Tolya cuffed the boy round his head and the others set on him with kicks and blows.
He let himself be hit, standing listless and soft — whether from real hopelessness or because he was smart enough not to stiffen at the punches, I couldn’t say. After a few heavy shots, he flopped into the snow. His greasy shapka plopped down a little further off.
The men beat him for a while. What is it about a prone body that makes men so murderous? Lucky for him, the snow where he fell was deep, and their felt boots muffled their blows. Also, unlike the prisoners, the guards were fat and idle, and they got tired after a minute or two of wading and kicking in the deep snow.
They left him and stood cursing and catching their breath. Tolya explained that the boy had been smoking meat in the forest at a little camp of his own that had been all burned out, and by the looks of things, he’d been there months at least.
I picked up his hat with the barrel of my gun and dropped it closer to him. It didn’t do to look too tender-hearted in front of those men, but I felt pity for the poor creature. I crouched down and spoke to him the few words of Tungus that I knew. He lay curled up in a ball and didn’t even raise his head to meet my glance. He was dazed and it seemed like his nose was broken. There was a spray of blood and dribble around his mouth. I couldn’t help thinking of Ping. It seemed like every encounter with a stranger spelled death or injury to someone.
Tolya and one of the guards called Stepan came up close behind me and asked what I was saying to him.
I told them they were fools for knocking him silly, because now we’d never get sense out of him. Stepan said he’d make him understand and he shook him and yelled questions at him: ‘Where you from? Where’s your friends hiding at? Who you spying for?’
This Stepan wasn’t a bad sort, but like the others he was scared. Outside of the base, they knew nothing of the land they lived in, and their imagination peopled the place with monsters. Here, only a few hundred miles north of where they lived, they felt as far from home and as uneasy about it as if we were on the moon.
One of the guards said to be careful because he might be a Wild Boy. Some of these Wild Boys lacked speech, he said, and ate meat raw, and some of them walked on all fours and could take out your throat with their bare teeth if they had a mind to.
I almost laughed in his face. I’ve been all over the Far North and if there are such things as Wild Boys, I ought to have seen at least one of them.
It seemd clear to me the boy was simple-minded. So I said to them that he was an idiot and that it would be bad luck to harm him. There wasn’t much that they held sacred, but anything in the way of a superstition had a lot of power over them. They were apt to believe all sorts of nonsense about charms, and omens, and black magic.
They kept him tied, but they let him be after that.
When evening came we ate dried meat and bread we had brought with us, on account of the radiation in the game. The guards threw scraps to the boy, which he ate as he sat and rocked on his haunches.
At nightfall he crawled under a caribou skin beside the fire and fell asleep.
*
That night the stars were bright as anything. There were wisps of silver fog above the trees, and still the smoke rose from the burned forest.
I watched my breath rise up into the clear sky. The stars once had names, every one, and once shone down like the lights of a familiar city, but each day they grew a little stranger. I knew the Pole Star and the Dipper to travel by, and I’d had the others explained to me over the years, but was that the Great Bear, or Arcturus? Andromeda, or Orion’s belt? Could you see Venus this far north in January?
The sky was becoming a page of lost language. Things as a race we’d witnessed and named for ever were being blotted out of existence.
Once these rivers all had names, the hills too, maybe even the smaller dinks and folds in the pattern of the landscape.
This was a place once, I thought.
We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought out all garbled.
Here we were, within a day of the Zone, getting ready to filch from dirty land the things we no longer had the wit nor means to make. And when the Zone was exhausted, we would be lucky to be this boy, stalking poisoned animals in a forest we could no longer name. He was our best possible future.
I lay down to sleep thinking that as much as I missed what was gone, maybe this was the best thing: for the world to lie fallow for a couple of hundred years or more, for the rain to wash her clean. We’d become another layer of her history, a little higher in the soil than the Romans and the people that built the Pyramids. Yes, Makepeace, I thought, maybe one day your mandible will show up under glass in a museum. Female of European origin. Note the worn incisors and the evidence of mineral deficiency from a poor and unvaried diet. Warlike and savage. And beside it some potsherds.
In the long run, the waters recede, the sun rises, and plants grow. I’ve never doubted that something will survive of us. Of course, I won’t make it. And all those books I saved will end up mulch and bird’s nests I suppose.
But something will go on. It just gives me no comfort when I imagine the day when the deluge has finally passed, and the dark, slippery, once-human things that will be waiting to hatch out of the ark.
4
WE WERE OFF and moving at daybreak, the clouds above us a mass of black and red.
I don’t know if it was the mood among us that morning, or the dead silence of that poisoned land, but I felt a deep misgiving about where we were headed.
I was afraid Tolya would kill the boy to save the trouble of keeping him, so I took charge of him and let him amble in back of me. He was docile like a herd animal and seemed to want nothing more than to trot behind my horse and share my water.
For two hours until mid-morning we made a long, slow pull up to the shoulder of a low hill. The boy and me were the last to get there. We found the others had stopped and were gazing out at the vista in the next valley.
It was the ruins of a city — and not a city like mine, with its middling houses dwarfed by the water tower — but a city of glass and concrete, with buildings that soared into the sky, and a bridge that spanned a wide, fast-moving section of the river. The city was still and grey, and birds wheeled over its silent streets.
The prisoners were staring too, though some had taken the chance to gulp water or chew on the bread they’d been given. Tolya had a spyglass, and he passed it among us.
Through Tolya’s glass, the city looked like a mouthful of rotten teeth, its buildings and windows hollowed out and lifeless, but its size was awesome. Way in back, on a rise in the rear of the city, was a tower that must have been a hundred yards high. It looked too spindly to stand without blowing over, and yet on top of it was a big disc with windows all around it that seemed to perch there in defiance of the laws of nature.
Over on the most eastern bend of the river, three chimneys, each of them painted in red and white stripes, rose from a vast square box. The building crouched at the water’s edge, and from it sprang a net of wires that were carried on steel legs to the farther side of the river and fanned out beyond it into the distance.
After we’d rested, we descended to the edge of the river and made our way along its bank to the bridge.
It took us maybe forty-five minutes to get there. Our pace slowed as we got closer. Not that we were fearful, but there was so much to take in. Every man’s head was craning this way and that, drinking in the details. The prisoners who were going to go right to the heart of it seemed almost excited.