back, landing in the snow. Booted feet began to kick his sides. One hit his cheek and he covered his face with his hands, still clutching the note.
‘Stop that!’ came a shout.
The barrage of blows ceased. Mihail lowered his hands. There were two Cossacks standing over him, rifles aimed, their muzzles almost touching him. A little way away, a third was doing his best to hold back an angry crowd, although the two misfits that Mihail had noted earlier were no longer a part of it.
In the other direction the Cossack captain was looking up into the open coach door, in conversation with Konstantin, whose face could not be seen but whose hands poked into view as he gestured with them. Mihail heard the crump, crump, crump of quick-marching boots on the snow, and saw more guards arriving from the palace, some to take their places in the group guarding Mihail, others to help fend off the crowd. The captain strode over and spoke to one of his subordinates.
Mihail was hauled to his feet. His sword was removed from its scabbard and a mercifully superficial search revealed no other weapons. They didn’t even discover the note, which he had managed to slip into his glove. They held him by the arms and marched him away to the east. Behind him, the Cossacks remounted and the procession set off once again.
Mihail’s journey was not a long one. On the right they passed a vast parade ground, which he guessed to be the Field of Mars. Then they turned left, walking alongside a small canal until, right on the Neva embankment, they came to a stone bridge, arched like a cat’s back, by which they could cross. They carried on along the embankment, past a beautiful park with a tall wrought-iron fence and over a larger canal via a three-span bridge. Then they turned away from the river again, along the side of this second canal.
At last they came to a squat, anonymous, three-storey building into which Mihail was led. They took him up the stairs to the top floor. An iron gate blocked their way, which a sentry opened. The corridor beyond had a blank wall on one side and doors on the other. Mihail was taken through the second door into a room that contained just a chair, a mattress and a table.
They left him there. The door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. Things were not going according to plan.
Naturally they had been forced to wait until it was dark. Fortunately, at this time of year, darkness came early to Petersburg. It wasn’t even five o’clock. That was one of the things that had brought Zmyeevich to the place to begin with, him and his friend Pyotr Alekseevich Romanov, all those years ago. Pyotr’s reasons had been different. He wanted a northern port for his empire, and a fortress to hold back the Swedes. But they had managed to work together, for a while.
Zmyeevich looked up at the Bronze Horseman. It was a close enough likeness, as far as he remembered. The statue hadn’t been cast until fifty years after Pyotr’s death, but there were plenty of portraits to base it on. And Zmyeevich too was immortalized in the statue – as if one already immortal needed such an honour – but for him the likeness was more symbolic than naturalistic. Under the hooves of Pyotr’s steed a serpent writhed, vanquished by the great tsar. The Empress Yekaterina had known the story when she commissioned the monument. Every Romanov did – they’d be fools not to pass the warning down to their children. She had put Pyotr in the role of Saint George and cast Zmyeevich as the dragon. How much had she really known, Zmyeevich wondered, to have come so close to the deeper truth?
It was almost on this very spot, just a little closer to the river, that Pyotr had betrayed his comrade. It was all very different now from 1712, the year that Petersburg had become the capital. So much building had gone on since. Zmyeevich had been lucky to escape with his life, throwing himself into the river and swimming to freedom. Not so easy at this time of year, with the Neva sealed under an inches-thick layer of ice.
It had been rare for him to return to Russia since then. Once he had done so, in 1762, to offer the new tsar, Pyotr III, the chance of immortality. Again he had