An Autumn Hunting

Chapter 60

Redemption is always tentative. All you can wish for is that your hopes, your motives and your actions don’t make things worse, maybe even improve them. You do wrong, you do your best to right it. A parent dies, their child lives. There’s a balance and a harmony in that; maybe that’s enough.

I slumped against the memorial wall, the marble chill against my back, shirt crimson and sticky with blood, gun strangely leaden in my hand. I could see the blood pouring out of me, watched with a curious detachment. I coughed, tasted blood in my mouth. The rain was falling harder now, and the sky had taken on an ominous dark as the mountains loomed over me.

I thought of Chinara, at rest in her grave overlooking the valley and the mountains beyond, the poets she loved safe and eternal on a thousand shelves.

Of the dead child I’d found dumped in Yekaterina Tynalieva’s mutilated belly like so much rubbish, now both of them avenged and at peace.

And of Saltanat, journeying back to safety and Otabek, the mute boy we’d rescued, the new life in her womb turning and stirring, waiting to enter the light.

For the briefest of moments, I sensed all their kisses on my cheek, light and insubstantial as a moth’s wing beating its rhythm on my skin.

And I realised how beautiful and unknowable the world is, in all its mystery and passion and danger, how relentlessly hard it would be to leave it, and how easy it is to die.