Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [191]
What did he believe? He scarcely knew himself. She loved the priest; she shrank from her husband. She had, by this and other means, humiliated him, tried to destroy the pride which was – should it not be? – at the centre of his being. Suddenly all his resentment of her over the years came together in a single, overpowering wave. He would punish her.
Besides, if he gave way now, if he acknowledged the child which might not be his, then she had won. Yes: her final triumph over him. She would laugh to all eternity and he, the bearer of the ancient, noble tamga of the trident, would lay it down in the dust at her cursed feet. Not only he, but all his ancestors. At this thought, another wave of rage went through him.
And what had the Tsar told him? What had he said, with such meaning?
‘You can have other sons.’ Of course, that was it. Other sons, with another wife, to inherit. As for this boy … whoever his father was, let him suffer – for that way, infallibly, he would hurt her.
He would punish her, the child, even himself. That, he now saw, in this deep, dark night – that was what he wanted.
‘The child is not mine,’ he said.
Ivan said not a word. Taking his staff in his right hand, holding the infant, who now began to cry, in his other, pressed against his dark, flowing beard, he turned and began to walk, with the same tap, tap of his staff, towards the gate.
Boris, uncertain what to do, followed at a distance behind.
What was happening? Only gradually, in her confusion and fright, had Elena understood what was being said. Now, shivering in the snow, she stared after them in horror.
‘Feodor!’ Her cry ran round the icy market place. ‘Fedya!’
Slipping in her felt shoes, almost falling, she threw herself wildly after them.
‘What are you doing?’
Neither man looked round.
She came up with Boris, seized him, but he pushed her aside so that she fell.
And now Tsar Ivan reached the gateway where the frightened keeper, his hand on his heart, was bowing low in mortal fear.
Ivan pointed to the door to the tower.
‘Open it.’
Still bearing the child, he went inside. Slowly he began to mount the steps.
They were barring her way. Her husband and the foolish gatekeeper: they were barring her way at the foot of the tower.
She understood now: instinctively, she understood them, and the terrors that lay in the dark labyrinths of their minds.
Forgetting everything, she clawed at the two men, fought them like an animal and, with a sudden rush, burst past them, slamming the heavy door behind her and shooting the bolt.
She ran up the wooden stairs.
She could hear him now, somewhere in the darkness above her: the creak of his footfall on the stairs, the tap, tap of his iron staff on every second step. He was high above.
Desperately, her heart sinking, she ran up after him. She could hear her baby crying.
‘Gospodi Pomily: Lord have mercy.’ The words came involuntarily on her breath. Still he was high above her, so high.
It was halfway up, at the point where the tower steps came out on to the battlement that ran along the wall, that she realized she could hear nothing from above.
Ivan was already up there, in the high chamber in the tent roof where the look-out windows faced over the endless plain. She stared up at the tower that rose sheer, harsh and silent above her, and whose wooden roof made a dark, triangular shadow across the night sky. For an instant, she was uncertain what to do.
And then she heard it, her child’s cry, high in that great roof above; and looking up she suddenly saw a pair of hands hold out a small white form which then, as she herself cried out with a cry, she thought, that must have reached the stars, they tossed, like a piece of jetsam, out into the night.
‘Fedya!’
She threw herself against the battlements, reaching out, in a futile gesture, into the blackness, as the small white form, shocked into silence, fell past her into the deep shadows beneath where she heard its faint thud upon the ice.
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