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Too late, the Tsar came to understand that his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, had wanted this war all along. Surrounded by the weak and sagging Empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, and with only a fraction of the colonies possessed by France and Britain, Wilhelm felt that it was time for Germany to claim an empire for itself. The murder of the Archduke Ferdinand provided him with exactly the catalyst he needed to set in motion the Schlieffen Plan, by which the German Army could strike first at France and the West, before swinging east to devastate the Army of the Tsar. The Tsar appealed to the Kaiser to act as an intermediary between Russia and the Austrians, but Wilhelm had no intention of brokering a peace deal. Nicholas’s attempts to avoid hostilities were simply viewed as weakness by his German cousin, who responded by demanding that Russia demobilise its army, even as his own prepared to fight. To this, the Tsar could not agree. Doing so would have left his borders unprotected against two nations, whose armies were already deployed. Reluctantly, the Tsar instructed his Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, that Russia would be going to war.

‘I solemnly swear,’ announced the Tsar, as he drew his declaration to a close, ‘that I will never make peace so long as one of the enemy is on the soil of the fatherland.’ This was the same oath Tsar Alexander I had taken when Napoleon’s troops invaded in 1812 and, months later, froze to a halt at Borodino, only a few days’ march from Moscow.

Carefully, the Tsar folded the piece of paper and returned it to his pocket. Then, with his wife at his side, he began the long walk to the end of the hall, where a balcony looked out over Palace Square, in which thousands of Russians had been waiting for this moment.

As Nicholas and Alexandra passed between the ranks of courtiers, those standing on either side began to applaud. At first, the clapping was uncertain and sporadic. No one seemed sure of what to do. But now the applause began to spread, until it echoed like thunder in the room. Encouraged, the Tsar quickened his pace. The weight of this monumental decision, which had hung on him for days while he tried hopelessly to negotiate a way out of hostilities, now seemed to rise from him and dissipate among the chandeliers.

Pekkala stood beside the balcony, just inside the hall. He had positioned himself there at the beginning of the ceremony, in the hope that it might be more bearable than sweltering in the centre of the room. He did not care for crowded places, and would gladly have stayed away, even from such an historic occasion, if the Tsar had not demanded his presence.

Now, as the Tsar stepped out on to the balcony, he turned and caught Pekkala’s eye. Immediately, the creases vanished from his forehead and the clenched muscles of his jaw relaxed. The only time he ever felt truly safe was in the presence of the Emerald Eye.

As soon as the Tsar stepped out on to the balcony, a roar went up from the square which drowned out even the hammering of palms inside the hall. If the Tsar had planned to speak a few words to the crowd, he soon thought better of it. To those below, no voice on earth could have been heard above that roar of celebration.

The Tsar stood beside a huge stone pillar, dwarfed by a shield bearing the Imperial crest which hung from the white metal railings. Unnerved by the long drop to the flagstoned street below, he gripped the railing firmly with one hand and, with the other, saluted the crowd. Glimpsing the pale moon of his palm, the cheering of the masses doubled and redoubled, until Pekkala could feel its vibration in his bones, as if he were standing on a platform as a train raced past the station.

And then the Tsar was calling his name.

Pekkala leaned around the corner. ‘Majesty?’

The Tsar beckoned to him. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You will never see the likes of this again.’

The Tsarina, who had been greeting the throng with both hands raised above her head, saw a movement from the corner of her eye and turned, just as Pekkala stepped cautiously out on to the balcony. ‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped. ‘Get back inside with the others. Get back where you belong!’

‘He is not one of the others,’ said the Tsar, ‘and he is here because I asked him to be.’

For a moment, the Tsarina stared angrily at her husband. Then she turned abruptly and resumed waving to the people below. Pekkala looked out at the thousands of faces, like pink cat licks dappling a summer-clothing sea of browns and reds and blues and whites. Then his gaze wandered to the Tsarina.

He wondered how she must feel, being forced to celebrate this declaration of war against her own people and knowing that, no matter what happened in the months ahead, all allegiance to her adopted Russia would be doubted and dismissed.

The Tsar, by now, was completely swept up in the exhilaration of the moment. ‘Do you see, Pekkala?’ he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the crowd, which had pressed forward against a line of policemen, whose linked arms strained to hold them back. ‘The spirit of the Russian people is unconquerable! With their faith in me and mine in them, we will bring a peace to this country that will last a thousand years! Nothing can defeat us! Not while we are guided by
The Shepherd
!’ He leaned across, resting his hand upon Pekkala’s. ‘And while the icon is looking after Russia, you will be looking after me!’

For a young man named Stefan Kohl, far to the east of Petrograd in a tiny village called Rosenheim, a war had already begun.

His family came from a long line of German farmers who had been invited by Catherine the Great, herself originally a German, to settle on the rich farmland near the river Volga. Beginning in the late 1700s, many such families arrived and were soon planting crops of wheat and rye in the Volga region’s black and fertile soil. They prospered and, although they were subjects of Russia, the Volga Germans kept their heritage intact.

But not all of the inhabitants of Rosenheim considered this cultural stubbornness to be a good idea.

Instead of the local school, where only German was spoken and the classes were so small that students of all ages were lumped together in the same rooms, Stefan’s father, Viktor Kohl, a Lutheran minister, sent his sons to the Russian school in the nearby town of Krasnoyar.

In Krasnoyar, the Kohl brothers were singled out for bullying, the result not only of their refusal to abandon their heritage but also of the lingering memory of the preferential treatment they had received when they first immigrated to Russia.

Stefan’s older brother, Emil, survived at the school by making himself as inconspicuous as possible, and by submitting so completely to the ridicule and torment of the bullies that they could find no sport in it, and eventually left him alone. Lacking the same instincts of self-preservation, Stefan was beaten so frequently that it became a rite of passage for Russian boys at the school to pick a fight with him.

The last of these scraps occurred between Stefan and a boy named Vyachyslav Konovalov. He was a slight and inoffensive young man, who would never have gone looking for trouble, least of all with the tall and powerful German, if he had not been goaded into it by his Russian classmates. Anxious to prove himself, Konovalov simply walked up to Stefan in the playground and took a swing at him.

Stefan, by now so used to these unprovoked attacks that nothing ever caught him by surprise, stepped back as Konovalov’s fist swept harmlessly past his face. Then, using the momentum of Konovalov’s swing to set him off balance, Stefan took hold of the boy’s arm, turned him sideways and landed a punch of his own. Stefan had been aiming to hit Konovalov in the jaw but as Konovalov spun around he lost his footing and began to fall. Stefan’s blow missed Konovalov’s jaw and struck him in the throat, causing a haemorrhage of the occipital vein. Konovalov dropped to the ground and immediately began coughing up blood. He was rushed to the hospital and, for a while, his life hung in the balance. Even though Konovalov eventually recovered from his injury, the sight of him retching up gore in the playground was too much for the school and Stefan was expelled.

Viktor Kohl, who had been anxious to improve ties with the nearby Russian community, was so shamed by his son’s dismissal that he refused to transfer Stefan to the local school in Rosenheim. Instead, he handed the boy, then aged fifteen, over to the local butcher, a leviathan of a man named Werner Grob, to be trained in a profession in which, he felt, the boy’s inherent violence might find some respectable outlet.

Emil, meanwhile, graduated from the school at Krasnoyar and won a scholarship to study at the University of Kiev. Although he did not bear the scars of the beatings which his brother had endured, Emil had not escaped unscathed. The time he spent at school in Krasnoyar had left him deeply troubled from having lived so long in constant fear. Emil found it difficult, if not impossible, to set aside his mental barricades. As a result, he made few friends and retreated increasingly into the world of his studies, where numbers and equations became the only things on which he felt he could truly rely.

His parents understood very little of Emil’s work, or of the effect it was having on him. In their eyes, as the first university-educated member of the family, Emil could do no wrong.

Meanwhile, Stefan continued his apprenticeship with Werner Grob, the butcher. Grob was a sensible, competent and monosyllabic man. He proved a good mentor to the boy, who had been all but disowned by his family.

Once a week, Stefan and Grob loaded up their butcher’s cart and rode to the marketplace at Krasnoyar, where Grob had a good reputation.

At first, Stefan had been nervous about returning to Krasnoyar, but he was surprised, and profoundly relieved, to hear none of the jeering or the angry voices which had followed him through his schooling. Instead, customers barely looked him in the eye as he stood among the hanging carcasses of pigs, chickens and sheep, blood-smeared hands heaving severed hearts, tongues and kidneys on to the scale to be weighed.

What Stefan did not realise was that people were afraid of him. He was no longer someone to be picked on with impunity by anyone who wished to try their luck. The boy they had once known was quickly growing into a man who, the inhabitants of Krasnoyar were quick to realise, would be unlikely to forget the cruelty they had shown to him.

In the months that followed, as Stefan learned his trade, he began to resign himself to the possibility that he belonged in the bloody apron of a butcher. But he was lonely, and frustrated by the way that his life was turning out. Some nights, as he lay in bed, listening to his father snoring down the hall and knowing he was barely welcome in his parents’ house, a gaping emptiness would open in his heart.

After a year as the butcher’s apprentice, Stefan was sometimes allowed to go alone to Krasnoyar on market day. On that same hot August afternoon that the Tsar declared war against Germany, a fact of which no one in Rosenheim was yet aware, Stefan was returning home when his horse shied away from something lying in the ditch. Bringing the cart to a halt, Stefan set the brake and climbed down to see what had startled the animal. What he found was a man, clothed in little more than rags and so bruised about the face that at first he appeared to be dead. But as Stefan dragged the body from the ditch, ready to bring it to the undertaker, the stranger opened his eyes.

‘Don’t hit me again,’ he pleaded deliriously, his lips split and teeth stained red.

‘There is nothing to fear,’ Stefan assured him as he wiped the man’s face with a handkerchief. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Who did this to you?’

The man said his name was Anatoli Bolotov and that he was a pilgrim from the village of Markha, near the city of Irkutsk in Siberia. Judging from the state of his clothes and the fact that his only possession was a Bible, Stefan had little reason to doubt that the pilgrim was telling the truth. After two years of wandering the country, Bolotov had just begun his journey home when he walked into the town of Krasnoyar.

There, while begging for food, he had been set upon, beaten senseless and heaved into a ditch on the outskirts of the town by some of the same people who had made a sport of beating Stefan Kohl.

Recalling the times he had stopped on this same road to wipe the blood from his own face, Stefan lifted Bolotov on to the cart, since the man was too weak to climb aboard himself. Then he brought the pilgrim into Rosenheim and presented the man to his father.

After hearing Bolotov’s story, and seeing the Bible he clutched against his chest, Viktor Kohl warily agreed to feed him and put a roof over his head for the night. ‘But only one night!’ he decreed.

At the table, while they ate, Bolotov spoke of his travels across Russia.

At first, Viktor Kohl seemed to warm to the man, impressed by his ability to quote so freely from the Scriptures, but there came a point in the evening, as Bolotov began to speak about the details of his faith, that the look in Viktor’s eyes began to change.

‘It is on our own flesh,’ said Bolotov, ‘that we must inscribe our dedication to the Lord.’

‘And what is meant by that?’ demanded Viktor Kohl.

‘The end is near,’ explained Bolotov, ‘and we must abandon not only the consolations of the flesh, but the things that make such consolation possible.’

Viktor Kohl set down his knife and fork. Slowly, he pushed his plate away and rose to his feet, watched by his wife, Christiana, and his son, neither of whom had yet fathomed the meaning of those words.

‘I know you now,’ whispered Viktor Kohl. ‘I know what group of outlaws you belong to and I will not foul the air in this house by even mentioning their name.’

‘I will not deny it to a fellow man of God,’ replied Bolotov.

‘There is no fellowship between a man like me,’ said Viktor, his lip curling in disgust, ‘and one who does what you have done in the name of Jesus Christ.’

‘These are they,’ Bolotov answered defiantly, ‘who follow the Lamb wheresoever he goeth. These alone are redeemed.’

‘Do not obscure your deeds with holy words!’ shouted Viktor, aiming a finger at the door. ‘Now get out!’