The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [123]
He opened his eyes once more, to see a young man in a green uniform, weeping, kneeling over him, trying to tell him something. It sounded like an apology of some sort.
“I have to go,” he told the boy. “Catherine and I are sailing today.”
The sky was blue. A good day for it, and the storm, by its sound, was receding.
Ilya Petrov knelt in the midst of the terror, took his tsar's head in his lap, and wept. “God!” he cried to the men milling around him. “It is the tsar! I met him four times, rode on campaign with him! We have been betrayed by that snake Golitsyn!” Across the field now, he saw a small company of riders coming through the confusion, wearing the uniforms of the Russian royal guard. They rode with the enemy, as the tsar had.
“We could not have known!” his friend Vasily shouted. “Who could know this? And he rode against us!”
“Then we are wrong! I never thought this was our damned war! I never thought this was right!”
“But now he is dead …”
“Yes, and, by God, I will have my answers. Send out the word everywhere, to every Russian soldier. We are betrayed!”
The guards had arrived, now, and Ilya rose to meet them. Their leader, face smudged with soot, swung down and, ignoring him, knelt to look at the tsar for a long moment, despite that the air still whined with lead. Then he—no, she—removed her hat, and her long black hair fell about her shoulders, and she knelt and kissed the dead tsar on the forehead.
“Sleep, father,” she said.
And Ilya recognized her. “Tsarevna Elizavet!” He had danced with her once, admired her in her velvet evening gown. Beautiful, she had been, a goddess of love.
But now, when she looked up at him, he saw instead a goddess of war, fierce and terrible as her father.
“Who are you?” she snapped.
“Captain Ilya Stepanovich Petrov, Tsarevna.”
“You fight for the devil, you know,” she told him. “You've murdered your rightful tsar.”
“I— We didn't know, Tsarevna.”
“And now you do. And now you will take up your weapons, and you will follow me, yes?”
“Yes, Tsarevna. By the true tsar and the true God, yes!”
A bullet chose that moment to cut past his cheek, and Ilya watched his friend Sergei sink to the earth in surprise, a red stain in the center of his chest.
“God!” Ilya shouted! “Yes! Up, you men! Fight with our tsarevna! Lay low these dogs who have betrayed us into hell!”
And like the roar of a monster, the name of the tsar went out of the mouth of every Russian there, a word of death. And Elizavet, the tsarevna, took up her father's bloody sword and lifted it high; and as they had done for a thousand years, in bitter cold and furnace heat, in mud or on dry sand, on taiga and meadowland, Russians went to fight and die.
Oglethorpe understood what was happening just in time to make some use of it.
Some of the Russians had turned. Maybe they had heard rumors that their tsar was alive—maybe they suddenly recognized him. It didn't matter—all that mattered was that impossibly, there was a hole in the artillery. He sat up straight and pointed the way with his sword, and they rode into the breach.
“Holy Mother,” Robert swore. “What—what's that?”
Franklin dragged himself to the window and stared down.
Something was forming, perhaps a half mile west of the ships. An axis of pure light, a black wheel spinning about it, growing larger.
“Oh, no,” Franklin said. “Look at that.”
“What is it?” Robert repeated.
“The dark engines,” Vasilisa said in a leaden voice. “It's the end.”
“The devil, you say.” Franklin grunted. “Robert, we're going down. Down there, right now.”
“Aye, cap'n.”
“Benjamin, no!” Vasilisa shouted. “Our only hope now is that Adrienne and the Indian—”
“No thank you, Mrs. Karevna,” Franklin said. “We let that thing go, and it kills everyone I hold dear—if they aren't dead already. The hell with the world. I'm saving them. And as to trusting this mumbo-jumbo our friends are up to —the devil with that, too.”
“What can I do?” Don Pedro asked.
“Help Robert bring down the countermeasures, and then check your weapons. We're goin’ into the lion's den for sure.”