He gave Paul a cheery wave and climbed back onto the carriage step. The soldiers who had been standing around them shuffled back into position and Paul found himself outside the circle again. Valentine tipped a finger to his fur hat and disappeared into the train.
Paul watched him go then resumed his march along the line of waiting trains. He looked in at each window he passed, but he never saw Sofya.
50
He dreamed he was tumbling through space. A discordant clash of cymbals echoed in his ears as he spun, climaxing with a screeching howl of violins.
He landed violently, hitting his head against something unyielding. The violins faded beneath a timpani that filled his head with drums and bells. A male voice choir took up a descant of grunts and curses.
Dazed, he lifted himself briefly onto his knees until a man fell across him, knocking him sideways. He reached out a hand and grabbed the stove. He fell down again, screaming and holding his burned hand. By the time he had regained his wits someone had lit an oil lamp.
The train wasn’t moving. The teplushka looked as if the Red Army had just passed through it, a Babel of Czech and Russian filling the boxcar around him. And English. Someone was saying: ‘brakes, not violins’ and he listened to the voice until he realised it was his own. He shut his mouth and rubbed his forehead. It ached abominably. His hand came away wet with blood.
The boxcar door slid open and a blast of icy air hit him. Men were still lying all over the floor, nursing limbs and heads. Others were on their feet helping them up. Karel Romanek grabbed Paul and hauled him upright.
‘You’re bleeding, Pasha.’
‘I burnt my hand.’
‘Your head!’
‘No, my hand.’ He held it up in front of Romanek’s face. ‘What happened?’
‘The train braked.’
Paul began to say that was obvious but his voice was drowned out by a medic outside the door on the track waving an oil lamp and shouting something about the injured.
‘Go with him,’ said Karel.
‘I’m all right. Really. Why did we break?’
‘There’s been a smash ahead,’ someone said.
‘Reds?’ asked another.
‘Have they torn up the track?’
‘There’s no gunfire.’
All Paul could hear were shouts and screams. Something was burning. Smoke was in the frozen air.
‘We managed to stop,’ the medic said, still waving his lamp around, ‘or we would have hit them too.’
‘Hit who?’
‘One of the forward trains was stopped in the station. Kolchak’s train and another has smashed into it.’
‘The man can’t even retreat properly,’ someone muttered.
‘What station? Where are we?’
‘Tartarskaya.’
They were only 140 versts east of Omsk. It had been dark before they left the city and there were still hours until dawn. Paul began pulling on his boots, wincing at the pain in his blistering hand. Karel helped him into his coat.
‘I’ve got to look,’ he said. ‘She might have been on Kolchak’s train.’
‘I know,’ said Romanek. ‘I’ll come with you.’
They climbed out of the boxcar. Snow had piled in drifts under the trees by the side of the track and they sank up to their knees in it as they stepped away from the train. Around them men were clambering out and making their way along the track. Ahead, the sky was lit by flame, the air thick with smoke. The stationary train ahead of their broněviky stood silhouetted against an inferno. Beyond it, Tartaskaya station was ablaze. The track was littered with boxcars and carriages. Paul saw some on their sides; others were skewed off the track at odd angles, pointing crazily into the sky. Flames from the station buildings rose into the night, sending showers of sparks cascading like fireworks over the scene. Figures, lit by the blaze, were dancing around the tangled wreckage like besotted savages.
‘Jesus,’ Karel muttered.
Hampered by his heavy coat, Paul ran through the melting snow. Passing the rear of Kolchak’s train he saw the admiral standing by the track surrounded by his staff. Illuminated by the fire, his pale face wore an expression of horror, like a figure in a Hieronymus Bosch painting who was contemplating the flames of hell.
Beyond them, those who had managed to clamber out of the wreck of the gold train stood, stunned, by the track. Men from the Legion had started pulling the injured from the wreckage. Burned bodies lay in the snow like lumps of charred meat. The air was heavy with acrid smoke and the screams of the injured.
Paul clambered over the wreckage of a carriage to get closer. The hot metal seared his already blistered hand. Forced back by the heat, he fell against a pile of split wooden crates and, picking himself up saw gold bars littered amid the twisted metal. Others had already seen them and had begun gathering the scattered treasury, hauling what they could off into the darkness of the trees.
Paul edged as close as he could to the blazing station but the heat was too intense. He backed away to where a line of scorched bodies had been pulled clear and lay in the slushing snow beneath the trees. He walked among them. Most of the faces were unrecognisable, heads of charred flesh and singed hair, their clothes still smouldering. As he passed, one of the bodies raised a blackened arm and pointed at him with a raw finger. The features no longer looked human. The nose was a smudged hole; the lips burned away to the toothy rictus beneath. It opened its mouth, gasping air, then spilled a bubbling rasp from its throat.
Paul stared at it in horror. The man tried again to say something, waving his arm weakly in the air. Paul dropped to his knees beside the blacked body and began shovelling snow onto the still smouldering clothes.
The man made another unintelligible noise before his arm fell to his side.
Paul put his face closer. ‘What? What are you saying?’
And even as he looked, something about the blackened skull appeared horribly familiar. The size of the skull? The bulk of the charred body? The shape of what was left of the ruined features…?
‘Pavel…’ the voice rasped. Then, sucking air, it rattled for a second and fell silent.
Paul fell back into the snow staring at the corpse. It was Mikhail. It had been Mikhail. He scrambled onto his knees again and grabbed Mikhail’s shoulders. The coat was still hot and the charred material fell to pieces under his hands. He got to his feet and went to each blackened corpse in turn, desperately staring into each devastated face. The acrid odour of burnt cloth and aroma of cooked meat filled his nostrils. Some of the bodies still clung to a vestige of life; others were already growing cold in the freezing air. Medics shouldered him aside to reach the injured but he pushed his way back. He examined each body for a trace of what might have been Sofya. When there were no more bodies left to examine he returned to the blazing station and the wrecked train.
It had been left to the men of the Czech and Slovak Legion to start clearing the wrecked train, hauling what they could of the twisted metal off the track by hand and fixing rope and hawser to what they couldn’t, pulling it off with the locomotives. Nothing could be saved of the station. Nothing could be done for the dead.
Paul worked alongside his comrades. Sometime before dawn he found a coat that looked like the one Valentine had been wearing. The fur collar was singed and the expensive material smeared with blood. Of Valentine’s body, he found no trace. Along the track, the remnants of Kolchak’s convoy had finally been galvanised into action. Officers had begun gathering up what they could find of the scattered treasury, picking through the wreckage and piling gold bars into sacks, stuffing paper money into bags. They even chased the charred scraps of government bonds that were drifting across what was left of the station on the Siberian wind.