That seemed to surprise him less than I expected, then I saw that he had fallen asleep. His face looked old and hollow and the skin of it hung in baggy folds.
I whistled him out of his slumber. It was cold enough that he would never come round if he slept there.
He stumbled after me groggily. I led him to the stairwell and covered him with a heap of bedclothes from the apartment.
*
At dawn, I went up to the roof to watch the sun come up over the city. It lit the glass in the distant windows of the second city — gold and bronze, and some the greenish-blue of cut ice.
I took the memory stone up with me and laid it down so it could drink in the sunshine for a few hours and come to life. It looked even prettier in the daylight, bright and shiny as a knife-blade. It had an ebony screen. There was some tiny writing on the front in Russian and a row of buttons marked with symbols that I couldn’t recognize. They moved with a faint click at the lightest touch. On the back were written the only words I could understand: Made in China.
*
The guards struck their camp and headed off an hour or so after sunrise. They moved slowly along the eastern bank of the river. I lay on my belly and followed them with the glass. They had just enough animals for the journey back. The sleds were loaded up with the things that had been brought out of the Zone.
All the bodies had been left where they had fallen. The one that had died on his knees had keeled over in the night. The others lay piled under the fresh snow too far away for me to count them, even with the glass.
I put some kibble in a pillowcase for Shamsudin to eat when he woke up.
It was a nuisance keeping him in this half-assed quarantine, but I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t certain that he was a danger to me, but I couldn’t risk it. I thought it was best not to touch him, or anything he handled or ate, and not breathe the same air.
He came around towards mid-morning. I watched from higher up the stairwell as he munched the food I’d left him.
The sleep and water seemed to do him some good. He looked less deathly and he had some of his old poise back.
I said to him that the guards had gone and we were free to go.
‘Free to go where?’ he asked.
I shrugged and told him he could go where he liked. As for me, I was headed home.
He gave me a mistrusting look. I sensed that business in the woods still hung over him. I said I wasn’t minded to pay him back for thinking of killing me. I found it easy enough to forgive him. I m
At that he came closer and offered to shake my hand on it.
I told him not to mistake me, and that I was shaking his hand in spirit, but that there were diseases and strong poisons in the Zone and either one of us might have picked them up. I said until it was clear that we were both well, we should give each other a wide berth.
Shamsudin surprised me then by bursting into tears and saying he was tortured by the thought of what he’d sunk to.
I told him not to mind it and that supposedly better men had sunk to a lot worse.
*
Before I left I collected the memory stone I’d put on the roof. It was warm to the touch but there was no life in it. I squeezed every button and even tried shaking it. The thing was just no good any more.
As I drew back my arm to pitch it into the river, its screen picked up the sunshine and cast it into my eyes. It was bright enough to make me wince. I held it in my palm and turned it this way and that in the light. The glass of it was so true that it worked like a mirror.
I hadn’t seen my face up close for so many years, and to tell the truth, it looked a little better than I remembered.
Twenty years seemed to have taken the anger out of the scarring. I was a sight older, but my face looked more comfortable with itself. Not pretty, by a long chalk, but no longer hideous. Or maybe I’d just imagined it was worse than it was.
I decided to reprieve the mirror. I would hang it from a string above my seeds to keep the crows off. I liked the idea that it would have a second life as a bird-scarer. I put it in my coat pocket with my tinder and flints.
After a hunt, I found a hammer for Shamsudin to break open his chains with. He went at it for a while and managed to get the chain off, but couldn’t crack the fetters.
*
We left the Zone around noontime. There were about four hundred yards of slush between us and the bridge. I walked the horse, but I kept ten yards ahead of Shamsudin. Whenever the squish of his footsteps got too close, I pressed on a little faster.
Just stepping onto the bridge, I immediately felt different. I realized that I’d been breathing shallow the whole time I’d been in the city.
The first body we came to lay a yard or two beyond the block post. It belonged to Zulfugar. I didn’t linger there. The shell they used must have had a soft tip because it had sprayed a peacock’s tail of his insides across the snow.
I pushed on to the campsite at the far side of the bridge. I was hoping that, being a horse down for the trip home, Tolya would have had to shed some rations, but all I could find at the spot was empty tins and bottles and their cold cooking fire. I raked the embers with my toe just in case they had dropped some food.
Shamsudin was dawdling on the bridge. I looked up and saw him stood on his knees by the body, head bowed, saying a prayer over the dead man, and I shouted to him not to get too close to him.
He yelled back an oath at me in a thick, choked voice.
I drew my gun and ran back after him, struggling to keep my footing in the slush, and telling him not to touch the corpse, or I’d shoot him. I was breathing hard by the time I caught up to him, but my gunsight was steady enough on his forehead.
His eyes were all flared up. He jutted his chin at me as though to say he’d get as close as he wanted. Then he turned away from me, grabbed Zulfugar’s sleeve to pull him up sitting, and hoisted the body from its armpits.
It was an awkward lift and he tottered as he got to his feet.
I don’t know if he thought I’d shoot. I don’t think he cared by then.
He buried the body in a bank of shale at the river’s edge. I watched him from the track as he dug out a trench with his hands and pieces of flat stone. It was not much more than a foot deep and it took him a while to get the body covered.
*
We made our way slowly south as the light lengthened, and the sky turned all blue and gold. Shamsudin and I never said a word to each other until sunset.
When we stopped, I cut us both branches to lie on. He offered to help but I said he should keep his distance. His coat was still spotted with gore from the corpse. He’d buried his friend and as good as buried himself, but he wasn’t going to bury me.
I made his bed a noisy one so I could keep an ear on him.
The weather was warm for early March, but it was cold and comfortless without a fire and I was too hungry to sleep.
I was watching us both for signs of sickness. I didn’t want to die now, not here, within an ace of being properly free.
The twigs Shamsudin was resting on rustled as he shifted his place.
I told him that in a day or two, we’d be able to hunt the wildlife and burn wood. There were fish in the rivers just south of here. We were too late for salmon, but there was pike-perch and grayling. We’d leave them on the ice and carve them into frozen slices — stroganina. There were leaves and mosses we could eat. If it came to it, I could make famine bread from pine bark. I asked Shamsudin if he’d ever eaten horse-flesh.
He said, ‘Not knowingly.’
I told him he was in for a treat. Horse makes a fine sausage, and the steaks are sweet and tender. The Yakuts eat the liver frozen raw — like meat ice cream.