CHAPTER 1

THE SMELL OF smoke woke him up, and Va realized he should never have been asleep in the first place. He got back onto his knees in the forest clearing, wiped the cold fragments of pine needles from his face and blew out a breath that condensed into a white cloud. Above him, snow-laden branches creaked and swayed against a pale southern sky.

He shut his eyes and tried to empty his mind of the concerns of the world. His fingers tightened around the cross in his hands. He ignored the coarseness of his habit, the steady drip of ice water from the firs that patted his bowed head. His lips might be blue, but they could still move in the trembling mouthing of rote prayers.

The drift of the wind brought the smoke back to him. As it entered his nose, it touched that part of his memory which he had thought locked away for ever.

Va stood. He turned slowly, letting his senses tell him which way to go. Then, with a feeling bordering on sickness, he started to run. The tears that streamed down his face never dared to blind him.

The closer he got, the stronger the stench of fire and oil and meat became. He knew what it meant even though he couldn’t see through the forest. He hesitated only once, when he burst through the tree line and found that his world was on fire. Then he plunged through the swinging, smouldering gates of the monastery of Saint Samuil of Arkady. There were so many dead that Va couldn’t find anyone who could tell him what had happened.

The five-domed basilica glowed brightly from the inside. It didn’t stop him from going in, again and again, calling out, listening above the roar of the flames and the cracking of timbers for any kind of answer. He only retreated when overwhelmed by the smoke and the heat. He reeled out, his black habit steaming, his lungs choked with soot and harsh vapours. He rolled in the last of the spring snows to extinguish any embers that might have fallen on him, coughed until he vomited, then raised himself up for another attempt.

The doors to the church had been barred from the inside, burst by force from outside. Most of his brothers had died there, by sword and spear and club, even as they knelt in prayer. The floor was thick with boiling blood. Va pressed himself to the wall, trying to get round to the north aisle.

‘Brothers! Father! Can anyone hear me?’

The roof trusses started to snap, one by one, failing like falling dominoes. Va jumped for a window recess. Tiles rattled down in a shower, and the smoke whistled up through the hole. The sudden rush of air turned the blazing church into an inferno. The glass shattered, and he was alight. He fell backwards, outwards, through the window and into the mud.

Blessed mud: he twisted and turned, wallowing like a pig until all the flames were out. Then he crawled away on his hands and knees as the great central copper dome creaked and groaned, and plummeted into the nave. He was far enough away that the explosion of red-hot masonry only pattered the ground around him with smoking missiles.

He kept crawling until he was safe. Every building was burning. The dormitory, the workshops, the storehouses; even the trees in the orchard were smoking, their new green leaves brown and curled.

A pair of brown leather boots walked across his line of sight. They stopped, and when he moved his hand, they moved closer.

‘Va?’

He tried to turn over. He was starting to feel the pain, and not just the pain but the loss. His world had just been torn in two.

‘Elenya?’

She bent down and looked at him. ‘Are you going to die?’

His hands were blistered and cut. His face felt stiff and wet, and he couldn’t tell whether he was caked in dried mud or melted flesh. His throat was burning and his chest felt crushed. If it hurt this much, it must mean he was going to live.

‘Die? Not today.’

‘Oh.’ She walked away again but not so far that she couldn’t watch him gasp and twitch like a stranded fish. After a while she sat down on a low wall.

Va lay there, listening to the life he knew consumed by fire. He had been almost happy here. The rituals, the order, the brotherhood, the closeness of his community; they all served to quieten the voices inside. Now it was all gone. If he concentrated, he could hear their whispering beginning.

He levered himself to his knees and shuffled like a penitent over to where Elenya sat.

‘You look like shit,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’re not going to die?’

‘Shut up, woman. No, don’t. Tell me what happened.’

‘There were – I don’t know – thirty or so men, maybe more. I was gathering firewood when I heard them coming, and I was certain I didn’t want to meet them. So I hid.’

‘Then what?’

‘I waited until they’d all gone past. Every one of them was on horseback; it didn’t take long. They just stormed in, killing as they found them. Some of the monks barricaded themselves in the church but that didn’t hold much hope, really.’ She shrugged. ‘It was over very quickly. They came, slaughtered everyone and left. Not quite. There were two big thunderclaps. I don’t know what they were. They didn’t come from the sky.’

Va got to his feet, staggered, almost put out his hand to steady himself on Elenya’s shoulder, but at the last moment managed to grab a gatepost instead. ‘The scriptorium.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be anything left of that.’

‘No, you don’t understand. The books.’

‘Va, they’ll be ash by now.’

‘No they won’t.’ He started walking painfully towards the burning annexe to the dormitory. ‘Don’t think that we haven’t tried.’

‘What are you talking about?’

But he wouldn’t answer. He kept on with his stiff gait until he stood under the wall of the scriptorium. All the books, all the inks and quills and gold leaf and leather and string and glue, all gone. The psalters and the gospels and books of the law, the prayers and the rules and the records of centuries, almost as back as far as the Reversal: destroyed. Yet all of this incidental to the reason for their destruction.

‘You can’t go in,’ said Elenya. ‘It might be days before you can go in.’

‘God will provide a way,’ said Va.

‘And what do you expect to find when you do?’

‘Nothing. Precisely nothing.’

‘So why look?’

‘So that I can tell the patriarch what I’ve seen.’

‘Seen nothing? I can see him taking that seriously.’

‘That’s because you don’t realize what it is that’s not there.’ He banged his blistered fist on the stonework. It was hot and hard against his hand. ‘Enough!’

The scriptorium roof caved in. All the first-floor windows blew outwards, spilling shards of glass and twisted ribbons of lead across the ground, where they lay like diamonds and worms. Tongues of flame twisted out then pulled back.

Va picked his way back to the low wall. There had been pigs in the pen, a sow and six piglets, but they were dead too. Perhaps only the pigeons had escaped.

‘Who were they, these men?’

‘I was hiding,’ said Elenya. With night falling and moving away from the fire, it was getting colder.

‘Who were they?’ he repeated. ‘Were they Rus?’

‘No. They didn’t look like us. Northerners.’

‘Yellowmen?’

‘No. I’ve met Yakut, and the yellowmen look a bit like them. Further north still. Turks?’

‘You were there.’ Va realized that he needed to eat and drink. The raiders couldn’t burn down the well, or steal all the snow, but the stores were up in flames. He took out his knife and swung his legs over the wall of the sty.

‘They had darker skin than me, so they might have been Turkmen. They had a leader. I only saw him for a moment. He was dressed all in black.’

‘Like me.’

‘No. It wasn’t a habit, more a shroud: black cloth wound around him, over his head. I didn’t see his face, or anything of him.’ She watched him slice the sow’s belly into strips. ‘I couldn’t stop what happened, Va. Even you couldn’t have.’

‘Even me.’ His voice was self-mocking. He concentrated on his bloody work.

‘You’re the one who surrendered himself to God. Made all those vows. Poverty, chastity, obedience.’

‘And I will keep them till the day I die.’

‘Which, as you’ve already said, won’t be today.’ She turned away. ‘Perhaps the Turkmen came for you, only to find that you weren’t here. Imagine, all that way. It might even be that if they’d found you, they would have spared everyone else.’

Va stopped cutting for a moment. His hand tightened around the blood-slick bone handle of his knife, to get a better grip on it. ‘You might deceive yourself as to my importance. I don’t. I’m nothing. A nobody. A man of no consequence at all.’

‘You’re the man I love.’

‘That counts for nothing.’ Elenya did this periodically. She would provoke him, and he would have to be resilient, surrounding himself with the armour of God until she grew tired. ‘It never did.’

‘Never? It’s a sin to lie, Va.’

‘I renounced the deeds of the flesh, and if I could, I would renounce the flesh itself. Be quiet and leave me alone.’

‘I’ll be quiet,’ she said. ‘I’ll never leave you alone.’

He had to pray. The physical necessity of prostrating himself in humility before God was overwhelming. He finished his work and gathered up the belly strips. ‘Quiet will do for the moment.’

There was a place where the east wall had fallen completely outwards. Stone and brick were piled with burning wood. He laid out the pork on a slab of masonry and pushed it into the heart of the fire. Then, facing east, he lay down, arms crucifix-wide, face in the mud, and began to recommend the souls of his brothers to the care of Heaven.

He was the only one left, and he should have died with them. Now he had to wrestle with the idea that his survival wasn’t a quirk of random fate but served a higher purpose. He had been chosen to bear witness to this atrocity for certain. But what else? Did God want more from him?

‘I am unworthy,’ he groaned. ‘Send another. Send anyone else but me, Lord God. I am a worm, a dog, a maggot. I am unclean. I am untrustworthy. I am weak and I will fail. Don’t spare me. Take me. The least of my brothers was better than me. Give life to one of them, please. Give them new life and destroy me.’

He was not struck down. After a while he got up, pulled back the stone with the charred meat on and ate slowly, resenting every mouthful.

‘I’m surprised you can eat, with your brothers’ bones cracking in the fire.’

‘If I don’t eat, I can’t bury them.’

‘Oh.’ Elenya sat down next to him, put part of a rye loaf on the stone and exchanged it for a piece of meat. ‘Isn’t this just like old times, Va?’

‘No. I wasn’t a monk, and you weren’t mad.’

‘But here we are all the same, under the stars, firelight—’

‘If you’re going to eat, eat. I have work to do.’

‘You can’t do anything now. Everything is gone. Only we remain.’

‘There’s plenty I can do. Like pray for rain.’

‘Rain?’ She looked up into the clear night sky. The stars were brittle-bright, twinkling at them from above. ‘There won’t be rain for days.’

‘Which is why I’m going to have to pray until I sweat blood.’ Va pulled back his hood and ran a fat-smeared hand over his shaved head. ‘God will hear me. He heard me before.’

‘So you say.’

‘He sent his angels.’

‘And He saved you.’

‘It is true.’

‘And you have the nerve to call me mad. At least my madness is my own fault.’

‘And mine is divine madness, one that I gratefully accept.’ He took the hard black bread and bit into it. ‘I wake up and my first thought is to thank God.’

‘Mine is to curse Him for making me want you.’

‘Each to their own. I won’t fight with you.’

‘You won’t fight with anyone. Not any more.’ She took another strip of meat and stood up. For a moment he looked up at her, her face lit by the same flames that consumed the bodies of his beloved brothers. She was still beautiful, and it made his rejection of her all the more pure. He had chosen the steepest road, simply because he had the furthest to climb.

‘Goodnight, Elenya.’

‘Goodnight, Va.’

When she had gone, but not too far, he went to the well. He drew up water and doused himself over and over again until he shivered with the cold. He stripped off his habit and washed it in the trough, abusing his blistered hands until he thought he would faint with dizziness. His body was scarred – more scarred than any man alive had a right to be. He’d picked up some more today, but he was proud of those, not like all the others: the burns to his forearms and thighs were gained trying to save life, not end it.

Finally his face. He had protected it instinctively by covering it with his cloaked arms. It was unmarked because his reactions were still that fast. If his features had been turned to bubbling ruin, would Elenya still adore him? He knew the answer was yes, and it was futile wishing otherwise. He would have disfigured himself long ago if it could have given her release.

He pulled on his sodden habit, which stole more heat from him. Now he was mortally cold. His lips were blue and his limbs spasming. His teeth chattered with a life of their own. To pray like this was not only his duty but his right. There was nothing to rely on, no earthly power, no inner strength. He had nothing. He had no status, no wealth to bribe the Almighty or position to lever influence. His name – even his name was not his own.

Va went back to where the east door had stood and looked down the ruined nave to the twisted remains of the great green dome that was once raised over the basilica, now thrown down and smashed. Elenya was right. It would burn all tomorrow and into the night. It would stay hot until the Sabbath and precious time would be lost.

The books were gone. He knew it in his heart. The raiders hadn’t picked at random. They hadn’t come to steal the plate or the crosses, the grain stores or the livestock. This place, in all of Mother Russia, hidden away in the far south where there was nothing but trees and wolves, was the one place they’d come. If he waited until the fires died down of their own accord, they’d be back in the heathen north and nothing could be done.

But something was being done. Gritting his teeth, Va prostrated himself again in the direction of the rising sun.

‘God, this is a test. I know it. A test of my faith. I won’t fail. I need rain. I need such a quantity of rain that I might drown here in the dirt. I want a deluge, a flood. I want the vaults of Heaven opened and a cataract to pour down. I need to get into the scriptorium, to check on the books. I know they’re not there, but the patriarch will ask me if I have checked and I cannot tell a lie to him. I have to look him in the eye and tell him that I have seen the place where they were and that the books are not there. If we’re going to get them back, we have to start as soon as possible. So, please: I need rain, and I need it now.’