'Our return out west with the Oprichniki gave me a fine opportunity to get back behind French lines and report what I knew. I looked for every chance to separate myself from Andrei, Simon and Iakov Alfeyinich, but it transpired that they were even more keen to be rid of me than I was of them. The very same night that we set out from Gzatsk – the last time, in fact, that I saw you – first one, then two, then all three of them had made some excuse to separate from the rest of the party and scout around on their own.

'I took full advantage of the solitude and headed straight off for the French encampments to the west of the town. I told them all I knew – again, I must assure you, nothing of our personal work, nor even of the Oprichniki, although on that latter point I wish I had – and after a couple of hours of debriefing I was treated to the wine, food and good company that is bestowed on any patriot who has been so long away from his confederates. It meant little to me. I seek little more from food than nourishment and the company was not as good as I have known.

'It was after sunset on the evening of the next day, as I was preparing to leave, that suddenly the camp that I was in came under a ferocious attack. Screams came from all around us in the darkness. I looked out of the tent, in which I had been talking with three other officers, to see two figures that I recognized as Andrei and Iakov Alfeyinich creeping towards the sentry who stood guard outside. I could only see the sentry's back. He could see the two Oprichniki that approached him and his head turned from one to the other in disbelief. Eventually, he fired his musket at Andrei and without doubt the musket ball passed through his chest, but hindered him no more than would a brief gust of wind. Iakov Alfeyinich dived for the soldier's legs. The soldier responded by stabbing his bayonet hard down into Iakov Alfeyinich's back. It was as ineffective as the musket ball had been.

'Iakov Alfeyinich's attack brought the sentry to the ground and in the same instant that he fell, Andrei launched himself upon his throat. What I saw then is beyond any comprehension of a civilized man. My upbringing never allowed any of the myth and folklore that is the staple for so many of my contemporaries. From what little I heard in the schoolyard of vampires and werewolves and other such abominations, I was glad to have been spared such nonsense. Even those who did hear those stories as children do not grow up to believe them. But any man must believe the evidence of his own eyes.

'Andrei sunk his teeth deep into the man's throat and tore off a sliver of flesh. The soldier was still alive and struggling for freedom beneath Andrei's firm grasp as Iakov Alfeyinich fell upon him and took a similar bite from the other side of his neck. Then the two lay there beside him, their mouths to his neck, lapping away at the blood that seeped out of him. It was only when the sentry had ceased to breathe that the two Oprichniki raised their heads from his throat and exchanged between themselves a glance of pride and self-satisfaction.

'Before they could rise, three more soldiers were upon them. Again, the damage inflicted by shot and by blade had little impact. They killed by the same method – with their teeth – but now they did not linger to drink the blood of their victims. Time had become too pressing for them to enjoy the aftermath of the kill.

'I turned back to speak to the other officers in the tent with me and was horrified by what I saw. Two of them lay dead upon the floor. The third remained upright, showing on his contorted face a look of agony that was matched only by the terror revealed in his staring eyes. Over his shoulder I saw the face of Simon, looking down to where his teeth were sunk into the man's neck. Behind his teeth, Simon's tongue flicked back and forth between the man's sinews, to taste every drop of blood he could find, much as a dog's tongue probes every crevice of his bone in search of the last tasty morsel of marrow.

'Behind them, I saw the rip in the side of the tent through which Simon had entered. Before Simon could look up and see that I had observed him, I felt a heavy blow to my head from behind and I collapsed into unconsciousness.

'When I came to, it was still dark. I saw Andrei's face looming close to mine, and I feared that it was now time for me too to become a meal for these creatures. Instead, Andrei displayed concern. I feigned amnesia until I had heard enough from them to understand what they thought had happened. It turned out that they were under the impression that I had been captured by the French. They had attacked the camp by chance, but when they recognized me, they transformed their attack into a rescue mission. I played along with them, and also managed to convince them that I remembered nothing of my liberation – that the blow to my head had wiped away all images of what I had seen of their methods of killing. Their concern was so much concentrated on finding out whether I knew their true nature that they showed no inquisitiveness whatsoever into my true nature. The fact that I had been captured by the French was universally accepted and the possibility that I had voluntarily walked into the French camp was never even mooted.

'They suggested that I should rest and recover from the head wound that – it turned out – Andrei had inflicted upon me, while they would continue to harry the French as best they could. The plan was that we meet again in Goryachkino in four days. I agreed, happy that this would give me plenty of time to engineer their downfall.

'Once it was daylight, I returned to the camp where the previous night's events had taken place. Not a soul remained alive. The Oprichniki had made some effort to cover their tracks. Many of the corpses had bullet wounds or bayonet wounds which, it was clear to my eye, had been inflicted after death. A number of fires had been started, but these too only superficially hid the stomach- churning throat wounds which I found on every carcass.

'The Oprichniki had not killed the horses at the camp, but had released them from their pens so as to add to the general impression of chaos. I got hold of one, and so my journey to Goryachkino was rapid. For a few days I attended the meeting place – the farm building – that we had arranged there, but neither you, nor Vadim, nor Dmitry, nor any of the Oprichniki showed up. By the twenty-fourth of August – the night when I had arranged to meet my three Oprichniki – the French were almost upon the village and were preparing for the great battle at Borodino. I left a brief message for you, simply saying that I had been there, and then went back out to the French lines to prepare the trap that I had planned for the Oprichniki.

'I told the guards at the camp that I would be sending three enemy spies to them that night. I described what they would look like, what direction they would come from and even the incorrect password which they would use when challenged by a sentry. I instructed the guards simply to capture them, bind them hand and foot and then hold them until my return. I told them to make sure that the captives were not held in a tent, but outside next to the fire. You may be surprised, Aleksei, at how easy it was for me to issue orders, but once my bona fides had been proved, the men in the camp were all too eager to help capture the Russian infiltrators.

'I went back to Goryachkino and waited. Soon after dusk, Andrei, Iakov Alfeyinich and Simon arrived. With them, they had brought Faddei, whom they had met somewhere along the way. My enthusiasm at seeing the opportunity to destroy four of these creatures, rather than the three that I had originally planned, was, I suppose, my undoing. I told them that I had found an isolated French camp that was perfect for them to attack. I told them the weakest points in the perimeter and even what the day's password was (which, incidentally, I said you had supplied for me, Aleksei).

'Faddei was not keen to join the raiding party. He felt he should get back to Vadim and the other Oprichniki under his command. I persuaded him that the French camp was a sitting duck, and that he would be a fool not to go. The description I gave of all those young, innocent, healthy soldiers must, I think, have whetted his appetite. They departed and I lay back and waited until dawn.

'Soon after the sun rose, I returned to the French camp into which I had sent the four Oprichniki. My instructions that they should be tied up and left in the open air had been a test of them and a test of my own credulity – something akin to the trials of witches in the Middle Ages. Despite my blinkered education, I had gathered some slight knowledge of the legends of the voordalaki. It seemed preposterous to me that mere sunlight could have such a devastating effect on their physical being, but no more preposterous than what I had already discovered to be irrefutably true. If the legends proved correct, then I would enter the camp to find four dead vampires, otherwise I would find four live ones, tied up and ready for death by firing squad. Either way, the twelve Oprichniki would be reduced to eight. A third of the battle would be won.

'Already, before my arrival, there was much commotion in the camp. A lieutenant, who recognized me from my visit the night before, dashed over to me and took me to the remains of the Oprichniki – three scorched patches of grass. They had been sitting, I was told, on wooden stools, of which only a few charred lumps remained. Some scraps of shoe leather and fragments of material were all else that was left to see. I asked what had happened to the fourth. He had escaped, I was told. They had been expecting only three and so the fourth had been able to get away almost before anyone saw him. As someone who has been lying throughout my adult life, Aleksei, I have long become used to disguising the fear of discovery, but there was little I could do to suppress the fear I felt then that one of the Oprichniki was out there, somewhere, aware of the trap into which I had sent them. I managed outwardly to retain my composure, but inside me every voice shouted that I should flee. I have been fleeing almost ever since.

'The lieutenant told me that they had followed my orders. They had done better than tie the three spies up, they had put them in irons, from which there would be no escape. As dawn had approached, the three had become more and more agitated, had pleaded to be released and had even tried to run – to any extent that they could – for freedom. At around dawn there had been three terrific explosions, so close together that they sounded as one. Two of the sentries guarding the prisoners had been slightly burnt, and all that remained of the three was the ash that I now saw.

'All the soldiers who had witnessed the events were keen to discover what had caused the explosions. A Russian in the same circumstances might, I suspect, have made some connection between the violent and unusual deaths of these men and their first contact with the sun's rays. The French are, however, not as superstitious as we foolish Russians. The most popular theory was that the men had come into the camp with gunpowder hidden in their clothes, hoping to get close to Napoleon himself and ignite the powder, but it had accidentally gone off too early. Some doubted that this could be so, that no Christian – not even a Russian – could commit the sin of suicide, however much he believed in his cause. I glibly assured them that, while the Catholic Church was strong on the point, the Orthodox had no such qualms about sending young men to their deaths. And so this was the version of events that became accepted.

'I departed as quickly as possible and set out eastwards, back to Moscow. I was in unprecedented fear for my life and so I stayed away from the main roads; thus my progress was slower than it would have been if I had taken the direct route. That night I made camp in a clearing in the woods. I had slept for a few hours when I was awakened by the sound of voices. I opened my eyes to see in front of me one Oprichnik and one man – Andrei and Dmitry.

'It was Andrei, clearly, who had escaped the raid on the French. He had obviously worked out that I had betrayed them. I could make no attempt to deny it. Instead, I told Dmitry what I had seen, what the Oprichniki had done, that they were vampires, but his only reaction was that he was well aware of it. I asked him how he could live with that knowledge, and he said that he would use any means he could find to defeat the French. Andrei was after my blood, but Dmitry – to his credit – held him back. He asked me to swear that I would take no more action against the Oprichniki. He seemed to think that now I understood what they were, I would let them get on with their work in the way that they did it best. I refused to go along with him.

'I believe at that stage, Dmitry only thought I had betrayed the Oprichniki because they were vampires; he had not perceived that I was working for the French. Perhaps, even if Andrei had told him, he hadn't believed it. But it was sometime during our conversation there that the realization came to him that I could not have set up the trap without being able to walk freely across the French lines. It was pointless for me to deny it. He took it like a physical wound – a shock to him far greater than had been the shock to me that the Oprichniki were vampires. He muttered that he did not relish the prospect of telling you and Vadim, and then he left me with Andrei.

'I tried to talk with Andrei, but he was as uncommunicative as the rest of the Oprichniki. His only intent was my death. Both he and Dmitry had an enormous faith in his abilities, since they had made no effort even to disarm me of my sword. When attacking by stealth, the Oprichniki were successful assailants, but Andrei's chances were less good here in an evenly matched contest. I drew my sword and he showed no fear of it. It did not seem right to use it on an unarmed man, so I told him to keep back, but he kept advancing. When he was just over the sword's length away from me he leapt towards me. I had no option but to bring the blade between us, and I felt the pressure on my hand as my sword met and overcame the resistance of his body. His face was up close to mine and I could smell his foul breath, but although the wound from my blade did not seem to hurt him, the physical impediment of the guard of my sword itself prevented him from getting close to me. After persisting for a little while, he stepped back and I heard and felt my sword slide smoothly out from under his ribs. There was a slight stain of blood on his coat, but little other damage seemed to have been done.

'I suspect that at that point, most of Andrei's victims give up in the face of his invincibility, for he laughed and suggested that I surrender to the inevitable. He did not realize that there is more than one way in which a man is trained to use a sabre. On his next advance I chose not to stab but to cut. With every step he took, I slashed the blade across his torso. On a normal man, each blow would have broken several ribs. Whether they did on him, I do not know. He showed little sign of weakening, but the very force of the blows did begin to push him back, away from me. The energy I was expending in every blow would not have allowed me to continue for long, but as he stepped back, he stumbled over something and found himself prone and helpless on the ground. I lifted my sword to give what I hoped would be a debilitating blow to his head, and he raised his arm to defend himself. The blade made contact with his arm and drew blood. I brought my sword down again and again, knowing that my attack now was only on his arm. I made no attempt to inflict a fatal blow, for I knew that such an attack would be unsuccessful. I cannot tell you, Aleksei, and if I could I would be ashamed to, the feeling of elation I felt with every blow as it cut further and further into the bone. Eventually, even the supernatural matter of which Andrei was made up could not resist me and his arm became detached from his body, leaving a bloody stub just below the elbow.

'The wound was clearly not fatal, but at least seemed to have incapacitated Andrei enough that he was no longer an immediate threat. I had never paid enough attention to even the little I had heard of the legends to know the various ways in which a creature like this might be destroyed, and I did not want to remain there trying to find out, for fear that Dmitry or some of the other Oprichniki might return. It is my hope that I disabled him enough so that he was unable to find shelter and so perished in the first light of dawn.

'For my part, I once again took flight. I stopped briefly at Shalikovo, hoping I might meet with you there, but I was afraid to wait long, so I chalked a message for you and continued to Moscow. I felt certain that I was being followed, either by Andrei or by the other Oprichniki, but the days are still longer than the nights, so the advantage was with me. Once in Moscow, I could think of only one way to contact you and to be sure of Dmitry not finding out. I went to see Dominique at the brothel. I told both her and Margarita the briefest of details of where I would be, and that you and only you should meet me. In that you are reading this, I must assume that you have spoken to Dominique. She was very concerned for your safety, Aleksei, and interrogated me for information about you – anything and everything about you – much as she has done in the past.

'I headed straight out for Desna and arrived here today. I travelled through daylight, so I don't think that the Oprichniki could have followed me here, but still I fear that they will find me. I do not want to die, but if I must, I would prefer it to be with the relative honour of a Russian firing squad than at their hands. Perhaps it is for the better that I never listened to the stories I was told about vampires as a child, otherwise I might fear even more what is to become of me now.

'If you are reading this, Aleksei, then it must be that I could not wait long enough for you and have moved on. Perhaps I am already in France by now. My hope is to settle in Paris, although I have learned that fate has little inclination to consider what my hopes may be. Should you one day come to Paris, either at the head of a conquering army, or as a visitor in more pacific times, then perhaps you will try to come and find me.

'To anyone else who finds this letter (or to whom you, Aleksei, choose to show it) I must make a plea that no suspicion of treachery should fall upon any of Vadim Fyodorovich, Dmitry Fetyukovich or Aleksei Ivanovich. Just because I am a French spy, it in no way follows that they are. I am reminded of a discussion we once had, Aleksei, about the Bible. Just because some things in it are true does not make the whole of it true. And (you will see that I stick to my guns to the last) just because there are vampires doesn't mean there is a god. I may soon know for sure.

'Please convey my apologies and regards to Vadim and Dmitry, and also my warmest affection to Marfa Mihailovna and young Dmitry Alekseevich.

'I remain, I hope, your friend,

'Maksim Sergeivich Lukin.'

Though some were more explicit than others, Maks' letter contained many condemnations. Most obvious was Maks' condemnation of himself in his confession of treachery against his tsar and his country. What it told of Dmitry and of the Oprichniki was once shocking, but by now it was nothing new. To that, though, there was one exception – Andrei's arm. I was not surprised that the flesh and blood of a vampire was close enough to that of a human that it was possible to sever one of their limbs. I had myself already seen that I could sever Andrei's head. And that was just the point. When I had destroyed Andrei, both his arms had been intact. Somehow since his meeting with Maks, Andrei had… recovered.

But that was a minor distraction. The worst thing in Maksim's letter was its condemnation of me. When I had spoken to Maks in this very building, all those weeks before, I had given him no chance to explain what he had now told me so clearly in his letter. I had been so blinded by my rage at his betrayal of our country that I had never even paused to consider that there might be some issue of greater importance which he had to tell me. I could blame Maks himself for not forcing me to listen to him and I could blame the Oprichniki for arriving to cut short our conversation, but I was the true culprit. With the Oprichniki there I might not have been able to save him, but at least he could have died knowing what he wanted to know above all – that I was still his friend.

CHAPTER XXII

I LOOKED OVER TO DMITRY. HE HAD RISEN TO HIS FEET AND WAS eyeing me suspiciously, calculating whether there was anything I had read in the letter that might tip the balance of my trust away from him. With self-defensive instinct, his hand reached for his sword.

'Don't worry, Dmitry. There's nothing much in there about you that I didn't know already.' I spoke with the intention of being more dismissive than comforting. There were a few details of Dmitry's involvement that had not been clear to me earlier, a few he had twisted to avoid revealing the nature of the Oprichniki, but nothing that substantially changed the nature of his attitude towards them or to anything else.

'He was an enemy of Russia. I knew that. That's what he died for,' Dmitry pleaded.

'You're a patriot, Dmitry,' I told him – a patriot and nothing more.

We found a few old tools behind the hut and between us we dug a grave for our fallen comrade. Two shards of wood formed a simple cross to mark his final resting place. For reasons that I am unable to explain – certainly not to Maks' level of satisfaction – I took off his spectacles before we placed him in the ground and slipped them into my pocket. One of the lenses was shattered, no doubt from a blow to Maks' head, but the other remained intact. Apart, perhaps, from the metal buttons on his jacket and his ancient, unidentifiable bones, they were all that would remain of Maksim, long after the rest of him was consumed by the earth in which we had buried him. I preferred that they would survive in the possession of someone who remembered the man who had once worn them.

It was dark by now, and so we decided to spend the night in the hut. It was cold. Once the sun had gone down, the temperature began to plummet. At the coldest during the nights at that time there were several degrees of frost, and it was usual to discover a covering of snow on the ground each morning that could be stirred up into a blizzard when the wind was high. We lit a fire in the stove, which would keep us in some comfort through the night.

'The difference this time is that it's my country,' said Dmitry. It broke a silence which had descended upon us after we had turned away from the grave of our friend.

'Your country?' I asked, failing to comprehend what he was saying.

'Our country, obviously, but I meant as opposed to theirs – the Oprichniki's – where I first met them.'

'So they were better behaved when they were at home – smart enough not to piss on their own doorstep?'

'No, not that,' said Dmitry resignedly. 'I just meant that my perception of it was different. They were just the same.'

Dmitry paused, but it was evident that he had more to tell. 'The same?' I prompted.

'When I told you before, about Wallachia, about meeting Zmyeevich, there was something I missed out.'

He stopped again. 'So tell me now,' I said.

'You remember I said that Pyetr, Andrei, Ioann and Varfolomei were the only ones still left from when I first met them.'

I nodded.

'Well, that wasn't quite true. After that first night, when Zmyeevich and the others had saved us from the Turks, we began to work together. We'd search the mountains by day, finding out where the Turks were and then telling Zmyeevich so he and the others could deal with them at night – just like we did in Moscow.

'But then after a few days, one of the Wallachians went missing; two days later, another. In less than a fortnight, there were only two left, from almost a dozen originally. I never saw the vampires take them, but somehow I knew – things they said; things Zmyeevich said. I couldn't really be sure, until this year back in Moscow when I first met Foma. I knew I recognized him, but I knew that he hadn't been one of the vampires who rode alongside Zmyeevich back then. Then I realized. He'd been one of the Wallachians who'd ridden alongside me; the one that went up to the castle door and called out to Zmyeevich. He'd been turned into one of them. I don't think any of the others were lucky enough to join the predators – they were just prey.'

'I'm not sure you should call either fate "lucky",' I said bitterly.

'No. No, you're right, of course. But as I said, it didn't seem so bad then. Who was I to argue if Wallachian vampires chose to kill Wallachian peasants? Mind you… When I left Zmyeevich and rejoined the army, the last thing I remember as I walked away was the look of fear and betrayal in those last two Wallachians' eyes.'

I was horrified. Until then, I had thought that Dmitry had been deceived, that despite what I knew, he had never had reason to suspect what they were doing behind our backs. Now I knew that he had been deceiving himself.

'Why didn't they leave too?' I asked. It was a mundane question.

'I don't know. They respected Zmyeevich as well as fearing him. Who knows, maybe they're alive and well even today.'

I let out a short laugh.

'Maybe not,' he muttered.

Dmitry was up before me and I was woken by the sound of him harnessing his horse.

'You're in a rush to get going,' I said to him.

'I'm not coming with you.'

'I see,' I said.

'I'm scared, Aleksei.' His voice quavered as he expressed the terror inside him. 'They'll not show any mercy to me – or to you. Come with me, Aleksei, back to Moscow. You don't have to face them. We can't bring back Vadim or Maks. All we can do is die like they did. They wouldn't ask us to.'

His diffidence was quite reasonable. Maks would not have seen the logic in taking revenge – in threatening it, yes, but not in taking it. Vadim would have understood the instinct, but would have counselled restraint. But I was motivated not by reason, but by hatred. I could no more rationalize the passion which drove me to pursue and erase the surviving Oprichniki than I could that which drove me to make love to Domnikiia when I had a loving wife at home. Hatred is a most powerful emotion. Leaders use it to stir up aggression in their armies and men use it to force themselves into actions that they would not contemplate without it. Hatred was the inseparable companion of the very thing that Iuda had said made me weak. While scruple could make me spare a man when every rational voice screamed to kill him, so hatred could make me kill when the arguments and reasons for doing so had long been forgotten. To divide them was impossible. Iuda might despise me for having one, but he would learn to regret my possessing the other.

'Do as you wish, Dmitry,' I said. 'I'm going to face them.'

'If they were French, or Turks, you know I'd be with you,' he tried to explain.

'We owe each other nothing, Dmitry. You know it doesn't work like that.'

'I want to help you, Aleksei, but I know them better than you do. I've seen what they do.'

'So have I. Remember?'

'You've seen nothing. What they did in Moscow? A fragment of what I saw them do to the Turks. Even side by side, the two of us could never beat them.' There was an edge of panic in his voice as he tried to convince both me and himself that what he intended to do – to desert – was in some way less than totally dishonourable.

'If it helps, Dmitry, I'm not convinced that I'd want you by my side.' It was more hurtful than I had intended it to be. Dmitry fell into an immediate silence. There was truth in what I had said on two counts. One was that, even after his apparent change of heart, he was still too close to the Oprichniki for me to trust, and the other that in his state of panic he would be of little use to anyone in a tight situation. But I had said it to try to help his decision; to make it me that decided he should not stay, rather than him.

'Thank you for that, Aleksei,' he said at length, without bitterness. 'I'm not much of a soldier any more, I know. Better to hear it from you, I suppose.' He was like a spurned lover, holding back his tears and clinging pathetically to the last vestiges of his pride. I took a step towards him, to embrace him before he left, but he raised his arms to fend me off. 'I'll just go,' he said with attempted nobility. 'You have things to do.'

He mounted his horse and began back towards Moscow at a gentle trot. Standing in the place where I had last seen Maksim alive and watching Dmitry depart, I was filled with the premonition that this would also be the last time I saw Dmitry. I recalled the miscommunication of my last words with Maks and the casualness of my farewell to Vadim. I knew that I could not let Dmitry leave quite like this.

I climbed on to my own horse and caught up with him. Perhaps if I had pleaded with him then, I would have been able to persuade him to stay with me. His joy at knowing I wanted him would have overcome his fear. But the truth was, I didn't want him with me. I just wanted him to leave on better terms.

'Take this,' I said, taking the icon from around my neck and handing it to him.

'It's no protection from them,' he said. 'You know that.'

'Do you think I'd be giving it away if it were?' I laughed, and was pleased to see something of a smile in him. 'It's a symbol, not a talisman.'

'A symbol of what?'

I did not have an answer. He put the chain around his neck and tucked the pendant into his shirt. 'When you're in Moscow, go to Ordynsky Lane,' I told him.

He looked puzzled. 'And why's that?'

'That's where Boris and Natalia are.'

He raised an eyebrow and then smiled at me. 'Thank you, Aleksei. I hope to see you soon.'

'You will,' I replied. We shook hands, and then he departed with the same steady trot of a few minutes before, but with his head held inestimably higher.

I rode back to the hut and packed my few possessions; then I turned and headed south towards Kurilovo.

It was around noon the following day, the twenty-eighth of October, when I finally reached the village. The blizzards of the past few days were beginning to abate, leaving the whole landscape as a desert of white. The crossroads where I was due to meet with Iuda that evening was a little to the south of the village. The sun was already low on the horizon by the time I inspected it. Already I could see a narrow crescent moon in the sky and even that would be following its brighter cousin round to the other side of the world before long.

As I had remembered, the crossroads was at the top of a slight hill. To the north, the buildings of the village were small and distant. To the east and west, I could see down the roads even further. The fields between the roads were smooth, blank and white. Anyone attempting to approach the crossroads by them would not only be hampered by the deep snow, but would also be seen long before they got anywhere near. The closest cover was to the south – a small coppice of trees which spanned the road almost a verst away – still far enough so that any approach from there would be seen long in advance of its arrival.

The crossroads itself was undistinguished, but for one thing – from a makeshift gibbet hung the gently swaying body of a hanged man. It was stiff from the cold and caked with snow, but I only needed to brush a little of the snow aside to discover beneath the dark-blue uniform of a French infantry captain.

I went back to the village and sat in the sole hostelry, drinking vodka until the appointed hour.

'I judge from your sword that you're a military man,' said a voice from a nearby table. I turned. It was just a couple of peasants, bored with each other's conversation and looking for an alternative. The one who had spoken was in his forties, with straggly, long red hair and bloodshot green eyes. His friend – possibly his father – was well past sixty. He had few hairs left on his head and even fewer teeth left in it.

'That's right,' I replied brusquely. My thoughts had been happily settled upon the image of Domnikiia, and I was irritated to be distracted from them.

'A bit of a forgetful one though,' said the older man.

'How do you mean?' I asked.

'Forgot your uniform and turned up two weeks late for the battle,' he laughed.

'You know – the battle. At Maloyaroslavets,' the first man explained, eager to start a conversation. Maloyaroslavets was the site of the first battle between the Russian and French armies after the latter had quitted Moscow. Like Borodino, it had been an encounter in which Bonaparte's tactical victory was to assist his strategic defeat. Though they were the victors, the French were turned back north, to retreat west along the road down which they had advanced – a road which they had already sucked dry of supplies. The town of Maloyaroslavets was almost forty versts away from Kurilovo, but it would be the closest to actual conflict that they had ever come, so it was not unnatural that it should become to the locals 'the battle'.

'I'm afraid I didn't fight there,' I said. 'I haven't been in a battle since Borodino.'

'Well, Bonaparte's probably back beyond Borodino by now,' laughed the second man. 'Maybe you should get back over there and relive your glory days.' These were the men for whom I had spent my adult life fighting. They had probably never left this village, certainly never gone outside the oblast, and yet they could criticize me for what they saw as my cowardice. That is the cross that must be borne by every spy, I heard Vadim's voice silently tell me. He is never given laurels – he must wear his medals inside his tunic. And what choice do they have? They're serfs, Maks now joined in. If they have fought, it was at their master's command. If they stayed home, it was that their masters preferred farmers to fighters, not that they preferred life to death.

There was no madness in my listening to the voices of my departed friends, only pleasure. Even when they were alive, I could at any time have conjured up their voices and their opinions. I had encountered few problems that could not be alleviated by a simple question along the lines of 'What would Maks think?' or, just as often, 'What would Marfa think?' Now, with Maks and Vadim at least, it was the only chance I got to hear them. Even if it was madness, it was a madness I would gladly choose.

I slammed my bottle of vodka down on their table with my left hand, making clear for them to see the wounds that I had earned on the Danube. 'Have a drink on me, why don't you?' I suggested. Whether it was my generosity or my manifest war wounds I do not know, but their mood towards me warmed a little.

'Where did that happen?' asked the older one, once he'd poured himself a vodka, indicating my missing fingers.

'In Bulgaria – Silistria.'

'In a battle?'

'That's right,' I lied, but I couldn't prevent the true story from forcing its way into my mind.

It had not been in a battle, but in a gaol. After Prince Bagration had decided to abandon the siege of Silistria, myself and a few others were sent into the city to spy. We'd split up, and I found myself staying in a hostel, with half a dozen or more men to a room, all of them locals. It was handily located right against the city wall, so all I had to do was drop messages out of the window at an appointed time – midnight each night. One of my comrades had simply to creep over, pick up the message and take the precious information to Bagration.

I don't know if it was me or the courier who got sloppy, but on the third night, it wasn't his hands that the small piece of paper, covered in Cyrillic and wrapped round a stone, fell into, but the hands of a Turkish patrol. There was nothing of much interest in it, even if they could break the simple code and then read the Russian, but they had seen which window it fell from.

Minutes later, Turkish soldiers – Janissaries – rushed into the room. It was easy enough for me to work out from their conversation what had happened, but the problem for them was that there were seven of us in the room. Any one could have dropped the message – and I'd made sure that none of the others had seen me go to the window.

So the Turks rounded us all up and took us to the gaol and used their best methods to persuade the spy to confess. I didn't, despite losing two fingers.

I forced myself back to the present. That much of the story I was happy to tell to most people. That's what I'd told Boris and Natalia. The details of what went on in the gaol, I never told. But to these two and today, I didn't even feel the urge to tell the basic story.

'I don't suppose you saw much of the French round here,' I said instead.

'No, not many,' said the younger man. 'The only Frenchman you'll find around here is old Napoleon, up at the crossroads.' They both laughed.

'I saw him,' I said. 'How long has he been there?'

'Since just after the battle,' the redhead continued. 'He wandered into town and we showed him some true Russian hospitality.'

'Was he a deserter, or just lost?' I asked.

'How would we know,' replied the old, bald man. 'We don't speak their language. We were just happy to do our bit for Russia.'

'So that's been what – two weeks?' I asked.

'Nearly,' said the younger. 'Now that the cold has set in, he'll be up there till spring.'

'Won't anyone cut him down?'

'Not while he's doing his work,' said the older.

'His work?'

'He's keeping the plague off us. They had it terrible in Tula.' His withered lips were sucked into his toothless mouth as he spoke.

'That was in the summer,' said the other man, evidently more thoughtful. 'It had died down long before we hung up Napoleon.'

'Are you going to take him down then?' came the reply, to which there was no response. Leaving the body hanging there kept away the plague, along with, no doubt, tigers, Turks, elephants and Englishmen, none of whom would have been seen in these parts since 'Napoleon' began his vigil at the crossroads. The one creature which it would not keep away was the very thing that I was due to meet that evening.

I set off back to the crossroads, leaving my horse in the village, with the plan of being there well before the appointed time. I trudged back along the road, listening to the creaking snow beneath my boots and feeling the cold wind in my face. The low crescent moon cast just enough light to see the whole landscape around me. Looking back over my shoulder, the little village glowed warm and inviting out of the darkness. I would have loved to stay and natter away the evening over a vodka with those two locals, to stay out of the cold and forget why I came to the village in the first place, but I could not. A serf can sit and remain in one state until his master tells him what he must do next. A freeman must be his own master.

Occasionally, the wind blew up a tiny snowstorm and I could see nothing beyond the scrabble of whiteness before my eyes. It would only last a moment. No new snow was falling and so, in the dim moonlight, I could see nearly as far as I had done during the day. At the crossroads, the snow showed traces of a few more pairs of feet having passed that way, but little else. The body of 'Napoleon' still hung from its noose and swung gently in the breeze, warding off all those alien terrors that might otherwise have dared to visit the little village of Kurilovo. There was less snow on his body than there had been earlier. Presumably the waning heat of the sun had been attracted to his dark uniform enough to melt a little of the snow that covered him. Any such thawing could only be superficial. After two weeks of the Russian winter, this Frenchman would forever remain frozen to his heart – or if not for ever, at least until spring.

I walked around in a wide circle, keeping respectfully distant from the corpse at its centre. My movement was partly in order to keep warm, but also to patrol each of the four roads that approached me. All of them remained empty for a long time. It must have been a little before seven that I saw the figure of a man approaching from the south. He first became visible next to the coppice I had noted earlier. I could only assume that he had been concealed somewhere within it.

As he approached, I continued to keep an eye on the other three roads which fed the crossroads. This was the most dangerous moment, when I could be blocked off along all four paths, leaving my only escape route across the impassable, snow-covered fields where I could easily be run to ground. There was no sign of anyone else. Each time I looked back towards the coppice, the figure approaching me was a little closer. Soon, it was clearly recognizable as Iuda.

When he arrived, I was a few steps away from the centre of the crossroads. He stood still, looking directly towards me, right beside the hanging man whose feet swung lazily in the breeze at about the level of Iuda's waist. Looking into Iuda's cold grey eyes, it was not difficult to believe that he was just as dead as the cadaver that hung beside him and that what now animated him was not the soul of a man, but the will of the devil.

'Good evening, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said.

CHAPTER XXIII

'GOOD EVENING,' I RESPONDED, STEPPING TOWARDS HIM.

'I see you have come alone. Did Dmitry Fetyukovich not care to join you?'

'This is between you and me,' I replied.

'That is indeed true, Aleksei Ivanovich, although some of the others do have issues with Dmitry. But I agree with you – it is best to save those separate squabbles for a separate occasion. You will see that I too came alone. We will only be able to talk if we trust one another.'

'I don't trust you, Iuda,' I said bitterly.

'I'm sorry, my friend,' said Iuda with a sincerity that anyone who did not know him would have taken for genuine. 'I am unfamiliar with the nuances of your language. Of course you don't trust me. Why should you? I have not earned that privilege. But you do trust your eyes. I have chosen this place well, I hope. You can see that there is no one else here.'

'I can see that.' The wind blew up a little more fiercely. A light shower of snow had begun which, combined with the wind, reduced the distance I could see down the roads. As we spoke, I rarely looked directly at Iuda, keeping my eyes instead always prowling for signs of a distant attack. 'So what do you have to say?' I asked.

His face pulled an expression of mild anguish, as though what he had to say was distasteful, but had to be discussed – like a man ' about to confess to his wife his infidelity. 'You have now killed three of our comrades – the same number that Maksim Sergeivich succeeded in destroying.'

'I've killed more than three,' I said, attempting to twist the knife.

He pressed his lips together as though he had tasted something sour. 'We have chosen to be gracious over the death of Ioann in the cellar. Though you were there at his death and did nothing to attempt to save him from the flames, he was probably beyond salvation. To kill by omission cannot be counted as murder. As for the Russian soldier – Pavel, I believe he was called – I would not count him amongst our number. He was a useful foot soldier, but not a loss to grieve over. So we will leave the tally at three.

'We cannot but be impressed by the martial skills that you have shown as you have killed,' he continued. 'I do not know precisely what you did with Matfei and Varfolomei, but they were strong fighters, so you did well to defeat them. I saw in close detail what you did to Andrei. That was truly inspiring – not just in the skill you showed with your sword but in the relish you displayed in finishing off an already incapacitated victim. It was a pleasure to see your hatred surging forth in that way – so much more manly than your friend Maksim, sending his friends off to a remote death in which he need not participate directly.'

'I'm glad to have you as an admirer,' I said, 'but if you wanted to compliment me, you could have done it all by letter.'

'I could. I could. And that would have meant that dear Dominique could also have read my praises of you and then she would warm even more to the image of her dashing hero. But perhaps I will yet have the chance to tell her in person. The poor girl must be in something of a quandary. On the one hand she sees your bravery and heroism as you do battle with us. On the other she must see that we with whom you do battle were once your friends. She must wonder if she will ever make some similar tiny mistake that will turn you against her.'

'The only mistake you made, Iuda, was not a tiny one,' I said, responding with the anger that he had clearly hoped to instil. 'Your mistake was to willingly turn your back on humanity when you became a vampire. It was foolish of you to let me know that only willing victims become vampires. It erased the last trace of pity that I might have had for any of you.' Behind him, back along the road he had come from, I thought I saw a slight movement through the buffeted snow. 'I presume there is a point that you're going to come to? Some sort of deal between us?' I asked, trying to move things along.

'A man of directness, I see,' smiled Iuda. He began to walk as he spoke, almost as if trying to outflank me, and I realized that he was moving my attention away from the road down which he had come. I stepped closer to the centre of the crossroads, ensuring I still had a good view in all directions.

'But you are right,' he continued. 'We must come to some sort of accommodation. When one comes up against a strong and powerful enemy there are two possible ways to deal with it. The first is to attempt to destroy it, to wipe it off the face of the earth so that it can never again irritate one with its persistent aggression. We have both already attempted this; we have both failed.'

'I don't seem to be failing too badly. There's seven of you dead already.'

Iuda smiled, not unlike a father delighting in the premature wisdom of his child. 'Such camaraderie, Lyosha. You are right, you personally are doing well – you are alive. But taken as a group, I think the four of you have fared little better than the twelve of us.'

The flurry of snow had subsided and whatever movement I had perceived in the distance behind Iuda had gone. For as far as I could see in the silver haze of the moonlight reflected by the glistening snow, there was only stillness. I looked around again at the other roads. They too were empty. Behind me, the hanged French captain continued to swing gently with the momentum picked up from the earlier breeze.

'But there is also a second way,' continued Iuda. 'That is accommodation. A creature does not need to be an enemy just because it is powerful. Wolves do not attack bears and bears do not attack wolves. It is not that the wolf loves the bear, it is that he knows he has little chance of winning. So which would your choice be, Lyosha? Shall we continue to fight and see which of us survives, bloodied and maimed? Or shall we leave each other to go in peace and continue the comfortable lives we enjoy?'

I remained silent. I had known my answer when I spoke to Dmitry just before we parted. Such a deal would fail because I did not trust the Oprichniki. And even if they were to keep their side of the bargain, I would not have kept mine. Iuda read my thoughts.

'But I do us an injustice to make comparisons with wild animals. If the wolf and the bear seem to trust each other, it cannot be because they are wise, so it must be because they are fools. The path to personal safety does not come by hoping that one's enemies will not attack one. It comes by ensuring it – by destroying those very enemies. We both know, Lyosha, how much each one of us yearns to kill the other – how much we dream of the pleasure we will take in it. Neither of us could walk in safety with that knowledge. The only safety lies in knowing that the other is truly dead, in being sure that he can never rise again to harm one.'

His voice was rising now. The patina of civility fell away and his every expression was filled with wrath and hatred. 'Much as one can be sure that a hanged French captain, whose body one inspected in the afternoon, cannot come back to life and attack one.' He stared into my eyes just long enough see that I had fathomed what he was talking about. 'Unless of course one goes away to drown one's sorrows in vodka, allowing one lifeless carcass to be exchanged for another.'

At the same time as he spoke, I was grabbed from behind. The arms of the body hanging behind me wrapped themselves around my neck and the legs around my waist.

'You remember Filipp, of course, don't you, Lyosha?' asked Iuda, his overplayed politeness returning, but accompanied now by a look of maniacal victory in his eyes. I heard a snigger from Filipp, and he held me tighter as he continued to hang, unharmed, by the noose around his neck.

Over Iuda's shoulder I saw movement. A coach emerged from the coppice from which Iuda himself had earlier come into view. Iuda turned and saw it too.

'And soon the others will be here, and then we can all go away to some nice, quiet, secluded retreat and have dinner. Oh, I know you're a brave man, Lyosha, and your own painful death will mean little to you, but it will give me the deepest satisfaction to know that you understand exactly how much Vadim and Maks suffered as they died.'

The coach was moving only at a canter and would take several minutes to reach us, but if its driver chose to break into a gallop, it would be with us in less than two. I had to act there and then. I lifted my feet into the air, so that Filipp now supported my whole weight, and kicked hard at Iuda's chest. The impact merely caused him to take a step backwards, but it sent me and Filipp swinging back on the rope. Filipp could do little but hang on to me. He tried to tighten his grip around my neck, but his initial aim had been to hold, not to throttle, and so it was to little effect.

I managed to free my sword from its scabbard and we swung around in a wide ellipse with Iuda at its centre. He was crouched and ready; in his right hand he held the double-bladed knife that once, long ago, he had been so keen for me not to see. He made a few thrusts at me as I passed, but could not seem to get the measure of the irregular motion of the human pendulum confronting him. I had no control over where we were going, but I waited until we swung close enough for me to strike. In the distance, the other Oprichniki had seen what was happening, and the coach broke into a gallop.

One swing brought us close enough to Iuda, and I struck. I knew from Maks' experience that stabbing would be to no avail, so instead I used the edge of my blade. I caught Iuda across the upper right arm and he yelled as he put his hand up to the wound. At the same moment, I heard the sound of splintering wood and Filipp and I came thudding to the ground as the gallows above us gave way under our combined weight. As we hit the snow, Filipp lost his grip on me and I felt the coils of the rope which had supported us snaking down on to me. I rolled aside just in time to avoid being hit by the wooden beam to which the other end of the rope was tied.

Filipp was not so lucky. The heavy beam hit him hard in the chest, knocking the breath out of him, but doing him little serious damage. Still clutching my sword in my right hand, I now took my wooden dagger in my left and began to back away, looking to see which, if either, of the two Oprichniki would pursue me. Iuda was hanging back, unable now to use his knife because of the wound to his arm. Filipp, however, was almost instantly on his feet and advancing towards me, the noose still trailing from his neck.

The coach was less than a minute away now. I backed behind the vertical post of the gibbet as Filipp came towards me. Iuda shouted something to him and he replied scornfully, clearly not needing advice in the matter. He lunged at me to one side of the post and I dodged round the other, running for all I was worth until a depression in the ground, hidden beneath the snow, tripped me and I fell. I quickly rolled on to my back and saw Filipp's bulky form looming towards me, his jaws wide open in readiness for the attack.

Suddenly his head jerked back and his body came to a halt. His hands reached up to his neck. The broken beam at one end of the rope had become embedded like an anchor in the snow. Wrapped round the post, the rope had become taut and Filipp could move no further. I sheathed my sabre and, grabbing the other end of the rope, began to pull. Rather than let himself be hauled off his feet, Filipp trotted along with the rope. Meanwhile, as well as pulling the rope, I began to cut across in front of him. Iuda was screaming instructions at his fellow Oprichnik, but Filipp was in no position to obey. As his back thudded against the wood I jerked the rope fast across his chest and ran twice more round him, pinioning him against the post.

Realizing the imminent danger, Iuda began to approach through the snow. The rope would not hold Filipp for long, but it was not my intention that he should be alive for long. I lunged at him with the dagger, straining hard on the end of the rope so that he was squeezed still tighter against the post and giving me even greater force against him. The wooden blade paused momentarily as it came up against his overcoat, but the cloth soon yielded and I felt the blade separate his ribs and slide into his heart.

I took no time to linger over his decaying body, but withdrew the dagger and turned to face Iuda. This was my golden opportunity to destroy him at last. The blow to his arm had weakened him and he seemed in no mood to fight. He backed away from me cautiously. I had little time to think. The coach was now only seconds away from us. Though I might take Iuda's life, it would be at the cost of my own. I turned and fled towards the village.

The snow-covered road was not easy to run down. Once I had built up speed then maintaining it was feasible enough, but to turn, stop or even slow down would risk me slipping and falling to the ground. Behind me I heard the coach come to a stop. There was shouting between its occupants and Iuda and then I heard the rattle of the harness and the wheels turning once again. I had managed to cover perhaps a tenth of a verst in the time they had taken to set off after me, but now it would be only a few moments before they caught up with me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that they were still distant, but gaining. The black silhouette of the coachman stood upright against the sky, whipping his horses furiously.

I kept on running, swifter than I had ever done before, but still I knew that the coach would soon be upon me. I heard its clattering wheels, partly muffled as they cut through the snow, coming closer and closer. I was lucky they had chosen a coach, not a troika or any kind of sled, which would have run faster, but even so, they were faster than me. The coachman's whip cracked again and again as he urged the horses towards me. They came so close that I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. I felt sure that the Oprichniki planned to run me down and let me be crushed to death in the snow under hoof and wheel, but that would have been too pleasant a death for them to inflict.

Rather than let the horses trample me, the coachman steered them to one side and the coach began to pull level with me. I looked over my shoulder again and saw the coachman – it was Foma – leaning out from his seat towards me, precariously balanced and leering like a gargoyle from the side of a western cathedral. In his hands he held his whip loosely so that the leather formed a long loop. He tossed the loop towards me and I felt it brush against the back of my head. He was trying to lasso it around my neck, so that he could drag me into the racing coach.

Foma was almost parallel with me. I was running level with the hind legs of the horses. I drew my sabre, knowing there was little I could do with it to fight the Oprichniki, but with one hope in my mind. I slashed at the hind leg of the creature that was racing alongside me. My sword bit deep, just above the hock, and with a startled neigh, the poor, lame animal instantly pulled up. As the heavy coach ploughed on into the two unfortunate horses, I lost my balance and fell to the ground, rolling over off the road and then into the adjacent field.

I turned to see what had happened to the coach. It had tipped over on to one side and was just coming to rest in the ditch on the far side of the road. One of the horses lay motionless in the road; the other was in the ditch, trying to get up under the weight of the coach to which it was still harnessed. Foma had been thrown off and lay dazed in the field beyond. The side door of the carriage, now facing upwards, flipped open like a trapdoor and Iuda emerged. He hauled himself out and then bent back in to help those remaining inside.

I left them to it and ran across the snowy field. The edge of the field was not far away, marked by a hedgerow. Once beyond that, I felt I was safely hidden, so I turned to look back at the Oprichniki. Through my spyglass I could see them making attempts to right the coach. Iuda was taking a supervisory role, evidently issuing instructions to the other three, but not himself participating. They soon abandoned the idea and began to remove from the coach a number of items of baggage. They then started to trudge purposefully through the snow, back towards the crossroads, Iuda still clutching his arm where I had cut him.

I shadowed them from a distance. The moon had now set and at times it was almost impossible to see them, but they were talking loudly and angrily to one another and, although I could not make out any of the meaning of what they said, it was enough to let me know where they were without ever getting a clear sight of them. Back at the crossroads they paused for a while. Stare as I might, I could see no sign of Filipp. I had not had a chance before to make certain that he was dead, but the fact that there was no sign of a body left me happy that I had indeed killed him. Pyetr knelt down in the snow next to the post where I had tied Filipp and lifted up a handful to examine. I inferred that he was holding the dust that was typical of a voordalak's earthly remains.

They continued over the crossroads, back along the road from which they had come. I continued to follow, though the snow in the fields was waist deep in places and my trousers were by now cold and sodden. Eventually, we came to the coppice from which the coach had emerged. To go round it would take me too far from the road, so I had to cut into the woods to keep close with them. While the voices of the Oprichniki had carried clearly across the open fields, once we were amongst the dense trees, they became muffled and soon faded to complete silence. I knew that it was from somewhere around here that they had set out in their coach towards the crossroads, so if they stopped and I continued on parallel to the road, as I was heading, there was a good chance that I would overtake them and lose track of them completely.

I changed direction, heading now towards the road instead of keeping level with it. In the dense woodland, there was no light at all. Looking up, I could just make out the stars through the canopy of branches which, although denuded of leaves, were clung to by sufficient snow to ensure that only patches of sky were visible. Without being able to see the pole star, it was difficult to know whether I was heading the right way. I had turned left to head back towards the road, but even after a few paces, I could have wandered a long way from that chosen path. Vampires are creatures of the night, and although I did not know for sure, I could only presume that they would be able to see far more clearly than I in this light. I could walk straight into the waiting arms of any one of the four of them and not know it until I saw the gleam of their fangs.

At least there was in that some morsel of comfort; there were now only four of them – one fewer than there had been when the night began. A part of me insisted that it was achievement enough for the evening; that I should return to rest and safety and leave the others for another day. It was an academic issue. More in question was whether I would make it out of these woods at all. Vampires were not my most pressing enemy. Wolves or even the icy cold itself were a more present danger.

I pushed on in the direction that I hoped would lead me back to the road. When I had entered the coppice, I had been only half a verst away from the road, and yet I had now been pacing through the woods for over a quarter of an hour without finding it again. Clearly I had not been sticking to a straight line. At last, a little way ahead of me I saw a light through the densely packed tree trunks. As I drew closer, I saw that I was coming to a clearing, opening on to the road but hidden by the trees so that I had not seen it from the crossroads. In the clearing was a small farmhouse and next to it a barn. The light I had seen was coming from the barn. There were no lights at the windows of the farmhouse. The sight of those lonely, snow-covered buildings looming out of the dark woodland gave me the sensation of being the child protagonist in some gruesome fairy story.

I crept close to the barn and listened. From within came the guttural, laughing voices of the Oprichniki. They seemed to be in a good mood again. Something had cheered them after their defeat at the crossroads. I quietly worked my way round to the door, looking for some crack in the woodwork through which I might observe them.

I put my eye to the narrow gap at the door's hinge, but before I could look in, the door was flung open, outwards at a huge speed. I would almost have been crushed as it slammed against the side of the barn had I not rolled out of the way. I pressed my back to the barn, coiled to fight, but not knowing whether the door had been opened because of my arrival or for some other, coincidental reason.

From the open doorway, something was hurled into the snow outside, carrying almost as far as the trees. It was large and bulky and sank into the snow where it landed. I glimpsed the two Oprichniki who had thrown it, but they did not venture outside and saw nothing of me. Having completed their task, they went back in. I heard more laughter and chatter in their language and what I made out to be a Russian cry of 'Niet! ' in a voice that certainly did not belong to any Oprichnik. Then Iuda's voice barked some instruction, and the barn door was closed again.

Rather than going straight over to the object that they had thrown out, which would have taken me straight past the door and hence possibly through the vampires' line of sight, I went back into the coppice and skirted around the edge of the clearing until I was as close to it as I could be. I crawled out to examine what the Oprichniki had so carelessly discarded.

It was, in accordance with the expectation that I had desperately tried to deny, a body. I wiped the snow away from the face and recoiled in brief shock, raising my hand to cover my mouth. It was a woman, middle-aged and most certainly dead, but none of that was of especial horror to me. Clearing more snow from her naked body, I saw repeated almost everywhere what I had seen on her face. Beyond the usual wounds to the throat, the Oprichniki had gone far further with this victim.

There were bites everywhere. Not just bitemarks, but actual missing pieces of flesh, torn away by the vampires' hungry teeth. Both her cheeks were missing, along with parts of her throat, her breasts, her belly, her buttocks, her thighs and her calves. They had not been thorough in their devouring of her. There was plenty of flesh still remaining. From the look of torment on her face, I could imagine only one reason why they had decided to stop eating. It was that she had died.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE OPRICHNIKI HAD NOT HAD LONG IN WHICH TO CAPTURE their victim. I had lost sight of them as I entered the woods, and that had been barely twenty minutes before. The only conclusion was that they had come across the woman earlier and left her imprisoned in the barn as they came after me. They may even have found her in the farmhouse just there. If she was the farmer's wife, then there must also be a farmer. I remembered the Russian voice I had heard from inside the barn.

I stole my way back over to the barn and peered through the crack at the side of the door. The scene within was unspeakably gruesome. The farmer was in the centre of the room. His wrists were tied together by long rope which had been slung over a beam in the ceiling. His arms stretched up above him, leaving his near-dislocated shoulders to take his full weight. His toes barely brushed against the floor as his body swung from one side to the other. Of all the devices medieval torture invented in the west as Catholic and Protestant each tried to bring the other closer to God, the rack was the most famously effective, but manacles were just as agonizing to their victim and far simpler. But this was only the first level of the suffering that the Oprichniki had created.

The man was stripped to his waist. His head hung limply backwards, but occasionally he tried to raise it. This, and the alternating groans and screams that emanated from his throat, told me that he was still alive. More importantly, they told the Oprichniki that he was alive. In what could be considered a twisted sexual parallel, the vampires' pleasure came not simply from the sensations which they experienced, but in the knowledge of the pain that they bestowed upon others.

Pressed close in around his body stood three of the four Oprichniki. They too were naked from the waist up – their appetites evidently requiring satisfaction through touch as well as taste. The three were Pyetr, Foma and Iakov Zevedayinich. Iuda stood a little way back from the action. He remained fully clothed and I saw on his bloodstained lips a sadistic smile that both shared and despised the gratification of the other three.

Iuda spoke. I could not understand what he said, but I could make out that it was addressed to Foma, and it had the tone more of a suggestion than of an instruction. Foma turned his head towards Iuda and grinned in pleasurable agreement. The other two watched Foma as he raised the palm of the man's right hand to his mouth and bit hard into the fleshly part at the base of the middle finger. The man screamed, not the shrill cry of shock that I would have expected, but the low weary howl of a man for whom pain has all too quickly become the only sensation he has left in his existence. The other wounds that I could see on his body told me that the Oprichniki had already indulged their appetites to quite an extent that night.

Foma pulled his mouth away from the hand and swallowed what he had bitten off displaying the same extravagance with which I might swallow an oyster in front of a charming dinner companion whom I wanted to impress. As he did so, the others all let out sounds that I took to be not part of their language but simple vocalizations of appreciation that could be understood in any tongue.

Foma moved to the next finger and took a deeper bite. This time, as well as the farmer's scream, I heard the crackle of splintering bones. The tip of his finger dropped to the floor, but Foma still managed to get a mouthful. He spat something out across the room, which bounced off a wall and fell to the ground. I could not see what it was, but it must have been in some way significant, since it got a tremendous laugh from the others; tremendous, but not hearty. It was the same laugh I had heard from them when I had first met them, the dirty laugh of those who want to be seen to laugh by those around them. Iuda joined in convincingly, but it was obvious that he mocked as much as he partook. Even later, when I discovered what Foma had spat out, it was difficult to fathom where the humour lay.

It is not easy to say now, nor was it then, why I stayed to watch the scene played out before me. But it was inevitable that I would. The fact that the farmer had just lost two of his fingers took me back to that prison in Silistria, three years before, but the strongest resonance was not with the farmer, not sharing his pain, but with those who stood and watched – with myself today, peering through a crack in the door and, worst of all, with Iuda who watched, smiled and, like me, did nothing.

The Turks had known that at least one of the seven of us was a Russian spy. They could just have killed us all, but they wanted information, and they could only get that if they could identify which one of us to concentrate their efforts on. They had kept us awake until late into the night, asking us questions, laughing at us, jeering at us. Eventually they lined us up; made us face the wall. I was in fifth place. Then they took the first man. I heard a strange crunching sound that I could not interpret, accompanied by a scream. It was the same sound I had just heard as Foma's teeth splintered the bones of the farmer's finger.

I had still not been able to see what was happening as our Turkish captors worked their way along the line, but each time I heard the same unfathomable combination of sounds. Then they came to me. I saw the blood on the table – not a huge amount, but four small, separate stains. When they grabbed my wrist and held it down I thought I understood what was happening – that they were going to sever my whole hand. I tried to pull away, but couldn't. The blade was a mundane thing, not one of the palas with which they fought, just a meat cleaver they had found somewhere. They tucked my other fingers in and the blade fell. I don't know whether I screamed. I don't really remember the pain, but I do remember feeling the blood that ran from the stump of my little finger dripping off my other fingers to the floor.

Those of us who had already visited the table were returned to position, but facing away from the wall. Once the element of surprise had been lost, it was far better torture for us to see what was going on. They explained to us it would stop if the spy confessed; that it would end not only his suffering, but all of our suffering. I was unmoved. I had little concern for my fellow captives – Bulgarians who had been happy to fight with the Ottomans against fellow Slavs – and I had no doubt as to just how permanently our captors would end our suffering.

Then they went round again. The fear in all of us was greater this time. Even though I cannot remember the pain, I can remember being afraid of it. The sound was the same as before as each man in turn lost a second finger. Most of the men against the wall turned their heads away to avoid seeing what was happening – what would soon happen to them – but I did not. I stared at the table, saw the cleaver fall each time, saw the agonized face of the victim and saw the indifferent faces of the Turks as they brushed the severed finger aside. I don't know why I looked; perhaps it was the hope that I would become numb to it by the time my next turn came. It worked, but it worked too well. The numbness persisted – increased over the years. It was that numbness, I realized, that meant I was now able to – needed to – stand at that barn door near Kurilovo and watch the torture that went on within.

In Silistria, only one of the other victims had looked on as I did. He was the second in the row – a young man, scarcely more than a boy. He too did not scream as the blade came down and took away his finger. When they came to me, I certainly did scream. I have no idea why the second cut hurt so much more than the first. Perhaps it was the anticipation. I was not at the point of confessing, but I wondered how many fingers I would be prepared to lose before I did give in. I could face, I thought, the loss of my whole left hand, but how many fingers of my right could I lose before I became useless as a man? But why did I care? – they would kill me anyway.

Again I felt my own blood running over my other fingers. It would not be fast, but the blood loss itself would eventually be enough to kill me. One of the soldiers indicated that we should hold our hands above our heads. It reduced the flow, but it was not an act of kindness. They had done this before, and this was experience showing. Raising our arms to reduce the blood flow prolonged our lives, and added a new, throbbing pain as our numbed arms began to ache. I felt the warm trickle of my own blood now running down my arm and on to my chest.

It was after they had moved on to third fingers that the confession came – but not from me. It was from someone who, to all my knowledge, had no connection with the Turks' enemies at all: the boy who was second in the line, who had not turned his face away from the table. There had been silence after he spoke; relief on the faces of the captives – even of the boy – satisfaction on those of the captors. I remember hearing the quiet chirping of birds through the high window. We had been in the prison all night.

The odd thing was that the boy had confessed just after, not before, it had been his turn to have his third finger severed. Had the pain broken his spirit? It didn't look like it. I could only guess that he had done what I would not have dreamed of – he had decided to spare the rest of us. If that was the case then he was a noble fool, but a fool nonetheless. If he'd made up the fact that he was a spy – as he surely had, unless there were two of us – then they would soon work it out. And then the torture would resume for the rest of us – perhaps some new, even worse torture. Only at that point was I truly tempted to confess, but even then I did not.

All seven of us were led out into the early, pre-dawn light, to be thrown back into the two small cells where we had been previously kept. It was at that point the boy made a run for it. He was up on to the prison wall in a flash and about to jump over when a shot rang out. I just saw him fall, but then I was off in the other direction. My left hand first stung as it gripped the top of the wall, and then slipped on the greasy blood that still oozed from it. But by then, my right hand had got a grip, and I pulled myself over. The Turks had now realized their mistake in all pursuing the one escapee, and shots whistled over my head, but they were too late. I was lucky to escape the city and lucky not to bleed to death, but I survived. I do not know what happened to the others whose torture I had both witnessed and shared, and at the time I did not care.

Now, staring into a similar scene inside that barn, I did care. But there was nothing I could do. To engage in a fight that pitted the four of them against just me would have ended in such a pointless death as to be immoral. I knew that I had to wait for better chances – to wait for the Oprichniki to become separated and to wait for daylight – before I could risk an attack. But the more difficult question was why I stayed to watch. I did not need to see any more to appreciate the vile nature of the Oprichniki, nor to find any aspect of their behaviour which might reveal a weakness in them. Part of what I needed was fuel for my hatred. It was a facet of myself of which I had long been aware. I am, or at least I perceive myself to be, a man of many passions, but all of those passions are difficult to kindle. I arrive at them in small steps, not in giant bounds. I would not go to the trouble of taking a lover, unless that lover was so available that her selection cost me but a few roubles. Moreover, I would not go to the trouble of falling in love unless it was with someone who was already my lover; it was only through the intensity of sex that I had discovered my depth of love for Domnikiia.

And similarly, it was only through the nauseating wrath of seeing what the Oprichniki actually did that I could stoke the fires of loathing enough to know that I would carry to the end my determination to destroy them. Iuda's words to me had struck home. I was a shallow, fickle, comfort-loving man. De-sensitized by what had happened in Silistria, and by what I had already seen of the Oprichniki, I had to remain there with my eye glued to what went on within the barn in order to corral the strength and determination that I would later require to defeat the accursed creatures. And yet, though it would give me that determination, would watching also not desensitize me further? The next time – though I prayed to God there would be no next time – I saw such horrors, would I dismiss them as commonplace, needing ever greater depths of corruption to raise my righteous passion? Whatever the risk, I stayed and watched.

Iuda issued another suggestion; this time it was to Iakov Zevedayinich. The vampire knelt before the man's stomach, gazing at it as if preparing to bite. The man already had several wounds to his belly. One on the side was long and deep and still bled profusely. Into this Iakov Zevedayinich swiftly jabbed his fingers, and the man's whole body convulsed with pain. Again a wave of laughter rippled through the Oprichniki. Foma grabbed the man's feet and Pyetr his chest so that he could not move. Iakov Zevedayinich twisted his fingers in the wound once more and this time the man's contortions, though more intense, were absorbed by the two vampires that held him fast.

Iakov Zevedayinich poked the wound again and again, learning from each jab how to make his victim's pain more intense. Each time, he exchanged glances with the other two, seeking their approval and relishing with laughter the approbation that he found. Pyetr called out to Iuda in a tone that might in normal life have said, 'Come on in, the water's fine.' Iuda strolled over to them. He had in his hand a small stick of wood. He may have picked it off the floor or ripped it from some tree or bush as he passed, but it was long and probing and had a jagged, uneven point. Iuda rammed it into the wound in the man's side and at the same time turned it like a gun worm. The man screamed in agony and Iuda spoke to him in Russian.

'I think your wife enjoyed it more than you when I did that to her.'

The man raised his head and attempted to meet Iuda's eyes. Had he the strength, he might have spat at him, but his head merely fell back as the exhaustion of his suffering overcame him.

Foma asked a question that could only be interpreted as 'What did you say to him?' Iuda's reply was, I presume, an honest answer to the question. The Oprichniki laughed again that same laugh.

Iuda took a step back and made a further suggestion. This time it was to Pyetr. I did not need to understand the details of it to comprehend that Pyetr complied readily. Whatever power struggles Dmitry might have perceived within them, it was clear that at this moment Pyetr was utterly subservient to Iuda, as were both of the other surviving Oprichniki. There was no laughter at Iuda's latest idea, but an intake of breath and an anticipatory licking of lips on the part of the two vampires who were not to be its implementers.

Pyetr opened his mouth wide and put his lips to the man's chest, totally encompassing his nipple. He left himself there for a moment mimicking a suckling baby and glancing slyly sideways at Iuda. Iuda smiled an appreciative smile and the other two exchanged their own glances, communicating solely in appreciative grunts, like a couple of dogs who knew that their master was about to feed them a titbit.

With a cocky smile, Iuda uttered a single word of encouragement to Pyetr, to which Pyetr's response was simply to bring his jaws together and then to pull back, shearing away the flesh that he had clasped between his teeth. The man's scream, momentarily so loud, exhausted him, fading into a croaking plea. Pyetr lay on his back on the floor of the barn with his hands behind his head, chewing contentedly at the flesh between his lips. It was as a red rag to the other two.

They pounced upon the farmer and began tasting the blood of old wounds and creating new ones with their sharp, probing teeth. Iuda's voice became firmer and his utterances became orders rather than ideas. He took a step forward and jerked Foma away. On seeing this, Iakov Zevedayinich meekly stepped away from the farmer as well, but it was too late – too late for them, but nothing like soon enough for their victim, or indeed for me. The farmer was dead, whether through the accumulation of unendurable pain or the happy accident of a thoughtless bite at a vital artery, it did not matter. He was released to join his so recently departed wife.

I slipped back into the surrounding woodland just in time to see the farmer's body ejected from the barn to lie alongside his wife in the snow. Crouched behind a tree in the freezing cold, I waited. If all four chose to sleep there through the following day, then it would be their last sleep. In daylight I had no qualms about confronting them and disposing of each as I had done others before them. But I would not go and face them in the dark. The fear that I had seen in Dmitry now became a solid presence in my chest. It stifled me and stiffened me, making me incapable of either advance or flight. It was as a conduit for the cold around me to enter my heart and freeze every sensation, every concept except for the most volatile instinct of all – that of self-preservation.

But at least the cold and the terror combined had one positive side effect – they kept me awake. Much as I would have liked to surrender to oblivion as I stood sentinel outside that barn, I could not. I waited and I wondered, thinking of all that had taken place since I had first met the Oprichniki, thinking of my memories, both happy and sad, of Vadim and Maks, thinking of Marfa and Dmitry Alekseevich, and thinking most of all of Domnikiia. The most ridiculous thing was the way that I attempted to combine my thoughts of those last three together – to see Dmitry playing happily with Domnikiia and to see the youthful Domnikiia chatting carelessly with the wise Marfa. I did not want them to merge. I did not want a single creature with the best aspects of both any more than I wanted a single great city of Russia, combining all that was fine in both Petersburg and Moscow. The result would be nothing – a synthetic perfection that could appeal only to the blandest of palates. I would enjoy it no more than if I were to take half a glass of red wine and another half of white and mix them together to produce the ideal beverage. My task was not only to keep them separate, but also to keep them balanced – to ensure that neither bottle became empty and also that neither came to taste so good to me that I would forget the other.

I may not have been at my most lucid, but at least I was wakeful when, some hours after their hideous feast, Iuda and Foma emerged from the barn. At the roadside they exchanged a few words and then Foma headed south while Iuda turned north. Foma's journey south would not have taken him far. He would soon hit the main road that could take him either east to Serpukhov or west to Mozhaysk. The latter seemed more likely. That would take him back to the path along which Bonaparte was retreating. As for Iuda's course, there was only one major city to the north.

I waited. There were good reasons for me not to rush in and surprise the two remaining vampires in the barn. One was that Iuda and Foma might yet return. The other was that, under the veil of night, even two Oprichniki might prove to be able opponents. I knew that I should wait – wait until midday when they would both be at the nadir of their consciousness and would be able to offer no opposition to the wooden stakes that pierced their chests. But in their consciousness lay the only satisfaction I could derive from their deaths. I had seen that they loved to keep their victims alive – that their only pleasure came in the pain of others. My reasoning went beyond that. I wanted them to suffer, but moreover I cherished a desire for them to know why they died, and at whose hand. In all honesty, I felt the same desire in myself. To perceive and comprehend the moment of one's death must be the final act of understanding, be the perception good or ill. I had failed to be present at the moment of Maks' death and before that, at my father's. I did not want to miss the occasion of my own mortality, nor did I see why these two vampires should miss theirs. Thus, even if it had not been to punish them, I would have wanted them to be sentient of their own deaths. It was merely that that was how I felt it ought to be.

Hence it was not long before dawn, but most certainly before it, that, to the sound of the first birds welcoming the new day, I crept back up to the barn and looked inside once more.

It was empty. I slipped inside. Two lanterns, hung from beams in the ceiling, lit the space within. The rope by which I had earlier seen the farmer suspended was still there, both ends roughly severed where his body had been cut down. Beneath it, the ground was stained with blood; two patches, side by side – one for the man, one for his wife. There was little else. In one corner was a collection of farm tools, and near to them an overturned manger, not big enough to hide a man. A ladder led up to the hayloft. There was no sign of any Oprichniki, not even of their coffins.

Above me I heard the sound of rats scuttling across the hayloft – their tiny claws clattering and their tails slithering over the wooden floorboards as they either scoured for food or clambered to see if I was any threat to them. Or was it rats? Was it a different breed of vermin? The hayloft provided a low flat ceiling for about a third of the length of the barn. From it sprouted a thick beam that ran across to the far wall. This was the beam from which the rope still hung. Smaller shafts sprung outwards from the central beam to support the walls and upwards at angles to hold up the roof.

I walked backwards to the far end of the barn, keeping my eyes on the hayloft. As I moved, I heard the sound of their movement. When I stopped, they stopped. I could not see them, but I knew that Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich were up there. Then, between two bales of hay, I saw the glint of a pair of gleaming dark eyes. I fixed my gaze on the eyes and began to approach. They made no move, nor any indication that they knew I was looking at them. My hope was to get back underneath the hayloft, directly under whichever of the Oprichniki those eyes belonged to and to stab at him upwards from below. I knew that I could not kill them that way, but I had seen how disabling the wound to Iuda had been the night before and I hoped it would give me enough of an advantage to move in for the kill. I glanced occasionally toward the ladder and along the edge of the hayloft. There was a second vampire up there as well, and I did not want my attack on one to leave me vulnerable to the other.

With a start, I felt something land on my cheek. I brushed it away and looking at my hand saw that it was a spider, curled up into a defensive ball. I glanced upwards to where it had fallen from and came face to face with Iakov Zevedayinich. He himself was perched much like a spider, his limbs spread across the oak roofbeams without any visible means of purchase. It was the same climbing skill that I had seen Foma display once in Moscow. Iakov Zevedayinich dropped down towards me from the ceiling, and though I had enough warning to take a step back, he still knocked me to the ground.

The vampire was immediately looming over me, ready for the kill. Over his shoulder I saw Pyetr emerging from the hayloft along the central beam, managing to crawl on all fours along a path no wider than his hand. I slashed wildly at Iakov Zevedayinich with my sword and he held back, giving me a chance to get to my feet. I swung the sabre sharply back and forth in front of me, aiming for his neck. On one stroke, I felt a tiny impediment as the sharp tip made contact with his skin. He put his hand to his throat. It was a trivial wound, but enough to make him wary. He backed further away and I looked up to see Pyetr now even closer to me, climbing his way deftly through the web of beams as though he had spun them himself.

I made a few upward jabs at him, but he easily dodged them, emitting a feral snarl. Iakov Zevedayinich made another lunge for me, but I was not so distracted by Pyetr that I could not connect the blade of my sword with the back of his hand. He snatched it back. Pyetr swung down from above, his legs hooked around a beam, and grabbed at my sword, holding the blade tightly with both hands, oblivious to any pain that the action might cause him. I tried to shake the sword free from his grasp, but he held firm. Iakov Zevedayinich approached again, more slowly now, not out of fear, but to savour the moment of my death. With Pyetr holding my sword, I had nothing with which to fend him off. My wooden dagger, though a fine device to despatch the creatures, was no weapon for engaging them in open combat.

I grasped the handle of my sword and lifted my feet, as though trying to drop to my knees. Pyetr managed to sustain my full weight for a fraction of a second, before the sharp blade of my sabre sliced its way out of his grip and I fell to the ground. I lashed out with the sword at Iakov Zevedayinich's ankle and landed a blow which made him leap sideways. Pyetr was still hanging upside-down from the beam, examining his injured hands, his head dangling like a ripe plum ready for the harvest. I swung at his neck and only a cry of warning from Iakov Zevedayinich told him to raise his body back up to the roof as my blade whistled inches beneath his head.

Pyetr retreated back across the rafters and I followed, jabbing at him with my sword. Iakov Zevedayinich too had retreated back under the hayloft. I soon discovered why, as a pitchfork from amongst the tools I had noted earlier flew towards me, flung like a trident from across the barn. I side-stepped and parried it with my sword, but still it caught my upper left arm, tearing through my coat and drawing blood before continuing to the ground, where its tines sunk in deep. The battle was not going my way and I decided now was the time for departure. I raced to the door, but Iakov Zevedayinich beat me to it. He now held a scythe in his hands and swept it in front of him, keeping me away from both himself and the exit. With a leering smile he slid the bolt across the door. It was not a serious impediment, but it would delay me.

'Just like you locked Ioann in,' he said, still smiling.

Behind me I heard a thud which I took to be Pyetr dropping to the floor of the barn. With the two of them now on my level and with Iakov Zevedayinich armed, the fight was most definitely going away from me. Iakov Zevedayinich was the closer of the two and I knew he had to be removed from the picture before Pyetr could take the few steps needed to reach me. Despite all that I knew of the inefficacy of the traditional use of the sword against these creatures, years of training and experience had built up in me so strongly as to make it almost an instinct. I attacked Iakov Zevedayinich as though he were a mortal man.

As he swung at me again with the scythe, I took a step back. He followed my movement and became slightly off balance. I grabbed hold of the shaft of the scythe and pulled him closer towards me and towards my sword, wincing even as I did at the pain it caused to my wounded arm. In fear, he let go of the scythe, and took a step away from me. The door was at his back and he could go no further. At that moment I lunged and the tip of my sabre pierced his chest, went through his heart, out of his back and through the wooden door behind him. So great was the force of my thrust that the blade continued, stopping only when the guard came to his chest. I let go the sword and took a step away. Any human would have died in an instant, his heart rupturing as the blade penetrated it, and with its rupture would come the withdrawal of that force which supplied blood so vitally to the body. But vampires had different means of supplying their bodies with blood and had no need – in any sense – for a heart. I heard Pyetr's laughter behind me, and a broad grin spread across Iakov Zevedayinich's brutal face.

'You should stick to fighting against men,' said Pyetr, mockingly. 'You'd be good at that.'

Iakov Zevedayinich prepared to take a step forward to resume the attack, but found that he could not. Although my sword had done him no serious injury, it had pinned him to the door like a butterfly in a collector's case. He put his hands to the handle of the sword and tried to pull it out, but he had no leverage. Pyetr's laughter ceased.

I turned to face Pyetr, drawing my only remaining weapon – my wooden dagger. Pyetr backed away in what struck me as unnecessary fear, but I took full advantage of it. I began to run towards him, and he backed away faster. Behind him, the handle of the embedded pitchfork jutted out of the ground towards him like a spear. It would be a lucky chance if he fell on it at the correct angle.

In the event, Iakov Zevedayinich foresaw the danger and shouted to his comrade. Just in time, Pyetr twisted his body to one side and avoided falling on to the handle of the pitchfork. Instead he fell on to his back on the ground beside it. I wrenched the pitchfork out of the earth and thrust it back down on to Pyetr's throat. His flesh offered only a momentary resistance before yielding deliciously to my pressure and allowing the sharp points to penetrate through it and deep into the ground beneath. It did not kill him; it didn't even appear to hurt him, despite the blood that oozed from the punctures in his neck, but it kept him from moving. His body writhed and arched as he tried to get free and he could even raise his head a little, his pierced neck sliding up and down the tines of the pitchfork, but unable to escape them.

Now I had two captive Oprichniki in my collection, but I needed only one. I turned back to Iakov Zevedayinich. He was still struggling to free himself from the door. It would take a few minutes, but he would have worked himself free. I kicked at the door's bolt with the sole of my booted foot. It gave a little, but not completely. Iakov Zevedayinich stretched out towards me with flailing arms, but could not reach me. At a second blow, the metal bolt splintered away from the wood and the door swung open into the early daylight outside, taking the vampire with it like a jacket hung on a peg – like Vadim Fyodorovich hung on a wall.

Only then did Iakov Zevedayinich realize the implication. His scream was not of pain, but of fear, and it was soon cut short by the sound of an explosion as the sunlight hit his body. It was not the tight, sharp explosion of a gun or a cannon, but a slower, broader whoosh, as when gunpowder ignites in a bowl. The door opened as far as it would go and then bounced closed again. My sword still remained protruding from the back of the door at the height of a man's chest. Of Iakov Zevedayinich there was no sign, save a few scorched rags drooping from my sword and a slight singeing of the wood, roughly forming the shape of a man.

I turned back to Pyetr. He was still struggling to try to free himself. I pulled the pitchfork out of him and held it to his face. He crawled backwards away from me with a crab-like motion, heading towards the door as if it could bring him some escape. I thrust the fork back into him – this time through his shoulder, laying in with all my weight so as to pierce the tough bone and sinew – and he was immobile once more. He stared at me with a face that revealed no fear; only hatred and contempt.

'More Russian hospitality?' he sneered. 'You invite people into your country and then kill them off one by one.'

'We may have invited people,' I replied, 'but that's not what we got.'

I glanced around the barn and saw the two pools of blood, reminding me of what I had witnessed just hours before. Part of me wanted to forget it, but a stronger part had to know more.

'I watched you,' I said, my voice scarcely above a whisper, 'watched what you did to that man. I saw the body of that woman. Animals eat, but that was… What was that? Why was that?'

Pyetr smiled. 'You really want to know?'

'No,' I lied instinctively. 'But tell me anyway.'

Within the constraints of the metal shafts that pierced his shoulder, Pyetr adjusted his posture, as if settling in to tell a long story.

'We each start off just by drinking,' he began, 'and that in itself is a pleasure, when one is young at least, and inexperienced. But as we grow older, merely drinking becomes dull, so we eat. Then eating becomes what drinking was, so we play. Then playing becomes as dull as eating, so we torture. Then to satisfy, torture becomes worse torture. The older the vampire, the further he has to go.'

They were, it seemed then, like me. I needed ever more intensity of experience to raise my anger; they needed it for their pleasure.

'Your beloved Zmyeevich is pretty old,' I said. 'He must do…' I dared not even imagine what he must do.

'The master is too old. He told me once, he has gone beyond physical pain. There is more pleasure to be had from people's minds. But humans realize that far quicker than we do. It's beyond me. The physical will do for now.'

'I'm surprised you have the imagination to find new… ideas.'

'It can be troublesome.' He smiled again. 'But Iuda must have been a vampire for a very long time – not as long as the master, for Iuda's interests are still physical, but he has such ideas.' He nodded an acknowledgement of the word he had taken from me. 'For instance,' he went on, smiling more broadly, 'had the man not died, we were going to-'

I jogged the handle of the pitchfork. In a human, that slight motion would have sent agonies through his wounded shoulder. For him it meant little, but at least it shut him up. I didn't want to help him indulge in a vicarious pleasure through his retelling, much as – to my shame – I was eager to hear. I moved on to more significant matters.

'Where have Iuda and Foma gone?' I asked.

'Gone to screw your mother,' he replied charmingly. I kicked him hard in the armpit, just next to where the pitchfork transfixed him.

'Tell me,' I growled, but again he seemed to feel no pain. I had no urgent need for the information. I felt sure that I would be able to track them down and that, even if I didn't, Iuda would not be able to resist the temptation of coming after me once again. I took a step back and picked up my wooden dagger, readying myself to kill the defenceless monster. Outside, the distant sound of a cockerel belatedly heralded the dawn. I turned back to Pyetr and saw that his expression had changed from a look of resigned malevolence to one of utmost fear. It was as though the sound of the cockerel had terrified him. Perhaps it had. It was a signal of the danger that he would have known every morning since he first made the repellent choice to become a vampire.

But it was not the sound – or at least not only the sound – that caused him this new unease. His breathing was short and shallow and he flicked his nervous gaze between me and his right hand, which he had snatched up from the ground in pain. On the ground where his hand had lain, a small patch of sunlight had been allowed in through the door by the damage I had done when I kicked off the bolt. A wisp of smoke arose from the centre of the patch, where a fragment of fingernail was shrivelling to nothing.

I looked at Pyetr's hand. The cuts to his palm where he had grabbed the blade of my sword had already vanished. The nail of his middle finger was missing where the sunlight had hit it. Even as I watched, it began to grow back. Pyetr was now gripped by a fearfulness that I had not seen in any of the Oprichniki before. He tugged his whole body against the pitchfork, trying to get free, and he looked up at me with a meek, frightened anxiety.

I placed my foot on his forearm and pushed it back down towards the ground, forcing his hand back into the patch of sunlight. His scream was high-pitched and continuous. The mild sunlight burnt the flesh of his hand in a way that would require the heat of a fire on human flesh. The skin of his fingers quickly blackened and split open, peeling back and curling like the skin of a rotten apple. Through the splits in the skin oozed red blood and yellow pus, some of which dribbled to the ground, while the rest boiled away into the atmosphere. The stench was nauseating – a mixture of the most pungent mildew and burning human hair. Soon his four fingers and the top half of his hand were stripped of all flesh and all that remained were bones which themselves began to smoulder. The tip of his middle finger caught fire and then fell off on to the ground below. The edge of the beam of light left a neat divide across his hand. All that was in darkness was untouched. The surviving skin ended in a thin black fringe across his palm, where the flesh had begun to burn and then receded into the safety of darkness. From the back of his hand, like a torn glove, hung a large flap of charred skin which had similarly slipped out of the sunlight as it fell away from the bone.

I lifted my foot and he snatched his hand back towards him. His screams stopped, but his breathing was irregular. He breathed out with hard, grating pants, but his in-breaths were short and snatched. He was coping with both pain and fear.

'Where have Iuda and Foma gone?' I asked again, shouting this time. He made no reply. It was hard to tell whether he had even heard my question. I was about to press his arm back into the light when, just as I had glimpsed with his nail, I saw the whole of his hand beginning to regrow. The bone that had fallen from his middle finger had already been replaced and lumps of healthy new flesh were forming before my eyes around each of his fingers. A new layer of skin was smoothly advancing from the undamaged half of his hand. Within five minutes the whole thing would be back to normal. This explained why there were no lacerations on his hands from my sword, and even further, explained why Maks could claim to have severed Andrei's arm when I had subsequently seen Andrei with the full complement of limbs. These creatures were (in this and in other ways) like spiders. The loss of an arm or a leg could be a temporary inconvenience, but they could be sure it would grow back. I shuddered as a thought crossed my mind that made me hope that they were merely like spiders. For a vampire to grow back an arm was one thing, but I prayed that the arm, once detached, could not grow back a new body, as is the case with an earthworm or a sorcerer's broomstick. If that were the case then there could still be another Andrei out there to deal with.

To my more immediate ends, however, this was an interesting turn of events. The aim of the torturer is to inflict the greatest pain on his victim whilst doing the least damage – the Turks had taken fingers, not arms or legs. The motivation is not out of any sympathy for the victim, but simply lies in the understanding that, once a body has been damaged too much, it is no longer able to feel pain – or indeed much of anything. But the vampire was a torturer's dream. Continuous pain could be inflicted because the body would be continually refreshed. I could take Pyetr up to the very point of death and then let him revive, only to do the same thing again the next day and the next. It was tempting, but I was not that much a follower of de Sade. I could not be sure it would work, anyway. When I had been tortured, although the physical pain had been excruciating, half of the terror had been in the knowledge that I would be maimed, that I would forever be missing those two fingers. Had I known that, whatever the degree of pain, I would still leave with my hand as intact and whole as it had ever been, the physical pain might perhaps have been bearable.

Pyetr did not seem to view it so philosophically. The pain to him was very real. And yet still he had not answered my question. I stamped my foot down on his arm again. The sun had moved a little and so this time the whole of his hand was exposed to the light. He screamed again as the centre of his palm split and peeled open to reveal the roasting flesh beneath. I held it down there until his entire hand was almost gone, and even then, I only let go to alleviate the sickening smell.

'So are you going to tell?' I asked.

He nodded, trying to catch his breath. 'Yes,' he panted. 'Yes.'

'Well?'

'They've gone after the French. They're trying to get back home to the Carpathians, but they'll stick with the French as far as they can – for food.'

'Both of them?' I asked.

Pyetr nodded. I placed my boot on his arm again, but did not push down.

'So why did I see Iuda heading towards Moscow?'

'I don't know,' he replied, trying to shrug his shoulders. I pressed his arm down once more, just briefly letting his raw, bleeding wrist touch the light before releasing him.

'All right,' screeched Pyetr. Then he smiled the self-satisfied smile of a man who in death foresees the ultimate retribution that will befall his killer. 'He's gone to see your whore. Dominique – that was her name. He's going to make her into one of us. He thinks she is just the sort who could be persuaded. And if not – well, you can look outside if you want to see how much we get out of a single human body. Either way, you won't get to fuck her again.' He forced out a laugh that reflected no amusement in him, but which he hoped would contribute to my pain.

I marched purposefully to the door. As I approached it, something glinted at me from the floor. Seeing what it was, I wondered how it might have got there. Then I realized. This was precisely the place where Foma had spat something after biting off the farmer's finger the previous night. I could now see what the thing was that had caused so much mirth amongst the Oprichniki. It was the man's wedding ring.

I continued to the door and flung it open. Behind me I heard the broad, whooshing explosion that had accompanied the destruction of Iakov Zevedayinich. I turned to see no sign of Pyetr, but only the pitchfork tottering to the ground now that its support had vanished. A rectangle of light shone through the door casting a shape akin to a coffin around where Pyetr had been lying, the lingering smoke his only memorial.

I wrenched my sword out of the door and set off on my way.

CHAPTER XXV

MY HORSE WAS STILL IN KURILOVO. THAT WAS ALMOST TWO versts away. I ran for all I was worth down the snowy road, slipping and stumbling as I went. I paused at the crossroads, exhausted, gasping for breath. The rope still lay coiled around the broken post where I had tied Filipp, but otherwise there was no hint of the previous night's adventures. I carried on, so out of breath that I ran probably slower than I could have walked. When I came to it, the coach still lay overturned in the ditch. The dead horse remained in the road, but the other one was gone, cut free from the wreckage either by some Good Samaritan or by some horse thief.

I carried on to the village. In the street I passed the red-haired man I had spoken to the previous evening. He recognized me and called after me.

'Hey! Was it you who stole Napoleon? Did you see what happened to that coach?'

I didn't pause to answer. I carried on back to the tavern, paid the ostler and, without waiting for change, mounted my horse. It had been almost fifteen minutes since I had left the barn. I spurred the horse into a gallop and allowed myself my first real opportunity to think.

My one hope lay in the fact that Iuda could not travel by day. He had left about three hours before dawn. That could never be sufficient time to reach Moscow. I had eight hours of daylight – slightly less now – to overtake him and get to Domnikiia before he could reawaken into the darkness and reach her. The journey ahead of me was around eighty versts over treacherous icy roads. It was achievable but it would be tight. I would not manage it at all if I killed my horse. I reined him back a little and we continued at a less breakneck speed.

If I did not get to Moscow in time, then my outlook was bleak – that of Domnikiia hopeless. The prospect of her suffering as she died, in the way that I had seen that farmer and his wife die, in the way that I now knew Maks and Vadim and so many others must have died, filled me with a nauseating rage. Were that to happen, then there would never be any peace for me until Iuda was destroyed. I would hunt him across Russia, across Austria, across the whole of the Ottoman empire if need be. I would climb every damned mountain in the Carpathians if I had to, but I would find him and he would die. I would not make him suffer physically too much – that would be to descend to his level – but he would know that it was I who took his life and why it was I who had done it.

I filled my journey with fantasies of discovering him in the dungeon of some mysterious Wallachian mountain castle, perhaps ten or twenty years from now; of pulling back the heavy stone lid of his coffin and raising my lantern to see the still-youthful face of the monster I had been stalking for so many years; of seeing his eyes open wide and peer into my world-weary face; of seeing the look of recognition in those eyes as he saw in me the face of the man he once confronted years before; of the memory returning to him of what he had done to Domnikiia at the very instant my stake plunged into his heart and terminated his putrid existence for ever; of seeing his earthly body collapse to dust under the weight of the corruption that it had borne over his long, repellent life.

There was more than self-indulgence in my desire to fill my mind with these thoughts – it was to keep other thoughts out. There was another possibility that Pyetr had mentioned – another side to the coin. Iuda was going to try to persuade Domnikiia to join him. It was a laughable concept, but it struck a cold terror in my heart. Domnikiia was a woman and a vain woman at that. She had already spoken of the delight she thought it would be to live for ever. How easy might it be for Iuda to persuade her that her sugar-coated vision of the life of a vampire was close to the truth? What lies would he conjure up to influence her – lies not only about him but about me as well?

But it could not happen. Although she might be romantic and fanciful, Domnikiia was a clever and a good woman. She would never choose such a path, no matter what worm-tongued falsehoods she was spun. And yet if she did, what would I then have to do? My vengeance upon Iuda would remain much the same, but what of my vengeance on Domnikiia? Vengeance it would be, for she would be beyond all hope of salvation. The moment she shared Iuda's blood, her soul would be condemned to hell. Whether it went there immediately or with the ultimate destruction of her mortal body, I knew not. I knew now many ways that a vampire might be killed. Which, I wondered, would I have to use on my dear, sweet Domnikiia?

I spurred my mount to a fast gallop, expelling from my mind all such thoughts and instead concentrating on riding across the slippery ground. The movement caused a sharp pain in my arm where the pitchfork had hit me. I had forgotten about it until then, and now I dared not look to see how serious it was, for fear that it would delay my journey. My arm was still strong enough for me to hold the reins – that was all I needed for the moment. We galloped on for several minutes through the chill winter air, my heart racing with the excitement of the ride. I cast my mind back to the more trouble-free days of my youth when I rode freely across the hills and fields around Petersburg, days when the name Bonaparte was rarely heard outside Corsica – never outside France. Could I really blame all of my present misfortunes on that one man? He had not transformed the Oprichniki into vampires, nor had he asked them to come to Moscow. The former was down to Satan and the latter to Dmitry, and with the willing agreement of the rest of us. And yet it had to be remembered that the Oprichniki, for all their ability to kill, were at heart scavengers, not predators. To flourish they had to exist in a matrix of death and fear. To be sure, at times of peace they might eke out an existence in Wallachia, killing just enough peasants to survive without drawing too much attention to themselves, but in war, where death was commonplace, they could indulge their most carnal of inclinations. War created an atmosphere in which all other evils could thrive, appearing trivial by comparison to the daily toll of death and carnage. A war is a fine place to hide any crime – another tree in the forest – and who could be so trite as to focus on perhaps a hundred deaths caused by the Oprichniki compared with the hundreds of thousands killed on both sides in the war? Bonaparte was not just responsible for those hundreds of thousands, but also for belittling every other death and every other tragedy that occurred in Russia, if not the whole of Europe throughout his era. When so many die as heroes, who remembers those who die frightened and alone?

I changed horses at Troitskoye. They did not have one shod and I had to wait almost half an hour before I could set out again. It was tempting to continue on my old horse, but he was tired and could barely manage a trot. Once I got going again, the delay was soon made up. Even so, the sun was already setting as I rode into the outskirts of Moscow. I continued across the city and tied up my horse just a little way from Degtyarny Lane, so as to approach on foot.

I banged impatiently on the door. It was Pyetr Pyetrovich who opened it. He ran his eyes up and down my bedraggled body, curling his lip with a degree of disdain that hardly befitted a man of his profession.

'Mademoiselle Dominique is not available tonight,' he told me before I had even uttered a word.

'Who is she with?' I asked.

'By "not available", I mean she is not here. You should try again tomorrow.'

'Where is she?'

'I have no idea. I should have thought you would be the man to know where she goes of an evening.' I could have forced my way past him and rushed into Domnikiia's room, but there was no reason to doubt that he was telling the truth. Whenever previously Domnikiia had been busy with a client, he had notified me outright, taking pleasure in the fact that I had to share.

'Is Margarita around?' I asked, hoping she might have some better idea of where Domnikiia had gone. Pyetr Pyetrovich's attitude changed slightly. I was no longer a possible threat to his livelihood – the single-minded suitor who might take away his star attraction – I was once more merely a customer like any other, prepared to accept in Margarita an alternative when my first choice was unavailable.

'Ah, I see sir has an eye for the brunette. But I'm afraid that Margarita too is unavailable. Raisa is free, but please, captain, do go and change your clothes first. And perhaps a wash as well? If not for the sake of Raisa, then at least for the other customers.'

I smiled a quiet, contemplative smile which I hoped gave the impression that I was about to break his nose, then turned and walked away. I had no idea of where I might start to look for Domnikiia. There was a slight chance that she had gone to find me at the inn, but she had no reason to expect me back in Moscow so soon, and even if she went there, she would not wait once she had discovered my absence. My best hope was to wait and watch the brothel. That was the one place that I could be sure Domnikiia would return, and also the place where Iuda would eventually show up. Given that Iuda could not travel by day and assuming that, when he did travel, his progress was at best at the same rate as mine, then I could expect him in about five hours, some time towards ten o'clock.

I glanced around the square for somewhere to wait, watch and hide. Several of the houses opposite the brothel appeared to have not yet been reoccupied. It was no effort at all to break into one – that had already been done weeks before by the pillaging French – and I went upstairs to get a better view over the square. As I climbed the staircase of the dark, abandoned house, I could not help but cast my mind back those few days to the house where I had found so many dishonoured corpses – Russian, French and others, Vadim among them – part eaten and then discarded like old chicken bones. But here there was no stench, no sound of rats. This was just an empty, looted house; one of the fortunate ones that had survived the fires.

In an upstairs front room, I was even lucky enough to find a little furniture. I sat on an old dining chair and watched the square below, in expectation of a long vigil.

I was taken by surprise. Scarcely had I sat down when across the square I saw a lamp come to light in Domnikiia's room. I took out my spyglass and focused it on the uncurtained window. Domnikiia and her client came into view. Evidently Pyetr Pyetrovich had lied to me. She was naked and had wrapped herself around the man. As he walked across the room towards the window, her arms held him tightly round the neck and her legs clasped him about the waist so that he could move freely as he held her whole weight. Her head swivelled from side to side, obscuring his face from view as she kissed his lips. Her shimmering, dark hair hung down over her neck and then disappeared over her shoulder, between their two bodies, leaving her elegant white back in plain view.

Less than twenty-four hours before, I had been the clandestine observer of another scene from which others might perhaps have turned away. Then I had stayed to watch out of the memories of how I myself had suffered, despite the nausea that rose within me. Now my motivations were far more mixed. Certainly I had to keep watch over Domnikiia to ensure her safety, but many men would have chosen to turn away on seeing the woman they loved in the arms of another. Although I had long been reconciled to the fact of Domnikiia's profession and though I truly believed that these men meant nothing to her, surely I should still have looked away and attempted to quell the jealous monster rising within me.

Instead, I felt only excitement, not just at seeing two other human beings engaged in so intimate and private an activity, but specifically to see the woman that I loved behave so utterly unlike how I had been brought up to believe a woman should – so much like a base animal. It pleased me also to see the man so deceived, to see him so overpowered by his own primitive instincts and to know that while for a moment he had all that he could care to have, in the long run he had nothing. It was I that had Domnikiia's heart, Domnikiia's love and Domnikiia's soul. Though they might queue for her all the way around Saint Vasily's and back, I would still mean more to her by a gentle touch of my hand than they with all their sweaty exertion ever could.

The man was already naked to the waist, save for a bandage on his arm. As he walked across the room with Domnikiia wrapped around him, he slipped his hands under her buttocks to support her. Together they came all the way over to the window, and the flesh of her back was pressed smooth and flat against the glass panes as he leaned against her. They pulled away from the window slightly and stood for a few moments, their mouths inseparable, his fingers meandering up and down her spine. Then he stepped back and Domnikiia dropped to her feet, looking upwards towards his face, which I could now see for the first time.

It was Iuda. He stared down towards Domnikiia with a look of dreadful tenderness and bent his head lower as though to kiss her, but I knew instantly what was his real intent. I leapt to my feet, but there was nothing I could do. If I shouted, I would not be heard, and even if I was, it would not stop him. It would take over a minute for me to go back down the stairs, cross the square and get to them. Had I brought a gun, I could have shot at him, but even that would have had no effect on a vampire.

I could only stand and watch as he parted his lips and prepared to plant them delicately on Domnikiia's throat. He brushed her long hair back over her shoulder and pulled it to one side with his hand, so as to make the flesh of her neck clear for his bite and also – or so it seemed to me in my numbed terror – to make it easier for me to see. His lips descended and Domnikiia's head arched back slightly as he made contact with her. Over her shoulder I could see only his devilish, grey eyes staring out into the night towards me. He did not drink for long, but soon raised his head and took a step back from her. She sat back unsteadily on the windowsill, her hands reaching out sideways for support. Her head was raised to look into his face, but I was unable to see whether the expression on hers was of terror, submission or ecstasy.

Iuda drew his knife from his pocket. My sudden, laughable fear that he might harm her was immediately quashed by the knowledge of the harm he had already done. He put the twin points of the knife to his own chest and, briefly closing his eyes, drew them across, etching two neat, red lines below his right nipple. Drizzles of blood seeped out of the wounds and ran down his firm stomach. Domnikiia rose to her feet and approached him, bending her knees slightly to lower her mouth to the level of the lesions. She placed one hand on his left breast and the other on his shoulder, pulling herself towards him as she pressed her mouth against his chest and, only moments after he had drunk hers, drank his blood.

Iuda placed his hand on the back of Domnikiia's head, pressing her into him. He closed his eyes and raised his head to the ceiling with a smile of sexual elation on his lips. Then his head dropped and his eyes flashed open, gleaming victoriously out of the window and across the square.

And though the room I was in was in utter darkness, and though there was no way that Iuda could be aware that I was there, I knew he was staring directly at me.

CHAPTER XXVI

I FELL BACK INTO MY CHAIR. I HAD BEEN WARNED WHAT IUDA HAD intended to do. I had flown from Kurilovo to Moscow to make it in time. I had stood at the very door of the building in which it had happened. And yet I had quietly and without intervention watched as Iuda had done everything I had feared, as he had destroyed yet another creature that was dear to me, as he had taken first Domnikiia's life and then her soul.

I dashed from the building and across the square towards the brothel. Halfway across, I glanced up at Domnikiia's window. Light still shone from it, but inside I could see no sign of either Domnikiia or Iuda. Even as I watched, the light was extinguished. I paused. If I went into the brothel, there was nothing that I could do. I was in no state to kill. If I went in there, I would be easy prey to Iuda and even to… I could not face thinking about it. I could not face anything. I turned and fled into the dark city streets. I would kill her tomorrow, and let her live tonight.

I do not know where I wandered that night. Every waking nightmare I had experienced on my journey during the day had come true. I felt a strange sense that Iuda had cheated. I had carefully worked out that he could not be in Moscow for several hours – certainly that he could not have arrived before I did. And therefore, if he could not have done so, it followed that he did not do so. Hence he had not just intermingled his blood with Domnikiia's and thereby transformed her into a creature as hellish as himself. It was an argument of perfect logic, except that I had witnessed the occurrence which I had just concluded could not have occurred. Domnikiia had become a vampire, and no amount of appealing to the gods of reason was going to change that.

And after all, it took only a little imagination to come up with a dozen ways in which Iuda could have made it to Moscow before me. How could I apply any physical laws to such a creature? By some legends, he could transform himself into a bat. How fast can a bat fly? It doesn't matter; a vampire in bat form may travel much faster. He could have reduced himself in size to some minute homunculus and been carried to Moscow in my own saddlebag. Preposterous? Who was I to say? Moreover, it did not matter. Somehow, Iuda had got to Moscow. In some way, it had been possible. I had smugly calculated that he could not make it, but I had observed rules to which Iuda had no need to conform. It was like playing chess against an opponent who could suddenly announce that his queen can move in a way that I had never been taught.

Even to invoke the supernatural was unnecessary. All Iuda had needed was another coach and a human driver. He could lie in the back, slumbering in his coffin, protected from the daylight by blackened windows, while his accomplice drove him pell-mell to his rendezvous with Domnikiia. I had already suspected that he might have some human servant, who could perform those daylight tasks that he could not.

There was no need to choose the correct explanation. The problem was that I had not considered the possibilities earlier. If I had not been so arrogant in my belief that I had beaten Iuda, then I could have stopped what had happened. I was horrified by my own stupidity.

But the real horror came in knowing that there had been no coercion on Iuda's part. Domnikiia had willingly done what she did. She did not love me, or God, or even life enough to resist the temptation offered to her of the prospect of eternity, even if that eternity came through eternal damnation. She knew that the Oprichniki were vampires – I had told her. She knew that they were evil. All the times that we had spoken of it – when she had said that living for ever was just a fantasy, when we had laughed together at Iuda's pompous letter – each time she had been hiding something away from me, some secret notion that in reality Iuda was right and I was wrong.

It was that betrayal that was so hurtful to me. If it had been some stranger who had chosen the path Domnikiia had taken, or even someone I knew and even loved, but whom I didn't expect to love me, then it would have been different. I would have felt some passing sorrow that the person was so foolish or so corrupt as to want to become a vampire, but that very revelation of their true nature would obliterate all genuine sympathy. Just as Iuda had said the desire to be a vampire was the only qualification required to become one, so that desire is also a sufficient disqualification from any expectation of the love of the rest of humanity. The convicted murderer cannot expect to be pitied for being what he is, except perhaps by his mother. Even then, is she not asking herself the question, how am I to blame? And so the sorrow I felt was not really directed towards Domnikiia. It was for myself that I wept. As in so many circumstances, my own self-interest was the matter at the front of my mind. It was I who had been betrayed. Domnikiia had chosen Iuda over me. I had failed to do what I could to prevent it. It was vanity, pure and simple. My pain came from my humiliation and from Iuda's ascendancy. Domnikiia was part of the mechanism of it all, but she was not the beginning or the end of my emotions.

And yet none of that was true. It all hinged on the fact that Domnikiia could not be worthy of my sympathy and therefore did not have my sympathy and therefore any sorrow which I felt could not be for her. But it was for her that I felt. I knew her. I knew that her decision must have been some tiny aberration and that somehow the one fragment of her mind that whispered 'yes' had spoken louder than the thousands which had screamed 'no'. Those thousands were now silenced for ever, I knew for sure. I knew because I had stared into the eyes of Matfei and Pyetr and Iuda and others and seen how little was left of them. It had been one, tiny, vociferous part of my mind that had originally persuaded me to visit Domnikiia for that first time, a year ago. The other voices that in unison shouted 'Marfa' had been drowned out then, and by now had been brought round in their way of thinking. From then on, until now, no part of me had seen my relationship with Domnikiia as anything but good and right. Was that how Domnikiia now felt about her newfound state? Did that one taste of Iuda's blood persuade her instantly and completely of the joy of the existence ahead of her, much as my first taste of her flesh had persuaded me?

It was a dangerous path to follow. I might allow myself during that night the indulgence of thinking fondly of Domnikiia and of looking for reasons not to judge her, but in the light of tomorrow I knew that she had to die and that I must be the one to kill her. Hard as it had been to drive out all sympathy for Maks when I had found out he was a spy, it would be so much harder for me to steel my heart enough to plunge a wooden shaft into Domnikiia's own heart – a heart that had so capriciously turned against me. True, a vampire is infinitely more deserving of death than a French spy, but then my love for Domnikiia was infinitely greater than my love for Maks. Not greater – different. Subsequently I had harboured, and still did, doubts as to whether the way I had treated Maks was right. Days, months and years after tomorrow I would wonder whether I had been right to kill Domnikiia. That was why tonight was a time to build up my hatred, enough to ensure that when the moment came, it would be the moment of least indecision. Once I had destroyed her then I could lie back and bathe in the luxury of doubt. It would be too late then to do anything more than to regret.

I found myself back in the churchyard in Kitay Gorod where Dmitry and I had stayed so briefly with Boris Mihailovich and Natalia Borisovna. I was sitting on the ground, the dampness of the snow seeping into me, with my back against a gravestone. I could not remember arriving there or how long I had been there. I was certain I had not been asleep and yet somehow the whole night had passed. The eastern sky had imperceptibly transformed from starry black to a dark, glowering blue, noticed only by me and by the waking birds who began to hail the rising sun. This time, my nightmare did not end as the birds sang to the dawn. It became worse. The horrors I had seen in the night were merely an overture to the horrors that the day would bring. I was going to kill Domnikiia. It was a horror made so much more dreadful in that I would not merely be an observer, but a participant. I could back away at any point and the horror would go away, only to be succeeded by the unthinkable prospect that she would live on. The price of my inaction of the previous night would be paid in the action of today.

But the day was long. There was no reason for me to go now, just as the sun rose. Yesterday I had had eight hours of daylight in which to race from Kurilovo to Moscow in order to save Domnikiia. I had failed. Today I had the same amount of daylight, and all I had to do was wander along a few Moscow streets, climb into a room and embed a wooden blade in a heart that was already dead. I could wait until lunchtime before I set out, complete the task, and still have most of the afternoon to myself.

I set off immediately. Domnikiia may not have been in any state to appreciate her hellish existence, but out of any love that remained in me for her, it was my duty to end that existence without a moment of undue delay. I scooped up a handful of snow to rub into my face, then noticed that it was stained red. All around me the snow was bloodstained. It was my own blood. The wound to my arm had reopened at some point during the night and had marked the snow beside me. I moved away to find some cleaner snow and bathed my face in it. I was cold enough already, but the icy contact refreshed and awakened me. I took a mouthful of the snow and let it melt on my tongue. Then I set out to do what I had to do.

I was scarcely out of the churchyard when my conviction failed me once again. I set off not towards Degtyarny Lane, nor away from it, but instead I followed a path that seemed simply to circle it, as if I were trying to trick myself into arriving there. My orbit was neither circular nor, like a comet, elliptical, but spiral like a meteor. Each turn I made took me closer to Domnikiia, but I never headed directly towards her. Just as when I had first arrived back in Moscow, after Smolensk, I was tricking myself into falling upon the brothel as if unintentionally. Then it was so that the thief of my desire could slip past the sentry of what I knew was right and wrong. Now my morality had to follow a path that was unnoticed by my sentiment.

Before too long, I was standing beneath her window once again. The ground-floor window below hers opened directly into the salon. It was easy enough to slip the catch and climb into a room in which but a few hours later I would have been welcomed through the front door as an honoured guest. The open window lay in front of me and beyond it the stairs that led to Domnikiia's room and hence to Domnikiia herself and so to Domnikiia's death, and now was my chance to leave.

I went in.

The silence and darkness inside were unfamiliar and unsuitable. This room above all in the brothel was where the sales pitch was made. Always before, it had been a happy, bright and noisy place. I had rarely wanted to linger here in the past, having in my mind a specific and singular objective in the room upstairs, and so the shopfront of the salon had scarcely been a distraction for me, never holding any allure. This time I almost burst into tears at the memory of it. I recalled the anticipation I had always felt on entering; the timid flick of my eyes from one girl to another until they fell upon Domnikiia; sometimes not seeing her there and having to wait until she floated down the stairs to greet me. Even in its darkness the room held those associations. I could hear the light chatter of the girls and the quiet, unnecessarily seductive murmurings of their suitors that had once filled the room. This would be the last time I entered. In its darkened, silent state I would, I feared, remember it always as the anteroom to a very different occasion. In holding back, I was attempting not only to relive happier times, but also to delay my journey upstairs to do what I had to do.

Though it was light outside, the heavy curtains over all the windows kept the inside in a state of muffled dimness. On a table was a candle, which I lit. The looming shadows cast by the flickering flame did little to rekindle in the room the vitality with which I had always associated it. I began to ascend the stairs. The third and the fifth step both squeaked loudly as my foot fell upon them. It was after half past eight, but I knew that no one in the building would yet be preparing to rise. Business hours extended long into the night and so almost the entire morning was spent in sleepy recuperation. The sound of my approach awoke no one.

I crossed the landing and put my hand on the knob of Domnikiia's door. I listened before turning it. Inside I could hear nothing. What I had expected, I did not know. Somewhere in me there had been the urge to knock. This slight pause of apparent politeness served as some form of substitute for that. I turned the knob and entered.

Inside, all was familiar. Across from the door, Domnikiia's dressing table was filled with her cosmetic paraphernalia. To one side was her window; the bright light of day barely glowed through the shutters and thick curtains. Opposite was her bed. I could hear her light breath and saw the blankets rise and fall in time with it. It was a cold night and she was heavily wrapped in bedclothes. Only her beautiful face peeped out. Her long, dark hair, plaited into a ponytail, adorned the pillow beside her.

It would have been easy to just fling open the curtains and shutters, and let the day outside cascade through the window and on to her bed, destroying her bodily remains as I had seen it destroy both Iakov Zevedayinich and Pyetr, but I remembered the look of terror in Pyetr's eyes as the sun had first caught him and the fearful scream that Iakov Zevedayinich had expelled as he had swung out into the light. This, it seemed to me, was the death that they found most terrible and most painful. It was not what I wanted to inflict upon Domnikiia. With those two, and with all the Oprichniki, I had wanted them to be aware of their own deaths – wanted them to understand that I was the cause of their demise. That was why I had gone to the barn before dawn, to be sure that they would still be awake. With Domnikiia, it was just the opposite. There was no need for her to be aware of the brevity of her life as a vampire, or that it was I who had terminated it. Her real life had been ended by Iuda the previous evening. I was simply tidying up the mess he had left.

I placed the candle on the table next to the bed and sat gently beside her. The candlelight illuminated an apple nearby on the table, with two, perhaps three bites taken from it. The flesh had already begun to brown in the time since Domnikiia had eaten. It was surely the last meal she had eaten – the last palatable flesh that she would ever eat. I tried to look at her, but could not. I turned away from her and cradled my head in my hands, silently sobbing. Once again, I attempted to summon up my hatred. It was not a hatred for her, even though it was she who had willingly become this monster. It was a hatred for vampires and specifically a hatred for Iuda. The creature which now lay on the bed behind me was not Domnikiia; it was a creation of Iuda's – a body that he had consumed and then corrupted by making it a continuation of himself. It was as if Moscow had been under the French occupation. The streets and the buildings were beautiful and familiar, but they were nothing without the people who had built them and who lived in them. If destroying the French meant destroying the physical city of Moscow along with them, then amen to it. If destroying the monstrous spirit that lay on the bed beside me meant destroying the beautiful, familiar body that it had stolen, then amen to that too. The body was only a memento of the soul that had once occupied it. Governor Rostopchin (if in fact it had been Rostopchin) had proved himself a true patriot in instigating those fires which, though they destroyed so much of the city, made it uninhabitable for the marauding French. He had understood that the essence of the city was not in its structure but in its people. No true Russian would disagree with him.

But now I had to display the single-minded righteousness of Rostopchin. I had to destroy the physical for the sake of a greater good. The greater good was not Domnikiia's soul – that was lost for ever. It was her memory. If I could limit her existence in this altered state to a mere few hours, then at least the creature she had become could do nothing to debase the years of goodness of her life.

I pulled back the bedclothes to reveal her body, clothed in a simple nightgown. The silver crucifix which, despite all superstition, would have done nothing to protect her still hung around her neck. She murmured softly and raised her hand to her face to brush aside a straying hair, but she did not awake. Her hand fell back across her chest and lay as if cradling her heart. I gently nudged it and it fell lazily to the side of her body, leaving no obstacle that would distract my aim. I took out my wooden dagger and held it in both hands. I remembered our conversation when I had first been making it – in fact, making its predecessor. I remembered the look of fear in her eyes when I had waved it at her and shouted at her. Had she decided even then that she would choose this path and become a vampire? Or was that a decision that had come to her more recently?

I kneeled over her, resting the tip of the dagger on her chest, just above her heart. It merely required that I should drop my weight on to my hands and through them to the dagger and I would have ended the accursed existence of another of these creatures. How long, I wondered, would it take for Domnikiia's bodily remains to decay? For her there would be no collapse into dust as there had been for the others. Her death had occurred but twelve hours ago. That was scarcely any headstart at all. Once I thrust the blade into her and extinguished her life, her body would remain almost as perfect as ever, decaying only over a period of days and weeks just as though she had been a mortal woman. I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer for strength in what I was about to do. It would take only the briefest of action from me to shift my weight and plunge the wooden blade into her. I waited for the moment when strength and hatred would fill me and I would carry out what I had to do. And I waited.

I was no Rostopchin. I was no more capable of destroying something so beautiful as Domnikiia as I would have been of burning down Moscow if I had been handed a flaming torch and pointed towards the quarters of Bonaparte himself. I was a pathetic cousin of Othello. For me the victory of my love over my wisdom meant that I could not kill when all sense dictated that I should. It was beyond me, as if some power greater than I could not stand to see Domnikiia depart the face of the earth at this time; that all the love that had been poured into her creation could not be so easily cast aside.

And yet if I could not kill her, then what was I to do? Should I leave now and never see her again, hearing only occasionally of the strange death of some innocent that I would suspect had been caused by her? The regret would crush me. Every terrible death would be my fault for my inaction today. By choosing now not to destroy the creature that had come to inhabit Domnikiia's body, I would take on the responsibility for each death that she went on to bring about. Were I to die tomorrow in battle, or even today by my own hand (the thought had occurred to me), then the deaths of all those future souls would still be reckoned against mine at my judgement. To not plunge my dagger into Domnikiia was to damn my own eternal soul, and yet I could not do it. So I was damned. The very certainty of it opened up a new vista of possibilities. A new liberty was endowed upon me that allowed me to take any action, regardless of its moral consequences. Like a man sentenced to hang for a petty theft, I was now free to commit any crime I chose – freer, in fact, because the thief would still have to fear what came after his death.

It was conceptually thrilling, but as I contemplated it, I could not think of many immoral acts that I desired to perform – certainly none that I hadn't already committed even before my newfound ethical liberation. I would never have considered myself an especially good person, but it seemed that somehow in my life I had lost – or had never acquired – the urge to be bad. My behaviour was not imposed upon me through a fear of ultimate retribution, but was somehow an innate part of my character, created perhaps by the accumulation of a lifetime of those fears. But did having no desire to be bad make me good? Surely goodness must come from the resistance of dark urges, not from their mere absence? It is only the weak who beg the Lord not to lead them into temptation. The strong need temptation to test their strength. I had been presented with but one temptation – to let the vile creature that Domnikiia had become live – and I had yielded to it without a fight. I knew that it was not too late, that I still only had to raise my hand and let it fall again to bring about my own salvation, and yet I knew too that I could not and nor would I ever be able to.

There was only one conceivable advantage that could be taken from my decision to damn myself. If I was to walk the remainder of my days on the earth in the knowledge that, when I departed it, my subsequent path would be precipitously downwards, then at least I did not have to walk alone. I could be with Domnikiia. I would let her take me and create me as a vampire in the same way that she had so recently become one, and then at least our journey to hell would be made hand in hand. I knew that I was clinging on to one last gleaming thread of self-flattery – that she would want me beside her. If she did not, then I would die at her hand with no subsequent rebirth as a vampire. It would be apt punishment for my vanity.

I set down my wooden dagger at the side of the bed and took one last look at Domnikiia's beauty, then I licked my fingers and put out the light of the candle beside us. I took off my boots and my coat and my scabbard, discarding them on the floor, and lay on the bed beside her. Beneath my coat I saw the bloody mess of my wounded arm, but it did not matter. When I awoke – if I awoke – it would be to become a creature of the same ilk as Domnikiia and we would have an eternity of togetherness before us. A wound such as that would mean nothing to me. I had not shut my eyes for two nights and, as the rush of sleepiness came over me, I began to wonder whether I was in any state to make such a profound decision about my life. What did this mean for how I felt about my wife and my son? Even if my soul was bound for hell, did they not deserve my company and my support at least while I was alive? They were questions which I was too weary to answer.

It struck me that one of the interesting aspects of what I was about to undertake was that I would have the opportunity of looking back on my own death. I had observed death from the outside on many occasions – although there were other times when I wished I had been there to observe it – but it would be a rare privilege to be able, as a vampire, to recall what it was like actually to die. And yet, I thought, all souls, whether they end up in heaven or in hell, must have that same opportunity. If I didn't appreciate that, then I had to question whether I believed in heaven and hell at all, in which case, how could I be so certain of my own damnation?

But the speculation was unnecessary. Soon, I would have knowledge. I fell asleep.

CHAPTER XXVII

WHEN I AWOKE, I WAS INSTANTLY UNEASY. MY SURROUNDINGS were vaguely familiar, but I was aware of some pressing issue that had to be resolved. Memory quickly returned. My first, perhaps unremarkable observation was that I was alive. I reached out to my right, but Domnikiia was no longer beside me. She must have awoken. She would have seen me. Surely I would have to have been awake to have drunk her blood and become a vampire. Had I woken to do that and then gone back to sleep, forgetting what had taken place? I considered myself, trying to determine whether physically or mentally I felt any different. I could find nothing.

I glanced to the window and looked outside. As far as I could judge, it was late morning. The snow shimmered in the light of the sun. The reflected light shone into my face and cast a shadow of my hand on to the empty pillow beside me. I was no vampire. As I had thought, I needed to be conscious to become one of those creatures, so that I might imbibe the blood of the one who created me. Domnikiia had not yet transformed me into a creature like herself, but she soon would. I heard a footstep outside and the doorknob began to turn. My earlier conviction that I would become a vampire had completely left me. I found it impossible to retrace the line of reason that had led me to it. Now, the prospect of letting Domnikiia sink her teeth into my neck and of my drinking her blood in return was both sickening and frightful. I would gladly kill her in order to save myself from such a fate.

I reached over the side of the bed to where I had dropped my dagger the previous night. I felt a twinge of pain, but at the same time I noted that the wound to my arm had been bandaged while I slept. The dagger was not there. I glanced around the room and saw it. It was on a chair, sitting on top of my neatly folded coat. My boots were beside it and my sword hung from its back. I would have no time to reach it before the door opened. Then my panic abated. It was daylight. Whoever was entering the room, it could not be a vampire. If it was Domnikiia then she would be quickly destroyed without any need for my intervention. Even so, I could not help but cower against the bedstead, clutching the blankets up to my chin.

It was her. She was carrying a tray on which I saw some bread and some cold meats and a pot which, from the smell, I immediately knew to contain coffee. She walked across the room, past the window, and put the tray down on the dressing table.

'Good morning,' she beamed. I said nothing. She came over to the bed and sat beside me. Even though it was now clear to me that she was no vampire, still I shrank from her. There was no sign that she noticed. She put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder, kissing my neck and squeezing me tightly.

'That was a nice surprise,' she said.

'What?' I managed to whimper.

'Waking up with you, of course!' She sat up and slipped her legs underneath the blankets. 'I did know you were back in town, though. Pyetr Pyetrovich said you'd called. Even so, I didn't expect you'd go to quite such lengths to see me. I don't know how you're going to get back out without anybody noticing. You could have bathed first, too.' She rose and went over to the dressing table.

'I'm sorry,' I mumbled, simply as an instinctive response. My heart was pounding and I felt a heady relief. It was like the resurgence of reality after a nightmare – a nightmare that has contained a horror so dreadful that there is no solution to it but to turn back time and discover that the horror never existed. What I had seen at Domnikiia's window the previous night had been no nightmare, but it was just such a horror. And yet, somehow, its inevitable consequence had not taken place. Domnikiia was human. In all my contemplation through the night I had found no sensible course of action to take, and yet now the solution came in a simple, inexplicable fact. She was not a vampire.

'Oh, I'm sorry, Lyosha,' she said with genuine distress. 'I was joking. You know I'll always love you however much you stink.' It felt cruel not to smile and acknowledge her humour, especially on seeing the disappointment in her face, but I was too deep in thought to react in any way. She came back over and handed me a cup of coffee. 'How's your arm?'

'Where were you last night?' I asked.

'I was visiting a client, if you must know. I don't do all my work here.'

'What time did you get back?' My voice was hushed and passionless as I tried to disguise my shock and fear.

'What is this, Lyosha?' she said, rising to her feet in anger. 'You know what I do. Do you want details all of a sudden?'

'Tell me!' I moaned with a pleading intensity, leaning across the bed towards her. She knelt down beside the bed and put her hands to my face.

'What is it, Lyosha?' she asked, staring into my eyes to discover what had brought this on in me. 'Why are you like this?'

'I saw you with Iuda last night,' I told her simply.

'What?' Her incredulity appeared genuine.

'Through that window,' I explained, pointing. 'I was watching.'

'You were spying on me?' She was more disappointed than angry.

'It's too late for that,' I said, taking her by the wrists and rising to my feet. 'I saw the two of you together and I saw what you did.'

'Lyosha, I saw no man in this room last night.' She was icy calm, perceiving that her life might depend on what she told me.

'Ha!' I snorted. 'You should be a lawyer. You saw no man, but you saw Iuda.'

'I didn't return here until almost midnight, and then I went straight to bed. Tell me what it was that you saw.'

'I saw what happened. I saw you and him, together. I saw him when he carried you over to the window. I saw when he bit you.

I saw when you…'

Domnikiia put her hand to the collar of her nightdress and ripped it away to expose her neck. 'If he bit me, then where are the marks?' She arched her head first to one side and then the other, stretching her neck so that I could clearly see that there was no sign of any contact with a vampire.

Dumbstruck, I put my hand to her throat and stretched the skin, peering closely to verify what was already quite evident. I sat back down on the bed, bewildered, and she sat beside me. I lay my head in her lap and stared vacantly at the ceiling.

'I think perhaps you dreamed it, Lyosha,' she said soothingly, reminding me, for the first time, quite specifically of my mother. I shook my head miserably.

'No. It was no dream. I saw it. I saw something.'

'And you thought I had become a vampire?' There was a mocking tone in the question.

'Yes,' I said, and a tear came to my eye. I took her hand in mine and pressed it to my lips. She thought for a moment before the obvious question came to her.

'So what were you doing here this morning?'

'I came to kill you.'

She took it well. 'I see.'

'But I couldn't,' I explained.

She thought for a moment longer. 'So…' She didn't complete her question. Instead I felt her hands on my chest, pulling my shirt open, searching for something. 'You're not wearing it,' she said. 'The icon – you've taken it off.'

'I gave it to Dmitry.'

'But it would have protected you. If I had been… If I had been a vampire, I could have killed you – or worse. Are you mad? You gave away your only protection.'

'It doesn't work as protection,' I explained. 'They're not superstitious.'

'I'm superstitious,' Domnikiia shouted. 'It would have kept me off you.' She thought for a moment more. 'Is that what you wanted?' she asked, incredulous. 'You're an idiot, Aleksei Ivanovich; a sentimental idiot.' She paused before adding quietly, 'But thank you.'

'As if anything could keep you off me,' I muttered. She smiled and then bent forwards to kiss me.

'We still don't know what you saw,' she said, returning to the point. 'Perhaps they can do that – change their faces to look like someone else.'

'I never saw her face,' I confessed. I had realized already that my reasons for supposing it had been Domnikiia at all were scarcely substantial.

'Well, it looks like I had a lucky escape. I wouldn't like to have been killed by an idiot while I slept. So what did you see?'

'Just her back – her hair. It was so like yours.' I had already realized the implication.

'Oh my God!' whispered Domnikiia. 'Margarita! She sometimes uses this room when I'm not here. It's bigger than hers. The connecting door's never locked.' She sprang to her feet and went over to the door.

'Wait!' I called. 'Given what I saw, she'll be a vampire too by now.'

'So what am I supposed to do, just leave her?'

'Let me go first.'

'What if she is a vampire?'

'It's daytime,' I explained. 'She won't be able to do much.'

I picked up my dagger from the chair and then went over to the door. I felt Domnikiia, behind me, pressed close to my body. For all that I feared for her safety, it was reassuring to have her there. As I turned the door handle, I felt a debilitating weariness within me. I had no more stomach to be chasing around Moscow killing vampires, or even killing Frenchmen. I just wanted them all to go away and leave me to enjoy my life. But I knew I had to go on. I opened the door.

Inside, it was dark. The curtains were closed and in the little light that there was, I could make out a figure on the bed.

'Stay there,' I whispered to Domnikiia, and I began to edge my way towards the window, keeping my back always to the wall. When I got there, I wasted no time in pulling the curtain to one side and flooding the bedroom with light.

Iuda had not changed his attitude towards offspring. He remained, as he had once told me in that room of rotting corpses, free from the responsibility of long-term consequences. The purpose of the previous night's theatricals had not been to convert Margarita into another vampire who could accompany Iuda across the centuries. It had been purely a charade for my benefit, so that I would believe that Domnikiia had become a vampire and would then, as I so nearly had, kill her. For me to know that she died at my hand would make a vengeance upon me far sweeter than anything that Iuda could have done to her.

But once the performance had been acted out, Iuda had no further need for the bit players. On the bed, Margarita lay naked on her back. Her legs were together and straight and her arms lay limply stretched out on either side of her, in a grim mimicry of our crucified Lord. Her long, dark hair radiated from her head across the pillows like a halo, surrounding a face from which her dead eyes gazed blankly at the ceiling.

To her right side, sheets and pillows were drenched in vivid, red blood, which was also smeared over her stomach, breasts and cheeks. The right side of her throat was ripped open in a style that only a voordalak could achieve.

Domnikiia screamed.

Domnikiia did not stay at the brothel after that. None of them did. The authorities began an investigation. A brief look at my papers was enough to persuade them not to pester either myself or Domnikiia, although I doubt whether it did much to convince them of my innocence. I could have told them to terminate the investigation with all possible haste, but I chose not to. I wanted the nature of Iuda and the other Oprichniki to be known by everyone, but it was something that the police would have to find out for themselves. A simple account of the truth from me would not be believed.

As it was, they showed little interest in the history of one more body amongst the thousands. They were more concerned with identifying those in Moscow who had collaborated with the invaders. If they had chosen to speak with Domnikiia, they might well have perceived a discrepancy between her description of Margarita's body and what they found. An additional wound would have appeared.

After I had guided Domnikiia out of her colleague's room and into her own, but before summoning the police, I had returned to see Margarita once more. Her body was lifeless. Her dead eyes gave no reaction to changes in the light. Her flesh did not burn when it came into contact with the sun. For all anyone could tell, Iuda had caused her death, not begun her transformation. But I recalled another body that I had once seen in a not dissimilar state – the body of a young Russian soldier named Pavel, carried on a wooden cart through the streets of Moscow. He too had seemed dead. He too had been able to lie unaffected under the gaze of the sun. But his body had not decayed, the reason being that he had exchanged blood with a vampire and so had, within days or weeks, become one.

I could not let that happen. It took a single, swift, undebated thrust from my hand to rupture her dead heart with the wooden shaft of my dagger. How much easier it was for me to do that to Margarita than it ever could have been with Domnikiia.

Domnikiia stayed with me at the inn. It was not the best of times in our relationship. Domnikiia may have kept her soul, but her spirit had been dealt a heavy blow by the death of Margarita. Her vitality had faded to almost nothing. She didn't smile; she didn't joke; she didn't even hate. All those reactions were, I was sure, quite natural under the circumstances, and those qualities would return with time, but for now she was not even a shadow of the Domnikiia I had known and had loved. Worse, though, than losing those things I admired in her, I now found her dependency upon me stifling. Again this was no more than a temporary reaction to her shock, but it was a reminder to me that, whatever might happen to us, while we were together she would be my responsibility. I already had responsibilities – Marfa and Dmitry. It was not that I could not cope with another; it was simply that I didn't want to. Domnikiia was supposed to be my irresponsibility – the person with whom I need have no concern for the future or for the world outside. Now, more than ever, that was what I needed. The carnage that I had witnessed in those autumn months of 1812 had left me as an old man. I had lost the three people closest to me; Maks and Vadim by their very lives, Dmitry by the insuperable mistrust that had grown up between us. Dmitry's cowardly retreat from what faced him had turned out to be a wise response, one which now, only a few days later, I followed. The terror that had consumed me in Moscow after the fire had returned. Then safety had seemed to lie in flight, now it lay in immobility. Yet I would have liked Domnikiia – the real Domnikiia – to have been there to distract me from the reality of my inaction; either to fill my days with trivial frivolity or to stand up to me in a way that would either force me to justify my torpor or would shatter it.

Instead, she was simply meek. She could have goaded me into chasing west after either the French or the two surviving Oprichniki, or she could have begged me to stay with her in Moscow. As it was, I stayed, but not because she begged – she hardly spoke at all. The excuse for staying was my wounded arm, but it was well on the mend and I had ridden into battle with worse injuries. The reason for staying was fear.

Margarita's funeral took place three days after her death. She proved to have many friends and acquaintances who had taken the time out of their lives to attend, though few spoke to one another – particularly the men. Of the nine uniformed officers who attended, I was surprised to see that four outranked me. What was truly remarkable was that Margarita should have a funeral at all. The fires in Moscow had not killed many, but subsequent starvation had eradicated thousands, both native and invader. Most were still to be hauled into mass graves. From what I could gather, it was Pyetr Pyetrovich who had paid for the ceremony. His diligence in looking after his property now proved to stretch beyond simple good business.

Most significantly, the funeral marked a turning point in Domnikiia's mood. Having bid a formal farewell to her friend and colleague, some hints of her former charm began to re-emerge. Even so, the memory of her at her lowest always haunted me.

A few days later, as we sat in my rooms at the inn, she made an announcement.

'I'm going to get a job.'

'You have a job – or you will when Pyetr Pyetrovich reopens,' I told her. It sounded odd even as I spoke. Most men in my position would be delighted for their mistress to be giving up such a profession, but I had grown used to it.

'I can't go back there. What happened to Margarita… Well, even if it hadn't been Iuda, it could have been someone else. It could happen to me one day.'

'Will Pyetr Pyetrovich let you leave?' I was not trying to place obstacles in her way, but it must have come across as such.

'If he doesn't, he'll have you to answer to.'

I went over and kissed her cheek. 'He certainly will.' I sat down beside her. 'So what will you do?'

'I could work in a shop, or go into service.'

'I might know people who would take you on as a maid.'

'Here or in Petersburg?'

'Some here; mostly in Petersburg though.'

'I'd prefer Moscow,' she replied. I'd prefer you in Moscow too, I thought, but didn't say it.

'On the other hand,' she asked thoughtfully, 'wouldn't your wife like a new maid?'

A momentary image of the convenience of such an arrangement was quickly banished by the unending riskiness of its reality. A wife in one city and a mistress in another was a comfortable arrangement. To have both in the same city would add spice. To have both in the same household was the stuff of Molière. It could never be. I knew she would understand that in the long run, but in her present mood a blunt refusal could be damaging.

'Wouldn't you like that?' she went on. Still I could find no response to give to her. 'Prostak,' she murmured softly.

It was a word that one heard a lot in the army, especially among card-players; an insult that they applied to anyone who was an easy mark.

'I beg your pardon,' I said with mock offence.

'You heard,' she replied. I don't know whether she had been trying to trick me all along, or whether this was just to save us both embarrassment. Either way, it was a joy to hear her speak again with that easy impertinence. 'I'm not surprised Iuda found it so easy to fool you,' she added slyly.

Sometimes her humour could be less of a joy.

'Captain Danilov!'

I had just walked out the door of the inn. It was a week now since Margarita's death; a month since Bonaparte's departure. Snow lay thickly on the ground. I turned my head to see where the call had come from.

I smiled broadly, recognizing the familiar face that emerged from a doorway across the street. It was Natalia.

She ran over to hug me. I held her tightly for a few moments, clinging to her as the only person in my world who had not become terrifyingly unfamiliar over the past days and weeks.

'And how are you, my dear Natasha?' I asked.

'I'm good. Well, better than when you last saw us. We have a roof over us. Father has work. What about you?'

'I'm well – a little war weary. I meant to come and see you.'

We walked along the street as we talked, as Muscovites habitually do in winter, avoiding the cold that would penetrate our bones if we stayed still.

'That's all right,' she said. 'Captain Petrenko said you'd be busy fighting the French.'

'You've seen Dmitry?' I asked, surprised that he had been in Moscow.

She nodded. 'He said he's going after them too.'

'After the French?'

'No, after the English,' she said with heavy sarcasm. And why not? She had no reason to suspect that Dmitry or I had any enemy other than Bonaparte.

'When did you see him?'

'Um… five days ago.'

'How was he?'

'Like you – exhausted, but he still carried on.' I wondered if this was meant as a jibe at me. 'I told him not to go – said the French would leave without his help. But he said he owed it to you. Did you make him go?'

'Not on purpose.'

'Are you going to go after him?'

I thought for a while, but with no conclusion. 'I don't know,' I told her.

'Then today, I got a letter from him,' she continued. I was taken aback by the fact that a girl of her status could even read, but the possibility of news from Dmitry was far more consuming.

'What did he say?' I asked urgently.

'That's between him and me,' she replied, with a proud smirk. 'But he did enclose this for you.' She handed me a small envelope. 'He said it was safer than sending it to you. Does that mean there are still French spies about?'

I looked at the package in my hands. The word 'Aleksei' in Dmitry's hand was all that was written on the outside. It was very thin – it might only contain a single sheet, but I was desperate to read it.

'Do you think?' asked Natalia.

'Think what?'

'That there are still French spies in Moscow.'

'Probably not,' I said distractedly. 'But Dmitry is always cautious.'

'You want to read that, don't you?'

I nodded.

'I thought you would. That's why I brought it straight here. I'll let you get on with it.'

'Thank you,' I said with a smile. I kissed her hand and said goodbye.

'Will you come and visit us?' she asked.

'Of course.'

'That's what Mitka said.'

'Then that's what he'll do.' And that was one thing concerning Dmitry of which I felt sure.

I opened the letter as soon as I got back to the inn. It was dated the third of November, three days previously, and was typically succinct.

Aleksei,

I think I have tracked down Iuda and Foma. They have infiltrated the French army and are retreating with them. While my every instinct is to leave them to it, I know you will disagree, and I think it is time that I deferred to you on this. I am staying in Smolensk, at the hostelry by the Dnieper where we stayed last time we were here (Я8). Please join me here with all speed,

Your friend and comrade,

Dmitry Fetyukovich Petrenko.

I no longer had the excuse of my arm to keep me in Moscow – it had almost healed. I no longer had the excuse of not knowing where I should go – Dmitry's letter told me. There was no way that I could avoid setting out once again, nor did I want to.

I showed the letter to Domnikiia. She read it swiftly. 'How long do you think it will take?' she asked.

'Who says I'm going?'

She pulled a face to tell me that I was fooling her no more than I was fooling myself. My fear required excuses, and the letter left me with none.

'You think I should go, after all Dmitry's done?' I asked her.

'No, but you think you should.'

'And you don't mind?'

'Would it make any odds if I did?' She was probably right.

I rushed downstairs and ordered a horse to be prepared, then returned and began to pack, with Domnikiia's help. I was soon ready. I wrote down a list of names of people that I knew in Moscow who might employ her, along with a hasty letter of recommendation. I held both her hands as I stood at the doorway. It suddenly felt more like adieu than au revoir.

'You'll have a job by the time I get back,' I told her.

'Maybe,' she said quietly, then she gazed intently into my eyes. 'Please don't go, Lyosha,' she implored. I considered for a moment, but no longer than that.

'I have to.'

She smirked. 'You see,' she said. 'No odds whatsoever. You're so easy, Lyosha, you prostak.'

I smiled broadly and embraced her tightly.

'I will be back,' I whispered.

I went out into the winter street, mounted my horse and set off westwards once again, this time in pursuit not of the French, but of the last two remaining Oprichniki.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE SMOLENSK ROAD WAS SCARCELY RECOGNIZABLE COMPARED with when I had last seen it. The hot, hazy warmth of summer had been replaced by a deep blanket of snow. The road itself was well trodden and the snow often gave way to slush and in places even to mud. I too had changed. Twelve weeks before, four of us had set out, confident and comradely, eager to defend our land and trusting of our new allies, the Oprichniki. Now only Dmitry and I were left, and the trust between us was fragile. Vadim and Maksim both lay silent in anonymous graves. The French had come to Moscow and they had gone. Had we or the Oprichniki played any significant part in that? I doubted it. Bonaparte's fate was sealed the moment he stepped across the border from Poland. In the west they simply don't understand how much east there is. Warsaw is a long, long way from Paris. If Bonaparte could get that far, could Moscow be much further? In reality, it's as far from Warsaw as Warsaw is from Paris, and the journey is a hundred times more dangerous.

Along the road were various signs of the devastation brought by the armies that had marched back and forth over the past weeks. In villages along the way, buildings had been destroyed by fire or, sometimes, by simple, brute force. This may have been caused by the French as they advanced, but more likely by the Russians as they retreated – not just the Russian army but also the very Russian peasants who lived in those villages. The policy of destruction that had been so effective in Moscow was also enacted wherever Bonaparte's army chose to march.

Beyond Mozhaysk, a new and horrible feature began to decorate the landscape, increasing by degree with every verst that I covered. Bonaparte's original plan had been to return by a different route from that by which he came, travelling to the south of the main Moscow to Smolensk road. But at Maloyaroslavets, the battle from which the French captain hanging at the crossroads at Kurilovo had fled, General Kutuzov had forced Bonaparte to turn from that path, back to the north. Mozhaysk was where the French had rejoined the main road, and there began the debris of an army in flight.

Horses – French horses – lay dead beside the road in their hundreds. Exhaustion, starvation and the freezing cold might have been to blame for some of them, but many were down simply to the ignorance or laziness of the French blacksmiths. The horses' shoes lacked the three calkins that a Russian smith would have instinctively added in winter to stop the shoe slipping on ice. Once a horse had lost its footing on the ice-covered road, there would have been little that it, or its rider, could do to raise it. I heard later that the starving French soldiers fell upon each stumbling horse even as it struggled hopelessly to regain its footing, hacking it to pieces in order to feed themselves. Only a fraction of the horses' bodies exhibited the kindness of a bullet to the head.

Even so, men succumbed to the same environment as did their mounts. The reason that the bodies only of horses and not men lay abandoned in the snow was probably not so much that men were dying in any few numbers, but that their comrades had made some effort to bury them. As their journey – and, following in their footsteps, my journey – continued, they had begun to forget such sensibilities. The bodies of men lay ever more frequently beside the bodies of fallen horses.

As I passed each body – be it of a man or a horse – a flurry of birds would launch themselves into the air, frightened by my passing. Once I had gone by, they would return to peck at what flesh still remained. Soon after Mozhaysk, I caught sight of huge flocks of crows circling some way in front of me. While the sound of birds may herald hope – the new dawn – the sight of them is so often an indicator that death is nearby. I soon realized that I was approaching the field of Borodino. I had seen little of the main battlefield on the day, though I had heard much of its horror from survivors. But now as I approached, almost three months later, I saw for myself for the first time how great the death toll had been.

There had not been a moment to pause for breath – certainly not for my country – since that battle, and so little effort had been made to clear away the dead; at least, little human effort. Dogs, wolves and scavenging birds had picked what they could from the thousands of bodies, yet still enough remained to make it clear where each man had fallen. The road ran for about eight versts through the battlefield, with the village of Borodino itself marking the mid-point. On either side, the bodies of the dead spread outwards as far as I could see. The French, from what I could see, had at least made some attempt to bury their dead after the battle, but they had not been thorough; many that had been hastily buried had subsequently been disinterred by the heavy rain. It was impossible – not to say repellent – to count, but the carcasses numbered in their tens of thousands. It was as though some extraterrestrial giant had chosen to slap his hand against the surface of the earth at that point, flattening with one blow all those men who stood beneath it. But no such unworldly explanation was needed. Each man that had died here had died in the way that most men die – at the hands of others. I spurred my horse and rode through as quickly as I could. Even beyond the battlefield, there was no let-up in the accompaniment of the dead. Now, though, it was once again not the bodies of those who had died in battle but of those who had died in retreat. It was not worth a debate as to which was more sickening.

From people I spoke to along the way, I learned that it was not just frost and starvation that was killing the retreating French; it was the Russian peasantry as well. When the French passed through a village they were welcomed with open arms, given food and brandy and put into a warm bed, only to have their throats slit or receive a bullet to the head as they slept. I recalled the hanging body of the French captain who had been lynched at Kurilovo. There was no reason that the serfs should have any sympathy for the invaders. Even if they did, they would still follow their master's orders and kill them without pity.

It took me three days to get to Smolensk. Fresh horses and accommodation were not plentiful along the way, but they were sufficient. It had been two weeks since the French had passed along that road. What had been a hostile trail through an unfriendly foreign land for them had, of necessity, become a vital supply line for the Russian forces that pursued them. Horses and victuals that had been moved away from the road during the French advance had surged back in after their retreat, as though Napoleon were Moses leading his army of Israelites across the Red Sea, except that what was drawn away in advance of him and returned behind him would have brought life, not death to his army.

Smolensk was changed in much the same way that Moscow had been – it was ruined and burnt. And whereas Moscow had been freed from French hands after only five weeks, Smolensk had been held for three months. The final days of the occupation had seen a complete breakdown in discipline as the cold, beleaguered, frightened remains of Bonaparte's army had ransacked the city that they passed through in their retreat. There had been less than two weeks for rebuilding to take place. It was in a worse state than I had ever seen Moscow.

I went to the inn from where Dmitry had sent his letter. I had stayed there earlier in the year, but I did not recognize the proprietor. A brief conversation with him revealed that his predecessor, a cousin of his, had been killed in the first French attacks. There was a letter for me from Dmitry, dated two days before.

Aleksei,

Sorry for not staying to wait for you. It's not that I'm impatient or doubt you will come, but I have discovered the precise whereabouts of Foma. He and Iuda had been together, but now I cannot find any trace of Iuda. If I can capture Foma alone, then I may be able to use him as bait to tempt Iuda into the open. If not, I will have at least reduced their numbers by one. In either case, I would appreciate your help. Out here, our list of places to meet has become very sparse. I will try to make it to the farmhouse north of Yurtsevo (U1) and wait there as long as possible.

As ever,

Dmitry.

Yurtsevo was another two or three days' journey to the west. I was cold, tired and saddle-sore. I spent a long, well-earned night in Smolensk before continuing after Dmitry. His plan was at best foolhardy. Capturing Foma might not be impossible, but were I to catch him, I would not keep him alive for long enough for Iuda to come to his aid. I would kill him within seconds. Better yet, I would kill him before he even knew I was there. Whatever desire I might once have had to allow these creatures to be aware of their deaths was now lost in the pragmatic expediency of my own fear.

The idea that Iuda would put his own life at any risk for any of his fellows was the most laughable part of Dmitry's scheme. Of all the Oprichniki, Iuda was the least human – the least likely to be swayed by any sense of camaraderie or partnership. But Dmitry had asked for my help, and I had to give it. I had little interest in small fry like Foma, but if he or Dmitry had any clue as to where I might find Iuda, then that would be of help to me.

Early the next day, I set out west once again. The ground was still frozen to iron and the wind still blew a blizzard that would cover with snow anything or anyone that remained unmoving for more than a few minutes. Yurtsevo was only a few versts north of the city of Orsha. The going that far was relatively easy, always downhill along the Dnieper valley, with plenty of places along the way to get a meal and a fresh horse.

The road to the west was still lined with the bodies of horses and men. Many of the men had been stripped of their possessions and even their clothes. I was not chauvinistic enough to believe that such desecration of the French dead could not have been perpetrated by Russian peasants or even by Russian soldiers, but it would have been their fellow Frenchmen who had the first opportunity to plunder the bodies of their fallen comrades, and they too who were in the direst need of extra clothing.

I was in Orsha in two more days, and after resting the night there, I set out on the final leg of my journey, to Yurtsevo. This was no longer a route of well-trodden roads between large, populous towns. When we had drawn up our list of meeting places, we had had little idea whether we would be meeting under the benign reign of Tsar Aleksandr or under the occupation of the invader Bonaparte. Moreover, it had been under a glorious summer sky that we had made our plans. Then the road from Orsha to Yurtsevo would have been a pleasant one through verdant woodland. Had we known the eventual circumstances, we would have chosen to meet by the largest fireplace inside the warmest tavern in Orsha. As it was, we had chosen a place where a man could die in November and be discovered in a state of perfect, frozen preservation the following March. But at least the road was no longer one that had been trod by the French, and so too it was no longer paved with carcasses of horses and of men. Even so, this slight recompense was soon forgotten in the face of the gnawing cold.

I began to doubt whether there was any point in my continuing when the depth of the snow reached up to my knees – and taking into account that I was still mounted on my horse. I had tried dismounting and leading my horse through the great drifts of snow, and for a while we had made swifter progress. But in places the snow was so deep that it would have been above my head. The prospect of me reaching the rendezvous was bleak, and even if I did, I was in grave doubt as to whether Dmitry would have made it there too. On the other hand, I believed that I was now nearer to Yurtsevo than I was to Orsha, and so to advance was the most sensible option.

The snow grew deeper. There were times when the drifts were so high that we had to plough through them like a ship frozen fast in the icy Baltic. The top of the snow was higher than my horse's head and it was only down to the sense of either trust or fear that she held for me that I was able to coax her to walk onwards along a path she could not see. Through half a dozen layers of clothing, the cold bit into me with a carnivorous aggression. How my horse bore it, I cannot tell.

It was after nightfall when I first saw the lights of the village. On any normal night they would have been a beacon to guide us home, but through the blowing snow they were but a glimpse, to be seen one moment and gone the next. Having first seen them, though they then disappeared, I headed towards them. Five minutes later I saw them again, this time to the left and further away. I spurred the horse and she grudgingly turned towards the lights. The wind and snow lashed against the tiny gap between my hat and my collar from which my face peeped out. It would have been more comfortable to be whipped across the eyes than to endure that frozen blast.

It was another ten minutes before I saw the lights of the village again. This time they were closer, but still to the left, at right angles to the direction in which we had been heading. I tried to turn my horse once again, but she would not move. It was no stubbornness on her part, she was simply stuck fast. She tried to neigh, but the sound was muffled by the insinuating snow that filled her mouth and nostrils. I dismounted and found that I could no longer see the village lights. I was in a snowdrift of which the top was way above my head. I scrabbled through the mountain of snow before me, tearing out handful after handful and casting them aside, but new snow built up far, far more quickly than I could disperse it. Soon, I could move neither my legs nor my hands. With each movement I made, the snow froze even harder to ice and tightened its grip upon me. I would be moving no further that night, and if I did not move that night, I would never move anywhere again. With hope gone, the cold seemed to double in its intensity, and I knew that I would quickly succumb.

I chose in my last moments to turn my mind to pleasant things. Images of my wife and my son came to me, but were quickly dismissed by thoughts of Domnikiia. My mind's eye became detached from my body and flew back to Moscow to observe her. It dwelt on her large eyes, her lips, her pale earlobes. I observed her closely, though she was unaware of my presence. I brought to mind the chatter of her voice, and even though I could make out no individual word, the sound of it was a perfect rendition of the real Domnikiia. It would have been hard to discover a more contented frame of mind in which to die.

Through the whistling of the wind, I heard the howl of a wolf, which was soon accompanied by a second. I prayed that the cold would render me insensible before the wolves got to me. At the same time, I remembered the folklore that the voordalak could transform itself into a wolf. I modified my prayer. If the cold could not save me, at least let the howling come from regular, respectable wolves.

I remember being dragged across the snowy ground, and the sound of voices shouting all around me. I also remember the impression of mouths and sharp teeth close to my face, the repellent smell of half-digested flesh rising from a carnivorous gullet and the curiously pleasant sensation of my face being licked

.

When I awoke, the one concept that cut its way through an abundance of feelings was that of warmth. I was wrapped in a heavy fur, and near me a fire blazed in an iron stove, filling the room with heat. I tasted brandy on my lips, which must have been forced between them while I was unconscious. Beside the fire, breathing heavily, their tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths, lay two huge dogs. They could well be mistaken for wolves. Their fur was a mixture of grey and white and their grey eyes looked towards me with a blank curiosity. One of the dogs raised an eyebrow as it turned its gaze away from me towards the source of a sound.

'Drink some more brandy!'

The voice came from just behind me. A tall, bulky man stood a little away from the fire, staring into its dancing flames, breathing in its warmth through large, hairy nostrils. On the table beside me was a glass of dark liquor, with a bottle beside it. I drank and the man refilled it for me.

'Thank you,' I said, drinking again from the replenished glass.

'You're a long way from the rest of the troops,' he said.

'How did you know I was a soldier?' I asked.

'You carry a sword, even though you wear no uniform.'

'How did you know I wasn't French?'

'I didn't until you spoke,' he explained, placing a cocked pistol gently on the table beside him, 'but I do now.'

The fact that we both spoke Russian was as reassuring to me as it was to him. This far west, I could just as easily have found myself in a Polish household, where a Russian soldier might have encountered a less friendly welcome.

The dogs turned their heads across the room to the door. Another man entered, younger than the first, but still of the same powerful build.

'He's awake then,' said the newcomer.

'Yes,' replied the other, 'and he seems to be on our side, although he still hasn't told me what he's doing here.'

'I'm supposed to be meeting someone,' I explained. 'This is Yurtsevo?'

'It is,' said the older man.

'There's a farm about a verst north of here,' I went on, 'towards Mezhevo.'

'Not any more. It burnt down.'

'The French?' I asked.

'Not even the French. It burnt down more than a year ago.'

'I see. I think my friend will still try to meet me there.'

'We haven't seen anyone. Mind you, in this weather, they could walk past the village and never see it – or walk through the village and we'd never see them. You were lucky the dogs caught your scent.'

'There was that smoke we saw from over there the other day, Pa,' said the younger man.

'When?' I asked.

'Yesterday, or the day before.'

'I must go and find him,' I said, rising from my chair.

'Not tonight, you don't,' said the older man. He put his meaty hand on my shoulder and pushed me back into my seat with an enormous, casual strength that reminded me of the force that the vampire Pavel had used to hold me against the wall. As the man moved, his dogs rose swiftly to their feet and silently bared their teeth. 'You go in the morning,' he told me firmly.

I spent the night in the chair where I had been sitting, revelling in the warmth given to me by the furs and the fire. I was woken early when a woman – I presumed from her age that she was the older man's wife – came in to refuel the fire. Later, she beckoned me into another room, where I shared a silent breakfast with her and her husband and son.

Soon after dawn, the head of the household turned to me.

'You're still planning on going out to the farm?' he asked.

'I have to,' I replied.

'Well, I won't offer to come with you, but I'll show you the road. It's not far, but in this weather it's treacherous. You should leave your horse here and go on foot.'

'My horse is alive?' I asked in surprise. I hadn't even thought to consider it.

'Why shouldn't she be? She was in a lot better state to survive the weather than you were when we found you.'

I put my overcoat and hat back on and we went outside. The village was not large and the buildings seemed to huddle together for warmth in the winter cold. It had stopped snowing and the wind was lighter than it had been, but it was still bitterly cold. We walked along the single main street to the edge of the village.

'That's the road to take,' the man told me, pointing to a path that could only be discerned as a vague gap in the trees. 'It's only about a verst. There's still enough of the buildings left for you to recognize it, unless the snow's covered it.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'If you're not back in three hours, I won't be coming to look for you, because you'll be dead. I'll bury you in the spring, if the wolves leave anything of you.'

I offered him my hand, but he preferred not to take his out of his deep pockets. I headed along the road he had indicated. I turned back to wave to him, but he had already turned and I saw only his stooping back as he trudged towards the warmth of his home.

The wind blew up again soon after I set off, directly against my direction of travel, making each step more tiresome and whipping sharp flecks of snow across my face. It seemed preposterous that Dmitry had ever got here, let alone that he would have stayed here, and yet being so close, it would be ridiculous for me to turn back. The same thought might well have passed through Dmitry's mind. If he had got this far, he would have gone further, and that could be said of him even if 'this far' had only been a single step. Besides, there had been smoke, so someone had been there and that was most likely Dmitry, though it was still improbable that he had stayed.

It was thanks only to a lucky break in the wind that I didn't walk straight past the ruins of the small farmhouse. The snow had not completely covered the charred remains, which still bore some resemblance to the basic shape of the building, but shrouded in the blizzard they would have been hard to spot. Walking through the blackened timbers, I saw on the far side of the structure the remains of a more recent fire – this time a campfire. The gnarled shapes of snow-encrusted logs that had been pulled up to sit on partially ringed a wide patch of burnt wood and cinders. I put my hand to it and felt that the fire was now completely cold. It had been more than a day since it had been burning. However, I was now certain that Dmitry had been here. No one would cast more than a passing glance at this cold, deserted place, let alone stop and make a fire, unless they had reason to be there. I too had made it to the appointment, but I was too late.

I searched around the ruins of the farmhouse, looking for a message from Dmitry in the code that had served us so well, hoping to discover where he had moved on to. It did not take me long to find it. A blackened, half-burnt tabletop had been leaned against what was once a door post. It was plastered with drifted snow, but as I wiped it clean I found Dmitry's message scratched firmly into its surface:

Three days ago. Unquestionably, it had been too long to wait in this overwhelming cold, but there was no further message to indicate where he might have gone. I brushed off the rest of the snow from the tabletop and then did the same on the other side, but there was nothing more. I went back over to the place where Dmitry had made his fire and sat on one of the logs. Its hard, twisted knots dug into me and its coldness seeped into my flesh.

What was I to do now? Dmitry clearly had been here, but where had he gone? Had his plan to capture Foma succeeded, or was he yet to carry it out, or had Foma somehow turned the tables on him? Worse still, had Dmitry's plan gone even further? Had he successfully used Foma as bait, only to find himself defeated by Iuda? That could mean that Iuda was still somewhere hereabouts, waiting for my arrival. I thanked the Lord that I had arrived in the daytime.

I could only act on the assumption that Dmitry was still alive, otherwise anything I did would be futile. If I were in his circumstances, then what I would have done would be to attempt to join up with the regular army. From what I had heard in Orsha, they were heading for Borisov in an attempt to prevent Bonaparte from crossing the Berezina. That was only a couple of days' ride away. My best guess was that that would be where Dmitry would go, and so that was where I would follow.

The decision made, I drew in my feet to stand up. As I did so, I disturbed the snow beside the log I was sitting on, revealing something that glinted in the sunlight. I bent forward and cleared away more snow to discover that it was a fine silver chain, of the sort used for a necklace or bracelet. I pulled it out of the snow and found that it was caught under one of the stunted branches that protruded from the log. As I cleared the snow further, I suddenly leapt to my feet with a startled gasp.

This was not a branch; it was a human hand.

I had not been sitting on a log, but on a frozen, rigid, human corpse.

CHAPTER XXIX

EVEN BEFORE I HAD CLEARED THE SNOW AWAY, I KNEW THAT IT was Dmitry. His body was, in fact, lying alongside the log on which he must have been sitting. Once he had collapsed, the blowing snow had covered them both, making them appear as a single object. I brushed the snow from his beard and hair and eyes to reveal his face. His lips and his eyes were tightly shut and his expression revealed no agony of death, just the solid determination of a man facing up to a night in the cold.

The silver chain that had first hinted at Dmitry's presence still trailed from his tightly clasped hand. I prised his fingers open one by one and found within the icon that I had given him the last time we had spoken, just after we had buried Maksim. I had been proved right and Domnikiia wrong. It had offered him no protection from death. I decided against exposing myself to the cold by putting it back around my neck. Instead I wrapped the chain around the small image of Christ and put it in my pocket.

There were no wounds on Dmitry's body that I could see; none, certainly, to his neck. Dmitry had, like so many of the fleeing French invaders, succumbed to no more terrifying an enemy than the Russian winter – an enemy more powerful, more reliable and far more ruthless than the Oprichniki could ever be.

One question remained. Had Dmitry captured Foma, as had been his plan? I glanced around the other logs that lay beside the burnt-out fire with new eyes. Each one could be interpreted through the thick snow as a twisted corpse, crawling across the ground in the agonies of death. When my eyes finally fell upon Foma's body, the form of a man became irrefutably clear. Once the idea that it might be a body had been put in my mind, what I saw could be interpreted in no other way.

Foma was lying on his front. A nodule which protruded from his back at about the level of his hips I took to be his hands, tied behind his back by Dmitry when he was captured. It surprised me that his body could exist at all outside in the daylight. I had seen the effects of the sun on Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich, and knew that little should remain. I could only surmise that the snow provided sufficient protection for his body from the sun's rays, or alternatively that once he had died of the cold and his body had frozen solid, then it was impossible for the sun to have any further effect upon it.

The body was some way away from Dmitry's, back towards the burnt-out house. It looked as though Foma had been crawling – or rather wriggling, with both his hands and his feet bound – away from Dmitry and towards relative safety. Perhaps Dmitry had yielded to the cold sooner than Foma and he had been taking the opportunity to escape, though to where he could escape I did not know. It did not matter. Foma too had become a lump of solid, icy flesh before he had got any distance.

I poked Foma's remains through the snow with the tip of my sword. He was quite solid, like stone or ice. Two days outside in this weather could turn to rock any living thing that did not keep moving. I rolled the lifeless corpse on to its back and leaned over it, wiping a little snow away from the face to verify that it was indeed Foma. It most certainly was. He had died with his eyes open, and looking into them I recognized the blackness that in life had been no more expressive than it now was in death.

The eyes flicked suddenly to the left and then to the right. I started with surprise and then looked again. He repeated the action twice, with a pause in between. Foma was not human, he was a vampire. Just as a stab wound that would kill a mortal man had no effect on a vampire, so it was impossible that a vampire could freeze to death. Though his whole body had cooled to the temperature of the world around him at tens of degrees of frost, though every fluid that had once flowed within him had now turned to solid ice, still life, or the vampire equivalent of life, could not be extinguished.

Only his eyes remained movable, though they themselves must have been tiny, hard balls of ice. They now moved rapidly in all directions through the only gap in the outer skin of snow that he had acquired, like the eyes of a man peering through a frosty window at a cosy, warm, firelit room. I was reminded of how I had seen him once before, standing frozen against the wall of an alleyway in Moscow, only his eyes moving as he inspected the potential prey that walked past him. Then his immobility had been voluntary, to help him in his concealment. Now it was forced upon him.

I do not know what it was, if anything, that Foma had been trying to communicate to me. Perhaps he had not been thinking at all, or had not even recognized that it was I who had discovered him. Perhaps they were just the eye movements of his dreams, revealed to the world now that he was unable to shut his frozen eyelids. He could be harbouring no hope that I would save him, but he might perhaps be hoping that I would kill him quickly, that he would die now rather than remain in this state of limbo until spring, when the warmth of the strengthening sun would obliterate both the winter snow and the vampire that lay shrouded within it.

As it was, his death was immediate, but by no intent of mine. I cleared a little more of the snow from his face, to see if he was capable of any further movement beyond that of his eyes. My shadow may have protected him before, but as the first blush of sunlight hit his cheek, it began to smoulder. I leapt back away from him, realizing what was about to happen. What I witnessed was strangely beautiful, not just in that I could take pleasure at the death of another of these creatures – I was becoming too jaded for that – but also in the spectacle of the display. It was as good as any show of fireworks I have seen in Moscow or Petersburg. Through the small patch of skin that I had cleared, the sun began to burn the vampire. This in turn melted more snow and even incinerated his clothes, exposing more flesh for the sun to work upon. A sparkling line of flame radiated out from Foma's head and ran in seconds down the length of his whole body, the heat melting ever more snow and the melted snow revealing ever more fuel for the combustion. A sound like the roaring of a fire combined with the whistling of the wind was emitted, following the line of flame down his body. For a moment, there was only a glow of blinding white in the shape of a man's body – reminiscent of the image I have always had of our Lord's ascension – but it quickly faded.

Soon, nothing remained but a pool of melted snow, some of which was warm enough to steam slightly. Within minutes, the winter had reasserted itself and the pool had frozen back to a gleaming sheet of ice.

I would have liked to bury Dmitry. He had been a friend for a long time; seven years. We had never been as close as Maks and I had been, but that was merely a result of our personalities, not of our hearts. He and I had trusted one another – we all had – and though, as with Maks, my trust had faltered for a moment, it had returned. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to be sure that Dmitry was aware of that. I hoped that somehow Maks was now similarly aware.

But to bury Dmitry was impossible. Even if I had had tools, the frozen earth was as hard as rock, and I would not have been able to dig deep. The best I could do was to cover him with snow and make a cross out of a couple of charred pieces of wood from the house. I hoped I would have the opportunity to return before spring and lay him to rest more properly.

I headed back to Yurtsevo. The wind, which had been against me as I had travelled away from the village, had contrived to change direction so that it was still against me as I went towards it. The snowy gale once more bit into my face, but the return journey was easier for the fact that I knew how far it was to my destination.

Once in the village, I knocked on the door of my saviours. The younger man answered.

'Did you find him?'

'No,' I replied, keeping it simple.

'I told you,' said his father, coming up behind him. 'I suppose you'll be wanting to stay here tonight as well?'

'No,' I said. 'I think I should be able to make it back to Orsha today.'

'You don't want to get lost like you did last night.'

'I'll try not to.'

'Show him his horse,' the man said to his son. The son, accompanied by the two huge wolf-like dogs, padding faithfully by his side, led me to a stable, where I found my horse fed and rested. We walked back to the house and the father handed over my bags.

'Thank you for your help,' I said to them both, as warmly as their gruff demeanours allowed.

'We're Christians,' said the father, the implication being that it was a duty, not a pleasure. I handed him some money. He looked at it with contempt – whether because it was too little or because I offered it at all, I could not tell – and then slipped it into his pocket. Their door was closed even before I had mounted my horse.

The journey back to Orsha was easy enough in daylight. The snow had already covered any traces of my journey the previous night, and though I tried to see where I had gone off the road, I could not. The sun was beginning to set as I entered the town. I gazed at it in the western sky, knowing that in that direction lay what was left of the French and with them, to the best of my knowledge, Iuda – the sole remaining Oprichnik. Back in the other direction, along the same road, was Moscow and in it Domnikiia. To the north was another road that stretched all the way to Petersburg – to my wife and my son. I returned to the same inn that I had been in two nights before. Any decisions about the day – and the days – to come could be deferred.

I ate and bathed and sank into an untroubled sleep.

When I awoke, I had come to a decision. The fine decision, the one in which would lie soul-searching and angst, was between Moscow and Petersburg, and so I chose the third path, to head west and rejoin the body of the army. It was the basis on which I knew many other soldiers had made their decisions to join up – to escape the complexity of trying to live their lives by opting for a world where they could simply pass the time trying to avoid their deaths. There was little chance, I thought, that I would be able to find Iuda (though some chance that he would find me), but even so, I could do some good helping to rout the French using the traditional methods of soldiery with which I felt the need to be reacquainted.

Still the refuse of the retreating French lay by the roadside, and became ever more sickening. Even before Orsha, I had noticed more and more that the dead horses had not simply died; they had been butchered. I could not blame the starving, desperate soldiers for turning to eating their faithful former companions in order to save their own lives. It would have started out with the horses dying of cold or of starvation; only then would they have been seen as meat. Later, though, even healthy horses had come to be regarded as a source of food, and were slaughtered deliberately. Again, I could not blame the men who did that. It was some slight respite that, as I carried on along the road, the bodies of mares and stallions became fewer and further between.

But as I headed towards Orsha, those tell-tale signs that I had seen on the carcasses of horses now became evident on the bodies of men. As the last horses died, so one food supply dried up. The living, who had already learned how to extract something nourishing from the body of a horse, had switched to applying the same skills to the bodies of their fellow men. Starvation had led to cannibalism. As with the horses, it would have begun with the violation of the bodies of those who were already dead. It would not have gone on to killing men for their meat – surely.

Was this the beginning of the path down which the Oprichniki, or their ancestors, had once, long ago, embarked? But no. As I had seen in the barn, and as Pyetr had told me, the Oprichniki ate not for sustenance, but for pleasure. They could not be compared with the degraded, starving men who had turned in desperation to the flesh of their comrades. But then, I too ate for pleasure. Nourishment is a requirement, but it was only the tiniest fraction of the motivation behind any meal I had enjoyed in the lowliest tavern in Moscow. Was there some parallel moment in the histories of vampires and humanity when consumption was transformed from a necessity into a vice?

I was closing now on the rearguard of our own Russian armies, and the road became busier with stragglers trying to catch up and with couriers ferrying messages in both directions. Still no one bothered even to begin to clear up the mess that the Grande Armée had left in its wake; and nor did I. Bonaparte had not yet been vanquished. There would be time for clearing up later.

Two days out of Orsha, and still some way east of Borisov, I came upon a fairly large encampment of Russian troops. I rode up to the sentries and dismounted. It had already been dark for some hours, and they were wary of a man who did not wear a uniform.

'Password?' one of them barked at me.

'I've no idea, I'm afraid,' I told him, 'but here are my papers.' I handed over my credentials, which he inspected. They were clear enough to convince him of my rank and also gave him some idea I was not a part of the regular army. Beyond that, he judged it better not to ask questions.

'Can you take me to your commanding officer?' I asked him once he had returned the papers. He ran to a tent and returned with a young man of about twenty, in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant of the imperial guard infantry.

'Captain Danilov, I take it?' I acknowledged his greeting. 'My name's Tarasov. Pleased to meet you. So what brings a man in your line of business to the front line?' There was no sign of resentment in his words. He was a professional soldier, and understood there are many ways in which a man can serve his country. With a gesture of his hand, he indicated that I should follow him through the camp.

'I've come to fight,' I explained as we walked.

'I see,' he said, with a hint of disbelief. 'Fed up with the spying game then?'

'There's no one left to spy on.'

'There'll be no one left to fight soon, either, thank heavens. If I'd been in your shoes I'd have given it another couple of weeks and Bonaparte would have been long dead.'

'I need to feel the sword in my hand once again.'

Tarasov laughed the laugh of a man who did not, in his heart, understand my sentiments. 'Well, good for you,' he said.

'So what is the French disposition at present?' I asked.

'They're pretty much trapped at Borisov,' he explained. 'They were hoping to cross the Berezina there, but Admiral Tchitchagov got in before them from the west and burnt the bridge.'

'Do they need a bridge?' I asked. 'Surely the river must be frozen pretty solid by now.'

'Ah, no. They may have Bonaparte, but we have God on our side. Haven't you noticed the thaw?' I looked at him in his heavy greatcoat, hat, scarf and gloves. He was more sensitive than I if he could notice any thaw. 'The river was frozen, but it's flowing again now. They'll never get across.'

'So we're going in for the kill?'

'Well, we can't leave them there, can we? Kutuzov is coming in from the south as well. They're trapped.'

'And who's in charge here?'

'Wittgenstein,' said Tarasov proudly.

'So will Bonaparte fight?'

'He doesn't stand a chance. He'll have to surrender.'

'That doesn't sound like him. Maybe he'll head south.'

'It won't help him. The river just gets wider downstream. He won't find anywhere to cross.'

'Until it freezes again,' I put in.

'Then he'll freeze too.'

We had come to a tent. Tarasov went inside and then soon returned to beckon me in, announcing me at the same time.

'Captain Danilov, sir!'

'Thank you, lieutenant,' said the lieutenant-colonel who sat behind a makeshift table inside the tent. Around him, a number of other officers were standing or sitting. The relaxed atmosphere of the officers' mess filled the tent. 'Sit down, Danilov,' he continued, indicating a bench opposite him. 'I'm Lieutenant-Colonel Chernyshev, by the way.' I saluted him before sitting. 'Drink?' he asked.

'Thank you, sir,' I responded.

'Wine or vodka?'

'Vodka, please sir.'

'Good man.' He handed me a glass of vodka and also offered a cigar, which I took and lit from the candle on the table.

'So tell me, Danilov, who's your commanding officer?' asked Chernyshev.

'Major Savin.'

'Savin? Vadim Fyodorovich, you mean?'

I smiled. 'That's right. A friend of yours?'

'Oh, yes. A great friend – Petersburg man, like myself.'

'Me too,' I told him.

'Really?' His interest seemed to waver a little. 'Splendid.' Then, returning to the subject that interested him more, he added, 'So how is Vadim Fyodorovich?'

'He's dead, sir.'

'Ah!' Chernyshev took the news with the numbed resilience that I have seen in many experienced army officers. Through all his bluster and bonhomie, the death of each man under his command was felt deeply. The accumulation of deaths made it more painful, but gave him more experience of hiding that pain. Some feel they can never leave the army, for fear that the sorrow of all those accumulated deaths will be released if they do. For those who do leave, the failure of civilians to understand what they have been through can be the cause of even greater pain.

'So tell me, Captain Danilov,' continued the lieutenant-colonel, his brief mourning absorbed into the mass, 'why have you come to join up with us?'

I took a deep breath in preparation to give an answer that I did not know myself. Before I could begin, one of the other officers bent down and whispered into Chernyshev's ear. Chernyshev whispered back and nodded at the reply he got.

'Well, Captain Danilov,' said Chernyshev, 'it seems we have been struck by something of a coincidence.' He waited for me to respond, but there was little that I could say. 'I am told that there is someone in this camp who claims he knows you. A prisoner, no less. A Frenchman, no less!'

He seemed particularly aghast at the fact that the prisoner should be French, though it was well within the realms of likelihood. It suddenly struck me why he should have got on so well with Vadim.

'Did he give a name?'

'No. Tell him the details, Mironov.'

The officer who had just whispered to Chernyshev now addressed me. 'He came in about an hour ago. They caught him up on the hills to the north-east. He didn't bother to put up any kind of a fight at all. He gave no name. He's wearing a French uniform, rank of chef de bataillon. All he would say was that he wanted to speak to Captain Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov.'

'He knew I was here?' I asked.

'Evidently,' shrugged Mironov.

I had been in the camp less than an hour myself. It could only be that I had been followed. 'What does he look like?' I asked.

'I'm afraid I haven't seen him myself,' replied Mironov. 'Do you want me to take you to him?'

'No, not yet,' I replied, taking another sip of vodka. 'What time is it?'

'Just gone midnight,' Mironov told me.

'And when's sunrise?'

'Around eight.'

'I'll speak to him at seven. Where are you keeping him?'

'He's with the other prisoners.'

I thought for a moment before saying, 'Keep him apart from them. Make sure he's bound hand and foot. Put him outside somewhere, by a fire – keep him warm – but definitely outside.' I was imitating Maks' plan of months before. 'And be very, very careful with him. He's dangerous.'

'You know who it is then?' asked Lieutenant-Colonel Chernyshev.

'I believe I do,' I replied, puffing at my cigar.

Once again, I slept well. I was woken up around six o'clock and had time for a leisurely breakfast before Lieutenant Mironov led me to where the mysterious prisoner was being guarded.

'I hope you're not going to spend too long with him, Captain Danilov,' the lieutenant told me as we walked across the camp.

'The word is that Bonaparte is heading south. The French are trying to build a bridge.'

'And we're to follow?'

'Absolutely. Admiral Tchitchagov is shadowing him, on the other side of the Berezina. We're already beginning to break camp. We'll be on our way within four hours.'

'I assure you, lieutenant, I'll be finished with the prisoner by dawn.'

'I hope so, sir.'

We were now some way away from a large campfire which warmed me even at a distance.

'There he is,' said Mironov, nodding towards the fire.

Beside it stood two guards, weary from their night's vigil, but still alert enough that their prisoner had not escaped. Between them, sitting on a bench next to the fire, a tall man with his wrists bound was slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. His long blond hair, straggly and dishevelled, hung forward to cover his face. Even so, he was unmistakable.

'Is it who you thought it was?' asked Mironov.

'Oh, yes,' I replied.

CHAPTER XXX

'GOOD MORNING, IUDA,' I SAID, SOFTLY.

Iuda lifted his head. He looked decrepit. His hair was unwashed and matted, his chin was unshaven and his complexion was sallow – I doubted whether he had 'eaten' for days. His jaw was swollen with the bruise of a recent, heavy blow. Yet still he smiled.

'Good morning, Aleksei Ivanovich.'

'Has he tried anything?' I said to one of his guards.

'Nothing, sir. He kept asking when you would come, but I shut him up.' He mimicked the action of a blow with the butt of his musket. Iuda winced at the appropriate moment, joining in the mime so as to mock it. He glanced momentarily up at the guard's face, then averted his eyes.

'Was he armed?' I asked.

'Just this.' The guard reached into his knapsack and handed me the double-bladed knife that I had seen in Iuda's hand before. 'It's an odd thing, don't you think, sir? I can't see the practical use for it.'

'That's one of the things I intend to find out.'

'Do you want us to stay close, sir?' he asked. It was refreshing to be once again amongst men who were so trustworthy and so steadfast, though his suggestion might also have been motivated by self-interest. Keeping close to us would mean keeping close to the fire. Both guards looked pale and deathly cold, their greatcoats ' buttoned tight up to their chins to keep in what warmth they could. Even so, my own concerns overcame my sympathy for them.

'Not too close,' I said. 'For reasons you'll understand, it's best that you don't hear what we discuss.' He nodded earnestly. I had no doubt that he would stand just on the far side of earshot, but I would speak to Iuda in French to be on the safe side. 'But if he does turn nasty, you'll need to be ready – for your own sakes as well as mine.'

All around us, the camp was in turmoil. Tents were being taken down. Horses were being harnessed to guns. Baggage was being loaded on to wagons. The activity of all was enough to keep them warm despite the frozen night air, but for Iuda and myself, and the two guards who stood apart, both at some distance from us, the fire provided the only heat.

I sat down opposite Iuda as his guards moved warily away. I pondered how to start, hoping that he might say something, but he remained silent, looking at the ground. Despite his circumstances, he still had an air of victory about him. Then I realized why. As far as he knew, his trick with Margarita had worked – I had believed Domnikiia to be a vampire and had killed her.

'Aren't you going to tell me that Domnikiia was never a vampire?' I asked him. He frowned briefly. The name was unfamiliar to him. Then he made the connection to Dominique.

'It seems you're already aware of it,' he replied.

'She's alive and well, you know.'

'I don't doubt it,' he said, nonplussed.

'Oh, come on, Iuda. I'm sure you have your pride, but I think you can be honest now. These are your last moments on earth – don't waste them. I know you intended me to see your performance with Margarita.'

'I won't waste them, Lyosha. Neither should you. You're right, though, I did know you were watching at the window.'

'And you expected me to march right in there and ram a stake straight through Domnikiia's heart, and then regret it for the rest of my life.'

'Do you play chess at all, Lyosha?' he asked.

'Some,' I replied.

'When you form a plan of attack – equally, when you plan an attack in a real battle – do you see it through (in your mind) to a single end, or does your plan branch with the varying assumptions about how your opponent might react?'

'It branches, of course – though I'd always assume it most likely that my opponent would make the best move.' I was surprised at how quickly Iuda had managed to take the reins of the conversation.

'Exactly. And it's disappointing, isn't it, when he doesn't play the best move – when he falls into some trivial trap you threw in his way, not with any real intent of entrapping him, but simply to force him along the path you had chosen? He doesn't in the end rob you of the victory, but robs you of the pleasure of demonstrating the full brilliance of your plan.'

'I think that depends on whether you're the sort of person who prefers the game or the victory,' I said.

'Clearly, without the victory, the game is nothing,' he replied, nodding in agreement. 'But the reverse is also true. And don't tell me that you don't enjoy the game, Aleksei Ivanovich. You've had many opportunities to go for the swift conclusion, but you've not taken them.'

'Haven't I?'

'Perhaps it's just caution on your part.'

I felt the same sense of unease in myself and the same confidence in him that I had done during our meeting at the crossroads. Here, though, I could see no reason for him to be confident. This was my territory. There was no hanging cadaver that was going to spring to his aid. Perhaps he was expecting something of the sort. Perhaps he was unaware that Foma was dead. That was it. This was part of a plan where Foma would come to his rescue. It would be a pleasure to see how he reacted to news of Foma's death, but for now I chose – as one cannot in the game of chess – to keep that card up my sleeve. In chess one can disguise one's plans, but not hide them.

'And so your scene with Margarita was just a sideshow – one of these little traps that I didn't fall into?' I asked.

'You have always played the better move when you've been given the choice. Only an idiot would kill the woman he loved without being sure she was a vampire.' It was the very word Domnikiia had used. As he spoke he smiled as if he knew how close I had come to doing what he described.

'So what's your real plan, from which that was just a diversion? To get captured here and to die in the morning sun?'

'There are more moves to make before you will see it.'

'Chess isn't a game of bluff, Iuda. A gentleman will resign once he sees he cannot win.'

'I am, I assure you, a gentleman.'

'And all your pretence at planning,' I went on, realizing that much of what he said could be only bravura, 'it all relies on so much luck. How could you be sure I would come back to Moscow to see Domnikiia that night?'

'Because I told Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich I was going to see her,' he said simply.

'And you asked them to tell me, I suppose?'

'No, I instructed them not to tell you.'

'So you knew I would get it out of them?'

'There were two of them in the barn, you outside. Either they would defeat you – which would have been a disappointment, but still a victory – or you would defeat them and probably get the information from them. Which one was it that talked, by the way? I would suspect Iakov Zevedayinich.'

'It was Pyetr. I didn't give Iakov Zevedayinich the opportunity. How did you know I was there?'

'Where else would you be? I never saw you after the coach crashed, but I knew you wouldn't run away. We were not particularly stealthy in our return to the barn.'

'And no concern at all for the others. You set up Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich for me to kill, just to further your own ends. Are all vampires like that, Iuda, or is it just you?'

'They all had as little concern for each other as I did for them. Clearly, there are times when it is convenient to work as a pack, and sometimes it's worth making an issue over the fate of one's comrades, as we did with Maksim Sergeivich, but it's mostly for show. There is no brotherly love that would make one sacrifice himself for another.'

'It's hard to see why there's any need for your soul to be damned,' I said contemplatively. 'To feel like that must be a living hell.'

'On the contrary, it is one of the vampire's most desirable attributes. I have no idea why it is that most humans possess these feelings of affection for other humans, nor why vampires suddenly lose them. I'm sure one day some great scientist will explain it. Myself, I suspect it's something to do with the different methods of reproduction.'

I looked at him blankly. He still did not believe that these were the last minutes of his life. I picked up his knife, which I had jabbed into the snow between my feet, and inspected it. It was a simple construction – precisely as I had conceived it to be when I first saw it. Two identical, short knives had been fastened together at the handles. The handles were bound up with a long strip of leather. The bond was very firm – I could not make the blades move relative to one another. Beneath the leather there must have been something that fixed them more solidly. The blades were smoothly sharp on one side, and serrated on the other – the teeth pointing slightly backwards towards the handle – ideal, in a single blade, for cutting the fur away from an animal's carcass. Each ended in a sharp point that could be used to stab. The gap between the blades was wide enough for me to comfortably fit two fingers.

'You don't all carry these, I noticed, do you?' I asked Iuda.

'No, just me.'

'Why do you need it? Your teeth no good? Too much sugar in your diet?'

He smiled, but did not grin, and it occurred to me that I could not recall ever seeing him grin. Perhaps I was right. Perhaps he was that most pitiful of creatures, a vampire with rotten teeth.

'Not quite,' he said.

'Useful, I suppose, for cutting your chest open when you create another one of you.'

'Then, and at other times.' He was more reticent on this matter than he had been on others. Another question raised itself in my mind, and the image of my own hand driving a stake into a young woman's chest.

'Did I need to kill Margarita?' I asked. 'Was she dead when we found her, or had you made her… one of you?'

'She was dead,' he said calmly, his eyes fixed on mine. 'I killed her.'

'But why? Why waste the chance of turning her into a vampire?'

'I killed her because I enjoy it. But as to turning anyone into a vampire, I am sadly incapable of that.'

'And why is that? I'm sure you must far outstrip the others in your ability to persuade people to willingly take the step.' I didn't like to compliment him, but as I had long ago discovered, he was the only one of the Oprichniki who showed any real personality.

'Certainly – and that, for me, is one of the most pleasurable parts. The problem, though, is a physical one.'

'What do you mean?'

'As we have discussed before, I am not a doctor. I cannot explain how these things work. I can go through the motions but it simply does not happen, any more than it would if you were to attempt it.'

'Except that I wouldn't even want to attempt it,' I added vehemently.

'That may be the difference between us,' he smiled.

'So in the end, despite what you both did, despite her willingness, Margarita did not become a vampire. When you killed her she died as a mortal human.'

He nodded thoughtfully and then looked towards me with an intent gaze, pinching his bottom lip between his fingers, indifferent to the inconvenience of his bound hands. I was reminded of the discussion of chess he had introduced earlier. He was a player who had made a move and was now trying to determine whether I, his opponent, had seen the full ramifications of it.

'What were you doing when you were captured?' I asked.

'Spying for the French.'

'Really?' I laughed.

'Really. I need to leave Russia. They are leaving Russia, or at least trying to. I can help them while our interests coincide.'

'It can't help you or them much for you to be captured. I presume that wasn't part of the plan.'

'No, you're right, it wasn't. Not until I happened to see you trotting down the road towards the camp. Then I knew I just had to see you one more time.'

So – assuming that he was telling the truth – he had not been following me. It had simply been luck that we had found each other again, though a luck that we had both been trying to manufacture. That he had not been following me made it all the more likely that he did not yet know about the death of Foma. I felt sure now that there was no escape for him.

'One more time before you died,' I added.

'One more time before I left your country,' he countered. 'Being the only one of us left, I feel it my duty.'

'The only one left?'

'Well, you've told me about Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich, and I presume that Dmitry has killed Foma by now.'

I nodded. 'Foma's dead.' I was deflated, but I had to hide it. If Foma was not part of Iuda's escape plan, then what was? I recalled the possibility that he might have some human collaborator. If he did, and he was a Russian, then the man would have had little trouble infiltrating this camp. Was that the basis of Iuda's confidence, or was it mere bluff? He glanced at the two guards, some way away on either side of him, as if judging how far he could run before they could catch him.

'Dmitry Fetyukovich proved to be a startlingly brave man,' Iuda continued. 'To kill a vampire is one thing, but to take one alive is quite another.'

'You saw it happen?'

'Oh yes.'

'And you did nothing to help Foma?'

'Why should I? It wasn't worth risking my life. Dmitry believed that I would come and rescue Foma, but he really didn't understand. As I said to you, even a vampire would not risk his life to save another vampire. I take it, then, that you've seen Dmitry. Is he here with you?'

'No, he's not here,' I replied. 'Just tell me, Iuda. How do you plan to escape?'

He deliberately misinterpreted the question. 'Well, as far as I understand it, Napoleon's move to the south is a feint. Already Tchitchagov has set out to follow him on the far bank of the Berezina, and Kutuzov will soon be heading that way too.'

Although it wasn't what I had been trying to find out, it was vital information nonetheless. I followed the line that Iuda had begun. 'Whereas Bonaparte's real plan is what?' I asked.

'Ah!' said Iuda with a smile. 'See how the wily interrogator tricks his quarry into revealing all!' He leaned forward and winked with an air of conspiracy. 'Between you and me, Lyosha, he's found a ford, upstream at a place called Studienka. It'll still need bridging of course, but it should get them across.'

'Get him across,' I responded cynically.

'How do you mean?'

'There's not much of the Grande Armée left compared with what came. Thirty thousand out of half a million? It's about the emperor, not the army now.'

'And why not? Napoleon is a great man.'

'You think so?'

'He makes my life a lot easier.'

'So Dmitry was quite wrong. You were never on our side?' I asked, feeling more vindicated than shocked by the proposition.

'Not at all. If Napoleon had defeated Russia it would have meant French hegemony over the whole of Europe. And that would have meant peace – a peace you and I would have despised for different reasons, but nonetheless inimical to both of our lifestyles. True, there would still be war with Britain, but I've never been much use at sea.'

'So you just always support the underdog?'

'I like to help maintain the balance of power.'

'So now you switch sides to France when she is weak?'

'Exactly.'

'How long have you been doing this?' I asked with genuine curiosity. 'How many times have you switched sides? How many wars have you tried to perpetuate for your own ends?' I was prevaricating unnecessarily. 'What I mean is, Iuda, when did you become a vampire?'

'An interesting question,' he replied, but one which he was not going to answer.

I had not noticed it begin, but as our conversation paused, I heard that the few birds which for some reason chose to remain in the trees during the winter months had begun their daily song.

The pre-dawn dark blue of the sky was only just becoming visible, but already they had noticed it and reacted to it. I felt a little sorry. There was so much more that I wanted to ask of Iuda and discover from him, but I could not afford to be sentimental. I could so easily learn to regret any opportunity for survival that I might offer him.

'Might I be allowed to smoke?' he asked politely.

I could see no harm in it. I shouted to the guard, 'Have you got a pipe? Or a cigar?' He came over and handed me a cigar. It was a thin, withered offering – much like the man who offered it – made à l'Espagnole, with just paper to wrap it. It was possibly all he had. I gave a coin in exchange, paying – in my sympathy for his instinctive willingness to hand over even his personal possessions at a senior officer's behest – a similar price to that I would have received during my days as a tobacco vendor in occupied Moscow.

Again Iuda eyed the guard, looking for a chance to flee. I lit the cigar from the fire and offered it to Iuda. He gestured to me with his bound hands and gave an expression of humble entreaty. I placed the cigar between my lips and then cut his hands free with his own knife, before handing the cigar to him. His feet were still tied, and I had the guards with me. Besides, it would soon be dawn and Iuda would be no more threat to anyone. I felt safe.

'Thank you,' he said, inhaling deeply. I sat back down and threw the knife once again into the snow between my feet. Knowing that time was short, I searched my brain for any other questions I could put to him. One immediately occurred to me.

'How was it that you managed to get from Kurilovo back to Moscow so quickly?'

'By horse,' he answered simply. 'The same as you.'

'But it took me eight hours, and you got there ahead of me.'

'Well, I left before you did.'

'What I mean is,' I asked, annoyed that he was, quite sincerely, missing my point, 'how did you travel in daylight?'

'Ah, I see. One of the many curses that the vampire must put up with. I often wonder whether there are any advantages to it at all.'

'The immortality, surely,' I said. It was Domnikiia's voice that had put it in my head.

'Ideally, yes, but not in practical terms. Did Pyetr prove to be immortal? Or Matfei? And what about that boy – Pavel? His vampire existence spanned only a few weeks. Vampires are so easy to kill.'

'I've not found it so easy.'

'Oh, you have, Lyosha! Once you know what to do. And even if you don't, the daylight thing must be a misery. Thousands must die by accident just because someone happens to open the curtains.' He failed to conceal the smirk that broke on his face, pleased at his own ridicule.

'So why do people willingly choose that path?' I asked.

'As you say, some are fools who do it for the immortality. Others do it for the liberty.'

' Liberty?'

'Yes, liberty. I doubt vampires have any desire for equality and I know that they have no conception of fraternity, but isn't liberty what all men seek?'

It was as though he had been reading my mind as I had lain beside Domnikiia, waiting to join her in that world of immoral immortality. Still I was compelled to hear what Iuda had to say – to understand what the appeal was that could turn a man willingly into a monster. ' Liberty from what?' I asked.

'Most men want liberty from many different things, but all seek – and few achieve – liberty from themselves. That is what the man who drinks the warm, fresh blood of a vampire seeks. That is what I too have found – to be unconstrained by conscience or by God – to revel in the ultimate pleasure that lies in the pain of others, both as its witness and its instigator, without the clammy undertow of one's own… sentiment.' He spoke the final word as though it tasted of rotting fish, then he smiled. 'You of all people, Lyosha, know that.'

He glanced pointedly at the scars on my left hand as he spoke, but I knew that he could not be aware how much his words rang true.

'And that makes becoming a vampire worthwhile?' I asked, both fascinated and repelled by what he had said.

He paused and bent his head forward. Its shadow, long and distorted in the low sun behind him, reached as far as my feet.

'I don't know,' he said wearily. 'There are so many restrictions – so much that they must miss out on. The desire to kill is so much intermingled with the desire to eat – much like in humans. The first kill of the night delights both predilections, but as they become less hungry, they also lose (to an extent) the urge to kill. By surfeiting, the appetite sickens. How much better it is to separate the two; to eat for hunger and to kill for pleasure. Do you hunt, Lyosha?'

'Occasionally,' I said.

'Then perhaps you will understand what I mean. More than that, though, there are straightforward, mechanical problems that make the life of a vampire so unappealing. For instance, have you ever considered, Lyosha, that a vampire can never look into the eyes of his victim as life departs? You can, and I'm sure you have. You know the experience of seeing a man's face as, thanks to you, he breathes his last. Whether you count it as a pleasure or not, you know the experience. A vampire must bite at the neck, and so can never take that pleasure.

'Now, with my knife…' He leaned forward, casting his cigar aside, and reached forward for the knife. I was so enthralled by what he was saying and his movement was so appropriate to the conversation, that I almost let him. Only at the last moment did I kick his hand to one side. He sat back upright and raised his palms to me in apology. The guard I had spoken to glanced towards us at the movement, but did nothing.

'With my knife,' Iuda continued, 'I can inflict all the pain that a vampire can with his teeth and so much more, and yet I'm still free to gaze into the face of my companion and see every exquisite reaction to every excruciating action I perform. And by joining up with the others – the Oprichniki, I believe you called us as a group – I had eleven other so much more brutal weapons whom I could let get on with inflicting the pain, whilst I sat back and experienced the pleasure.'

As he spoke, I found myself confronted with the memory of the scene in the barn near Kurilovo. Each of the Oprichniki had bowed to Iuda's every suggestion of what they should do. He had scarcely touched the man or ever tasted his flesh, and yet he had been the one who had taken the most pleasure from the situation. The sun, now risen in the east behind Iuda's head, made to seem larger by its low declination, formed an ironic halo.

'What freedom, I wonder, do they really have – the vampires – that I have not also achieved?' asked Iuda.

'Achieved?'

'You are right, as ever, Lyosha. I cannot claim it as any achievement. It is something I have always had – something I was born with – something that most men can only gain by becoming a vampire. I have the best of both worlds. I can bask in the sun. I can eat a normal meal. I could even father a child if I wanted. Yet still I can indulge in the ultimate bliss that lies in the unutterable, absolute, unfettered suffering of another human being.'

'Did the other vampires never recognize you for what you are?' I asked.

'For what I am? I could ask the same question of you. You had no idea that the twelve of us were vampires at first. And then when you did, you had no idea that I was not. There's no magic to it. I act as they do. I feel as they do. I kill as they do. They're not going to notice that occasionally I like to go outside during the day – not without killing themselves in the process. Zmyeevich, of course, is a different matter. He's been a vampire for a long, long time. But whatever his suspicions about me may have been, he has his own reasons for not pursuing them.'

I sat in silence, facing him. Still today, I cannot determine exactly when during the conversation the truth had come to me. It was astonishing, but not revolutionary. Iuda was exactly what he claimed he was. He was not a vampire in much the same way that Maksim was not French. He aspired to be a vampire. He behaved like a vampire. But occasionally he was able to benefit from the fact that he was not a vampire. Maks himself had known that he deserved to be treated as though he were French. Similarly, though he might in some minor, legalistic way be human, Iuda deserved to be treated as though he were a vampire. The problem was that the light of the sun could no longer do the work for me. It was a problem and a pleasure. I would be happy to see him die in a more traditional manner.

I rose to my feet and faced him. 'I think we should be able to arrange a firing squad before we break camp. You are, after all, a French spy.' I began to raise my hand to summon the guard.

Iuda frowned and turned away from me with a look of impatient disappointment on his face. He shook his head and tutted to himself quietly. 'So, you see, there was never any prospect of her becoming a vampire,' he said. There was some point on to which our conversation had not turned, and he wanted it to.

'Margarita, you mean?'

'I wonder when it was she realized that she was unchanged – that she would remain mortal.'

'I think you demonstrated her mortality pretty quickly,' I snapped.

'What do you mean?'

'By killing her straight after.'

Iuda smiled a tight, knowing smile that barely resisted breaking into a laugh. 'Tell me, Lyosha,' he asked. 'What was it that first made you believe that it was not Dominique you had seen me with at the window?'

I thought about it for a moment, but there was no trick to it – the answer was obvious. 'The fact that she hadn't become a vampire.'

'Which means…'

'Which means?'

Iuda sighed. 'It's really no fun for me if you can't be bothered to work it out for yourself.' I looked at him blankly. 'You concluded that Dominique had not been with me because if she had been with a vampire she would have become a vampire,' he explained, like a schoolteacher.

I don't know whether I had been dull-witted or whether it was a conclusion that I wanted to avoid coming to, but now Iuda had brought it to a point where I could not ignore it. I sank back on to my seat. Could it have after all been Domnikiia that I had seen with Iuda at the window and not Margarita? Of course she had not become a vampire; Iuda had no ability to make her into one. She could have sucked every last drop of blood from the wound in his chest and it would have had no effect.

But she had believed that it would. Had she awoken that morning with exactly the same sense of surprise that I had later felt, as she discovered there had been no change in her? Had she found to her horror that she could stand comfortably in the bright morning sunlight and begun to cry as she realized that it meant she would still one day die a mortal death? She would have had to think quickly to then pretend that it was Margarita that I had seen. No, that was impossible. She must have decided to say it was Margarita beforehand. Either Iuda had told her to, or they had planned it together. There had been a great deal of careful choreography to ensure that, watching from across the square, I only ever saw Domnikiia from behind. Had Margarita known about the plan? Domnikiia had seemed genuinely shocked when we had found Margarita's body. Genuinely? How could I now regard anything about her as being genuine? A woman who would gladly become a vampire would hardly baulk at the death of her best friend being a part of the process.

It could not be true, and yet I could not see any fault in it. I myself had been sure it was Domnikiia that I had seen with Iuda right up until the point I had discovered she was not a vampire. Now I had a better explanation for that. Was I really fool enough to mistake Margarita for Domnikiia just because their hair was similar – I who knew every inch of Domnikiia's body? There must have been something more that I had seen, without consciously registering, that had told me it was Domnikiia, and now I knew it to be true. All her sorrow and anguish in the days that followed had been very convincing, but then, that was her speciality. I heard Domnikiia speaking to me, but she only repeated one whispered word over and over. How much she must have been laughing to herself when she had first said it to me. 'Prostak! Prostak! Prostak!'

Iuda placed a consolatory hand on my knee, saying, 'She did it for you, Lyosha. She thought she could be with you for ever.' He was standing now. At some point, unnoticed by me, he had retrieved his knife and had cut the ropes around his feet with it. I heard a shout from one of the soldiers guarding us to the other, but he was too late. The other had momentarily turned his back on us and Iuda was now behind him. A brief stroke from Iuda's toothed blades across his neck and he fell to the ground, the pure, white snow around him sullied by an ever-growing stain of red as blood haemorrhaged from his wounded neck, unhindered by the grasping of his dying hands.

The other soldier had raised his musket, but had been hesitant to fire while he might hit his comrade. Now he fired, but it was too late. Iuda was on the move again, keeping low and changing direction again and again. I set off in pursuit. The remaining guard did likewise, some paces behind me. The rest of the camp, consumed by their preparations for departure, did not at first notice what was happening, but soon our shouts alerted them to the fugitive. Those who threw themselves in Iuda's way offered little impediment to him. He was far more brutal and effective with his knife than any vampire could have been with its teeth. Some men tackled him with swords and bayonets, but he showed no fear, and though some of the blades hit their mark, he seemed to show little discomfort either. None of the wounds was deep enough to cause serious injury, and while posing as a vampire he had clearly learned to control his pain – along with so many other feelings – lest his humanity should be discovered.

We were now beyond the edge of the camp, almost at woodland in which Iuda could easily hide himself. The guard who had been pursuing a little way behind, younger and fitter than I was, had now caught up and overtaken me. Having discharged his musket, he had found no time to reload, and so now had only his bayonet as a weapon. He was within striking distance of Iuda when Iuda stopped and turned. The soldier had no time to stop himself. He had not been aiming his bayonet and so it glided harmlessly past Iuda's side. As he turned, Iuda brought forward his hand and the soldier ran straight on to Iuda's knife. It penetrated just below his breastbone, embedding itself deep behind his ribcage. With the force of the blow, the soldier was lifted off his feet, his back arched in agony and his limbs splayed out limply as life began to retreat from them. With a jerk of his arm, Iuda threw the man off his knife and I heard the tearing, rasping sound of its teeth making the wound even greater on exit than it had been on entry.

Iuda turned and continued to run, but I was already upon him. I launched myself towards him and grabbed him around the waist. We both fell to the ground and my face was filled with snow, blinding me. I knelt up and wiped the snow from my eyes, just in time to see Iuda's hand scything towards me, the toothed blades presented, not to stab but to slash. I flung myself backwards, flicking my head away from him. As I fell, I felt a searing pain in my left cheek where the blades connected. I fell to my back, breathing deeply, and noticed as I breathed that air was coming in through my wounded cheek as well as through my mouth.

I pushed myself up in preparation to avoid Iuda's next blow, but it did not come. A shot rang out from behind me, hitting Iuda in the arm. He turned and fled into the woods, leaving me to live with the misery that he had created for me.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE WOUND TO MY CHEEK WAS NOT AS SERIOUS AS I HAD FIRST thought. The cold weather became a brief friend as it numbed my face while the surgeon closed it up with a suture. I went back to Lieutenant-Colonel Chernyshev to tell him what had happened.

'Escaped?' he thundered.

'I'm afraid so, sir,' I replied.

'I'll have those guards flogged.'

'It's too late for that, sir.'

He glanced up at my face and understood. 'I see,' he said. 'Well, it's only one man, I suppose. All a bit of a waste of time, though.'

'Bonaparte's move south is a ruse, sir. The prisoner told me. The real crossing is to the north, at Studienka.'

'That's something at least. So you'll soon be joining us in action there then?'

'No, sir. I'd like to pursue the prisoner.'

'Is he worth it – just one man?'

'I believe so,' I said.

'Well, I suppose you people know your job. I can't lend you any men.'

'I don't ask for any, sir. Just a French uniform, if you have one.'

'We have dozens. Lieutenant Mironov, see that he gets what he needs.'

Mironov provided a dragoon uniform and a horse and some provisions, and I was soon heading out of what remained of the breaking camp. At first, I had to make my way alongside the advancing Russian troops (fortunately, I had not yet changed into my new uniform), but soon I headed off to the north of their path and the sound of marching faded behind me.

The only trail that Iuda had left was that he had planned to cross the Berezina with Bonaparte at Studienka. It was quite possible that this had been a lie, or that he would now change his mind, but my only option was still to try to intercept him there. I had not had time to properly consider what Iuda had said to me, but now as I rode through the quiet, frozen woods, I began to think.

The less painful matter to deal with was that Iuda was not a vampire. I had already concluded that this made little difference to my opinion of him. If a man chooses to become a vampire so that he may behave like a monster or if he finds himself quite able to behave like a monster anyway, he is still a monster and still happy so to be. Iuda remained a danger to all those he came into contact with. One question that had to be asked was whether any of the other Oprichniki was also not a vampire. Iuda had implied that they all were, but was Iuda to be trusted? The evidence of my own eyes convinced me of most of them – after their deaths I had witnessed their immediate bodily decay. I had not seen what became of Ioann or Filipp once they had perished. The deaths of Simon, Iakov Alfeyinich and Faddei had, if Maks was to be believed, been caused by sunlight. I felt confident that all eleven had indeed been vampires. If not, what was I to care? Just as it did not fundamentally matter with Iuda, neither did it with any of the others.

But what of Domnikiia? The idea of being tricked – of being betrayed – by her of all people was the true nightmare from which I saw no prospect of awakening. When she teased me it revealed her wit and her spirit, but to play games with me like this over such issues showed in her what almost amounted to insanity. 'I'm not surprised Iuda found it so easy to fool you.' Those had been her words. She and Iuda both delighted in playing me for the fool, and I had so far been gullibly eager to oblige them. But I also remembered what Maksim had once said, about the best place to hide a tree being in a forest, the best place to hide a lie being amongst the truth. Why had Iuda allowed himself to be captured?

To speak to me. What was it that he wanted to tell me? Not about Bonaparte's plans. Not about his views on chess. Not even to tell me he wasn't a vampire. It was to put the thought into my head that Domnikiia had chosen to become a vampire. Amongst that forest of truth, that was the single fact that he had wanted to convey. It was not even a fact – it was a piece of information that might be true and might not be. The truth could never be known and so the doubt would haunt me for ever.

Iuda's game, either through planning or through extemporization, had unfolded layer by layer in front of me, like a journey up a mountain when every false peak, once conquered, reveals another higher peak behind it. First I believed he had turned Domnikiia into a vampire. Then I discovered that, even so, I could not kill her. Then I discovered that she was not a vampire and that, had I killed her, it would have been as a mortal woman. This morning he had convinced me that she had all along wanted to be a vampire, even though he could not make her one. He could not go on forever pushing on one side of the scales and then the other and switching my view from one side to the next, but now he did not need to. He had found a perfect balance point. I could never know the truth and so, whatever I chose to do, I would spend half my life regretting. If I abandoned Domnikiia, then I would worry that I had done her wrong, that I had believed Iuda's final lie about her when she had behaved throughout in perfect innocence. If I stayed with her, I would be forever looking at her, wondering what happened between them that night in Moscow.

My perception was so battered by my constantly changing view of the truth – not just over Domnikiia, but over Maksim, over Dmitry, over the Oprichniki and over Iuda himself – that I was no longer able to find certainty in anything. Vadim's advice, I knew, would have been to go back to Petersburg, to go back to Marfa. She was someone in whom I had never had any doubt, nor had I any reason to. With her I would find a safe, content retreat. But then even Vadim's advice became ambiguous. How he would have despised any concept of retreat.

I was nearing the village of Studienka. I dismounted, tied up my horse and, despite the freezing cold, changed from the outer layers of my clothing into my French uniform. Skirting around the village, hidden by the woods, I made my way to a small hillock that overlooked the river itself. There I lay, concealed almost instantly beneath the falling snow, and observed the tattered remains of the Grande Armée.

Tattered and yet magnificent. There must have been fifty thousand before me; half of them soldiers, half non-combatants, all desperate to get across that river, to get out of Russia and to get home. Bonaparte's great campaign lay in ruins, the conquering ambition of every man transformed into self-preserving terror. None could have dreamed that the largest army ever assembled in the world would be reduced, in scarcely six months, to such a shambles. And yet it had happened, and I was thrilled to witness it.

But for an army slashed to less than a tenth of its former size, beset by the hellish cold of a foreign winter and caught between three Russian armies, each on its own the size of theirs, they had performed a remarkable feat. Two bridges had been built across the river. Even now I could see sappers and pontoniers up to their armpits in the icy water, strengthening and repairing the bridges as thousand upon thousands of men broke step to march across. Every building in the village had been torn down to provide timber. On the high ground on the far side of the river, the advance guard had already set up a defensive position. They were being engaged from the south. Tchitchagov, realizing his error, had travelled back north to the real crossing point. The French deployments already across the river were holding him off and allowing the remainder of the army to slip away to the west unmolested once they had crossed.

On the eastern bank, an innumerable multitude waited to cross along the two narrow, manmade isthmuses – not just soldiers, though of those there were many, but the entire entourage that any army requires to survive, particularly one so far from home. Men and women waited to cross the river, and those whose duties, however vital they might be, did not require them to carry a sword or a musket found themselves reckoned least in the pecking order. Cooks, washerwomen, smiths and armourers were among those who waited to cross and, even amongst them, an order of merit would be established. Would an army in hopeless, frozen retreat favour those who maintained its weapons or those who filled its belly?

My intention of spotting one man amongst the tens of thousands was not as futile as it could have been. Though it would be impossible to scan the crowds of weary-faced troops that milled and bustled on the riverbank, the bridges themselves were narrow and all had to cross by one or the other. Indeed, most crossed by the smaller bridge, the larger being used for guns, wagons and cavalry. When I had last seen him, Iuda had no horse. Whether he had acquired one by now, I could only guess.

Although, with the help of my spyglass, I could inspect the face of each man as he approached the bridge, I was so far away that Iuda would be across the river by the time I could get down to the bank. My only prospect was to get down there amongst the French.

However determined the French were in getting as many men across the river as possible, it was at the expense of every other feature of military discipline. I was not challenged for any password or credentials as I picked my way first through the crowds of casualties and camp followers who would be the last to cross the bridge, if at all, and secondly through the teeming infantry who waited impatiently for their turn to cross. I looked out of place; any idea of uniform had been abandoned by the majority of the Grande Armée, in favour of more practical clothes – any clothes – that might keep out the cold. Even so, nobody paid me any attention.

As I got close to the bridges themselves, I received a few angry shoves from those who thought I was trying to jump my turn, but it was easy to assure them that I was not planning to cross the bridge, but to guard it. I joined the exclusive band of truculent sentries who stood at the entrance to the smaller footbridge.

'What did you do to get posted here?' asked one.

Evidently, this thankless duty was assigned as a punishment, not an honour. 'I misheard an order,' I said.

'Lots of soldiers have been hard of hearing today,' he laughed. We said little more to one another. There was nothing to do but watch the lines of men as they jostled to get on to the bridge, giving them the occasional shove when they got too much out of shape. I inspected every face that went past, as well as trying to keep an eye on the mounted men that crossed by the other bridge, but there was no sign of Iuda. What I would do if I saw him, I was not sure. To kill him there and then – one French soldier killing another, apparently unprovoked – would mean almost certain and instant execution for me. Despite the fact that I had voluntarily walked into the midst of a desperate enemy, I was in no mood for suicide. Iuda's death was now a secondary issue to me. What I needed from him was certainty. If I was lucky, I would have the opportunity to see him die afterwards, but now I had to know, one way or the other, what had happened between him and Domnikiia.

I could think of no other way to determine it. I could ask Domnikiia herself, but I would not believe her answer; at least not if she denied it. I would believe her only if the answer she gave was the one I did not want to hear. I could find the man she claimed she had been with that night, but he would, for the sake of his reputation, instantly deny ever having heard of her. Iuda was the only other person who knew for sure. He had already told me that it had been Domnikiia, but he had previously allowed me to believe that it hadn't. I would go through hell – and this frozen exodus seemed to me a pretty close thing – to get a definitive answer from him.

That afternoon, I was bestowed with an unexpected privilege, if that is the correct word for it. For the first and only time in my life, I saw Bonaparte himself in the flesh. Accompanied by the once mighty Imperial Guard, he made his way across the larger bridge to the west bank of the river. He was not the man I had imagined him to be. My image of him was formed from engravings and paintings and stoked by his reputation. It was no surprise if today he was not at his best. He was both older and fatter than any picture I had seen of him. His nose was not hooked, as is often portrayed, but of normal size and with a slight, hardly noticeable bend. His hair was not black, but of a dark reddish-blond. I wondered if the images I had seen of his empress, Marie-Louise, were as inaccurate and whether Domnikiia in fact looked anything like her. Though he tried to ride upright and erect, he had a tendency to slouch in his saddle. His mouth held the grimace of a man in pain. Despite all this, his blue eyes still burnt with a fury. Was this the look of the intense desire for conquest that had brought the whole of Europe under his heel? Or was it the glazed shield of defiance of a man despairing at his humiliation?

For those tired remnants of the Grande Armée, it was still the former. A cheer – with which I instinctively joined in – went up as he passed by, even from those men still in the water, working to ensure that the bridges would hold up long enough to get not only their emperor, but every one of his subjects across to safety. For at least an hour after his crossing, there remained a stir in the atmosphere, an increase in conversation and a general feeling that all would survive and make it back home. Looking out across the mass of those still waiting to cross, however, I could see that the enthusiasm was not felt universally. But around me, the feelings were genuine. Only when he was long gone did some sense of reality return to the men with whom I stood.

'I'm surprised they're still bothering, now he's across,' said one, his eyes flicking back and forth between the men who continued unendingly to file past.

'He'll get us out,' said another.

'Why so sure?'

'Because it's another two hundred leagues to Warsaw. He needs us till then.'

'But do we need him?'

'Could you have got the bridges built?'

That night, to my astonishment, the horde that had been filing in unbroken procession across the bridges petered away to nothing. Tens of thousands still remained to cross, but they sat around huge campfires, roasting the flesh of fallen horses and waiting to recommence the crossing in the morning. With hindsight of the number that failed to make it across before the full Russian forces fell upon us, this was a ridiculous waste of time, but no one gave the order, and so no one crossed.

The quiet darkness would be a perfect opportunity for Iuda to slip over the bridge, avoiding the crowds, and I tried to stay awake and so prevent him, but I could not. Had Iuda come by that night, I would not have noticed. Had he seen me, he could have killed me with ease. But he did not come that night.

I woke at about seven. I could hear the sound of artillery, closer than it had been the night before, but I do not think it was that which woke me. I looked and saw a solitary figure crossing the river via the smaller bridge. There was no question of it being Iuda, although his hat and clothing completely obscured his face; he was far too short. He was dressed in a bearskin – at least, that was the outermost layer – with a hole cut in it from which his head protruded. It was practical, if inelegant. I could only guess that he was that rarity of a French soldier who had the independence of mind to cross the river when the opportunity was there. I felt sure he would be one of the few that made it safely back to France.

Soon the sun rose, and the crossing of the Berezina resumed en masse. The indolence of the previous night now forced an additional urgency during the day. All had heard rumours that the Russian forces were closing in on our side of the river, and we began to hear to the north and east the sound of battle which was not so far distant when it began, and grew ever nearer as the day went on.

Later in the day, when the first Russian cannonballs began to fall on the riverbank itself, any remaining vestige of orderliness evaporated. The crowds around the entrances to the bridges became more disorderly, and those who failed to angle themselves on to the bridges began to be pushed into the water by the crowds behind them.

Laden with too many horses and too many carts, the larger bridge began to sag in the middle and soon, with a wrenching and creaking of splintering wood, a section of it crumpled into the river. Horses, wagons and men were swept downstream. Those on what remained of the bridge on the far side dashed to safety with an alacrity they had not shown when it was intact. The crowds on the bank at first did not realize what had happened and continued to push on to what they thought was a bridge but was now a jetty. Dozens were forced off the bridge's broken end and into the river – soldiers becoming sailors as they were obliged to walk the plank into which the bridge had been transformed by its collapse – before any order was restored. As people realized what had happened, there was a rush to the other bridge, where I was standing watch. By now all the other guards had abandoned their post, either voluntarily or simply swept away by the crowd. A French marshal – I think it was Lefebvre – stood at the end of the bridge and tried to restore order, but the crowd ignored him and in the end he was forced to cross with them, rather than resist and be trampled underfoot. I retreated behind one of the piles that supported the bridge, my feet lapped by the river water as it scurried over the ice, and continued my vigil.

As darkness fell there was still no sign of Iuda. I had always known it was a long shot, but now I realized that, unclear as I was what I would do if I found him, I had no idea whatsoever of what to do if I didn't. If the evacuation continued then I would soon be swept across the bridge with the rest of the troops. Somehow, I would have to get away from them. Doing so on this side of the Berezina would be preferable, but I could foresee the possibility of having to creep back across this bridge or another, somewhere else along the river, to return to Russian lines.

Whatever plans I might have been able to formulate, I was interrupted by the sound of cannon fire. To the east, the Russian forces were much closer now. The French rearguard, which had been holding off the main body of the Russian army, was beginning to disengage. New swarms of men came down the banks of the river and tried to get on to the bridges. From the far bank, shells from French cannon were now screaming over our heads to rain down on the unseen Russian troops beyond the trees. With the fall of darkness, there was to be no cessation in the flow of people across the river as there had been the previous night.

As more and more soldiers crushed on to the narrow bridge, a sense began to fill the air that the end was coming; that if we did not get across now, then the Russians would be upon us and there would be no further chance to escape. Officers and men all around, who had been maintaining some slight degree of order, abandoned their posts and joined the mêlée that pushed and shoved around the bridges. Others decided to forget about the bridges and risk the river itself.

Close to the bank, the water remained frozen, and men began gingerly to walk out as far as they could. One reached the edge of the ice sheet and leapt into the water. Because of the thaw, the river was full and fast. He was swept away downstream. Others were luckier. I saw two or three who stripped themselves of guns, swords and boots – anything that weighed them down – and who thereby managed to swim across. How much further they would get without boots, I had to wonder, but on either side of the river there was a plentiful supply of dead men who had no further requirement for their footwear. One man who jumped in was again swept away, his head disappearing instantly beneath the turbulent water, only to emerge way, way downstream on the far side of the river and scramble thankfully on to dry land.

Upstream of the bridge, a group of a dozen or so were edging out across the ice. The man at the front turned to the others and began screaming at them, urging them to go back because their weight would break the fragile shelf. The vigour of his gesticulation unbalanced him and he slipped over on the ice. With the impact of his fall I heard a cracking sound as the whole sheet splintered away from the bank. Almost immediately it capsized, tipping the men into the water. The current took them rapidly downstream and dashed them into the side of the bridge. Some began to climb up on to the structure and were kicked back by those already desperately scrambling across it. Others remained in the water, clinging to the piles that supported the bridge until the sheet of ice itself slammed into the bridge, crushing those who clung beneath it and knocking several who were on the bridge into the water.

Memories of Austerlitz and the horrible mass of men drowned at Lake Satschan came rushing to me – memories that I had been fighting off ever since I had arrived at this place, ever since winter had begun to fall. At Austerlitz it had been Russian and Austrian lives, but now the score was evened. This time there had been no need to fire upon the ice to break it, as Bonaparte had at Satschan. That is not to say that there was no Russian cannon fire, only that it killed by more traditional means.

Terror finally overcame my desire to confront Iuda. It was time for me to leave, but even that was not going to be easy. Close to the bridge I was protected from the crowd, which travelled with a single mind and in a single direction. It would have been easier for me simply to get into the crowd and let it carry me across the river, but the bridge was now so swelled with bodies that I doubted whether more than half those who got on to it made it to the other side without falling into the water. I remembered crossing the Moskva Bridge, back when Moscow was being evacuated and when I again had found myself the only person wanting to travel against the flow. That had been an easier bridge to cross than this, but then the French crossing here were a hundred times more certain of their defeat than those Russians had been. I started out away from the river, against the direction that every other man on the bank was heading. They were not concerned or inquisitive about the direction I was going, they did not deliberately try to take me with them, but however much I pressed onward away from the icy water, still I found myself carried closer and closer towards it.

I grabbed men's arms and their coats and tried to push them aside to get past them, climbing against the flow of human bodies.

As I grabbed one man's lapel to throw him out of my way he looked at me with cold, familiar, grey eyes. For once he had not been looking for me, and I had only just then abandoned my search for him, and yet still Iuda and I had found one another.

CHAPTER XXXII

IT WAS ALMOST A WALTZ THAT WE ENGAGED IN AS WE MADE OUR way through the morass of panicking men to the edge of the crowd. Each of us had grabbed hold of the other, not in the conventional pose to dance but holding tightly so that the other would not escape. We each pushed the other, neither realizing it, but both with the same intent; to be free of the crowd so that we could deal with one another alone.

As we emerged, we were released from the supporting pressure of the men and women around us and fell to the ground. We rolled down the steep bank towards the river's edge, with first one man on top and then the other, coming to rest in an icy puddle, which the tread of thousands of feet had kept liquid despite the freezing temperature all around. By luck, I ended up on top of Iuda, and gave him a blow to the jaw with my fist which I hoped would subdue any further fighting spirit in him. He was still in the uniform of a chef de bataillon, whereas I was a mere soldat – each of us overdressed in comparison with the multitude around us – but no one around seemed to question whether I should be treating my superior officer in such a way. On the far side of the river, the military hierarchy might reassert itself, but here, each man's soul was his own.

'I presume by now you're beyond believing me,' shouted Iuda, striving to be heard above the chaos around us.

'I've long been beyond that,' I lied. Suddenly a body of men erupted from the main throng like a hernia, redrawing the arbitrary lines that partitioned the crowd from the empty space around it. Hundreds surged through us and past us and out on to the ice, knocking me over and knocking Iuda from my grasp. I hauled myself up to my feet and, feeling the slippery surface beneath them, realized with dread that I too had been forced out on to the frozen river. Seven years ago, on Lake Satschan, I had felt the same terror. Today, supported above the waves not like Saint Peter by the will of God, but by a flimsy layer of frozen water, I stood my ground.

I looked around to try to recapture Iuda before he could disappear into the mob, but, through the thinning veil of frightened men and women who slipped and slid their way to the shore, I could see him, facing me and approaching me.

'But are you yet beyond disbelieving me?' he shouted through the crowd. He had not read my mind; he had simply understood it perfectly. I once heard a story of a chess-player – who was said to have studied under Philidor – who could write down his opponent's play for five moves ahead, but only if that opponent was a great player. Against a weaker opponent, he was consistently wrong. In truth, it was the opponent who was wrong, the master who was right. Iuda knew that at some point I would have come to the conclusion that his word was valueless in terms of the truth it represented, and therefore all the more powerful in the ideas that it suggested.

'I have to know,' I said. We were now face to face.

'I can't tell you,' he replied, with a smile of mischievous delight.

'You will!' As I spoke I grabbed his wrist and swung my foot against his shin, knocking his legs from under him. He writhed as he fell and succeeded in pulling me over too. The ice sheet dipped under our weight and we both slid towards the water. My grip on Iuda's wrist was now reciprocated by his on mine, but there was no grip that either of us could find on the glassy surface beneath us to halt our descent. A swathe of powdered ice sprayed into my face, sheared from the surface as Iuda dug in the teeth of his knife to slow our motion. He came to a halt on the very lip of the ice, but my impact into him knocked him a little further over, so that his legs dipped into the water.

Wriggling on my back, I kicked at the knife in his hand and it skated across the ice and over the edge, disappearing into the water with a plop. Iuda spread his hands and arms wide across the surface of the ice, trying to find purchase, trying to prevent himself from slipping into the cold, turbid water. But he was no voordalak, and did not have their ability to find a grip on the most polished of surfaces.

I regained my feet as he hung limply off the edge of the ice, now up to his chest in water and, with every movement he made, slipping in a little deeper.

'You can't let me die,' he said, not as a plea but as a statement of fact.

'Why not?'

'That way you'll never know.'

I stamped my foot firmly beside his hand. He grabbed it and clung to it, his arm wrapping around my leg like a serpent's tail.

'So,' I asked, breathing deeply and trying to calm myself now I had the upper hand, 'was it Margarita or Domnikiia you were with?'

He looked up at me with his head cocked slightly to one side. 'It was…' He paused in thought, as though he had been asked whether he would prefer beef or mutton for dinner. 'Margarita!' he announced with an air of decision. Then he yanked firmly on my leg, throwing me once again on to my back on the ice. As I began to slide once more towards the river, Iuda too had lost his only anchorage and his head disappeared beneath the surface.

The ice sheet beneath me began to tip and I found myself sliding even faster towards the water into which Iuda had just disappeared. I rolled on to my stomach and splayed my arms out wide, but just like Iuda, I could find little purchase. My right hand found a momentary grip, but the fingers of my left could do nothing. Within seconds I splashed into the water, going under and feeling a new coldness that infiltrated those last few parts of me that had been protected by my clothing. By the time I bobbed back to the surface, so had he.

'I can't lie to you any more, Lyosha,' he said, spitting out some of the water that had filled his mouth and swallowing the rest. 'It was Dominique.'

Once again he disappeared beneath the waves. I might have dived down to pull him back to the surface, but my concern now was more that the current was hurtling me towards the pillars of the bridge itself. I put my arms and legs out in front of me, but even then I could not protect myself entirely from the force of the impact. The wind was knocked out of me as my chest collided with the wooden support and my head bashed against it, almost knocking me out. Only some instinct told me to hold on to whatever I could grab, otherwise, weighed down by my wet clothes, I would have sunk straight to the riverbed.

Moments later, I was again fully conscious. I hauled myself up out of the water and entwined my legs around one of the beams. Looking to my left, I saw Iuda also climbing out of the water on to the substructure of the bridge. His motion was like that of a newt, dragging itself from the slime of its watery habitat on to dry land. He paused for a moment, panting, and only then looked around to see me advancing on him, stretching from pillar to beam across the wooden web that comprised the bridge's foundations.

Iuda ducked inside, crossing underneath the bridge. I followed, but made better ground, managing to get both to the other side of the bridge and closer to him. We were now dead centre in the river, about as far from one bank as from the other. Above our heads, hundreds of French were trampling one another in an attempt to get over to the right bank. Russian cannonballs splashed into the river around us. Stretching away from us to the south, the river flowed fast and free. Beyond this bridge, past what little the current had left of the shattered other bridge, there was nothing for miles. Somewhere, way downstream, there would be some other bridge against which all those dead who fell here would eventually congregate. If not, the Black Sea awaited them, far, far away.

Iuda leapt out into the water and I made a grab after him. With my left hand I just managed to get a hold of a clump of his filthy blond hair, whilst keeping myself anchored to the bridge with my right. With only two fingers and a thumb, it was hard to get a good grip, but his hair was long and soon I had it entwined. He was at my mercy, up to his neck in the water. I could duck him beneath it, pull him to safety, or let him go.

'Tell me the truth!' I screamed at him.

'I have told you the truth,' he replied, laughing despite his predicament.

'When?' I demanded. It was not a rhetorical question and he knew it. What I wanted to know was which of his two contradictory statements was true.

'Often,' was his only reply, again accompanied by a laugh.

I pushed him downwards under the water, counting the seconds to myself to be sure that he would not die. I pulled him back up and he gasped for breath, but never lost his smile.

'Tell me!' I screamed at him again.

'You can't torture me, Lyosha.' He raised his hand to clear the wet hair from his eyes. 'I have the ultimate protection that you'll never believe me. I've told you everything – not just everything that's true, but everything else as well. All I can offer you is the ultimate enlightenment; not just what is but what could be. To know everything is to know nothing. What's the point in asking any more? What's the point in forcing it out of me? You might as well torture a coin and expect it to turn up tails.'

I pushed his head back under the water. He was right. Many people choose to live by their reputation; Iuda chose to live by the lack of it. With my help, he had put himself in a situation where I could lend no credence to anything he said. However many times I dipped his head beneath the waves, he could change his answer. The final answer would never be the definitive one, because another different answer could always follow. I could put Iuda through the agonies of hell and he could scream 'Margarita' nine hundred and ninety-nine times and I would still not believe him, for fear that on the thousandth he would mutter 'Domnikiia'.

I pulled him back up to the surface, tightening my grip on his hair as though to pull it out of his scalp.

'You're slow today, Lyosha,' he said. 'Do you still think you can get the truth out of me?'

Silistria had taught me more than one thing about torture. It had taught me about being a victim, but I had also learned about being a perpetrator. I'd learned that it's not always about gaining information; sometimes it's an end in itself.

I shook my head and waited for the look in his eyes that showed he realized that the torture was over. The instant I saw it, I pushed his head back under and began to count again. He knew that, this time, I was not intending to pull him back up again. He had chosen a game that led to his own destruction; chosen to lose with a clever move rather than survive through a mundane one. As I counted the seconds, he struggled to break free; past ten, past twenty, thirty and forty. Then he quietened. It was not long enough for a man to drown – I knew he was bluffing. My hand was so cold I could scarcely feel his head beneath it. I squeezed tighter, unable to feel even pain and wondering if I might be breaking my own fingers by gripping so tightly. After about a minute he began to struggle again and then a convulsion ripped through his body. Had that been his final, irresistible, instinctive attempt to breathe, when the urging of his lungs overcame the knowledge that he was surrounded not by air but by water? Afterwards, he moved no more.

I waited for a further minute with my numbed arm plunged deep into the river before I raised it to look into his face. He was gone. A clump of trailing blond hairs was left curled around in my insensible fingers, but of the rest of him there was no sign. His body had been ripped from my numb, frozen hand by the torrent of the river. I looked out downstream, but it was an impossible task to distinguish one lifeless, floating corpse from another. Amongst them, a few swimmers even now made it to the safety of the western shore, but I did not see Iuda amongst those either.

I pulled myself back in, underneath the bridge, my knees hunched up against my chest as I listened, troll-like, to the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet above my head. I began to shiver. The layers of clothing that I wore were all wet through. If I were to leave my hand at rest for too long against some piece of the bridge's structure, it might freeze there. I crawled back along under the bridge to the eastern bank of the river. Thousands still remained to cross, but it was now unlikely that many more would. The Russian troops under Kutuzov and Wittgenstein were closing in.

I headed south along the riverbank, quickly discarding my French greatcoat. The choice was between death from the cold or from a Russian bullet. I chose not on the basis of preference but of likelihood, and it was a close-run thing. As I continued downriver, those few Russian patrols I encountered were convinced by a few words from me. The even fewer French I met were just as easily convinced when they heard their own language.

Before long, I came to Borisov, the town abandoned by Bonaparte but a few days before. Now Bonaparte was heading back west. How much of his army made it with him was open to question, but he himself would surely get back to Paris. I had no further desire to chase him, nor to chase any other Frenchman. And if Iuda were somehow still alive, I did not have the desire to pursue him, or even find out for sure if he was dead or not. He was out of Russia, or very soon would be – whether swept south, downriver to the Black Sea, or swept west with the Grande Armée to Poland and beyond. He was no longer my problem. My problems were those that he had left with me.

Though it was still dark when I reached Borisov, I was lucky enough to be able to find a horse, left forgotten as the French rushed north. I mounted it and headed out of the town.

Bonaparte would struggle on for a few more years and would even, it would transpire, rise as a brief phoenix before his ultimate finale, but here in Russia his defeat had begun. It was not a defeat that I had taken any part in. I had fought Bonaparte at Austerlitz and we had lost. I had fought him at Smolensk, and we had lost. After Borodino I had found another battle to fight. If my grandchildren one day were to ask me how I helped in the downfall of Napoleon, I would be unable to tell them the truth. I could tell them of Maksim and of Vadim and Dmitry and of how we had fought together in unorthodox ways on and off for seven years, but I could never tell them how it had ended. I could never tell them how Dmitry had frozen to death and how he had been lucky compared to Vadim and how even Vadim had been lucky compared to Maksim. For although both Vadim and Maksim had died a similar death, Maks had the added weight of knowing that he had been sent to it by those he thought to be his friends.

The doubt about Domnikiia which Iuda had so guilefully insinuated into me was, I now understood, easy to cope with. It was Maks who had suggested the solution to me. It was a matter of faith. Faith, Maks had said, allows us to feel certain about things that we can never know for sure. I could never discover whether it had been Domnikiia or Margarita with Iuda – that was knowledge that could never be known – but it was clear what I wanted the truth to be. All I had to do was have faith in my chosen view of reality. It would not be easy, certainly not for a man like me, to maintain such faith, but the fact that it meant I could be with Domnikiia would make the effort worthwhile. Every day on which my faith was rewarded would in its turn strengthen that faith – and strengthen my need for that faith. I would not, however, be seeing Domnikiia quite every day.

The town of Borisov holds an interesting geographical position in Russia. It stands on one corner of an equilateral triangle, of which the other two vertices are Moscow and Petersburg. From here it was as far to Petersburg as it was to Moscow, and it was as far again from one to the other.

I could weigh myself down now with the choice of which one to go to, and I would not even attempt to fool myself that it was a choice between two cities – it was a choice between Domnikiia and Marfa. It did not matter which road I chose now – Moscow or Petersburg – I would still be able to travel at will between the two. I knew that I could never give up Domnikiia, simply because I did not want to. I knew that I would never abandon Marfa, not only because I would never abandon my son, but because I knew that my love for her was always inside me, waiting to be rekindled whenever I chose to let it. I spurred my new horse and headed off under a red sky, just beginning to be lit in the east.

Birds began to awaken to the new dawn and, to the sound of their song, the nightmare began to fade. My country had faced five hundred thousand invaders. I had faced just twelve. We had both won. We would both recover. But, unlike Russia herself, when I was to look back on the events of the autumn and winter of the year 1812, I would not feel the blood coursing in my veins, my heart swelling in my bosom and my lip quivering at the recollection of honours past. Oh, I would shed a tear for my fallen friends. But, unlike my country, I would feel no pride.