Aleksei had never suspected that his son might have anything to do with the Northern Society. For one thing, he was far too young. For another, he had never been out of Russia – excepting one brief visit to Warsaw – never to the West. The two reasons were really the same reason. It was in Paris that the soldiers who had fought Napoleon, routed him from their own land and pursued him across a continent, discovered the true nature of what they had been fighting. For many, particularly the young, it was paradise. For Aleksei it came close, but he had been old enough to understand that it was a paradise that could never be achieved in Russia. The idea of Heaven on earth brings with it, inescapably, the concept of the final destruction of earth. And Russia was the most earthly nation imaginable. More than that, Aleksei knew that even France was no utopia, for how could a utopia have produced the monster Bonaparte? He had dragged half a million men across Europe into Russia and returned with less than a hundred thousand. That didn’t even take into account the Russians who had died. Whatever blessings the French Revolution had brought, it had not brought peace, and Aleksei had fought in enough battles to love peace above all things; even above freedom.
Thus, although there were a few in the Northern Society of Aleksei’s age, and older, he was too old to be a typical member. Similarly, Dmitry was too young; too young and too Russian. But if Dmitry had somehow acquired revolutionary ideas during his short life, they could only have come from one source – Aleksei himself. It would be appropriate. Aleksei’s own father had had little education, and yet his love of the idea of learning had been passed down to Aleksei to become in him a reality. Had Aleksei’s talk of liberty similarly become in his son a concrete desire to bring that liberty about, no matter what the cost?
Aleksei’s eyes locked with his son’s for less than a second. He could see questions in Dmitry’s face that were no less confused than those in his own mind. For Dmitry to learn that his father mixed with those who openly plotted to overthrow the tsar would be more shocking than anything Aleksei could feel at the reverse discovery. He did not wait for his son to ask those questions. He turned and fled – walking calmly and unhurriedly, yet still his action could only be described as flight – walking out of the room, out of the building and into the cool, darkening evening of Lubyanka Square.
Aleksei had not had far to walk to reach that evening’s rendezvous. Red Square was a very different place from what it had been when he first met the Oprichniki there in 1812. Before that – only days before – it had been different again, filled with shops and stalls that obscured the huge majesty of the open space that lay to the east of the Kremlin. By the time Aleksei had had his meetings there, during the French occupation, most of those primitive wooden buildings had been burnt to nothing, and the stone ones had suffered almost as badly. The rebuilt square was less cluttered. There were still shops on the east side, but nothing taller than a single storey. Nothing had been built that would hide Saint Vasiliy’s or the Kremlin itself. Beyond the cathedral, on the hill down to the river, there was a mess of new buildings, but they were scarcely visible from the square. Even viewed from the south, Saint Vasiliy’s managed to dwarf them.
It was a little after eight when Aleksei arrived. He preferred the square as it was now, though he would have liked it even more if it had been completely clear – of shops, at least. He would have broken down and cried if Saint Vasiliy’s had become a victim of the fires. He stood briefly to look up at the statue of Minin and Pozharskiy taking pride of place in the centre of the square. This was the kind of clutter he appreciated, even though it was less than a decade old. The heroic events it commemorated were over two centuries old, back in the ‘Time of Troubles’. Boris Godunov – one of the original Oprichniki after whom the monsters Aleksei had encountered had been given the epithet – had declared himself emperor, but the entire nation had come under threat from a Polish invasion, which had besieged the Kremlin. It was only when a prince, Dmitry Mihailovich Pozharskiy, and a butcher, Kuzma Minich Minin, had raised an army of Muscovites that the Poles were driven out. The year was 1612. It was always the twelves. 1612: liberation from the Poles, which led almost immediately to the foundation of the Romanov dynasty. 1712: the year Saint Petersburg became the capital – Aleksei might not have liked it, but he couldn’t deny its place in history. 1812: the defeat of Bonaparte – an event that had not merely changed Russia, but the entire world. What, Aleksei wondered, would happen in 1912 that would be so globally significant that it could compare with the happenings of a century, two centuries, three centuries before? Aleksei would not be around see it. Neither would his children – but his children’s children? Perhaps.
There was still no sign of Kyesha, but the clock on the Saviour’s Tower said that it was barely half past eight. Aleksei walked on towards Saint Vasiliy’s, revelling in the new openness of the square. He had entered from the north, and the moment he had done so, the cathedral had called to him across the vast empty space, in a way it never could have when the area was built up. The Kremlin itself was ubiquitous, looming over the entire length of Red Square, but Saint Vasiliy’s was like a beacon, small in the distance, but never insignificant, and ever growing as it was approached. Aleksei had seen Notre Dame in Paris. He had been inside and had climbed its towers. It was massive and beautiful, but it could never be as compelling as this ornate, garish symbol of all that it meant to be Russian.
‘I never could work out quite where in Red Square you planned to meet.’ Aleksei could not see where Kyesha had come from. It did not matter.
‘It doesn’t seem to have caused you any trouble,’ he said.
‘Are you ready to play?’
‘Of course. Where shall we go?’
Kyesha looked around, then nodded towards the only object that interrupted the surface of the square between the cathedral and the statue of Minin and Pozharskiy – the Lobnoye Mesto. It was a round stone dais from which, traditionally, the ukases issued by the tsar had been announced. They climbed the steps up to it. The platform itself was more than a man’s height above the square, and surrounded by a stone wall that came up almost to Aleksei’s shoulders. It would not have been easy to attract attention when making a proclamation, but at the very centre of the large circular platform was another, smaller podium. Aleksei presumed it would have been on this that the herald actually stood.
But it was not Aleksei and Kyesha’s intention to be seen by the people in the square, few of them though there were that evening. Once they had sat down, their backs against the outer wall, they were invisible to anyone who did not actually climb the steps and look inside. Even if someone had done, they would have had to look closely to see the two men through the darkness of the moonless night. But the dark would be an equal problem for them if they intended to play knucklebones. Kyesha had come prepared. He lit a candle. Its dim light didn’t even reach the far wall, but it was sufficient. He took the bones from his pocket again and placed five of them on the stone floor between them.
‘How shall we do this?’ asked Aleksei. He was sure Kyesha would have worked out the details.
‘The question is the bet,’ he replied. ‘You announce the question and the number of bones, and if you succeed, you’re given an answer. We’ll forget about doubling.’
‘And if you don’t succeed?’