Far North (18 page)

The prisoners were up and panicking too, shouting about being poisoned.

We struck camp then and there in the darkness, moving out of the path of the smoke, and travelling north, until at daybreak the burning forest was behind us and its coils of black smoke formed a huge cloud in back of us with a flat top like an anvil.

The faces of the prisoners looked bloodless and drained in the half-light from bad sleep and fatigue, so we stopped and rested for the remaining daylight hours.

The mood in the camp that night was sour as wormwood.

Tolya split the guards at daybreak and rode back with half of them to find out who had set the fire. They rode the long way round, staying away from the grey banner of the poisoned smoke.

I stayed back with the prisoners. Tolya had left me the spare cerberus for finding firewood. I went with Shamsudin and Zulfugar to get it.

I took them further from the camp than we needed so as to be more private.

Watching the two of them sweat over the saw, and sweat again as they loaded up the sled, I felt a little bad inside myself. Because of me they’d been dragged out of the warm on a lie to face who knew what?

I swung down off the horse. She nuzzled a tuft of grass at the foot of the tree. I looped the reins round a branch so she wouldn’t go off and eat the dirty stuff.

Zulfugar had walked a little apart and was breaking branches for kindling off a dead birch. I went over to speak to Shamsudin.

He was working with a hand-axe, stripping logs so they’d sit more easy in the sled I hauled a couple of pieces alongside him, and I told him that I was sorry he’d been deceived, that I knew as little as he did, and that I gave him my word that I would let nothing bad happen to him.

‘That’s not in your power,’ he said.

I didn’t disagree, but I was thinking to myself that with a couple more horses we could all three of us get clean out of there before Tolya returned with the other guards.

Life at the base depended on separating the guards from the prisoners by the fact of their privilege. I wanted to tell Shamsudin that Boathwaite hadn’t been able to buy my loyalty with the promise of a whorehouse and coffee made out of dandelion roots.

He dumped a load of wood with a crash onto the sled. ‘Zulfugar says there is a plague city north of here. He says we are being sent as grave-robbers to steal from the dead.’

‘How does he know a thing like that?’ I said. It sounded like it might be true, but it also sounded like the kind of wild rumour that the men liked to scare each other with. There was a kind of prestige attached to being the man with the darkest view of Boathwaite’s motives.

I bent to pick up a stray branch and I found myself sliding backwards. The treads of my leather boots had filled with snow that spread out in a pancake of ice around my feet and wouldn’t bite. I fell forward onto my front into the snow, almost laughing at myself, because the fall was comical.

Shamsudin drew nearer and I thought he was going to offer to help me raise myself up out of the deep snow, but then I saw the hand-axe glint by his side, and instead of laughter in his eyes there was something deadly serious.

I could never hate him for it. He had the look of a hungry dog, measuring the length of his chain against the distance of a juicy bone, wondering if he was about to feed or choke himself.

He took one step forward. I had fallen awkwardly and my gun sat under me, so that I would need to wriggle to get it free – and even then, there was a chance it would fail to fire, and he could brain me. I wonder what restrained him for those seconds. I’d like to think it was his affection for me, his decency, maybe his religion, or his training as a doctor – ‘First, do no harm,’ they say. Maybe running it through his mind gave him second thoughts and his intelligence got the better of him: the two of them, one horse, no easy way to break their shackles. Maybe he just lacked courage.

Shamsudin was the kind of man the old world must have turned out in millions. Smart and charming, but with such a slim connection between him and the earth. He had more stuff in him than a book does, and if you cared to listen he had a better sense than most how we’d ended up in this world, but still a beast like Hansom was better able to live in it. Those soft hands delayed a moment too long. And then Zulfugar was back, panting and tugging his load of branches, and Shamsudin looked aside like a guilty thing. And in that second, I rolled over and freed my side-arm.

Shamsudin raised his arms over his head. I wagged the gun at the two of them. ‘Get this thing loaded up,’ I said. A glance passed between them. There was an after-smell of danger in the air.

We went back in silence.

 *

Tolya rode back into the camp late that afternoon with a Tungus boy stumbling along behind him, his wrists tied and roped to Tolya’s saddle. One of the boy’s eyes was puffy and closed and he had dried blood in his nostrils. He looked to be no more than fourteen.

‘This is who set the fire,’ Tolya said.

The guards circled the boy. He trembled as they looked at him, his eyes cast down at his ragged fur boots that were held together with strands of rawhide. Everything he wore seemed on the brink of falling apart. He reeked of woodsmoke and his face was blotchy with smuts. He called to mind a tiny mouse that might die of fear in your hand if you picked him up.

Tolya cuffed the boy round his head and the others set on him with kicks and blows.

He let himself be hit, standing listless and soft – whether from real hopelessness or because he was smart enough not to stiffen at the punches, I couldn’t say. After a few heavy shots, he flopped into the snow. His greasy shapka plopped down a little further off.

The men beat him for a while. What is it about a prone body that makes men so murderous? Lucky for him, the snow where he fell was deep, and their felt boots muffled their blows. Also, unlike the prisoners, the guards were fat and idle, and they got tired after a minute or two of wading and kicking in the deep snow.

They left him and stood cursing and catching their breath. Tolya explained that the boy had been smoking meat in the forest at a little camp of his own that had been all burned out, and by the looks of things, he’d been there months at least.

I picked up his hat with the barrel of my gun and dropped it closer to him. It didn’t do to look too tender-hearted in front of those men, but I felt pity for the poor creature. I crouched down and spoke to him the few words of Tungus that I knew. He lay curled up in a ball and didn’t even raise his head to meet my glance. He was dazed and it seemed like his nose was broken. There was a spray of blood and dribble around his mouth. I couldn’t help thinking of Ping. It seemed like every encounter with a stranger spelled death or injury to someone.

Tolya and one of the guards called Stepan came up close behind me and asked what I was saying to him.

I told them they were fools for knocking him silly, because now we’d never get sense out of him. Stepan said he’d make him understand and he shook him and yelled questions at him: ‘Where you from? Where’s your friends hiding at? Who you spying for?’

This Stepan wasn’t a bad sort, but like the others he was scared. Outside of the base, they knew nothing of the land they lived in, and their imagination peopled the place with monsters. Here, only a few hundred miles north of where they lived, they felt as far from home and as uneasy about it as if we were on the moon.

One of the guards said to be careful because he might be a Wild Boy. Some of these Wild Boys lacked speech, he said, and ate meat raw, and some of them walked on all fours and could take out your throat with their bare teeth if they had a mind to.

I almost laughed in his face. I’ve been all over the Far North and if there are such things as Wild Boys, I ought to have seen at least one of them.

It seemd clear to me the boy was simple-minded. So I said to them that he was an idiot and that it would be bad luck to harm him. There wasn’t much that they held sacred, but anything in the way of a superstition had a lot of power over them. They were apt to believe all sorts of nonsense about charms, and omens, and black magic.

They kept him tied, but they let him be after that.

When evening came we ate dried meat and bread we had brought with us, on account of the radiation in the game. The guards threw scraps to the boy, which he ate as he sat and rocked on his haunches.

At nightfall he crawled under a caribou skin beside the fire and fell asleep.

 *

That night the stars were bright as anything. There were wisps of silver fog above the trees, and still the smoke rose from the burned forest.

I watched my breath rise up into the clear sky. The stars once had names, every one, and once shone down like the lights of a familiar city, but each day they grew a little stranger. I knew the Pole Star and the Dipper to travel by, and I’d had the others explained to me over the years, but was that the Great Bear, or Arcturus? Andromeda, or Orion’s belt? Could you see Venus this far north in January?

The sky was becoming a page of lost language. Things as a race we’d witnessed and named for ever were being blotted out of existence.

Once these rivers all had names, the hills too, maybe even the smaller dinks and folds in the pattern of the landscape.

This was a place once
, I thought.

We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought out all garbled.

Here we were, within a day of the Zone, getting ready to filch from dirty land the things we no longer had the wit nor means to make. And when the Zone was exhausted, we would be lucky to be this boy, stalking poisoned animals in a forest we could no longer name. He was our best possible future.

I lay down to sleep thinking that as much as I missed what was gone, maybe this was the best thing: for the world to lie fallow for a couple of hundred years or more, for the rain to wash her clean. We’d become another layer of her history, a little higher in the soil than the Romans and the people that built the Pyramids. Yes, Makepeace, I thought, maybe one day your mandible will show up under glass in a museum. Female of European origin. Note the worn incisors and the evidence of mineral deficiency from a poor and unvaried diet. Warlike and savage. And beside it some potsherds.

In the long run, the waters recede, the sun rises, and plants grow. I’ve never doubted that something will survive of us. Of course, I won’t make it. And all those books I saved will end up mulch and bird’s nests I suppose.

But something will go on. It just gives me no comfort when I imagine the day when the deluge has finally passed, and the dark, slippery, once-human things that will be waiting to hatch out of the ark.

4

W
E
WERE
OFF
and moving at daybreak, the clouds above us a mass of black and red.

I don’t know if it was the mood among us that morning, or the dead silence of that poisoned land, but I felt a deep misgiving about where we were headed.

I was afraid Tolya would kill the boy to save the trouble of keeping him, so I took charge of him and let him amble in back of me. He was docile like a herd animal and seemed to want nothing more than to trot behind my horse and share my water.

For two hours until mid-morning we made a long, slow pull up to the shoulder of a low hill. The boy and me were the last to get there. We found the others had stopped and were gazing out at the vista in the next valley.

It was the ruins of a city – and not a city like mine, with its middling houses dwarfed by the water tower – but a city of glass and concrete, with buildings that soared into the sky, and a bridge that spanned a wide, fast-moving section of the river. The city was still and grey, and birds wheeled over its silent streets.

The prisoners were staring too, though some had taken the chance to gulp water or chew on the bread they’d been given. Tolya had a spyglass, and he passed it among us.

Through Tolya’s glass, the city looked like a mouthful of rotten teeth, its buildings and windows hollowed out and lifeless, but its size was awesome. Way in back, on a rise in the rear of the city, was a tower that must have been a hundred yards high. It looked too spindly to stand without blowing over, and yet on top of it was a big disc with windows all around it that seemed to perch there in defiance of the laws of nature.

Over on the most eastern bend of the river, three chimneys, each of them painted in red and white stripes, rose from a vast square box. The building crouched at the water’s edge, and from it sprang a net of wires that were carried on steel legs to the farther side of the river and fanned out beyond it into the distance.

After we’d rested, we descended to the edge of the river and made our way along its bank to the bridge.

It took us maybe forty-five minutes to get there. Our pace slowed as we got closer. Not that we were fearful, but there was so much to take in. Every man’s head was craning this way and that, drinking in the details. The prisoners who were going to go right to the heart of it seemed almost excited.

The banks of the river were lined with concrete slabs which had narrowed its original course. That was why, even in February, it hadn’t frozen hard.

Beyond it, on the far side, those towers rose up. You had to wonder how many thousands of people might have lived here when the place was alive. And you had to wonder, too, how many thousands of places like this might have been built the world over. In the old days, at night, men in planes must have been able to see a city like this from the air, sketched out by the lines of its streetlights and the glow of its lit windows.

It struck me that my plae had gone out from a city much like this one – god knows, even bigger than this one – a place that had kept its knowledge and customs, a place where each person woke up each day to add their piece to the whole sum of endeavour that had been going on since who knew when, instead of waking up each day like Adam, and having to feed and clothe yourself from the garden and think up names for the trees.

 *

We only went midway across the bridge, to where an empty block post divided the highway. There were rolls of rusting barbed wire scattered around it across the snow. That’s where we were to separate. The prisoners were to go on without us. They were chattering like children. One of them peed off the side of the bridge, just for the novelty of it, his piss arcing and then breaking into fine spray before it reached the concrete supports below.

As we stood and watched, they went on, passing the central span of the bridge, and moving leisurely forward, like a congregation taking their seats at a funeral. At that moment, I envied them for what they’d find.

I feel awe and wonder at the Lights, for instance, but I know it’s nature’s work. Standing on the bridge, looking across at that empty city, everything in the compass of my gaze had been set there by a human hand. Somehow, those pylons had been strung with wire, and those towers raised, and roofs felted. There had been food and drink for millions of mouths. I don’t cry easy, but my vision blurred as I stared on the ruins of what we had been, and I watched the small band of men in rags move towards it to pick at it like birds on the carcass of some giant.

They’d entered a patch of waste ground at the other end of the bridge where the road split three ways – one each way along the river bank, and a third that went on into the heart of the city, bearing right down a boulevard that was lined with tall, blighted chestnut trees.

A couple of them hunkered down on their haunches while they considered what to do next. That unfamiliar feeling they had – no one breathing down their neck, all that space around them – must have given them an inkling of freedom.

The guards whistled at them and Tolya shook his gun and shouted at them to get along. He told them we’d be waiting for them at the same place in twenty-four hours.

Gradually, they moved off down the road in the middle, until pretty soon they were out of sight and only a few clouds of frozen breath hung in the air to tell you that anyone had passed that way.

Tolya stood watching them, almost motionless, just a couple of little bumps flexing on each side of his jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

Once the prisoners were out of sight, he was extra friendly to us. He pulled out cans of meat from one of his bags, some bottles of spirit from the still at the base, and a loaf of bread. There were ten cans and only eight of us, so he gave one of the tins to the Tungus boy. A couple of the guards weren’t keen on eating something so old, but when they saw the rest of us tucking in, and smelled that it was still good, they ate theirs up. The Tungus boy could only manage a little of his.

It was some kind of meat in jelly and it wasn’t to my taste either, but this didn’t seem the time to get finicky.

Tolya let a little spirit spill onto the snow ahen poured the rest into the tin cups each man had brought with him.

‘To the Zone,’ he said, and they all drank to the bottom, and sniffed their chunks of bread to take the taste away.

I put my cup down without tasting it, which a couple of them didn’t like. That was held to be bad luck, too – as was toasting with an empty cup, or leaving an empty bottle upright, or eating where you can see into a mirror, and too many others to list.

Stepan chided me, and called for my cup to be filled. His cheeks were greasy from the canned fat and his eyes had lit up from the drinking.

I covered the cup with my hand so they couldn’t add more, but I drank what I had so as to be comradely. It was the first time I’d touched alcohol for years.

They didn’t offer the boy any drink, though. It was too precious to be wasted on him.

When Tolya pulled out the second bottle, I decided I didn’t want to stick around there either drinking myself, or watching them get drunk. I got to my feet and dusted the snow off my pants.

‘Where are you off to?’ Tolya asked.

I explained that I wanted to cross the bridge and take a look round.

Tolya came apart from the others with me a little way and said not to go deeper than fifty yards on the other side. Something in his voice made me go suddenly alert. I wished I hadn’t had that drink.

There was the first notion of evening in the sky: the grey was heavier above us, and the shadows longer. We were standing out of earshot of the rest of them.

Tolya put his arm over my shoulders and turned me towards the far side of the bridge – not roughly, but forcefully enough that I knew he was serious. He pointed at a pair of lamp-posts on either side of the road to the downtown. ‘If you go any further than those, I can’t take you back with us. Do you understand?’

There was a peal of laughter from the huddle of men drinking.

He lowered his voice and his fingers gripped tight on the meat of my arm. ‘The city’s poisoned,’ he said. ‘No one leaves the Zone.’

I said that that was pretty harsh on the boys we’d sent in there.

He said nothing. It seemed like he had enough left in him of the old life to feel guilty about it. You could see he didn’t like what he’d been sent to do, but still, he was one of those lucky enough to make his own destiny, unlike the prisoners.

Stepan yelled at us to come back and join them.

I jerked my head towards the little drinking party behind us on the apron of the bridge. ‘Do they know what you’ve got planned?’

‘The ones who have been in before do. The others not yet.’

I guess something in my face betrayed what I was feeling.

‘Some are damned and some are saved,’ he said. ‘Be glad you’re one of the saved.’

Then he let my arm go anme to back to the others. He sang a dirty ballad in Russian and made a show of being light-hearted so as not jar the mood in the gathering. Their jokes and oaths followed me across the bridge.

I stepped over the concrete divider. The wind had swept the top of the camber clean of snow, and where it had drifted, it had been chased into curling shapes. Here and there, the prisoners’ feet had burst through the crust on top leaving tracks that were more like passing hooves than feet.

Be glad you’re one of the saved
.

I’d been saved to see this, I thought: a city stripped of life, but kept intact by the power of the poison that had been spread on it; a dead place, but one that by its size and wealth might as well have been built by gods as men; a place that made a mockery of our patched clothes and our scavenged food. What kind of salvation was this?

 *

I walked as far as the end of the bridge. Where I’d thought the prisoners had been resting, they’d been squatting. I suppose they were afraid to seek a more sheltered place, given the radiation they’d been warned about, but there was also something about the vastness of the city that made itself felt in your bowels. The few times I had to investigate a robbery – when robbery was a thing to be concerned about – the robbers had shat right in the open of the house they were stealing from. It looks like a gesture of contempt, but it was the fear and excitement of doing the crime that made them need to void themselves. And so with the robbers we’d sent. They’d fouled the streets of this once-dainty, once-plumbed city.

Their tracks led up the central avenue to wherever Apofagato’s map told them they should be heading. The trees and the big brick mansions crowded out the light, but fifty yards further on there was a break in the buildings, and the street lit up again. I could just make out furniture – chairs, tables, a dresser with its drawers gone – lying on its side in the snow, where it had spilled out of one of the buildings like the innards of a slaughtered animal. Much nearer than that, practically on the street corner, was a circular kiosk with some kind of posters glued to it that were too faint and far for me to read. I wished I’d had Tolya’s spyglass with me. Just as much as the paved road and the tall buildings, the tiny detail of the posters and the work they’d demanded (paper, ink, a press, gummed brushes) told a story about abundance and persistent ant-like industry.

 *

By the time I got back to the others, the drinking had made them mellow.

They wanted to know what I’d seen, so I told them about the size of the city. From their curiosity and easy laughter, it seemed that Tolya hadn’t broken it to them yet that he intended us to kill the prisoners.

Hearing about the boulevards, and the furniture on the sidewalk, and the posters, they became reflective, and one or two of them expressed a wish to see it too, but Tolya told them it was already too dark and pulled out another bottle.

This one made them talkative, and they started to do a thing men rarely did in the camp unless you knew them very well. They talked about where they were from, their families, and their past lives.

Between them, they’d seen a lot of war and trouble. Exact"0em" widtalf of them had been soldiers of one kind or another. That was often the way of things. It seemed like the routine of soldiering fitted a man pretty well for life in the base.

One called Osip said his father had been an engineer and that he’d been with him once to Paris. That seized all our imaginations. It sounded like the most exotic place there was, and the other guards had a million questions about the food and the weather, and the women. But when they pressed him on it, he didn’t seem to know anything more about the place than the rest of us, or than someone could have got out of a book. He spoke in a tongue he claimed was French, but it could have been anything for all we knew.

Stepan said he’d been in a plane as a child and visited the Black Sea. He said the water was warm as a bath. He said there were fields of vines as far as the eye could see. About flying, he couldn’t remember anything except that it had made his ears hurt.

Tolya had been trained for the priesthood. He had been to an orthodox seminary in the west and then sent to his own church in the Buryat region. He said his parishioners had been without a priest for so long that they did all his cooking and cleaning for him. He lived like a lord and spent most of his spare time painting icons. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a leather pouch with a tiny portrait in it which he said was his own work. It went round the group, just like the bottle had, from hand to hand.

It was a Mary and Child, painted tiny as can be. Osip held it for a long while, and he actually kissed its tin frame before he passed it to me to have a look at.

The icon itself was no more than two inches square. The frame was warm from Tolya’s body. I’m no judge of that kind of workmanship, but it must have taken a steady hand to be able to paint that small with brushes.

Tolya said that when the hungry times came, his village was still living well. The villagers were well off for food – the hot weather that brought drought to the south just made their growing season longer.