her few memories of him from back then. He in turn had been given it by his wife, Marfa – Dmitry’s mother, but not Tamara’s – as he set out to do battle against Napoleon in 1812. That Mihail now wore it meant that his mother was dead.
He read through Nadia’s letter again, but there was little it could tell him. It corralled many words into expressing a simple concept – a death. It explained how Tamara had found it harder and harder to breathe, and how every day she coughed up blood more regularly. It explained how Tamara did not blame her son for being absent at the moment of her death, in such a way that suggested that though Tamara might not, Nadia perhaps did.
Mihail did not blame himself and knew that his mother did not blame him either. She had raised him to have but one destiny, to fulfil one goal that she knew she was too old and too weak to achieve. Although he had failed on this occasion, nothing would have given her more pleasure than to know that at the time of her passing, or close to it, he was face to face with the creature that had caused the death of her father, of her mother, and destroyed her life. If she had lived to see that destiny fulfilled, all the better, but Mihail knew she had died in the knowledge that her son would one day achieve what she had sent him out to do. She would have died happy.
Mihail folded the letter from Nadia and slipped it into his pocket. Then he crumpled his own letter to a ball and let it drop from his hand, watching the wind catch it and take it away from the hull of the ship before flinging it into the sea. His eyes followed as it floated away and became entangled with the foam of the ship’s wake, never to be seen again.
He reached inside his shirt and stroked his thumb across the face of the icon, remembering his mother, remembering what she had told him of her life, and how most of that had been the story of her father’s life, recounted to her in short, painful breaths in the few hours before his death. Beside the icon hung another item that Tamara had given to Mihail and that Aleksei had given to her. This one was a locket, square and made of silver. Aleksei had handed it to Tamara moments before his death. She had given it to Mihail the day he left to go to university in Moscow.
He had only looked inside once, but Tamara had already explained what was in there: twelve strands of blond hair, coiled into a circle. It was the same blond – the same hair – that Mihail had seen on the head of the prisoner in Geok Tepe just a few days ago. Aleksei had ripped it from Iuda’s head as he’d tried to drown him in the frozen Berezina, seventy years before. One day, Mihail would reunite those hairs with their owner, and complete the job his grandfather had begun.
And those few hairs were not the only memento he had to remind him of Iuda. The other was buried deep in his luggage. Major Osokin had shown it to him as he lay in the field hospital – Iuda’s severed ear. Osokin had scarcely dared to voice the implication of what he had witnessed, and had almost wept with relief when Mihail had unquestioningly agreed with his interpretation of what had taken place. He had gladly handed the lump of flesh over to his subordinate, hoping to forget all that had happened.
Mihail did not know what use he would make of it. However distant, it remained a part of Iuda’s living body. If he exposed it to the sun and let it burn, then Iuda would feel it burn – but that was not a pleasure to be squandered. When Iuda finally died, then the ear would crumble to dust with the rest of him. If that were to happen at the hands of another then at least Mihail would know. But his hope was to be there, to destroy Iuda for himself and in the monster’s dying moments to reveal his heritage and his true name.
Until then, he would stick with Lukin. It was the name by which he was known in the army, and so it would make life, and travel, much easier