Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

‘That’s enough,’ said Draganov. ‘You are the only witness to the crime, and you will now come with us.’

Saskia allowed herself to be brought upright. The Hussars were gentler this time. She kept her mouth shut and her tearful eyes open. Draganov did not give her a secret look, or anything of the kind. He regarded her with the same disgust he had shown Pasha’s body. He sneered, and was about to give an order to the Hussars when the door to the Portrait Hall was shouldered open by a gendarme. A second gendarme entered. He was followed by a young clerk in a brown suit.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ shouted the clerk.

‘I have taken control of the situation,’ said Draganov. ‘Calm yourself.’

‘You have done no such thing.’ The clerk looked with dejection around the damaged room. From the corner of her eye, Saskia saw a small, but clear change in the body language of the Hussar near the door to the Apartments. He had turned to look at the two Hussars on the balcony. It took little effort to imagine that they had become uneasy and were communicating this to one another with a glance.

‘I wish to know the situation,’ said the clerk. He looked from Draganov to the gendarmes as he said this. ‘Identify yourself, Colonel. Why are you and your soldiers here?’

The gendarme raised his pistol and pointed it at Draganov.

‘Yes, something strange is happening here,’ continued the clerk, as though confirming his intuition. ‘I suggest that we wait for more officers of the Fourth Squadron who can verify your position.’

Draganov folded his arms and approached the clerk. There was a considerable difference in their height. The clerk was still looking up in anger when Draganov headbutted him. The small man crumpled. Draganov turned towards the shocked gendarme and struck him with a haymaker punch to the side of his head. Saskia guessed that he was unconscious before he spilled across the floor. Draganov had not finished. Still turning, he kicked out at the open door to the Portrait Hall, closing it on the masked faces of the guests who had gathered there. He wedged a chair beneath its handles.

The Hussar near the door to the Apartments aimed his rifle at Draganov and said, ‘That’s enough, sir. I, too, would like to know your role here. You are not with the Imperial Convoy.’

‘Listen to me,’ Draganov replied, reaching inside his jacket. ‘I am an officer of the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, Special Section.’

The reply of the Hussar was interrupted by a movement from the middle of the room: Pasha’s foot kicked. At the same time, Saskia almost collapsed with dizziness. Her breath shuddered and there was a sharp pain behind her left eye. She looked hard at Pasha and noticed black dots on his face and chest. His chest expanded, held, then shrank as an inhuman, sibilant breath escaped his mouth. The breath was white.

‘Mother of God,’ said one of the Hussars holding her. His grip weakened and he fell forward, unconscious. The second Hussar fell a moment later.

Saskia nodded. Her message to the i-Core had been received. The last words of Pavel Eduardovitch in the parallel Geneva had been: O Lord, revive me, for Your name’s sake. For Your righteousness, deliver my soul from danger.

She fought to remain upright. She swayed as she looked around the room. All the Hussars had collapsed, though the Hussar near the door to the Apartments was kneeling and still held his weapon. His eyes were narrow but not closed. Only Saskia and Draganov could stand. She staggered towards him.

‘What happened to my men?’ he asked.

‘Oxygen, heat, everything, is being pulled into Pasha so that he may live. We’re being spared the worst effects.’

‘Come,’ he said, putting an arm around her shoulders and leading her towards the central door, ‘we’ll get out through the Maria Fyodorovna Apartments.’

He opened the door onto a sumptuous room. Saskia was glad to find it empty. The next breath she took was like the first after breaking the surface of Baikal those years ago; her mind resumed its edge, and her back straightened. She allowed Draganov to steer her towards a second door, which was simple by the standards of the Summer Palace. It opened onto a light-green room richly ornamented with wooden wainscot. In the corner was the metal staircase. As they hurried down, the shouts of alarms, bootfalls and whistles grew louder. No doubt the soldiers of the many barracks in the Tsar’s Village were being mobilised, not to mention the police—both secret and ordinary.

The stairs ended in a storage room. Draganov pointed to a brass bucket near the door. Saskia looked inside and saw the neatly folded uniform of a cleaning maid: a navy-blue dress and white pinafore. She wasted no time. She pulled away the telephone wires from her costume, slipped the dress from her shoulders, and let it fall to the floor. Draganov, meanwhile, removed his scarlet coat and took a second uniform jacket from beneath a dust sheet.

‘You are my patient. Understood?’

Saskia nodded. She fastened the dress and pulled the pinafore over her head. Draganov buttoned the back. When she reached for the left sleeve of her dress to tie it up, he said, ‘No, leave that.’ He took a jar from a shelf, unscrewed the top, and smeared its contents on her stump. ‘Food colouring.’

Saskia looked at him as he worked.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Thank me when you’ve left Russia for the last time. Understand? Stop for no one once we’re underway. Leave Russia somehow and don’t come back.’

He put the jar back on the shelf.

‘Who are you, Draganov?’

The man smiled, as though the answer was a private joke. He reached for the doors to the garden and opened them. On the gravel path was an ambulance. Its horse shuffled at the noise of their approach. A boy in a travelling cloak pinched out his cigarette, tucked it behind his ear, and climbed to the driver’s seat. Draganov and Saskia climbed into the back as the ambulance pulled away.

‘Answer my questions,’ said Saskia. She laid herself on a canvas stretcher while Draganov opened a compartment at the head of the carriage.

He replied using a language that Saskia had never heard before. She felt a part of her mind seize its sounds, mark the phonemes among its phonetics, compute a likely morpheme or two, and place it in a multi-dimensional constellation of all languages. Then the meaning was hers.

Draganov had said, ‘If I speak this way, do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Old Frankish, though we always called it Lingua Franca.’ Draganov smiled as he took Saskia’s wrist and dressed a wound that was years old, and long healed. ‘First, you want to know about the countdown. It is an automatic behaviour that the band is designed to exhibit. There are specific, known points of escape. The Amber Room is one of them.’

Saskia frowned. It disturbed her to think of a network of exits connecting this time to the future, and perhaps the past.

‘Under what circumstances would the band enter such a mode?’

Draganov shrugged. He tied a reef knot over her wound. For good measure, he took the jar of food colouring from his jacket pocket and smeared redness over the bandage and her forearm.

‘Loss or capture,’ he said. ‘A sense that the wearer is in danger, perhaps.’

‘But the band works on its own. I’ve seen it used in that way. If its senses danger, why not make my …’ She trailed off, not finding a word in Old Frankish for “evacuation”. ‘Why not take me home directly?’

‘My dear,’ said Draganov, patiently, ‘the band was damaged. Some of its functions still worked. Some did not. I would not mourn its loss if I were you.’