CHAPTER 2
Elenya found him at first light, still stretched out before the ruined church. She was already soaked to the skin.
‘I suppose you think this is a sign,’ she said.
Va said nothing in reply. Instead, he got up wearily and started over to the remains of one of the workshops. There would be a spade, or a pick–probably without a handle, but he was used to working with impossibilities.
He kicked at the smoking timbers, and moved aside the remains of a fallen wall. Underneath was an iron-shod shovel, scorched but intact. It would do. His gaze strayed to the scriptorium, sweating and creaking as the rain lashed down. Later. There would be time later. He had a solemn duty to fulfil.
Under the unwavering watch of Elenya, he marked out a patch of bare earth as close to the high altar as he could get, and began to dig into the frozen ground. The metal blade scratched and scraped against stones and ice, jarring his hands, bringing out blisters that soon rubbed raw and bled. They joined the fresh burns and stained the handle. Still he dug.
When he had gone as far as he could, though not as deep as he ought, he started to scour the monastery grounds for remains. The first few weren’t so bad, hacked and bludgeoned to death as they’d run or knelt. It was those trapped in the buildings that wore him down, the endless sifting and lifting: a skull here, a ribcage there, a thigh bone or a foot. Disarticulated or whole, they were glazed with the remnants of their skin and contorted with the heat of the fire.
He finally wept as he carried another charred bundle of bones over to the grave. He’d been backwards and forwards all morning, and he was sick of it.
Va couldn’t recognize them any more. He thought that he could: a rosary of a certain style, a scrap of cloth. But they were just guesses. These men had been his brothers. They deserved better than this. They deserved full ritual: three days in an open coffin on the chancel steps, the air rich with incense and prayer.
Instead, he was tipping bits and pieces of them in a hollow-sounding shower into a hole he’d carved from the ground.
‘My friends. My family. Gone.’ He had never felt so wretched, never less able to contend with the urge inside him to go out and take terrible revenge.
‘I know,’ said Elenya. ‘I am genuinely sorry. They were good men; rough, but good. They treated me better than you did.’ She watched him as he brushed a fragment of bone into the pit. ‘Is that the last?’
‘It’s the last I can find.’ He wiped his eyes with his filthy sleeve. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘Except you.’ She took the spade and started shovelling dirt back into the ground. ‘Say your words, Brother Va. Commend the souls of the lost to the God who didn’t care enough about them in the first place to stop this from happening. Then we can go.’
He stared at her for a long time, watching her as she attacked the mound of freshly dug earth with quiet violence.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.
‘I honour them. Not you,’ she grunted. The blade of the spade bit down hard.
He dropped the hem of his habit down from where he had tucked it into his waist cord, and raised his hand upwards, feeling the pat of raindrops on his palms. As he stood, he started to chant, using the ancient language of the Church that had not changed for two thousand years. Old Russian, heavy with meaning and mystery. The learned words rolled off his tongue and he was in another place.
No longer beside an open grave filled with the bodies of his brothers, no longer outside in the rain and the cold, no longer a wretched man smeared in mud and decay. He approached the holy throne of God Almighty, and he was oblivious to anything else. No pain, no hunger, no thirst, no loss, no rejection. He could smell Heaven, it was so close.
When he opened his eyes again, Elenya was dragging a burned crossbeam upright. She forced it into the ground and hammered it home with the flat of the spade. On the last blow, the handle finally broke with a crack.
She threw both halves away. ‘That’s that.’
He looked at the grave site. It was pitifully small for all that it contained. ‘Now for the other thing.’
‘Give it up, Va. There are no books left.’ She caught his defiant expression and tried another tack. ‘Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?’
‘Rest, like they do? Or rest like the northerners who killed them?’ There was mud in his mouth and he spat it out. He lowered his head and watched a dribble of rainwater run down the bridge of his nose, tremble for a moment, then fall. ‘There’ll be no rest from now on.’
They cleared the rubble on the floor of the scriptorium.
‘We haven’t seen so much as a whole page yet.’
‘Dig, woman. The noise of work is the only thing I want to hear.’
‘But of course. Brother Va prays for rain and look, it comes. Then he searches for books in the heart of a fire and expects them to be there. He takes the miraculous in his stride these days. Once you would have been terrified.’ She heaved back a blackened timber with an iron bar still warm from the fire.
Va looked up at the remaining walls and judged his position. ‘It should be here. Go straight down.’
‘It would help if you told me what we’re not looking for.’
‘There’s a stone slab on the floor. Huge–too big for a dozen men to lift.’
‘And we’re going to lift it? How? Another miracle?’
‘Dig.’
Va did everything by hand, picking up, turning, throwing, and all the time the rain came down, turning the soot into black slurry. He worked not as if his life depended on it, but as if everyone else’s did. He never broke off to ease his screaming back or wipe the sweat mixed with rain from his eyes.
‘Va? Va. Stop.’
‘Not until we’re done.’
‘You’re lower than floor level. This,’ she said, banging the heel of her boot down, ‘is the floor.’
‘What?’ He peered around him. She was right. He was in a hole, which he tried immediately to widen, searching out the edges.
Elenya was content to watch him. She wiped a raindrop from the end of her nose and left a black smudge.
‘Look,’ he finally said. ‘This is the slab I was talking about. It’s cracked in two, at least.’ He dug under the remaining piece, opening up a gap between the debris and the stonework. Then he lay on his belly and started to slither into the void he’d made.
He pulled himself forward, down the face of the rubble slope. The air inside was rank, thick with the stench of smoke. He tried not to breathe deeply, but took fast, shallow sips. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he started to make out the corners of the hidden vault.
There should have been a chest, lined with lead inside, covered with lead without, sealed by heating it up and beating the join until it disappeared. A chest that he would have comfortably fitted in twice over.
It was gone, and now he could tell the patriarch that he’d seen the truth of it.
He turned himself round and dragged his aching body out again, out into the rain and the fresh air. He struggled onto his back and lay there, mouth wide open, drinking and breathing in great gasps.
‘Are they there?’
‘No. I have to go to Moskva now.’
‘To tell the patriarch.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what makes you think he’ll listen to a single word you say?’
‘He’ll listen,’ said Va. He sat up, his feet still in the hole made by two parts of the shattered capstone. He had to get ready. The journey was going to be long, difficult, painful. ‘He’ll listen to me even if I have to write him a letter in my own blood.’
‘That sounds like fun. If you dictate, I’ll gladly be the scribe.’
‘I need a horse. You still have a horse, don’t you?’
Elenya threw down the iron bar. It clattered off the stonework and came to rest by Va’s side. He looked at it, sensing its weight, judging its length, feeling the motion of it as it spun and twisted in his hands. What an excellent weapon.
‘No,’ he hissed, louder than he intended.
Elenya heard. ‘No, what?’
‘I won’t. I won’t…’ He dropped his voice, muttering to himself under his breath. ‘Not in my hands.’ He got up and climbed out of the pit.
‘I won’t give you my horse,’ she said.
He couldn’t just take the animal. If he’d been a different man, he would have done. If he’d been a man who fought. So he had to persuade her instead. ‘This is a matter of the utmost importance. The books must not leave Mother Russia.’
‘All the books are gone, Va. Even the ones that were buried beneath the floor of the scriptorium. The heat would have destroyed them.’
‘They took the books before they set the fire. You said there were two great noises? Black powder, I’d swear on it. And in any event, these books would survive an iron forge.’
She tilted her head just so. ‘Yes, of course they would.’ She started to pick her way out from the ruins.
He called after her. ‘We tried. We tried everything to get rid of them. We burned them. We turned them red-hot and pounded them on an anvil. We scratched at them with diamonds. Nothing. Not a mark. Rather than taking them to sea where there was always the chance of them washing ashore somewhere, they were kept here. Safe. Safe for seven centuries. Now they’ve gone.’ He shouted at her back: ‘Disaster waits for us all.’
She stopped and looked over her shoulder. ‘Va, what the hell are you talking about?’
He clambered over the rubble, his feet slipping on the wet stones in his haste. ‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. But we have to get those books back.’
‘We?’ She arched an eyebrow.
‘Stop it. I mean us, the Church, and anyone who’ll help us. Clearly that doesn’t include you because all you do is hang around and wait for me to die. So either give me your horse or leave me alone.’ He sat down on what remained of the scriptorium wall and pressed his palms hard against his temples. ‘Why now? Why not in fifty years’ time when this wouldn’t be my problem?’
‘Because all the people you ever killed are crying out from beyond the grave, and God wants to dispense justice by giving you a really shitty time.’
He sighed. ‘There may be something in that.’
‘And while you’re speaking to the Almighty, you can tell Him we’ve had enough rain. A light shower would have done, but this is beyond a joke.’ Elenya picked up the hem of her coat and wrung it out on the ground in front of Va. The water formed a puddle, where more rain added to it.
‘The Lord is nothing if not bountiful.’
‘Shut up, you sanctimonious shit.’ Her shoulders sagged. ‘I’ll get the horse.’
He raised his head, and the rain dripped off his nose. ‘Thank you.’
She wagged her finger at him. ‘You misunderstand me. You’re going to Moskva. I’m going to Moskva. You can argue all you like, but you know as well as I do that you’re desperate to get there quickly. You’ll have to travel with me.’
‘No. You’ll be travelling with me.’
‘And whose horse is it?’
‘Yours,’ he admitted.
‘So I’ll be letting you come along. Remember that.’ She walked away, through the ruined courtyard and out into the woods beyond.
Va went over to the well to douse himself in bucket after bucket of freezing water, scraping his skin with stones to remove some of the dirt. More water after that. A memory: his baptism in a river, still frozen at the edges, surrounded by awed villagers, held under for longer than necessary by the priest, who needed to know that the sacrament would genuinely take.
‘You look like a rat. A wet rat.’
‘I no longer care what I look like–that’s not how my worth is judged.’
She was leading a horse, a shaggy-haired beast, snorting and stamping. ‘I take it you remember how to ride.’
‘I cannot ride with you.’
‘And you can’t take my horse.’ She wiped her hands on her hips. ‘You’re not leaving my sight, and you’ve run out of options. You have to ride with me, or not at all.’
‘Then,’ said Va, ‘I choose not to ride at all. I can’t share a saddle with you, Elenya. It would be too cruel to you. If you did not love me so, then I would say yes, let us ride, no matter how unseemly it looked, a monk and a woman so close together. But you do. Five years, and you’ve sat outside these walls, with the wolves and the bears and howling wind and biting cold, the snow in winter and the flies in summer.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘I don’t. But neither of us is stupid. You stayed, and you still say you love me. I say you’re in the grip of some intractable madness. Whichever: I can’t share a saddle with you because it would send you out of your mind with longing. I haven’t touched you for all this time, praying that your passion for me would die. My prayers are unanswered. I don’t know why.’
‘Perhaps because I’m praying that you’ll throw off your habit and take me, even now. My prayers also remain unanswered. Isn’t God cruel?’ She bit at her lip. ‘So how are you going to get to Moskva? Walk?’
‘No. It would take too long. Those who stole the books would be gone, and the traces of their passing gone as well. It’s a week’s walk. The ice is melting, and boats can’t navigate the rivers.’
‘So?’
‘I’ll run.’ He adjusted his waist cord.
‘All the way?’ She was incredulous. ‘Just because you won’t ride with me?’
‘All the way. It’s kinder for you if I do.’ He turned round and judged the weather, the wind.
‘I’ll be right behind you. On the horse. When you get tired of running, I can give you a lift.’
‘My mind’s made up. Wish me Godspeed.’ He shook his arms out, rolled his neck this way and that. Then he set off, taking an easy pace, hands loose by his side. His bare feet scarcely touched the ground.
‘Men. Stupid, stubborn men. They get one idea in their heads and it’s the only thing they can think of.’ She shouted after him: ‘You haven’t even got any shoes!’
He was gone, out of the gate. There was a track of sorts that led into the forest of close-packed pines. It headed north, towards the city of Moskva. If there had been no track, Va would have made one.
Five years of isolation was over. He was back in the world.