Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

Xenia did not forget her purpose in bringing me along, and contrived each day to put us in the company of various unattached men. Into the second week, we stood one afternoon by the side of the road watching the procession of pilgrims pass, until she spotted a page she had met the previous evening. My first thought was that Xenia had misjudged: I had seen this same young man seated at supper next to one of the Shuvalov brothers.

“Yes, he is their nephew,” she answered.

“He is too far above me.” I did not add that he was too pretty as well.

“The heart does not know its station.”

She took me by the arm and fell in just ahead of the page. When he caught sight of her, she expressed delight at the happy accident of meeting again.

“This is my cousin Daria Nikolayevna of whom I spoke. Dasha, this is Ivan Ivanovich. He is a great lover of books. I told him last evening that you read.”

He expressed his pleasure at making my acquaintance and asked if I might commend any books to him. I had read the whole of what was available to me—the Psalter, the domestic rules of the Domostroi , and a pamphlet condemning the aggressions of the former King of Sweden—in short, nothing I might recommend. I returned the question. He recommended a book of lives by a Roman called Plutarch and described to me its virtues. He then kindly offered to lend me his volume.

Had we more time, we might have gotten on well, for he was frank and intelligent and fond of ideas. But our walk was cut short by a pebble in the Empress’s slipper.

We did not see Ivan Ivanovich again over the next several days. After Xenia asked Andrei to make inquiries, we learnt that the page had been moved to the head of the procession and was now walking in the company of the Empress herself.

“I fear the Shuvalovs have designs for him.” Andrei was grim. It seemed the brothers, dangerous and tireless schemers both, had brought their nephew on the pilgrimage with the purpose of introducing him to the Empress. By all appearances, they had calculated rightly the particular weakness of their sovereign. This young man, twenty-seven years her junior, had caught the Empress’s fancy, and the enemies of Razumovsky were gleefully predicting that the Count would be out on his ear soon.

Andrei reflected the gradual darkening of the courtiers’ mood. The lake lay no more than one hundred and twenty versts to the east of our starting point, but it had taken us nearly a fortnight to cover half that distance, for we could walk at best an hour a day before Her Majesty became winded or footsore. Prince Merchersky remarked that the early fathers might never have made it to the Holy Land had they been obliged to wear corsets and slippers. It began to seem we should be on that road forever, and the prospect bred a restive ill-temper which spread like disease in the close quarters. However various were our lodgings en route, they shared the quality of being overcrowded. Xenia and I were compelled one night to lie in a doorsill and were woken a dozen times by people stepping over us. On another night, we slept seated in a long queue of carriages parked before the inn where the Empress and her ladies were bedded.

Xenia, however, remained cheerful. She liked being out of doors and relished every aspect of travel. As we walked, each new prospect excited her, though its only virtue might seem to be that it was unfamiliar. Even the small hardships, she insisted cheerily, were a diversion from one’s daily routines and familiar discomforts. Why, she might even become a wandering monk. Andrei replied that she would make a terrible monk. “How would you manage without your dresses and baubles? Besides, you have no gift for being alone.” She snugged her arm into the crook of his and said that he was right. Though she could live without her worldly possessions, she would die if deprived of his company.

At last our caravan reached the lake. There being no suitable lodgings in the vicinity, scores of tents had been erected in a meadow overlooking the water. Our spirits were lifted to have finally reached our destination and to find it equal to all that had been said of it. The lake, glassy and round as a mirror, looked like a circle cut from the sky and set down there. Cottony clouds floated on the still blue surface, and lily pads and cattails garlanded the rim. Andrei jested that the city of Kitezh had risen again.

The legend goes that five hundred years ago, a city of golden-domed churches stood there. This was in the time of Batu Khan, when his barbarous warriors swarmed across the land, setting fire to every village and town, slaying without mercy old men and mothers, and sweeping up children onto the backs of their horses to be sold into slavery. Even the great Kiev was laid waste, its churches and libraries burnt, its streets turned to rivers of blood, and not a single person spared to mourn the dead. Then Batu Khan turned his army towards the city of Kitezh. In anticipation of the coming terror, the people built no fortifications and made no preparations to defend their city but instead prayed fervently to God to spare them.

It is said that as the Mongol horde approached the walls of the city, fountains of water sprouted from the ground around them. Khan’s army retreated and watched from a remove as God caused the city to be swallowed into a deep lake.

Many pilgrim to Lake Svetloyar to pray and to drink from these waters. Holy persons have sometimes reported seeing the lights of the invisible city glimmering in the black depths or hearing, faintly, the tolling of bells and the murmured prayers of the ancient inhabitants. There are even stories of pilgrims who have gone there and never returned, or they have disappeared for a time and then reappeared on the banks of the lake with no memory of where they have been.

That evening, we processed down to the water, where hundreds of candles had been set adrift and twinkled in the summer dusk. We knelt in the damp grasses and turned to watch Her Imperial Majesty take the final steps of the pilgrimage. On her left was Count Razumovsky and close by, Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov. At the edge of the water, Razumovsky helped the Empress to kneel onto a carpet. Her confessor said the prayers and then, dipping a goblet into the lake, held it for her to drink. When she had drunk, she held a plump hand out, not to Razumovsky but to Ivan Ivanovich. He handed her onto her throne, which had been carried from Petersburg, and she rested her tired feet on a stool.

Across the dark water came the high note of a hand bell, icy and ethereal. Then another bell and another, and beneath these sounds, a slow, upwelling chant. The hum of whispers occasioned by Her Imperial Majesty’s slighting of her favorite fell away, and all eyes turned towards the water. The Empress had commissioned a song to be written for the occasion of our arrival. I knew that Andrei, with the choir, was installed on a barge tethered somewhere off the shore to sing it, but peering into the gloaming I could not discern the source of the music. It was as though a fissure had opened up, sonorous and deep, and was breathing out the sounds of the ancient city, and the even more ancient sounds of the earth itself. Whales and beetles, grass pushing up through the soil, the slow exhalation of mountains and tides, the buzz of everything, living or not, swelling and contracting and pulling the soul down into its music.

A chorus of supplications rose to the heavens. Save us, O merciful Lord, they sang, in this our time of trouble. And the waters began to rise and to turn back the barbarians, who fell away in fear and awe. The waters filled the streets and crept up the walls of the houses, rising above the roofs, and still the voices could be heard praising God. One by one, the domes of the many churches disappeared until the Mongol’s last sight of the city was a gold cross hovering above the water. The voice of the choir grew triumphant. It extolled the long line of holy ones from Kitezh to our present mother, Elizabeth, whose prayers had sheltered Russia from its enemies. At the end of time, the choir sang, this golden-domed city would rise up again, a new kingdom on earth. The hand bells accompanying the choir rang out and then died. We on the banks strained to hear the last tones melting into the silence.