The guards watched us pretty closely, so I had to glean information out of him a piece at a time. One day, crouching down beside him in the dust at one of the water stops, I found out that he was forty-six and that he had been born in Bokhara, one of the old silk cities in the south. He left to train as a surgeon in the Far East and returned to work at a hospital back in his home town.
He had been a wealthy man and had managed to bribe his way north when the troubles started.
I told him that from what I had observed, it only took three days before desperation and hunger overturned all civilized instinct in a person. He smiled and said I had a bleak view of human nature, and that in his experience, it was nearer to four days.
His chains clanked as he scooped up the water in his hands.
I asked him what kind of surgery he had done.
‘Noses,’ he said, and there was just the trace of a smile.
‘You were a nose surgeon?’
‘I made women more beautiful.’
‘Don’t muslim women go covered up anyway?’ I said, and he laughed.
The guards rode past, and chivvied us to move on. We ambled on, all eighty of us, getting into motion slowly like one big reluctant animal.
‘I don’t suppose you could do anything for me,’ I whispered to him with a wink.
‘There is nothing wrong with your nose.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of my nose.’
‘What were you thinking of?’ he asked, deadpan.
‘You’re very gallant,’ I said.
He looked me over carefully, as though it was the first time he had noticed anything odd about me. ‘An acid burn, I think?’
‘It was lye, but you were close.’
‘Yes, this is easy to treat. We use chemicals to restructureepidermis. I would take skin from your thigh to reconstruct the eyelid. I could make you even more beautiful.’
That was the nearest I came to laughing. You could see how he’d got rich — charming the cash out of wealthy women. It meant something to me that he knew I wasn’t a man.
There was a gentlemanly way about Shamsudin. He wore his rags well, and when he ate, he didn’t wolf his food the way we all did, tearing at it and burping. He ate elegantly, breaking off morsels of food with his long fingers, rolling it into little balls and eating them one by one. I started to do the same — apart from anything, the food went slower that way and so there seemed to be more of it.
The little I told him of my life struck him as insane. He couldn’t believe that my parents had willingly abandoned lives of comfort for the cold of the Far North.
Shamsudin’s own family were all dead, and he had left Bokhara with two companions. They’d been hoping to get to the coast to find a boat that would take them south to Japan or even up to Alaska. They’d come across very few living settlements in their travels, and fewer still who’d help them. One of his companions died of dysentery and the other was shot dead when they broke into a farmstead to steal food. Shamsudin arrived at his destination alone, almost starving, and all the banknotes in his pockets already worthless paper.
He said there was still the occasional boat on the Pacific coast, but the only trade as such was in men and women. About two-thirds of our fellow prisoners had arrived as cargo from Saint Peterpaul in Kamchatka. Shamsudin had watched on the quayside as they disembarked in manacles. If he was aghast at first, he soon got to noticing that the slaves were better fed than he was.
When night fell, he could smell the food cooking over in the slave camp. His guts ached with hunger and his muscles were wasting from slow starvation. He just handed himself over to the guards and begged them to take him. He said he sobbed over his first bowl of food with the shame of what he had done, and he thanked god his parents weren’t alive to see his weakness.
I told him he was being hard on himself. He wasn’t the only one. For every two that were bought, there was another that had enslaved himself because he couldn’t stand it any longer as a free man.
*
Shamsudin aside, the self-enslaved tended to have a harder time of it. There were beast-people among us. One man called Hansom killed a man with a rock one night and strangled someone the second. The guards stripped their bodies of their clothes and left their grey corpses by the roadside.
Hansom went unpunished. The guards let him walk and sleep alone so they didn’t lose any more men.
*
We were backtracking on the same road I’d ridden on through the fall, the commissars’ highway. It all looked different with the snow gone, but now and again I’d see places that I seemed to remember from my journey north. We passed Evangeline towards mid-morning round about the fourth week of the march. I’d known it was coming for days, and as we drew closer to it, my chains seemed to hang a little lighter on me. Just to be close to home was a comfort to me. I hoped we’d pass the night there. Like the rabbit orybook, I felt my chance of freedom would be greater in a place I knew well. I could slip away like Ping had, vanish into the storm drains until the men driving us grew impatient and moved on.
I could feel my heart lifting as the tower on the fire-house loomed proud of the trees and the line slowed to a stop. We were there ten minutes in all, as the guards doled out water. There was one tin mug for all of us, but most of the prisoners, me included, had made our own cups of birch bark like the Tungus did. It was cleaner than sharing, and the birchsap sweetened the water. More than that, just to have something of your own, however small, gave you some of your dignity back.
But at that instant, standing on the edge of the town that had once been my whole world, I felt — not for the last time — like the ghost of the woman I’d been. I thought I could hear a voice calling to me from a distant part of the city, but the sound was drowned out by the shouts of the guards riding along the line and yelling at us all to move on.
*
There was no rain for weeks after the thaw, and the dust raised by all those feet meant we were marching through a choking cloud. It coated the trees beside us and turned the prisoners’ faces grey. Our eyes were wet and bloodshot in masks of ash.
The guards were reluctant to ride at the back of the line, where the dust was worst, so for those of us in the rear discipline slackened somewhat, and we were able to talk more freely to one another, and I got to know Zulfugar a little.
He was an old thirty-five, a full head shorter than me but tough as the devil, and stringy and brown, as though they’d made him out of walnut and rawhide. He prayed even more than Shamsudin.
One night, the guards killed a couple of wild pigs and threw us the leftovers, not out of kindness, but to see us fight over the scraps. A big chunk of haunch landed at Zulfugar’s feet, but he didn’t so much as budge.
I wasn’t too proud to stoop for food so I grabbed it and ate. It was part-burned, part-raw, and very bloody because it wasn’t killed right, but my spit still runs when I remember it. I offered Zulfugar a piece but he wouldn’t take it — he said his religion forbade it.
Zulfugar had been a soldier, and he was very particular about the state of his feet. He washed and dried his foot-cloths each night if he could. Some of the prisoners would rib him about it, as though it was sissy of him to be so concerned about such an unmanly thing, but I soon saw the wisdom of it. One of the men who mocked hardest at him got an abscess on his foot that made his toes goes black. He hobbled so badly that the guards cut his chains off to give him a chance to keep up, but he drifted further and further behind, till one day there was just one fewer at the evening muster. A lot more of us started taking care of our feet after that.