Silver Nights (37 page)

 

Dmitriev ignored the knowledge that his men were fatigued almost to the limit of endurance. If he could endure, then so could they. He would allow a halt once the sun was well up, but night travel was too hazardous for rest periods. Besides, while they kept moving, the screams of the brat were less noticeable. The minute they stopped, the dreadful wailing filled the air, unsettling the men with its note of helpless, hopeless, unfocused distress. The woman said the child refused the breast, or if he took it would turn away from it within seconds, howling with frustration. Dmitriev, who knew nothing of these things, wondered acidly if peasant milk had a coarseness to it, noticeably unpleasant to a child who had suckled only a princess's breast. The reflection did nothing to sweeten his mood.

Ahead, the moonlight sparked off quartz-seamed rock on either side of the road. A warning prickle ran down the soldier's back. For several hundred yards they would be traversing something resembling a gully. The night was quiet, except for the hoot of an owl, the howl of a wolf, the whistle of the ice-tipped wind. It was a well-traveled road, but few would be abroad at night, except perhaps in the summer, when it would be light as day and warm. Late autumn was not the season to encourage brigands in the pursuit of their trade. However, Dmitriev was an experienced soldier who knew the value of caution. He ordered his men to close ranks, to take out their firearms.

They rode into the gully. Dmitriev was instantly aware that
something was amiss. His head swiveled from side to side, but he could see nothing, yet he knew eyes were upon them. He gave the order to increase speed, and just as the cavalcade reached the center of the gully all hell broke loose. The night was lit with gunpowder flashes, deafened by pistol reports, as men seemed to pour from the rocks hemming them in behind and ahead.

Confusion reigned as his own men returned the fire. Swords scraped out of sheaths; horses, unaccustomed to battle and alarmed by the cracks and flashes, reared up, unseating riders who found themselves tangled up in flailing hooves. Gunsmoke hung heavy in the air, making identification difficult so that Dmitriev's men in their confusion found themselves occasionally slashing at each other.

Dmitriev assumed they were under attack from brigands. It was an assumption that died when he recognized a giant muzhik, wielding a mighty sword with grim effect. Men, if they did not fall beneath the sword, fell back before the power and resolution of the swordsman.

“Boris Mikhailov!” Dmitriev whispered savagely, taking careful aim at the large target. Then the gun fell from his hand as a knife pressed into his back.

“Where is she?” Adam Danilevski's voice rustled in the prince's ear. The knife pressed deeper, drawing blood.

Dmitriev was no coward, but the sensation of a knife in his back, a knife wielded by a man the general knew from the depths of his soul would use it without compunction, was more terrifying than anything he could imagine. He called “To me!” but all his men were occupied with their own private battles. They were outnumbered, they were trapped, and they had been surprised.

The knife cut and the prince choked. “Where have you sent her, Dmitriev?”

“She is a whore!” the prince spat through his terror, then cried out as the knife cut again, then again, ripping through his coat. He could make no move to defend himself without the knife's penetrating further. “To me!” he called again.

This time his cry was heard. A man, pistol at the ready,
came running. A shot rang out and he fell. Boris Mikhailov slashed his way toward Adam and the prince. “Where have you sent her?” The inexorable question came again. Blood trickled warmly down Dmitriev's back. At his front stood the giant muzhik, gaze implacable as he placed the blade of his sword flat against the prince's throat.

“Answer the question, Prince.”

“To the Convent of the Assumption at Orenburg.” The admission came through saliva-flecked lips as Dmitriev struggled with fear, humiliation, and rage. “I will see you hang for this, Danilevski!”

“I don't think so.” Adam withdrew the knife, wiping the blood upon the prince's coat. Somehow he managed to keep hidden his surge of nearly uncontrollable rage and terrifying fear at the knowledge of the destination Dmitriev had chosen for Sophie. Images of the barren, tortured existence to which she had been condemned writhed in his mind, and for a few seconds he could not speak. Then he said in an almost bored tone, “Boris Mikhailov has a score to settle, I believe.”

Dmitriev looked into the eyes of the man he had once condemned to cruel death, and he read his own death there.

“There are many reckonings to be met, Prince,” Boris said slowly. “I do not know how you were responsible for the death of my friend and master, the young Prince Golitskov, but I know that you were.” Dmitriev's pallor grew ghastly. “As you were, in the same way, responsible for the death of Sophia Ivanova. You sent Sophia Alexeyevna away, intending that she should meet her death upon the road. You left Gregory hanging after torture for the cold and the crows. I do not yet know what you have done to Sophia Alexeyevna this time, but I will add it to the reckoning nevertheless. Prince Golitskov lies sore wounded at your hands. Even if I forgive the harm you have done to me, Prince Dmitriev, there is enough there to warrant your execution.”

“I will not die at the hands of a serf!” He turned his head against the flat blade, outrage at such final degradation mingling with appeal as he looked at Adam, who, an aristocrat himself, would surely understand the impossibility of such an end.

Adam turned on his heel and walked away toward the carriage. Order was emerging gradually from the chaos of the battlefield. Dmitriev's men, those left standing, were huddled against the rocks, under the steady-eyed guard of two of the Golitskov men. “How many of our own are injured?”

“Just two, lord,” was the answer. “They're being attended to over by the carriage. No deaths, neither.”

Adam nodded and continued to the carriage. Into the semi-silence came a shrill wailing. He opened the carriage door, peering into the dim interior. A woman moaning in fear sat huddled in the corner. From her arms came the squalls of Adam's son.

“You're quite safe,” he said gently to the woman. “Cease your moaning and give me my son.”

“Oh, lord, here he is. Quite unhurt.” The words tumbled anxiously from her as she held out her bundle. “But he will not take the breast, lord. I cannot soothe him.”

“That does not surprise me in the least.” Adam stepped backward into the gray light of dawn, feeling some measure of peace come upon him as he retrieved this precious part of his little family so violently torn asunder. Sasha, as if responding to familiar arms, ceased crying and lay hiccuping in his father's arms. Adam wondered how he was to feed the child during the desperate ride ahead and placed his face against the drenched, distraught infant's.

“He'll take milk on a rag until we reach his mother, Count.” Boris, as usual an accurate reader of Adam's thoughts, spoke softly. “I did it with his mother on just such a journey when she was younger even than he.”

Adam rested the child against his shoulder, rubbing his back until the hiccups died down. “Is it done, Boris Mikhailov?”

“It is done,” replied the muzhik.

“Then there is nothing to keep us here. Send the woman back to Berkholzskoye with our men.”

“And those?” Boris gestured disdainfully toward the prisoners gazing around the littered gully with morose and fearful incomprehension.

“Turn them loose. As far as they know, they have been the victims of a brigand attack. Their master is dead. With
luck, they may strike lucky and find a better one. I don't see them plodding on to St. Petersburg, somehow.” Adam opened the leather pouch at his belt, drawing out a handful of rubles. “Give them this; let them fight it out among them. I would have more sympathy if I did not know that one of them had used the knout on Gregory.”

“We take the road to Orenburg?”

“Yes, but we will cut across country. I know this area well, Boris. It is coming into the territory of my own home, Mogilev. If we retrace our steps to beyond Kiev and take the Siberian road they would themselves have taken, we will be over a day behind them. If we go across country, it will be rougher riding, but we will join the Siberian road farther along. With luck, we should not then be far behind them. Maybe even ahead of them.” He turned impatiently to his horse. “It is not much traveled, that road. We shall get information of their passing easily enough.” Holding the child tightly, he swung up. Not many people chose to journey into Siberia, particularly at this season. But it was to be presumed that Dmitriev intended her to arrive this time, so adequate preparation would have been made, and they would stop frequently to change the team.

They reached a post house within an hour, and Boris explained their needs with the knowledge acquired so many years ago. The postman's wife, clucking energetically, produced goat's milk and a clean rag. Adam, seating himself in front of the fire, squashed his desperate need to continue the journey without respite and set himself patiently to satisfy his infant son's ferocious appetite.

For some reason, the babe who had rejected the peasant woman's breast showed no reluctance when held safe in familiar arms to suck upon the rag. The tears dried miraculously, and the pale cheeks pinkened as the rhythmic sucking soothed and satisfied. It seemed to Adam almost as if Sasha grew round and content again before his eyes.

“Poor little mite's soaking wet,” the postman's wife declared. “You'd best change his clothes before you go on again, lord.” Whatever she might think of the extraordinary circum
stance of a lord mothering a baby in her post house, she said nothing. It was not her place to notice, let alone comment.

Sasha had not been ill-provided for on his journey, and Boris had brought the bundle from the carriage. Fed, washed, and in clean clothes, the baby fell asleep and stayed so, exhausted by his earlier desperation, for nearly six hours, during which they rode, barely talking, pushing their horses over the steppe until they discerned the barely discernible cart track that constituted the road to Siberia.

The noonday sun was bright, warming the air a little. They stopped to rest the horses, feed and change the now-fretful baby, and eat the food provided by the postman's wife. Adam looked along the track. “The question is, Boris, are we ahead of them or behind them?”

“Behind,” Boris said with confidence. On receiving a raised, questioning eyebrow, he said, “They had orders to drive day and night, changing the team whenever they could so they were always fresh. There are four of them, and the coachman.”

“You gleaned this valuable information from one of Dmitriev's men?”

Boris nodded and said nothing more. He would not tell the count that Sophia Alexeyevna was cruelly bound, that her escort had orders that she was to remain so until they reached their destination. The escort were also under orders to ensure that she reached the convent alive, although her condition was immaterial.

“Then let us go. We will change the horses at the next farm.”

They rode through the afternoon, exchanging their own exhausted mounts for two nags who were at least fresh. The farmer who cheerfully provided the exchange informed them that a coach and outriders had passed some three hours earlier. Generous payment ensured good care for their horses until their return and bought more milk for Sasha, and black bread, cheese, and beer for themselves.

With the certain knowledge that he was now within a hand's grasp of Sophie, Adam curbed his hideous imaginings, forced himself to eat and to tend the baby patiently, experience having taught him that any attempt to hurry over his care for the
child produced wails and restlessness, which in turn led to what Boris diagnosed sagely as an attack of wind.

On the road again, though, Adam could not conceal his agitation. No less anxious, Boris kept his own counsel. A few wispy clouds became massed cumulus crowding the sun, then obscuring it. The first drops of rain plopped, huge and wet upon the track ahead. Adam swore, drawing his cloak more tightly over the baby. The track twisted, turned, and ahead of them moved a coach with four outriders, cloaks turned up against the dash of raindrops.

Adam drew in his breath, exhaled on a deep sigh. “Shall we join forces with our fellow travelers, Boris?”

“I am sure they will be glad of our company,” returned his companion. “It might be best to leave the babe, though.”

Adam searched the roadside. “If Moses could be hidden in the bullrushes, I see no reason why Sasha should not find a temporary cradle beneath a blackberry bush.” He dismounted, carried the well-wrapped, sleeping child to the shelter of a flourishing bramble, and gently laid him down.

“Let us make an end of this business.” He remounted, his voice curt, edged now with the fear of what he would find in the carriage. Dmitriev could have done anything to her during the long hours of that night at Berkholzskoye.

“How do you want to do this, Count?”

“I think we simply ride up with them. Exchange a few civilities. They will not be expecting pursuit, how should they? I would avoid further bloodshed if we can.”

Boris nodded. They caught up with the carriage and horsemen, and found their easy greetings returned monosyllabically. Chatty inquiries as to destination produced grunts, mutters.

Adam casually moved his mount sideways so he flanked the riders. Boris did the same on the other side. Both drew their pistols simultaneously, aiming at the head of the near-side rider on either side.

“I suggest we stop here,” Adam said politely. “You will come to no harm. My interest is with your prisoner.”

The four men looked stunned. They had not been prepared for this—a courteous aristocrat on the Siberian road intent on
rescue of that silent woman who already looked as if she was no longer of this world. Brigands they knew to look out for…but these two were not brigands.