For days at a time, we had to turn off the Lena and make our way through the taiga. Then it was slow travelling, working our way through snow, until the ice on the river was strong enough to carry us again.
As we drew closer to the arctic circle, the ice on the river thinned once more and we had to turn back into the taiga for the last push north.
We shared rations with the prisoners and kept an easy pace. It was the closest thing to fraternal I’d seen in my days at the base. All the same, there was something that grew heavy and joyless in the mood of the prisoners as we made our progress north.
Usually you couldn’t stop those fellows chatting. Now there seemed to be hours of silence, broken only by the clink of chains and bridles and the crunch of snow.
Every time we stopped to make camp, Tolya pulled a cerberus from his saddle-bag and pointed it around the place. He had brought two of them. Once or twice he gave me one to use on the firewood before we lh the tat to make sure it was clean.
I’d never held one before. It was about the size of a sidearm but dense and top-heavy, with a dial in the top of it and a couple of wires sticking out the back. I got a thrill from using it, but it spooked the prisoners, especially when it gave out a noise.
Most of the trees were clean and safe to use, but there were copses of them that made the cerberus chirrup. It was the same as at Buktygachak: poison had got into the fibre of things. Radiation had blown this way across the land. The trees had leached it up from the soil. It was locked into them, for now, but breathing their smoke would burn your throat and bray the inside of your lungs to mush. Whatever grew out the soil there would harm you if you ate it. And any creatures that fed there would be poisoned too. One day, that place will be clean again, but it will be long after my lifetime.
*
Two nights after we left the Lena, we were woken by the smell of smoke and the crackle of woods blazing. We’d camped in the lee of a stand of trees.
That night there had been long discussions between Tolya and one of the other guards, a man named Victor. It seemed that one of them wasn’t too keen on the place. We camped there anyway, but we gathered the firewood from further away.
When he saw the flames in the darkness, Tolya straight out panicked. His cerberus was going crazy from the smoke, howling and wailing like a beast in a trap.
The prisoners were up and panicking too, shouting about being poisoned.
We struck camp then and there in the darkness, moving out of the path of the smoke, and travelling north, until at daybreak the burning forest was behind us and its coils of black smoke formed a huge cloud in back of us with a flat top like an anvil.
The faces of the prisoners looked bloodless and drained in the half-light from bad sleep and fatigue, so we stopped and rested for the remaining daylight hours.
The mood in the camp that night was sour as wormwood.
Tolya split the guards at daybreak and rode back with half of them to find out who had set the fire. They rode the long way round, staying away from the grey banner of the poisoned smoke.
I stayed back with the prisoners. Tolya had left me the spare cerberus for finding firewood. I went with Shamsudin and Zulfugar to get it.
I took them further from the camp than we needed so as to be more private.
Watching the two of them sweat over the saw, and sweat again as they loaded up the sled, I felt a little bad inside myself. Because of me they’d been dragged out of the warm on a lie to face who knew what?
I swung down off the horse. She nuzzled a tuft of grass at the foot of the tree. I looped the reins round a branch so she wouldn’t go off and eat the dirty stuff.
Zulfugar had walked a little apart and was breaking branches for kindling off a dead birch. I went over to speak to Shamsudin.
He was working with a hand-axe, stripping logs so they’d sit more easy in the sled I hauled a couple of pieces alongside him, and I told him that I was sorry he’d been deceived, that I knew as little as he did, and that I gave him my word that I would let nothing bad happen to him.
‘That’s not in your power,’ he said.
I didn’t disagree, but I was thinking to myself that with a couple more horses we could all three of us get clean out of there before Tolya returned with the other guards.
Life at the base depended on separating the guards from the prisoners by the fact of their privilege. I wanted to tell Shamsudin that Boathwaite hadn’t been able to buy my loyalty with the promise of a whorehouse and coffee made out of dandelion roots.
He dumped a load of wood with a crash onto the sled. ‘Zulfugar says there is a plague city north of here. He says we are being sent as grave-robbers to steal from the dead.’
‘How does he know a thing like that?’ I said. It sounded like it might be true, but it also sounded like the kind of wild rumour that the men liked to scare each other with. There was a kind of prestige attached to being the man with the darkest view of Boathwaite’s motives.
I bent to pick up a stray branch and I found myself sliding backwards. The treads of my leather boots had filled with snow that spread out in a pancake of ice around my feet and wouldn’t bite. I fell forward onto my front into the snow, almost laughing at myself, because the fall was comical.
Shamsudin drew nearer and I thought he was going to offer to help me raise myself up out of the deep snow, but then I saw the hand-axe glint by his side, and instead of laughter in his eyes there was something deadly serious.
I could never hate him for it. He had the look of a hungry dog, measuring the length of his chain against the distance of a juicy bone, wondering if he was about to feed or choke himself.
He took one step forward. I had fallen awkwardly and my gun sat under me, so that I would need to wriggle to get it free — and even then, there was a chance it would fail to fire, and he could brain me. I wonder what restrained him for those seconds. I’d like to think it was his affection for me, his decency, maybe his religion, or his training as a doctor — ‘First, do no harm,’ they say. Maybe running it through his mind gave him second thoughts and his intelligence got the better of him: the two of them, one horse, no easy way to break their shackles. Maybe he just lacked courage.
Shamsudin was the kind of man the old world must have turned out in millions. Smart and charming, but with such a slim connection between him and the earth. He had more stuff in him than a book does, and if you cared to listen he had a better sense than most how we’d ended up in this world, but still a beast like Hansom was better able to live in it. Those soft hands delayed a moment too long. And then Zulfugar was back, panting and tugging his load of branches, and Shamsudin looked aside like a guilty thing. And in that second, I rolled over and freed my side-arm.
Shamsudin raised his arms over his head. I wagged the gun at the two of them. ‘Get this thing loaded up,’ I said. A glance passed between them. There was an after-smell of danger in the air.
We went back in silence.
*
Tolya rode back into the camp late that afternoon with a Tungus boy stumbling along behind him, his wrists tied and roped to Tolya’s saddle. One of the boy’s eyes was puffy and closed and he had dried blood in his nostrils. He looked to be no more than fourteen.
‘This is who set the fire,’ Tolya said.
The guards circled the boy. He trembled as they looked at him, his eyes cast down at his ragged fur boots that were held together with strands of rawhide. Everything he wore seemed on the brink of falling apart. He reeked of woodsmoke and his face was blotchy with smuts. He called to mind a tiny mouse that might die of fear in your hand if you picked him up.