The dog pulled harder, baring teeth like shards of ice. Katia looked around frantically. Where were the yantchiki? And why were the outriders standing back, watching the man and his dog as they teased and played with her fear? Would they stand silent and permit the animal to tear her apart? The horror of the thought held Katia in a kind of paralysis for a moment. She knew she must scream for the yantchiki or make a run for the sleigh; she had to do something! But her legs were heavy and would not move. Even her arms felt strangely weighted.
A crowd of peasants had gathered around. Katia looked to them for succour, but in the deep dusk their features were unclear. On one or two faces she read a message that terrified and confused her. They wanted to see her dead. Suddenly the unfairness of her predicament overrode her fears with a growing, vitalizing anger. In a rage, she realized that she could not and would not permit a mob of villagers to rob her of her liberty. Not now when it had just begun!
Without thinking, she grabbed Madame Minin’s arm and pulled her away from the kitchen door. Inside, the old woman was still laughing, but Katia blotted out the demented sound. The mob had begun to jeer and taunt. She heard one man cry, “Let Kiska go. See what she does to the baryshna!” There was more raucous laughter.
At any moment Katia expected to feel the teeth and claws dragging at her flesh, but she whispered to Madame Minin, “Don’t listen to them. And don’t give up. There’s a knife in the sleigh. The yantchik showed me where it’s hidden. Come, Madame, come!”
Somehow the two women backed their way toward the sleigh despite the dog and the blood-lusting crowd that followed. Madame Minin was sobbing violently, and for some reason the older woman’s near-hysteria made it easier for Katia to think clearly. It seemed as if she were the only person in the village who had not gone mad. That thought gave her confidence.
They had almost reached the sleigh when Katia saw someone in the crowd kick the dog brutally in the hindquarters. The animal snarled and turned, ripping the lead from its master. The beast was free and leaping toward Katia when suddenly the night was full of violent sound. Before Katia’s eyes, the dog was blown apart. Her clothes were splattered with its blood and gore, but there was no time for horror. Strong hands were pushing her into the sleigh. She looked up and saw the young yantchik, his musket aimed into the mob as it began to move slowly back from the body of the dog.
No sooner were the women aboard than the sleigh lurched forward. In a matter of seconds, they had left the village of Yoisha behind and returned to the comparative safety of the black Muscovy forest. Trembling and praying, Madame Minin retired immediately to the sleigh’s interior; but Katia remained in the front unable to tolerate the sound of the woman’s sobs and moans. The night air was like an icy whip that gradually drove the fear away, leaving Katia clear-headed and able to think.
She was assessing the slight damage to her traveling costume, when the young yantchik—who seemed emboldened by his dramatic rescue of the baryshna—gave the reins to his partner and swung down from the driver’s high seat. He sat opposite Katia at the head of the sleigh. Despite the frigid air, he held his cap in his hands respectfully.
Katia assured him she was entirely recovered from her fright. “Surely there is no further danger?”
The yantchik considered his response too long.
“You are afraid to tell me something,” said Katia softly. Suddenly, the driver looked very young to her. He was no older than she, and he was clearly frightened.
“We have lost most of our outriders to drink and panic,” he said slowly, not bothering now to conceal his desperation. “All but three of them believed the story told of peasant trouble up ahead.”
“But with good horses surely we can outrun any trouble?”
“There were no fresh animals for us in Yoisha. That is, they wouldn’t let us have them. The team is exhausted as are all the outriders’ horses.”
“We are in grave danger then from peasant marauders?” Katia made her voice calm in spite of her growing fear.
The young driver nodded disconsolately. Before swinging back up beside his partner, he said, “I watched you with that crowd back there. You are brave like a peasant woman. You are not soft and timid like a baryshna or the old one who rides with you.” He resumed his seat beside the other yantchik. After a moment, as if it were an afterthought, he turned back and said, “Remember the knife that is hidden, Mademoiselle.”
At first, though her body ached for rest, Katia was too nervous to sleep. The horses slowed to a walk, and she imagined all sorts of terrors in the dark woods through which they made their slow passage. The sleigh rocked gently; and finally she dozed a little on and off, wrapped in her torn cape, her face turned into her shoulder away from the frigid air.
Near dawn, just as the woods began to fill with a luminous grey light, the sleigh entered a long narrow clearing heavily wooded on all sides. The meadow was everywhere mounded with drifts that had piled against the abandoned logs and stumps that littered the cleared area. The track was ill-defined and the horses moved ever more slowly.
They had almost reached the woods at the clearing’s far end. Katia yawned and stretched. She stood up, planning to check on Madame Minin. Suddenly the gloom was pierced by dozens of lights as peasants brandishing torches and farm implement weapons streamed out of the forest on both sides. The dawn was noisy with their cries. Katia heard the yantchik’s whip as it slapped across the backs of the horses. The frightened beasts surged forward, straining for the cover of the forest. But the noise and lights confused them. They snorted, reared, and then careened hard to the left where the snow had drifted.
The sleigh overturned and Katia was thrown wide, into a deep drift some distance away. The fall left her stunned for a moment. She lay still, half-buried in the snow. The nightmare sounds told her what was happening to Madame Minin and the others. The outriders fired only a shot or two before she heard them cry out to each other to flee before it was too late. She heard a woman screaming, screaming…
Katia took her breath in gagging sobs. Her body was soaked through, and she trembled so hard she thought the peasants would surely notice the movement in the snow. She waited to be found, to be massacred like the others. She tried to pray, knowing they would be her last prayers; but her mind was in confusion. She lay still, waiting. But nothing happened. Eventually, the clearing was silent once more.
A long time passed before she believed the silence. Then she rolled out of the drift and, crouched in the snow, looked around her. The peasants had taken the horses and looted the once elegant sleigh. But they had left the bodies of the yantchiki and Madame Minin as food for the wolves.
Wolves!
In her terror, Katia had not heard their howls before. They were quite close. Her mind raced. What could she do? Was there any way to save herself?
At last she remembered the hidden knife. As she dragged herself back toward the sleigh, she prayed the peasants had not found it. The howls were closer now, and wilder; it seemed as if the death smell from the clearing had intoxicated the animals.
She staggered toward the overturned sleigh. Beside it she saw Madame Minin’s headless body, lying in a pool of its own blood. Near it, gutted like an autumn swine, lay the heroic young driver, his whip broken in his hand. Katia gagged and turned away, covering her face. But something caught her eye, and she looked toward the forest. It was the wolves. Seven or eight of them skulked on the border, eyeing the sleigh.
She knew the knife would not save her from them, but she had no other hope.
Chapter Three
A mile away, from the safe cover of the forest, Prince Oleg Romanov and his body guards surveyed the damage done by a peasant fire and then turned their horses toward home. The bite of gunfire made them detour toward the coachroad. Prince Oleg thought the silence following the shots was ominous. He had half a mind to turn his grey stallion back towards home.
Damn, he was cold! How like the serfs to run amuck when the weather was its most unplea
sant, he thought. Two winters before, he had been forced to bring one hundred guardsmen from Moscow to quell an uprising. It was quite ridiculous. Not to mention expensive.
He could deal with peasants easily enough, though. His men would rout the leaders, and then he would show what happened to rebels on Romanov land. The gory heads of the accused would loom over their village for days and act as a lesson for all.
His thoughts were interrupted by one of his guards just returned from scouting the territory ahead. “Highness, there’s been some trouble on the road. A sleigh is down and there are wolves.”
“No survivors, I suppose.”
’There never are,’ thought Oleg. The crazed peasants lusted for blood like savages.
“Take some men with you and investigate more closely. Watch yourselves, though. And for God’s sake, hurry!” Prince Oleg was cold as the permafrost and his breath clouded into white vapor around his face. He wanted to be home before the fire with his dogs at his side. Smiling, he thought how he would call little Dinka from her duties in the scullery after he had drunk enough vodka to stand the smell of her. And then…He shifted impatiently in his saddle.
When the guards returned, Leo, the forward man, carried a body slung across his saddle. “We found her down there. Highness. She had a dirk.” He fingered his torn clothing. “She meant to kill me, Highness. No mistaking her intent for I had to wrestle the knife from her.” The other men in the party snickered. “She’s fainted dead away.”
Oleg urged his grey a few steps forward and leaned across Leo’s saddle to lift Katia’s head. Her skin had the strange and dangerous opalescence of flesh that is close to freezing, but even so her beauty made his pulse quicken. The waves of her dark brown hair framed her face like a pale cameo. The shoulders of her kaftan had ripped, revealing the snug bodice of her underblouse. Thinking he discerned a faint heartbeat, Oleg pressed his palm to her breast.
“She’s breathing,” he said as he took an extra wrap of lynx from his saddlebag and folded it around her supple form. “I’ll carry her.” Seeing how the shadowy silver pelt intensified her fragility, Oleg felt his body move with excitement.
As he drew her close to him, she became conscious for a moment. Heavy-lidded tartar eyes stared up at Oleg. Blue as turquoise. She struggled pitifully before she was overcome by weakness. The breathtaking blue eyes closed again as she slipped back into unconsciousness. Oleg was haunted by the fathomless innocence of her expression.
As his men kept watch for renegade serfs. Prince Oleg set his mind on other things. He knew he wouldn’t have to satisfy himself with that scullery slut, Dinka, much longer. Katia’s youthful beauty was etched on his memory and he felt the stirring of desire in his loins.
The Romanov country estate was ringed by two stone walls. The outer wall encircled one hundred acres of parkland. Oleg could remember the summertimes of his childhood when the park had bloomed, and elegantly clad men and women—nobility not only of Russia but of all the European capitals as well—made promenades through the mazes of gardens.
Since the war, Oleg had allowed the parkland to return to wilderness. The vast acreage loomed threateningly despite the regular contingent of guards. He knew it would be all to easy for a band of rebels to scale the outer walls and hide in the wild park. Waiting.
At the gate of the inner wall, Oleg halted the party. “Dimitri,” he said, addressing one of his guards, “take as many men as you need and scour the park for serfs. Shoot any you find. I’ll pay a bounty in vodka. I want extra guards on all the outer gates and by the mill where the wall is down.”
“Tonight, Highness?”
“Did you think I meant next week?”
“Forgive me, My Lord, but the men are tired. We’ve been out all night.”
“Don’t you think I know that? Do as you are told. Or would you rather I put another man in your place? Permanently?”
The guard shook his head grimly and signalled to his men to follow him back into the park. Alone, Oleg rode through the tall iron gate into the manor courtyard.
The manor was an imposing three storied structure built of stone and wood. The facade was dominated by an outside staircase that gave access to the second floor, where the residential room, or gornitza, was located. The ground floor of the building was given over to kitchen and laundry and store rooms. In the past, portions of the building had been gutted by numerous fires and rebuilt with materials at hand and little thought to design. Oleg had many times been a guest in the classically perfect homes of the English and French aristocracy, but he preferred the rough-hewn masculinity of this two hundred year old structure.
At the foot of the outside staircase, he was met by half a dozen fawning servants. He began giving orders before dismounting.
“I want a room prepared for this poor child. And call the znakhara. Tell her to prepare a recuperative potion. I want the girl well and on her feet in twenty-four hours. Go through her clothing before you burn it. Her papers were probably lost in the wreckage, but you might find something to identify her. I want my bath now. And then supper.”
The portly housekeeper who had belonged to the Romanovs for nearly sixty years was clearly agitated. “Your cousin, Alexei Stepanovich, has come, My Lord. He and that horrible bodyguard of his.” Dashka, like all the servants, knew there was bad blood between the princely cousins. As the bearer of ill tidings, she risked her Prince’s fury. She cowered visibly.
Oleg cursed under his breath and tightened his hands into fists. “Where is he now?”
“In the stable, my Prince.”
Oleg strode across the courtyard to the low building of thatch and timber that stabled the riding horses. He found his cousin in a back stall, carefully salving the wounded ankles of a magnificent black stallion.
“What are you doing here?” Oleg demanded with his hands on his hips, his heavy-booted legs planted a stride apart.
“I was in Borodino and heard about your troubles. I thought you might need me, cousin,” drawled Alexei, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. He continued to minister to his horse.
Oleg cursed inwardly. ‘Damn the man!’ What was Alexei’s game? What had brought him to Muscovy and the home of a kinsman he hated?
Their fathers had been brothers who married two beautiful sisters. Married in a double ceremony by the Patriarch of Moscow himself, their wives had borne sons only weeks apart. Now each in his thirtieth year, the cousins were tall, well-muscled men, their features characteristically Romanov—strong jaws, proud aquiline noses. But Oleg had inherited his father’s arrogant icy blondness, while Alexei was dark, like his mother.
“I asked why you are here.” The last Oleg had been told, Alexei was in England attending to his immensely profitable shipping interests there.
“And I answered you, Oleg. Now, have you no better hospitality for a man and his lamed horse than this airless cell?” Alexei indicated the stallion’s cruelly lacerated ankles. “We came through a bramble hell skirting trouble back by the old threshing house.”
“Where is that black bodyguard of yours?”
Oleg could barely conceal a shudder thinking about Black Jake. Apart from his sinister coloring, something indefinable in the man—a stance, a twist of the lips—filled Oleg with dread. He would have relished ringing all the secrets a bodyguard is privy to from that perpetually scowling man. Ah, but there was the difficulty. Black Jake would never yield any insight into Alexei’s business or political affairs because he was mute. Oleg half suspected Alexei himself of having silenced the man.
“I have increased the guard along the outside wall.”
“If the serfs want in, Oleg, they will get in.” Alexei took a short-bristled brush from its place on the wall and began grooming his horse.
“We have muskets, remember. And the peasants are stupid.”
“Like most of our class, you make the mistake of believing what the serfs want you to believe. So long as you think them stupid, you are in danger.”
Oleg chafed under
this criticism. How he hated his cousin! He knew Alexei and Black Jake had friends among the peasants, and it galled him that the two men travelled unmolested throughout Russia, while he was forced to keep a full body of guards about him at all times.
As he caparisoned Alladin against the freezing night air, Alexei said, “Oleg, you deserve whatever the peasants give you. I know how you operate your estates. Just like your father, your only concern is with the profit you can make off furs and grain and timber. The people are nothing—kine to be sold or used for profit until they drop. With masters like you, the peasants are bound to rebel. Mark my words, cousin: reform must come.”
Oleg laughed bitterly. Let the fool hang himself! The Czar was a canny man and would not ignore Alexei’s treasonous words. Then Alexei Romanov would get a taste of Russian justice. The thought satisfied Oleg.
“Well, all I can say is that it is a sad day in Russia when an innocent child cannot travel safely,” said Oleg as the two men left the stable together.
Alexei cast him a quizzical look, and Oleg went on to tell about the girl he had recently rescued.
Alexei seemed amused. “Well, I cannot fault your luck, Oleg. She, on the other hand, might rather have died than find herself in debt to such as you.”
“Keep a civil tongue, Alexei Stephanovich.”
“You are touchy, Cousin. Can it be this girl is someone special? Well, now, never fear that I will intrude on whatever you have planned. I will not stay here longer than necessary. As soon as Alladin is healed, I will leave you to your appetites. It cannot be soon enough for me, I assure you.” Alexei turned and strode away, leaving his cousin in the silence of the empty courtyard.
Later, in the gornitza, the large middle room linking the two wings of the house, the room which served as both living and dining room, Oleg forgot his cousin’s irritating presence. Life was definitely becoming more interesting. Only a day earlier, he had been dreading his enforced return to diplomatic service in St. Petersburg. That day’s communique from the new Czar, Nicholas I, issued in the first hours of his reign, had been emphatic, however. “Your Holy Duty as a Russian noble calls you to serve Mother Russia.” Oleg really had little choice in the matter. As he had for the late Czar, he would ingratiate himself into the diplomatic community and spend his days and gala nights easing inter-embassy tensions. The diplomatic atmosphere in St. Petersburg was volatile and dangerous, but the work challenged Oleg’s skill and gave him power and prestige with the Crown.
The Frost And The Flame Page 3