“And whom do you love most, granny or me?”
Alexis does not answer immediately; it is difficult for him to decide. Suddenly clinging closer still to his father, trembling and shrinking in shy tenderness, he whispers in his ear:—
“I love daddy, love him more than any one!”
And suddenly all vanishes, the squat Terem, the downy bed, his mother, grandmother, and nurses. He seems to have fallen into some dark hole, like a bird from its nest, on to the hard frozen earth. He is in a large cold room with bare walls and iron-barred windows. He no longer dozes. On the contrary he is always longing for sleep; he cannot get enough, he is roused so early. Through a fog, which makes the eyes smart, loom long barrack buildings, earthen ramparts with pyramids of shot, muzzles of cannon, the Sokolinki field covered with grey thawing snow, dotted with wet crows and ravens, under a leaden sky. He hears the roll of the drums, the drill commands: “Eyes front!” “Shoulder arms!” “Present arms!” “Right turn!” the dry rattle of the musketry and again the roll of the drums. His aunt, the Tsarevna Natalia Alexeyevna, is with him; an old maid with sallow face, bony fingers which hurt so in pinching, and cross piercing eyes which seems to eat him: She cries:—
“O scurvy brat of thy mother!”
It was not until long after he learnt what had actually happened. How the Tsar on his return from Holland had banished his wife, the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, to a nunnery, forcing her to take the veil under the name of Elena, while he removed his son from the Kremlin residence to the new Potíeshny Palace in the village Preobrazhensky. Side by side with this palace were the torture-chambers of the Privy Chancery, where the trial of the Streltsy Mutiny took place. They daily burnt more than thirty wood fires, at which the rebels were tortured. Was his remembrance true or only a nightmare? He could no longer tell. It was as if he were stealing along the huge pointed piles of the wall which surrounded the prison; groans issue from within, a streak of light reveals a chink in the log-built wall. He put his eye to the hole and saw a veritable hell:—
Hot fires are burning,
Cauldrons are steaming,
Knives are being sharpened,
All to butcher thee!