Twelve (7 page)

This time, the Oprichniki kept their appointment. They seemed in no mood to exchange pleasantries and keen only to get on with the job at hand. We split into the groups we had determined back in Moscow. I said a far more cursory goodbye to Vadim, Dmitry and Maks than previously. I led my team of Iuda, Foma and Matfei out of the town to the south, before turning westwards towards the right flank of the advancing French.

The journey proceeded mostly in silence. Those attempts that I made at conversation with Foma and Matfei were not even rebuffed, simply ignored. Iuda was marginally more talkative, but even then only on matters directly related to our mission. It was, I suppose, wise of them. We were travelling through darkness in a direction that we knew would take us to the enemy's lines, but we had little idea of precisely where those lines were situated. It was best that we remained silent and did not reveal ourselves through unnecessary chatter. We rode on for several hours, looking and listening for any sign of Bonaparte's armies.

Some time after midnight, the crescent moon rose in the sky behind us. The light would be of little extra help to us, and might be of great assistance in revealing our presence to the enemy. Luckily, it wasn't long – much sooner, indeed, than I had expected – before we saw the first glimpse of the French campfires. The rumours of how far they had advanced were proving to be true. We dismounted and I watched the camp, about half a verst away, through my spyglass.

'How many do you see?' asked Iuda.

'There's only a dozen or so still awake, but there are several tents,' I replied. 'There could be over a hundred men there in total.'

'Too many, I think,' said Iuda thoughtfully, although to me it seemed he was stating the obvious, until he went on with, 'at least for the first attack of our campaign. Probably better if we just start out by picking off a few stragglers.'

I thought that this was somewhat pointless. While on the one hand, an attack on a camp of a hundred or so was impossible, attacking isolated soldiers in ones and twos would have no impact whatsoever. There were tactical problems too.

'Finding stragglers may not be easy,' I told him. 'They'll all stay close to their—'

I was interrupted by the abrupt French command of 'Stand up!' Looking over my shoulder I saw first a bayonet, then the rifle to which it was attached and, finally, the French infantryman holding the rifle. In all, there were six of them surrounding the four of us. 'Lay down your swords and guns!' continued the officer in charge.

The odds against us weren't insurmountable, but our survival (and, more pertinently,
my
survival) didn't seem probable if we resisted. 'Do as he says,' I said calmly to the three Oprichniki under my command.

I think that may well have been the first time I attempted to give them a direct order. As orders go, it wasn't particularly successful. As I began to unbuckle my scabbard, Matfei threw himself towards the nearest Frenchman. Two rifles fired at him. Whether they both missed completely or caused some minor wound, I could not see, but he did not flinch and soon had his man on the ground.

Taking our cue from Matfei, Iuda, Foma and I also attacked. The infantryman who was covering me was distracted and it was no problem to knock his bayonet to one side and get in close enough for my sword to be of use in a quick kill. I turned to the next man. He had already fired his musket and had no bayonet fixed, so should have been easy meat.

As I turned, the butt of his gun came into heavy contact with my temple. I slumped to the ground. My last vision before unconsciousness was of the French infantryman again lifting his rifle to deliver a final, fatal blow to my skull and behind him Iuda, his arm raised ready to attack and his mouth wide open in a silent scream.

W
HEN I CAME TO, IT WAS DAYLIGHT. I WAS ALONE. I TRIED
to recall what had happened, but all that came to me were images of utter savagery. I had seen only seconds of the fight before I was knocked out, although perhaps I may still have been half-conscious as I lay on the ground. The memories that flooded into my mind were not of any ordinary battle, but of something which felt like (and 'felt' is the right word, for I could not recall actually seeing anything) a pack of wolves ripping apart its prey rather than soldiers defeating soldiers. Also blood – I remembered much blood.

I sat up, and feeling an intense pain in my head, lay down again. I put my hand to my temple where I had been hit. It was bruised, but not bleeding and not excessively tender to touch. It was the pain inside my skull that was the real problem. I sat up again, more gently this time, and looked around.

I had been right about the blood. The grass around where we had fought was covered with it. Dmitry had said the Oprichniki were ruthless fighters. Looking at myself, I saw bloodstains on the arm of my coat. I checked my body, but found no wounds to suggest that the blood was mine. There were no bodies lying around – neither of the French nor of the Oprichniki. The immediate question was who had won the battle? If the French had won, then surely I would be dead or at least a prisoner. But if the Oprichniki had won, why would they just leave me here? On the other hand, the Oprichniki hadn't been at all keen in having us along in the first place, so perhaps this encounter had played into their hands. I was alone, and by now, they might be versts away.

I stood up, trying to ignore my headache. The bloodstains and the impressions in the grass gave some indication that the bodies had been dragged away. I followed as far as I could, into a nearby copse, but the bloodstains soon petered out and the drag marks became impossible to distinguish on the rough ground. I returned to where the fight had taken place.

My sword and my spyglass were lying beside a tree trunk. It could not have been where I dropped them, and I could only conclude that someone had placed them there deliberately. Again, this was more likely the behaviour of an Oprichnik than a Frenchman.

I looked towards the camp on which we had been spying the previous night. The remains of the fire still smouldered, but all signs of the French themselves were gone. By now they were probably in Gzatsk.

For me there was only one option; to regroup. With that end in mind, I realized a further problem: my horse had gone. By now, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that it was the Oprichniki who had won the previous night's conflict, so it must have been they who had taken my horse – left my sword, but taken my horse. Sadly, this all seemed to fit. With a sword I could defend myself, but without a horse there was little chance that I could catch up and interfere with them. It was still difficult, however, to fathom why it was they wanted rid of me. Certainly from what I had seen they were immensely capable in close-quarter combat, but I was hardly so useless as to be a hindrance to them. There was something about them that they wanted to keep from us. Some secret way of fighting that was so effective that they had to keep it to themselves. And, as far as I could guess, Dmitry knew what it was.

Even so, there was little to be gained by standing there worrying about it. I had a long journey back east ahead of me, alone and on foot.

The first issue I had to deal with was that our next appointed meeting place (decided on the presumption that the French would still be advancing, which they were) was in Goryachkino, to the north of the main Smolensk to Moscow road – the very road along which Bonaparte and his army were now advancing and which I was currently south of. I had two options. Either I could head east as rapidly as possible and then cut across the road ahead of the French or I could go across the road west of Gzatsk, behind the French, hoping to evade their rearguard, and set off east from there.

Taking a route that would lead me well behind French lines didn't seem the best option for rejoining my compatriots, so I went for the more direct route, heading east, to the south of the Moscow road. This proved to be the right choice. Bonaparte rested his army in Gzatsk for three days and so I was in fact overcautious, keeping well away from the road which was, as yet, not in French hands, and thus delaying my progress.

The first day of my journey was uneventful. Sleeping rough was not too uncomfortable in the still-warm weather of late August. I arose early and carried on eastwards once again, making as good ground as could be expected over the rough, wooded terrain and covering about 25 versts each day.

It was just after sunset on the second day, when I heard a sound way over to my right, that I first began to suspect I was being followed. A single incongruous noise in the forest is not enough to announce the presence of a pursuer – there are natural sounds all around – but I had already heard other noises from that direction. How long ago I had heard the first of them I could not recall, but the fact that they came consistently from the same direction relative to me, even though I was on the move, told me that whoever or whatever was out there was deliberately keeping pace with me. Though the sun had already set, it still cast enough light to see by. The moon had not yet risen, and even when it did, it would be a new moon. Throughout the night there would be total darkness. I made camp and used the remaining twilight to gather some wood for a fire, not for warmth, but to give some light – and with it, some hope – in case my pursuer decided to strike.

I sat beside the fire, gazing into the flames and listening intently to the forest around me. The Russian woodlands are full of noise, although those of the night are very different from those of the day. The continuous background of birdsong, which becomes so familiar during the day that it is forgotten, had begun to quieten, with only owls remaining awake. Nocturnal animals began to move around, but they were mostly small creatures. The sound of a human skirting around my campsite, just beyond the light of the fire, watching, waiting, scheming, was unmistakable against these familiar background noises of the night.

He (I presumed it was a he, although my hearing is not quite up to making such distinctions) settled down some way ahead of me, directly on the path that I would be taking the following morning, and did not move for around half an hour. Tactically, now was the time to act, but I needed no tactics to know it. Human instinct – human fear – told me that I did not want to be found curled up on the ground, exposed and asleep and at the mercy of whoever was out there. If I was to die, I would die while conscious.

I headed out towards roughly where I believed him to be and relieved myself against a nearby tree. I stood there longer than I needed to, taking the time to let my eyes adjust to the darkness away from the fire, letting the cool air prime my body for action. Walking back, I caught a glimpse of him directly in my path, pressed into a hollow in the ground, trying not to be seen. I stepped over the figure as if I hadn't noticed him, but immediately I had passed him, I turned and gave him a heavy kick in the side of his stomach.

He groaned and rolled quickly away, but not so quickly that I didn't have time to place another boot in his ribs. By the time he had got to his feet, my sabre was drawn. In the vague light of the distant fire, there was still little to see of him, but I caught the glint of a knife in his hand. My sword seemed no deterrent to him and he threw himself at me, knocking me to the ground and pinning down my sword arm with his left hand as he raised his knife to strike. Only when he was this close did I recognize him as the Oprichnik, Iuda. His eyes showed no recognition of me, only the intensity of a man intent on another's death.

My knee connected with his groin and I managed to throw him off.

'Iuda!' I shouted at him, rising to my feet, but he still seemed not to recognize me and lunged once again with the knife. I smashed the flat of my sword against his wrist and the knife flew into the darkness. My boot in his chest forced him to the ground and I held the point of my sabre to his throat.

'Iuda! It's me. Aleksei Ivanovich.' The frenzy gradually began to fade from his eyes, to be replaced by recognition. At the same time I felt a chill of fear. The last time I had seen Iuda, he had not been alone. On his own I may have beaten him, but where were Matfei and Foma? In the dark woodland, they could have been feet away and I would not have known until it was too late.

'Get over to the fire!' I indicated the way with the point of my sword. He sat down beside it and rubbed his injured wrist.

'I'm sorry, Aleksei. When you attacked me, instinct just took over.'

Such an instinct to kill seemed to me to be inhumanly strong, but I let it pass. 'Why were you following me?'

'I only caught sight of you just before you made camp. There are French soldiers around here. Your fire might have caught their attention. I thought I'd better keep an eye on you.'

'Keep an eye on me?' I laughed. 'And then try to kill me.'

'It was you that attacked me.' He sounded genuinely offended. 'If we wanted to kill you, don't you think we would have done it while you lay there unconscious back at Gzatsk?'

It was a fair point, but his 'we' had reminded me of another issue. I looked as deep as I could into the darkness around us, but saw nothing. 'Where are Matfei and Foma?'

'I left them this morning,' he said. As he did so, he too flicked his eyes from side to side about the woodland, as though expecting to see his friends. 'They're making a few attacks on the French.' He looked straight back at me, his expression giving the slightest hint that he was merely teasing me. 'We're supposed to meet up again tonight.'

'Where?'

'Further on.' He nodded his head to the east.

I knew I wouldn't discover anything if I tackled him directly. 'The countryside here must be very different from what you're used to,' I said.

He considered for a moment, as if he'd never thought of the question before. 'In some ways. We come from the mountains, but down in the lowlands, things aren't so different.'

'You must have seen a lot of our country on your journey here.' He seemed talkative, certainly by the standards of the other Oprichniki, so I hoped a few general questions might elicit a little more of their background.

'We came by boat, so there wasn't much to see,' he said. In talking of his homeland, I thought I had perceived some hint of affection in his voice, but now he was once again terse and uninterested.

'I'm from Petersburg, so I know the sea pretty well.' This was something of an overstatement. I'd swum in it, but I'd never sailed.

'You have family there?'

'Yes.' I smiled, thinking of young Dmitry, and perhaps even a little of Marfa. The image of her retroussé nose and dark eyes looking up into mine filled my mind. I might have indulged myself in talking about her, but little as I had wanted to do so with Domnikiia I desired to even less with Iuda. I stuck to my line of questioning. 'But you would have come from the south, of course. Where did you sail from? Constanta?'

'Varna. We sailed over the Black Sea to Rostov.'

I felt suddenly cold. Rostov was near the mouth of the Don. Domnikiia's stories of death travelling upriver towards Moscow fitted neatly with the journey of the Oprichniki. 'And then carried on sailing up the Don?' I asked, hoping to confirm their route.

'I should get going.' He had realized I was trying to gather information. 'I have to meet up with the others.'

'Still doing all your work at night?' I said with a sarcasm that was born of regret. I had been trying, however obliquely, to interrogate him, and as a result I had lost him as a companion. In the dark Russian night, in woods crawling with wolves and Frenchmen, friendship might be of more value than intelligence.

'It's effective,' he replied.

There was nothing I could do to keep him there. It was too late, on that occasion at least, for an olive branch. 'I'm heading for Goryachkino,' I told him. 'I should be there the day after tomorrow. The others will be there.'

'We'll try to be there too,' he said as he stood to go. Then he put his hand to his belt. 'My knife!'

I remembered catching a glimpse of his strange knife as we fought. It had a serrated top edge with backward-pointing teeth, like a huntsman's knife, but there had been something else – something odd about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

'It won't be hard to find,' I said, picking a branch of pinewood from the fire to give us some light to search by.

'No, I'll go,' he insisted, setting out into the darkness without me. His concern to keep me out of it naturally made me all the keener to see this knife. I ran after him, holding up the burning branch to see the way. It wasn't far to the spot where we had fought. I had the advantage of having seen where the knife fell as I struck it from his hand, but I caught sight of it only moments before he snatched it up. I had just time to notice what made it so strange.

It had two blades; not one from each end of the handle, like with some oriental weapons I have seen, but two parallel blades, as though two identical knives had had their handles strapped together. He slipped it into his belt before I could get a better look. Then he stood and offered me his hand.

'Well, goodbye then, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said as we shook hands. 'I'll see you again in two days, I hope. But when we do meet, don't attack me. You may not be so lucky a second time.' His final words started as a joke, but ended as a threat.

I went back to the fire, but didn't much feel like sleep. When I did doze off, it was with my sword drawn and in my hand. It was, though, I thought, unfair to worry about Iuda returning to attack me as I slept. As he had said, he'd had plenty of opportunity to kill me earlier had he wanted to. And why should he want to? The Oprichniki were on our side in this war. It seemed a long way to come just to turn on your allies. Thinking that reminded me of the route by which they had come, up the Don – the same route along which Domnikiia had described first a plague and then changed into attacks by wild animals. The Oprichniki had brought no dogs or wolves with them that we had seen, but remembering the way Iuda and the others had fought, had they needed to?