by Boris Akunin
Then he suddenly shook his head and clasped his hands together in front of himself.
“No, no, not about that. About penetration. I'll try. Slowly. Word!”
The physicist gave the bishop a frightened look, in case he might stop listening or turn away. But no, Mitrofanii was listening closely, patiently.
“Outskirts is there, yes?” Sergei Nikolaevich asked, pointing to the right.
“Yes,” said the bishop, although he had no idea in which direction the hermitage lay from there.
“Legend, yes? Basilisk. Fiery finger from the heavens, burning pine.”
“Yes, of course, that is a legend,” the bishop agreed. “Religion includes many magical traditions; they reflect the human longing for the miraculous. We have to interpret these stories allegorically, not in the literal sense.”
“Precisely literal!” Lampier cried. “Literal! It happened. The finger, the pine! There are coals. Fossilized, clearly a trunk!”
“Wait, wait, my son,” Mitrofanii put in. “How could you have seen the scorched trunk of that pine? Have you …” The bishop's eyes opened wide. “Have you been on Outskirts Island?”
Sergei Nikolaevich nodded as if that were nothing out of the ordinary.
“But… but what for?”
“I needed good emanation. Plenty of bad, gray-colored. Not rare. But pure orange, like yours, almost never. Not even the precise shade. Needed it—for science. I thought and thought. Eureka! Hermits are righteous, yes? So powerful moral emanation! Logic! Test and measure. Yes? Very simple. At night I took a boat and went.”
“You took a boat to the hermitage to measure the hermits’ moral emanation?” the bishop asked in a dubious tone of voice. “With those violet spectacles of yours?”
Lampier nodded, delighted to have been understood.
“But that is absolutely forbidden!”
“Nonsense. Superstition.”
His Grace was about to wax indignant and he even knitted his brows in a frown, but curiosity proved stronger than righteous wrath. “And what is there on the island?”
“Hill, pines, cave. The kingdom of death. Bald. Repellent. But not important—the sphere is the main thing.”
“What?”
“Sphere. Like this. Passage, chambers along the sides. Inside, under summit—round.”
“What is round?”
“Cave. I fell in. Broke through roof. Then a hole with roots, grass, earth, not visible now. But trunk still visible. Eight hundred years, still visible! Coals. Sphere, like a big, big pumpkin. Even bigger, like …” Lampier looked around. “Like an armchair.”
“In a round cave below the summit of the hill, there is a sphere,” Mitrofanii summed up. “What sort of sphere is it?”
“I was just. From above. Broke the ceiling. When Basilisk was. A meteorite. Fell, broke through, set pine on fire. Visible faraway at night. He saw it.”
“Who, Saint Basilisk?” The bishop wiped his forehead. “Wait. You are trying to tell me that eight hundred years ago he saw some kind of heavenly body fall to earth. He took it for the finger of God pointing the way, walked across the water, and found the island at night because of the burning pine tree?”
“You can't walk on water,” the physicist observed with unexpected coherence. “Relative density won't permit it. He didn't walk. He had a boat or something. That's not important. What's important is what is there. In the cave I fell into.”
“And what is there?”
“Uranium. Have you heard of it? You know it? Pitchblende. A deposit.”
His Grace thought for a moment and nodded. “Yes, yes, I read something in the Physics Herald. Uranium is a natural element that possesses unusual properties. Together with another element, radium, it is presently being studied by the finest minds of Europe. And pitchblende, if I am not mistaken, is a mineral with a very high content of uranium. Is that right?”
“A cleric, but you follow things. Good,” Sergei Nikolaevich said approvingly. “A light blue aura. A good head.”
“Never mind my head. What about this pitchblende of yours?”
Lampier drew himself upright. “My discovery. The nucleus starts to divide. Spontaneously. A special mechanism is required. And I invented a name: Nuclear Factor. Incredibly difficult conditions. So far impossible. Theoretically it can in nature. But very rare conditions. But there it was! A unique instance.” He dashed across to the table and began rustling the pages of a plump notebook. “Look, look! It splits! Look! Meteorite, extremely high temperature—one. Deposit of pitchblende— two! Underground sources—three! That's all! The factor! Natural! Worked it out! Energy of the nucleus, a chain! Once started, can't be stopped. Eight hundred years! I sent Masha and Toto a letter! No, they don't believe! Think I'm mad! Because I write from a madhouse!”
“Wait a moment, will you!” Mitrofanii implored him. The strain had brought beads of sweat out on the bishop's brow. “The fall of the meteorite into the deposit set off some kind of natural mechanism that started giving out energy. I don't understand anything about it, but assume everything is just as you say it is. But where is the danger in all this?”
“Don't know. Not a doctor. And I didn't write in the notebook, because I don't know. But I am certain. Absolutely certain. I was there a few hours, and nausea, then fever. Hermits are always there. So they die. Six months, a year, then death. A crime! It should be closed! But no one. They don't listen! I went to the one with the skull. He raised his hand …”
“What skull?” His Grace asked, confused again. “Who are you talking about?”
“On his forehead. Right here. The one with no face, with holes. There.” And once again the physicist gestured in the direction of Outskirts Island.
“A hermit. The holy elder Israel? With a skull and crossbones embroidered on his cowl?”
“Yes. The head. Went to Korovin, he injected me. Notebook, he didn't read it.” Sergei Nikolaevich's voice began to tremble as he recalled the old injury. “I thought and thought. Invented the Black Monk. Frighten them. A cursed place. And then research in peace. Without interference.”
“But how did you discover the emanation? I remember reading that radiation of that kind cannot be perceived by the sense organs.”
Lampier smiled proudly. “Not immediately. First a sample of the sphere. I realized straightaway, a meteorite. Fused surface. Rainbow colors. Especially with a torch. Mystery of the hermitage. Sacred. Holy elders’ secret. Eight hundred years. Probably the reason for silence. So they wouldn't give it away. Sample one way, then another. No good. Exceptionally hard. Came back again. Tempered steel file. Still no use. Then diamond file. From Antwerp. By post. It worked. A quarter of an hour—look, three grams.” He pointed to the little pile of powder in the flask. “Enough for analysis.”
“You ordered a diamond file by post from Antwerp?” Mitrofanii asked, mopping up his sweat with his handkerchief and feeling that his head, no matter how blue its aura might be, could not take in so much astounding information. “But surely that must have been very expensive?”
“Possibly. Never mind. Korovin has lots of money.”
“And Donat Savvich did not even ask why you needed such a strange instrument?”
“He asked. I was glad. Explaining—waved his arms about. ‘I don't wish to hear about the emanation, you'll have your file.’ Let him think. I got it.”
The bishop cast a curious glance at the table. “But where is it? What does it look like?”
The scientist shrugged casually.
“Disappeared. Ages ago. Never mind, not needed now. Don't interrupt with stupid questions!” he said angrily. “You kissed the cross! Listen!”
“Yes, yes, my son, forgive me,” His Grace said reassuringly and turned to see if Berdichevsky was listening. He was, very attentively, but to judge from his wrinkled brow, he did not understand very much. Unlike the bishop, Matvei Bentsionovich did not take any great interest in the latest news of scientific progress; he read almost nothing apart from leg
al journals. Naturally, he had never heard about the mysterious properties of radium and uranium.
“So what did the analysis of the meteoritic material show?” the bishop asked.
“Platinum-iridium nugget. From up there.” Lampier jabbed his finger toward the ceiling. “Sometimes from space. But rare, never so huge. Of course steel file is useless. A density of twenty-two! Only diamond. And no way to move it. Six thousand, seven thousand pounds.”
“Seven thousand pounds of platinum!” the assistant public prosecutor gasped. “But that is immensely valuable! How much is an ounce of platinum worth?”
Sergei Nikolaevich shrugged.
“No idea. But no value, only danger. Eight hundred years, penetrated right through. I found them: rays.” He nodded at the flask. “Pass through everything. Exactly as Toto wrote. About photographic film. And Masha wrote. Earlier. Korovin wrote a letter. Said I'm in a madhouse. They don't write now.”
“Yes, yes, I read about the experiments with radium radiation in Paris,” the bishop recalled. “They were carried out by Antoine Beckerel, and a married couple, the Curies. Pierre and Marie.”
“Pierrot is a crimson head,” Lampier snapped. “Not good. Masha shouldn't have. Better an old maid. But Toto Beckerel is clever, blue. I talk about them all the time: Masha and Toto. Ignoramuses! And Korovin too! A fine island! I went to the quayside, looked through the spectroscope. To find someone intelligent. Who could help. Explain to them. I couldn't. Good you're here. You understand, yes?” He looked at the bishop in fear and hope. “You understand?”
Mitrofanii walked over to the table, cautiously picked up the flask, and looked at the filings glinting dully inside it. “So the nugget is polluted with harmful rays?”
“Through and through. The whole cave. Eight hundred years! Even six hundred, all the same. Not an island, a gallows.” Sergei Nikolaevich grabbed hold of the sleeve of the bishop's cassock. “You are their superior! Forbid it! So that no one! Not one! And bring those back! If it's not too late. But no, too late to bring them. I heard, a new one just sent. If he hasn't been in the round cave, not long. Can be saved. Not the earlier two. But this one can be. How long is he there? Five days? Six?”
“He means the new hermit, the one that Pelagia was mistaken about,” Berdichevsky explained to the bishop, who was frowning perplexedly. “Well, well, the idea never even entered my head that your nun and Mrs. Lisitsyna were the same person.”
“I'll explain to you about that,” Mitrofanii said, embarrassed. “You see, according to the monastery's charter, it is absolutely impermissible, scandalous even, but …”
“Stop this stupid nonsense,” said Lampier, tugging unceremoniously at the bishop's cassock. “Take those out. Don't let any more in. Only me.
First I need screening material. I'm looking. Nothing so far. Copper no, steel no, tin plate no. Perhaps lead. Or silver. You're intelligent. I'll show you.”
He pulled the bishop over to the table, leafed through the pages of the notebook, and began running his finger over the calculations and formulae. Mitrofanii watched with interest and sometimes even nodded—either out of politeness, or because he really did understand something.
Berdichevsky looked as well, peeping over Sergei Nikolaevich's narrow shoulder. He sighed. Something jingled four times in his waistcoat pocket.
“Good Lord! Your Grace!” the assistant public prosecutor exclaimed. “Four o'clock in the morning! And Polina Andreevna, Pelagia, still isn't back! Could something have happened …”
He choked and stopped without finishing his question when he saw the sudden change in Mitrofanii's face as it contorted into a grimace of alarm and guilt.
Pushing aside the fascinating notebook, the bishop abruptly gathered up his cassock and dashed out of the basement and up the stairs with his shoes clattering.
The Cave
WHEN POLINA ANDREEVNA called in to the Immaculate Virgin on her way from the clinic, to collect the things she needed for her expedition, there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for her in her room.
The precautionary measures taken to protect Lagrange's dangerous legacy from curious members of the staff had failed. While in the vestibule Lisitsyna noticed the attendant on duty looking at her in a rather strange way—with either suspicion or fear. And when in her room she glanced into the traveling bag, she discovered that someone had been rummaging in it: the glove with the bullet hole was not lying in the same way as before, and the revolver was also wrapped rather differently in the drawers.
Never mind, Polina Andreevna told herself. She might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. If she got away with her nocturnal expedition, then the matter of the gun could be managed somehow. The bishop would smooth things over.
But she could deal with it even more simply than that. When she was changing in the pavilion, she could take the revolver out of the traveling bag and hide it there, and if the monastery's peacekeepers came calling, she could tell them the half-witted maid had imagined it. Come now, what would a pilgrim want with a gun?
In any case, one way or another she had to take the traveling bag with her.
She put several candles and some matches into it. What else did she need? Nothing, really.
She sat down for a moment before her journey and crossed herself. Then she set off into the gathering twilight.
She had to wait a long time on the waterfront by the pavilion. It had been a clear, windless evening and there were so many people still out strolling that she simply had no chance to slip in behind the little wooden structure without attracting attention to herself.
Polina Andreevna walked to and fro, huddled up in her long cloak, burning with impatience, but still there were as many people in the street as ever. A group of elderly women had stopped right in front of the pavilion and launched into a discussion of the provincial prelate's arrival—a colossal event by the standards of New Ararat. Numerous suppositions and surmises were voiced, and it was clear that the pilgrims’ animated discussion would continue for a long time yet.
Do I really need to change? Polina Andreevna suddenly thought. A novice and a woman were prohibited alike from visiting Outskirts Island. And she would be held doubly responsible for the masquerade. For a woman to dress up in a monk's robes was not simply blasphemous—it was probably a criminal offense as well.
And so she abandoned her wait and went as she was, in her woman's clothes and carrying the traveling bag.
It was a bright, moonlit night and Lisitsyna found Brother Kleopa's boat very quickly. She looked along the Canaan shoreline—all was quiet, not a single soul. As she embarked, she whispered a prayer and then started pulling on the oars.
Outskirts Island came drifting toward her out of the darkness, round and overgrown with pine trees that made it look like a prickly hedgehog. The keel of the boat scraped repulsively on the bottom and the prow nudged into the gravel. Polina Andreevna sat there and listened. The only sounds were the splashing of the oars and the sleepy rustling of the pine needles.
She weighed the boat's mooring rope down with a heavy stone and set off to walk around the island, moving in a gentle upward spiral. If it were not for the moon, she would have been unlikely to find the hermitage: a small, dark door of oak surrounded by an uneven border of moss-covered stones.
The little door was set straight into the slope on the side facing toward the lake, not Canaan—the side on which the sun rose in the morning.
Mrs. Lisitsyna was anything but timid, but she had to summon up her courage before she took hold of the bronze ring.
She pulled on it gently, prepared to discover that the hermitage was bolted shut for the night. But no, the door yielded easily. And indeed, who was there to lock the door against her?
The creak was not loud, but in the absolute silence it sounded so clear that the sacrilegious trespasser shivered. But she only paused for a brief moment before tugging on the ring again.
Inside the door there was darkness. Not like the darkness outs
ide, permeated with a silvery glow, but genuine pitch darkness that smelled of something musty and something else very specific—either wax or mice or old wood. Or perhaps it was simply the dust that had accumulated over the centuries?
When the spy stepped forward and closed the door behind her, God's world seemed to disappear, swallowed up by the gloom and the silence, leaving nothing but the strange smell as a reminder of itself.
Polina Andreevna stood there and sniffed, waiting a while for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. But they did not—evidently no light at all penetrated into this place, not even the tiniest amount.
She took the matches out of the traveling bag, struck one, and lit a candle.
A wide gallery led into the depths of the hill, its high vaulted ceiling lost in darkness. Its walls were uneven and a vague white color—lined with blocks of limestone, or perhaps shell rock. Mrs. Lisitsyna raised her candle higher and screamed.
And with good reason. These were no blocks of stone, but dead bodies laid one on top of another in a stack taller than the height of a man. Not skeletons, but remains desiccated with age, mummies with tautly stretched skin, sunken eyelids and mouths, their hands folded devoutly on their chests. When she saw the bony fingers of the uppermost body, with its long, curved nails, Polina Andreevna gave a quiet gasp. How frightening!
She wanted to get past the terrible place as quickly as possible—no matter where she might come to. The rows of the dead stretched on and on—there were hundreds and hundreds of them. The ones lying closest to the entrance were almost naked, barely covered by scraps of rotted clothing, obviously the most ancient burials. After them the walls gradually grew darker as the hermits’ robes were better preserved. But the cowls that had covered the faces of the holy elders in life had all been slit open, and Mrs. Lisitsyna was struck by the incredible similarity between all of these dead heads: with smooth craniums, no eyebrows, no mustache, no beard, not even any eyelashes, the pious hermits were as alike as brothers. And this discovery suddenly dissipated the fear that had been driving Polina Andreevna to turn and run as fast as her legs could carry her away from this kingdom of death.
