by Jasper Kent
As I walked, just far enough behind not to be seen or heard, I began to marvel at my own inhumanity. There was nothing I could have done to save the woman that Ilya had killed when I first saw him, but I had just allowed four men to die, simply so that I could pursue him. If I had acted swiftly and thrust the cane I still held in my hand through his heart, then those men might have been saved. But it would not have achieved my goal. There was more than one voordalak in Petrograd, I felt certain of it, and so I had to find their lair. I felt the coldblooded resolution of my youth returning to me, a determination that had been inculcated in me by my mother. I could not be sentimental about those four soldiers, any more than I had been about killing Dusya. If I allowed Ilya or any of the vampires he shared his nest with to live, then there would be a far greater number of deaths on my conscience.
At the Obvodny Canal there were guards on the bridge, but they were letting people through unchecked. We were too far from the city centre now for them to care. Ilya turned along the canal, passing the Baltic Station and the Warsaw Station and then finally headed south on Zabalkansky Avenue. We were truly leaving the city.
I had some inkling now of where Ilya would be sleeping when the sun finally rose. He had not taken the most direct route, but he’d clearly known the best way out of the city, avoiding guard posts manned in such numbers that even he might be overcome. But now we were heading along a path that was familiar to me, that I’d traversed years before in very similar circumstances. Again I had been following a vampire. On that occasion it had been my uncle Dmitry. He had found a location that was most suitable for a vampire to sleep – why shouldn’t Ilya come to the same conclusion?
I was proved right. Ilya turned off into the Novodyevichye Cemetery. Since I’d started following him, the moon had risen – it was almost full – and although it was dimmed by a thin layer of cloud I could see him making his way between the gravestones and sepulchres. Perhaps it would have been wisest to leave him there. I knew his resting place now, and I could return in daylight, safely to deal with him and however many others I found there. But it was a big graveyard; anything I could do to restrict the area I had to search when I came back would save time – and therefore lives.
I removed the cap from the end of my cane and slipped it into my pocket, holding the sharp point out in front of me. I crept in after him. Somewhere in the distance I could see the light of a fire, towards which he seemed to be heading. After a few minutes I lost sight of him, but I could still see the flickering flames and thought I could make out voices. I took a few more steps, and then decided I had gone far enough. I’d be able to get this far again in daylight; the remnants of the fire they had lit would show me precisely where they were. I looked over my shoulder to check that the path behind me was clear.
In an instant the fire went out. The moon still shone down, but it was not nearly as bright as the flames. I became aware of movement all around me, shadows dancing amongst the headstones – figures of men, though I knew they had long since ceased to be humans. I heard whispered instructions and laughter, and then I felt hands gripping my shoulders. I lashed out with my cane, but it was plucked from my fingers. I was shoved to the ground and then dragged face down by the ankles, grass, earth and stones rubbing against me. I covered my face with my hands.
At last we stopped and I was rolled on to my back. The fire was alight again – I don’t know how they had managed to hide its flames. They stood all around me, in a circle. I didn’t have time to count them. One bent forward, his face leering in front of me, fangs bared. It was Ilya. I tried to lift myself up, but another of them stamped his foot down on my right arm. A third copied him on the other side. The only chance I could see was to tell Ilya who I was and pray that some spark of humanity might remain in him, but I knew the nature of the voordalak too well to imagine it to be any real hope, and besides, his next words proved that he was already quite aware of my identity.
‘This’ll teach you to screw my little sister.’
He raised his head to strike and at that moment my eyes locked with one of those surrounding us. It was a tall figure with dark hair, aged about fifty, or at least he had been when he became undead. I couldn’t fail to recognize him, but his brown eyes stared down on me with complete dispassion. Either he didn’t know me or he didn’t care. But I knew him.
It was my uncle, Dmitry.
CHAPTER IV
‘FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, Dmitry, it’s me! Mihail Konstantinovich! Tamara’s son!’
Ilya thrust the heel of his hand against my jaw, silencing me and forcing my head to one side, so that my neck was stretched out for him to bite. I felt his lips touch my skin, but then he jerked away. I looked up to see Dmitry standing closer, his booted foot still raised from kicking Ilya in the side.
‘Let him go!’ Dmitry’s voice had the same timbre that I had known years before, but now there was an added authority to it. The vampires obeyed him instantly and I was able to sit up. He reached out a hand to help me to my feet.
‘You’re an idiot,’ he said as I dusted myself down.
I wondered for a moment whether I should counter by telling him that he was an idiot for letting me live – that one day he would come to regret it – but it would have been churlish. And I wasn’t sure it was even true. In the past we’d each had ample opportunity to kill the other, and yet we were both still here.
‘I didn’t think there’d be so many of you,’ I replied instead.
He led me away from the group that still stood in a circle around where I had been lying and pointed to the plinth of an overturned statue near the fire. I sat down. ‘Did you count how many?’ he asked.
I looked over to them and totted up. They were shuffling away, uninterested now they knew they would not be feeding on me. Before I could complete the count Dmitry told me the number.
‘Twelve of them,’ he said. ‘It seemed appropriate.’
‘Appropriate?’
‘In 1812 my father, your grandfather, recruited a dozen vampires to help him save Russia from the tyrant Bonaparte. Today I’m doing the same.’
‘He went on to kill them – all of them.’
‘All but one,’ Dmitry reminded me. ‘But that was a mistake born of ignorance. You and I understand these things better.’
‘So you’re going to save Russia?’ My voice was scornful. ‘Send the Boche scurrying home to Berlin?’
Dmitry gave the briefest of laughs. ‘Germany isn’t the enemy – not the real enemy. The Kaiser may be a tyrant, but that’s for his people to worry about. We have our own tyrant to deal with.’
I could guess his meaning. ‘Nikolai?’
Dmitry nodded. ‘I take it then that you share my opinion.’
‘Perhaps. I didn’t think it was the kind of matter over which a voordalak could really have an opinion.’
‘And why not?’ He exaggerated his offence, but it was real enough. ‘Perhaps when I was young – young as a voordalak – then all I was interested in was my baser desires. It’s the same with the young of any species, though their desires may differ. And not all of us grow to be much different, but some do. Look at Zmyeevich. When he brought the twelve – the oprichniki – to Russia, his mind was on things greater than simply the craving to feed.’
‘He wanted the throne – wanted revenge on the descendants of Peter the Great.’
‘Absolutely. But my point is that his desire was beyond mere bloodlust.’
‘His may have been, but the oprichniki had only one thing on their minds. How do you know your lot won’t be the same? I’ve already seen one of them kill tonight.’
‘We have to feed. But I know they will obey me.’
‘The same way Zmyeevich knew? Because you exchange blood with them – and control their minds?’
A strange expression crossed his face. He lowered his jaw, but did not allow his lips to part. His eyes widened and bulged. I could not tell by the light of the moon and the fire, but I imagined he grew pale.
&nb
sp; Finally he spoke. ‘I would never do that again.’
I studied him. There was an indisputable sincerity in his words, and on his face. It was in a tomb in this very graveyard that I had witnessed him and the great vampire Zmyeevich exchange blood. It was I who had explained to him that it meant their consciousness would begin to merge. It would be the same process that bound Zmyeevich to the Romanovs, but the link would be far tighter, and quite irrevocable. In the end the stronger mind would be dominant. Neither of us had been in any doubt which of the two that would be. Dmitry had been fortunate to be able to tear himself away from Zmyeevich before his will was subsumed entirely.
I felt suddenly aware of the enormity of the moment. This was my uncle – my half-uncle; we both were descended from Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, but Dmitry was his son by his wife, Marfa. I was his grandson by his mistress, Domnikiia. Even so, he was the closest thing I had to a family. More than that, he’d known Aleksei. My grandfather was my hero, but I had never met him. Even my mother had only spent a few brief hours with him. Dmitry was his son. And Dmitry had been born into a different time – a different world. 1807. He was a hundred and ten years old. Of his long strange life, I knew very little.
‘Where did you go?’ I asked. ‘After … Zmyeevich.’
‘As I told you I would, I went to America.’ He spoke as if he’d mentioned it to me only the other day. Perhaps it seemed like that to him. For me it was over half a lifetime ago. ‘The further I was from Zmyeevich, the safer I felt. I’d left Petersburg even before they killed Aleksandr. I landed in New York – just one amongst millions.’ He smiled to himself. ‘It was easier for me to get in than most. I travelled as a piece of cargo. Oh, but what a city! Have you been there?’
I shook my head. I was the least well-travelled man in my family. Aleksei had been to Paris, and now I heard Dmitry had gone even further. I’d made it as far as Vienna once, though to the east I’d been almost as far as a man can go.
Dmitry continued. ‘The nation was scarcely a hundred years old. The French sent them a statue to commemorate it. It went up soon after I arrived: Liberty Enlightening the World. They believe that’s what they can do, not like here, where we can’t even enlighten our own children. I lived there for over twenty years; passed myself off as an American, although there were so many Russians arriving every day I could just as well have lived amongst them.’
‘You fed, I take it.’
He laughed. ‘Of course I did, and enjoyed it too. I don’t need to justify myself to you, Mihail. I don’t need to explain myself to you, because I cannot. You question how I can kill an innocent human, eat his flesh, drink his blood, but at the same time want the best for humanity? It makes no sense to you, but then you’re a human. I’m not. Humans do far worse things. Those Russians I told you about, who came to America? Most of them Jews, fleeing their own country in fear for their lives, just because the tsar decided to blame them for his nation’s ills. And worse than him are the millions of Russians who happily believed him, who turned on their neighbours of hundreds of years and burned down their houses, murdered them and sent them running across the world in hope of a safer place to live. And even those who didn’t participate stood by and let it happen. Drinking a little blood hardly seems so bad, does it?’
It was a spurious argument. Not ‘I am good’, but ‘you’re just as bad’. It didn’t absolve him of what he had done, and continued to do. But he was right, I had stood by and let it happen. Many of us had. ‘Why did you leave?’ I asked.
‘I knew I’d have to one day. A vampire can’t settle like a man does. There’s no moment at which he can say to himself, yes, this is the place where I shall live out my days, because he knows that no end will come. I could have stayed longer in New York, or gone to another city. I travelled back and forth between Europe and America, unable to settle. I had no plans to return to Russia. The revolution of 1905 had already failed, and the best of Russia were those wise enough to abandon the country, like the ones coming to America.’ He paused. ‘That’s what I thought.
‘But then I found myself in Paris. It was the twenty-ninth of May 1913. I went to the theatre – a new place called the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It had only been open a month or so. It was a mixed bill – ballet. Les Sylphides was first, and I so used to love Chopin. There was some Weber and Borodin too, but the main event was a new work by Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky called Le Sacre du Printemps – The Rite of Spring. You must have heard what happened.’
I nodded. ‘It made news around the world.’
‘The theatre fell apart,’ Dmitry continued. ‘There was always a divided crowd in Paris. The rich who sat in their boxes so they’d be seen, and the young, artistic types – les bohèmes – who adored anything that was new, however awful it might be. But then I heard that opening bassoon solo, so high up, quite wrong for the instrument, and yet so perfect, and I knew that this was as far from awful as it’s possible to be. And yet there was laughter. And it wasn’t just the music. When the curtain rose and the dancers stood there, their feet turned in as though they knew nothing of ballet. I understood the music better, but it was still all beautiful to me. But the audience wouldn’t have it. They weren’t there to see what was on stage, just to hurl abuse at each other. And then they got bored with that and started to shout at the orchestra and to throw things at them. The noise was so loud, I’m surprised they managed to keep going. I could see Nijinsky standing in the wings shouting the count at the dancers because they couldn’t hear the music.
‘Finally the police were called, and the worst offenders were taken away. It quietened down after that, but there was still some catcalling. In the end they applauded; demanded Stravinsky and Nijinsky come on stage to take a bow.’
‘And what were you doing throughout all this?’ I asked. ‘With all that chaos around you, no one would have noticed a few drained bodies until it was all over.’
Dmitry didn’t rise to the bait. I don’t think he even noticed the bile I’d tried to inject into my words. ‘I just sat there. I was enraptured. It was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. When I became a vampire, I lost something, some ability to understand music; certain aspects of it – the emotion. I’d sat through Les Sylphides and remembered how much I used to enjoy Chopin – to listen to or to play – but now the sound was no more than pleasant. Chopin is so much about emotion. But there’s more to music than that, and Stravinsky has it all. Maybe there’s emotion there too, maybe I am missing something, but there’s plenty to listen to without it. At the end I was on my feet, shouting and applauding. I saw it twice more before it went to London. There were still people laughing and shouting, but it was nothing like at the premiere.’
‘And that’s why you came back to Russia?’ I asked.
‘That’s when I began to consider it. This was the greatest work of art I’d ever seen. All right, it was staged in Paris, but the conception was entirely Russian. The composer, Stravinsky; the choreographer, Nijinsky; the designer, Rerikh; the impresario, Diaghilev; all of them Russian. But they’d all left Russia, like those immigrants in New York. Like Chopin, for God’s sake, a century ago. And I realized what Russia might be if her greatest minds didn’t just leak away to the West. And I understood what I’ve always known, that the thing driving them away was the tsar. It doesn’t matter which one. In 1825 I stood with three thousand comrades in Senate Square to stop the first Nikolai. We failed, and for a long time I believed we’d always fail. But things have changed. The world’s changed. And for once Russia will change.’
I couldn’t disagree with him. ‘And that was four years ago,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Then the war started and things got difficult for everyone. Difficult for Nikolai too, which was a good thing. That lunatic starets, Rasputin, made them look like fools. I rejoined the army, stirred things up a bit, but there wasn’t much I could do but wait – and gather together my little troop. I knew there would be a battle in the end, between the people and those sti
ll loyal to the tsar, and I knew that then we’d be able to help. And now it’s started.’
He stopped, his story complete. I could think of nothing to ask him. Mostly his eyes had been fixed on the fire as he relived times past. Now he looked directly at me and smiled. His face was open, genuine and friendly, and I felt very much afraid.
‘Which side are you on, by the way, Mihail? That of the people? Or do you remain loyal to the tsar? He is, after all, your cousin.’
There was no reason to suppose he would have forgotten who my father was. And clearly my life depended on the answer I gave. Here I was in the dark, sitting opposite a vampire, with a dozen others lurking somewhere near by. If I chose to side against them, I was doomed. But I had no need to lie.
‘You’re my uncle,’ I said, ‘and I despise what you’ve become. If Aleksandr II were still alive, I would have fought to save him, but not his son, nor his grandson.’
‘You protected his son.’
‘By drinking Zmyeevich’s blood, you mean?’
Dmitry nodded. ‘And thereby attracting to yourself the power that Zmyeevich can wield over the Romanov family just once in each generation.’
‘The lesser of two evils. If Zmyeevich ruled over Russia then the reign of the tsar would seem like paradise. That’s why, much as I hated Aleksandr III, I feared for his death. I couldn’t protect his son, not in the same way. I knew Zmyeevich would come for him.’