‘Anne must go home,’ Dmitri said at once. ‘That is plain. And you too, Feodor. The estate needs you.’
‘You also,’ Grishka pointed out. ‘You are a married man with children – the risk is too great. This is a mission for unmarried men. Seryosha and I will take the men and go to this place, while you and Feodor escort Anna Petrovna back to Chastnaya.’
Sergei interrupted impatiently. ‘None of you has listened to a word that has been spoken! Don’t you understand how dangerous this is likely to be? If the Chechen have kidnapped Nasha, they will not tamely let her go because her uncles come and ask politely for her! They are fighting men, bandits; they live by war and pillage.’
His bright eye swept over them; his cheeks were flushed with the prospect of action. ‘You, all of you – and the men – are to go back to Chastnaya. I shall go with this Kizka to the village – but not alone, I promise you! First we will go back to Vladikavkaz, and I will use my authority to call out a platoon of the Guards. Armed and trained soldiers will be a match for these tribesmen. I wish to God I could call out the Independents, but there isn’t the time to spare to ride to Grozny and back. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’
Grishka began to argue, but Sergei cut him short. ‘I have the best right to decide. She is my sister, and I am my father’s representative while he is away. For God’s sake, don’t waste any more time. See that Anna is safe. I will send word as soon as I can.’
Seeing some of them still not convinced, Anne intervened. ‘He’s right – it’s the best way. Go, Seryosha. Don’t worry about us. Do what ever you have to.’
He gave her one burning, grateful look, nodded briefly to the others, and then swung himself into the saddle, and with the tribesman beside him, clattered away towards the path down the hillside.
The others watched him go, aware that however much danger he might be called upon to face, he still had the easier part. For them, there remained only the ride home to Chastnaya, and the wait for news. They watched until the two figures were out of sight and then prepared to take their leave. A serf brought Quassy out for Anne, and the mare whickered eagerly, looking bright-eyed and well rested. Someone had groomed her very thoroughly, even to the extent of crimping her mane into handsome parallel waves.
Anne felt a sudden surge of gratitude and warmth towards the Prince, who had been kind to them, entertained them, helped them, without any need to do so. He might so easily have behaved otherwise – at best, merely refused to listen to them, at worst had them put to death, without anyone being the wiser. As she settled herself in the saddle for the long ride back to Chastnaya, she looked towards the house, wondering whether he were watching, wishing there were some way for her to show him her gratitude. Her feelings about him were very confused: in her mind he was ineradicably tangled with the image of the tiger – a barely contained savagery, with only the appearance of being civilised.
Now that he had something to do at last, some proper action to perform, Sergei was full of restless energy. Every delay frustrated him, and no one and nothing could possibly have moved quickly enough to satisfy his desire to get on.
On the way down to Vladikavkaz he questioned Kizka closely, and came up against the maddening propensity, of which he had heard, of tribesmen lying to Russians, even when the truth would serve them better. ‘To lie like a tribesman’ was a common adage amongst the Independents; and it was not an indication of general untruthfulness – to each other, he believed, they were as true as any people – but rather an unwillingness to give anything away to the hated invaders. When the Russian masters asked a question, they were requesting a commodity which they did not propose to pay for; it was the natural, the obvious thing to do, to deny them what they wanted.
Kizka, he discovered, was a half-bred Nogay, and something of an outsider, belonging to no clan, making his living by trading amongst the tribesmen of the hills, who tolerated him because of his usefulness. He spoke in a strange patois which was a mingling of many different dialects; and though he said a great deal in answer to Sergei’s many questions, what exactly he knew about Natasha remained maddeningly vague.
Through a mass of evasions and contradictions, Sergei elicited the information that Kizka had been at Kourayashour some days ago – Sergei could not determine exactly when, and gained the impression that Kizka’s notions of time were no more definite than they needed to be. A mountain peddler, wandering his own way and answerable to no one, would probably count time in generous measure, by the month and the season, rather than the hour and the day.
However, at Kourayashour he had been, and there had heard talk of the golden-haired child who had come to the village with an armed party returning from a raiding expedition on the Valley of the Horses. Sergei puzzled a little over this, for though he questioned Kizka closely, he could not get him to define ‘with’ any more precisely. Was it in the company of, or as a prisoner of the raiding party? Kizka only nodded. With the raiding party, he reaffirmed unhelpfully.
Had Kizka seen the golden-haired child himself?
‘No – only heard speak of her. She had already gone to the Holy Place, high up in the sky.’
Those words chilled Sergei’s blood, for he took them to mean that Natasha was dead; but as he pressed Kizka further, there seemed some doubt about it. The Holy Place – was it of this earth? Both of this earth, Kizka said wisely, and not of it – as all Holy Places were. He had never been there himself, but he understood it to be a place of great power, where the sky was very thin.
A dangerous place, then?
Assuredly a dangerous place. Kizka suggested all Holy Places were dangerous; and then affirmed that there could be nowhere safer for one of the Faithful, than in the shadow of the Prophet’s beard.
Sergei struggled with the notion. Was the child still there, then?
Kizka shrugged and would not commit himself further.
The Governor of Vladikavkaz made no difficulties about Sergei’s request. Though he outranked Sergei himself, he knew that the Count Kirov was a senior member of the Diplomatic Service, and a prominent courtier, a favourite of the Emperor, and at present fulfilling a mission for which he had been personally chosen by the Little Father himself. That the Count’s daughter should have been kidnapped and was at present in Chechen hands was a horrible thing to contemplate, but not nearly so horrible as the thought of what would happen to the Governor’s career, if it ever emerged that he had done less than his utmost to help the Count’s son to recover her.
Within two hours of Sergei’s arrival in Vladikavkaz, he was on his way again, this time accompanied by a troop of regular Cossacks under their own lieutenant, with instructions to accept Sergei’s orders without question. The two hours had been twice too long for Sergei, but he was aware that he was lucky not to have been delayed longer, for the Governor thought it would be much more sensible for him to dine and stay the night at his house, and set off on the morrow for what was – his eye plainly said, though he didn’t speak the words – after all, a hopeless mission.
Feeling much happier with a disciplined force of armed men at his back, Sergei rode beside his guide up the road into the mountains. Kizka eyed the Cossacks a little nervously, aware that most of them hated the tribesmen of the Caucasus as a traveller hates bedbugs, and would relish the opportunity to reduce their number even by one.