Siberian Red

harsh conditions under which the miners worked. In 1912 the workers had gone on strike, demanding better conditions. Rather than give in to their demands, the Tsar had sent in a regiment of Cossacks. By the time the strike was finally called off, hundreds of miners had been cut down by the Cossacks’ swords.
    Pulling on a brass ring set flush into the floor, the Tsar opened the trapdoor and led Pekkala down a tightly spiralled stone staircase, lit by small electric bulbs. The air was cool and damp and hard to breathe. At last, deep underground, they arrived at an unpainted metal door set straight into the rock.
    There was no lock on this last door, only a metal bolt, which the Tsar slid back with a dull clank. Then he pushed the door open, revealing a chamber of darkness so complete it felt to Pekkala like a patch of blindness in his eye. The Tsar gestured for Pekkala to enter. ‘After you,’ he said.
    Pekkala froze. He could not bear confined spaces, especially when they were unlit.
    ‘Go on!’ urged the Tsar.
    Hesitantly, Pekkala stepped into the black. His breathing became shallow. It felt to him as if the floor was crumbling away beneath his feet.
    At that moment, the Tsar flipped a switch and the room was suddenly flooded in light.
    Pekkala found himself in a chamber ten paces wide by twenty paces long. The ceiling was so low that he could touch it easily by raising his hand above his head. The floor was dirt and the walls themselves were chipped out of the bedrock on which the palace had been built. Of this space, only a small fraction remained empty. The rest, from floor to ceiling, was completely filled with gold. Reflected in the glow of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the air itself seemed filled with a trembling fire.
    The gold had been moulded into large ingots, each one roughly the length of a man’s forearm. The only variation was in the finish of the metal. Some were polished smooth and brilliant, while others looked as if they had been wrapped in yellow velvet. All of the ingots were stamped with the double-headed Romanov eagle, in addition to weight and purity marks and the letter L in a circle, denoting its source as the Lena goldfields.
    Pekkala noticed that each stack of gold contained exactly the same number of ingots and that the ingots themselves had been placed, one on top of the other, with a precision that reminded him of pictures he had seen of ancient Peruvian stonework, fitted together so closely that not even a sheet of paper could be slid between them.
    ‘Another shipment arrived today,’ the Tsar told him. ‘That’s why I came back from Spala. I needed to be here to meet it.’
    Pekkala turned and looked at him. The sight of this fortune, scraped from the darkness of the earth by slaves and returned to that same darkness by an emperor, filled him with profound uneasiness.
    ‘Few people have set eyes on this treasure,’ the Tsar confided. ‘Few people ever will.’
    Pekkala spread his arms, taking in the contents of the room. ‘But Excellency‚ how much gold does one man really need? What do you intend to do with it?’
    ‘Do with it?’ This question caught the Tsar by surprise. ‘I possess it. That is what you do with treasure.’ Seeing the lack of comprehension in Pekkala’s face, he tried a different tack. ‘Think of it as my insurance against a world of instability. Say something were to happen to this country, a disaster of biblical proportions. This gold would help to see me through. And my family. And you, of course,’ he added hastily and smiled. ‘What would I do without my Emerald Eye?’
    ‘And the people of Russia?’ asked Pekkala. ‘What are they to do when this disaster hits?’
    The Tsar rested his hand upon the shelf of gold. The feel of the metal seemed to comfort him. ‘As my wife is fond of saying: on the Day of Judgement, only the chosen will be saved.’

Listening to the Comitati speak
     
     
    Listening to the Comitati speak of their deliverance, Pekkala began to think Klenovkin might have been right. The years in prison had worn through the fabric of their collective sanity. And even if the gold was real, Pekkala felt sure these men would never live to see it.
    He thought of a prophet named Wovoka: a Paiute Indian of the American West who, faced with the annihilation of his way of life, began to speak of a day when all the whites would disappear and the Indians’ shattered civilisation would be made whole again if only they would