*
Another time we passed the outskirts of a town on a river which must have flooded some years earlier. You could see the high tide stains on the buildings that were still standing. There was silt across the highway, and we came across an automobile all crusted with dried mud that looked like it had been swallowed and spat out by a whale. Its windows were all blurred with mud, but it still had an odd poise, like something squat and pwerful. It put me in mind of one of those low, broad men with sloping shoulders. The rubber of its tyres was ripped and splayed out.
Zulfugar was drawn to it. He caressed its rear window with his dirty hand and muttered something in Russian to Shamsudin. The two of them laughed.
‘He says as a child he dreamed of having such a machine,’ said Shamsudin.
Zulfugar tried the door, but couldn’t budge it. The sound of him snubbing that lock seemed almighty loud in the silence. He was so insistent on getting in that I thought one of our guards would shoot him.
I took hold of his elbow and his arm went slack in my hand, the way it does when you pull someone away from a fight he doesn’t really fancy, and he came along with me, but not without turning to look at the car as it grew smaller behind us. And when we stopped ten minutes later to fill up from the river, he was still full of his car, banging away in Russian and shaking his head, like a hunter who just missed bagging a white moose.
There’s always those moments with the loss of someone close when the pang just grabs you and doubles you up. And other times, when it’s just another of the facts you live with, like the time of sunrise, or the colour of the windowsill. In different ways, all of us confronted the facts of what we lost when the world our ancestors bequeathed to us hit the buffers. I had things which triggered it for me. Laundry was one: there was something so sedate and ordinary about the routines of washing linen. But we didn’t come across too much clean linen on our march. In some strange way, for Zulfugar it was all about that ancient car.
*
We lost eleven men on our trek. That includes the two that Hansom killed, a guard that was thrown by his horse, the man who got left behind, and four of the other prisoners: a heart attack, snakebite, malaria, and an older man called Christopher something or other who just didn’t wake up one morning. I envied him a little.
To be honest, I was surprised that we didn’t lose more, but the gang-master knew his work: he knew when to push us hard, and he knew when to ease off when we were floundering. He kept discipline among the guards, and though there was drinking among them, they never went beyond common or garden rowdy.
He rode up beside me one day and started speaking in a low voice and without any introduction. ‘I hear you fell out with my brother Silas.’
He was ambling just slightly in back of me, so I had to turn at an odd angle and look up into the sun to see his face. I told him he must have been mistaken as I didn’t know anyone of that name.
‘I’m Caleb Boathwaite,’ he said. ‘My brother Silas is who sent you here.’ He had a kerchief pulled round his nose against the dust and now he lowered it.
I said nothing.
‘He tells me you’re a woman too. I took you for a man that time we met outside the city limits of — now what place was it now?’
‘Evangeline.’
‘That’s right. I’ve been racking my brains to think why you left that place. Someone like you, on th move, getting mixed up with my brother. It makes me nervous.’ He smiled as though to say that nothing in the wide world could ever make a man like him lose his cool.
I could feel my cheeks burning behind their layer of dust but I stayed silent.
He looked at me for a few moments and then spurred his horse to the front of the line.
He never spoke to me again after that, but I noticed now and then that he would watch me, and when he wasn’t he had detailed one of the guards to give me closer attention.
*
Once I knew they were related, I saw lots of likenesses between Caleb and his brother the Reverend. They both had the same thin noses, and those smart eyes that weigh you up in a second. If anything, I preferred Caleb of the two of them, since he wasn’t apt to prettify what he was doing with the name of religion. He wasn’t self-deceived. But I got to know him better in time, and I learned he was more dangerous. That look he had I’ve seen on a few men, and it never boded well. In other times, it would have been the look of a sea captain, or an explorer, pushing his men into an unknown latitude, or a military general, perhaps, of the most practical and ruthless kind. But in these times of ours, the material of conquest was much more limited, and he had turned out a trader in human flesh.
*
We all felt we had an idea where we were headed for, but no one knew for sure. Rumours would pass through the line about our destination, a different one each day. Someone would say he’d overheard the guards saying we were going to fight in a war. Another would say that the base was a mine and we’d be working miles underground. I tried not to think that far ahead, just sticking to the moment at hand, keeping marching, holding my nose and eyes clear of the dust.
There wasn’t a soul to be seen on that road, but now and again you’d see a place that looked like it might house someone — there’d be a couple of chickens perhaps, or a row of beans in the garden. The guards would scoop up anything that could be eaten and we’d move on. I often wondered about whose meal they’d taken. I suppose whoever it was had learned to hide the moment they saw our dust on the road.
By the beginning of June there was a kind of laggardliness in the line that no amount of cajoling or threats of beating could cure us of. Something in our bones sensed the object of our journey growing nearer, and the fear of what was to come made our feet drag.
*
It was usual for us to stop and make camp towards the end of the day. Although you couldn’t tell by looking at it because it seemed so straight, the road had been making a slow arc to the south. The trees had changed and there was more variety among them: walnuts as well as birches, elm, willow, limes. I’d never been this far south in my life before. I almost missed the arctic summer. In the Far North, there’d be no night at all by now, round-the-clock daytime, and that always gave me a jolt of energy that I enjoyed. But where we had fetched up, the day unravelled into darkness around nine.
We had been growing jumpier by the day. Whereas before, the spurs off the highway had been rare, now we passed more and more of them. There were road signs too, blackened and twisted, and, or a rin any lettering I could understand, but still keepsakes of something, mementoes of the past.
I thought of all the other humans who had looked on these signs, arriving here from the west with a sense of wonder and hopefulness as they came to start lives in these cities, a late chapter in the story of humanity. How late, they could never have guessed.
And I thought of Ping. How lucky for her that she had been spared this. Sometimes I looked at the guards and wondered if one of them had fathered her child. I could have been fooling myself, but I felt that Boathwaite was too cold a fish to have done a thing like that. Was it him? The horseman with the Tatar eyes? Or the older one in the patched jacket, who ate with his knife, and whose slow movements breathed his contempt of us? Or the young one with the sweet face, the most junior of the whole crew, who gathered their plates after their mealtimes, and fetched fire for their smokes?
We’d hear them talking and laughing in the evenings, but too far away to make any sense of it. All of them must have had stories like mine and Shamsudin’s. Boathwaite was the child of settlers like I was. One of the others was part-Tungus. There were Russians and a couple of fellows who looked like they were from the Caucasus, reddish of hair with joined-up eyebrows, gold teeth, and big ears.