The Amber Rooms

Chapter Two

In the first sleeping carriage, the steward was sitting in his chair. He rose as Saskia passed. She smiled, expressed her desire to remain undisturbed in her compartment, and continued along the narrow, carpeted passage until she reached the last door.

She knocked once and went inside. There was nobody hiding beneath the fold-out seats or in the en suite bathroom. She locked the door. The steward had left her smoked salmon and vodka in an ice bucket. On one seat was a printed note from the train manager. It described the weather and the wildlife one might see coming into St Petersburg. The note from the previous day, which had appeared following their departure from Moscow, had said much the same.

Saskia popped some salmon into her mouth and withdrew a small travelling bag from the cupboard beneath the sink in the bathroom. It had a tumbler lock. She turned the dials, opened the bag, and withdrew her papers. There were several. Each testified to the state’s anxiety. Saskia set them alight using the oil lamp and brushed the debris into the sink. She turned the tap and watched the blackened flakes swill away. Then she opened the window and threw out Kamo’s second hat, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and his wash bag.

She looked at herself in the mirror.

Home, she thought. We’re going home.

There was no time to consider what she meant by ‘we’. Did she feel some responsibility for Ute Schlesinger, the woman who had been born in this body? Saskia knew her own mind to be a digital ghost. Indeed, perhaps her thoughts were only a crude facsimile, a simulation.

Mirror, mirror.

As always, the imperfections stood out. Her eyes were wrinkling at the edges. The dimples either side of her mouth were deeper now. This is age. This is time. The days were long passed since she had shaved her legs or shaped the edges of her eyebrows. Saskia had been told that she gave the impression of a sadly lost beauty, a woman whose twin turned beneath chandeliers. The compliment did not please her. The physical attractiveness distinguished her as surely as her missing left hand. Both were attributes she wanted to hide.

So neat: those petals of skin that a butcher had gathered, folded and stitched during the winter of 1905. It was a curious thing that the absence of her hand should embarrass her when she was alone. Curious too that the hand had been lost in the crash of a heavier-than-air flying machine. What secrets she carried.

It is time for us to go home, she thought.

Am I thinking in Russian?

‘It is time,’ she said in German, watching her mouth in the mirror, ‘to go home.’

The face—Ute’s face, Saskia’s face—smiled.

She took her long coat from the hook on the bathroom door and swung it around her shoulders. She fastened the buckles with a practised movement and folded back the material on her left sleeve. Pinned it. As she held the bearskin warmer between her teeth, she changed her hat for a thick cap, and undid the laces on her boots. They had high heels and would not do.

In Kamo’s trunk beneath the window, she found the expensive fur boots that he had bought in Baku, on the Caspian. She stuffed the toes with newspaper and put them on.

Before she could pack her satchel, there was a knock at the door. It was sturdy but the upper panel, hidden by a green blind, was glass. A strong man would be able to break it open. She watched the brass handle turn. Its lock held.

She remembered that her revolver had fallen from the train along with Kamo, and regretted her refusal to accept the replacement offered by the guard.

Am I thinking in Russian?

The handle turned again.

Fear, she thought. Lead me.

Had there been a day without fear since her unhappy arrival in Russia? Not truly. Days of camaraderie, yes. Mountain work. Milk bar stories in the hard lands around Tiflis. Her friends there had risked death for a future they could not imagine. It had been imagined for them by the orators and downright mountebanks of the revolutionary movements.

A voice outside said, quietly, ‘Open in the name of the Tsar.’

Saskia smiled with one side of her mouth. She entered the bathroom. It had a door, identical to the one leading to the corridor, which connected to the bathroom of the neighbouring compartment. She could break through it but the sound would carry and she would only gain the advantage of another compartment, which could be occupied.

She crossed to the window, opened it, and looked forward along the train. Through habit, Kamo had chosen a compartment next to the maintenance foot-hoops, and they were within reach. She saw the dining carriage, the luggage carriage beyond that, the tender, and the locomotive. The darkness of the sky was complete. The train was passing through a wood whose trees rose to twice the height of a carriage.

She remembered a dervish in Yerevan Square. And the bloody, gut-blown horses. When the horses had screamed, she had not heard them over the echo of grenades. Those grenades had been called “apples” in the parlance of the Outfit. She remembered everything.

Saskia closed Kamo’s trunk and stepped onto it. She swung her leg out into the night air. She had climbed from a moving train window twice before, but she had never ascended to the roof. The bunched newspaper in the toes of her boots made the job difficult. She reached one of the maintenance hoops with her heel and swung out to snag the topmost rung with her hand. She caught it, held on, exhaled. For the moment, she was secure against the side of the train with the window below and to her left.

As she looked, a head emerged from it.

Saskia tried to make herself small against the train. She felt the vibration of the carriage through her cheekbone. She could see that the man was holding onto his hat and looking towards the rear of the train. He did not, however, lift his eyes. She hoped he could not hear the flapping of her skirt.

The train blew its whistle. Saskia squinted against the sooty air and saw the locomotive enter the tunnel that the guard had described. If their speed did not change, she had between six and seven seconds before her own carriage passed through.

She looked down. The man in the hat was staring at her. He had the red eyes of an addict and his mouth was open. One hand still pressed his hat against his head. Saskia could see its brim flutter. His other hand held a gun, but she was already moving when it fired.

The roof was arched, slick with rain and dirt, and swaying unpredictably in the gloom. Saskia stood for a moment, then dropped to one knee. She turned to face the tunnel.

It was four seconds away.

A gloved hand gripped the topmost maintenance rail.

Saskia spun again, this time to face the rear of the train. She had half a carriage in which to sprint as fast as her body could take her, against the direction of travel, cutting her absolute speed by a margin that would reduce the chance of injury from her jump.

She raised her skirt and ran.

When she was two thirds of the way along the carriage, she knew that time had run out. She shortened her run and cut to the side. She released her skirt and leapt as a long-jumper, wheeling her arms. A shot rang out.

Then she was in freefall.

She had slipped through a raincloud twisting like a cat. She wore twenty-first century clothes. There was fear; fear like a shrill note, deafening her thoughts. But the reflexes told, with or without her. She settled flat as a leaf. Face down. Her fall described a helix. She arched her back, relaxed her legs, and spread her arms.

Where did I learn that?

Oh, God.

She was thousands of feet above a lake whose waters were the richest blue she had ever seen. Brown-green forest pressed on all its sides.

Where am I?

‘Jem, help me!’

An automated mechanism within her mind captured a diagnostic portion of the shoreline. She heard a single, foreign thought—Siberia—and she understood that the word meant “sleeping land” in a language one thousand years dead.

This is Lake Baikal.

I’m going to—

She dropped her shoulders to bring her crash zone nearer the shore.

Forty seconds remaining.

Baikal. Lake Baikal.

She was screaming.

Russia.

Twenty seconds.

She bit down on the scream, made it her last, and took a huge breath. This relaxed her a little.

Ten seconds.

Oh, God.

She straightened her legs and her body slipped towards the vertical. Her feet were together and her knees were bent. She tried to understand how she could hit this blue-black, indifferent water and live.

Cat.

Remember Ego, the cat? She fell from a balcony in Berlin and lived to chase the birds another day.

How deep?

Seventeen-point-eight-three metres, plus or minus point-three.

When?

She did not know.

Where?

Siberia, no other.

The sleeping land.

Jem, I’m sorry.

More than three years after that fall into Baikal, Saskia landed on the yielding stones of the track foundation. Her momentum gave her two backward rolls, a third during which she wheeled her legs to change direction, and then she was jogging through the wet nettles to a stop. She watched the remaining carriages enter the tunnel. Four. Three. Two. Smoke poured from the floor of the tunnel entrance. She heard the rats call as one. They chirped like sparrows.

She flexed her shoulders and brushed away the worst of the dirt. She gathered her skirts and walked up the slope. The trees thinned. There, the domes of the Church of St Alexander Nevsky and of St Isaac’s Cathedral were visible as brighter stars in the flat constellation of St Petersburg.

Saskia imagined its bridges rising. Then she bit the last of the gravel from her palm and set off towards the light.