by Smith, Dan
Kashtan’s pleasure was clear; she liked the forest even less than I did. It was an unnatural place to her, primordial and full of hidden threat, and she was happiest where she could see approaching danger and where there was space for her to run. When we climbed into the saddle, she needed no more encouragement than a quick nudge for her to race out into the steppe. She thundered through the hoarfrost, scattering the ice dust, and there was a great sense of freedom in her movement. The air was clear, as fresh as I had ever known it, and I couldn’t help smiling at the joy of that moment. In those brief minutes, everything was forgotten and I knew that Anna felt it too.
As Kashtan began to tire, she slowed to a trot and Anna turned to me. She wasn’t smiling – happiness was still beyond her – but something had lightened in her.
‘What about the dog?’ she asked, looking back at the trees. They were some way behind us now, and I wished it was as easy to put other things behind us. How simple life would be if we could forget the things in our past.
‘He’ll catch up,’ I said. ‘He did last time.’
‘We should call him Tuzik. Mama said that if she had a dog, she would call it that. She said it was a good name for a dog.’
‘Tuzik.’ I nodded. ‘It is a good name.’
With little available cover, we stayed close to the road, and when Anna asked if we shouldn’t try to cover our tracks, I explained that it would be easy to follow us in the open, whichever route we took, so we might as well take the most direct one. At least on the road, our prints could mingle with the many others. I didn’t need to tell her that if the riders had been able to follow us through the night, they would see us almost as soon as they came out of the trees, but I knew she hoped, as I did, that they had not. We had been able to travel a good distance during the night, but it would have been impossible for anyone to track us.
Around midday, we came into a small village, just six houses set back to one side of the road. The izbas were in various states of ruin, but none of them was untouched by fire. We had watched from a distance, seeing nothing moving and decided it was safe to approach.
‘Horse droppings,’ I said, pointing to dung scattered on the road in front of the houses. ‘Looks quite fresh.’ I dismounted and went to look at it, moving it with the toe of my boot. It was still soft, a little damp, and a smell came off it too. ‘There are tracks here. Maybe a couple of horses.’ I squatted to study the hard ground, seeing marks where the frost had been disturbed and the mud pressed into hoof prints and boot prints. ‘People too. Someone’s been here recently.’ I looked up at what was left of the buildings. ‘Maybe just this morning.’
Neither of us said it, but we were both thinking the same thing.
Koschei.
By now Tuzik had caught up with us, and he sniffed the dung, then trailed around the front of the izba, testing everything, spending some time around the base of an intact water barrel to one side of the shattered ruin. It was the kind of barrel peasants used to store water brought from the river, or to collect fresh rainwater. Tuzik cocked his leg to mark the base of it, then caught scent of something else and hurried out of sight, nose to the ground.
‘What’s he found?’ Anna asked.
‘Probably a rabbit,’ I told her. ‘Wait here.’
‘Don’t leave me alone, Kolya.’
‘I’ll be right where you can see me. I’m not going anywhere. Just stay on Kashtan, and if anything happens, you know how to ride her, right?’
Anna nodded.
‘Then stay here.’ I pulled the revolver from my pocket and went into the ruin of the first house.
All that remained was the north wall and the pich; everything else had crumbled in the heat of the fire. I took a blackened stick and poked in the ashes, looking for anything that might be of use, but found nothing. I raised a hand to Anna, letting her know everything was all right, then I moved on to the next house, but this one was as ruined as the last.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I called to Anna.
‘Can we go, then?’ She didn’t like it when we stopped. It was as if she were more aware of our pursuers than I was. Even now, as she spoke to me, her eyes kept going to the horizon behind us, looking for the seven riders. But, for now they were nowhere to be seen.
‘Not yet.’
If Koschei had been here, there would be something to confirm it.
So I told Anna I would check the rest of the houses and moved on to each one, raking through the debris to find some sign, but it wasn’t until I ventured into the yard at the back of the last izba that I found what I was looking for.
Tuzik had already discovered the bodies and was licking blood from the back of one man’s head. He looked more like a wolf than ever when he was standing over those corpses. I stopped, wondering how he would react to me. I didn’t blame him for what was instinctive, but I couldn’t let him continue, not while I was here, so I slapped my hands together and kicked him in the ribs when he displayed a reluctance to leave. However much wolf he had in him, he had lived with humans long enough to know what a kick meant, so he yelped and skulked away, averse to losing a meal.
There were four bodies lying in the frost, and while the cold made it difficult to tell how long they had been here, I had seen enough dead men to estimate that it had been no more than a few days. Each of them was naked from the waist up, and each of them with the skin flayed from both hands. I could only imagine the terror they must have felt waiting for their turn to be tortured, the pain they would have endured when the skin was peeled away. The perpetrators would have been high on their power and bloodlust while they carried it out. Perhaps drinking to heighten their enjoyment.
Tuzik sat a few paces away, watching as I stood over the bodies.
The flaying reminded me of what I had seen in Belev, but such an act was not unknown elsewhere. Although my instinct told me Koschei had been here, this kind of atrocity did not necessarily point to him. I had seen things like it before when I had still been fighting. It was an effective way to persuade men to confess to almost anything, and it acted as a good deterrent from anti-Soviet activities when witnessed. It was the kind of act that had made me want to leave the army and return home.
However, the loss of skin had not been the cause of death for these men. One of them had suffered the same fate as Galina’s husband, while the other three had been shot using a common method of execution for Cheka units. A single bullet fired downwards into the back of the neck was an effective and economical means of despatching large numbers of prisoners. Two of them were lying face down, side by side, but the last body was lying face up, dry, dead eyes staring at the sky, and it was clear this was not the way he had been left by his killers. Whoever had shot him had left him face down like the others, but someone had turned him over. The blood on the ground beside him and the imprint in the frost told me that much.
The man must have been in his fifties when he died, maybe a little younger. He had been a working man, from the look of his complexion, weather-beaten and old beyond his years, so it was difficult to be sure of his age. His beard was thick, but his torso was thin and pale, his ribs visible. His skin was marked all over with bruises, indicating that he had been beaten as well as skinned before he was shot. And in the centre of his chest, an angry red burn in the shape of a five-pointed star. The same star I had seen in Belev, and the same star Lev and Anna had seen.
‘Koschei,’ I whispered.
I turned the remaining bodies onto their backs, rolling them over and looking at their bruised faces, but I recognised none of them and it occurred to me that whoever had turned the first body had seen all they needed to see. They had moved only one of the men and left the others as they had found them. One look at the red star had been enough for them to know who had done this. They hadn’t been here to identify the victims, only the perpetrator.
Perhaps I was following more than just one trail now.
And when I turned to walk away, I saw something that confirmed my suspic
ions.
24
‘Did you find something?’ Anna asked as I came back to her. ‘What is it?’
I stopped and shook my head.
‘Dead people?’
I didn’t need to answer for Anna to know she was right. Instead I studied the object in my hand, turning it over to see it better in the light.
‘What’s that?’
I held it up for her to see.
‘A cigarette end?’
‘Found it over there,’ I said. ‘Behind the houses.’
‘What’s so special about it?’
‘See this?’ I said, holding it up in front of her to look at. ‘The way this is rolled with the piece of card?’ There might be a thousand, a million people who did the same thing, but I had only ever known one person to do it, and it was too much of a coincidence to find it here. Beside the overturned body. ‘I think I know who smoked this.’
‘Koschei?’ she asked.
‘No. Someone else who’s looking for him.’ And if Tanya had come this way, then it was another clue to confirm I was on the right track. But the red star had been the biggest give away. Koschei had left his mark here.
‘Who is it?’
‘Someone I met.’ It was then that I remembered the cigarette she had given me. The one I had half smoked behind the church and put into my pocket. I took it out now and smelled the end, comparing it to the smell of the one I had found here, but the two just smelled of burned cigarettes.
‘Who?’ Anna asked.
‘Two women I met in Belev. My village. They’re called Tanya and Lyudmila. I think they might have been here not long ago. The prints I found.’
‘Are they soldiers?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Tanya had been here. I was certain. She had been here recently, and she had found the bodies before moving on.
I split the cigarette and brushed the tobacco into my pouch, then replaced it in my satchel and took out the water bottle.
‘We’re getting closer,’ I said, looking back for any sign of the riders while unscrewing the cap. ‘We’ll follow these prints for now.’
‘What about Tuzik?’ Anna asked.
I rinsed my mouth and spat water onto the road. ‘He’ll catch up like always.’ I had been able to shoo him away from the bodies while I was there, but he had not left them. Short of burying them, there was nothing I could do to stop him from doing what was natural to him. He would follow us when he was ready.
I didn’t want to think about Tuzik’s meal, though, so I drank and turned my mind to Tanya and Lyudmila. It was reassuring that they had come this way – I had begun to wonder if I might have passed Koschei, or if he might have turned back towards Tambov, but the signs were clear. Something was making him press north, and I was still on his trail, probably growing closer.
I wondered what orders he might have that would make him travel away from the centre of the fighting, or if something else was driving him north, but for now it didn’t matter. The important thing was that I was still headed in the right direction. If this was the way Tanya was coming, then it was the route to finding Koschei. Her desire to find him was strong, and she might have even discovered more about him on her path from Belev. She had come from a different direction, would have found different clues. Perhaps she even knew who he was now. She, too, might have heard the name Krukov in connection with the monster she was following.
I passed the water bottle to Anna, telling her to take as much as she needed.
‘We’ll fill it up here,’ I said when she handed it back to me. I had been trained not to waste any opportunity to replenish my supplies, so I went to the barrel at the side of the nearest izba and removed the stone from the top before taking out my knife. The blade slipped under the lid, cracking the icy seal when I twisted, giving enough room for me to take hold of it with my fingertips. I dropped the lid and used the butt of my knife to break the thin layer of ice that had formed on the surface, but as the pieces began to separate, I saw that the water beneath was spoiled. Tendrils of dark algae floated and swirled in the disturbance, like they did in the still parts of the lake during the summer. Before I had time to register the strangeness of such plant life in winter, I caught sight of something else among the chunks of ice and suspended fronds.
Something beneath the surface.
Something so white it was almost glowing in the darkness.
And when I leaned closer, brushing the ice aside with the blade of my knife, I realised it was not algae that hung in the water but hair. And the whiteness was skin.
Her eyes were still open. Her mouth was stretched wide. Her arms were twisted behind her back, her body wedged in place.
He likes to drown the women.
I recoiled, dropping the canteen.
‘What is it?’ Anna asked.
I stared at the barrel as if the woman inside might push to her feet, wet hair falling about her bloated white face.
‘What’s the matter?’
Was this how Marianna would look?
‘Kolya!’
I turned away so I didn’t have to see that bloated face as I snatched up the lid, shoving it down on the barrel, closing the woman back in. I pushed it down hard, then lifted the rock into place and stepped away.
‘Nothing,’ I said as I retrieved the canteen. ‘It’s nothing. We need to go, that’s all. We need to go.’
We stayed on the road, seeing one or two small settlements in the distance on either side, always looking back, always scanning ahead.
‘My wife is called Marianna,’ I said.
Anna made no comment. I wasn’t even sure if she had heard me.
‘I sometimes call her Anna. The two of you almost share a name.’
‘And you’re going to keep looking for her, like Prince Ivan looked for Marya Morevna.’
‘Yes. Except I’m no prince.’
‘Is she pretty?’
I couldn’t see her face in my mind, so I closed my eyes and tried to picture her. I was bothered that I was still unable to see her. I knew she had hair the colour of winter wheat and eyes that were blue like a clear summer sky. I knew her nose was small and sharp and well formed, and that her lips were thin. I even knew that her left front tooth was chipped from the time she fell when she was seventeen, but I couldn’t see that in my mind.
‘Yes,’ I said, opening my eyes. ‘Like you.’
‘What about your sons? What are their names?’
I smiled to myself and imagined them all sitting round the table. Again, I couldn’t picture their faces, but I could feel them all together, Marianna taking care of them, making our little izba a good home. We didn’t have much, but we had enough. A house and an outbuilding. A small plot of land.
‘Misha is the oldest,’ I said. ‘Then there’s Pavel. He’s about your age.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Serious most of the time, I suppose, but not always.’ I remembered how excited and proud they’d been to show me the rabbits and fish they had caught when I was last there. ‘They like to be outside in the summer, just like my brother and I did, daring each other into the forest, hiding in the wheat, swimming in the . . .’ I faltered as the image of the lake came to mind and I pushed it away. ‘When we sat for a meal, there was always a lot of talk. Sometimes it was like they’d never stop.’
‘So they’re good friends?’
‘Definitely. They look after each other too. Misha always lets Pavel have the last piece of fruit or the last pinch of sugar, and Pavel lets his brother have the best side of the bed. Misha even tried to carve a wooden horse for his brother once, like the ones my papa used to carve for me.’ I smiled at the memory of it. ‘Wasn’t so good, though,’ I laughed. ‘Marianna and I thought it looked more like a goat.’
Anna smiled and waited for me to go on.
‘They’re not perfect, though,’ I said ‘Boys are boys. They argue sometimes, just like all brothers do. Like I did with mine. They answer back too. You know, wh
en they were younger, my wife used to clip them on the backside with a wooden spoon when they talked back.’
‘Didn’t it hurt?’
‘Probably,’ I laughed again, remembering how cross she would get if they dirtied the house or took food without asking. ‘But not too much. As they got older, though, they were too quick for her. Misha is like a wolf, the way he slips away from her. One time she chased him out into the road. It was autumn and the mud was thick and she slipped, right in front of the whole village. She was so mad . . . but when everyone laughed, there wasn’t anything she could do but laugh herself.’
‘Will she hit me with a wooden spoon?’
‘Of course not.’ I nudged her. ‘The spoon is only for the boys.’
It was good to think about home as a place filled with warmth and sound and life rather than the empty village I had left behind. I smiled to myself, enjoying the unexpected moment. The thoughts came to me in the way that a patch of cloud might clear on a dull day and let the sun shine through and I allowed myself to bask in them for a while as we continued along the road.
With Anna’s next words, though, the clouds reformed and closed around the gap.
‘There’s another farm.’
I scoped it with the binoculars, but it was in ruins like the last settlement. Just two deserted buildings burned to almost nothing, standing beside a single chestnut tree that had grown to lean away from the wind. In the lenses I saw the bodies hanging from the tree, twisting in the wind.
Anna was afraid to be left alone, but I didn’t want to take either her or Kashtan any closer, so we stopped a hundred metres from it and I dismounted to investigate on my own.
When I returned, I had seen more flayed hands, more branded stars, and I mounted without a word, taking Kashtan off the road and steering well clear of the farm before we came back to the road.
We were still on the right track. Koschei had been here.