CHAPTER XXII

I LOOKED OVER TO DMITRY. HE HAD RISEN TO HIS FEET AND WAS eyeing me suspiciously, calculating whether there was anything I had read in the letter that might tip the balance of my trust away from him. With self-defensive instinct, his hand reached for his sword.

'Don't worry, Dmitry. There's nothing much in there about you that I didn't know already.' I spoke with the intention of being more dismissive than comforting. There were a few details of Dmitry's involvement that had not been clear to me earlier, a few he had twisted to avoid revealing the nature of the Oprichniki, but nothing that substantially changed the nature of his attitude towards them or to anything else.

'He was an enemy of Russia. I knew that. That's what he died for,' Dmitry pleaded.

'You're a patriot, Dmitry,' I told him – a patriot and nothing more.

We found a few old tools behind the hut and between us we dug a grave for our fallen comrade. Two shards of wood formed a simple cross to mark his final resting place. For reasons that I am unable to explain – certainly not to Maks' level of satisfaction – I took off his spectacles before we placed him in the ground and slipped them into my pocket. One of the lenses was shattered, no doubt from a blow to Maks' head, but the other remained intact. Apart, perhaps, from the metal buttons on his jacket and his ancient, unidentifiable bones, they were all that would remain of Maksim, long after the rest of him was consumed by the earth in which we had buried him. I preferred that they would survive in the possession of someone who remembered the man who had once worn them.

It was dark by now, and so we decided to spend the night in the hut. It was cold. Once the sun had gone down, the temperature began to plummet. At the coldest during the nights at that time there were several degrees of frost, and it was usual to discover a covering of snow on the ground each morning that could be stirred up into a blizzard when the wind was high. We lit a fire in the stove, which would keep us in some comfort through the night.

'The difference this time is that it's my country,' said Dmitry. It broke a silence which had descended upon us after we had turned away from the grave of our friend.

'Your country?' I asked, failing to comprehend what he was saying.

'Our country, obviously, but I meant as opposed to theirs – the Oprichniki's – where I first met them.'

'So they were better behaved when they were at home – smart enough not to piss on their own doorstep?'

'No, not that,' said Dmitry resignedly. 'I just meant that my perception of it was different. They were just the same.'

Dmitry paused, but it was evident that he had more to tell. 'The same?' I prompted.

'When I told you before, about Wallachia, about meeting Zmyeevich, there was something I missed out.'

He stopped again. 'So tell me now,' I said.

'You remember I said that Pyetr, Andrei, Ioann and Varfolomei were the only ones still left from when I first met them.'

I nodded.

'Well, that wasn't quite true. After that first night, when Zmyeevich and the others had saved us from the Turks, we began to work together. We'd search the mountains by day, finding out where the Turks were and then telling Zmyeevich so he and the others could deal with them at night – just like we did in Moscow.

'But then after a few days, one of the Wallachians went missing; two days later, another. In less than a fortnight, there were only two left, from almost a dozen originally. I never saw the vampires take them, but somehow I knew – things they said; things Zmyeevich said. I couldn't really be sure, until this year back in Moscow when I first met Foma. I knew I recognized him, but I knew that he hadn't been one of the vampires who rode alongside Zmyeevich back then. Then I realized. He'd been one of the Wallachians who'd ridden alongside me; the one that went up to the castle door and called out to Zmyeevich. He'd been turned into one of them. I don't think any of the others were lucky enough to join the predators – they were just prey.'

'I'm not sure you should call either fate "lucky",' I said bitterly.

'No. No, you're right, of course. But as I said, it didn't seem so bad then. Who was I to argue if Wallachian vampires chose to kill Wallachian peasants? Mind you . . . When I left Zmyeevich and rejoined the army, the last thing I remember as I walked away was the look of fear and betrayal in those last two Wallachians' eyes.'

I was horrified. Until then, I had thought that Dmitry had been deceived, that despite what I knew, he had never had reason to suspect what they were doing behind our backs. Now I knew that he had been deceiving himself.

'Why didn't they leave too?' I asked. It was a mundane question.

'I don't know. They respected Zmyeevich as well as fearing him. Who knows, maybe they're alive and well even today.'

I let out a short laugh.

'Maybe not,' he muttered.

Dmitry was up before me and I was woken by the sound of him harnessing his horse.

'You're in a rush to get going,' I said to him.

'I'm not coming with you.'

'I see,' I said.

'I'm scared, Aleksei.' His voice quavered as he expressed the terror inside him. 'They'll not show any mercy to me – or to you. Come with me, Aleksei, back to Moscow. You don't have to face them. We can't bring back Vadim or Maks. All we can do is die like they did. They wouldn't ask us to.'

His diffidence was quite reasonable. Maks would not have seen the logic in taking revenge – in threatening it, yes, but not in taking it. Vadim would have understood the instinct, but would have counselled restraint. But I was motivated not by reason, but by hatred. I could no more rationalize the passion which drove me to pursue and erase the surviving Oprichniki than I could that which drove me to make love to Domnikiia when I had a loving wife at home. Hatred is a most powerful emotion. Leaders use it to stir up aggression in their armies and men use it to force themselves into actions that they would not contemplate without it. Hatred was the inseparable companion of the very thing that Iuda had said made me weak. While scruple could make me spare a man when every rational voice screamed to kill him, so hatred could make me kill when the arguments and reasons for doing so had long been forgotten. To divide them was impossible. Iuda might despise me for having one, but he would learn to regret my possessing the other.

'Do as you wish, Dmitry,' I said. 'I'm going to face them.'

'If they were French, or Turks, you know I'd be with you,' he tried to explain.

'We owe each other nothing, Dmitry. You know it doesn't work like that.'

'I want to help you, Aleksei, but I know them better than you do. I've seen what they do.'

'So have I. Remember?'

'You've seen nothing. What they did in Moscow? A fragment of what I saw them do to the Turks. Even side by side, the two of us could never beat them.' There was an edge of panic in his voice as he tried to convince both me and himself that what he intended to do – to desert – was in some way less than totally dishonourable.

'If it helps, Dmitry, I'm not convinced that I'd want you by my side.' It was more hurtful than I had intended it to be. Dmitry fell into an immediate silence. There was truth in what I had said on two counts. One was that, even after his apparent change of heart, he was still too close to the Oprichniki for me to trust, and the other that in his state of panic he would be of little use to anyone in a tight situation. But I had said it to try to help his decision; to make it me that decided he should not stay, rather than him.

'Thank you for that, Aleksei,' he said at length, without bitterness. 'I'm not much of a soldier any more, I know. Better to hear it from you, I suppose.' He was like a spurned lover, holding back his tears and clinging pathetically to the last vestiges of his pride. I took a step towards him, to embrace him before he left, but he raised his arms to fend me off. 'I'll just go,' he said with attempted nobility. 'You have things to do.'

He mounted his horse and began back towards Moscow at a gentle trot. Standing in the place where I had last seen Maksim alive and watching Dmitry depart, I was filled with the premonition that this would also be the last time I saw Dmitry. I recalled the miscommunication of my last words with Maks and the casualness of my farewell to Vadim. I knew that I could not let Dmitry leave quite like this.

I climbed on to my own horse and caught up with him. Perhaps if I had pleaded with him then, I would have been able to persuade him to stay with me. His joy at knowing I wanted him would have overcome his fear. But the truth was, I didn't want him with me. I just wanted him to leave on better terms.

'Take this,' I said, taking the icon from around my neck and handing it to him.

'It's no protection from them,' he said. 'You know that.'

'Do you think I'd be giving it away if it were?' I laughed, and was pleased to see something of a smile in him. 'It's a symbol, not a talisman.'

'A symbol of what?'

I did not have an answer. He put the chain around his neck and tucked the pendant into his shirt. 'When you're in Moscow, go to Ordynsky Lane,' I told him.

He looked puzzled. 'And why's that?'

'That's where Boris and Natalia are.'

He raised an eyebrow and then smiled at me. 'Thank you, Aleksei. I hope to see you soon.'

'You will,' I replied. We shook hands, and then he departed with the same steady trot of a few minutes before, but with his head held inestimably higher.

I rode back to the hut and packed my few possessions; then I turned and headed south towards Kurilovo.

It was around noon the following day, the twenty-eighth of October, when I finally reached the village. The blizzards of the past few days were beginning to abate, leaving the whole landscape as a desert of white. The crossroads where I was due to meet with Iuda that evening was a little to the south of the village. The sun was already low on the horizon by the time I inspected it. Already I could see a narrow crescent moon in the sky and even that would be following its brighter cousin round to the other side of the world before long.

As I had remembered, the crossroads was at the top of a slight hill. To the north, the buildings of the village were small and distant. To the east and west, I could see down the roads even further. The fields between the roads were smooth, blank and white. Anyone attempting to approach the crossroads by them would not only be hampered by the deep snow, but would also be seen long before they got anywhere near. The closest cover was to the south – a small coppice of trees which spanned the road almost a verst away – still far enough so that any approach from there would be seen long in advance of its arrival.

The crossroads itself was undistinguished, but for one thing – from a makeshift gibbet hung the gently swaying body of a hanged man. It was stiff from the cold and caked with snow, but I only needed to brush a little of the snow aside to discover beneath the dark-blue uniform of a French infantry captain.

I went back to the village and sat in the sole hostelry, drinking vodka until the appointed hour.

'I judge from your sword that you're a military man,' said a voice from a nearby table. I turned. It was just a couple of peasants, bored with each other's conversation and looking for an alternative. The one who had spoken was in his forties, with straggly, long red hair and bloodshot green eyes. His friend – possibly his father – was well past sixty. He had few hairs left on his head and even fewer teeth left in it.

'That's right,' I replied brusquely. My thoughts had been happily settled upon the image of Domnikiia, and I was irritated to be distracted from them.

'A bit of a forgetful one though,' said the older man.

'How do you mean?' I asked.

'Forgot your uniform and turned up two weeks late for the battle,' he laughed.

'You know – the battle. At Maloyaroslavets,' the first man explained, eager to start a conversation. Maloyaroslavets was the site of the first battle between the Russian and French armies after the latter had quitted Moscow. Like Borodino, it had been an encounter in which Bonaparte's tactical victory was to assist his strategic defeat. Though they were the victors, the French were turned back north, to retreat west along the road down which they had advanced – a road which they had already sucked dry of supplies. The town of Maloyaroslavets was almost forty versts away from Kurilovo, but it would be the closest to actual conflict that they had ever come, so it was not unnatural that it should become to the locals 'the battle'.

'I'm afraid I didn't fight there,' I said. 'I haven't been in a battle since Borodino.'

'Well, Bonaparte's probably back beyond Borodino by now,' laughed the second man. 'Maybe you should get back over there and relive your glory days.' These were the men for whom I had spent my adult life fighting. They had probably never left this village, certainly never gone outside the oblast, and yet they could criticize me for what they saw as my cowardice. That is the cross that must be borne by every spy, I heard Vadim's voice silently tell me. He is never given laurels – he must wear his medals inside his tunic. And what choice do they have? They're serfs, Maks now joined in. If they have fought, it was at their master's command. If they stayed home, it was that their masters preferred farmers to fighters, not that they preferred life to death.

There was no madness in my listening to the voices of my departed friends, only pleasure. Even when they were alive, I could at any time have conjured up their voices and their opinions. I had encountered few problems that could not be alleviated by a simple question along the lines of 'What would Maks think?' or, just as often, 'What would Marfa think?' Now, with Maks and Vadim at least, it was the only chance I got to hear them. Even if it was madness, it was a madness I would gladly choose.

I slammed my bottle of vodka down on their table with my left hand, making clear for them to see the wounds that I had earned on the Danube. 'Have a drink on me, why don't you?' I suggested. Whether it was my generosity or my manifest war wounds I do not know, but their mood towards me warmed a little.

'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.