‘I can’t believe it’, she kept saying through the gaps between her fingers. ‘What if…?’ Her words trailed off. They both understood. Tom’s arm curled around her shoulders in an attempt to comfort her.
‘There!’ he said, pointing at a figure wrapped in a damp blanket emerging from the bedroom. Ekaterina looked up, her face screaming relief.
‘Dedushka, dedushka!’ she shouted, running towards the sombre survivor coming towards them out of the darkness. ‘Kak de la?’ Herman took her face in his hands.
‘Orchin kraseeva devoushka’, he reassured her, ‘horosho, horosho!’ Herman’s eyes met Tom’s over Ekaterina’s shoulder. ‘So history repeats itself. We have our civil war. It is time for a strong man in Russia again’, he said, coughing through smoke-filled lungs. ‘The question, of course, is, are men like you and Grigori strong enough?’ His face beseeched the Englishman to protect his girl by whatever means necessary.
After getting Herman to hospital, they returned to the Astoria. There were four or five threatening messages on his phone. Tom recognised Arkady’s voice and hit call back, screaming down the phone about avenging the firebombing.
‘You should let us handle it!’ she insisted.
‘No, this is personal.’
‘Are you trying to impress me or my grandfather?’
‘Maybe both of you.’ While Tom was shaving Ekaterina, flicked to and fro through the TV channels:
• Traditionalist sympathisers use the Internet monitor Roskomnadzor to prevent Navalny and Leftist activists from accessing Firechat mesh-networking social media in order to foment discord and demonstrations;
• Troops loyal to the new regime are busy removing liberal agitators from rallying sites in Red Square and the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow;
• General Yegor Moskvin appears on state television. Speaking from the Kremlin, he declares that martial law will be imposed from midnight, following the barricading of roads leading to immigrant communities and the sealing off of parts of urban areas where they are the demographic majority;
• The UN, EU, and World Bank insist that Russia returns to a model of democracy acceptable to the world community;
• Nationalist composer Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov is played continuously on the radio;
• T-90 battle tanks and BTR-80 armoured personnel carriers block the Tretye Transportnoye Koltso and Garden Ring roads in Moscow;
• The Lefortovo tunnel is sealed and the M10 between the capital and St Petersburg is made into a strategic corridor, defended by air and ground forces;
• Unknown gunmen open fire on police and army units imposing order in Nizhny Tagil;
• The Pushkinsky District in St Petersburg is militarised, becoming a logistics centre to support brigades facing any potential EU threat via the Finnish border;
• GROM units conduct mass arrests of drug dealers, seizing stockpiles of weapons as well as quantities of heroin, cocaine, and synthetic marijuana known as ‘spice’ in Kemerov, Nalchik, Shakhy, Orsk, Balashikva, Rybinsk, and Korov.
Eventually, she came to the bathroom door, leaned on the wood frame, and looked hard at him.
‘I want to be the next Sabine or Yevgenia Khasis.’
‘In prison and hunted, you mean?’
‘The new government will release Yevgenia from the camps.’
‘But Sabine’s got a harder job in France.’
‘You know I am descended from the Sarmatian and Alans, the tribes that gave birth to the legends about the Amazons.’ She broke off as Tom looked up from the bowl.
‘And brought the myths that would eventually become King Arthur and the Holy Grail to Britain.’
‘I see you have recalled your classes about Batradz’, she laughed.
‘And the warrior women buried in the Pokrovka mounds on the Kazakh border.’
‘Then you know our girls were not allowed to wed until they had killed a man in battle.’
‘They also cut off their right breasts!’
She bent forward. ‘Not all the stories are true.’
‘Thank God.’
‘You know I am a believer in the beregini, the Slavic protector goddesses.’
‘Not necessarily a good Orthodox girl, then?’
‘Nyet! Below, old traditions remain.’
Tom smiled as Ekaterina walked over to the window, sliding her hand up and down the lined drapes. ‘We believe the sacred feminine cocoons our lives, being conceived in the womb and returning to Mother Earth, after we die. It is a simple cycle, much less complex than the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.’
‘A nice idea!’ His voice sounded unconvinced.
‘Are you being ironic?’
‘No’, he replied with more than a hint of guilt.
‘You should be careful not to offend our deities. Mokosh, the goddess of destiny, may be a lovely young woman who spins the thread of life, but she is also dangerous. Sometimes we Slavs call her Srecha.’ Then she began to recite:
Tom sat in silent awe for a moment, braced by the heartfelt veracity of her words. Ekaterina’s hair cascaded over her shoulders, her pointing breasts staring down at him. She had the shapely hips and slender legs of her horseback ancestors. He could easily imagine her thundering across the windswept steppes, loosing arrows at Mongol raiders, riding her steed hard into the ripped, red heart of a stormy sunset.
They opened some wine. Ekaterina kicked off her shoes and unzipped her jeans. ‘I think I’m getting drunk’, she said, fingers loosening his tie. He saw she wore the mask of a Veely water sprite dancing and singing in the mountain springs. Tom pushed her back onto the bed, thumbs slipping under her briefs and sliding thin cotton down over her knees.
• Celtic Cross flags begin appearing on prominent buildings and national monuments across Russia;
• Mass rallies are held in Perm’s Gorkovo Park and along Lenina and Komsomolsky Prospekt. ‘We demand our city stays Russian’ echoes across the Kama River;
• Slavic Force and Russian Action militants seize the Kremlin government building of Nizhny Novgorod and arrest the Supreme Regional Officer;
• Army Brigades rally volunteers in city and town squares, distributing food and munitions, as well as providing basic arms training;
• Right and Left gangs clash across the country;
• The military imposes local curfews to prevent looting and disorder.
The wind came biting off the Baltic. Frost-hard teeth raked flesh. Tom cut a thin, black figure on the bleak expanse of the Dvortsovvy Most as Arkady approached, wearing a long greatcoat, his bulky body acting as a windbreaker.
‘Privet!’ he declared as he came close. ‘You are tired, no?’
‘Nyet’, the Professor replied.
‘You look like you burn candle at both ends!’
Tom shrugged. ‘I am still celebrating our success!’
‘Or maybe you can’t handle our girls?’ Arkady laughed.
‘I told you to leave her out of this!’
‘You don’t tell me, shit!’
‘But burning the apartment?’
‘You were warned!’
‘But that is ridiculous. A speech…’