truth it just served to quieten their consciences. There was nothing brave about many of the killings that had taken place during the battle. It was not just enemy soldiers; the old, the young, women too – there was no sector of the population that did not have its losses. Some of the women had been raped first – even some of the children.
And there had been looting, of course. Osokin couldn’t object to that, up to a point. It wasn’t like the old days, when an army had to finance itself as it marched, but any little extra picked up along the way could help. But you couldn’t leave the enemy destitute, otherwise they’d turn to crime and half your troops would be busy just keeping the peace, instead of marching on to greater victories.
General Skobyelev – the White Pasha, as the Turks called him, thanks to the colour of his charger and matching uniform – decided to take things a step further. On the day after the battle he commanded the women of the city – the surviving women – to hand over all their gold and silver jewellery by way of a war contribution. There was a tradition among the locals that at a woman’s wedding she should be decked with so much jewellery that she could not stand unaided under its weight, so there was plenty to be taken, even from the poor. At first the women resisted, but then they looked at the bodies of their mothers, sisters and daughters.
Osokin saw the loot for himself. Two large carpets had been laid out to receive the offerings, but had disappeared from sight, obscured by piles of jewellery that stood taller than a man’s height – and still the women came to pay their tributes.
Some brave staff officer, lower in rank but higher in nobility than Skobyelev, asked what it was all supposed to achieve. Wasn’t victory enough? But for Skobyelev, this was not about war; it was about the permanence of the ensuing peace.
‘The harder you hit them,’ he explained, ‘the longer they stay quiet.’
Osokin had the dressing on his arm changed and then returned to the tunnels and to the strange conical chamber with its solitary captive. At least now the bodies of the dead had been cleared away – particularly the awful headless torso that had lain in the middle of the place. But bloodstains still marked the point at which each man had fallen, and one didn’t need to venture too far along the corridor outside to discover them all, stacked up, awaiting a mass burial.
‘Take an hour or so,’ he said to Lieutenant Lukin. ‘You might as well see what we’ve conquered.’
‘I’ll be all right, sir,’ Lukin replied.
‘Just do as you’re told!’ The boy – that’s all he really was – didn’t deserve to escape the consequences of what they had done. However brilliant he might be at digging tunnels and laying explosives, he needed to learn that it was about more than just making precise mathematical calculations. He needed to see the result.
Lukin reluctantly obeyed.
Otrepyev’s men had achieved little success in drawing the shutter back into place above them. They’d managed to reach the dangling rope, but in pulling it they had only opened the gap a little further. There was no obvious mechanism to reverse the process. The whole contraption had been devised to be used just once – to open the roof, which would never then need closing.
One of the soldiers had managed to shin his way up the support for the swinging blade that had so efficiently beheaded his comrade the previous day. But its pivot was not close enough to the skylight. He reached out as if expecting his arm to suddenly grow in length and bridge the gap, but it was hopeless. His fingers lost their grip and he fell with a cry, landing at the feet of the prisoner, still in his chair, who glanced down with an expression of contempt. Even if he’d escaped breaking any bones, the fallen man must have been horribly bruised, but he looked up into the eyes that stared down upon him from the chair and in an instant was scrambling away like a startled crab. He huddled against the wall, nursing his aching limbs.
It was all very peculiar: the prisoner himself, the two strange contrivances – one to open up the roof, the other to behead the prisoner. It was clear that the man was not meant to