Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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Tichon saw the gallows erected in the shape of a cross for the mutinous Streltsy priests. The hangman was Nikíta Zotoff, the mock patriarch. A great number of wheels with the mutilated bodies still hanging to them; iron spikes and stakes with half putrefied heads. The Tsar’s command forbade their being taken off till they had completely rotted. The air was one awful stench. Crows hovered over the place in large flocks.

The boy fixed his eyes on one of the heads. It stood out black against the transparent azure of the sky, all strewn with cloudlets of delicate rose and golden hue; while further off, the domes of the Kremlin churches glowed like living embers. The evening bell rang out in the still air. Suddenly Tichon felt the sky, the domes, the very earth go from under his feet, while he himself was falling into some bottomless abyss: he had recognised his father’s face in that head with black sockets for eyes.

The drum rolled, a division of the Preobrazhensky regiment came round the corner; it accompanied carts with fresh victims. The condemned sat in white shirts with calm faces, holding lighted tapers in their hands. A tall man on horseback rode in front of them. His face too was calm, yet terrible. This was Peter. Tichon had never seen him before, but he at once recognised him, and it seemed to the child that the dead head of his father with its blank eye-sockets was looking straight into the Tsar’s eyes. The next moment he swooned. The crowd falling back in terror would have crushed the boy, had not an old man noticed him. This man, an old friend of Pahómitch, a certain Gregory of Talitsa, lifted him up and carried him home. In the night Tichon had a fit such as he never had before. It was a wonder he survived.