by Judith Gould
Senda could bear no more. She was sickened by the violence, the needless slaughter; repulsed by the devilish joy the Cossacks seemed to derive from it. And then, miraculously, she saw an opportunity to try to help one person.
Despite her size, Aunt Sophie had avoided the slashing sabres on three occasions in as many minutes, and she was racing as fast as her plump legs could carry her toward the very bushes behind which Senda and Schmarya were hidden. She was running breathlessly, her thick arms stretched out in front of her, as though waiting for invisible hands to pull her. When she caught sight of Senda parting the bushes and reaching out to her, hope gleamed in Sophie's eyes.
'Hurry!' Senda called encouragingly, her heart hammering wildly. 'Hurry, Aunt Sophie!' And she prayed as the gap between the two of them narrowed. 'Hurry!'
At that moment, a Cossack cut Aunt Sophie off and aimed his rifle. Senda screamed as she heard the report. Aunt Sophie's body seemed to jump into the air; her head snapped backward. Her face was shattered, spraying everything around her with fragments of tissue, bone, and blood. Senda could feel warm drops of it raining down on her face and arms.
She squeezed her eyes shut, too shocked to scream any longer. Numbly she allowed Schmarya to pull her back into the shielding safety of the bushes. For several minutes she lay there in white-faced shock. Then she heard Schmarya curse.
She turned to him and opened her eyes. 'What is it?' she asked tremulously, afraid of the reply. She was afraid of so many things suddenly.
Schmarya's face seemed to have undergone a metamorphosis. Whereas anguish had contorted it earlier, a silent, seething rage was now burning.
'Schmarya . . .'
'They're not all Cossacks,' he muttered grimly. 'At least one of them isn't.'
'What!'
'Look for yourself,' Schmarya whispered. 'It's the collector. See? Over there, on the horse.'
Senda carefully parted the bushes and peered out. Until Schmarya had pointed him out, she hadn't noticed Wolzak's tax collector. Her attention had been focused on the massacre, and the collector had been waiting quite some distance away on a horse far inferior to those of the Cossacks. His back was turned from the slaughter, as though by not watching it he would be absolved of any moral responsibility. Only when the massacre was over and every building was burning furiously did the leader of the Cossacks bellow for the collector. The collector wasted no time; the huge burly bear of a Cossack inspired fear even in him. With his perpetually scowling expression, fierce moustache, bushy black beard, and fiery eyes, the Cossack leader was enough to make anyone turn tail and run. During the massacre, his black lamb hat had been lost, and his glistening, frightfully smooth hairless skull threatened all who looked upon him, as did the massive raised white welt of a scar which coursed down the left side of his face from his brow to the corner of his mouth.
Senda turned to Schmarya. 'But what's the collector doing here? There's nothing to collect.' Her voice was choked. 'Not anymore, there isn't.'
'Yes, but he knows everyone in the village.'
Senda watched the collector. His conversation with the leader of the Cossacks over, he swung down off his horse and started walking among the corpses.
Senda frowned as she saw him consult a black ledger and make a note of the victims. 'He's checking the dead against some sort of list!'
'Don't you see?' Schmarya hissed. 'The collector knows every man, woman, and child—even newborn babies—in this village. His ledger lists everyone. Now he's taking inventory of the dead.'
Senda shook her head. 'But . . . why? I don't understand. If everyone has been butchered—'
'To make certain everyone's accounted for,' Schmarya said grimly. 'Don't you see? Everyone is to have been killed. Every man, woman, and child in this village.' He shook his head in disbelief. 'Everyone! It was cold-bloodedly planned that way!'
'Which means . . .' Senda gasped and her throat worked slackly. '. . . that when they find out we're missing . . .'
'I'll kill that bastard first!' Schmarya growled. He jumped to his feet and clenched his fists at his sides.
Senda clung to his legs and pulled him back down, out of sight. 'No, Schmarya,' she said softly. 'You won't. You'll only get yourself killed.'
'So what?' he retorted bitterly. 'Everyone else is dead. Why shouldn't I die too?'
'Why?' she whispered vehemently, shaking him with quiet fury. 'I'll tell you why. If we die too, then nobody will ever know what happened here. We have to live to keep the story alive. Besides, if we die too, then who's to mourn the dead?'
His shoulders sagged. 'I suppose you're right,' he murmured. Then he reached out and embraced her. They clung to each other for meagre comfort. Once again Senda felt as if each of her senses were heightened, only this time she did not smell the moist freshness of the earth or hear the singing of the birds. The birds and the whirring insects were still. The foul stench of blood and excrement assaulted her senses. She could almost taste the coppery, metallic aftertaste of blood in her mouth. Death hung in the air.
Oily black plumes of smoke billowed skyward. Soon there would be nothing left of the village, only piles of ashes and scorch-scarred earth.
The Cossack leader burst through a wall of smoke on his horse and looked about with grim satisfaction. 'Well?' he bellowed to the collector, who had finished his inventory. 'Did all the Jews get what they deserved? Are they all accounted for?'
Senda held her breath, waiting to hear Schmarya's death notice—and her own—pronounced. This was the moment of reckoning, she knew. For she understood that if the Cossack learned that they'd escaped, the countryside would be searched until they were found and killed.
The collector consulted his ledger and then looked stonily around him. He was dumbstruck by the holocaust. His throat throbbed, and his face was ashen. Suddenly he bent over and retched noisily. When he finally finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at the Cossack. He nodded weakly. 'They're all accounted for.'
Only after the Cossack turned his back did the collector quickly mark off the names of the two villagers unaccounted for on the list.
So there had been enough death. Even for him.
Senda let out a sigh of relief.
The Cossacks regrouped, the collector swung himself up on his horse, and the leader raised his sabre high. Then he brought it down, signalling their departure.
The sabre no longer gleamed. It was matt brown with dried blood.
The scourge rode off as noisily and swiftly as it had come.
As the pounding hoofbeats receded, Senda felt Schmarya gripping her arm. 'All right,' he said wearily. 'Let's go.'
'Where?'
'Anywhere, as long as it's far away from here.'
She shook her head. 'We can't,' she said. 'We have to bury and mourn the dead.' 'No.' He shook his head. 'We must leave everything as it is. If they return and see that somebody . . .' His voice trailed off, leaving the unfinished threat hanging heavily over them both.
Senda pursed her lips. Finally she nodded. He was right. If they stayed to bury or burn the dead, then Wolzak and his Cossacks would know some villagers were left alive. Horrible though it was to leave the victims lying scattered, it was their only hope to escape alive. Overhead, a shadow had crossed the darkening sky. Senda glanced up and shuddered: a flock of black carrion birds wheeled around, already attracted by the prospect of a feast.
She nodded at Schmarya. Her eyes were awash with tears, but a peculiar hardness had come into her face, a strength which had never before been there. 'Let's go,' she said quietly.
And she never looked back.
Chapter 3
Prince Vaslav Danilov relaxed comfortably on the forward-facing velvet seat of his barouche. It was one of forty carriages he owned in St. Petersburg alone, but one of only seven he had ordered converted into a sleigh so that the coach slid easily over the hard-packed snow and ice on smoothly polished gold-plated runners and swayed ever so gently on its well-mounted, shock-abs
orbing springs. This particular barouche, its sides emblazoned with the gilded coat of arms of the Danilovs, as were the thirty-nine other carriages, was pulled by his six finest matched black horses, and His Highness's privacy from the prying eyes of curious commoners was assured by brocade curtains drawn tightly across rolled-up windows. Outside, the early afternoon had already become nighttime, and an icy Baltic wind whipped through the city, lashing at anyone unfortunate enough to be caught out-of-doors. But Prince Vaslav, unlike his driver and footmen, who were exposed to the bitter elements, was well protected from the Russian winter. He was warmly dressed and draped with a thick bearskin rug, and the little coal braziers built into the sides of the barouche glowed with heat. A compact custom-made silver samovar, filled with hot tea, was strapped to the narrow burl-wood shelf behind the facing seat, as were crystal decanters of vodka and kvass and crystal glasses and cups engraved with the Danilov coat of arms.
Prince Vaslav was happiest when he rode in any of his multitude of sleighs or carriages, or when on horseback. For him, half the pleasure of going somewhere lay in the method of transportation, and he believed that there was nothing as elegant, enchanting, or indubitably Russian as horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Never mind that one wing of the great Danilov Palace on the Neva had recently undergone conversion to accommodate his fleet of motorcars. It had been his wife's idea, and he had bowed to her wishes. The Princess Irina was not one to let any of her social competitors—each of whom owned garages full of cars—outdo her. Were it up to him, he would banish the imported Mercedeses, Rolls-Royces, Citroëns, Bentleys, and Hispano-Suizas from the streets and stately boulevards of St. Petersburg forever, and the sooner accomplished, the better. But he was realist enough to know that motorcars were here to stay, whether he personally liked them or not. There were some things even a prince was powerless to change.
With his forefinger he moved the curtain aside a crack and glanced idly out of the coach as it made a sweeping turn and sped across the Neva on the lamplit Nicholas Bridge. A confectioner's delight, the bridge never failed to remind him of Paris. Ah, Paris . . . Like the bon ton of the City of Light, the aristocrats of the Prince's Paris of the North waltzed through endless months of operas, ballets, concerts, banquets, official receptions, private parties, and extravagant midnight suppers. Even cultured Paris, resplendent though it was, lacked the magic that was St. Petersburg, the staggering elegance and riches which he had so enjoyed since the moment of his high-placed birth. True, the palaces here were more reminiscent of those in Venice than Paris—many of them Mediterranean in style, thanks to the Italian influence from the armies of architects and artisans imported over the centuries—but even this Italianate dominance had its decidedly Russian twists.
He smiled. In no building was this more true than in his own daunting palace, which he had just left. The Danilov Palace itself sprawled over four square blocks and was decidedly baroque in style, beautifully designed like a colossal capital C, with the open end becoming a masssive circular courtyard and the closed side looking down upon the stately Neva, frozen hard as steel during this and every winter. Its five storeys were painted, plastered, and ornamented in yellow and orange, and it boasted three massive square towers, two at each end of the C and a third at the colonnaded curve facing the Neva. Each tower culminated in a splendid cluster of five gilded, spired onion domes. What magnificent buildings did Paris have to compare with this, especially when viewed, alternatingly, in the sun- and water-dappled summers, the swirling snowstorms of winter, or on those particularly prized, though rare, winter days when the oppressive, monotonous gloom was broken and the sky became silvery blue, causing the snow-shrouded palace to glare so brightly in the sun that one had to shield one's eyes? Or, as now, with the incredibly iridescent vertical fires of the aurora borealis hanging like a coral-and-amythyst necklace suspended above it in the premature darkness of the Arctic sky?
Nothing. Nothing on earth could compare with St. Petersburg, especially not now, in January, when the 1914 'season' promised to be a glittering one. The season had begun a week earlier, on New Year's Day, and would continue until Lent.
He was about to withdraw his finger and let the curtain fall back into place when the coach suddenly slid to an abrupt halt, jolting him.
He sat bolt upright and made a mental note to admonish his driver once they arrived at their destination, which would be the jewellery emporium of Carl Fabergé. With its solid soaring granite pillars and rich atmosphere of Byzantine opulence, it was a thief's paradise of glittering gold, sparkling gems, dazzling silver, and gleaming enamel. The Prince had decided to pick up his wife's birthday present in person. Her birthday was in two days' time, on the ninth, and now that she had daringly taken up smoking long, thin black Turkish cigars, he had ordered her an exquisite custom-designed cigarette box of translucent dusty-rose enamel, its edges on both sides lined with rows of fiery pink diamonds. But her gift was not the only reason he had decided to take the opportunity to honour the shop with his presence: he had decided to buy a little ready-made something—a diamond bauble, perhaps, or an emerald or ruby bracelet—for his mistress, Tatiana Ivanova.
Tatiana Ivanova was the reigning star of the St. Petersburg theatre, and what she lacked in dramatic talent she more than made up for in beauty and a fiery temperament, both enhanced by her extravagant costumes. The last night he had seen her, he had been a little forceful in their game-playing, and had injured one of her nipples. Not that he'd meant to actually hurt her. It had been an accident. But she had screamed bloody murder and thrown him out, threatening to tell everyone what a sadistic bastard he was.
Well, the tart would be appeased and her silence bought with a bauble. Still, he had decided it would be prudent to find himself a new mistress. Sooner or later, Tatiana was going to be trouble. He was tired of her threats and tired of her.
The barouche-sleigh had not yet begun to move. Irritated, first by the abrupt stop and now by the delay, the Prince reached up to yank the tasselled bell-pull connected to the bell behind the driver's seat. It was not necessary: a knock came on the door.
He parted the curtain and peered out. It was one of his well-bundled footmen, his nose exhaling a plume of white vapour, the gold buttons of his massive blue greatcoat raised in relief with the Danilov coat of arms.
Prince Vaslav cursed under his breath and rolled the window down a crack. 'Now what is it?' he demanded angrily, at once sorry he'd assumed that tone. It wasn't like him; he'd been taught from an early age to treat servants, if not with a modicum of respect, then at least with politeness. He realized that his irritableness was a reflection of his own growing annoyance with Tatiana.
'I'm sorry, your Highness. A wagon has overturned up ahead and is blocking the street. Would you like for us to turn around and try another route?'
'See how long the delay will be. And find out who they are and if anyone has been injured.'
'Yes, your Highness.' The footman bowed low. Etiquette required that he face his employer as he withdrew, so he took a few steps backward, turning only when his polished boot heels hit a high, frozen snowbank. Then he hurried forward to the scene of the accident.
The Prince rolled his window all the way down and stuck his head out into the icy dark. Looking beyond the impatient horses of his own coach, he could see a small crowd gathered in the illumination of a streetlamp. He could also see a portion of the overturned wagon, its wheels still spinning in the air. Two horses had gone down along with it. One was getting unsteadily to its feet, but the other, although someone had already unhitched it, kept falling back down.
The footman hurried back. 'Well?' the Prince demanded, turning his cold blue eyes on his servant.
'It will take a quarter of an hour, your Highness. Perhaps longer.'
'Is anyone injured?'
'No, your Highness. There were no passengers. The people were in the two forward wagons. The driver jumped off in time. Apparently he was trying to avoid a motorcar which was skidding.'
'I'm not surprised.' The Prince nodded gravely. 'And the horses?'
'One seems to have no injuries, your Highness.'
'And the other?'
'Someone has gone off to fetch a gun.'
The Prince pursed his lips. He could not bear to think of a horse in agony. He knew that pain frightened horses, and finding someone with a gun to put it out of its misery might take time. Meanwhile, the horse was suffering.
He reached under his seat for the Karelian birch gun case in which he kept two loaded pistols. He always had them there in case of trouble: these were troubled times, with marchers and strikers taking to the streets in droves. Besides, there were altogether too many reports of anarchists roving the shadows of the city.
He checked a pistol, waited for a footman to open the door of the barouche, then passed him his heavy sable-lined coat. The footman took it, unfolded the step, and helped him down. Since the Prince did not hold out his arms, the footman took it as a sign to merely drape the coat capelike over his Highness's broad shoulders.
'Follow me,' the Prince ordered without looking at his servant, making it plain that it was he who would lead the way. He strode forward like a general, the pistol at his side, and his servant hurried after him.
The small crowd gathered around the scene of the accident took one look at Vaslav Danilov and fell silent. Here was a personage of the uppermost crust, they could tell. Here was a man who took command of a situation at once. He was striding purposefully toward them, as though daring the treacherous ice to cause him to slip and fall. Despite the seeming recklessness of his pace, his movements were calculated and precise.
The crowd drew back as one, respectfully putting more distance between the Prince and themselves. He was a man who commanded such respect, a man born to the power he exuded, and a presence to be reckoned with. He was a big man, and his towering height and wide shoulders gave an imposing impression. His bare head was dark with medium-length thick black hair combed backward and cut close about the ears. His beard was carefully trimmed, and his magnificent moustache made two sweeping handlebar curves. His eyes and noble brows were those of a grandee.