was cold, but even now, in the middle of January, it was nothing to what he had known in Moscow or even in Saratov. To the north, the sea often froze in the winter, and Mihail could see a few solitary chunks of ice drifting gently by. Here though, and further south, the sea was deeper and warmer, and ice, so he was told, rarely formed.
He looked down at the two letters in his hands, one to him, the other from him, the arrival of the former making the completion of the latter superfluous. He’d known what the letter to him had been about without the need to open it. He’d felt the small, hard lump inside and understood immediately what it was, and what it meant.
The bayonet that Iuda hurled at him had not done any serious damage. It caught him in the back of the left hand, almost dead centre, and had gone right through. Mihail had been forced to let go of the rope and so he and the others had fallen. He landed badly, and was knocked out, waking the following day inside a mosque that had been commandeered for use as a field hospital. Major Osokin had told him of the prisoner’s strange departure.
He’d spent two further nights in the hospital. His concussion was not serious, but the doctor was concerned about his hand. The bloody mark on his palm might have been taken for a single stigma. The doctor told him he was lucky not to have lost a finger or two, and Mihail had smiled quietly to himself. But the wound was bad enough to justify his taking some leave; that and his commendation for the mine works. He was more than happy to get away from the place, after what he’d seen of the Russian army’s treatment of the vanquished citizens of Geok Tepe – they’d given him no warning of the barbarity of his own army during his training at the Imperial Technical School. The only hold-up had been in waiting for the slow machine of military bureaucracy to fill out the paperwork. But ultimately it was a lucky delay. The letter arrived on the morning of his departure – three weeks after it had been sent.
He’d taken the road north-west from Geok Tepe towards Krasnovodsk. There was plenty of traffic in both directions; supplies travelling one way and empty carriages holding a few dispatches being sent back. It was slow, but he doubted his quarry would be travelling much faster, and it gave him time to think. After Kyzyl-Arvat, the railway began; General Skobyelev’s great scheme for keeping the army supplied as it marched ever closer to the British Empire. But even by train, the pace was infuriatingly slow. The track had been started with a narrow gauge, and then the decision had been made to switch to the standard used throughout the Russian Empire. In places the carriages were pulled by steam engines, which broke down, in others by horses, who struggled to find a grip in the winter mud.
Once at Krasnovodsk, it was a simple task to book a passage across the Caspian. The sense in every soldier on that boat that once ashore they would be on home soil was palpable – though Baku was very different from any truly Russian town.
He might have chosen a different route across that vast inland sea, heading north and then following the path of the Volga – by boat if it still flowed or on land if it had frozen – up to Saratov, the town of his birth. But the place held little for him now, and the only clue he had to guide his quest pointed towards a quite different city – to Saint Petersburg, far in the north.
Mihail had listened intently to that conversation between Dmitry and Iuda, though his eyes had been closed and his head had lolled idly against the stone wall of the chamber. His mother had insisted that he learn English from an early age, even though she spoke not a word herself. The reason she held it so important, she had told him, was that English was the language of Cain’s journal. Whether he was truly an Englishman, no one had been able to determine for sure, but that he used it in writings intended only for himself to read suggested that the language was close to his heart. Mihail had been a little surprised to learn that Dmitry could speak English