He arrived at the Black Sea coast in the town of Samsun and there, with little real direction to his wanderings but the desire to learn, found a passage to Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. It was the first time he set foot on Russian soil, little knowing that the country was to become his second home.
It was his detailed study of wildlife in the Crimea that gained him, on his eventual return to England, his fellowship at the Royal Society. He catalogued several species that were previously quite unknown in the West and provided details of the life cycle of many others. His favourite creature – the vampire excepted, of which he had encountered none since leaving Esher – was the scolopendra. He had seen centipedes and the like in England, and on his travels, but it was the venomous bite and carnivorous temperament of these creatures that fascinated him most. In later years he heard of relatives from South America that grew to over a foot in length and would devour creatures as large as bats and could defend themselves against tarantulas. In the Crimea he only witnessed them feeding on other insects and once a small lizard. Perhaps his life would have been different if his travels had taken him to that distant continent, but he had no regrets.
It was also on that first visit to the Crimea that he reached Bakhchisaray and climbed up to the citadel of Chufut Kalye to explore its caves. Even then he had remarked how the steep cliffs around it had created what, with a little human intervention, might become an inescapable prison – a fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war – but he had not then guessed what manner of creature his prisoners might be.
In total he spent six years in the Crimea, venturing occasionally into southern Russia and on one expedition getting as far as Odessa. He spoke Russian almost perfectly, though when later he travelled to the north of the country he realized that he sounded like a yokel, and quickly learned to adjust his accent. Eventually, he craved a return to civilization and began to make his way back west, sailing first from Sevastopol to Constantinople. By the time he arrived, the Ottoman Empire was at war with Russia, and an Englishman who could speak Russian was seized upon as being of enormous potential use to the sultan. Cain was happy to be made use of – for a fee.
The sultan at the time was Mustafa IV, whose reign was to prove brief and to whom Cain never spoke in person. His grand vizier was Çelebi Mustafa Pasha, who negotiated with Cain and quickly dispatched him north to the Danube where he would be able to channel valuable information back to the Porte. Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, who had later betrayed Iuda, was not even born, but Iuda came to wonder if some record of his first visit to Constantinople might have been passed down through the years.
By the time Cain reached the front lines both the grand vizier and the sultan had fallen from power, and the deal they had struck was meaningless, but for the time being it was safer to stick with the small band of Turks he’d been assigned to lead. They soon crossed the Russian lines and were in Wallachia. Only a few days into their mission, when he and his squad had camped high in the hills, he saw his chance and crept away. But he was out of luck. In the valley below he stumbled across a Russian encampment. There was no way he could sneak past, and he had no desire to return to the Turks. His solution was elegant. He simply marched in among the Russians, announced himself to be one of their own and revealed the location of his erstwhile comrades.
A platoon was dispatched, briefed by Cain as to exactly where the enemy was situated, and he retired for a relatively comfortable night’s sleep, confident that he would soon be able to give the Russians the slip and head for the Adriatic coast and thence back to England. Outside the campfire blazed, Russian troops sitting around it, chatting and eating. Cain wondered for a moment whether he should join them, but preferred to rest.
It was a little after midnight that the camp was attacked. To begin with all that Cain knew of it was the screams from nearby tents. His first