The books were gone. He knew it in his heart. The raiders hadn’t picked at random. They hadn’t come to steal the plate or the crosses, the grain stores or the livestock. This place, in all of Mother Russia, hidden away in the far south where there was nothing but trees and wolves, was the one place they’d come. If he waited until the fires died down of their own accord, they’d be back in the heathen north and nothing could be done.
But something was being done. Gritting his teeth, Va prostrated himself again in the direction of the rising sun.
‘God, this is a test. I know it. A test of my faith. I won’t fail. I need rain. I need such a quantity of rain that I might drown here in the dirt. I want a deluge, a flood. I want the vaults of Heaven opened and a cataract to pour down. I need to get into the scriptorium, to check on the books. I know they’re not there, but the patriarch will ask me if I have checked and I cannot tell a lie to him. I have to look him in the eye and tell him that I have seen the place where they were and that the books are not there. If we’re going to get them back, we have to start as soon as possible. So, please: I need rain, and I need it now.’
CHAPTER 2
ELENYA FOUND HIM at first light, still stretched out before the ruined church. She was already soaked to the skin.
‘I suppose you think this is a sign,’ she said. Va said nothing in reply. Instead he got up wearily and started over to the remains of one of the workshops. There would be a spade, or a pick – probably without a handle, but he was used to working with impossibilities.
He kicked at the smoking timbers, and moved aside the remains of a fallen wall. Underneath was an iron-shod shovel, scorched but intact. It would do. His gaze strayed to the scriptorium, sweating and creaking as the rain lashed down. Later. There would be time later. He had a solemn duty to fulfil.
Under the unwavering watch of Elenya, he marked out a patch of bare earth as close to the high altar as he could get, and began to dig into the frozen ground. The metal blade scratched and scraped against stones and ice, jarring his hands, bringing out blisters that soon rubbed raw and bled. They joined the fresh burns and stained the handle. Still he dug.
When he had gone as far as he could, though not as deep as he ought, he started to scour the monastery grounds for remains. The first few weren’t so bad, hacked and bludgeoned to death as they’d run or knelt. It was those trapped in the buildings that wore him down, the endless sifting and lifting: a skull here, a ribcage there, a thigh bone or a foot. Disarticulated or whole, they were glazed with the remnants of their skin and contorted with the heat of the fire.
He finally wept as he carried another charred bundle of bones over to the grave. He’d been backwards and forwards all morning, and he was sick of it.
Va couldn’t recognize them any more. He thought that he could: a rosary of a certain style, a scrap of cloth. But they were just guesses. These men had been his brothers. They deserved better than this. They deserved full rituaclass="underline" three days in an open coffin on the chancel steps, the air rich with incense and prayer.
Instead he was tipping bits and pieces of them in a hollow-sounding shower into a hole he’d carved from the ground.
‘My friends. My family. Gone.’ He had never felt so wretched, never less able to contend with the urge inside him to go out and take terrible revenge.
‘I know,’ said Elenya. ‘I am genuinely sorry. They were good men; rough, but good. They treated me better than you did.’ She watched him as he brushed a fragment of bone into the pit. ‘Is that the last?’
‘It’s the last I can find.’ He wiped his eyes with his filthy sleeve. ‘They’re all dead.’
‘Except you.’ She took the spade and started shovelling dirt back into the ground. ‘Say your words, Brother Va. Commend the souls of the lost to the God who didn’t care enough about them in the first place to stop this from happening. Then we can go.’
He stared at her for a long time, watching her as she attacked the mound of freshly dug earth with quiet violence.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.
‘I honour them. Not you,’ she grunted. The blade of the spade bit down hard.
He dropped the hem of his habit down from where he had tucked it into his waist cord, and raised his hand upwards, feeling the pat of raindrops on his palms. As he stood, he started to chant, using the ancient language of the Church that had not changed for two thousand years. Old Russian, heavy with meaning and mystery. The learned words rolled off his tongue and he was in another place.
No longer beside an open grave filled with the bodies of his brothers, no longer outside in the rain and the cold, no longer a wretched man smeared in mud and decay. He approached the holy throne of God Almighty, and he was oblivious to anything else. No pain, no hunger, no thirst, no loss, no rejection. He could smell Heaven, it was so close.
When he opened his eyes again, Elenya was dragging a burned crossbeam upright. She forced it into the ground and hammered it home with the flat of the spade. On the last blow, the handle finally broke with a crack.
She threw both halves away. ‘That’s that.’
He looked at the grave site. It was pitifully small for all that it contained. ‘Now for the other thing.’
‘Give it up, Va. There are no books left.’ She caught his defiant expression and tried another tack. ‘Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest?’
‘Rest, like they do? Or rest like the northerners who killed them?’ There was mud in his mouth and he spat it out. He lowered his head and watched a dribble of rainwater run down the bridge of his nose, tremble for a moment, then fall. ‘There’ll be no rest from now on.’
They cleared the rubble on the floor of the scriptorium.
‘We haven’t seen so much as a whole page yet.’
‘Dig, woman. The noise of work is the only thing I want to hear.’
‘But of course. Brother Va prays for rain and look, it comes. Then he searches for books in the heart of a fire and expects them to be there. He takes the miraculous in his stride these days. Once you would have been terrified.’ She heaved back a blackened timber with an iron bar still warm from the fire.
Va looked up at the remaining walls and judged his position. ‘It should be here. Go straight down.’
‘It would help if you told me what we’re not looking for.’
‘There’s a stone slab on the floor. Huge – too big for a dozen men to lift.’
‘And we’re going to lift it? How? Another miracle?’
‘Dig.’
Va did everything by hand, picking up, turning, throwing, and all the time the rain came down, turning the soot into black slurry. He worked not as if his life depended on it, but as if everyone else’s did. He never broke off to ease his screaming back or wipe the sweat mixed with rain from his eyes.
‘Va? Va. Stop.’
‘Not until we’re done.’
‘You’re lower than floor level. This,’ she said, banging the heel of her boot down, ‘is the floor.’
‘What?’ He peered around him. She was right. He was in a hole, which he tried immediately to widen, searching out the edges.
Elenya was content to watch him. She wiped a raindrop from the end of her nose and left a black smudge.
‘Look,’ he finally said. ‘This is the slab I was talking about. It’s cracked in two, at least.’ He dug under the remaining piece, opening up a gap between the debris and the stonework. Then he lay on his belly and started to slither into the void he’d made.
He pulled himself forward, down the face of the rubble slope. The air inside was rank, thick with the stench of smoke. He tried not to breathe deeply, but took fast, shallow sips. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he started to make out the corners of the hidden vault.