Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk Read online

  ALSO BY BORIS AKUNIN

  Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

  THE ERAST FANDORIN MYSTERIES

  The Winter Queen

  The Turkish Gambit

  Murder on the Leviathan

  The Death of Achilles

  Special Assignments

  Prologue

  THE SQUARE ONTO which the windows of the district court looked out was already almost completely empty by this hour in the early evening. Two mongrels were yelping lazily at each other beside a streetlamp and a boy in a cloth jacket and blacked boots was hopping over a puddle on one leg But from the far end of the square, where it runs into Malaya Kupecheskaya Street, there came the resounding clop of hooves over cobblestones, the rumbling of wheels, and the jingling of harness. These combined sounds approached at a brisk pace, and soon it was possible to make out a lathered pair of piebald grays pulling along a sprung carriage. Standing on the box, waving a whip, was a dusty monk in a black cassock that fluttered behind him in the wind, and his head was uncovered, so that his long locks were tousled and tangled. Then it became clear that the forehead of this terrible coachman was covered in blood and his eyes were bulging out of his head. The small number of people in the street who saw this sight all froze on the spot.

  Approaching the court building, the monk pulled back on the reins, halting the dashing horses, jumped to the ground, and shouted to Pelagia.

  But then, we shall not relate here exactly what the messenger shouted, because that will be the beginning of an entirely different story, one even stranger than the story of the white bulldog.

  Pelagia turned back quickly toward the bishop. Mitrofanii had not seen the strange monk or heard his shout, but he immediately sensed that something was wrong. He pushed the correspondent aside gently but firmly and…

  The Appearance of ‘Basilisk

  SEVERAL LONG STRIDES brought him to the side of the nun. Glancing out the window of the courthouse and seeing the lathered horses and the disheveled monk, he knitted his bushy brows sternly.

  “He shouted to me: ‘Mother, disaster! He's here already? Where's His Reverence?’ ” Pelagia told the bishop in a low voice.

  At the word disaster Mitrofanii nodded in satisfaction, as if he had been expecting nothing less from this interminably long day that seemed determined never to end. From the window he beckoned with his finger to the tattered and dusty messenger (the general manner and loud shouting of this monk, who had arrived in such a rush from God only knew where, left no doubt that he was in fact a messenger, and one bearing bad tidings), as if to say, Right, come up here and we'll take a look at you.

  With a rapid bow to the bishop that reached almost down to the ground, the monk dropped the reins and dashed into the court building, elbowing aside the public on its way out after the trial. The appearance of this servant of God, with his head uncovered and his forehead scratched and bleeding, was so unusual that people glanced around at him, some in curiosity, others in alarm. The tumultuous discussion of the recently concluded hearing and its remarkable verdict was suddenly broken off. It looked as though some new remarkable Event was in the offing, or had even, perhaps, already taken place.

  Such is always the way of things in quiet backwaters like our peaceful town of Zavolzhsk: five or ten years of peace and quiet, drowsy torpor, and then suddenly one hurricane blast following another, bending the very bell towers down to the ground.

  The ominous herald ran up the white marble staircase. On the upper landing, below the scales held aloft by blind-eyed Justice, he hesitated for a moment, uncertain which way to turn, to the right or the left, but immediately spotted the knot of correspondents from Russia's two capital cities and the two figures in black robes, one large and one small, in the far corner of the lobby: the Reverend Mitrofanii and beside him the sister in spectacles who had been standing in the window.

  The monk's massive boots roused a thunderous echo as he dashed across the floor toward the bishop, howling to him from a distance: “My lord, he's here! Close by already! Coming after me! Huge and black!”

  The journalists from St. Petersburg and Moscow, including some genuine luminaries of this profession, who had come to Zavolzhsk for the sensational trial, stared in bewilderment at this wild-looking figure in a cassock.

  “Who's coming? Who's black?” His Grace thundered. “Speak clearly. Who are you? Where from?”

  “The humble monk Antipa from Ararat,” the agitated fellow said with a hasty bow. He reached up to remove his skullcap, but it wasn't there—he had lost it somewhere. “Basilisk is coming, who else! He himself, our patron! He has come forth from the hermitage. Your Reverence, order the bells to be rung and the icons to be brought out! Saint John's prophecy is being fulfilled! ‘For lo, I come soon, and bring vengeance with me, to render unto each according to his deeds!’ It is the end!” he howled. “The end of everything!”

  The big-city types didn't seem concerned. They weren't frightened by the news of the end of the world; they just pricked up their ears and moved a little closer to the monk, but the courthouse janitor, who had already begun pushing his broom along the corridor, froze on the spot when he heard this terrible cry, dropping his implement of labor and crossing himself hastily.

  The herald of the Apocalypse was too anguished and terrified to say anything else coherent—he began shaking all over, and tears began coursing down his stark white face and his beard.

  As always in critical situations, His Grace demonstrated a most efficacious decisiveness. Following the ancient precept according to which the best remedy for hysterics is a good, hard slap, Mitrofanii gave the sobbing man two resounding blows to the cheeks with his weighty hand, and the monk immediately stopped shaking and howling. His eyes went blank and he hiccuped. Then, building on his success, the bishop seized the messenger by the collar and dragged him toward the nearest door, which led into the court archives. Sister Pelagia gave a gasp of pity at the sound of the slaps and then trotted after them.

  The archivist was just settling down to enjoy some tea following the conclusion of the court session, but the bishop merely glanced at him with one eyebrow raised, and the court official disappeared in a flash. The three ecclesiastics were left alone in the government office.

  The bishop sat the sobbing Antipa down on a chair and thrust the barely begun glass of tea under his nose: Take that, drink it. He waited while the monk took a drink with his teeth rattling against the glass, and wetted his constricted throat, then asked impatiently, “Well, what has happened over there in Ararat? Tell me.”

  The correspondents were left facing a locked door. They stood there for a while, repeating the mysterious words basilisk and Ararat over and over again, and then gradually began to disperse, still in a state of total perplexity. That was natural enough—they were all strangers, people who knew nothing of our Zavolzhian holy places and legends. Local people would have understood immediately.

  However, since our readers may include some outsiders who have never been to the province of Zavolzhie—or might never even have heard of it—before recounting the conversation that ensued in the archive room we will provide several explanations, which while they might appear excessively lengthy are nonetheless essential to an understanding of the narrative that follows.

  WHERE WOULD BE the most appropriate place to start?

  Probably with Ararat. Or rather, New Ararat, a famous monastery located in the far north of our extensive but little-populated province. There, on the forested islands amidst the waters of the Blue Lake, which in its dimensions resembles a sea (that is what the simple folk call it, the Blue Sea), holy monks have taken refuge from the vanity and malice of the world since ancient times. T
here have been periods when the monastery fell into decline and neglect, so that only a small handful of anchorites were left living in isolated cells and hermitages across the entire archipelago, but it never became completely deserted, not even during the Time of Troubles.

  There was one special reason for this tenacious grasp on life, and it goes by the name of Basilisk's Hermitage—but we shall tell you about that a little further on, for the hermitage has always led an existence almost separate from the actual monastery itself. In this nineteenth century, under the influence of the beneficial conditions of our own calm and peaceful times, the monastery has blossomed quite magnificently— initially owing to the fashion for northern holy places that became widespread among well-to-do pilgrims, and in very recent times thanks to the efforts of the present archimandrite, Father Vitalii II, who bears that title because in the last century the monastery had another father superior with the same name.

  This exceptional servant of the church has raised New Ararat to unprecedented heights of prosperity. When he was instructed to take charge of the quiet island monastery, the reverend father rightly decided that Fashion is a fickle creature, and before she could turn the gaze of her favor to some other, no less venerable monastic institution he needed to extract as much benefit as possible from the flow of donations.

  Father Vitalii began by replacing the former monastery hotel, which was dilapidated and poorly maintained, with a new one, opening a splendid eating house with special dishes for the fasts, and organizing boat rides around the waterways and bays, so that the well-to-do visitors would be in no hurry to depart from those blessed shores, which in their beauty, the freshness of their air, and their natural serenity are in no wise inferior to the finest Finnish resorts. And then, by the skillful expenditure of the surplus funds accumulated in this manner, he set about gradually establishing a complex and highly profitable local economy, with mechanized farms, an icon-painting factory, a fishing flotilla, smoking sheds, and even a small hardware factory that produced the finest bolts and catches in the whole of Russia. He also built a water main, and even a railway from the quayside to the warehouses. Some of the more experienced monks complained that life in New Ararat had become unredemptive, but their voices had a fearful ring and their complaint hardly even filtered through to the outside world at all, being drowned out by the cheerful clatter of the intensive construction work. On the main island of Canaan the father superior erected numerous new buildings and churches, which were most impressive in terms of their size and magnificence, although, in the opinion of connoisseurs of architecture, they were not always distinguished by elegant and flawless taste.

  A few years ago a special government commission, led by the minister of trade and industry himself, the highly intelligent Count Litte, came to investigate the New Ararat “economic miracle” and see whether the model of such successful development could be adopted for the good of the whole empire.

  It transpired that it could not. On returning to the capital, the count reported to the sovereign that Father Vitalii was an adept of a dubious economic theory that assumed that a country's true wealth does not lie in its natural resources, but in the industry of its population. It was easy for the archimandrite—he had a population of a special kind: monks who performed all the labor as works of penance, and without any salary. When a worker like that stood by his butter-making machine, say, or his metalworking lathe, he wasn't thinking about his family or his bottle of vodka—he was getting on with saving his soul. That was why the product was so high-quality and cheaper than competitors could even dream of.

  This economic model was definitely of no use to the Russian state, but within the limits of the archipelago entrusted to Father Vitalii's care it brought forth truly remarkable fruits. Indeed, in some respects the monastery, with all its settlements, farmsteads, and utilities, resembled a small state—not a fully sovereign one, but one that was at least completely self-governing and was accountable only to the provincial bishop, His Grace Mitrofanii.

  Under Father Vitalii the number of monks and lay brothers on the islands grew to fifteen hundred, and the population of the central estate—which, in addition to the holy brothers, was also home to a large number of hired workers and their entire households—was large enough to rival a district town, especially if you counted the pilgrims who, despite the father superior's concerns, continued to stream in in ever increasing numbers. With the economy of the monastery already firmly established, the reverend father would have been quite happy to manage without the pilgrims, who only distracted him from his urgent work in administering the New Ararat community (for among their numbers there were important and influential people who required special attention), but there was nothing he could do on that score. People came on foot and by other means from far away, and then they sailed across the immense Blue Lake on the monastery's steamboat, not to take a look at the zealous pastor's industrial achievements, but to bend a knee at the holy places of New Ararat, including the foremost among them, Basilisk's Hermitage.

  This latter site was actually completely inaccessible to visitors, since it was located on a small forested rock that bore the name of Outskirts Island, located directly opposite Canaan—not, however, facing the inhabited side, but rather the deserted one. The pilgrims who came to New Ararat were in the habit of going down on their knees at the water's edge and gazing reverently at the little island that was the dwelling place of holy ascetics who prayed for the whole of mankind.

  However, let us now speak at greater length, as promised, about Basilisk's Hermitage and its legendary founder.

  A LONG, LONG time ago, about six hundred or perhaps even eight hundred years ago (the chronology of the Life of Saint Basilisk is somewhat confused), a hermit was wandering through a remote forest. All we know about him for certain is that he was called Basilisk, was no longer young in years, and had lived a hard life that had been exceptional for its lack of righteousness at the beginning; but in his declining years he had seen the light of true repentance and been illuminated by the thirst for Salvation. In expiation of his earlier years lived in transgression of the moral law, the monk had taken a vow to walk around the whole world until he found the place where he could serve the Lord best. Sometimes in some devout monastery or, on the contrary, in the midst of godless pagans, it had seemed to him that this was it, the place where Basilisk, the humble servant of God, should stay; but soon the elderly monk would be overtaken by doubt—what if someone else who stayed there might serve the Almighty equally well?—and, driven by this thought, which was undoubtedly sent down to him from on high, the monk had continued on his way, never finding what he sought.

  But then one day, when he parted the thick branches of a fir grove, he saw blue water before him, extending away from the very edge of the forest toward the gray, lowering sky and merging into it. Basilisk had never seen so much water before, and in his simplemindedness taking this phenomenon for a great miracle from the Lord, he bent his knee and prayed until darkness fell, and then for a long time in the dark.

  And the monk had a vision. A finger of fire clove the sky into two halves, so that one became bright and the other became black, and then plunged into the waters, setting them heaving and frothing. And a voice of thunder spoke to Basilisk: “Seek no more. Go to the place that has been shown. It is a place that is close to Me. Serve Me not among men and their vanity, but in the midst of silence, and in a year I shall summon you to Myself.”

  In his salutary simple-heartedness the monk did not even think to doubt the possibility of fulfilling this strange demand to walk into the middle of the sea, but set off straightaway, and though the water bowed and sagged beneath his weight, it held him up, which did not greatly surprise Basilisk, for he recalled Christ walking on the water in the Gospels. He walked on and on, reciting the Credo in Russian for a whole night and a whole day, and the next evening he began to feel afraid that he would not find the place the fiery finger had indicated to him in the middle of this wa
tery wilderness. And then the monk was granted a second miracle in a row, something that does not happen often, even in the lives of the saints.

  When darkness fell, he saw a small spark of light in the distance and turned toward it. A short while later he saw that it was a pine tree blazing on the top of a hill that rose straight up out of the water. Behind it there was more land, lower and broader (that was the present-day Canaan, the main island of the archipelago).

  And Basilisk made his home in a cave under the scorched pine. He lived there for a while in total silence and incessant inward prayer, and a year later the Lord did as He had promised and summoned the repentant sinner to Himself and gave him a place beside His Throne. The hermitage and monastery that subsequently sprang up nearby were named New Ararat in commemoration of the mountain that had remained towering alone above the waters when “the depths stirred and the heavens opened” and had saved the lives of the righteous.

  The Life omits any mention of how Basilisk's successors came to learn about the Miracle of the Finger if the hermit maintained such a rigorous silence, but let us be indulgent toward ancient tradition. We can also make a concession to the skepticism of a rationalistic age, and accept that the holy founder of the hermitage did not reach the islands by walking miraculously across the water, but on some kind of raft or, say, in a hollowed-out log—let it be so. But here is a fact that is indisputable, attested to by many generations, and can even, if you so wish, be confirmed by documentary evidence: none of the ascetics who have settled in the underground cells of Basilisk's Hermitage have ever waited long for God to summon them to Himself. After six months, a year, or at the most a year and a half, all of the select few thirsting for salvation have achieved their hearts desire and, leaving behind a small heap of dusty bones, have soared aloft from the kingdom of earth to that other, Heavenly Kingdom. And it is not at all a matter of a meager diet or the severity of the climate. There are, after all, many other hermitages where the hermits have performed even greater feats of asceticism and mortified the flesh more fervently, but God has been less quick to grant them His pardon and take them to Himself.