of skin and sinew that had been left by Otrepyev’s blow, provided no cover. Otrepyev quickly put him out of his misery, his pistol firing at close range into the middle of the face the Turcoman had seemed so eager to protect.
Next Otrepyev grabbed the rope that stretched out above him with one hand and hacked at it with his sword. It was soon cut through and the colonel let it swing freely across the chamber. Almost instantly another Turcoman broke free of the swordfight that had been engaging him and leapt high into the air, grabbing the dangling rope and pulling it down so that the panel above opened a little further and the line of sunlight progressed another step across the room. The Turcoman tugged and jiggled on the end of the rope, swinging back and forth as he did so, but his weight was insufficient to encourage any additional movement. As this human pendulum came past him, Otrepyev took a short run and flung himself into the air – an impressive feat for a man of his years. At the apex of his flight he hacked at the rope again with his sword, cutting it in a single stroke. The Turcoman fell to the ground, still clutching his end of the rope like a valued treasure. Otrepyev landed comfortably on his feet and turned, but he had no need to deal with his adversary. A swarm of Russian soldiers rallied to the prone figure and finished him with their bayonets.
That so many of them were free to do so showed that the fight had turned in the Russians’ favour. There now remained only a small group huddled against the wall, furiously working on the other device that Osokin still could not see. Otrepyev shouted an order and pointed towards the Turcomans. A number of his men moved towards them. At the same moment one of the Turcomans gave a cry which Osokin guessed to be an exhortation to his god. There was a sudden movement among the group, two of them falling to the ground, and Osokin could at last see what they were working on: a great iron lever set into the wall which they had finally managed to pull down from the vertical to the horizontal.
Osokin heard a sound above him, as did Otrepyev, who looked to its source and then broke into a run towards the chair at the centre of the chamber. He quite deliberately barged one of his own troops out of the way, pushing him across the room so that he blocked Osokin’s view of the chair and the prisoner. As the soldier’s head turned towards Osokin, a look of horror appeared on the man’s face and he attempted to throw himself backwards. But he was already off balance and could do nothing. Behind him Otrepyev could be seen, still dashing towards the chair.
Osokin felt a whoosh of air above his head and a dark shape appeared in front of his eyes, as though some great black raven had swooped down from its nesting place high in the wall. But as it moved away Osokin saw that it was no bird. Two long, straight poles stretched up from it to a pivot in the ceiling by which it swung, released by the lever he had watched the Turcomans operate. At the end of the poles was a thin horizontal sheet of metal, which was travelling at huge speed now that it approached the bottom of its arc.
The Russian soldier in front of him had had no time to move. The horizontal blade hit him with gruesome precision just a little way above the middle of his Adam’s apple. The man’s body fell to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut; as though the head had been holding up the body instead of the other way round. The head itself remained momentarily in situ, given a slight upward momentum by the impact and spinning frantically in the air, repeatedly showing and hiding the gaping red cross-section of its hewn neck. Osokin felt a splatter of blood across his face, and then another.
But the impact had done little to slow the blade’s progress. As the soldier’s head continued to turn in the air, behind it Otrepyev had launched himself off the ground, his feet out in front of him, as if aiming a drop kick at the prisoner. But instead the impact was just to one side of the captive’s