Twelve (42 page)

Through the whistling of the wind, I heard the howl of a wolf, which was soon accompanied by a second. I prayed that the cold would render me insensible before the wolves got to me. At the same time, I remembered the folklore that the
voordalak
could transform itself into a wolf. I modified my prayer. If the cold could not save me, at least let the howling come from regular, respectable wolves.

I remember being dragged across the snowy ground, and the sound of voices shouting all around me. I also remember the impression of mouths and sharp teeth close to my face, the repellent smell of half-digested flesh rising from a carnivorous gullet and the curiously pleasant sensation of my face being licked

.

When I awoke, the one concept that cut its way through an abundance of feelings was that of warmth. I was wrapped in a heavy fur, and near me a fire blazed in an iron stove, filling the room with heat. I tasted brandy on my lips, which must have been forced between them while I was unconscious. Beside the fire, breathing heavily, their tongues lolling from the sides of their mouths, lay two huge dogs. They could well be mistaken for wolves. Their fur was a mixture of grey and white and their grey eyes looked towards me with a blank curiosity. One of the dogs raised an eyebrow as it turned its gaze away from me towards the source of a sound.

'Drink some more brandy!'

The voice came from just behind me. A tall, bulky man stood a little away from the fire, staring into its dancing flames, breathing in its warmth through large, hairy nostrils. On the table beside me was a glass of dark liquor, with a bottle beside it. I drank and the man refilled it for me.

'Thank you,' I said, drinking again from the replenished glass.

'You're a long way from the rest of the troops,' he said.

'How did you know I was a soldier?' I asked.

'You carry a sword, even though you wear no uniform.'

'How did you know I wasn't French?'

'I didn't until you spoke,' he explained, placing a cocked pistol gently on the table beside him, 'but I do now.'

The fact that we both spoke Russian was as reassuring to me as it was to him. This far west, I could just as easily have found myself in a Polish household, where a Russian soldier might have encountered a less friendly welcome.

The dogs turned their heads across the room to the door. Another man entered, younger than the first, but still of the same powerful build.

'He's awake then,' said the newcomer.

'Yes,' replied the other, 'and he seems to be on our side, although he still hasn't told me what he's doing here.'

'I'm supposed to be meeting someone,' I explained. 'This is Yurtsevo?'

'It is,' said the older man.

'There's a farm about a verst north of here,' I went on, 'towards Mezhevo.'

'Not any more. It burnt down.'

'The French?' I asked.

'Not even the French. It burnt down more than a year ago.'

'I see. I think my friend will still try to meet me there.'

'We haven't seen anyone. Mind you, in this weather, they could walk past the village and never see it – or walk through the village and we'd never see them. You were lucky the dogs caught your scent.'

'There was that smoke we saw from over there the other day, Pa,' said the younger man.

'When?' I asked.

'Yesterday, or the day before.'

'I must go and find him,' I said, rising from my chair.

'Not tonight, you don't,' said the older man. He put his meaty hand on my shoulder and pushed me back into my seat with an enormous, casual strength that reminded me of the force that the vampire Pavel had used to hold me against the wall. As the man moved, his dogs rose swiftly to their feet and silently bared their teeth. 'You go in the morning,' he told me firmly.

I spent the night in the chair where I had been sitting, revelling in the warmth given to me by the furs and the fire. I was woken early when a woman – I presumed from her age that she was the older man's wife – came in to refuel the fire. Later, she beckoned me into another room, where I shared a silent breakfast with her and her husband and son.

Soon after dawn, the head of the household turned to me.

'You're still planning on going out to the farm?' he asked.

'I have to,' I replied.

'Well, I won't offer to come with you, but I'll show you the road. It's not far, but in this weather it's treacherous. You should leave your horse here and go on foot.'

'My horse is alive?' I asked in surprise. I hadn't even thought to consider it.

'Why shouldn't she be? She was in a lot better state to survive the weather than you were when we found you.'

I put my overcoat and hat back on and we went outside. The village was not large and the buildings seemed to huddle together for warmth in the winter cold. It had stopped snowing and the wind was lighter than it had been, but it was still bitterly cold. We walked along the single main street to the edge of the village.

'That's the road to take,' the man told me, pointing to a path that could only be discerned as a vague gap in the trees. 'It's only about a verst. There's still enough of the buildings left for you to recognize it, unless the snow's covered it.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'If you're not back in three hours, I won't be coming to look for you, because you'll be dead. I'll bury you in the spring, if the wolves leave anything of you.'

I offered him my hand, but he preferred not to take his out of his deep pockets. I headed along the road he had indicated. I turned back to wave to him, but he had already turned and I saw only his stooping back as he trudged towards the warmth of his home.

The wind blew up again soon after I set off, directly against my direction of travel, making each step more tiresome and whipping sharp flecks of snow across my face. It seemed preposterous that Dmitry had ever got here, let alone that he would have stayed here, and yet being so close, it would be ridiculous for me to turn back. The same thought might well have passed through Dmitry's mind. If he had got this far, he would have gone further, and that could be said of him even if 'this far' had only been a single step. Besides, there had been smoke, so someone had been there and that was most likely Dmitry, though it was still improbable that he had stayed.

It was thanks only to a lucky break in the wind that I didn't walk straight past the ruins of the small farmhouse. The snow had not completely covered the charred remains, which still bore some resemblance to the basic shape of the building, but shrouded in the blizzard they would have been hard to spot. Walking through the blackened timbers, I saw on the far side of the structure the remains of a more recent fire – this time a campfire. The gnarled shapes of snow-encrusted logs that had been pulled up to sit on partially ringed a wide patch of burnt wood and cinders. I put my hand to it and felt that the fire was now completely cold. It had been more than a day since it had been burning. However, I was now certain that Dmitry had been here. No one would cast more than a passing glance at this cold, deserted place, let alone stop and make a fire, unless they had reason to be there. I too had made it to the appointment, but I was too late.

I searched around the ruins of the farmhouse, looking for a message from Dmitry in the code that had served us so well, hoping to discover where he had moved on to. It did not take me long to find it. A blackened, half-burnt tabletop had been leaned against what was once a door post. It was plastered with drifted snow, but as I wiped it clean I found Dmitry's message scratched firmly into its surface:

Three days ago. Unquestionably, it had been too long to wait in this overwhelming cold, but there was no further message to indicate where he might have gone. I brushed off the rest of the snow from the tabletop and then did the same on the other side, but there was nothing more. I went back over to the place where Dmitry had made his fire and sat on one of the logs. Its hard, twisted knots dug into me and its coldness seeped into my flesh.

What was I to do now? Dmitry clearly had been here, but where had he gone? Had his plan to capture Foma succeeded, or was he yet to carry it out, or had Foma somehow turned the tables on him? Worse still, had Dmitry's plan gone even further? Had he successfully used Foma as bait, only to find himself defeated by Iuda? That could mean that Iuda was still somewhere hereabouts, waiting for my arrival. I thanked the Lord that I had arrived in the daytime.

I could only act on the assumption that Dmitry was still alive, otherwise anything I did would be futile. If I were in his circumstances, then what I would have done would be to attempt to join up with the regular army. From what I had heard in Orsha, they were heading for Borisov in an attempt to prevent Bonaparte from crossing the Berezina. That was only a couple of days' ride away. My best guess was that that would be where Dmitry would go, and so that was where I would follow.

The decision made, I drew in my feet to stand up. As I did so, I disturbed the snow beside the log I was sitting on, revealing something that glinted in the sunlight. I bent forward and cleared away more snow to discover that it was a fine silver chain, of the sort used for a necklace or bracelet. I pulled it out of the snow and found that it was caught under one of the stunted branches that protruded from the log. As I cleared the snow further, I suddenly leapt to my feet with a startled gasp.

This was not a branch; it was a human hand.

I had not been sitting on a log, but on a frozen, rigid, human corpse.

E
VEN BEFORE I HAD CLEARED THE SNOW AWAY, I KNEW THAT IT
was Dmitry. His body was, in fact, lying alongside the log on which he must have been sitting. Once he had collapsed, the blowing snow had covered them both, making them appear as a single object. I brushed the snow from his beard and hair and eyes to reveal his face. His lips and his eyes were tightly shut and his expression revealed no agony of death, just the solid determination of a man facing up to a night in the cold.

The silver chain that had first hinted at Dmitry's presence still trailed from his tightly clasped hand. I prised his fingers open one by one and found within the icon that I had given him the last time we had spoken, just after we had buried Maksim. I had been proved right and Domnikiia wrong. It had offered him no protection from death. I decided against exposing myself to the cold by putting it back around my neck. Instead I wrapped the chain around the small image of Christ and put it in my pocket.

There were no wounds on Dmitry's body that I could see; none, certainly, to his neck. Dmitry had, like so many of the fleeing French invaders, succumbed to no more terrifying an enemy than the Russian winter – an enemy more powerful, more reliable and far more ruthless than the Oprichniki could ever be.

One question remained. Had Dmitry captured Foma, as had been his plan? I glanced around the other logs that lay beside the burnt-out fire with new eyes. Each one could be interpreted through the thick snow as a twisted corpse, crawling across the ground in the agonies of death. When my eyes finally fell upon Foma's body, the form of a man became irrefutably clear. Once the idea that it might be a body had been put in my mind, what I saw could be interpreted in no other way.

Foma was lying on his front. A nodule which protruded from his back at about the level of his hips I took to be his hands, tied behind his back by Dmitry when he was captured. It surprised me that his body could exist at all outside in the daylight. I had seen the effects of the sun on Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich, and knew that little should remain. I could only surmise that the snow provided sufficient protection for his body from the sun's rays, or alternatively that once he had died of the cold and his body had frozen solid, then it was impossible for the sun to have any further effect upon it.

The body was some way away from Dmitry's, back towards the burnt-out house. It looked as though Foma had been crawling – or rather wriggling, with both his hands and his feet bound – away from Dmitry and towards relative safety. Perhaps Dmitry had yielded to the cold sooner than Foma and he had been taking the opportunity to escape, though to where he could escape I did not know. It did not matter. Foma too had become a lump of solid, icy flesh before he had got any distance.

I poked Foma's remains through the snow with the tip of my sword. He was quite solid, like stone or ice. Two days outside in this weather could turn to rock any living thing that did not keep moving. I rolled the lifeless corpse on to its back and leaned over it, wiping a little snow away from the face to verify that it was indeed Foma. It most certainly was. He had died with his eyes open, and looking into them I recognized the blackness that in life had been no more expressive than it now was in death.

The eyes flicked suddenly to the left and then to the right. I started with surprise and then looked again. He repeated the action twice, with a pause in between. Foma was not human, he was a vampire. Just as a stab wound that would kill a mortal man had no effect on a vampire, so it was impossible that a vampire could freeze to death. Though his whole body had cooled to the temperature of the world around him at tens of degrees of frost, though every fluid that had once flowed within him had now turned to solid ice, still life, or the vampire equivalent of life, could not be extinguished.

Only his eyes remained movable, though they themselves must have been tiny, hard balls of ice. They now moved rapidly in all directions through the only gap in the outer skin of snow that he had acquired, like the eyes of a man peering through a frosty window at a cosy, warm, firelit room. I was reminded of how I had seen him once before, standing frozen against the wall of an alleyway in Moscow, only his eyes moving as he inspected the potential prey that walked past him. Then his immobility had been voluntary, to help him in his concealment. Now it was forced upon him.

I do not know what it was, if anything, that Foma had been trying to communicate to me. Perhaps he had not been thinking at all, or had not even recognized that it was I who had discovered him. Perhaps they were just the eye movements of his dreams, revealed to the world now that he was unable to shut his frozen eyelids. He could be harbouring no hope that I would save him, but he might perhaps be hoping that I would kill him quickly, that he would die now rather than remain in this state of limbo until spring, when the warmth of the strengthening sun would obliterate both the winter snow and the vampire that lay shrouded within it.

As it was, his death was immediate, but by no intent of mine. I cleared a little more of the snow from his face, to see if he was capable of any further movement beyond that of his eyes. My shadow may have protected him before, but as the first blush of sunlight hit his cheek, it began to smoulder. I leapt back away from him, realizing what was about to happen. What I witnessed was strangely beautiful, not just in that I could take pleasure at the death of another of these creatures – I was becoming too jaded for that – but also in the spectacle of the display. It was as good as any show of fireworks I have seen in Moscow or Petersburg. Through the small patch of skin that I had cleared, the sun began to burn the vampire. This in turn melted more snow and even incinerated his clothes, exposing more flesh for the sun to work upon. A sparkling line of flame radiated out from Foma's head and ran in seconds down the length of his whole body, the heat melting ever more snow and the melted snow revealing ever more fuel for the combustion. A sound like the roaring of a fire combined with the whistling of the wind was emitted, following the line of flame down his body. For a moment, there was only a glow of blinding white in the shape of a man's body – reminiscent of the image I have always had of our Lord's ascension – but it quickly faded.

Soon, nothing remained but a pool of melted snow, some of which was warm enough to steam slightly. Within minutes, the winter had reasserted itself and the pool had frozen back to a gleaming sheet of ice.

I would have liked to bury Dmitry. He had been a friend for a long time; seven years. We had never been as close as Maks and I had been, but that was merely a result of our personalities, not of our hearts. He and I had trusted one another – we all had – and though, as with Maks, my trust had faltered for a moment, it had returned. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to be sure that Dmitry was aware of that. I hoped that somehow Maks was now similarly aware.

But to bury Dmitry was impossible. Even if I had had tools, the frozen earth was as hard as rock, and I would not have been able to dig deep. The best I could do was to cover him with snow and make a cross out of a couple of charred pieces of wood from the house. I hoped I would have the opportunity to return before spring and lay him to rest more properly.

I headed back to Yurtsevo. The wind, which had been against me as I had travelled away from the village, had contrived to change direction so that it was still against me as I went towards it. The snowy gale once more bit into my face, but the return journey was easier for the fact that I knew how far it was to my destination.

Once in the village, I knocked on the door of my saviours. The younger man answered.

'Did you find him?'

'No,' I replied, keeping it simple.

'I told you,' said his father, coming up behind him. 'I suppose you'll be wanting to stay here tonight as well?'

'No,' I said. 'I think I should be able to make it back to Orsha today.'

'You don't want to get lost like you did last night.'

'I'll try not to.'

'Show him his horse,' the man said to his son. The son, accompanied by the two huge wolf-like dogs, padding faithfully by his side, led me to a stable, where I found my horse fed and rested. We walked back to the house and the father handed over my bags.

'Thank you for your help,' I said to them both, as warmly as their gruff demeanours allowed.

'We're Christians,' said the father, the implication being that it was a duty, not a pleasure. I handed him some money. He looked at it with contempt – whether because it was too little or because I offered it at all, I could not tell – and then slipped it into his pocket. Their door was closed even before I had mounted my horse.

The journey back to Orsha was easy enough in daylight. The snow had already covered any traces of my journey the previous night, and though I tried to see where I had gone off the road, I could not. The sun was beginning to set as I entered the town. I gazed at it in the western sky, knowing that in that direction lay what was left of the French and with them, to the best of my knowledge, Iuda – the sole remaining Oprichnik. Back in the other direction, along the same road, was Moscow and in it Domnikiia. To the north was another road that stretched all the way to Petersburg – to my wife and my son. I returned to the same inn that I had been in two nights before. Any decisions about the day – and the days – to come could be deferred.

I ate and bathed and sank into an untroubled sleep.

When I awoke, I had come to a decision. The fine decision, the one in which would lie soul-searching and angst, was between Moscow and Petersburg, and so I chose the third path, to head west and rejoin the body of the army. It was the basis on which I knew many other soldiers had made their decisions to join up – to escape the complexity of trying to live their lives by opting for a world where they could simply pass the time trying to avoid their deaths. There was little chance, I thought, that I would be able to find Iuda (though some chance that he would find me), but even so, I could do some good helping to rout the French using the traditional methods of soldiery with which I felt the need to be reacquainted.

Still the refuse of the retreating French lay by the roadside, and became ever more sickening. Even before Orsha, I had noticed more and more that the dead horses had not simply died; they had been butchered. I could not blame the starving, desperate soldiers for turning to eating their faithful former companions in order to save their own lives. It would have started out with the horses dying of cold or of starvation; only then would they have been seen as meat. Later, though, even healthy horses had come to be regarded as a source of food, and were slaughtered deliberately. Again, I could not blame the men who did that. It was some slight respite that, as I carried on along the road, the bodies of mares and stallions became fewer and further between.

But as I headed towards Orsha, those tell-tale signs that I had seen on the carcasses of horses now became evident on the bodies of men. As the last horses died, so one food supply dried up. The living, who had already learned how to extract something nourishing from the body of a horse, had switched to applying the same skills to the bodies of their fellow men. Starvation had led to cannibalism. As with the horses, it would have begun with the violation of the bodies of those who were already dead. It would not have gone on to killing men for their meat – surely.

Was this the beginning of the path down which the Oprichniki, or their ancestors, had once, long ago, embarked? But no. As I had seen in the barn, and as Pyetr had told me, the Oprichniki ate not for sustenance, but for pleasure. They could not be compared with the degraded, starving men who had turned in desperation to the flesh of their comrades. But then, I too ate for pleasure. Nourishment is a requirement, but it was only the tiniest fraction of the motivation behind any meal I had enjoyed in the lowliest tavern in Moscow. Was there some parallel moment in the histories of vampires and humanity when consumption was transformed from a necessity into a vice?

I was closing now on the rearguard of our own Russian armies, and the road became busier with stragglers trying to catch up and with couriers ferrying messages in both directions. Still no one bothered even to begin to clear up the mess that the Grande Armée had left in its wake; and nor did I. Bonaparte had not yet been vanquished. There would be time for clearing up later.

Two days out of Orsha, and still some way east of Borisov, I came upon a fairly large encampment of Russian troops. I rode up to the sentries and dismounted. It had already been dark for some hours, and they were wary of a man who did not wear a uniform.

'Password?' one of them barked at me.

'I've no idea, I'm afraid,' I told him, 'but here are my papers.' I handed over my credentials, which he inspected. They were clear enough to convince him of my rank and also gave him some idea I was not a part of the regular army. Beyond that, he judged it better not to ask questions.

'Can you take me to your commanding officer?' I asked him once he had returned the papers. He ran to a tent and returned with a young man of about twenty, in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant of the imperial guard infantry.

'Captain Danilov, I take it?' I acknowledged his greeting. 'My name's Tarasov. Pleased to meet you. So what brings a man in your line of business to the front line?' There was no sign of resentment in his words. He was a professional soldier, and understood there are many ways in which a man can serve his country. With a gesture of his hand, he indicated that I should follow him through the camp.

'I've come to fight,' I explained as we walked.

'I see,' he said, with a hint of disbelief. 'Fed up with the spying game then?'

'There's no one left to spy on.'

'There'll be no one left to fight soon, either, thank heavens. If I'd been in your shoes I'd have given it another couple of weeks and Bonaparte would have been long dead.'

'I need to feel the sword in my hand once again.'