The path to the village left the main road and climbed in a winding way between natural cliffs. Anyone using it would be kept in view, and at a disadvantage, by lookouts on the top; and Anne, riding well to the front to emphasise the peaceful nature of their approach, thought that Akim Shan Kalmuck would be a hard man to take by surprise. She felt that they were being watched, but her occasional glances upwards could not discover anyone; only once there was a flash from amongst the bushes high overhead, as though something metallic had caught the sun’s rays.
When they emerged from the gully and out on to the hilltop, there was a party of horsemen waiting for them, dark, hook-nosed tribesmen in striped coats, with guns held upright before them, not threatening, but at the ready. The Prince was in the centre of them, on a white Kabardin stallion whose restless sidlings he sat effortlessly. The champing of its bit and the ringing of the gold discs on its browband were the only sounds on that silent hilltop.
The Chastnaya party halted, and Feodor raised his hand in the universal, palm-outwards gesture of greeting.
‘Peace be with you, Akim Shan Kalmuck,’ he said. ‘Peace and prosperity to your tribe.’
The Prince gave a courteous bow, and raised his own hand, his eyes flicking over the group speculatively. ‘Peace be with you, Feodor Pavlovitch,’ he said in the Russian form. ‘You are a long way from Chastnaya of the Horses.’
‘We have come to visit you,’ Feodor said. ‘We bring gifts –’ he made a superbly throwaway gesture, as though the gifts were hardly worth mentioning between gentlemen of standing – ‘so that we shall not leave your house poorer than we found it.’
The Prince inclined his head slightly. ‘The guest who comes in friendship can never leave the house poorer,’ he replied in kind. He surveyed them again. ‘You will come and drink wine with me! Your men will be taken care of.’
It was not quite an invitation. The men surrounding the Prince performed a neat manoeuvre which put them between the Kiriakovs and their men, cutting off master from servant, ushering the former forward, and retaining the latter behind. But the Prince smiled as though he were in the Tsar’s drawing-room, and turned his fretting stallion to walk him alongside Anne, holding him in with the curved spring of a wrist so that he kept perfect pace with Quassy. He was, Anne acknowledged to herself, a superb rider.
‘I had not thought’, the Prince said, ‘to have the honour of receiving you into my house, Anna Petrovna.’
‘You know my name,’ she said in surprise. Always before he had called her ‘English Lady’.
He bowed. ‘I think it must be some very important thing that brings you such a long way on horseback, in this wild country. I wonder what it may be?’
His bright eyes were watchful, and Anne felt she was being tested, though she had no idea what was the nature of the test. She tried to smile. ‘I have come to see the tiger, of course,’ she said. ‘When you told me you had a tame tiger with an emerald collar, I felt my days would be weary until I had seen it for myself, with my own eyes.’
She seemed to have said the right thing. He relaxed a little, and laughed, showing all his teeth.
‘You shall see it!’ he cried.
‘It exists, then?’ she said demurely.
‘It exists. Did you doubt it?’
‘Entirely. And it has an emerald collar?’
‘A collar of the most fabulous emeralds in the world, the bright green emeralds that are found nowhere but in the waters of the Ganges River. That also you shall see.’ He looked pleased with himself, and allowed the stallion to dance a little. ‘I have never entertained an English lady in my house before. This is indeed a special day.’
They were approaching the stone house, whose single door was a black cave in the shadowed side away from the sun. Servants in white robes came running out to take the horses’ heads, and the Prince leapt down to come to Quassy’s side and hold out his hands to Anne. Sergei was there at the same instant, ready to be angry and push the Prince aside; and though she looked at those hands with fear, and was loath to let them touch her, she knew he must not be offended. She stilled Sergei with a ferocious glance, and allowed the Prince to jump her down.
Close to he smelled of oil and strong perfume and meat and garlic, a smell like sheep yolk from the raw wool of his sleeveless coat, and a musky animal smell which she supposed was his body. He terrified her, but she forced herself not to struggle away from him as soon as her feet touched the ground; forced herself to meet his eyes steadily as he towered over her.
She saw his lower lip, pink and naked-looking amongst the curled and oiled hairs of his beard; the brown edges of his lower teeth; the dark pitted skin of his cheeks above his beard; the black hairs in his nostrils; the little white scar across the bridge of his beaked nose; and then the bright, black, unfathomable eyes with their yellowish whites under the jutting black cliffs of his eyebrows. She saw his tongue move like an animal in its cave behind his teeth, and felt his breath warm and moist on her face, as he said, ‘The mare is tired. I shall order my men to give her a cooling feed while you drink wine with me. She must be taken care of, the beautiful one.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Anne managed to say. She felt faint, and longed to break the gaze and put her head down, but she would not before he did. Minutes later, it seemed, though it must really have been almost instantly, he released her and stepped away, snapping an order to the servant who held Quassy’s head. At the door he turned and spread his hands to all of them.
‘Enter, and be welcome. My house is yours.’
He turned and led the way, and they followed him, as the servants led away their horses. Now by stages they had been divested of men, arms, and means of escape. Inside his house he might have them all murdered if he chose, and no one would ever be any the wiser. They knew it, and they knew he knew it, and the air around them seemed almost briny with tension. But Anne trusted him. He terrified her, but she did not believe he would strike without a reason.
Sergei jostled up beside her. ‘Are you all right, Anna?’ he murmured. ‘When I saw him put his hands on you, by God, I wanted to–’
‘Hush,’ she whispered urgently. ‘It’s all right, Seryosha. For God’s sake try to act like a guest – be friendly, don’t provoke him. We’re in his power now.’
‘Don’t I know it!’ he muttered. ‘I should have come here with a company of the Independents…’
‘Then we should never have found out anything. Now be quiet – and smile!’
Inside the house was very dark, from the lack of windows – partly the result of fortification, she guessed, and partly to keep out the burning sun in summer, and the bitter wind in winter. Burning incense sticks smouldered in brass holders at every corner, wreathing faint blue smoke up into the shadows of the roof. Their choking sweetness did not disguise an unpleasant smell underneath. Anne did not know what it was, could catch it only in brief snatches, and unwillingly.
The floor was stone, and its unevenness suggested that they were walking on the living rock, which had been roughly levelled when the house was built. The walls were plastered white, and again looked rough, as if the plaster had been laid on bare rock. They were decorated with painted designs in bright, clear colours, though the true beauty of them was only evident where a shaft of sunlight from a slit window suddenly illuminated them. There was a frieze of twined flowers and fruit; there were hunting scenes, and feasting scenes, dancers and dogs and horses and hawks; a parade of serfs carrying baskets of produce on their shoulders; a young warrior leading his war horse; a slender girl feeding a bird from the palm of her hand.