could have conceived. And Dmitry, of course, was not working alone – his ‘we’ had given that away to Mihail as much as to Iuda. Both could take a good guess as to who the other half of the ‘we’ was. Even so, it would not be enough. No punishment, no death would be enough if Iuda did not at that moment look into Mihail’s eyes and see in them the eyes of his mother, and of his grandfather.
And so it had become clear that, thanks to Dmitry’s intervention, Mihail would not take his revenge – not that day. He had been happy to listen to the two of them, and to learn. In all they had said, there were two things of particular interest.
One was Ascalon. It was not a word that Mihail had ever heard before, but it seemed to be of importance to both vampires. Mihail had asked around, mentioning the word to Osokin and others he encountered during his brief stay in hospital. The only meaning anyone could put upon it was the town of Ascalon, or sometimes Ashkelon, a place on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from Jerusalem. The padre had even recalled a mention of it in the Bible, in the second book of Samuel:
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ascalon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
It didn’t seem likely to be helpful. Mihail considered going there, but Petersburg was the better bet. He didn’t think that the Ascalon in question was a place. Admittedly Dmitry had asked where it was, but if he was talking about the city, that question would be simple to answer. And then Iuda had talked about fetching it, which made no sense if it was a town. Dmitry had mentioned the Karaites. Mihail had heard about them from his mother too – a Jewish sect, a group of whom had lived at Chufut Kalye in the Crimea. But Mihail had already been there – it was one of the first places he’d looked in his search for Iuda. The Karaites were long gone and rubble still blocked the mouths to Iuda’s caves below. Mihail had not dug down – fearful of what he might uncover.
No, Petersburg was the place to go. That would be where Dmitry was taking Iuda, secured in that coffin-prison. Dmitry himself would presumably travel in a similar manner, though without the constraints. Mihail knew because of a second name he had heard them speak of.
Luka Miroslavich.
Mihail had never met his brother – his half-brother – Luka Miroslavich Novikov. Luka had been adopted years before Mihail was born and taken the name of his new family. They had different fathers, but the same mother: Tamara Alekseevna Danilova. And Tamara’s brother – again, her half-brother – was Dmitry. That was why Dmitry could rightly call Luka his nephew.
Just like her son, Tamara had been adopted, years earlier, but she’d always known in her heart that the man and woman who had raised her were not her true parents. Once she was old enough she had gone in search of them – and been reunited only to see them both die within hours of each other. It was obvious to Mihail that she hoped Luka would one day come looking for her, just as she had gone in search of her parents, Aleksei and Domnikiia. But Luka never came. It made her bitter towards him, even though she had loved Luka’s father, her husband Vitaliy, more than she could ever love Mihail’s, a passing encounter. She’d had two other children with Vitaliy. Both had died. Mihail often tried to imagine Milenochka and Stasik – his sister and brother – but Tamara was loath to talk of them.
Neither did she speak much of Mihail’s father, but of all the things she had told him – drummed into him since before he could remember – this was the aspect over which he most doubted her.
It would be untrue to say he had not doubted other things. For a boy brought up in the second half of the nineteenth century to be told every day, by the woman whom he is by nature itself compelled to trust, that the voordalak – the vampire – was as real a creature as the wolf or the bear was, to say the least, unusual. She had told him of Baba Yaga and Zmey Gorynych, but never pretended