CHAPTER XXIX

EVEN 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.'

Tarasov laughed the laugh of a man who did not, in his heart, understand my sentiments. 'Well, good for you,' he said.

'So what is the French disposition at present?' I asked.

'They're pretty much trapped at Borisov,' he explained. 'They were hoping to cross the Berezina there, but Admiral Tchitchagov got in before them from the west and burnt the bridge.'

'Do they need a bridge?' I asked. 'Surely the river must be frozen pretty solid by now.'

'Ah, no. They may have Bonaparte, but we have God on our side. Haven't you noticed the thaw?' I looked at him in his heavy greatcoat, hat, scarf and gloves. He was more sensitive than I if he could notice any thaw. 'The river was frozen, but it's flowing again now. They'll never get across.'

'So we're going in for the kill?'

'Well, we can't leave them there, can we? Kutuzov is coming in from the south as well. They're trapped.'

'And who's in charge here?'

'Wittgenstein,' said Tarasov proudly.

'So will Bonaparte fight?'

'He doesn't stand a chance. He'll have to surrender.'

'That doesn't sound like him. Maybe he'll head south.'

'It won't help him. The river just gets wider downstream. He won't find anywhere to cross.'

'Until it freezes again,' I put in.

'Then he'll freeze too.'

We had come to a tent. Tarasov went inside and then soon returned to beckon me in, announcing me at the same time.

'Captain Danilov, sir!'

'Thank you, lieutenant,' said the lieutenant-colonel who sat behind a makeshift table inside the tent. Around him, a number of other officers were standing or sitting. The relaxed atmosphere of the officers' mess filled the tent. 'Sit down, Danilov,' he continued, indicating a bench opposite him. 'I'm Lieutenant-Colonel Chernyshev, by the way.' I saluted him before sitting. 'Drink?' he asked.

'Thank you, sir,' I responded.

'Wine or vodka?'

'Vodka, please sir.'

'Good man.' He handed me a glass of vodka and also offered a cigar, which I took and lit from the candle on the table.

'So tell me, Danilov, who's your commanding officer?' asked Chernyshev.

'Major Savin.'

'Savin? Vadim Fyodorovich, you mean?'

I smiled. 'That's right. A friend of yours?'

'Oh, yes. A great friend – Petersburg man, like myself.'

'Me too,' I told him.

'Really?' His interest seemed to waver a little. 'Splendid.' Then, returning to the subject that interested him more, he added, 'So how is Vadim Fyodorovich?'

'He's dead, sir.'

'Ah!' Chernyshev took the news with the numbed resilience that I have seen in many experienced army officers. Through all his bluster and bonhomie, the death of each man under his command was felt deeply. The accumulation of deaths made it more painful, but gave him more experience of hiding that pain. Some feel they can never leave the army, for fear that the sorrow of all those accumulated deaths will be released if they do. For those who do leave, the failure of civilians to understand what they have been through can be the cause of even greater pain.

'So tell me, Captain Danilov,' continued the lieutenant-colonel, his brief mourning absorbed into the mass, 'why have you come to join up with us?'

I took a deep breath in preparation to give an answer that I did not know myself. Before I could begin, one of the other officers bent down and whispered into Chernyshev's ear. Chernyshev whispered back and nodded at the reply he got.

'Well, Captain Danilov,' said Chernyshev, 'it seems we have been struck by something of a coincidence.' He waited for me to respond, but there was little that I could say. 'I am told that there is someone in this camp who claims he knows you. A prisoner, no less. A Frenchman, no less!'

He seemed particularly aghast at the fact that the prisoner should be French, though it was well within the realms of likelihood. It suddenly struck me why he should have got on so well with Vadim.

'Did he give a name?'

'No. Tell him the details, Mironov.'

The officer who had just whispered to Chernyshev now addressed me. 'He came in about an hour ago. They caught him up on the hills to the north-east. He didn't bother to put up any kind of a fight at all. He gave no name. He's wearing a French uniform, rank of chef de bataillon. All he would say was that he wanted to speak to Captain Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov.'

'He knew I was here?' I asked.

'Evidently,' shrugged Mironov.

I had been in the camp less than an hour myself. It could only be that I had been followed. 'What does he look like?' I asked.

'I'm afraid I haven't seen him myself,' replied Mironov. 'Do you want me to take you to him?'

'No, not yet,' I replied, taking another sip of vodka. 'What time is it?'

'Just gone midnight,' Mironov told me.

'And when's sunrise?'

'Around eight.'

'I'll speak to him at seven. Where are you keeping him?'

'He's with the other prisoners.'

I thought for a moment before saying, 'Keep him apart from them. Make sure he's bound hand and foot. Put him outside somewhere, by a fire – keep him warm – but definitely outside.' I was imitating Maks' plan of months before. 'And be very, very careful with him. He's dangerous.'

'You know who it is then?' asked Lieutenant-Colonel Chernyshev.

'I believe I do,' I replied, puffing at my cigar.

Once again, I slept well. I was woken up around six o'clock and had time for a leisurely breakfast before Lieutenant Mironov led me to where the mysterious prisoner was being guarded.

'I hope you're not going to spend too long with him, Captain Danilov,' the lieutenant told me as we walked across the camp.

'The word is that Bonaparte is heading south. The French are trying to build a bridge.'

'And we're to follow?'

'Absolutely. Admiral Tchitchagov is shadowing him, on the other side of the Berezina. We're already beginning to break camp. We'll be on our way within four hours.'

'I assure you, lieutenant, I'll be finished with the prisoner by dawn.'

'I hope so, sir.'

We were now some way away from a large campfire which warmed me even at a distance.

'There he is,' said Mironov, nodding towards the fire.

Beside it stood two guards, weary from their night's vigil, but still alert enough that their prisoner had not escaped. Between them, sitting on a bench next to the fire, a tall man with his wrists bound was slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. His long blond hair, straggly and dishevelled, hung forward to cover his face. Even so, he was unmistakable.

'Is it who you thought it was?' asked Mironov.

'Oh, yes,' I replied.