Cyril Vlasenko tried to sit up in bed.
“I want to see the stable!” he demanded petulantly.
“The stable is gone, Father.”
“Humph!” Cyril snorted. “So much for the tsar’s manifesto.”
The manifesto, in fact, had not brought about the immediate results Nicholas might have hoped for. Disturbances continued throughout the country until Witte had to call out troops to quell them. Some lives were lost, but at least it wasn’t the bloodbath the tsar had feared.
But the demonstration in Vlasenko’s own territory of Katyk had turned especially ugly. Five peasants and two Cossacks had been killed; thousands of rubles in property were destroyed, including Cyril’s own stable. And all because Cyril had one of his servants flogged for refusing to work.
“It’s too far, Father,” Cyril’s son Karl continued to protest. “Besides, there’s nothing left to see.”
“I don’t care! I’ll walk there today or, by the Saints, I won’t walk at all.”
“You need to walk, Father. It’s the only way you will rebuild your strength. But the stable is too far.”
“What do you know?”
“I am a doctor, you know.”
“You’re a quack.”
“Please, Father.”
“Anyway, you said I’d never walk again.”
“Well, perhaps I was hasty in my prognosis—”
“Hasty, ha! You couldn’t make a proper diagnosis to save your life.”
“I resent that, Father,” returned Karl, but in too weak a tone to impress his father.
Cyril knew that his son would never get over the fact that it was no doctor at all who had been instrumental in Cyril’s miraculous escape from certain death.
Cyril fell back against his pillows, ignoring his son’s protest. Nine months ago he had been critically injured by a terrorist’s bomb. He had spent weeks in a semicoma, then months bedridden. His three-hundred-pound frame had shrunk to two hundred. Before the bombing, the tsar had assured him that he would be promoted to the coveted position of the Minister of the Interior, vacated when Minister Svyatopolk-Mirsky had been fired after the debacle of Bloody Sunday. At last all Cyril had ever hoped for was within his grasp.
Then that cursed bomb. He was all but certain it had been planted by that crazy malcontent Basil Anickin. In all likelihood Anickin had also been responsible for the death of Cyril’s assistant, Cerkover. But Anickin had been killed shortly afterward, and Cyril had been robbed of seeing him punished for his crime. Told that he would never walk again, Cyril then fell to brooding about his failures. He became totally apathetic, hardly caring if he lived or died. Everything he had worked for had also been demolished by that bomb. His family had feared he might do himself harm, and, in fact, Cyril had thought often about taking his miserable life.
After two months of this, Cyril’s wife, in desperation, had called upon the starets. Cyril had always disdained these holy types, so-called men of God. Cyril was not a spiritual man. When Father Grigori had come to the Vlasenko country estate, where Cyril had retired as a virtual recluse after the bombing, Cyril had at first refused to see him.
Grigori Efimovich Rasputin was a dirty peasant who smelled as bad as Cyril’s stables, with greasy hair and matted beard. What Poznia and the aristocratic ladies saw in him was a mystery. They acted as if the man’s wretchedness was a sure sign of his spirituality—having scorned outward adornments and such so as not to distract him from God. But to scorn even a bath! Cyril couldn’t understand that.
But even Cyril had to admit there was something compelling about the starets. When Cyril had shouted at the man to go away, Rasputin had come into his bedroom anyway. Since the accident, Cyril had seen no one but his family, his doctor, and the servants. So, he rose out of his lethargy enough to protest this intrusion. Cyril yelled, but Rasputin had stood over the bed in silence, staring down at Cyril with those intense, penetrating eyes of his.
Cyril tried to escape that gaze, tried to turn his head away, but he couldn’t. Despite the fact that Father Grigori hadn’t laid a hand on him, Cyril was held as firmly as if in a vise.
“Go away,” Cyril finally said, but weakly, without force.
“Is that what you truly want?”
“Yes.”
“And then will you take the revolver you keep in that drawer by your bed and put a hole in your head?”
How did he know about the revolver? Even Poznia was unaware of it.
“It’s none of your business,” said Cyril.
“Look at me Cyril Karlovich.”
What could the man mean? Cyril couldn’t stop looking at him.
“What do you want, Father?” asked Cyril, swallowing hard, still trying to extract himself from the starets’ hold. How he hated to be under any man’s control!
“Why don’t you fight them the way you are fighting me?”
“Who?”
“The demons of defeat and despair that own you.”
“I . . . I . . .”
“You don’t like to be owned, do you?”
Cyril’s mouth was dry; all he could manage was a negative shake of his head.
“Then throw them off. Fight them! Get up and walk!”
For a brief, fleeting moment Cyril felt as if he could do just that. He squirmed in bed, strained against his afflictions. But before anything happened, he fell back exhausted.
“I can’t,” he moaned. “I’m an invalid.”
“Bah! You are a coward!”
“No.”
“A coward and a weakling, I tell you! Half a man. Worthless!”
The words incensed Cyril. No one would have ever had the nerve to call him such things before. But what truly galled Cyril was the fact that he had often hurled those same words at his son.
Were they now also true about him? No!
“Shut up, you stinking peasant,” Cyril screamed at the starets. “Get out of my house!”
Rasputin said not another word but turned on his heel and left the room.
If it had been Rasputin’s intention to make Vlasenko draw upon the baser elements of his character to find the strength he required to triumph over his disabilities, it had been successful. Cyril drew upon his hate, his anger, his vindictiveness, his ambition. He would not be reduced to the pathetic level of his son. He refused to be helpless. He had once before risen from the dust of obscurity—he would do so again!
He’d prove the whole lot of them wrong! All those who thought he was washed up, all those who hoped he was finished. He’d show them all!
He immediately set out upon a regime of exercises while still bedridden. When Karl brought him a wheelchair, Cyril flew into a rage. He would never use one of those wretched contraptions—never! Within a few months of Rasputin’s first visit, he had actually gotten out of bed and taken a few short steps. With the aid of another of Karl’s contraptions—a wooden cagelike thing, a sort of two-handed cane that stood waist-high and which Cyril could grip in front of him with both hands as he walked—he steadily began to build up his endurance.
One day, shortly after Cyril’s first attempt at walking, Rasputin had returned to visit. This time Cyril welcomed him. He didn’t know what part the starets had actually played in his recovery. Since Cyril believed he was master of his own destiny, he was convinced his recovery was due to his own tenaciousness. Yet, he couldn’t deny that Rasputin had somehow caused the will to live to be rekindled in him. He saw no reason not to give the starets his due. Besides, a man like Rasputin might one day be a useful ally. Cyril had heard that the empress was quite taken with the holy man.
And Cyril was going to need all the help he could get to regain his lost influence. Perhaps even the help of God.
But before Cyril could hope to take on the government, he first had to get his own house back in order. The peasants would not have gotten out of hand so quickly if he had been his old self. Even now, if they could glimpse him on his feet, a force still to be reckoned with, they might come to their senses. For, even if the troops had dispersed the riots of the last week, there was still no guarantee that there would not be a repeat of the violence that had, among other things, been the cause of the razing of Cyril’s stable and the subsequent loss of several fine horses.
“Well? What’s it going to be?” Cyril’s thoughts returned to the problem at hand.
“Such a long distance for your first time out . . .” Karl hesitated.
“I’d rather die doing something than rot in this bed.”
Karl hurriedly crossed himself. He had definitely inherited all his mother’s superstitious tendencies.
“Don’t speak like that, Father.”
“Stop it—please!” said Cyril, his tone filled with sarcasm. “You’d simply love to have your inheritance speeded up.”
“Not that you’ve left me anything to inherit,” Karl snapped.
Cyril grinned. He loved it when his son showed even a hint of backbone. And Karl’s statement was unfortunately too near the truth. Since Cyril’s injury, the always-precarious Vlasenko holdings had begun a serious decline.
“All right, let’s quit this senseless discussion,” ordered Cyril. “Get me that walking contraption. I’m going to the stables. I want to see what those worthless peasants have done. Then I want to see the magistrate because I’m going to have every one of those scoundrels arrested.”
“That’ll mean half the countryside. At least a hundred stormed the estate last night.”
“Then, so be it.”
Cyril inched himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed as Karl brought the walker to him, then put slippers on his feet. As Cyril’s feet touched the floor and he put his weight on them, pain shot up through his legs. He winced slightly but for the most part concentrated on ignoring it. There was going to be pain. The doctor had hinted that Cyril might have to live with pain for the rest of his life, even if he did learn to walk on his own. But Cyril knew better. People thought he was irascible, selfish, and callous, but he was also strong willed. He had given in to depression for a short while after his incapacitation—he was only human—but that had merely been a brief lapse in the tenacity that was his true self.
It took twice as long as it normally would have to reach the stables, and at the end of the trek Cyril was panting and perspiring. He might have dropped a hundred pounds, but he was still a middle-aged, sedentary man who had just suffered a near-fatal injury.
Smoke rose from the charred remains of the stables. The bricks of the blacksmith’s forge were all that was left—of the building at least. The burned carcasses of four horses lay among the rubble. The stench of charred flesh permeated the air, and there was no wind to disperse it—a fact that had saved other nearby buildings from being destroyed also.
“Curse them!” breathed Cyril. “That nincompoop of a tsar gave away the country with that despicable manifesto of his, and what good has it done? He should have made those ungrateful people face ten thousand Cossack rifles. He’s so afraid of a little blood, but that’s all these dirty peasants understand. And I swear, if they ever try to harm my land again, that’s what I’m going to do.” He turned savagely on his son. “I want you to see to it that our supply of weapons are restocked. I want ten loaded rifles at the ready at all times.”
“And who do you think will use them?”
“I have a few faithful servants left. I’ll put one in your mother’s hands if I have to.” He pointedly didn’t mention his son’s ability to help. He knew Karl wouldn’t have the guts. And Karl didn’t correct the omission. “I’m ready to go back now,” Cyril said as he maneuvered an awkward turn. “It must be lunchtime. I’m starved.”