Once, when Ana had strayed too far from the train while picking cornflowers, a young soldier, thin as a rail and with a struggling brown moustache, had warned her back. Anastasia, gesturing out at the vast wilderness, said, “You think I would make a run for it? Where do you think I would go?”
The soldier, who seemed flustered to be speaking to a grand duchess at all — even a deposed one — said, “I don’t know. But please don’t try.” His tone was less admonitory than it was pleading. He was doing his duty, that she could see, but he wasn’t entirely at ease with it. She smiled at him — he couldn’t be more than a year or two older than she was, nineteen or twenty at the most — and he held his rifle as if it were a hoe, something she suspected he was much more familiar with.
“Sergei!” another of the soldiers hollered from atop a nearby hill. “Get that limping bitch back here!”
Sergei blushed deeply; some of the soldiers enjoyed delivering insults to their royal prisoners. Ana, who had grown accustomed if not inured to it, glanced at the bouquet of bright blue cornflowers in her hand and said, “I have enough.”
When she dropped one on her return to the waiting train, Sergei picked it up and, bobbing his head as if in a furtive bow, tried to give it back to her.
“You keep it,” she said, and if she thought he had blushed before, it was nothing compared to the crimson flush that filled his young face now. He looked so much like a tomato she laughed and said, “Don’t let the others see that you have it, Sergei. They’ll call it imperial property and take it away.”
He stuck it into the pocket of his frayed military tunic as if it were made of gold.
After that, Ana got used to Sergei’s guarding her. Whenever she stepped off the train with her spaniel, Jemmy, she expected to see him trailing her at a distance, and the other soldiers, too, seemed to regard her as his charge. Her sisters kidded her that she had found a suitor. Usually, the train would not stop anywhere near a station or a town; Ana didn’t know if it was because the Red Guards thought the local people would attack the imperial family, or try to liberate them. On one day, a village was in sight — a prosperous-looking one, judging from the flower-filled window boxes, the green fields, and busy barnyards — but it was safely removed on the other side of the river. Ana noticed that Sergei was gazing at it longingly, his rifle drooping even lower than usual.
“What’s the name of that village?” she asked, and at first he was so lost in thought he didn’t answer.
When she repeated the question, he said, “That is my home.” And then he turned toward her and said, “It’s called Pokrovskoe.”
Now Anastasia looked at it, too, with special attention. Pokrovskoe. She had heard Rasputin speak of it often. It was his own hometown. And he had predicted that the Romanovs would see it one day.
Could he have imagined it would be under circumstances like these?
She did not need to ask the next question before Sergei said, “Father Grigori lived in the house you see with two stories.”
It was unmistakable, looming over all the other cottages in the town the way Rasputin himself had always dominated whatever company he was in. Anastasia wondered who lived in it now — she had heard rumors of a wife and young son. But then there had been so many rumors, most of them scurrilous, that neither she, nor the Tsaritsa, to whom they were often whispered, knew what to believe. She was eager to alert her mother, who was still on the train resting her bad back, where they were; she would want to know.
Coming closer than he ever had before, but keeping an eye out lest the other guards grow suspicious, Sergei said, “There are those who still communicate with the starets.”
“What do you mean, communicate with him? Father Grigori is dead. He is buried in the imperial park.”
Sergei’s eyes earnestly bore into hers.
“I put a white rose on his coffin myself,” Ana said. Her fingers, without meaning to, went to her chest and touched the cross beneath her blouse.
“There are those who keep the fire alight,” Sergei said, just before the whistle on the locomotive screeched. Jemmy barked back at it.
“All aboard,” an officer hollered from on top of the royal train car, “and now!” The whistle went off again, and there was an impatient chuffing sound from the engine.
Sergei ostentatiously lifted his rifle barrel and nudged his prisoner in the direction of the train. Anastasia walked back toward the tracks, Jemmy trotting at her heels. Her sisters were already mounting the stairs, followed by her father in his customary khaki tunic and forage cap. He was holding Alexei, identically dressed, by the hand. The engineer was waving a flag.
Anastasia turned around to say something to Sergei, but he was sauntering back to the troop car with a pair of the other guards and pretended not to notice.
Moments later, the train resumed its journey, and as Ana watched from the window, the flowers and fields and whitewashed barns of Pokrovskoe slid from view. She had forgotten to ask which house had been Sergei’s, and deeply regretted that now.
Chapter 25
“Kushtaka,” Nika said, and Slater had to ask her to repeat it, partly to catch this new word again, and partly because he simply liked to hear her say it.
The lights in the mess tent were wavering, as the wind, only partially blocked by the old stockade, battered the triple-reinforced nylon walls with a dull roar. The temporary electrical grid Sergeant Groves had slapped together was still holding, but the lamps, strung up on wires, were swaying above their makeshift dinner table. Tomorrow, Slater thought, they’d have to get the backup generator online, too — just in case.
“Kushtaka,” Nika said. “The otter-men. If you were an unhappy soul, still nursing some grievance on earth, you were condemned to linger here, unable to ascend the staircase of the aurora borealis into heaven. Or maybe you just drowned, and your body could not be recovered and properly disposed of — either way, your spirit could become a changeling, half-human and half-otter.”
“Why otter?” Dr. Eva Lantos asked, as she dunked her herbal tea bag one more time.
“Because the otter lived between the sea and the land, and now your spirit lived between life and death.”
“We have many such legends in Russia, too,” Professor Kozak said, mopping up the last remnants of his stew with a crust of bread. “I grew up with such stories.”
“Most cultures do have something similar,” Nika agreed. “The kushtaka, for instance, were sometimes said to take on the form of a beautiful woman, or someone you loved, in order to lure you into deep water or the depths of a forest. If you got lost, you could wind up becoming a changeling yourself.”