Red Winter

23

When morning finally broke, the low sun was bright and good. It was as welcome as any morning had ever been, and though its light lacked heat, there was enough for it to burn away what was left of the mist. Our spirits were lifted even further when we came to the edge of the forest and stepped out into the open. There was a greater chance of being seen, and we would be easier to follow, but it was a relief to be away from the forest once more, and we would move quicker, taking us further from our pursuers and closer to our goal.

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 suspicions.