A bearded man holding a hayfork at the ready dashed towards one of the bus’s wheels. Veronika blocked his way. Anna, swinging her flail, rushed to help her sister.
The next second light spears were thrust against my back and my chest. They did no damage, but pain engulfed my calf like a red-hot whiplash. I yelled and pulled out the small harpoon, which looked like a broom, only the twigs were steel spokes tied round with wire.
Men in jute-rope waistcoats came running out. This simple homespun protection took the place of armour for them. They were armed with equal simplicity—stakes with charred points on their ends. Some of them had convex shields woven out of osiers, like baskets.
For some reason the other attackers were dumbfounded by the appearance of this group. The man with the fork forgot about the bus and roared: “Bastards! Where are you going? You’ve jumped the queue!” And he impaled one of the men without armour on his long prongs.
“Over here, over here!” the bearded man roared furiously. “The Ulyanovites are jumping the queue!”
Hearing his strident summons, some of the warriors from the second troop abandoned the fighting by the trailer and ran to attack the newcomers. In order not to be thrust back by the impact, the armourless men ran to meet them.
Thanks to this incidental strife between the allies, I was given a breathing space and I withdrew, limping back closer to the roadblock. Ievlev was flinging rounds of sawn tree trunks, as heavy as large boulders, felling members of the greatly reduced animal-headed army, crushing heads and torsos.
Lutsis, fending off his adversaries with an axe that had a horned skull stuck on it, shouted:
“Alexei, let’s get to the bus!”
In among the trees the orange dots of torches flared up. Another brigade, the fourth of the evening, appeared, walking in such dense formation that it was impossible to tell how many men there were. The polished metal of their breastplates and their pointed helmets glinted brightly. Their visors, with holes in them that made them look like the grilles of stoves, were lowered. Their arms were protected by shoulder plates and bracers, and most of them were holding bladed weapons. Their leader’s left fist was covered by a rounded piece of steel, like a boxer’s glove, and he used this knuckleduster to deliver crushing uppercuts and hooks. His brigade tore into the armourless fighters as they were dragging their wounded into the bushes, like ants. For a minute the slaughter shifted to and fro between the forest and thickets of alder. The armourless men fought desperately; even when they were felled, they grabbed the armoured men’s legs and tumbled them to the ground, in order to thrust a kitchen knife into their adversary and then die.
Reinforcements came rushing out of the forest from both sides. The warriors were clutching crude short pikes, gaffs with triple hooks, clubs studded with nails, and axes. The new forces arrived in two independent groups; acting according to a coherent plan, they ran in and wedged themselves between the bus and the wrecked Niva. Only seconds earlier Anna and Veronika were standing beside me, and a short distance away Tanya, Kruchina, Dzyuba and Ozerov had readied themselves for action, and now suddenly we had been scattered, as if an ocean wave had surged over us.
I saw an axe swooping down, then the metal top-plate of a helmet sent flying by a blow from my hammer. A grinning mouth contorted in a scream, flooding a ginger beard with blood. A bayonet jabbing in the rush, a jagged-toothed bear spear darted to and fro.
The knobbly iron apple of a flail slammed into my helmet. For a moment I was stunned by the piercing clang of bronze, and the pain shot into my neck, as if someone had driven a spike between the vertebrae. I collapsed onto the sticky earth, no longer aware of anything but the agonizing chime that had flooded my ears. I pulled the helmet off my head, as if it were the only source of the unbearable sound. Someone’s boot turned me face up. I made out Anna, aiming her heavy flail with two hands. The hawkish claw of a triple gaff was thrust into Veronika’s underbelly. I was grabbed by the scruff of my neck and dragged along. I gulped in air three times. My hearing returned abruptly and painfully.
A black silhouette leaned down over me and asked distinctly in the squeaky womanish voice of a eunuch.
“Your name?”
All I could see of the face was a thin-lipped mouth and a plump chin with a dimple. Everything else was covered by a mask with a horizontal slit for the eyes.
There was no reason to be secretive and I answered, squinting at the iron stump on the end of the speaker’s left hand.
“Vyazintsev.”
“Then live.” The figure got up and a dark patchwork of leaves swayed above me.
“Nikolai Tarasovich, Alexei’s here!” Lutsis’s voice shouted somewhere near me.
The warrior walking away deftly caught the clanging axe on his glove and slashed with his own sword.
Someone threw me over his shoulder and carried me. The ground swayed like a chiming bell. A woman trilled piercingly, as if she were giving birth. Nayda crawled along with a broken back, dying. An animal-headed whaler flung a harpoon from a distance of three metres. Sukharev strained in awkward amazement to get a look at the sharp point that had suddenly emerged from his back…
Dezhnev dragged me into the bus.
“How are you?”
“All right…” I collapsed onto a seat.
Veronika was lying on the floor beside me with her padded jacket pulled up and her trousers lowered to her pubic mound. She was pressing her hands to her lower stomach, which was slashed into three parts. At every breath dull, almost blue, blood spurted out through her cramped finger. Anna was frantically trying to plug the wound with a bunched-up rag.
Garshenin was trying to drag limp Sukharev into the bus. The harpoon, which had pierced right through Sasha’s body, had stuck in the narrow doorway, and his dangling head shuddered with each jerk.
Twice the bus heeled over steeply with a jolt. Unfamiliar voices yelled outside. Stones smashed into the windows, sending showers of glass splinters flying. Garshenin and Vyrin jumped onto the step, followed by Ievlev.
“Quick! Get a move on!” he yelled hoarsely to the remaining Shironinites.
“Get into the car!” Garshenin told them in a cracked whisper.
As if they had heard Garshenin’s advice, the remnants of the first two brigades pushed small trees in under the bottom of the Niva and overturned it. The armoured brigade, the same one that had dealt so skilfully and cruelly with the deprived readers from Ulyanovsk, dressed in their yellow peasant bast, was crowding round our comrades, preventing them from breaking through to the bus.
“They won’t make it!” Vyrin raged.
With every second they moved farther away—Lutsis dragging Svetlana, Tanya criss-crossing with her rapier. Kruchina waved in farewell, telling us to continue our flight. Ozerov and Dzyuba, with their backs together, had fused into a single, unassailable fighting organism, stabbing with a pike and lashing with an axe. The road took a turn and they disappeared from view…
“Marat Andreyevich!” I roared. “Reverse!”
The breaks squealed like a stuck pig. Our inertia first pressed me against a seat. Then it flung me onto the floor, slippery with blood. Veronika’s head bounced off her sister’s knees and Sukharev, posthumously freed from his harpoon, flew off the seat and tumbled over.
“Marat Andreyevich!” Vyrin yelled raucously. With his head stuck out of the window, he pointed to the road, where a new danger was lurking directly in out path. Up ahead, about a hundred metres from the skidding bus, there was a tall new roadblock, twice as wide as the first one. There were armed men swarming beside the tree trunks, as massive as museum columns. A moment later they came running in a dense, roaring pack—at least fifty raging warriors…
“Marat Andreyevich, go back!” I howled. “We’ll pick up our people and go to the village soviet! Turn round!”
The rounded snout of the bus slammed into our enemies’ backs. The mighty blow flung a spreadeagled body up onto the windscreen and tossed another, waving its arms
about, up into the air like a bull.
Garshenin thrust his scythe out of a broken window like an oar. The black blade sliced through an armoured torso. Nikolai Tarasovich and Anna exited as a landing party and now they were hammering the adversary right and left. Blood spurted as Vyrin, clinging to the door handle, slashed with his entrenching tool. The formation scattered and our enemies dashed to the edges of the road in panic. Then I saw the Shironinites. There were only four of them. Kruchina in a slashed cuirass and dented fireman’s helmet, with a slim dart that looked like an antenna protruding from his hip. Tanya’s hair had clumped into coarse, bloody plaits and her forehead was dissected by a ragged, bleeding wound. Dzyuba lowered his hammer pick and covered his face with one hand, as if there was a blinding light shining into his face. Ozerov staggered back as if he had seen some forbidden miracle.
“Why? Igor Valeryevich groaned a moment later. “Now we’ll all die!”
I read reproach in Tanya’s eyes. She hadn’t wanted us to come back either. The expression on Dzyuba’s and Ozerov’s faces, soaked in blood as if they had been flayed, was not joy, but bewildered despair. Hoping for nothing, condemning no one, they had been willing to pay with their lives for our chance to escape, and we had foiled their plan.
Then I saw Lutsis stretched out on the ground. He was frozen in movement, as if he were crawling on his belly. Svetlana was lying farther away with her head in a murky puddle of blood that looked like a halo…
I heard an inhuman roaring and a loud trampling moving closer. It sounded like a gang of growling throats straddling a herd of crazed horses. On a high note the shouting merged into a wolf-song to the moon. The hoarse voice howled of a Book, of the horrors of suffering endured, of imminent delivery from torment. The improvization, with neither rhythm nor metre, like the keening of women at a funeral, flew through the forest. And men came back, full of deadly determination, to finish what they had started…
“Everyone into the bus!” I yelled, rousing myself from the enchantment of terror. “That’s an order!” Then I turned Lutsis over onto his back and stumbled along, dragging him to the door. Ievlev picked up Svetlana. Overwhelmed by new grief, Anna was almost dragged along by Kruchina.
Rasping blows hammered against the sides of the bus. The motor roared. Slashed tyres burst. Riddled with spears, the LAZ tore its way out of encirclement, picked up speed and hurtled out of the forest…
That was how I remembered those fleeting seconds for ever: the road, bodies, the rattling, sagging bus. For the last few metres we were already travelling on tyre rims that stuck in the ground…
The village soviet was guarded by a small group. They barely managed to close the heavy log gates before the bus smashed through them in a spray of glass, squeezed in between the logs of the stockade and stopped dead, becoming the new gate. Half of a bloodied torso in a padded work jacket, with its head twisted unnaturally, protruded from under the bumper that had ploughed up the ground.
A minute later the yard was ours again. This battle was the shortest of all. A small Yakut with a broad, flattened nose deftly dodged Dzyuba’s hammer pick, dived under Garshenin’s scythe and caught Ievlev’s leg a glancing blow with his pike, but couldn’t avoid the hammer and died without a sound, as if he didn’t even feel his death. Vyrin’s entrenching tool turned a deadly somersault as it flew through the air, burying itself deep in the face of the third guard with a crunch, and blood spurted out of the man’s dissected eye. The fourth guard tried to escape by squeezing between the bus and the stockade, but got stuck and was mercilessly dispatched by Anna.
BREATHING SPACE
THEY HELPED ME clamber onto the roof of the bus. From up there I surveyed the road that cut across the dreary meadow like a cartridge belt—our pursuers had long ago changed their run to the jogging pace of a trek. Small scattered gangs were seeping stealthily out of the forest, but they were in no rush to storm us.
Our enemies occupied the huts farthest away, on the outskirts of the village. The campfires of numerous bivouacs blazed up in the meadow; axes started tapping. Then I realized that the combined army had called a halt; nothing could be expected to happen in the next few hours, and I could get down.
When I reached the ground I felt blood squelching in my boot. The frenzy of battle was gradually receding. Bruises I hadn’t felt before flared up under the tyre rubber. My forehead was burning as if it had been bandaged with a dressing of crushed glass.
Ievlev pulled a long fragment of the snapped-off tip of a Yakut pike out of his leg. Vyrin took off his jacket cautiously, to avoid causing himself unnecessary pain. The roubles had left crimson imprints on his back and sides. Dzyuba could only see with one eye—the other had almost disappeared under a blue swelling. On his left hand, instead of a middle finger and little finger Ozerov had wiggling scraps of skin and gnawed chicken bones. He hadn’t even noticed when it happened to him. Kruchina had taken a close swipe to the jaw with a club and the sharp spikes had ripped deep into his cheek and chin. Marat Andreyevich had paid for ramming the gates with a rib broken against the steering wheel and numerous contusions…
Smeared with their own blood and the blood of others, mauled and weary, the Shironinites gradually revived. The emerging physical pain brought with it the bitter realization of irreparable losses. The failed breakout had cost us dearly. Sukharev and Lutsis had been killed; Svetlana and Veronika had bled to death…
My throat constricted as if it were caught in a prickly noose when Anna fell on her sisters’ bodies and started wailing. Tanya wept and even stern Igor Valeryevich sobbed. Grisha could barely hold back his tears. Marat Andreyevich’s face had turned to stone and his teeth were clenched. Nikolai Tarasovich turned away so that no one would see his eyes. Ozerov, Dzyuba and Garshenin stood there with their heads lowered…
But, alas, there was no time for grieving. We carried our dead comrades into the house and then Marat Andreyevich started treating our wounds. By sheer luck, all the medical supplies were in the bus. Ozerov’s crushed fingers were removed immediately. He bore the amputation manfully, without a single groan. For more than an hour Marat Andreyevich treated and stitched up ragged wounds, staunched blood, applied splints to cracked bones, wound on bandages and rubbed ointment into bruised and battered shoulders, sides and backs.
Relentless pain poked about with a needle between my neck vertebrae and fanned glowing coals under the dressing where my leg had been torn by a harpoon. I greedily ate a full pack of analgin and then asked for another one. Soon my body lost all sensitivity.
As far as our strength and medical analgesia permitted, we reinforced the yard, rolling out metal barrels that had not previously found any use in our home life and setting them along the wall. We set a platform of planks across the metal bottoms so that we could get above the stockade and repel the attacking enemy from up there. The cobblestones that had been used to pave the paths were gouged out of the earth and piled in heaps. The rear windows of the bus were blocked off with logs. Only after we had prepared the village soviet for a storm did we allow ourselves a brief breathing space. The stalwart Ievlev and Garshenin volunteered to be sentries.
In the porch I collapsed, exhausted, onto the couch, sticking the first bag that came to hand under my head. A sharp corner jabbed into my temple. After contemplating the discomfort, I pulled out the wooden frame with Margarita Tikhonovna’s photograph in it. I read the dedication, noting to myself that the recipient of this kind memento was unlikely to survive the next day. There was no hope left, just as there was no trace of my former despondency.
Following the established tradition of the world, before facing deadly danger, I had to put my earthly affairs in order. After a moment’s thought I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t really have any. Neither did I feel any fear in the face of the imminent battle.
For the sake of decency I remembered my father, my mother, my sister and nephews, but somehow I felt neither love nor tenderness. I gazed into my family’s faces with surprise
d indifference. They seemed to me like pale copies of a dream from last year. It was absurd and ridiculous to feel any familial emotions for these ghosts. The city where I had lived for almost thirty years, my school, my two institutes, my former wife, my work—it had all become a stupid, unreal game, like some boring popular film that I had watched many years ago in a summer cinema in the Crimea.
A sticky sense of unease forced me to open my eyes. It was simplest of all to blame this incomprehensible coldheartedness on the analgin, which had numbed my feelings as well as my body, but I knew another explanation. I had read Gromov too often. The Book’s implant, full of sparkling happiness, had invaded the entire space of my memory, simultaneously rendering my own childhood worthless. I had to make a serious mental effort finally to convince myself that this sequence of faded portraits, burned-out events and blurred landscapes was once my real life.
I spent a long time splashing cold water onto my face out of a bucket, and the apparition that had restricted my breathing relaxed its grip. To be honest, I no longer understood what I had been afraid of. Alexei Vyazintsev’s self-awareness was not in any fundamental danger; he had always remained himself, regardless of the nature of his memories.
I reminded myself yet again of the strict mental discipline without which the Book would undoubtedly herd the events of my childhood into the reservation of forgetfulness. But then this touching concern was also absurd. Was it worth taking care of this ordinary past, or feeling compassion for its morose shadows, if soon there would be no present, and no future either?
A campfire was blazing in the yard. The entire reading room gathered round the flames. Ievlev sang a front-line song about a dark night. Ozerov pensively tested the blade of his axe with his thumb. Vyrin dozed, leaning on Marat Andreyevich’s shoulder. Tanya honed the point of her rapier with a whetstone. Anna was a frozen, hunched-over stone idol. Garshenin strode round the edge of the village soviet’s roof with a pair of binoculars—watching over the surrounding area.
The Librarian Page 30