The Concubine's Secret (59 page)

‘Papa! Papa! Papa!’

She could hear the sound of her own voice but her lips felt nothing, unaware of making it, as if disconnected from the rest of her. She stumbled over something, a wooden panel that had collapsed on to the ground in flames, and it set fire to one of her boots. Frantically her gloved hands beat at it and she found herself staggering into a small empty space at the heart of all this chaos, a kind of clearing in a blazing forest. Flames leapt all around her but this small still spot was miraculously free of fire. Across it lay a ladder tangled up with metal girders and a large heavy section of polished wood which was blistering in the heat. Crushed under them lay her father. She saw his white hair. Only his head and one arm were visible and his hand was stretched out, his eyes fixed on her. They were smiling.

‘ Lydia.’

The roar in her ears stole the sound but she saw his lips make the word.

‘Papa!’

She crouched down and clutched his hand. Their fingers entwined for a fleeting moment, the way they had in the snow so many years ago. She whispered, ‘My dear Papa,’ before she pushed herself to her feet, seized the wood and tried to yank it off his back. Her lack of strength shocked her. Her vision filled with bright stars and she had no idea whether they were the real night sky opening up above or whether they were inside her head. Jens touched her ankle and she knelt down quickly beside his head.

‘ Lydia,’ he said hoarsely, ‘get out of here. Now.’ He pushed at her but the gesture was so weak she barely felt it. ‘Don’t cry,’ he murmured. ‘Just go.’

She didn’t know she was crying. She kissed his white hair and it stank of oil and smoke. Blood was oozing from his ear. ‘Papa,’ she gasped and tucked her leg under the edge of the slab that was crushing him, taking the weight of it. She forced herself to push upright with the other leg. The wood shifted a fraction, enough for Jens to drag out his other arm and attempt to crawl forward on his elbows. But he was caught, his legs pinned.

‘ Leave, Lydia.’

‘Not without you.’

‘We’ll both die.’

In response Lydia seized a fallen piece of timber, heedless of the flames devouring it, and jammed it under the polished slab, freeing her leg. Then she bent down, gripped both Jens’ hands and pulled with all her strength until her lungs seemed to rip apart inside her. For a moment nothing happened except the fire leaping several paces closer, but suddenly something yielded. There was a loud crack and Jens started to slide forward. He made no sound. Lydia could see in his green eyes what this was doing to her father, yet she didn’t stop until he was clear of the wood. Relief surged through her until she looked at his legs. Bones were sticking out in all directions through the flesh. Even in the billowing black air she couldn’t miss the white of them, and the red of the blood. One kneecap had been torn off.

‘ Lydia, I beg you to go.’ His face was robbed of all colour, his lips ash-grey. ‘Don’t let… me kill my daughter too.’

Lydia crouched beside him, bent low and draped one of his arms over her shoulder. ‘You did this? This fire?’

He smiled and she loved his smile.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

He struggled to release himself from her grip but she refused to let him go. Instead she half lifted herself, raising him with her, holding him on her bent back. Still he made no sound as his shattered legs dragged behind him, but he didn’t breathe either. A sudden furious squall of sparks and fiery debris showered on their heads and she felt something burning her ear, then the back of her neck, but her father knocked whatever it was from her hair. She swayed, her lungs screaming for oxygen, and took one laboured step forward. Both of them knew the only way out of this inferno was to run but she couldn’t run. Not with her father on her back. She took another step.

‘Put me down, Lydia,’ he ordered in her ear. ‘I love you for coming for me. Now put me down.’

‘Alexei came.’ Another step. ‘He stopped the…’ three more steps but each one smaller than the last, ‘stopped the truck.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re…’ she gasped, dragging in smoke, ‘his father.’

A wall of flames rose before her. This was it. She had to walk through it. She twisted her head sideways. ‘Ready?’

He kissed her cheek. ‘ Lydia, I am not Alexei’s father.’

Chang would not give up. He’d find her. Or die. There was no middle path. He called her name without ceasing but the flames swallowed his words. The smoke suffocated life. He could feel it dying in his own lungs and his fear for Lydia tore his heart into pieces.

The gods had warned him. They’d sent him the omen but he had refused to listen to any words but hers. He’d let her come over the wall with him and now he was paying for not heeding the murmur of the gods, for not keeping a balance of desires. He could live – or die – with that, but he could not bear that she should die for it too.

He called out. He roared her name into the fire and the flames roared back at him, their laughter in every crackle and explosion that they spat in his face. He could see nothing beyond the inferno towering around him, whichever direction he turned, and quite suddenly he realised he was looking with the wrong sense. Eyes could lie and confuse and panic. So he closed them. He stood totally still and exhaled the poisons from his lungs.

He listened for her again. But this time he listened with his heart.

Lydia knew her hair was on fire. Jens was no longer moving on her back. As she stepped forward, one painfully slow foot after the other, she refused to let her knees buckle even though, for all she knew, Jens could be ablaze too. Her mind no longer functioned properly. Control of her limbs had ceased and her lungs were shutting down. She couldn’t scream if she wanted to. How she was still on her feet and pushing through a tunnel of flame and smoke that never seemed to end, she had no idea. It occurred to her briefly that she was dead and that this was hell.

Chang, my love, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say I love you. The thought expanded and filled her whole mind, so that when she heard his voice she didn’t know whether it came from inside or outside her head. But hands were lifting her father from her back and a strong familiar arm encircled her waist, supporting her. Even if she were dead and in hell’s torment for the whole of eternity, she didn’t care because Chang An Lo was at her side.

The final moments became a blur and she felt herself trembling uncontrollably. Big paws were knocking her head from side to side and the burning on her scalp stopped. Dimly she caught a glimpse of an eyepatch and heard someone laugh. Laugh? How could they laugh if they were dead?

‘You were supposed to stay on the other side of the wall,’ Chang said to someone. ‘You’re sick.’

‘I was bored. You can’t have all the fun.’

It was Popkov’s booming voice and the filthy smell of his overcoat covering her. She saw him drape Jens over his great shoulder like a doll and, without knowing how, she found herself on Chang’s back. She laid her head against his and tried to inhale but all she got was thick, choking smoke. She coughed, vomited, and felt herself slide down into a black hole so deep and so suffocating, she knew she would never claw her way back up.

Alexei watched the hangar turn into a fireball. It transformed the compound into shrieking, screaming chaos. The darkness was gripped by writhing shadows as the flames tore loose and the noise was deafening.

Figures hurtled towards the burning building, black and jerky in their panic, while others were racing away from it as though a pack of wolves was at their heels. Alexei threw the NAMI-1 into gear and drove at full speed straight for the hangar. To hell with anyone in his way. The heat hit him from twenty metres out and it struck so hard it was like driving into a wall.

He saw them coming, Chang and Popkov. Bursting out of the side of the hangar where half the wall was gone. What the hell were they doing here? Wasn’t Popkov wounded? Then he saw something on Chang’s back and realised with a shock that it was Lydia. Another figure with white hair lay across the big Cossack’s shoulder. It had to be Jens. He slewed the car round and gunned it towards the blackened figures, fully visible to all in the glare of the flames, but afterwards Alexei could not recall which came first: the shot or the explosion. They seemed to occur at the same moment, yet in his mind it was the shot that lingered, the sharp crack of a rifle ringing for ever in his ears.

They were still more than five metres from him. Silhouetted and defenceless. The shot came from the side, from a soldier whose adrenalin was running high, too high for him to keep a steady hand on his rifle. He’d aimed at Chang who was several paces ahead of Popkov, but he hit Lydia. Alexei saw her body jerk on Chang’s back, then hang lifeless, her hands flapping loose as he ran.

Alexei’s heart stopped. That was when he registered the other sound, a dull boom that reverberated inside his head like a roll of thunder. The stench of fumes burned in his nostrils and a part of his mind recognised them – a petrol drum had exploded. But all his eyes saw was the wall, the way it moved. What remained of the side of the hangar, with all its heavy structural timbers and solid planking on fire, blasted away from the building. For one second it seemed to hang in the air, choosing its victims, then came rushing down towards Chang and Popkov.

Alexei stamped on the pedal. The car flung itself forward in one final effort and Chang hurled Lydia and himself inside it as the wall crashed around them. The windscreen exploded. The canvas roof split as a blazing beam tore through it and embedded itself in the empty rear seat. Sparks and flaming debris rained down on the bonnet.

‘Jens!’ Alexei shouted.

Beside him on the passenger seat, clutching Lydia as if he would never release her again in this lifetime, Chang murmured, ‘Popkov.’

Alexei leapt from the NAMI-1 and he found them both. Popkov was half hidden under the car’s axle where the blast had thrown him. The chassis had protected him except for a long gash on the back of his leg. Amid the flames Alexei discovered Jens’ body. His head was half severed, his chest and limbs crushed under a flaming mass of timbers. His hair was smouldering. Another rifle bullet slammed into the side of the car and voices shouted, yet Alexei couldn’t move. He gazed down at his dead father’s mutilated face and couldn’t walk away. Not like this. Don’t let it end like this, Papa. He didn’t even feel the next bullet graze his ear.

It was Popkov who moved him. Physically picked him up, dumped him in the driver’s seat of the car and wrenched out the blazing beam from the rear seat. Seconds later Alexei was speeding towards the entrance gate with his three passengers crammed in the back. When the sentry challenged him, he swore viciously at the soldier and waved Dmitri’s papers under his nose.

‘Get out of my way, you fool. I have to report this incompetence to Colonel Tursenov immediately.’

‘
Da
, Colonel, da.’

The gate swung back and the forest opened before them. He drove only until the compound was out of sight and then stamped on the brakes, swivelling round in his seat.

‘How is she?’ he asked.

Chang didn’t reply, but he was crooning softly and it sounded like a death lament. In the corner the big Cossack sat hunched and silent, tears streaming down his blackened face.

‘Don’t die.’

From somewhere far, far above, the words drifted down to her. Like the tiniest flakes of snow that melt to nothing the moment they touch your skin. But these words weren’t soft.

‘Don’t die, my love.’

It’s too late. Can’t you see? I’m already dead.

There was no pain, no thoughts, no desires, no colours, just a nothingness. A hollow void. But if being dead was this, just nothing, what was the point of all the effort of life? And what happened to the future she had planned? Did it still exist? Would it go on unfolding without her? An image of Chang slid into the void inside her, Chang An Lo going on, taking himself a Chinese wife and having bright-eyed Communist children. All without her. Would he weep? Would he remember? The strange thing was that even in death her heart wanted him to be happy.

But happy with
her.

‘Come back to me, my fox girl.’ His words floated down to her, yet they were sharp as needles under her skin and wouldn’t let her rest.

No, my precious one, it’s too late. She felt herself tumbling deeper into the hole, head over heels down into the void, its blackness swallowing her, sucking all the brightness out of her, her fingers uncurling and letting go. No pain. Not even the image of Chang any more. Just the emptiness of the void now.
It’s over.

‘Come back, Lydia, or I’ll come down there after you and drag you back with my bare hands.’

No, let me rest.

Something was grabbing her, physically shaking her until she felt her teeth rattle.

Teeth? How could she have teeth if she was dead? When you’re dead, you’re just spirit, damn it. Teeth! That meant a tiny part of her was alive. Damn it! With a gigantic effort of will she dug her fingernails into the wall of blackness and felt her body jerk as the falling came to an abrupt halt. It made everything hurt. It would be so much easier to let go.

Chyort! Inch by inch, hand over hand, she started to haul herself up.

The bullet, that’s what she saw first when she opened her eyes. It was sitting on the windowsill, proud of itself in the sunlight, shining as if it had been polished. Second came Elena’s broad face. She was leaning over Lydia, the lines round her eyes rigid, her fingers stained scarlet. Red paint? Why was Elena messing with paint?

‘So you’re awake.’

‘Yes.’ Lydia ’s throat felt as though it had been skinned. The air inside her tasted black and rotten.

‘I’ve just changed your dressing.’ The colourless eyes studied her intently. ‘Sore?’