by Boris Akunin
And after all, there was so much commentary on them in Holy Writ. The ancient Israelites had lived in caves and buried their dead in them. The prophet Elijah heard a voice from a cave that asked him: “Why are you here, Elijah?” And could it really be a coincidence that Christ’s resurrection had taken place in a cave?
A natural passage into the bowels of the earth—surely that was an opening from one world to another? From light into darkness, from the visible to the invisible? A cave was like the crater of a volcano, which led from the surface into the essential core of the earth—a planet that, according to science, consisted ninety-nine percent of blazing fire. We were all flying through the darkness on a ball of fire with nothing but a thin crust of solid ground over it. Death was above our heads, but also below our feet.
Perhaps as a result of her philosophical ponderings, or perhaps for some other reason, Pelagia thought she saw the darkness around her start to quiver and flow. She began feeling drowsy, and she heard a low, vague ringing sound that couldn’t possibly have been caused by anything in this place.
And then something else happened.
From out of the darkness on the side where the entrance was, she heard a crack, followed by a rumble. At first indistinct, then louder and louder.
Pelagia dashed toward the sound. She crawled into the narrow passage on all fours, her heart pounding furiously. And her hands encountered a solid barrier of rocky scree.
A landslide!
She tried to clear the stones, but it was hopeless. Pressed down from above, they were locked solid. Pelagia broke her nails as she tried desperately to shift the heap at least a little, but she got nowhere. On the contrary, she heard the sound of new rocks falling on the outside. The heap shifted slightly toward the nun as it was subjected to an even greater load.
CALMLY, NOW, let’s not have any female hysterics, Pelagia told herself, wiping the fine beads of cold sweat off her forehead with her sleeve. Tomorrow, that is, later today, Durka will see that I haven’t come back, she’ll come running here and realize what’s happened. If she can’t clear the stones away herself, she’ll bring the peasants. For something like that she’ll recover the gift of speech.
A few hours to wait. A day at most. It was bad, of course, but not fatal. The nun made her way back to the spacious open area and forced herself to sit down. She wound down the wick in the lamp in order to use the kerosene more economically.
She sat there until suddenly her heart was seared by a horrible thought: You were trying to guess what was drawing you to this cave, weren’t you? Perhaps you were drawn here because this is the very place appointed for you to meet your destiny? What if the instinct that drew you here was not the instinct of life, but the instinct of death?
This sudden surmise frightened Pelagia very badly and made her jump to her feet. What a cruel trick of fate it would be if she were to die here! Truly a case of Curious Varvara getting her nose pulled off! And worst of all, it was so stupid, there was no need for it, no sense to it!
I have to do something the nun told herself. Otherwise I shall go insane in here. What do they want with me, these cursed caves? What are they tormenting me for, what have I done to displease them?
She picked up the lamp and set off upward over the gravel and the small stones. Perhaps she could find another entrance.
The cave narrowed so much that she had to scramble along on her elbows and knees. She crawled a couple of paces, then dragged the lamp from behind her and set it higher up ahead. Then she crawled again. The poor nun tried not to think about the fact that there could quite easily be snakes here. They would just be waking up after their winter hibernation. April, the vipers’ venom was at its strongest. Lord, Lord …
After a while the passage widened and led out into a new hall, much larger than the lower one. Pelagia explored the empty space. She walked to the left and the right and found at least nine passages—if they weren’t simply cracks. Which path should she choose?
It turned out that the rooster had also managed to make his way in there. And he hadn’t lost any of his high spirits—he was running back and forth, his claws clattering gaily.
Then the holy sister remembered that Durka had said a rooster would always find its way out of a maze. She squatted down in front of the bird and started coaxing him: “Rousty Rousty Rooster, you show me the way out of here and I’ll get a whole sack of millet for you. Eh, Rousty?”
He looked at her with his face turned sideways, listening to her tender voice. But he didn’t actually go anywhere.
Then Pelagia lost patience. She picked him up and started carrying him to each of the passages by turns, putting him down and watching to see if he would go in.
The rooster skipped into the first crack, but immediately jumped back out again. He didn’t even stick his beak into the second. But then he darted nimbly into the third and disappeared from view.
Pelagia picked up the lamp and squeezed in after him. This burrow was even narrower than the one that led from the first level to the second. Pelagia almost got stuck in one place, like a bottleneck. Somehow she managed to force her way through, but afterward she couldn’t reach the lamp, and it was left behind and below.
She scrambled on in pitch-black darkness, feeling for anything to hold on to. She was soaked through and shivering—there was cold water running over the rocks. But that still didn’t mean that there was a way out higher up; everyone knows that water can seep through any crack, and sometimes it even filters through solid rock.
The nun tried to drive out of her mind the terrible thought that now the passage would narrow down to such a tiny crack that it would be impossible to go any farther. Then that would be the end, and a terrible one, because it was quite impossible for her to reverse direction. She would be stuck here in this stone shroud, and nobody would ever find her … Why, oh why had she decided to follow the rooster? She ought to have stayed down below and waited for help!
Where had he got to, anyway, the rascal? It was fine for him, he could squeeze through anywhere.
Exhausted, Pelagia pressed her forehead against the wet stone and closed her eyes.
And then Rouster announced his presence at the top of his cocksure voice, somewhere higher up, but quite close:
“cock-a-doodle-doo!”
The time must have come for the third and final crow. The holy sister opened her eyes, threw back her head—and saw a pale, trembling light. She gasped and started scrambling forward.
The sky, God be praised, the sky! Its glow was unbearably bright, stinging her eyes that were accustomed to the darkness. Pelagia thrust herself out of the burrow up to her waist and filled her lungs with the blessed scent of freedom. There was Rousty, sitting on the rock beside her as if nothing special had happened. He was busily preening himself under one wing, paying no attention to the nun.
The light was not as bright as it had seemed to the holy sister from the darkness. In fact, it was only just daybreak, and the sun had not yet appeared above the horizon.
Strange—the nun could have sworn that she had spent several hours incarcerated underground, but the color of the sky indicated that it had been only half an hour at the most. What a mysterious substance time was, after all. Sometimes it stood still and sometimes it hurtled along at breakneck speed, and no minute, or hour, or day, or year was ever equal to another.
But now she had to figure out where it was that she had emerged. And she discovered that she couldn’t climb out of the hole completely—there was nowhere for her to go. The crack out of which the holy sister was peering was in a sheer vertical surface: she couldn’t go either up or down. The cockerel had somehow managed to install himself in an indentation in the rock, but a human being is not a bird. And so her joy proved to be premature.
Leaning over, Pelagia was alarmed to see that there was not merely a sheer drop—the surface was actually convex. There was absolutely no way she could climb down that. Jumping was even more impossible. She was about fifty feet up, and
there were sharp rocks below.
How could she get out of here? She could go back into the cave; the very thought of it set her shuddering. And then, what point was there in going back—the entrance was blocked.
On looking more closely, Pelagia realized that she was exactly above the spot where she had entered the cave. She recognized the wedge-shaped hollow and the bushes. And she could see clearly that the entrance was not blocked at all, but completely free!
She couldn’t believe her own eyes. How could that be possible?
Could someone have managed to clear away the rubble during that interminable half-hour while she had been climbing upward? But then there would have been rocks scattered all around, only she couldn’t see any.
There was a rumbling sound from down below—quiet at first, gradually growing louder. Another landslide?
Sticking her head out even farther, the nun suddenly saw a man on the slope above the entrance passage. He was acting very strangely. In his hands he had a massive club and he was using it as a lever, prying loose a huge block of stone, from beneath which smaller stones were already scattering downward. Then the block swayed and went plunging down. The branches of the bushes cracked as the boulder was followed by a shower of rock, and the passage was now completely blocked off.
Pelagia watched as if spellbound, not so much at the landslide itself as at the man who had caused it. Or rather, at the malefactor’s head. She could not see his face from above, because it was concealed by a shaggy cap with a wolf’s tail dangling from it. The tail was what held the nun’s gaze so fixedly. It was the same tail, definitely the same one! Struk’s tail, the one that had been dangling from a fir-tree branch that evening in the forest thicket!
Pelagia’s greatest fear was that she was asleep and dreaming. That she had dozed off in the sealed cave and fallen into a reverie. Now she would wake up and discover that none of this had happened—there was no light, no fresh air, only a stone cell. She squeezed her eyes shut so tight that her temples started to ache, and put her hands over her ears. She mustn’t see anything or hear anything!
When the strain of it gave her a ringing in her ears, she took her hands away and opened her eyes. No, it wasn’t a dream. The sky, pink patches of dawn light, a wall of stone. Only the specter in the wolfskin cap had disappeared. But the work of his hands was still there—the entrance to the cave was totally blocked.
Or had all that been a dream?
For a long time after that Pelagia simply prayed, without attempting to fathom what was inaccessible to reason. It was good to be a nun after all: when she didn’t know what to do or what to think, she could simply turn around and pray—she had learned lots of different prayers. Against the wiles of the Evil One, and against the assaults of the darkness, and against the blinding of the soul.
It took some time—perhaps an hour, or even two—until the sun was shining at full strength—before she calmed down and started pondering how to get out of there. And she thought of something. It was Rousty Rooster who gave her the idea.
He clearly got bored with hanging about on the tiny shelf. He clucked a little bit and then leaped off the vertical slope. He glided down, desperately fluttering his short, iridescent wings. When he landed, he shook himself and ran off along the path, without so much as a backward glance at his abandoned comrade in misfortune.
Pelagia was roused from her paralysis.
This cloth is strong, she told herself, fingering her habit. If she tore it into strips and tied them together, she would have a rope, and a long one. She could tie the end of it around this stone finger here.
It wouldn’t reach all the way down, of course, but it didn’t need to. She could get as far as the slope on which Wolf-Tail had been standing—that was only twenty feet—and after that the descent was less steep. And if the fabric rope turned out to be too short, she still had her stockings.
It was all right, it was all right, she would manage somehow.
The Achilles’ heel
THE DISTRICT PROSECUTOR Matvei Bentsionovich Berdichevsky had a distinct penchant for resounding turns of speech—it was a habit he had picked up from addressing members of the jury in court. And even in everyday life he would sometimes start speaking in ordinary language and then get carried away, and various “hithertos” and “verilys” immediately began getting woven into the fabric of his discourse.
“And yet another thing,” he said, shifting his gaze from Mitrofanii to Pelagia. “Permit me to say that I am, verily, at a loss for words to express the extent of my admiration for your presence of mind and thoroughness of approach, my dear Sister! After such a terrible shock you did not suffer a nervous breakdown, as any other individual of the weaker sex would have done, not to mention nine out of ten men! You actually carried out an absolutely authentic, highly competent preliminary investigation of fresh evidence! And moreover, entirely alone, without your Mr. Dolinin! I am filled with admiration for your heroic valor!”
Embarrassed by such an abundance of adjectives and exclamation marks, and especially by the admiration, the nun replied as if she were trying to justify her actions: “How could I not investigate, if the girl didn’t come to drive the sheep out? I had to find out where she had got to. You haven’t told me yet what the spot was.”
Matvei Bentsionovich sighed sadly and replied, flaunting his scientific terminology just ever so slightly, “The laboratory analyzed the bag of soil that you collected on the spot. You were right in what you thought, it really is blood, as confirmed by the Van Deen reaction to a solution of guaiac resin. And a serodiagnostic analysis according to the Ulengut method has demonstrated that the blood is, alas, human.”
“Ah, how terrible!” the nun exclaimed, throwing her arms up in the air. “That was what I was afraid of! They killed the poor little thing, hid her in some crevice in the rock, and covered her with stones! She lost her life because of me. Now what is going to happen to her granny?” And she burst into tears—that is, on this occasion she behaved exactly as the aforementioned members of the weaker sex are supposed to.
Mitrofanii frowned—he found women’s tears hard to bear, especially if they were not shed out of self-indulgence but for some substantial reason, as now. “I’ll send for the old woman, let them put her in our hospice. But what a villain this Wolf-Tail of yours is! It wasn’t enough for him to kill you, a nun—he had to destroy the girl as well. What had the girl done to get in his way?”
“That was so she wouldn’t tell anyone in the village where she had taken Pelagia,” the prosecutor explained, crumpling a clean handkerchief in his hand—he wanted to offer it to Pelagia to wipe her eyes, but he didn’t dare.
The holy sister made do with her own little handkerchief. She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, then asked in a nasal voice: “What about the footprint? Did I copy it well?”
Delighted at the conversation’s return to a less emotional channel, Matvei Bentsionovich hastily responded, “My specialist says that the print of the boot was sketched almost perfectly. Why were you not afraid, all alone at the scene of a suspected murder?”
“I was very afraid.” Pelagia sobbed, trying to suppress her tears. “But what else could I do? I felt so bad when I got back to Stroganovka from Devil’s Rock and found out that Durka had never arrived to help drive out the livestock. I went running to the elder and told him we had to search. He wouldn’t give me any men, he said they were all at work and some little halfwit or other wasn’t much of a loss. I went back to Devil’s Rock alone, by the same path. I was afraid, of course, but I thought: Why would the villain still be there? After all, he’s certain that he did what he wanted to do and trapped me in the cave. I walked all the way to the Rock, looking around. But on the way back, I only looked down at my feet. And I found a track on the ground, under the cliff: a line, as if something had been dragged along, a dark spot, and the imprint of a boot. The villagers don’t wear boots, only birch-bark sandals: I asked afterward. There’s only one pair of boots in the whole of St
roganovka, and they belong to the elder. He puts them on for saints’ days and when he travels to the district center. But the sole on them is quite different.”
“Yes, the sole is unusual,” Berdichevsky said with a nod. “And that, I must say, is our only clue. The cap with the wolf’s tail is not a distinctive feature. The Zytyaks have been making caps like that since time out of mind. You can even buy them in the market here in Zavolzhsk for five rubles. But the boots, now—that’s a different matter. A distinctive sole, if one might put it like that, with a pattern of small nails. I held a conference in the department, including the best police officers and investigators. Here, if you please.” He took out a little notebook and started reading: “‘Blunt toe with three rhomboids formed of four nails, a ten-millimeter welt, double steel tip. Square heel of medium height. Conclusion: not factory-made, the work of a high-class craftsman with his own signature.’ This is a good thing, because it makes a search possible,” the prosecutor explained. “The bad thing is that there is no such craftsman in our own province. What else can we conclude from the imprint? Applying Parville’s formula, which determines that a man’s height is 6.876 times the length of his foot, with a correction of four or five millimeters for the footwear, we arrive at a height between 1.78 and 1.84 meters for our subject, which is extremely tall.”
“How much is that in Russian?” His Eminence grumbled, frowning. He took a dim view of the newfangled tendency to translate everything from Russian measures into meters. “All right, God be with the centimeters. But now why don’t you tell me, Matvei, what you make of all this?”
Berdichevsky did have a theory, although a rather indefinite one. “The criminal (following Your Eminence’s example, I shall refer to him as ‘Wolf-Tail’) followed Sister Pelagia all the way from Zavolzhsk. For lack of evidence I shall, for the time being, resist the temptation to assume that Wolf-Tail and Glass-Eye are one and the same individual. However, there can be no doubt that the reason for the malefactor’s paying such importunate attention to a certain individual so dear to us should be seen as none other than a desire to take the life of the presumptive prophet.”