Far North (22 page)

Shamsudin looked at him in surprise and asked him for his other hand. Zulfugar showed him its back and front. The wound had knitted up without a mark.

Zulfugar grabbed him fiercely by the coat and told him, ‘God is great.’

I asked Shamsudin if he was sure it was the flask that had done it. He swore five ways that it was and said that it healed some smaller scrapes of his own.

Then Zulfugar asked Shamsudin if he thought he would be able to find his way back to the room where they were stored.

Shamsudin said he thought that with a rope and a lantern the return could be made pretty smoothly, though the truth was that he dreaded going back there.

A change had come over Zulfugar. He puzzled over his drawings and found a number that matched one on the flask. His joy had given way to a kind of nervousness. It’s the same when a green card player gets dealt a winning hand and he finds himself all sweaty and anxious at the thought of scooping the pot. Zulfugar was hatching a plan to barter the flask for their freedom.

He said that if they went back to the bridge together, the guards wouldn’t hesitate to strong-arm the flask off whoever had it. Instead, he told Shamsudin that one of them should return while the other remained in the Zone guarding it.

His proposal was that Shamsudin should go back empty-handed and tell Tolya exactly what he’d stumbled upon. In return for leading the guards to it, he was to ask for a week of rations and a horse.

Time was ticking by. Shamsudin had misgivings about the plan. He had a timid spirit and his natural inclination was just to hand over the flask and trust to the good faith of the guards.

Zulfugar would have none of that. He was pacing in the snow, ramping up his demands like the fisherman’s wife in the fairy tale: two weeks of rations, a month of rations, a horse each, a gun.

Right at the last minute, Zulfugar decided Shamsudin should be the one to stay behind. Maybe he didn’t trust his friend. More likely, he felt he was the shrewder bargainer.

The trouble with Zulfugar’s plan was that it credited the guards with too much intelligence. I don’t think anyone but Apofagato knew exactly what we had been sent to the Zone to find. You could copy pictures until your hand got cramp, and write down all the numbers you liked, but until you saw that flask, with the light pulsing in it, you would never believe such a thing existed.

I could see it right in front of me and I had a hard time crediting it.

Also, Tolya’s speech about the Zone had all the guards panicking. Even watching them through the glass, I could see they wanted to get their job done as quick as possible.

As Zulfugar waited on the bridge with the other prisoners, he must have sensed that he’d miscalculated.

Instead of being let loose on the other side, they were being corralled together, like pigs waiting for the bolt.

He’d turned to flee. Maybe he risked a bullet, thinking that if he could just get back to the flask it would make him better.

I’d seen what had unfolded next from my perch on the roof.

That flask might be able to heal a graze or close up a cut hand, but it couldn’t fix the hole they put in Zulfugar.

 *

We made good time over the next two days in spite of the dearth of food. Shamsudin walked quicker without the chain, and we moved so fast that we had to watch that we didn’t overtake the party of guards.

I didn’t dare risk hunting or a fire those first two days – not because of disease or radiation, but because I feared revealing our position.

On the third night, I snared a pair of rabbits and started to build a tiny fire to broil them on.

That evening, Shamsudin got a fever. It was by no means warm yet, but he complained about the heat, and even by the moonlight, I could see his face was basted in sweat.

He had taken it into his head that his flask, as well as mending cuts, would be proof against disease, and he had started laying it on himself when we stopped to melt snow or let the horse feed.

I teased him for it. I told him that it was no medicine, but pure ju-ju. But he was ready with a theory about how it worked and even suggested I try it.

‘I’ll take my chances with the germs I have,’ I said, ‘rather than sharing yours.’

Anyway, he was at it with his magic jar, rolling it over his sweaty forehead and up andown his arms which he said ached.

That gave me a bad feeling, and the truth was I didn’t feel so great myself. Also, the horse was skittish and off her food.

I thought it would be a twisted kind of justice for us to get sick now.

Digging in my pocket for the flints, my hand closed on the memory stone. I drew it out without thinking. When I had put it away three days before, the thing was dead. Now its face was all etched with green fire and the lights on it were winking and alive.

The thought crossed my mind that it had drawn its power from the bottled lightning, or that whatever had been broken in it, had been knit up by its closeness to the flask. But I pushed the idea out of my head for a piece of foolishness.

Shamsudin had noticed me pause, and he asked what I had.

I showed it to him and he told me how to make it play.

It lit into life at my touch. Its screen took colour and moved with pictures that showed the city as it had been, its streets all come to life, filled with people and transport.

You couldn’t see her at first, but there was a girl’s voice in it, telling you what the pictures were. She was speaking in Russian which I couldn’t make sense of, but Shamsudin translated.

She said this is my school, this is where I live, this is my friend Darya – who was a girl giggling and covering her face with her hand, this is my father who is packing to leave.

It became clear that all the bustle in the city was people getting ready to go.

I understood why she’d made this thing. I’ve often wished I had a keepsake like it. It was a sampler with patches of the past worked into it. It should have been with her in the city she had gone to. It seemed a pity that she had forgotten it in a drawer.

Then it showed her on her bed. The picture went wobbly and you could hear a girl laughing in the background.

Lyudi budushchevo
, she said, or something that sounded like it.

Shamsudin sat up and said she hadn’t forgotten it at all, she’d intended it to be left.

People of the future, she was saying. Whoever sees this message. I was born in the city of Polyn, Russia. I am eighteen years old. This is how I lived. This is who I was.

This is how I lived
.
This is who I was
.

When Shamsudin said those words I felt a chill run through me. I saw that skull of a city with the life gone from it.

I thought of the mounds of coins and ribbons beside the highway. And the scratches on the cell-walls at Buktygachak. And the bronze head guarding the empty square.

You never expect to be in at the end of anything
, Boathwaite had said. But then he had his brother’s arrogance. The end is where you end up. You always end up at the end of
something
. So what is it that keeps you shambling out to the stable when it’s sixty below, doing up the saddle with your fingers stiff with cold shding out in summer when you can’t breathe for dust?

There are many words I’ve seen written down that I’ve never heard spoken. This is one I wouldn’t know how to say exactly, but I know it’s at the back of every other fear.

It doesn’t make sense to fear it, because you’re never around when it happens. Fear hunger, or cold, or the pain of sickness – but this? And yet this is the one that preys on me. I bumped up against it in the darkness hearing her say those words.

I fear
annihilation
.

Boathwaite can say what he likes. A sane person knows they’re headed for the end of something. But the thought that things will continue, there’ll be kind words at their funeral, or even just a pulse of blood in someone, somewhere, that dumbly recalls that they were here – that gives the rest of it some point. A sane person expects that.

That girl had cast her message adrift on a sea of time so that she could live again briefly in the mind of whoever saw it. Maybe she didn’t know that, but that’s how it was.

Everyone expects to be in at the end of something. What no one expects is to be in at the end of
everything
.

 *

When I woke up in the morning there were six inches of snow on me. I was a little feverish, but Shamsudin was badly ill. His skin was grey and he was breathing hard. He kept saying he’d be fine, and he insisted we moved off as normal, but he barely got ten yards before he stumbled.

He said not to get close, but I was all done with that. I figured I was gone, or as good as gone, if he was.

I helped up from the place where he’d fallen and I lay him back down on his bed and covered him with all the blankets we had. Then I boiled some soup from the rabbits and gave it to him, spoon by spoon, as he lay shivering.

Between bouts of sweating he was able to sleep, and I held his head in my lap and he felt like a baby. I thought about Ping, and as I pictured her face I told him I loved him.

He murmured in his sleep.

The flush of fever in his face made him look almost youthful again.

After an hour or two, he woke up and asked me if I held out hopes for the afterlife.

I said not, but if anyone deserved it, he surely did.

‘I have been in Andalus,’ he said. ‘I think paradise will smell like the flowers of bitter oranges.’

I said I had always thought something similar.

By then, he had exhausted himself with speaking and just held onto me until the two of us were moved to a feverish intimacy, clinging together in loneliness and fear of death.

 *

When the sickness got bad again, he raved and told me to shoot him. In his lucid moments, he wanted to talk about his childhood. He said his mother had always been proud of him. I said I dn’t doubt it. Just like the girl from Polyn, he wanted a witness.

When the sun came out, I opened his jacket to get some fresh air on him. His skinny chest burned like fire.

Later that afternoon, sores broke out on his face, and the infection spread to his lungs so he had to sleep upright. The horse had sickened too, but I didn’t have time to tend it.

I boiled up some herbs in a bucket for him to breathe them in. That seemed to help him, and he slept easier that night.

At first light I was up to gather more plants. I found a bunch of them. And while I was doing it, I caught sight of a deer. I had my gun with me, and I thought, to hell with it: either the sickness will get us, or Tolya’s men will get us, but at least this way we won’t die hungry.

I was pretty dizzy with fever myself, and it took me three shots to put her down and half an hour to drag her back to our camp.

She was a young female who must have got separated from her herd.

Shamsudin was sitting up, but groggy, and I shouted out that we had fresh meat.

It struck me that it would do him good to eat the liver so I butchered that out first. By the time I was ready to cook it, I could hear that his breathing was rattling again.

I went over to him and his eyes were glazed and he gripped my arm as he breathed hard, struggling like a man in a race. His tongue seemed dry and spongy, however much water I tried to put down him.

Maybe if I’d used a bullet he would have died more comfortable, but I couldn’t do it.

About noon, Shamsudin died, then the horse died. But I lived. Well, that’s the kind of luck I’ve had.

FOUR

1

A
FTER
THE
HORSE
DIED
, I had to go on foot. I delayed to bury Shamsudin and then I moved on southeast, feeling my  way through the taiga for the start of the highway that  would take me home.

It was the worst season to travel. Meltwater made even the smaller rivers impassable. And if you got wet, and then the temperature dropped, you ended up with your pants all armoured with ice.

I’d always been a wiry and uncomplaining sort. Four hours of sleep would get me back to myself after a day’s work. Now I was aching and short of breath. I’d stop every hour, then every half-hour, then every fifteen minutes. Finally I was walking for a hundred yards and resting for five minutes. I carried my belongings on a birch frame which dug into my arms.

Soon I was too weak to hunt. The ground was soaked through, so with the last of my strength I lopped the branes off a larch and spread them out for a bed. Then I crawled onto it and waited to die.

I must have lain there days as the sickness worked its way through me. Day and night wheeled about the sky. On the third or fourth morning, I sat up and drank a pint of water from the stream in my cupped hands.

Why I should have been spared, I couldn’t think. I heard a tale later that the plague in Polyn was an artificial one, engineered to be deadly to men but to spare women. It wasn’t out of any sense of chivalry: just practical to kill male soldiers and leave females behind to wait on the victorious army and bear children. It sounds unlikely, but not unlikelier than many other things I know to be true.

As soon as I was strong enough to stand, I hoisted up my pack and stumbled on. I picked fiddle-heads and ate them as I walked. A couple of them had caterpillars on them and I munched them too because I was so hungry. I was thinking about counting my shells and seeing if I could spare some to hunt with, when I smelled a terrible sweetness on the wind.

About two hundred yards further on, I came upon a heap of bodies stacked like logwood. Some were half-dressed, but most had been stripped and their limbs were naked and waxy in the sunlight. The remains of the caterpillar went bitter in my mouth.

They had been killed with blades and some were only trunks. Tolya’s head sat on top, mouth downcast, winking out from under drooping eyelids.

The bodies were soft with decay, and ants were busy on their mouths and eyes. I guessed they had been dead two or three days.

The tracks of their attackers had melted away with the snow, but here and there were dropped objects – a boot, a saddle-bag, saucepans – that made me think the struggle had been in the dark. The guards were well armed. I doubted that anywhere else in the region were there such guns and weapons as they carried. It would have taken a large number to subdue them by force. But the relief of surviving the Zone and the power of their guns might have made them unwary. If someone had come stealthily, sneaked up on them at night, they might have been too drunk or bleary-eyed to defend themselves.

I blacked my face with dirt, loaded my carbine with all the shells I had and skirted the track until darkness fell.

It was the mildest night we’d had since autumn. The land was shedding winter like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Now and again, a chunk of damp snow flopped out of the branches and made a sound like a footfall. Each time I heard one drop, I flinched.

I sat and snoozed under a tree for a couple of hours before dawn. When I opened my eyes, it was still dark. There was silence, then I felt a blade at my throat and a hand close over my mouth. It smelled of soil and caribou meat.

The prick of the knife in my neck forced me up on my feet. I wasn’t aware that I was scared, but I peed myself, like I had that time in the lake. A little light was coming in to the sky, but it wasn’t any comfort to be able to squint down at my chin and see that whoever had got me was wearing Tolya’s watch.

He marched me out to the track and gave a low whistle. Horses and men appeared from the woods.

The heap of bodies wasn’t more than two miles behind us.

They talked quietly in a throaty language that I guessed was Yakut. I’d never had much dealings with the Yakut but I knew them to be a tough, horse-herding people. They had flat, dark faces like Kazakhs and were dressed in a ragbag of clothes. I spotted a few hats and coats that I remembered as belonging to the guards. What surprised me most was that, bundled up as they were, I still recognized women among them.

I knelt in the slush listening to their chatter. It sounded like a conversation you might overhear at a market, except they were haggling over me. The higher voice of a woman was as forceful as any of them. I could guess what they were saying: Mercy or not mercy? Kill here or over there? Who gets to keep her stuff?

My hand felt raw and wet. I’d lost a glove stumbling out of the woods, but that didn’t seem to matter any more.

Whoever held the knife in my throat joined the conversation from time to time. I dreaded hearing his harsh raised voice in my ear, because whenever he spoke, he pressed the knife harder and I had to tip my head back to keep him from cutting me.

A faint blue haze was beginning to light the sky from the east. Flawless arctic blue. I knew for certain there was nothing waiting beyond it. No other worlds. No mother, or pa, or Charlo, or Shamsudin. No Ping. And yet, I found myself muttering the words of the Our Father over and over again, as though it was something to bite down on so I wouldn’t cry out in pain.

Someone else came up beside me. A hand wiped the dirt roughly off my face. A new voice said something. It talked for a while. The knife stopped cutting into my windpipe and I fell forward onto my belly.

The ground had the earthy damp smell of mushrooms. I lay there nose-down for a while as they argued back and forth above me.

No one stopped me as I got to my feet. Standing beside me was the boy from the Zone, the Tungus boy. The man who was arguing with him turned away in disgust.

A woman with a chapped red face was breastfeeding a baby. On a little pony beside her was a pale-skinned girl of about ten. Her eyes were so light that she couldn’t have been native and she had fair hair curling out of her bushy fox-fur hat. I almost cried out in surprise, but she looked straight through me with the stony gaze you’d use to aim a gun.

Tolya’s icon was fixed to the lapel of her coat.

One by one the Yakuts went back to their horses, until only the boy stood beside me. He never met my eye, or gave the least indication that he knew me.

I watched them drift away into the forest. The woman with her baby rode behind the man wearing Tolya’s jacket, and the white girl didn’t give a backward glance.

Soon there were only two of them left in the clearing with their horses, the boy and the man with the knife. The boy patted the flank of his horse, but instead of swinging up into its saddle, he handed me the reins and got up on the other horse behind his friend.

He looked back at me for an instant with the blank face of a stranger. There was no kindness or understanding in his expression. I can’t say what he might have been thinking.

It would be nice to suppose he did me a good turn for the one I did him. But there’s no telling ow grace works. I don’t even know if there’s a word for mercy in Yakut.

The imprint of his empty eyes stayed with me when he turned away. He dipped his head as the two of them rode under a branch which scattered snow down his back. In ten more yards, they had vanished, and the drip of the thaw swallowed the sounds of their hooves.

I thought of the curt way I turned him loose that time by the river bank, and of times out hunting when I just held my shot on a whim, or threw back fish because they were too small. They never lingered to speculate about my motives.

It would be consoling to think there’s a pattern of justice in things, but I’ve seen enough to be sure that there isn’t. My father would point to what the boy did and say it was the redeemable part of his humanity. Maybe – rarer than a tadpole in a hailstone – that’s what it was. But if I killed ten caribou, butchered them for their meat and skins, and then freed a snared rabbit just for the pleasure of watching its fluffy behind vanishing in the bracken, would that make me St Francis? I’d be deceived to think so.

The horse licked my bare hand. My pack and glove lay under the tree where I’d been woken. I found them, swung my stiff body onto the horse and aimed her nose at the sunrise.

2

I
KEPT AWAY
from the track we’d come out on in case Boathwaite had sent a party to find where we’d got to. It meant slower going, but I had the whole summer to get home.

At night, I’d see my route in the sky, mapped out in a pattern of stars. The Lena takes a great swerve to the west, but it ends up almost due south of Polyn, right near the base. I was planning to cut out that bend altogether and ride southeast until I struck the commissar’s highway. As long as I kept on roughly in the right direction, I couldn’t miss it. It was a straight line east to west. And once I was on it, there was less than a thousand miles between me and Evangeline. I could be home in six weeks.

Some evenings I’d pull out Shamsudin’s blue flask. It had bumped around in my pack, but nothing could put a scratch on it. Once I fell asleep holding it. I had bad dreams and my forehead and cheeks were sore the next day, as though I’d spent too long in the sun.

 *

I stopped to fish one evening, hooked a pike-perch, and then found four duck eggs in a nest. I made a fire and cooked one of them with the fish.

Overhead, there were cranes coming back from their winters in the south. Their long white bodies looked pink in the dying sunlight. They are holy birds to the Tungus. They use their bones as calendars and mark the phases of the moon in notches on them. The shamans say they ride them up to the ninth heaven where the spirits live and make mischief with human souls.

It’s all fairy tales to me, but I did see a shaman heal a sick woman once. She was a Tungus woman who’d had a stillborn child. It had left something awry with her womb.

The shaman had on a heavy coat of skins with jingling metal beads on it. The beads make a map of the stars. Before there were ever books, those coats were an atlas of the skies. He danced around her body for almost an hour, until a weird web of what looked like blood appeared on the skin of his drum.

I couldn’t speak to the shaman myself, but I asked him questions afterwards by way of a half-Tungus guide.

The shaman said he felt himself rise up through the air as he drummed. The air around him became thick and watery. He claimed it was like being lost in fog, and every now and again the fog thinned, and he was aware of the breathing in the hall. Then he rose up through a final bank of cloud and landed in a clearing.

He followed a path along a mountainside, past a skeleton he said was his father’s, towards a lighted tent.

The sick woman’s body was inside it, in the shape of a pile of stones, with a vine growing out of it. The shaman ripped out the tendrils of the vine. The nearer he got to the centre of the plant, the thicker they got – in the middle, they were a couple of inches round, and furry and hot, like the shaft of spring antlers, full of new blood. And at the heart of the plant was a shrivelled-up thing – the miscarried child whose soul had got lost on its way back from earth.

I don’t know if he made this up to fool me, or if he believed himself. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to my mind. But after that dance, I heard the woman was able to conceive.

It seems like wherever it goes, my mind always comes back to dead children. That Tungus girl’s. And Ping’s. And mine.

Mine was born dead after a three-day labour. It was the worst pain I’ve ever known. In the chaos that had been brought to the city, there was not a doctor to be had.

They took him away and buried him somewhere. We never mentioned it again. I was sixteen. I was never close to a man after that, although I think I could have been. It just wasn’t how things were.

 *

My looping route towards the highway took me through a village with an old church in it. The houses around were all rotted and overgrown, but the church was solid enough, with a big wooden cupola and a bell still hanging in it.

The door opened and the air inside had a hint of incense and new whitewash.

Someone called up from the cellarage in Russian. I was too amazed to recall any words of it beyond
bog
, which, crazy as it seems, is what they call god. Then a man clumped up the stairs with an armful of books. He looked taken aback to see me.

I couldn’t have been more surprised to find a chuchunaa, and, come to think of it, he resembled one a little, being tall and having a long white beard.

We didn’t have enough words in common to say much to each other, but we were able to talk in a kind of dumbshow.

He was the priest of the village, and he had a helper, a kind of junior priest called Yuri. Yuri had a beard too, but his was jet black, and he smelled strongly of onions. I’d put his age at fifty and the priest’s at seventy-five.

 *

How they’d managed to survive,st the two of them, with Boathwaite on one side and the Tungus on the other, and keep the church in good repair, I don’t know. I guess they’d just clung on there like a pair of limpets.

They lived in a little house in a yard alongside the church. I put my horse in an empty stall in their barn and they fed me.

We had a kind of soup of salted cabbage and some sausage, and I marked out my route to them on the table top.

They rolled their eyes when I showed them where I was going.

It was too bad that we couldn’t say more. I had so many questions.

After dinner, they took me down into the cellarage and showed me all the books they had squirrelled away down there. The old priest kept giving me things to hold, talking about them, and then looking at me closely as if to check I’d understood. Of course, I had no idea, but whatever it was he was talking about, he was proud of it.