Doctor Who_ Bunker Soldiers Part 7

Lesia watched as her friend gave the old man an impromptu hug. Dodo was a slim thing, with little strength, but beneath her embrace the Doctor seemed liable to bend or snap. Lesia could scarcely believe that the fate of their city rested on his ancient shoulders.

Bishop Vasil strode into the vestibule beyond the main entrance of the governor's residence. He looked less than happy at having to leave the cathedral, a fish plucked from water and left floundering on the ground.

Yevhen watched as he reached for a hollowed-out horn that he carried beneath his robes, and drew from it a medicinal preparation. The bishop dabbed the greenish embrocation on to his tongue with a look of unfettered disgust.

'Are you well, my lord?' asked Yevhen.

'I have head pains and a feeling of dizziness,' explained Vasil.

He indicated the sheep's horn of medicine. 'It is derived from a wort of some kind. I have found that, on occasion, it works when prayer does not.'

Yevhen drew him to one side, away from the prying ears of the soldiers close to the door. 'I am sorry I had to ask to see you here,' he whispered.

Vasil looked around him with distaste. 'I had heard that the governor wished to limit the movements of his advisers:.' he said. 'A particular shame for you, being trapped in so gloomy a place.'

'It leaves me isolated from the preparations. The governor clearly expects me to do nothing but talk!'

'Whereas you are a man of action,' noted the bishop. His eyes were full of sly innuendo. 'There is doubtless much you would wish to do... or perhaps have already done...'

Yevhen caught the implication of his words. 'That may be so,' he said defensively. He paused, wondering how best to draw the information he wanted from Vasil. 'You know, of course, that the young male traveller is in prison?'

Vasil nodded. 'Yes. Poor Taras.' The bishop chuckled.

'Rumour has it that he was killed within the confines of the cathedral.'

'Nonsense, of course,' said Yevhen.

'Of course,' said Vasil. 'He was found by the Church of the Virgin, was he not? It is no small distance from the cathedral catacombs to the church.'

'The catacombs?'

Vasil smiled. 'The dead man was a friend of yours, no?'

'I have known him for some years,' said Yevhen. 'I wonder...' he added cautiously. 'I wonder what will happen to the murderer while he is in prison...'

Vasil straightened, as if signifying that he had said quite enough and that even Yevhen's allusions were becoming too blunt. 'Some things are known to G.o.d alone,' he said, and turned smartly for the door.

As darkness fell, the house descended from hysterical sobbing to near silence. Elisabet listened intently as the boys struggled to find peace underneath heavy blankets; only the dogs that curled at their feet seemed immune to the stresses the family had experienced that day.

It had struck Elisabet as peculiar that Taras had not returned the previous night, but it was not without precedent. In happier times times before the devilish Tartars swept into Europe Taras had had a reputation as something of a wastrel, frequenting taverns and places of ill repute until well into the morning. Sometimes, when he finally returned, having spent money they did not have on the ale she could still smell on his breath, they would argue, in harsh, clipped whispers for fear of waking the children. He would always win her round, blaming Yevhen for his late return and talking animatedly of some scheme, some plan, that would make things better for them.

How she wished he was here with her now. She would rather argue with him for all eternity than spend the last few months of her life as a widow.

Word had arrived just before midday that her husband had been found, and that he was dead. Elisabet had been working, as usual, in the governor's kitchens. She had a.s.sumed that Taras had been drunk and had ended up sleeping in a gutter or perhaps in the bed of the one of the wh.o.r.es who frequented the east side of the city. In a moment, as the soldier stammered out the awful truth, her world, and all its preconceived notions of future happiness, had come crashing around her.

She could not remember much from the hours that followed, bar that she would never have believed her capacity for tears. Each time she thought she was in control of her melancholy, she would glance at her dumbfounded children and the crushing sadness would descend again.

As she put the boys to bed, she had been telling herself over and over again that, if she truly believed in the Christ, she would one day be reunited with Taras in a far, far better place a place not under threat from the hors.e.m.e.n of the very Devil himself!

She wondered if the grief she felt would be as nothing to the coming destruction which, quite possibly, no one would survive.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the night watchmen in the street. She walked over to the window and closed the wooden shutters.

Elisabet stepped carefully through the darkness. There was little point in further delaying the inevitable battle with sleep. She settled on to a mattress.

Almost immediately, a dreaming haze of thoughts and memories enveloped her. She imagined Taras's death, killed by one of the travellers, and then at the hands of some great beast; she remembered the soldier's grim news, told again and again like a grotesque liturgy. She watched herself falling in love, tumbling in the hills around Kiev before the sun was blotted out by the dust of the Tartar's hooves. For a moment, she and Taras were standing in the cathedral, exchanging vows, on a day when G.o.d Himself seemed to smile. A flash of imagined, remembered pain brought her to the agony of childbirth, when she wished for death as a kind of release from the torture, the torture of the Fall. Then a noise an insistent sound, like a drum.

She was in bed again, in that dazed world between wakefulness and sleep. Through the clutter of images and fantasies she heard another m.u.f.fled thump from the direction of the door.

Her nervous ears were suddenly alert to the myriad sounds underneath the silence of the dark. Perhaps it was nothing a hound, perhaps, or a thief momentarily pressing himself into the shadows to avoid the night-watch patrols.

Then it came again this time a much more deliberate tap on the door.

'Who's there?' she called. 'We are all in bed.'

The noise continued, soft taps, lengthy thuds, as if someone outside were trying to communicate with her.

For the first time, a chill slid down Elisabet's spine. She cautiously approached the door, still not sure whether or not she was dreaming.

'Who is it?'

No reply.

She pulled back one of the shutters, but the fenestral lattice of wood and tallow-soaked linen that it covered showed nothing of the street.

Elisabet gathered her careering thoughts, and pulled open the door.

She was ready to scream, to alert the guards and the watchmen, but even she was not prepared for what she saw.

It was Taras, a kind of lopsided grin on his face, his hands loosely held upwards as if in supplication.

Elisabet gripped the frame of the doorway as her legs weakened and threatened to give way. 'But... but you are dead,'

she heard herself stammer.

Taras moved his head slowly, as if trying to pinpoint the source of the words. Still he did not speak. Instead, he opened his arms to embrace her.

Elisabet collapsed into them, the only solid, dependable things in a world gone mad. 'I knew you were not dead,' she found herself repeating over and over again. 'I knew we would always be together!'

Taras's smile became stronger. How beautiful his lips looked, glistening in the moonlight. How mysterious his eyes.

Elisabet raised her head for a kiss.

As her husband brought his head downwards, his mouth was full of needles.

V.

Confutatis meledictis, flammis acribus addictis The sleeping arrangements in the prison must have been bad, for they made me think longingly of my rough bed in the governor's home.

I have never had as many nightmares and dreams as I had that first night within the damp, grey walls of the prison. Behind my closed eyes I saw, over and over again, my own execution, played out in various and increasingly grisly forms. On occasions I swear I could smell the fatty stench of flesh burning on a pyre.

Worse still, every time my slumbering body moved I would graze a knee or an elbow on the harsh stone floor, and momentarily find myself awake, in darkness and terrified. I had but a thin mattress stuffed with straw for comfort and, by all accounts, I was lucky to have that.

I awoke to the clatter of bowls being dropped in front of me. They contained pottage of some sort. I had little interest in food, but I had no idea when my next meal might come so I set at one of the bowls with gusto. There was a little water, too, in a tankard of stiff leather.

The other bowl belonged to my fellow prisoner, who had been resolutely asleep since my arrival. I did check on him at one point, fearful that he might be dead, but could just detect the flow of air from his lips.

I suppose it was the sound of my eating that finally roused him.

'What?' he exclaimed, sitting up swiftly. 'Who is there?'

'A fellow prisoner,' I said bitterly. 'You've been asleep for hours hours.'

'Sleep is my one remaining privilege,' said the man. 'Forgive me if I exercise that privilege as often as I can.'

He was a small fellow, little more than protruding bones in a sack of wrinkled skin topped by a mop of white hair and eyes that blinked like a mole's. It was difficult to guess exactly how old he was but, in a society where life expectancy is about thirty years, this man was positively ancient.

'I am Olexander,' said the man by way of introduction.

'Former official to the court of Prince Michael.'

'I'm Steven Taylor,' I said.

'A tailor, eh? My clothes are in need of your skills.'

'No, I'm not...' My words trailed away. It didn't really seem to matter what the old man thought I was. 'How did you end up in here?' I asked.

'It is a long story,' he replied. He came over and sat at my side, and began to pick at his bowl of food.

'I've got plenty of time,' I said.

'To whom is your allegiance?' queried the man, clearly worried that I might have been sent to spy on him.

'I am a traveller,' I said. 'I've been imprisoned on a charge of murder, but I'm completely innocent. Circ.u.mstantial evidence has been twisted against me.'

'Who is to blame?'

I paused this questioning could cut both ways. I had no idea of Olexander's 'allegiance', as he put it. Perhaps he was a plant, placed in my cell to spy on me me, thus incriminating me further.

I looked closely at his face, at the creased lines of decades and the honest interest of his eyes, and decided that this man was barely capable of wilful duplicity. I trusted him in an instant.

'I think adviser Yevhen may have had a hand in it.'

Clearly I had said the right thing. Olexander's eyes gleamed like polished b.u.t.tons. 'Yevhen! Is that traitorous dog still up to his old tricks?'

'It would seem that way.'

'Then clearly we have more in common than our current location, Steven,' said the man with a smile. He ran his fingers round the edge of his bowl, and sucked on them greedily. 'My mouth is well accustomed to the food here,' he said, by way of explanation. 'Yours will be so, in time.'

I'd long since had my fill, and pushed my half-empty bowl away 'I'm not planning on staying here that long.'

'That is what I first said.' Olexander sighed sadly. 'Over a year ago, I think.'

'A year!' I couldn't bear the thought of even another night in the cell.

'I imagine the Tartars will attack long before the next year is spent,' he continued, though his tone of voice implied that death at the hands of the Mongols was preferable to continued imprisonment. I wondered if in time, I too would share that feeling of desperation.

Olexander turned to me, his small eyes still burning with energy and, I had to concede, perhaps also with madness or senility.

'What do you know of the coming Tartar hordes?' he asked.

'I'll tell you whatever you want,' I said, 'if you tell me how you ended up here.'

'Of course,' smiled the man. 'Do they not say that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?' He paused, gathering his thoughts. 'I was not always as you see me now,' he said. 'I was once a man of status, of knowledge a trusted adviser, no less! My particular interest has always been the study of languages and religious history. Before I came to Kiev I was a monk in the Church of G.o.d.'

'Why did you leave?'

'The Church? It is an imperfect body at best. It is full of fallen men and women, you know!'

He smiled, and I saw a faraway look in his eyes. I sensed that the memories he recalled didn't simply help him tell his tale, but also offered an escape from his current situation.

'I came to the conclusion that although it is easier to be holy in a place where you are shut off from the world, this does not make it a right right way to seek after holiness. Well, for others, it might,' he conceded, with a rhetorical flap of a bony hand. 'But I wanted something else, something more. Far better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, no?' way to seek after holiness. Well, for others, it might,' he conceded, with a rhetorical flap of a bony hand. 'But I wanted something else, something more. Far better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, no?'

He paused, muttering to himself, then exclaimed, 'Thankfully, I had learnt many skills over the years... if only you could see the ma.n.u.scripts I illuminated!'

He held up his fingers for me to see. They looked normal to my eyes, but I said nothing.

'You can see the gold on my hands from the hours I spent in the scriptorium,' he said.

I nodded. 'All this knowledge would have come in useful in Kiev.'

'It did but it also led to my imprisonment. Adviser Yevhen had obtained a ma.n.u.script of some sort. Now, his family are a rustic bunch, and Yevhen is the first to achieve any prominence.