Twelve (35 page)

'Where did that happen?' asked the older one, once he'd poured himself a vodka, indicating my missing fingers.

'In Bulgaria – Silistria.'

'In a battle?'

'That's right,' I lied, but I couldn't prevent the true story from forcing its way into my mind.

It had not been in a battle, but in a gaol. After Prince Bagration had decided to abandon the siege of Silistria, myself and a few others were sent into the city to spy. We'd split up, and I found myself staying in a hostel, with half a dozen or more men to a room, all of them locals. It was handily located right against the city wall, so all I had to do was drop messages out of the window at an appointed time – midnight each night. One of my comrades had simply to creep over, pick up the message and take the precious information to Bagration.

I don't know if it was me or the courier who got sloppy, but on the third night, it wasn't his hands that the small piece of paper, covered in Cyrillic and wrapped round a stone, fell into, but the hands of a Turkish patrol. There was nothing of much interest in it, even if they could break the simple code and then read the Russian, but they had seen which window it fell from.

Minutes later, Turkish soldiers – Janissaries – rushed into the room. It was easy enough for me to work out from their conversation what had happened, but the problem for them was that there were seven of us in the room. Any one could have dropped the message – and I'd made sure that none of the others had seen me go to the window.

So the Turks rounded us all up and took us to the gaol and used their best methods to persuade the spy to confess. I didn't, despite losing two fingers.

I forced myself back to the present. That much of the story I was happy to tell to most people. That's what I'd told Boris and Natalia. The details of what went on in the gaol, I never told. But to these two and today, I didn't even feel the urge to tell the basic story.

'I don't suppose you saw much of the French round here,' I said instead.

'No, not many,' said the younger man. 'The only Frenchman you'll find around here is old Napoleon, up at the crossroads.' They both laughed.

'I saw him,' I said. 'How long has he been there?'

'Since just after the battle,' the redhead continued. 'He wandered into town and we showed him some true Russian hospitality.'

'Was he a deserter, or just lost?' I asked.

'How would we know,' replied the old, bald man. 'We don't speak their language. We were just happy to do our bit for Russia.'

'So that's been what – two weeks?' I asked.

'Nearly,' said the younger. 'Now that the cold has set in, he'll be up there till spring.'

'Won't anyone cut him down?'

'Not while he's doing his work,' said the older.

'His work?'

'He's keeping the plague off us. They had it terrible in Tula.' His withered lips were sucked into his toothless mouth as he spoke.

'That was in the summer,' said the other man, evidently more thoughtful. 'It had died down long before we hung up Napoleon.'

'Are
you
going to take him down then?' came the reply, to which there was no response. Leaving the body hanging there kept away the plague, along with, no doubt, tigers, Turks, elephants and Englishmen, none of whom would have been seen in these parts since 'Napoleon' began his vigil at the crossroads. The one creature which it would not keep away was the very thing that I was due to meet that evening.

I set off back to the crossroads, leaving my horse in the village, with the plan of being there well before the appointed time. I trudged back along the road, listening to the creaking snow beneath my boots and feeling the cold wind in my face. The low crescent moon cast just enough light to see the whole landscape around me. Looking back over my shoulder, the little village glowed warm and inviting out of the darkness. I would have loved to stay and natter away the evening over a vodka with those two locals, to stay out of the cold and forget why I came to the village in the first place, but I could not. A serf can sit and remain in one state until his master tells him what he must do next. A freeman must be his own master.

Occasionally, the wind blew up a tiny snowstorm and I could see nothing beyond the scrabble of whiteness before my eyes. It would only last a moment. No new snow was falling and so, in the dim moonlight, I could see nearly as far as I had done during the day. At the crossroads, the snow showed traces of a few more pairs of feet having passed that way, but little else. The body of 'Napoleon' still hung from its noose and swung gently in the breeze, warding off all those alien terrors that might otherwise have dared to visit the little village of Kurilovo. There was less snow on his body than there had been earlier. Presumably the waning heat of the sun had been attracted to his dark uniform enough to melt a little of the snow that covered him. Any such thawing could only be superficial. After two weeks of the Russian winter, this Frenchman would forever remain frozen to his heart – or if not for ever, at least until spring.

I walked around in a wide circle, keeping respectfully distant from the corpse at its centre. My movement was partly in order to keep warm, but also to patrol each of the four roads that approached me. All of them remained empty for a long time. It must have been a little before seven that I saw the figure of a man approaching from the south. He first became visible next to the coppice I had noted earlier. I could only assume that he had been concealed somewhere within it.

As he approached, I continued to keep an eye on the other three roads which fed the crossroads. This was the most dangerous moment, when I could be blocked off along all four paths, leaving my only escape route across the impassable, snow-covered fields where I could easily be run to ground. There was no sign of anyone else. Each time I looked back towards the coppice, the figure approaching me was a little closer. Soon, it was clearly recognizable as Iuda.

When he arrived, I was a few steps away from the centre of the crossroads. He stood still, looking directly towards me, right beside the hanging man whose feet swung lazily in the breeze at about the level of Iuda's waist. Looking into Iuda's cold grey eyes, it was not difficult to believe that he was just as dead as the cadaver that hung beside him and that what now animated him was not the soul of a man, but the will of the devil.

'Good evening, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said.

'G
OOD EVENING,' I RESPONDED, STEPPING TOWARDS HIM
.

'I see you have come alone. Did Dmitry Fetyukovich not care to join you?'

'This is between you and me,' I replied.

'That is indeed true, Aleksei Ivanovich, although some of the others do have issues with Dmitry. But I agree with you – it is best to save those separate squabbles for a separate occasion. You will see that I too came alone. We will only be able to talk if we trust one another.'

'I don't trust you, Iuda,' I said bitterly.

'I'm sorry, my friend,' said Iuda with a sincerity that anyone who did not know him would have taken for genuine. 'I am unfamiliar with the nuances of your language. Of course you don't trust me. Why should you? I have not earned that privilege. But you do trust your eyes. I have chosen this place well, I hope. You can see that there is no one else here.'

'I can see that.' The wind blew up a little more fiercely. A light shower of snow had begun which, combined with the wind, reduced the distance I could see down the roads. As we spoke, I rarely looked directly at Iuda, keeping my eyes instead always prowling for signs of a distant attack. 'So what do you have to say?' I asked.

His face pulled an expression of mild anguish, as though what he had to say was distasteful, but had to be discussed – like a man ' about to confess to his wife his infidelity. 'You have now killed three of our comrades – the same number that Maksim Sergeivich succeeded in destroying.'

'I've killed more than three,' I said, attempting to twist the knife.

He pressed his lips together as though he had tasted something sour. 'We have chosen to be gracious over the death of Ioann in the cellar. Though you were there at his death and did nothing to attempt to save him from the flames, he was probably beyond salvation. To kill by omission cannot be counted as murder. As for the Russian soldier – Pavel, I believe he was called – I would not count him amongst our number. He was a useful foot soldier, but not a loss to grieve over. So we will leave the tally at three.

'We cannot but be impressed by the martial skills that you have shown as you have killed,' he continued. 'I do not know precisely what you did with Matfei and Varfolomei, but they were strong fighters, so you did well to defeat them. I saw in close detail what you did to Andrei. That was truly inspiring – not just in the skill you showed with your sword but in the relish you displayed in finishing off an already incapacitated victim. It was a pleasure to see your hatred surging forth in that way – so much more manly than your friend Maksim, sending his friends off to a remote death in which he need not participate directly.'

'I'm glad to have you as an admirer,' I said, 'but if you wanted to compliment me, you could have done it all by letter.'

'I could. I could. And that would have meant that dear Dominique could also have read my praises of you and then she would warm even more to the image of her dashing hero. But perhaps I will yet have the chance to tell her in person. The poor girl must be in something of a quandary. On the one hand she sees your bravery and heroism as you do battle with us. On the other she must see that we with whom you do battle were once your friends. She must wonder if she will ever make some similar tiny mistake that will turn you against
her
.'

'The only mistake you made, Iuda, was not a tiny one,' I said, responding with the anger that he had clearly hoped to instil. 'Your mistake was to willingly turn your back on humanity when you became a vampire. It was foolish of you to let me know that only willing victims become vampires. It erased the last trace of pity that I might have had for any of you.' Behind him, back along the road he had come from, I thought I saw a slight movement through the buffeted snow. 'I presume there is a point that you're going to come to? Some sort of deal between us?' I asked, trying to move things along.

'A man of directness, I see,' smiled Iuda. He began to walk as he spoke, almost as if trying to outflank me, and I realized that he was moving my attention away from the road down which he had come. I stepped closer to the centre of the crossroads, ensuring I still had a good view in all directions.

'But you are right,' he continued. 'We must come to some sort of accommodation. When one comes up against a strong and powerful enemy there are two possible ways to deal with it. The first is to attempt to destroy it, to wipe it off the face of the earth so that it can never again irritate one with its persistent aggression. We have both already attempted this; we have both failed.'

'I don't seem to be failing too badly. There's seven of you dead already.'

Iuda smiled, not unlike a father delighting in the premature wisdom of his child. 'Such camaraderie, Lyosha. You are right, you personally are doing well – you are alive. But taken as a group, I think the four of you have fared little better than the twelve of us.'

The flurry of snow had subsided and whatever movement I had perceived in the distance behind Iuda had gone. For as far as I could see in the silver haze of the moonlight reflected by the glistening snow, there was only stillness. I looked around again at the other roads. They too were empty. Behind me, the hanged French captain continued to swing gently with the momentum picked up from the earlier breeze.

'But there is also a second way,' continued Iuda. 'That is accommodation. A creature does not need to be an enemy just because it is powerful. Wolves do not attack bears and bears do not attack wolves. It is not that the wolf loves the bear, it is that he knows he has little chance of winning. So which would your choice be, Lyosha? Shall we continue to fight and see which of us survives, bloodied and maimed? Or shall we leave each other to go in peace and continue the comfortable lives we enjoy?'

I remained silent. I had known my answer when I spoke to Dmitry just before we parted. Such a deal would fail because I did not trust the Oprichniki. And even if they were to keep their side of the bargain, I would not have kept mine. Iuda read my thoughts.

'But I do us an injustice to make comparisons with wild animals. If the wolf and the bear seem to trust each other, it cannot be because they are wise, so it must be because they are fools. The path to personal safety does not come by hoping that one's enemies will not attack one. It comes by ensuring it – by destroying those very enemies. We both know, Lyosha, how much each one of us yearns to kill the other – how much we dream of the pleasure we will take in it. Neither of us could walk in safety with that knowledge. The only safety lies in knowing that the other is truly dead, in being sure that he can never rise again to harm one.'

His voice was rising now. The patina of civility fell away and his every expression was filled with wrath and hatred. 'Much as one can be sure that a hanged French captain, whose body one inspected in the afternoon, cannot come back to life and attack one.' He stared into my eyes just long enough see that I had fathomed what he was talking about. 'Unless of course one goes away to drown one's sorrows in vodka, allowing one lifeless carcass to be exchanged for another.'

At the same time as he spoke, I was grabbed from behind. The arms of the body hanging behind me wrapped themselves around my neck and the legs around my waist.

'You remember Filipp, of course, don't you, Lyosha?' asked Iuda, his overplayed politeness returning, but accompanied now by a look of maniacal victory in his eyes. I heard a snigger from Filipp, and he held me tighter as he continued to hang, unharmed, by the noose around his neck.

Over Iuda's shoulder I saw movement. A coach emerged from the coppice from which Iuda himself had earlier come into view. Iuda turned and saw it too.

'And soon the others will be here, and then we can all go away to some nice, quiet, secluded retreat and have dinner. Oh, I know you're a brave man, Lyosha, and your own painful death will mean little to you, but it will give me the deepest satisfaction to know that you understand exactly how much Vadim and Maks suffered as they died.'

The coach was moving only at a canter and would take several minutes to reach us, but if its driver chose to break into a gallop, it would be with us in less than two. I had to act there and then. I lifted my feet into the air, so that Filipp now supported my whole weight, and kicked hard at Iuda's chest. The impact merely caused him to take a step backwards, but it sent me and Filipp swinging back on the rope. Filipp could do little but hang on to me. He tried to tighten his grip around my neck, but his initial aim had been to hold, not to throttle, and so it was to little effect.

I managed to free my sword from its scabbard and we swung around in a wide ellipse with Iuda at its centre. He was crouched and ready; in his right hand he held the double-bladed knife that once, long ago, he had been so keen for me not to see. He made a few thrusts at me as I passed, but could not seem to get the measure of the irregular motion of the human pendulum confronting him. I had no control over where we were going, but I waited until we swung close enough for me to strike. In the distance, the other Oprichniki had seen what was happening, and the coach broke into a gallop.

One swing brought us close enough to Iuda, and I struck. I knew from Maks' experience that stabbing would be to no avail, so instead I used the edge of my blade. I caught Iuda across the upper right arm and he yelled as he put his hand up to the wound. At the same moment, I heard the sound of splintering wood and Filipp and I came thudding to the ground as the gallows above us gave way under our combined weight. As we hit the snow, Filipp lost his grip on me and I felt the coils of the rope which had supported us snaking down on to me. I rolled aside just in time to avoid being hit by the wooden beam to which the other end of the rope was tied.

Filipp was not so lucky. The heavy beam hit him hard in the chest, knocking the breath out of him, but doing him little serious damage. Still clutching my sword in my right hand, I now took my wooden dagger in my left and began to back away, looking to see which, if either, of the two Oprichniki would pursue me. Iuda was hanging back, unable now to use his knife because of the wound to his arm. Filipp, however, was almost instantly on his feet and advancing towards me, the noose still trailing from his neck.

The coach was less than a minute away now. I backed behind the vertical post of the gibbet as Filipp came towards me. Iuda shouted something to him and he replied scornfully, clearly not needing advice in the matter. He lunged at me to one side of the post and I dodged round the other, running for all I was worth until a depression in the ground, hidden beneath the snow, tripped me and I fell. I quickly rolled on to my back and saw Filipp's bulky form looming towards me, his jaws wide open in readiness for the attack.

Suddenly his head jerked back and his body came to a halt. His hands reached up to his neck. The broken beam at one end of the rope had become embedded like an anchor in the snow. Wrapped round the post, the rope had become taut and Filipp could move no further. I sheathed my sabre and, grabbing the other end of the rope, began to pull. Rather than let himself be hauled off his feet, Filipp trotted along with the rope. Meanwhile, as well as pulling the rope, I began to cut across in front of him. Iuda was screaming instructions at his fellow Oprichnik, but Filipp was in no position to obey. As his back thudded against the wood I jerked the rope fast across his chest and ran twice more round him, pinioning him against the post.

Realizing the imminent danger, Iuda began to approach through the snow. The rope would not hold Filipp for long, but it was not my intention that he should be alive for long. I lunged at him with the dagger, straining hard on the end of the rope so that he was squeezed still tighter against the post and giving me even greater force against him. The wooden blade paused momentarily as it came up against his overcoat, but the cloth soon yielded and I felt the blade separate his ribs and slide into his heart.

I took no time to linger over his decaying body, but withdrew the dagger and turned to face Iuda. This was my golden opportunity to destroy him at last. The blow to his arm had weakened him and he seemed in no mood to fight. He backed away from me cautiously. I had little time to think. The coach was now only seconds away from us. Though I might take Iuda's life, it would be at the cost of my own. I turned and fled towards the village.

The snow-covered road was not easy to run down. Once I had built up speed then maintaining it was feasible enough, but to turn, stop or even slow down would risk me slipping and falling to the ground. Behind me I heard the coach come to a stop. There was shouting between its occupants and Iuda and then I heard the rattle of the harness and the wheels turning once again. I had managed to cover perhaps a tenth of a verst in the time they had taken to set off after me, but now it would be only a few moments before they caught up with me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that they were still distant, but gaining. The black silhouette of the coachman stood upright against the sky, whipping his horses furiously.

I kept on running, swifter than I had ever done before, but still I knew that the coach would soon be upon me. I heard its clattering wheels, partly muffled as they cut through the snow, coming closer and closer. I was lucky they had chosen a coach, not a troika or any kind of sled, which would have run faster, but even so, they were faster than me. The coachman's whip cracked again and again as he urged the horses towards me. They came so close that I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. I felt sure that the Oprichniki planned to run me down and let me be crushed to death in the snow under hoof and wheel, but that would have been too pleasant a death for them to inflict.

Rather than let the horses trample me, the coachman steered them to one side and the coach began to pull level with me. I looked over my shoulder again and saw the coachman – it was Foma – leaning out from his seat towards me, precariously balanced and leering like a gargoyle from the side of a western cathedral. In his hands he held his whip loosely so that the leather formed a long loop. He tossed the loop towards me and I felt it brush against the back of my head. He was trying to lasso it around my neck, so that he could drag me into the racing coach.