We made camp a good way from the bridge because the pile of bodies was stinking.
It was a lot different from my last time there. They’d brought bedding, fresh food, and clean firewood from the base — not to keep warm, but for smoke to put off the insects.
The pilot slept in the plane that night, but the rest of them spent the night in the open, sleeping in shifts so there was always someone keeping one eye on the Tungus — and another on me. They still didn’t trust my change of heart.
*
Apofagato had told me I should shave my hair off as a safeguard — anything to stop dust leaving the Zone. So at first light I snipped it short with some clippers and finished it off with a razor.
The guards were asleep. Eben Callard had a private tent and two men to guard it. Like he’d said, he had to be careful how he did business.
I had some tools but no weapons to speak of and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop the double-cross. I just hoped if they’d decided to kill me, they’d do it quickly.
My hair lay all around me in mousy tufts. It was darker than I’d expected, but for the first time in my life I could see there was grey in it. I stroked my naked skull with my fingers — it felt queer and slick to the touch. It was a comfort to cradle it, somehow. It was warm and there was a pulse in it. It reminded me of Ping.
The last thing I did was to throw away the keepsake I had made from the wing. I’d been wearing it so long it left a smudge of grey on my skin. I took it off and pitched it into the river. It rose and dipped like a bird in flight, then vanished. I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.
I didn’t doubt that Eben had told me the truth. Bill Evans had a rule of thumb he used to size up suspects. It wasn’t foolproof — what is? — but it helped to get a handle on people. He called it the law of opposites. He said the truth of a man is the opposite of what he wants you to know about him. If you want to understand someone, you have to find a way to catch hold of his shadow. By Bill’s reckoning, the man to fear is the one always harping on about goodness.
My father felt exalted by the thought of the things he had given up to live his life. He believed that he was a better man than those people who had clung on to riches and city life, who had been slower to see the changes in the world. But the truth was he wasn’t even as good a man as Eben Callard.
Eben was cruel and blunt and practical. He called himself a Christian, but his real beliefs put him closer to the Tungus. There was no right in the first religions — no goodness to confuse the shamans, just the way things were done, just what served life and what didn’t. And no room for hypocrisy.
The prayers my father had offered were the prayers of the Pharisee. He spoke of god and sacrifice. But his god was his own vanity, and the sacrifice had turned out to be me.
*
I crossed back into the Zone a few hours after dawn. The town was quite different with spring on it. The chestnut trees were in flower on the main streets, and the sidewalks seemed coated with a kind of sticky sap that had been thrown down from some of the branches. But in general, there was something sicklier and deader about Polyn in the summer. In winter, it had seemed frozen — or maybe asleep, like the princess in the fairy tale. But in summer, you could see she wasn’t just dead — her corpse was fly-blown.
It took me till early afternoon to find the place Shamsudin had told me about and I spent another hour fixing holds to the wall with the tools I’d brought with me. I tied a rope to one of them.
Then I squeezed myself though the broken window and dropped down into the basement.
It wasn’t exactly how Shamsudin had described it. The way he had told it, the storeroom was near the place he’d come in, but there was nothing like that near by. The chamber was much bigger than I’d expected — it was a walkway almost the size of a road t— noas lit with hidden skylights, and ways coming off it every ten yards or so. It was a labyrinth all right, but on the white tiles of the floor I could see traces of dirt and dried blood where Shamsudin had been before me, so I let him lead me down.
Following his prints was like tracking a wounded thing — the way they doubled back on themselves, went nowhere in particular, and seemed to rest exhausted in one place before continuing. They still told of his despair. The man who left these marks had only days to live, I thought. And as I followed him deeper into the labyrinth, I wondered how long I had, and I thought about the double-cross. I figured it was fifty-fifty that they’d shoot me on the bridge.
The storeroom was much deeper than he’d explained, down several ramps and staircases that he’d never mentioned. I doubt anyone else could have found it. Only someone who’d lost all hope of getting out by another way would have floundered this deeply into the building. Out of all the combinations of turns and corridors, he happened on this one. There was almost a divinity in that — until you remembered how he ended.
Deep, deep inside the bowels of that thing I found a bloody handprint head-high on a pair of double doors, and beyond those, the storeroom.
It was filled with rack upon rack of jars, filled with their flickering blue essence. They looked identical at first, but when you examined them more closely, you saw tiny variations in shape and design, until I wasn’t sure if there were even two the same.
I’ve been in some strange places in my life, but there was something about that room that was so unforeseen. It felt stranger than a tomb, like something divine, but in a religion unknown to me. I thought of the shaman dropping in on the bones of his ancestors. At that moment, if you’d told me that each one of those jars contained a human soul, I might have believed you.
I wasn’t minded to hang around in there. I put four in my bag and lit out.
*
The prisoners at the base used to joke about ‘overfulfilling the plan’ — they said it when some newcomer to their team worked too hard and seemed likely to make them look bad. The first few times they’d say it as a joke, but if the person kept on digging or threshing as though his life depended it — usually in the hope of impressing the guards — then there might be a beating, or worse. Once, I saw a man have his toes taken off with a shovel. The long-term inmates knew it did you no favours to exceed expectations.
I was keen not to overfulfill the plan. There was easily a dozen plane-loads down in those stores, but it seemed to me that there would come a point when I’d brought out so much that they wouldn’t need me any more. If that happened, I guessed they’d cancel my ticket to Barrow.
*
The evening light was melting back into caramel once again by the time I hit the avenue of chestnut trees and bent left onto the bridge. The sound of hooves and laughter echoed from a long way off along the concrete wall of the river, just as the gunshots did the time before.
I dismounted at the bridge approach and walked the last stretch to the block post. There were only two guards waiting. I slung my pack over the concrete division and let the guards spray it off.
I hitched the horse and dropped my tools on the city side of the block post, just how we agreed it. I had an uneaten apple in my pants from my lunch and I offered it to the horse. She nosed it uncertainly, her nostrils quivering. After a moment, she drew back her lips and bit. Then I started to undress, moving gingerly because of all the biting insects.
Pretty soon I was stood there naked, slapping away the mosquitoes from my naked flesh, waiting for the guards to call me across.