Authors: Dan Smith
Two men lay on the ground close to the cold remains of a small fire. They were naked, victims of the same fate as Galina’s husband, except their heads were nowhere to be seen. Judging by the shape and size of their bodies, they were older men, so I passed them by and steeled myself as I approached another man, who was slumped against a tree, his face swollen and beaten beyond recognition. His hands had been flayed, and in the centre of his chest was branded a star, just as I had seen on Sasha. The swollen welt of seared flesh was pink now, but would have been angry when it was first burned. The star would have been a bold, patriotic red.
I turned away and went to another man, nailed to a tree, his head dropped so that his chin rested on his chest. He was just out of reach, so I put the barrel of my rifle under his chin and pushed up his head. Maxim Mikhailovich. In the centre of his forehead was branded a five-pointed star.
Other men were there, all of them older, and I forced myself to detach. I had to view them not as people I knew, not even as people at all, but as something else. Something less valuable. Something unimportant. Callous as it seemed, I had learned it was the only way to cope when faced with people whose skin was flayed from their hands, whose throats were cut, whose necks were punctured by bullets.
Each man had the five-pointed star branded into the skin somewhere on his naked body. I had never seen anything like it and I found myself wondering if it had been done before or after death.
If it had been done to my sons.
I saw no children at all, though, no women, and that gave me a glimmer of guilty hope as I went from body to body, identifying each one, finding neither Misha nor Pavel, but many of the people I had grown up with. I told myself that my sons were still alive, and that until I knew for certain, I had to believe that Marianna was too. I refused to accept that she was drowned in the lake. So I kept on, forcing myself to look at each body, trying not to remember their names and their families, and only when I came to the last of them did the full horror of this place sink in. Now that I had satisfied myself that my family wasn’t here, the evil of this place began to overcome me. It was like a malevolent spirit wrapping its arms around me and dragging me into its despair. My hands began to shake, and my breathing quickened. Only now did I realise how dry my throat was, that I had been clamping my teeth together so hard my jaw ached.
The tableau of death before me was as shocking as anything I had seen during the course of the war. I had grown all too aware of the appalling things that one person could do to another, but I had never seen such a variety of atrocity in once place. Most perpetrators of this kind of extermination tended to stick to a preferred method. There were those who flayed their victims while they were still alive. Others opted for crucifixion or hanging or a simple bullet to the back of the neck. Some liked to impale their victims or roll them naked in barrels punched through with nails. I had even heard of men and women forced to stand naked in the cold while water was poured over them, a few drops at a time, until they became ice statues frozen in death.
The one thing I believed these victims had in common was that they had been visited by the cruellest enforcers of Bolshevism: Chekists. The men tasked with bringing the populace into line by spreading fear in their campaign of Red Terror. That was the only conclusion I could come to, looking at the massacre before me. This was not the work of some supernatural being; this was the work of men.
I could only imagine why the perpetrators had brought their victims this deep into the forest. As far as I knew, this kind of thing was not usually kept hidden, but displayed for the world to see. After all, what use would there be for Red Terror if not to terrorise? Perhaps they had been brought here to maximise their fear. I would probably never know, but the end result was the same.
My chest burned as I drew shallow breaths. The sweat was cold on my brow, and my body trembled as the world fell away from me, spinning into the abyss. I backed away, shaking my head, and suddenly the forest was alive with noise. Everything darkened, my mind spun in confusion, and I moved away further, afraid to take my eyes from the carnage in case the bodies should rise against me for the things
I
had done.
I stumbled over something hidden in a tuft of grass, putting my hands out to stop myself, but there was nothing there for me to grab. I dropped my rifle as my arms wheeled in the air and I fell, collapsing into the cold grass, turning immediately, afraid to be so vulnerable. The frozen undergrowth brushed against my face as I searched on my hands and knees for my rifle.
‘Where is it?’ I said, over and over. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’
My hands pushed against something hard and cold. I recoiled in horror at the sight of a human head lost in the foliage. I turned, desperate to find my rifle, desperate to be away from here.
When my fingers finally curled round the weapon, I pushed to my feet and began to run.
I ran and ran, stumbling and faltering, the low branches tearing at my face as I passed them. I felt the breath of the dead on the back of my neck, forcing me on, always threatening to catch me, and when I finally reached Kashtan, I fumbled with her reins and climbed onto her, panic and grief and guilt and revulsion all boiling in my veins.
I kicked her hard and drove her through the forest, not daring to look back. I bent low towards her neck, an instinct to streamline myself and avoid the branches that flashed past as she wove in and out of the trees, obeying my furious commands to run faster and faster. Her hooves pounded the hard ground, and her body moved this way and that, fluid as she twisted and turned, finding the most accessible route ahead. I kept urging her on, digging my heels hard, frantic to be away from here, anxious to be in the open and to see the light of the day.
The forest floor was treacherous, though, and when Kashtan slipped, I felt a different kind of panic. Her hooves caught on something hard, a protruding tree root or a rock, and she stumbled to one side, her flanks thumping into the trunk of a nearby tree. Her cry of pain penetrated the shock that had taken control of me. I could not survive without her. I was driving her too hard.
Kashtan’s stride was uneven now, her steps faltering. I pulled back on her reins, but she felt my fear as if we were one being and she surged on through the forest. I struggled to bring her under control, speaking to her, slowing her.
‘Good girl.’ I stroked her neck. ‘It’s all right now. We’re safe.’ Once again I realised that when I was speaking to her, I was speaking to myself. ‘We’ll take it slowly now.’
I looked back, seeing the place where she had bumped the tree, then I inspected her flanks where there was a dusting of moss and bark. ‘No broken skin. That’s lucky.’ I reached back and brushed it away. ‘You’ll have a bruise, though.’
But there was a difference in her step, she dipped more to one side, and I suspected straight away that she had thrown a shoe during our race through the forest. I brought her to a halt and she stood, breathing hard, her chest expanding and relaxing, the smell of sweat oozing from her well-lathered coat. I climbed down and soothed her before lifting her left front leg.
‘We’ll have to get it looked at. Can’t go far like that.’ The shoe was missing, and as well as there being a stone lodged in her hoof, a small chunk was missing on the outer edge of the wall. If the damage worsened, it could lead to serious bruising and even lameness.
I placed her foot on the ground and looked back into the forest, turning about, searching for any signs of followers. I had that inkling once again, that something was closing in on me, and that whatever it was, I would never outrun it.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said, still watching, ‘but it’ll have to be quick.’
From one of the rear saddlebags I took a hoof pick and checked each of Kashtan’s hooves in turn, removing any stones and clearing the dirt from around the frog. I should have done it before I had saddled her, as well as checking her shoes, but I had been in too much of a hurry.
As I worked, I felt a constant unease, as if I were being watched.
I untied the roll of blankets from home and cut a square large enough to put round Kashtan’s damaged hoof. I secured it with a short piece of twine round her fetlock before cutting another square, this time from the small tarpaulin that acted as my rain cover when sleeping outdoors. This, too, I tied round her hoof.
‘It should do for now,’ I said, hoping it would prevent any further damage.
When that was done, I rested for a few minutes, sitting on the tarpaulin and leaning back against a tree, trying not to think about what I had left behind in the forest. Kashtan stood close and I watched her for any sign that her hoof was bothering her.
‘I don’t know where we are,’ I said to her.
Just as Babushka had told us, so Marianna had told our boys that the woodland spirits would try to lead them astray in the forest by covering their tracks so they couldn’t follow them home, or by calling to them, enticing them deeper into the trees, always at the edge of their vision, always tricking. I hadn’t needed the
leshii
to confuse me – I’d had my own demons to do that – but I couldn’t help looking around. Alone, it was easy to imagine that something malevolent was waiting out there, hiding just out of view.
I struggled not to think about such things. There were no
rusalkas
. No vengeful spirits of the dead surrounded me, preparing to descend on me from the darkness. I was alone with Kashtan. Nothing else was here.
And yet the disquiet would not leave me.
‘We need to move,’ I said to her, fishing a small compass from my satchel and tapping the dirty glass cover. ‘Need to get away from here.’ I held it out to the light so I could read it better and shook my head. ‘We’re heading in the wrong direction.’ I looked over my shoulder, then put the compass away, touching the tobacco pouch in my satchel and wishing I had enough for a cigarette. It would have helped to calm my nerves, but the half-smoked stub from Tanya lay forgotten in my pocket.
‘What now, though?’ I had intended to further investigate the forest beyond the lake before returning to follow the treeline close to the road the women had taken, but hearing horses in the village had put a stop to that. I wouldn’t be able to return to the road yet.
‘We’ll go north,’ I said to Kashtan. ‘That’s where they said they were headed, so we’ll keep going that way until we’re out of the forest. Then we’ll think again. Maybe even look for the road.’ I tried to sound hopeful. ‘Perhaps find Tanya and Lyudmila. God knows I could use the company.’ And they had been following Koschei for some time. We could work together to find him.
‘They weren’t there,’ I said. ‘My boys. They weren’t there. I’m sure of that.’ I stood and put my face against Kashtan’s. ‘That means they might still be alive. Maybe even Marianna too.’
He likes to drown the women.
No. I couldn’t let myself believe that.
‘You think they’re out here somewhere on their own? That they got away?’ I turned and looked behind me. ‘Maybe we
should
double-back. Lay a false trail and . . . They might be hiding in the forest right now. Or they might have gone home to wait and . . .’ The possibilities tore at my resolve and I wished I could split myself and go in different directions, but I could make only one choice, so I
had
to assume Koschei had them. It was the most likely of all the alternatives that tumbled through my mind, and I made myself concentrate on why I believed that.
Koschei had visited the village a week ago, maybe a little longer, according to Galina in one of her rare moments of lucidity. If Marianna and the boys
had
managed to escape, I was sure they would have returned home by now, but I had seen no sign of recent activity there. Nor had I found their bodies – not of any of the women or children – and I couldn’t afford to run blind through the forest searching for them while Koschei moved further and further from me. Returning would waste precious time and increase the possibility of coming face to face with whoever might be following me.
Pursuing Koschei was my only choice.
‘God, I hope they took prisoners. You think they took prisoners?’ I touched the
chotki
on my wrist.
Please let them have taken prisoners.
I stood back and looked at Kashtan, my only friend. ‘I’m sorry I scared you. You ready to go now? You ready to help me find them?’
Kashtan snorted, bowing her head up and down as if she had understood me.
She looked fine, so I rolled the blankets and tarpaulin, securing them behind the saddle, then climbed onto her back, but it wasn’t long before she began to favour her right foot, her head bobbing down each time she put pressure on the left.
My own weight was adding to her pain, so I climbed down and led her through the forest, checking the compass every now and then to make sure we were headed the right way.
We turned this way and that, never moving in a straight line, stopping from time to time to cover any tracks we had left. If anyone
had
found our trail in Belev and was following us, it would be difficult for them to hunt us in here, and there would be breaks in our trail, places where we seemed to simply disappear. Our erratic journey through the trees would make it almost impossible to pick up the trail once more. Travelling like that took longer and was more tiring, but if it threw potential hunters off our tracks, it would be worth it.
I was of no use to Marianna and the boys if I were dead.
Passing from the gloom into the dull evening light after hours in the forest was like emerging from the underworld. Leaving that darkness was a blessing and the relief was tangible. The air tasted fresher, the expansive sky spread above, and the steppe stretched out before me, a vast sea of frosted grass and thistle and dandelion, scattered with lonely islands of hawthorn and oak. There was cover to be found among the trees behind me, but right now it felt safer to be in the open. In there, anyone following was invisible, and there was a constant sensation of being watched, of being pursued. On the steppe, nothing could hide.