Bassanda and the Bolshevik Revolution, Ch. 50
A VIKING FUNERAL AND A SECOND HELL-RIDE WITH THE BASMACHI
June 1919
Michael found himself looking down from above at his own body, sprawled on the roof of the Parliament building, surrounded by the shocked, foreshortened figures of his friends and lover. He saw from both within and beyond his own eyes. Raising his gaze to the eastern horizon, which was paling now with the first rose and pink of a new dawn, he saw black, white, and gray clouds rolling across the sky. Then, as the sun rose, blood-red over the eastern horizon, the black clouds above began to pale to gray and the gray to white and the white then to rose and pink, and then to thin altogether, revealing the blue, blue sky above. And as the golden light all around him began to fade, he thought he saw, in a vision of the Basmachi, a cloud of riders in rose and crimson robes swooping down out of the eastern sky. And at their head he saw Luzja, dressed in white, holding his son in her arms, as she fell down on horseback toward him out of the dawn.
Michael smiled.