The Holy Place! He tried to mock with his mind; but he didn’t want to go on. He wanted to go back, and be safe.
And then Zaktal gave a little gasp and gripped his arm; and he saw Natasha. She was sitting at the edge of the band of light, looking so small in that vastness, less than a child. Her back was to the rock wall, her knees drawn up, and she was staring upwards through the fissure into the blue sky above.
Sergei’s heart leapt. ‘Nasha! Nashka!’ he cried out.
The echo jumped and boomed and reverberated, flicking from rock to rock high up like mocking goblin voices. Zaktal whimpered, and pulled at his arm, trying to hold him back.
‘Come away,’ he begged. ‘Come back. It’s not safe.’
Sergei shook him free. ‘‘It’s my sister.’
‘Don’t touch her! It’s unlucky!’
But Sergei ran forward, heedless of everything but having found Natasha against all hope. He flung himself down, hurting his knees on the rock. ‘Doushenka, it’s me! Thank God I’ve found you!’ He took her by the shoulders; and his words were cut off.
She was cold, as cold as the stones on which she sat. Her knees were drawn up and her arms locked around her knees, locked with a rigidity that defied his fingers. Her head was tilted back, her eyes open and fixed on that patch of blue sky far, far above, and her lips were curved in a smile. But she saw nothing. The first touch told Sergei that his sister was not here. She heard nothing, smiled at nothing, felt nothing.
‘God,’ he said. He drew back from her in horror. He looked around, looking for escape, escape from those blank, staring eyes and that terrible smile. His fists clenched. ‘God. God.’
Zaktal was whispering, retreating. ‘Come away. Leave her. It’s not lucky. Come away.’
‘God!’ cried Sergei. His mind felt close to bursting. There was too much space, inside and outside, pouring through him as though he were hardly there, transparent as air; and that terrible, burning light, and the madness of that small smile, burning his brain. Get out, get out, get out.
Not without Natasha. He forced himself to stoop and pick her up, and she came up all-of-a-piece, light as a starveling bird, stiff and cold with the loathsome cold of death. The madness expanded like an indrawn breath in his mind as he made himself hold on to her, and turned and stumbled away from the light, with the horrified, retreating Zaktal before him; into the darkness, blacker than before, too black, going on for ever, into the eternity of death, going on into the nothing of Hell itself. They would never get out. He held death in his arms, and it was inside him and outside him, filling him with its emptiness.
Then, thank God, there was a little grey light. With a sob of relief he went towards it, dragging his breath as though he had been running. Grey, drab light from the misty cave mouth, dank, chill light, but oh! the light of sanity! He stumbled towards it; and then they were out of the cave mouth, and he felt earth under his feet, and tendrils of cloud on his face. He stopped and turned his face up into it, and gulped at it like a man saved from drowning.
When at last he looked unwillingly down at what he held in his arms, he saw it was only pitiful, a frail little husk of humanity. There was no horror there, only a great overmastering sorrow. Natasha, his sister, was dead. He set her down carefully on the grass, as though she could still feel, and knelt beside her. Her empty eyes were frozen open, and her lips had drawn back a little with the stiffening of death, but there was no glare, no horrible smile. She had died of cold and hunger in that remote cave to which somehow she had been brought, or wandered; small and alone and lost, she had died.
Zaktal stood near. Sergei looked up and met his eyes. ‘I am sorry for your grief,’ the tribesman said with dignity, ‘but it was between her and God. She was called, and she went. We did not harm her. I knew when I saw her that she had been called, and I suffered no one to touch her. This I swear, by all that is holy.’ Sergei tried to speak, but nothing emerged but a shapeless sob.
He brought Natasha’s body home from Vladikavkaz three days later. When the stiffness of death had passed away, the women of the Governor’s house had straightened her limbs and washed her, and made a decent robe for her from one of the Governor’s wife’s nightgowns. A coffin had been hastily fashioned for her, and they laid her in it. Sergei hired a cart, and drove it himself, and the Governor authorised an armed guard to ride with him, to see him safe home to Chastnaya. He offered also to start a message on its way to the Count by official courier, and Sergei accepted the offer bleakly.
Torn with anxiety, the family had waited, hardly daring to think that Natasha would be found alive after all that time. The first sign of that melancholy procession told all, spelled the death of hope. That common little telega, drawn by a gaunt, bewhiskered dray horse, with the weary Nabat nodding behind; the plain wooden coffin in the back; Sergei on the box, the reins slack in his hands, his shoulders bowed as though with great age; these were sights no mother ought to witness. Irina and Anne came out on the verandah as the cart drew near. Irina’s eyes widened; only one small sound escaped her, but it was a sound Anne could never forget, a cry of unbearable pain. The horse halted of its own accord; Sergei managed to remember to put on the brake; and then he simply sat, his head bowed, his hands in his lap, unable to do more.
Others took over. Death had its dues and its rituals, which must be observed, and Anne perceived dimly through her grief how they were a comfort. Perhaps the worst thing about death, she thought, was its passivity. There was nothing to do about it, nothing to distract the mind from it: the rituals gave the bereaved some action to perform, to fill the vast empty spaces of time.
A new coffin was made, lovingly, with their own hands, by Mishka and Grishka. Nyanka and Tanya made a new robe of white silk, rocking and weeping over it: Tanya with the easy, healing tears of youth; Nyanka, grey-faced and red-eyed, with sobs that tore her painfully. With her own shaking hands, the old woman dressed her nursling and lifted her into the coffin. ‘There’s so little of her!’ she cried out in pity. ‘She weighs no more than a dead leaf.’
The coffin was placed on a trestle, draped with a white pall, turned back to show the face, and the hands crossed high on the breast over an icon of St Catharine, her birth saint. Candles burned at the four corners, and more were set all round the room, so that their blaze almost challenged the daylight. Juniper sprays were spread about the floor; the chanter sat in the corner, reading psalms, while members of the family prayed, and neighbours came in to pay their respects. The village priest came in every hour to say the panihida, the prayers for the dead, and prudently made great play with his censer: despite the juniper and the candles, it was noticeable that the body had been dead four or five days.
As soon as darkness fell, the bells began to toll monotonously, and the funeral took place. Anne did not consider for a moment absenting herself, knowing Irina needed her. Anne helped Marie to dress her, and then drew her arm through her own and led her like a blind woman to take her place in the procession.
The flaming torches turned the dusk to darkness, stretching like a bright snake all the way from the house to the church, as the servants lined the route, ready to fall in behind as the coffin passed. Dmitri, Danil, Mishka and Grishka carried the coffin; Feodor walked before, bearing Irina on his arm; Sergei supported Anne, who led the bewildered Sashka by the hand; the rest of the family walked behind. It seemed a long way, between the darkness and the wavering torchlight; Anne stumbled a little on the uneven ground, and Sergei bore her up. She kept thinking of Natasha’s pink kid slipper. She could not associate her with the coffin; it could not be Natasha in there, not possibly.