Twelve

'They have no life and they have no love,' I said with all the gravity I could muster. 'They have hunger. They have to eat and they enjoy causing pain as they do it.'

'But that's probably just what they were like in life. We'd be like us. Do you think any man would refuse to have his blood drunk by a vampire as pretty as me – and then be made immortal by it too?'

This was too much. I leapt to my feet, causing her to fall to the hard wooden floor. I grabbed the dagger I had been carving and held it out to her, simply to show to her, not to threaten, but I don't think she saw it like that.

'Do you know what this is for?' I shouted. 'This is to kill them – to stab them in the heart, because that's the way to destroy them. They can't be killed like men because, as men, they died a long time ago.' Without getting up off the floor, she backed up against the wall with a look of fear in her eyes which, I'm sorry to say, I enjoyed seeing. 'If you were a vampire, people would hunt you down and kill you in just the same way. And they'd be right to do it, because these things are monsters – animals – worse than animals, because they once had souls enough to know right from wrong.'

I flung the dagger back across the room and threw myself on my bed. She sat huddled in against the wall, right next to the bed, silent and thoughtful, but showing no sign of moving from the uncomfortable position. It was an hour before either of us spoke.

'I didn't mean it,' she said moodily. 'It would be a fantasy to have you to myself for a year, let alone for ever.'

I should have replied, but I didn't. Five minutes later she stood up and left the room.

Domnikiia never visited me again in Yuryev-Polsky. While he had been in hospital, and after, she had taken to calling on Dmitry. She did this, I think, largely for my sake, since she had no reason to like him, and also out of some sense of duty as a nurse. Even after we argued, she continued to visit him, and so our paths still crossed occasionally; she was always polite, but always devastatingly formal. No more 'Lyosha's emanated from her lips.

I occasionally came across Margarita too. Like Domnikiia, she was working as a nurse, although the rumours from some of the soldiers under her care were that she was still keeping her hand in at her former trade. I begged her to talk to Domnikiia for me, or to tell me what I should say to her myself.

'Can't you even work that out?' she said with an uncalled-for hostility that I felt came to her from Domnikiia.

'If I knew what to say, I'd have said it.'

'But you didn't.'

'So what should I say?'

'What would you say to your wife?' replied Margarita acidly.

'I can't help being married,' I explained, but evidently I had missed the point. With a sharp 'tut', she turned and left.

The day after my argument with Domnikiia, it had snowed for the first time. It was early – October had only just begun – and the snow was very light, not even trying to settle. Many versts away in Moscow, that same snow must have placed a chill in Bonaparte's soul. He had not planned to spend the winter in Russia.

Just over a week later, news came that the Grande Armée had at last quit Moscow and was heading out of the city to the southwest. Bonaparte had stayed for five weeks – just as the wave stays for a few moments at the top of the beach – before understanding that he had won a worthless trophy. Now his starving army had to flee for safety, with a reinvigorated Russian army in full pursuit.

I went to see Dmitry. His hands and arms were, though scarred, almost fully usable. His beard was not growing back. He did not shave it off completely, but left the smooth, ruddy bald patch so that all could see the long straight scar from a French sabre that the flames had been unable to erase. We discussed the news from Moscow.

'So what do you plan to do?' he asked.

'Get back as soon as possible. Half the town will be setting off there in the next few days.'

'Wouldn't it be better to join up with the regular army? Moscow's no longer the battlefield. We should be chasing the French.'

'We have to try and make contact with Vadim. And let the Oprichniki know what's happening.' The first half of what I said had been honest.

Dmitry thought for a moment. 'We can't be sure that he or they are still in Moscow. I'm planning to go south and join up with the main body of the army. If Vadim's there, I'll get word to you. You go to Moscow.'

I decided to test the water. There had been a thousand opportunities in the weeks since our departure from Moscow, but, as with Domnikiia, I had always put it off. Now was my last chance, at least for a while, and I knew that if there was any hint in Dmitry of the loathing of the Oprichniki that dwelt in me, then there was a chance that he could once again be turned into a formidable ally.

'Do you trust them?' I asked.

'Trust them?' He tried to pretend he didn't understand, but we knew each other too well for him to bother for long. 'It's different for you, Aleksei.'

'Different?'

'They deceived you – we deceived you. We didn't tell you what they were from the start. That wasn't fair.'

Wise though, I thought.

'That's no basis for trust,' he continued, 'especially given your – everyone's – natural fear of them. But I always knew, right from the very start.'

'What happened?' I asked. 'Right at the start?'

'It's a long story, Aleksei, from a long time ago.'

'What happened?' At first I had asked idly, but now I was insistent. Whatever he had to tell me could be of incalculable help in fighting the Oprichniki, and might even help me to understand how Dmitry could be so accepting of them.

Dmitry looked at me and understood that I wasn't going to let him run away from this one. He took a deep breath.

CHAPTER XVII

'IT WAS BACK IN '09,' HE SAID, 'WHEN IT SEEMED LIKE THE TURKS were our only problem – and what a problem! You must have been down in the south-east then, across the Danube, but in the west, we were having real trouble. The Turks were way further north and I was trying to organize Wallachian peasants to do some of the fighting for us – to save their own country.'

Dmitry walked over to stare out of the window, the cold sunlight causing the burnt skin of his cheek to glisten.

'But it was useless,' he continued. 'They had no more wits than the serfs, and they were a darned sight slower to take an order. Still, I suppose they'd learned over the years that driving out the Turks just made it easier for us to move in – us or whoever happened to be fighting the Turks at the time. Anyway, things had gone badly and we'd been pushed right back up into the Carpathians. There was me and about fifteen locals – only one of them spoke any French – cut down from a force of over a hundred.

'It was late winter – you couldn't call it spring yet – and though the winters are nothing like as cold down there as they are here, we were high up in the mountains, so we felt it. Darkness fell, and we could see the torches of the Turks on the foothills below us, climbing up after us. There must have been ten of them for each one of us and, although it was going to take them a good couple of hours to reach us, reach us they would. And you know what they're like with prisoners.'

He turned slightly and nodded towards my hand and its missing fingers. I said nothing.

'I was all for carrying on up the mountain. At least then there might be some hope that they'd give up pursuing us, especially with the cold, but the others had lost it. They just sat around the fire muttering to each other and wouldn't move. The one I could understand said they were waiting for the 'saviour'. I said we'd all be seeing Him soon enough, but it turns out they were talking about some local mythic hero – though it might as well have been Christ, judging by the way they crossed themselves whenever this 'saviour' was mentioned.

'It was some local warlord from the Middle Ages; a ruthless type, but pretty handy at dealing with invading Turks. A genuine figure, if they were to be believed, which was all very well, but not much use to us four hundred years later. The idea was, of course, that he would 'rise again', much like Christ, when the country was in its direst need. Nothing very original; you'd get the same basic plot from peasants anywhere in Europe.'