The prick of the knife in my neck forced me up on my feet. I wasn’t aware that I was scared, but I peed myself, like I had that time in the lake. A little light was coming in to the sky, but it wasn’t any comfort to be able to squint down at my chin and see that whoever had got me was wearing Tolya’s watch.
He marched me out to the track and gave a low whistle. Horses and men appeared from the woods.
The heap of bodies wasn’t more than two miles behind us.
They talked quietly in a throaty language that I guessed was Yakut. I’d never had much dealings with the Yakut but I knew them to be a tough, horse-herding people. They had flat, dark faces like Kazakhs and were dressed in a ragbag of clothes. I spotted a few hats and coats that I remembered as belonging to the guards. What surprised me most was that, bundled up as they were, I still recognized women among them.
I knelt in the slush listening to their chatter. It sounded like a conversation you might overhear at a market, except they were haggling over me. The higher voice of a woman was as forceful as any of them. I could guess what they were saying: Mercy or not mercy? Kill here or over there? Who gets to keep her stuff?
My hand felt raw and wet. I’d lost a glove stumbling out of the woods, but that didn’t seem to matter any more.
Whoever held the knife in my throat joined the conversation from time to time. I dreaded hearing his harsh raised voice in my ear, because whenever he spoke, he pressed the knife harder and I had to tip my head back to keep him from cutting me.
A faint blue haze was beginning to light the sky from the east. Flawless arctic blue. I knew for certain there was nothing waiting beyond it. No other worlds. No mother, or pa, or Charlo, or Shamsudin. No Ping. And yet, I found myself muttering the words of the Our Father over and over again, as though it was something to bite down on so I wouldn’t cry out in pain.
Someone else came up beside me. A hand wiped the dirt roughly off my face. A new voice said something. It talked for a while. The knife stopped cutting into my windpipe and I fell forward onto my belly.
The ground had the earthy damp smell of mushrooms. I lay there nose-down for a while as they argued back and forth above me.
No one stopped me as I got to my feet. Standing beside me was the boy from the Zone, the Tungus boy. The man who was arguing with him turned away in disgust.
A woman with a chapped red face was breastfeeding a baby. On a little pony beside her was a pale-skinned girl of about ten. Her eyes were so light that she couldn’t have been native and she had fair hair curling out of her bushy fox-fur hat. I almost cried out in surprise, but she looked straight through me with the stony gaze you’d use to aim a gun.
Tolya’s icon was fixed to the lapel of her coat.
One by one the Yakuts went back to their horses, until only the boy stood beside me. He never met my eye, or gave the least indication that he knew me.
I watched them drift away into the forest. The woman with her baby rode behind the man wearing Tolya’s jacket, and the white girl didn’t give a backward glance.
Soon there were only two of them left in the clearing with their horses, the boy and the man with the knife. The boy patted the flank of his horse, but instead of swinging up into its saddle, he handed me the reins and got up on the other horse behind his friend.
He looked back at me for an instant with the blank face of a stranger. There was no kindness or understanding in his expression. I can’t say what he might have been thinking.
It would be nice to suppose he did me a good turn for the one I did him. But there’s no telling ow grace works. I don’t even know if there’s a word for mercy in Yakut.
The imprint of his empty eyes stayed with me when he turned away. He dipped his head as the two of them rode under a branch which scattered snow down his back. In ten more yards, they had vanished, and the drip of the thaw swallowed the sounds of their hooves.
I thought of the curt way I turned him loose that time by the river bank, and of times out hunting when I just held my shot on a whim, or threw back fish because they were too small. They never lingered to speculate about my motives.
It would be consoling to think there’s a pattern of justice in things, but I’ve seen enough to be sure that there isn’t. My father would point to what the boy did and say it was the redeemable part of his humanity. Maybe — rarer than a tadpole in a hailstone — that’s what it was. But if I killed ten caribou, butchered them for their meat and skins, and then freed a snared rabbit just for the pleasure of watching its fluffy behind vanishing in the bracken, would that make me St Francis? I’d be deceived to think so.
The horse licked my bare hand. My pack and glove lay under the tree where I’d been woken. I found them, swung my stiff body onto the horse and aimed her nose at the sunrise.
2
I KEPT AWAY from the track we’d come out on in case Boathwaite had sent a party to find where we’d got to. It meant slower going, but I had the whole summer to get home.
At night, I’d see my route in the sky, mapped out in a pattern of stars. The Lena takes a great swerve to the west, but it ends up almost due south of Polyn, right near the base. I was planning to cut out that bend altogether and ride southeast until I struck the commissar’s highway. As long as I kept on roughly in the right direction, I couldn’t miss it. It was a straight line east to west. And once I was on it, there was less than a thousand miles between me and Evangeline. I could be home in six weeks.
Some evenings I’d pull out Shamsudin’s blue flask. It had bumped around in my pack, but nothing could put a scratch on it. Once I fell asleep holding it. I had bad dreams and my forehead and cheeks were sore the next day, as though I’d spent too long in the sun.
*
I stopped to fish one evening, hooked a pike-perch, and then found four duck eggs in a nest. I made a fire and cooked one of them with the fish.
Overhead, there were cranes coming back from their winters in the south. Their long white bodies looked pink in the dying sunlight. They are holy birds to the Tungus. They use their bones as calendars and mark the phases of the moon in notches on them. The shamans say they ride them up to the ninth heaven where the spirits live and make mischief with human souls.
It’s all fairy tales to me, but I did see a shaman heal a sick woman once. She was a Tungus woman who’d had a stillborn child. It had left something awry with her womb.
The shaman had on a heavy coat of skins with jingling metal beads on it. The beads make a map of the stars. Before there were ever books, those coats were an atlas of the skies. He danced around her body for almost an hour, until a weird web of what looked like blood appeared on the skin of his drum.
I couldn’t speak to the shaman myself, but I asked him questions afterwards by way of a half-Tungus guide.
The shaman said he felt himself rise up through the air as he drummed. The air around him became thick and watery. He claimed it was like being lost in fog, and every now and again the fog thinned, and he was aware of the breathing in the hall. Then he rose up through a final bank of cloud and landed in a clearing.
He followed a path along a mountainside, past a skeleton he said was his father’s, towards a lighted tent.
The sick woman’s body was inside it, in the shape of a pile of stones, with a vine growing out of it. The shaman ripped out the tendrils of the vine. The nearer he got to the centre of the plant, the thicker they got — in the middle, they were a couple of inches round, and furry and hot, like the shaft of spring antlers, full of new blood. And at the heart of the plant was a shrivelled-up thing — the miscarried child whose soul had got lost on its way back from earth.