Red Winter (35 page)

There was also the thought of our proximity to Krukov. The soldiers in the nearby farm might not be Krukov and his men, but there was a good chance they were. We had been following them for days, and everything had pointed us in this direction. The temptation to stand and fight was a powerful one, and our decision to leave, right though it was, was a difficult one for any of us to stomach. The thought of letting him go was like a pain in my heart, and I knew it would be the same for Tanya, perhaps more so. If it weren’t for Anna and for my need to have Krukov alive, Tanya might have chosen to make a final stand against him. With nothing to lose, she might have taken that risk. Tanya, though, was not as filled with the need for vengeance as she wanted to be, and she had a small chink in her armour. She had us. Or, rather, she had
Anna
.

‘Please,’ Anna said, and her single word cut through my own anger like a light splitting the dark. In that moment I saw one thing more clearly than anything else. She needed my strength to reassure her. She needed the father in me as much as my family needed the soldier.

I took a deep breath and banished my rage to its dark place to fester for a while longer, but I knew that when it finally came – when I finally allowed it freedom – the soldier in me would surface and my rage would be colder and blacker than it had ever been before.

‘Leave her,’ I said to Tanya. ‘We don’t have time for this.’

Tanya heard me but didn’t respond right away. Whatever questions she had been asking Oksana now stopped, but the pistol remained against her skin.

I looked down at Anna, seeing the expectation in her face. She believed
me
to be the strong one. She wanted
me
to stop this. I couldn’t let her down, and that in itself was another source of anger and frustration for me.

‘We don’t have
time
,’ I said, striding across the barn.

Lyudmila tried to stop me. She saw the nature of my intent, if not exactly what I was going to do, and she stepped between me and Tanya, but she was neither powerful nor quick enough and I pushed her aside. She stumbled and fell as I grabbed Tanya’s arm and tore it away from Oksana, who sank to her knees in the straw.

Tanya had allowed her anger to take control of her, as my own had threatened to do, and now she wheeled round, raising her pistol to point at me.

Arm outstretched, barrel against my cheek, her eyes like a demon’s. She couldn’t focus on me, such was the intensity of her feeling, and she was taking long breaths, sucking the air into her nostrils as if trying to calm herself. But her arm was like iron. Unmoving. The barrel of the pistol unwavering.

My own revolver was less visible, but just as deadly. I’d had no intention of using it against Tanya, but her action had triggered my reaction and now I held it at waist height, aimed at her stomach.

Lyudmila tried to get to her feet beside me, to protect her comrade, but Tuzik stood over her, and when she tried to back away from him, he showed her his teeth.

‘Look at yourself,’ I said. ‘Save your anger for
him
.’

Tanya stared. For a moment she struggled to speak, and when she finally did, the words were spat through gritted teeth. ‘They betrayed us.’

I looked down at Oksana, but she had lowered her gaze. She remained on her knees, head bowed as if in prayer.

‘I know.’ My eyes met Tanya’s. ‘And I know how you feel. After everything. All this way. All the things we’ve seen and done, and all that came before. But this is not the end, Tanya. This is
not
where it ends. We still have further to go.’

‘They betrayed us.’ It was as if the treachery stood in front of her, blinding her to everything else.

‘Oksana
warned
us.’

‘Kill him and have done with it,’ Lyudmila said. ‘We have to go.’

Tanya’s eyes flicked in her direction, almost imperceptible, and the idea in her mind grew larger. Shoot and be gone. But I was armed too, my revolver pointing at her stomach, angled upwards for maximum damage. If there were to be shots tonight, there would be more than one.

‘She changed her mind,’ I said. ‘She warned us, gave us a chance. Let’s not waste it.’

‘They betrayed us,’ Tanya said again, quieter this time, and pressed the barrel harder.

‘Leave him alone,’ Anna said, and I heard her coming forward, but I held out a hand and told her to stop.

‘Stay back. Don’t watch.’

Now Tanya’s eyes went to Anna, just for a second, but it was long enough for a new image to burn itself into her mind. The image of herself murdering me in front of this child. Perhaps the irony of that was not lost on her, that she should become the hated aggressor.

‘She’s afraid,’ I said. ‘Oksana is afraid like everyone else. And you’re just making it worse. I want to hurt someone as much as you do, but this is not the right person. We don’t have time for this. Krukov might be coming across the field right now. Do you want him to find us in here? Like this?’

Or perhaps she
did
want that to happen. Maybe that’s what this was about – delaying our escape so that she could meet Krukov face to face.

‘If he comes here,’ I said, ‘we’ll all die. You, me, Anna, the children in the farm. He’ll kill everyone and burn this place to the ground. We’ve seen that everywhere we’ve been.’ But something in those words didn’t ring quite true; a big question whispered quietly at the back of my mind, like a bad seed planted in a dark corner. If Krukov was here, why hadn’t he already killed Oksana and her family?

Tanya lifted her left hand to the grip of the pistol and altered her stance. She set her jaw tight, but I knew there was a shift in her resolve. It was a sign of her doubt.

‘So what are we going to do? Shoot each other?’ I kept my eyes on her and lowered my revolver. ‘What then? Who will punish Krukov then? Who will look after Anna?’

Tanya blinked.

‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘We have to live. If there are men coming, we have to go. Now. This woman is not worth dying for.’

Tanya said nothing.

‘Let’s ride into the forest, disappear, find the right moment.’

She stayed as she was, trying to calm herself.

‘We don’t have much time,’ I told her. ‘Save your bullets for when we need them most.’

Tanya looked away now. She let herself see Lyudmila lying on the floor with Tuzik standing over her. She saw Anna, small and vulnerable and needing our help, and she turned to look at Oksana kneeling in the straw, shamed by her actions.

‘If we wait much longer,’ I said, ‘we’ll all be dead.’

When Tanya lowered her weapon, she said nothing.

She collected her rifle from the floor and walked away from me, holstering her pistol.

‘Get this damn dog away from me.’ Lyudmila stole my attention and I called to Tuzik, unsure if he would even listen to me, but he came as soon as I spoke his name, and Lyudmila jumped to her feet, casting a hateful look at me.

On the other side of the barn, Tanya lifted her animal’s bridle from the beam where it was stored and began securing it over her horse’s head.

‘Help me with Kashtan,’ I said to Anna.

Anna seemed to deflate then, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time.

‘Quick,’ I told her, feeling the urgency return. This was not over yet.

Kashtan was a little agitated by what had happened and she moved away as I tried to put the saddle onto her back, so I soothed her as gently as I could, feeling the time draining away, imagining the approach of the soldiers.

‘Have you done this before?’ I asked Oksana as I struggled to fit Kashtan’s bridle, my fingers moving as quickly as I could make them. ‘Taken people in like this? Betrayed them to—’

‘Yes,’ Oksana replied. She was still on her knees, in the gloom at the back of the barn. ‘I’m so sorry. I . . .’ She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t explain the wickedness of what they had done to us. ‘That’s why I came to warn you. I . . . Anna. The child. The
children
. I don’t know what I would do if someone took my
children
.’

My fingers fumbled with the buckles, my hands shaking.

Anna reached up to take the fastenings in her small hands, saying, ‘I’ll do that.’

‘You’re lucky they
haven’t
taken your children,’ I said, taking my saddle and hefting it onto Kashtan’s back.

‘Perhaps they still will,’ Lyudmila said.

Oksana looked over at her, and the realisation was clear in her eyes. Her children were no safer than ours were. Reporting and trapping deserters might earn her a few favours, but there was no guarantee.

‘What have they given you in return?’ I asked, pulling the straps tight under Kashtan’s stomach and tightening the buckles. The fixings were larger and my fingers managed them well enough. ‘The Chekists? What have they given you?’

Oksana shrugged and shook her head.

The saddle was secured, the bridle on, and I straightened up, running a hand along Kashtan’s smooth coat, feeling some of the anger and tension drain away. As always, there was something about her that calmed me, the sense that no one would ever be as in tune with me as she was.

‘Good girl,’ I whispered, patting her shoulder. ‘Good girl.’ Then I handed her reins to Anna, while Tanya helped Lyudmila to finish tacking her horse.

‘How many are they?’ I asked, drawing my revolver and heading towards the door. ‘The Chekists?’

Oksana thought for a moment. ‘Five or six, but they come and go. Sometimes there are more.’

‘Have you seen any of them with prisoners? Women and children?’ I stopped and looked back at her. ‘Tell me the truth.’

Oksana lowered her head again and cowered against the wall of the outbuilding as if she wished the earth would swallow her whole.

‘The truth.’

Tanya and Lyudmila had finished now and were preparing to lead the horses from the barn, but they too stopped to hear Oksana’s answer.

‘Yesterday. There were more here yesterday.’

‘With prisoners?’

‘I think so. We didn’t see them, but—’

‘Didn’t see them? Then how can you be sure?’

‘Not close, I mean. There were
people
, not soldiers – I saw that, but not who they were. Not really. They stayed at the other farm. They didn’t come here.’

‘Are they still there?’

She shook her head.

‘And you kept that from us?’ Tanya said. ‘You kept that from us and you were going to let the Chekists come and drag us out in the night?’ She looked at me. ‘You should have let me put a bullet in her.’

‘She’s protecting herself,’ I said, looking at Anna, knowing the depths to which people would sink in order to keep themselves and their family safe.

‘You’re wrong,’ Tanya said. ‘
She’s
wrong. Nothing would make me betray someone like that.’

‘Not even for your own children?’ I asked her. ‘Would you not have done
anything
to protect them?’

Tanya stopped and stared at me, knowing I was right. We lived in times that made people do things they would never have considered before.

‘Come on,’ I said, crossing the short distance to the door and looking out to check it was clear for our escape. ‘We need to leave.’

But we were already too late.

To my right was the dark shape of the
izba
from which we had run a few minutes ago. To the side of that, overshadowed by the trees, only the slightest hint of light was visible, nothing more than slashes of orange round the curtained windows of the old woman’s house, as if cut into dark cloth by a sharp sword. Above, the sky was blacker than Koschei’s heart, but all around, the air was sprinkled with a gentle fall of snow, the delicate drops sinking to the shapeless dirt at our feet.

To my left, though, looking out at what should have been a never-ending sea of night, something was moving.

‘They’re coming.’

Tanya and Lyudmila released the reins of their horses and came to the door. Anna did the same, but she was a part of me now, just as Kashtan and Tuzik were, so she came closer, fitting herself under my left arm, looking for my protection.

‘Is it them?’ she asked. ‘Is it
him
?’

Nothing could have prepared me for the shocking beauty of the approaching evil.

Lamps danced in the gloom like fallen stars, floating first this way, then that. Stopping, starting, raising and lowering. Small patches of the field were brightened as they came, revealing snatches of hedgerow, casting shadows in the furrows and making giants of even the smallest thistles.

‘Looks like we fight,’ Lyudmila said, working the bolt on her rifle, then pushing past me for a better look.

‘I count five,’ I said, watching the mesmerising motion of the lights, slow and illusory, moving like spirits coming at us across the field. Demons risen from the broken, frozen soil, spilling from the forest to come and claim us. But these were not the demons Marianna told about. They were not the kind that inhabited the stories Babushka used to spin. These devils were real.

‘Shoot at the lights.’ Lyudmila pulled the rifle butt into her shoulder and aimed into the night.

‘No.’ I put my hand on the barrel and pushed it down. ‘We have to get away. Save it for when we need it.’

‘What?’ Lyudmila snatched the weapon away.

‘They don’t know we’re here. They think we’re in the house, asleep. They can’t see us—’

‘So we shoot . . .’

‘No. So we head into the forest. We disappear where they won’t follow, and then we come back. When it suits us. When we have a plan.’

‘Don’t need a plan.’ Lyudmila raised the rifle once more. ‘We shoot.’

‘No, we have to leave,’ Tanya said. ‘Come on, get the horses.’

‘Don’t lose your nerve,’ Lyudmila argued.

‘I haven’t,’ Tanya replied. ‘There might be two men for every lamp. Three men. Five. As soon as we fire the first shot, they’ll put the lamps out and we’ll have no idea where they are or how many they are. If we let them trap us in here . . .’

‘No windows, only one way out,’ I said. ‘We’ll be blind in here and they’ll burn us alive. At the moment, as far as they know, we’re fast asleep. It’s better to keep it that way, keep them slow and quiet.’