by K L Conger
“Come.” Nikolai jerked his head in the direction he'd been going. “I could use your help. Children are trapped.”
Taras fell in beside him as they trotted into the heart of the city. The temperature rose as they neared the center.
“The cathedrals and churches double as orphanages and schools,” Nikolai explained as they went. “Hundreds of children are trapped inside them.”
“The tsar. Has he been—?”
“Evacuated. Yes. To Sparrow Hills, outside the city. The fire has jumped the Kremlin Wall. Parts of the palace are burning.”
Taras stopped in his tracks. Three paces further on Nikolai turned around, surprised to find Taras no longer beside him.
“The palace is burning?”
“Yes. Come. We cannot stop.” Nikolai urged, his voice thick with impatience.
Taras moved forward again. The palace? That meant . . . Inga. Taras fell in beside Nikolai again. An icy hand gripped his heart. He could do nothing for Inga now. If the tsar had been evacuated, others might have been too. Even if he went looking, he might not find her. Besides, Yehvah would look after Inga. She always did.
Taras and Nikolai worked side by side for the rest of the afternoon. They smashed windows and lifted children out of burning buildings. The work was exhausting—beyond exhausting—but everywhere they turned, more people needed help, compelling them on.
Often the children and other adults in the cathedrals would cluster around the windows, awaiting rescue. Taras, Nikolai, and the other rescuers moved as fast as they could. Too often they could not get everyone out before the flames reached them. When that happened, the monks acted as human walls against the fire. Taras hauled people out through a window as fast as he could, while behind them the holy men were eaten alive by the flames. The smell of charred flesh became so strong, he turned his head and vomit, even as he worked.
Scorched corpses piled up around them as the day wore on. When people were rescued, they hurried off to safety, but Taras didn't know where that was.
As darkness came on, Taras and Nikolai, still working side by side, came upon an enormous wooden cathedral. It looked familiar to Taras, and he thought he ought to know its name, but couldn’t recall. Exhaustion, dehydration, and bleary vision slowed him.
Flames ravaged the roof of the cathedral but had yet to climb the outer walls. The building next door was a bonfire of snarling flames. It had collapsed against the cathedral door, trapping the people inside. Flames on the inside cast silhouettes of trapped people against the windows. The windows of this cathedral sat higher than most, and the soldiers couldn't reach them. They tried to stack things up to climb, but anything that could be stacked had already burned. What little they found buckled under their weight.
Taras circled the building, looking for another way in. The heat pushed in on him so heavily that he feared his head would collapse in on itself. They would not survive long in this furnace. Taras fell into a crouch. The air at ground level felt cooler by a scant degree. Even down here, breathing was difficult.
“We cannot go farther in.” Nikolai’s voice in his ear surprised Taras. He hadn’t realized Nikolai followed him around the building. “The middle of the city is a giant furnace, and it’s expanding. After this cathedral, we head back out and hope we make it alive.”
Taras nodded. They gazed up at the cathedral. Taras couldn’t see a way in. The silhouettes visible against the glass were too small to be adults. He looked around. On the other side of the street, something glinted in the firelight. Rising into the suffocating heat, he walked quickly toward it. It turned out to be a pair of razor sharp daggers, lying on a bed of hay.
Taras had an idea. The cathedral was built entirely of wood. Walking past Nikolai to the wall of the building, he thrust one dagger into the wood at waist-height.
“Help me.” Raising his foot, he pushed his weight onto the dagger and lifted himself up. Nikolai held his middle, keeping Taras fast against the side of the building. He thrust the second dagger into the wood higher up. Once he got his other foot onto that dagger, he would be able to lift himself up to the windowpane. He got his foot up, but as he reached for the window, something grabbed his belt and yanked him down.
Taras hardly knew what happened. He fell, the air was driven from his lungs, and he found himself ten feet from the cathedral. Sitting up, he shook his head, trying to clear it. Nikolai sat next to him, hand still on Taras’s belt.
“What are you—?”
The crash drowned out the rest of his question. A horse-sized chunk of roof, alive with flame and crawling with embers, fell right where he'd been climbing. If Nikolai hadn’t pulled Taras out of the way, he’d be dead and burning by now.
Taras ought to thank Nikolai, but couldn’t. He let his head hang and shut his eyes. His shoulders felt like granite cobblestones, as though he were shackled to this piece of ground and he’d never rise again.
Voices came around the corner. They belonged to the men who'd been trying to get in on the other side.
“We can’t get in. The roof is coming down. Any ideas?”
“No.” Nikolai answered.
A crash from inside the cathedral told them that the roof was coming down in there as well. Many of the screams from inside went silent. The silhouettes near the windows pounded harder and screamed louder. An adult might have broken the glass. These were obviously children.
The small group of men stood silently watching outside, defeated.
“There’s nothing we can do for them.” Nikolai said, his voice hollow and resigned. “We’ll die if we try.”
“We can pray for them.” Taras did not know the man who spoke, but his large arms and white smock—blackened with soot—could only belong to a blacksmith. He made a motion as though to remove a hat. He wasn’t wearing one. Instead, he clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head.
They stood silently, listening to the horrifying screams from the cathedral for several seconds. Taras couldn’t stand it. The screams clawed their way into his veins, into his soul. With a groan he got to his feet.
“I cannot sit here and listen to this.” He turned to stride away. Someone grabbed his arm and swung him around. Nikolai didn't look angry or judgmental. Only resolute.
“Someone ought to be with them in their time of dying.”
“But we’re not with them.” Taras’s voice broke. He would have been crying if not for the heat. “No one is.”
“God is with them. It will be over soon.”
“Not soon enough.”
A series of ear splitting crashes inside the cathedral followed. The voices went silent.
The men exhaled as one.
“We must go now.” Nikolai said. The men all nodded in agreement. Taras said nothing. “It won’t be easy to weave our way back through all this flame. Everyone stay close.”
“We’ve failed,” another man sobbed. “Moscow is in flames. How could this happen to the tsar’s holy city?”
Nikolai shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s nothing else to be done. It will have to burn itself out. Then we will start over. We can look for more survivors on our way to the river. We must get ourselves out now, or risk becoming food for the flames. Come. I think darkness has fallen.”
Taras followed the others mechanically as they wove through alleys and climbed over hot rubble. All of them made it to the river. The others talked of God's mercy. For the first time in his life, Taras could not find his religion.
Chapter 27
THE NEXT DAY, INGA, exhausted and covered in soot, trudged through a makeshift hospital camp. It had been erected on Red Square, directly outside the Kremlin Wall. She carried a large bag of waste out to the river. The waste consisted of everything from bloody bandages, to garbage, to human limbs. Not the first such trip she’d made today, but with darkness falling, hopefully it would be the last.
The fire was finally dying, after two straight days of carnage.
This was the third fire to break ou
t in Moscow past months. The first two had been smaller, and were contained with relative ease. The flames of this fire jumped walls, ditches, and mud barriers. They jumped the Kremlin Wall, destroying several cathedrals and parts of the palace. The Wall itself had been partially destroyed, blown to pieces when a powder magazine in one of the towers caught fire.
The tsar and tsarina were evacuated to safer ground—a castle outside the city walls called Sparrow Hills. Reports said they gazed down on Moscow in flames and prayed all night long.
The dry heat and wind spurred the fire onward, despite all efforts to quell it. Eventually, the bulk of the flames died, not because of efforts to put them out, but because they'd burned through everything and no longer had any fuel.
As Inga dropped her putrid waste into the river, she looked north. She could still see a few small pockets of flame glimmering in the twilight. She heaved a sigh. She felt so tired, she could have fallen at the river’s edge and slept peacefully.
Heading back, she did her best to ignore the corpses that littered Red Square, most of them burned beyond recognition. Reports already put the death count at more than 1,700, and that didn’t include the children. More than five hundred little ones remained unaccounted for.
Beyond Red Square, from every direction, came wailing: the wails of parents for children, children for siblings. Their mournful sounds ghosted through the otherwise eerily quiet night. Most of the city’s inhabitants had evacuated. Tomorrow, when the sun arose, they would be forced to return and pick up the charred pieces of their lives.
After the fire started, Inga stayed in the Kremlin, helping Yehvah gather supplies for the need they knew would come. They found bandages and extra food. Servants carted water from the river. Once the fire breached the Kremlin, all the supplies were destroyed.
Inga had been running for two days. Back and forth, from one place to the next. She’d avoided the flames. Many were not so lucky. Now there were too many wounded, too many with lost families, and too many to be buried.
Inga hadn't seen Taras since Nikolai came to wake them. It seemed years since that happened—since she'd worried that Nikolai would tell their secret, and she would be given to Sergei despite all their efforts. Could it only have been yesterday morning?
Inga shook her head to clear it of any thoughts of Taras. She didn't know if he still lived, but worrying about him would destroy what little sanity she had left.
After what felt like miles, she reached the tents again. They weren’t truly tents, but blackened sheets strung up to separate the dead from the dying, and the dying from the living. Candles lit the tents. Fire was the one thing not in short supply.
When she arrived, Inga leaned against the Kremlin Wall for support. She thought she might fall asleep on her feet. She realized she had no specific task to complete. Perhaps she could...
“Inga?” She jumped at Yehvah’s voice. “I know you’re tired, child. We all are, but there are too many sick and wounded. I know you can bandage simple wounds. Have you also learned to care for burns?”
“Yes. The doctors showed me yesterday.”
“Well, get to it. The soldier at the end lost his leg. The doctor wants the bandage changed.”
Inga nodded and pushed herself up from the wall. She plodded toward the end of the line of tents. On the way, she passed a supply tray. From it she picked up more bandages and a dish of water. As she started toward her destination again, Anne stepped out from behind a curtain. Inga stopped so abruptly, the water sloshed out of the dish, wetting her hands and forearms.
“Anne. What are you doing?” Irritation tinged voice.
“I’ll do that, Inga. This soldier,” she jerked her head toward the curtain behind her, “has a bad burn on his arm. I don’t know how to deal with burns. I heard what Yehvah said. I’ll change the other man’s bandage.”
Anne snatched Inga’s supplies and sped in the other direction before Inga could protest. Inga did not see what difference it made, who did what, but she resented Anne’s presumption. With a sigh, she ducked behind the curtain Anne emerged from. Anne had been right beside her the previous day, when the doctors showed them how to treat burns. What did she mean she didn’t know how?
Deciding that the fire must have melted Anne’s brain, Inga pulled the curtain up and ducked inside. Suddenly she understood.
A tattered, soot-blackened Taras raised his head as she entered. She and Anne had spoken right outside where he sat, but he seemed surprised to see her. Shirtless and with pants ripped and burned, a fine layer of black soot covered Taras, even where his shirt had been. He held his right elbow in his left hand. On the outside of his forearm glared a large, white mass of burned skin.
“Are you all right?” She went to kneel on the floor beside the cot on which he sat. He nodded. Anne had already set up the needed supplies on a footstool next to him. Inga began preparing them. Taras stared at her like he’d never seen her before.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, looking down and blinking several times. “Nothing. It’s only . . . you’re. . . it’s good to see you.”
She attempted a smile. “I doubt I look good.”
“None of us does." He gave her an exhausted smile. "But you look better than most.” She smiled back briefly. She was about to cause him a great deal of pain.
Picking up the skinny, razor-sharp knife, she ran the blade through the flame of the candle burning on the footstool.
“Taras, this is going to hurt—badly.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“Do you want something to bite on?”
He glanced around the tent. “I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t bite your tongue.”
He nodded, and she began.
Taras grunted through clenched teeth at the pain, and his body shook, but he kept his arm still. She cut a slit from one end of the white mass to the other, then down and all the way around, removing the flap of burnt skin rather than simply cutting across it. White puss poured from the wound like river water. She used a bowl to collect it.
As soon as skin and puss were safely deposited in the bowl, she picked up a dish of water from the footstool and poured it onto the wound. This part always hurt worse than the cutting. Taras cried out through gritted teeth, thrashing his feet and unwounded arm around like a drowning man. When the water was gone, she layered several bandages over the burn, then wrapped a longer bandage around his entire arm.
He sat still now, eyes closed, recovering from the pain.
“This will have to be changed regularly. I know the doctors are in short supply, but you need to see one of them several times over the next few days. Only they can tell if infection is spreading.” She hated Anne for making her come in here. Why did it have to be her who caused him so much pain?
He opened his eyes. His face loomed so close, she could feel his breath on her lips.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He reached out a trembling hand and gently clasped her ear.
“Don’t be,” he whispered, his voice husky and raw.
They stared at one another for several seconds. Then he leaned forward and kissed her. It was not like before, when Yehvah interrupted them. This time he kissed her deeply, thoroughly. She tasted soot and grit on his lips. The last two days had been too horrifying to not want to kiss him.
When his lips left hers, he reached out his good arm and put it around her waist, scooping her up onto his lap. She knelt, straddling his legs. He pressed his cheek against hers for a moment. She relished the feel of his rough skin against hers. He kissed her again, both softer and deeper. His hands rested on the sides of her face. Then his fingers massaged their way upward into her hair, pushing her platok back. They ran roughly through her hair, down the back of her head to her neck.
The thought of being without her platok spooked Inga. It was the reason Sergei noticed her in the first place, and she was not ready to bed Taras, even if she liked kissing him. She pulled away, repositioni
ng the scarf. His hands stayed on her neck, fingers gently rubbing the back of it.
“What is it?” He whispered.
Inga felt foolish. “Nothing.”
They stared at one another for several seconds before she leaned up and wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder. He put his arms around her too, crushing her against his chest.
She wanted this fire to be behind them.
Chapter 28
TARAS GOT LITTLE SLEEP that night. After Inga bandaged his arm, he found a place to lie down. A small patch of ground, mercifully left un-burnt, lay beneath the charred skeleton of a tree. Inga followed him out and left a wad of bandages and a water skin with him, telling him to make sure he changed the bandage every few hours. Then she went back to work.
“Inga.” He took her arm as she turned to leave. “If you get a chance to sleep, come here and sleep beside me.” She asked no questions, only nodded, then rose and walked slowly away.
It wasn’t only that he missed her—though he felt her absence like a gaping wound in his side—but the palace grounds were more dangerous than ever. People mourned, shocked by what happened. Few fully controlled their emotions. Those who did could easily take advantage of others, and Taras did not want Inga hurt. The last few days had been hellish enough.
He slept fitfully on the hard ground with a constant, lancing pain in his arm. Inga never returned.
When he awoke, he walked around, looking for a familiar face. The fire’s carnage looked worse by sunlight, revealed in all its horrid detail. A putrid smell permeated the air.
He went to the makeshift hospital and asked for Inga. Yehvah came out instead.
“Inga is busy and cannot be disturbed.”
“She has to sleep some time.”
Yehvah’s mouth formed into a hard line, then softened. “I know. But my girls are sleeping in shifts.” With no other explanation, Yehvah turned her back on him.
With a sigh he left the hospital. He needed to find his commander. He didn’t find the man directly over him, but instead ran into Andrey Kurbsky, one of the tsar’s foremost and most loyal generals.