Doctor Who_ Bunker Soldiers - Martin Day [26]
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the night watchmen in the street. She walked over to the window and closed the wooden shutters.
Elisabet stepped carefully through the darkness. There was little point in further delaying the inevitable battle with sleep. She settled on to a mattress.
Almost immediately, a dreaming haze of thoughts and memories enveloped her. She imagined Taras’s death, killed by one of the travellers, and then at the hands of some great beast; she remembered the soldier’s grim news, told again and again like a grotesque liturgy. She watched herself falling in love, tumbling in the hills around Kiev before the sun was blotted out by the dust of the Tartar’s hooves. For a moment, she and Taras were standing in the cathedral, exchanging vows, on a day when God Himself seemed to smile. A flash of imagined, remembered pain brought her to the agony of childbirth, when she wished for death as a kind of release from the torture, the torture of the Fall. Then a noise – an insistent sound, like a drum.
She was in bed again, in that dazed world between wakefulness and sleep. Through the clutter of images and fantasies she heard another muffled thump from the direction of the door.
Her nervous ears were suddenly alert to the myriad sounds underneath the silence of the dark. Perhaps it was nothing – a hound, perhaps, or a thief momentarily pressing himself into the shadows to avoid the night-watch patrols.
Then it came again – this time a much more deliberate tap on the door.
‘Who’s there?’ she called. ‘We are all in bed.’
The noise continued, soft taps, lengthy thuds, as if someone outside were trying to communicate with her.
For the first time, a chill slid down Elisabet’s spine. She cautiously approached the door, still not sure whether or not she was dreaming.
‘Who is it?’
No reply.
She pulled back one of the shutters, but the fenestral lattice of wood and tallow-soaked linen that it covered showed nothing of the street.
Elisabet gathered her careering thoughts, and pulled open the door.
She was ready to scream, to alert the guards and the watchmen, but even she was not prepared for what she saw.
It was Taras, a kind of lopsided grin on his face, his hands loosely held upwards as if in supplication.
Elisabet gripped the frame of the doorway as her legs weakened and threatened to give way. ‘But... but you are dead,’
she heard herself stammer.
Taras moved his head slowly, as if trying to pinpoint the source of the words. Still he did not speak. Instead, he opened his arms to embrace her.
Elisabet collapsed into them, the only solid, dependable things in a world gone mad. ‘I knew you were not dead,’ she found herself repeating over and over again. ‘I knew we would always be together!’
Taras’s smile became stronger. How beautiful his lips looked, glistening in the moonlight. How mysterious his eyes.
Elisabet raised her head for a kiss.
As her husband brought his head downwards, his mouth was full of needles.
V
Confutatis meledictis, flammis acribus addictis The sleeping arrangements in the prison must have been bad, for they made me think longingly of my rough bed in the governor’s home.
I have never had as many nightmares and dreams as I had that first night within the damp, grey walls of the prison. Behind my closed eyes I saw, over and over again, my own execution, played out in various and increasingly grisly forms. On occasions I swear I could smell the fatty stench of flesh burning on a pyre.
Worse still, every time my slumbering body moved I would graze a knee or an elbow on the harsh stone floor, and momentarily find myself awake, in darkness and terrified. I had but a thin mattress stuffed with straw for comfort – and, by all accounts, I was lucky to have that.
I awoke to the clatter of bowls being dropped in front of me. They contained pottage of some sort. I had little interest in food, but I had no idea when my next meal might come so I set at one of the bowls with gusto. There was a little