‘Sir, they’ll surprise you as soon as you are beyond our help, and kill you, for sure! Don’t go, sir. It’s madness!’
Sergei looked at him steadily. ‘I don’t believe this crack-brained tale any more than you do, but I don’t see what else I can do. You will wait here with the men. If I don’t return, you must use your own judgement about what to do next. The thing is, the guide, Kizka, spoke about a holy place too,’ Sergei added musingly. ‘There may be some grain of truth in it.’
The lieutenant raised a brow. ‘Oh, but there is a holy place up there, sir. It’s famous amongst the tribesmen. The Lesghians call it the Cave in the Sky: it’s sacred to them, though it’s actually just in Chechen country. They say the sky is so thin there, you can step through into Heaven.’ He laughed, uneasily, seeing Sergei’s look. ‘A lot of nonsense, of course, sir, but the Tcherkess believe it all right.’
Sergei heard him with a sense of shock. He looked around, and everything seemed suddenly sharply etched, the colours bright and clean, as though he were seeing this place for the first time – or was it the last? Even the distances were clear, every detail outlined, small but distinct, as if seen through a perspective-glass.
‘Wait for me here,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t provoke anything unless you’re sure I’m lost.’
Zaktal was waiting for him at a little distance, patient, resigned.
‘I’m ready,’ Sergei said.
It was a stiff climb, and Sergei’s riding boots were not made for the exercise. Zaktal went on upwards lightly, only pausing from time to time to take his bearings. It was true there was a path, of sorts, but it petered out here and there, where there had been an earthslip, or there was a rock too big and hard to move. It did not seem to have been much used, and that reassured Sergei. No armed party could inhabit the higher place, and be supplied with their needs, without leaving a well-worn track behind them; if there were to be an ambush, it would be by one or two men only, and against a few he might give a good account of himself.
It was getting harder to breathe. Though the air was no more than pleasantly cool in the sunshine, there was a scattering of snow here and there, and he imagined it would be very cold at night. They were climbing towards the cloud, but Sergei, his eyes on his footholds, didn’t notice until he suddenly stepped into it, and it closed down around him, chill and grey, shutting out the sun, and cutting off the warmth of the day.
Zaktal climbed on steadily, without slowing. Now there was only one way to go, and the path ran deep like a furrow between knee-high rocks, as though it had been worn away by thousands of years of devout footsteps. An old water course, perhaps, Sergei thought. The rock was smooth under his feet, and glistening damp from the mist. His foot slipped a little; he put out a hand to save himself, and a big, irridescent green-gold beetle scurried away almost from under his fingers.
They came out at last on to level ground, and now Zaktal stopped.
‘I go no further,’ he said. ‘The cave is straight ahead – you will not miss it. I wait here for you.’
The milky mist was all around them, opaque, shutting out everything further than a few feet away.
‘You come with me,’ Sergei said firmly.
‘No, I cannot.’
Sergei drew out from inside his jacket the knife he had not given up with the rest of his arms. ‘We live together or die together,’ he said. He seized and twisted Zaktal’s arm round behind him, and put the point of the knife to his neck, pricking the skin over the great vein lightly. ‘Go on, now, if you wish to live. Take me to the place.’
Zaktal wriggled lightly, to test the strength of the grip, and then relaxed. He bowed his head a moment, and then sighed.
‘Very well. But go quietly, and be careful what you say. It does not do to anger the spirits of such a place.’
They walked forward, and the mouth of the cave appeared suddenly out of the mist like the yawn of a monster. It was huge, as tall as a cathedral. Sergei had imagined some little, man-sized cave, and saw easily how the ignorant mountain people might be afraid of it, and weave some magical story about it. But it was only, he told himself, a natural phenomenon, nothing to be afraid of.
Zaktal was hanging more and more heavily on his arm, though it must have hurt him, and Sergei got the odd impression that the man’s body was shrinking back in spite of his mind; that he had resigned himself to going in, but that his body was refusing all on its own.
They stepped into the entrance. Beyond the grey slick of light from the cave-mouth, it was dark, and it smelled cold and utterly unused. No higher garrison this – no armed guard would jump out on him. Why, then, had the man brought him here? To abandon him? Or had Natasha really come here? He shivered.
‘We should have brought a torch,’ he said, and his voice sounded shockingly loud.
Zaktal made a little whimpering sound of protest, and pulled a little, desisting at once with a gasp of pain.
‘Walk,’ Sergei said – but he whispered this time. ‘I don’t wish to hurt you.’
‘Let me go,’ Zaktal muttered. ‘Let me wait outside. This is a bad place.’
‘It’s a cave, like any other,’ Sergei said determinedly. ‘Take me to my sister.’
‘I don’t know where she is.’
But they walked forward into the blackness. Sergei strained his eyes forward, waiting to become accustomed to the dark; sliding his feet cautiously in case of potholes; feeling his way, almost as unwillingly as his companion. He began to feel that it was pointless to go on without a torch. Why hadn’t he thought of it? He thought of going back down to the village for one, and the notion wearied him. What was he doing here? Nasha could not be here. Zaktal was wasting his time, leading him away from the scent.
But now the darkness before him was not so utterly black: there was a greyness of light somewhere ahead. He stopped, thinking he must have wandered round in a circle in the darkness. He looked over his shoulder, and saw the dim light of the cave entrance behind them. He walked forward again, and now, oddly, the sense of position the two sources of light had given him made him more reluctant to move on, made his stepping into the blackness seem even more dangerous than before.
The hair rose on his scalp at the sensation of space all around him, the cold deadness of the air, the fear that there might be something in the dark that could see better than him. No, that was not it. There was no sense of any living creature near them: if there had been – bear or bat or snake or lizard – it would have been in a strange way comforting. What was so terrible was the feeling that there was no life anywhere in the darkness, that no living thing could survive here.
The source of light grew nearer, illuminated a rock wall, massive, impossibly high, reaching up into the fluted vaults of the mountain top. The light came from behind it: the cave turned a corner, that was it. Sergei shuffled towards it, laid his hand on the vertical plane, stepped round it; and there suddenly was the light. He drew in a breath of astonished awe. It was a perfect column of sunlight falling from a gap in the roof of the cave, far, far above: extraordinary, eerie in the blackness, its sides too regular to seem natural. It was like a finger of light pointing down from Heaven.
At some point, without knowing, he had let go of Zaktal’s arm, but Zaktal was beyond running away. He crept at Sergei’s heels, more afraid of being left alone now than Sergei was. Closer to, they could see that it was a natural fissure in the rock which went all the way up to the top of the mountain. The peak must have been clear of the cloud they had climbed up through: high above there was a strip of heavenly blue sky, and the sunlight fell into the cave like liquid gold.
‘Where the sky is so thin,’ Sergei murmured, remembering, ‘that you can step through into Heaven.’ After all, it was nothing but a natural phenomenon, a trick of light and rock and space; but to a receptive mind, it would seem much more, in some way significant. Sergei stared, fascinated; even he felt a reluctance to go closer, as though that strange golden beam might burn him up like paper, or transport him upwards lto another place. It looked unnatural, eerie – dangerous.