What had he done? Warily she sat down opposite him.

‘So the soldiers at the stable let you go,’ she said.

‘Did you think they wouldn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘I was searching for you up there. I didn’t expect to see the troops. I was worried for you.’

‘It was priests they were seeking today, not gypsies. Next time I may not be so fortunate.’

‘Did the worshippers escape?’

‘Every last soul of them.’

‘And Priest?’

‘He is safe… but not safe.’

‘It’s a miracle that he hasn’t been arrested and put to death before now.’

‘I look after him.’

She understood now exactly what he meant by that: he used this strange hypnotic power of his. ‘So why wouldn’t you look after Mikhail when he needed it? I begged you.’

‘Oh Sofia, don’t look so angry. You have to understand that there were too many troops swarming round him and it was impossible. The time was all wrong, but now… the time has changed. Tonight is the moment when your eyes will open.’

She didn’t know what he meant. There was a strange formality in the way he spoke, his tongue clicking against his teeth. His gaze was distant and she was not sure he was even seeing her at all.

‘Rafik,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you?’

He didn’t answer. The whistle of his breath grew louder in the room and a movement of his hands made her look down at the table where they’d been clenched together. Now they lay apart, placed on the worn wooden surface with fingers splayed like stars, and between them lay the white pebble. It seemed to draw all light from the room deep into itself. Sofia felt her skin grew cold.

The stone was the one she’d found earlier in the chest. Then it had seemed harmless but now, for some unknown reason, it made her nervous. And yet her eyes refused to turn away from it. Her breath quickened.

‘Sofia.’ Rafik’s voice was deep. He reached out and rested a heavy hand on her head.

Instantly her eyelids drifted shut. For the first time in the darkness of her own skull she became aware of a powerful humming sound, a vibration that rattled her teeth. To her dislocated mind it seemed to be coming from the stone.

45

‘Are you ready?’

‘Do I look ready?’

Pokrovsky had just stepped out of his banya, the bath hut behind the forge, with nothing but a towel draped round his barrel waist and a grin on his face. Elizaveta Lishnikova wasn’t sure whether she found the grin or the massive naked chest more disconcerting. The sun was about to dip down behind the ridge but not before it had set fire to the clouds in the west, a flaming red that draped a glowing sheen over the blacksmith’s oiled skin.

‘You’re beautiful,’ she murmured. ‘Like Odysseus.’

‘Like who?’

‘Odysseus. A Greek warrior from…’ she was going to say Homer’s Odyssey but changed it to ‘from long ago’.

Pokrovsky laughed unself-consciously, flexing both his arms to emphasise his huge biceps for her entertainment.

‘Like rocks,’ he said.

‘Granite boulders, more like.’

He laughed again and put his muscles away, leaving her wondering what they would be like to touch. Until she came to teach in Tivil sixteen years ago, her experience of men had been limited to waltzing with cavalry officers or walking through the gilded gardens of Peterhof on the arm of an elegant naval captain. Even then she had enjoyed the feel of their hard masculine flesh under their uniforms, but they were as remote from Pokrovsky as the bright orange lizards that darted under his banya were from the grey monster crocodiles of the Nile.

Elizaveta was fifty-three now. Wasn’t it time she stopped this girlish rubbish? It wasn’t as though she’d never been asked, despite being as tall as she was. Three offers of marriage she’d turned down, much to her parents’ anguish. She had even allowed one of the suitors to kiss her on the terrace, a recollection of a bristling moustache and the taste of good brandy on his lips, but she hadn’t loved any of them and preferred her own company to that of fools.

‘Pokrovsky,’ she said in her teacher’s voice, ‘how old are you?’

‘That’s personal.’

‘How old, man?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘Why aren’t you married?’

‘That’s none of your damn business.’

‘I expect you frighten the females with those great granite boulders of yours. You’d crush any girl to death with them.’

‘Hah!’ But the blacksmith was grinning again. ‘The trouble with you, Elizaveta, is that you think you know everything. If you’re so damn clever, tell me, how old are you and why aren’t you married?’

‘Don’t be so bloody impertinent, Pokrovsky. Go and get yourself decent at once. You’ll be late for tonight if you don’t hurry. Don’t you know that you shouldn’t even be talking to a lady in that rude state of undress?’

He roared with laughter and rubbed a great hand across his neat little beard, then ambled off to his izba. Elizaveta took her time heading into the forge, she didn’t want him to think she was anything other than calm and indifferent to his gibes. But once inside, she poured herself a stiff glass of vodka and knocked it back in one.

Only then did she permit herself a smile and dare to imagine the heroic Odysseus with a chest like that.

The noise of a bell came first, sweet and silvery. Five pure notes in the darkness that wasn’t darkness. It was more an absence of being, and Sofia even wondered if she were dead. Was this her own death knell she was hearing? But the ringing of the bell changed. It expanded and grew and surged and swelled until it was a rich, rounded sound that reverberated all around her, making the air quiver and dance.

Yet the tolling of the bell seemed to arise from inside Sofia’s head, not from outside, and she could not only hear it, she could feel it. The great brass clapper rapping against the delicate inside of her skull, clanging out each bass note in a crescendo of sound that she feared would crack her bones, the way glass will shatter when the right note is hit. And through it all came a voice in her ear, soft as love itself, yet so clear she could hear every word.

‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

She looked down for the first time and discovered that she was high up in the air at the topmost pinnacle of a tall spire. It was attached to no building, just a towering needle of gold that pierced the sky. Like the Admiralty spire in St Petersburg that used to glint like a blade of fire in the sunlight when she was a child.

‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

In one smooth movement she spread out her arms and found they were wings. She stared with astonishment at the fluttering of the feathers, long pearl-white gossamer feathers that smelled as salty as the sea and rustled as she breathed. She moved her wings gently up and down, flexing them, testing them, but they weighed nothing at all. Far below her stretched a wide flat plain full of silver-haired women, their faces turned up to her, thousands of pale ovals, each one with arms raised above her head. All whispered, ‘Fly, my angel, fly.’

Sofia felt the breath of it under her wings and launched herself…

She opened her eyes. She had no idea where she was or how she’d arrived there, just that she was standing upright in the dark, arms outstretched to each side. White figures circled her, four of them. Flickering lights in their hands, candle flames and the scent of cedarwood. Rising from the floor, a mist wove around her. She inhaled, a short sharp breath, and tasted the tang of burning pine needles. It made her look down.

At her feet on the blood red cloth from Rafik’s wooden chest stood a small iron brazier. In it were things she could only guess at but which were alight, all of them crackled and spat and writhed. Her feet were bare. Outside the circle of light all was darkness but she could sense instantly that she was indoors, somewhere cool, somewhere damp, somewhere deep inside the black womb of Mother Russia. The four figures stood silent and unmoving around her, one at each point of the compass, a loose white gown covering each of their bodies.