“That was where I first met Ungern. I won’t forget it. The way he looked at me when I walked in ... The way he waited for me.”
He shuddered.
“Ordinarily, I’d hit a man who looked at me like that. But I didn’t hit him. I knew better than that. I tried to stare him out, but .. . Anyway, you’ll meet him soon enough. Be very careful when you do. He can shift from complete affability to the purest sadism or rage in a matter of seconds. I saw it myself.
“He always carries a sort of riding crop made of bamboo.
Extremely thin and flexible, but with rough edges. One of his staff officers came in. A youngish man, probably not long out of military academy, but already showing marked signs of the dissipation I’d already seen in Chita. He reported something Ungern obviously didn’t like to hear. The baron flew into a rage and hit him full across the face with the cane. It cut the man’s cheek open, right along the bone. He almost fainted, but Ungern made him stand and finish his report. He was quivering with rage Ungern, I mean. But the second the boy left, he began talking to me as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. From what I know now, I suppose nothing had.”
Winterpole looked out of the window to his left. In the west, the sun was setting, blood-red in a haze of sand. Behind them, the dust laid a long plume across the desert.
“Something else happened while I was there,” he went on.
“They brought in an old man, a Jew. His son had been executed on Ungern’s orders the day before, for no reason I was able to ascertain.
The old man had come to ask for the body. That’s all. He wanted to give his son a Jewish burial, not leave him to be eaten by the dogs the way they do in those parts. He made no complaint. He didn’t criticize. But whether it was his face or his manner or his being Jewish or something else, he infuriated the baron.
“Ungern called two of his aides and had them take the old man outside. He told me to come out and watch, to see how he punished traitors. I saw I would have to obey: being a foreigner was no guarantee of immunity there.
“They took the old man and put him in a tall wooden box. There was a hole in the side of it, and they had the old man put his arm through it. It was freezing, well below zero: we were all dressed in warm furs, but it still felt cold, bitterly cold.
“They tied the old man’s arm so he couldn’t get it back inside the box. Then they poured water over it until it was soaking. It didn’t take long to freeze. Three hours later, they came back. The arm had frozen solid, like a lump of ice. Ungern just walked up and snapped it off. I watched him do it. As if he were snapping off a rotten twig. It made a cracking sound, like an old branch. It didn’t even bleed.”
He paused. It was growing dark suddenly. He switched on the headlights of the car, long white cones that stabbed into the darkness far ahead, catching insects in their beams, creating narrow worlds in which small creatures stirred for brief moments before being swept away again into the blackness.
“The old man died, of course. He died that night in great pain, and by morning the dogs had eaten what was left of him, along with his son.”
Winterpole looked up. All the aplomb, all the casual affectation had drained away to leave him empty and bereft, like a shell far away from the heart of the sea.
“So now you know,” he said.
“Now you know who we’re dealing with. Who our friends are.” His eyes filled with a sense of horror.
“He’s all we have here, Christopher. He’s all that stands between us and the Bolsheviks.”
There was silence. The car drove on through the dark waste, a brightly lit warning of times yet to come. The desert was coming awake. Between them, Winterpole and Ungern Sternberg and Zamyatin would bring the benefits of their cold civilization into the wilderness. If it did not blossom, they would not despair: they had time: they would water it with blood.
“Do we need friends like that?” asked Christopher. He failed to see the necessity. He failed to understand how such a frail barrier could stand between two philosophies.
“It’s hard for you to understand, Christopher. You weren’t in Europe during the war. You didn’t see what we did to one another.
We lost our heads. We became animals. When the war ended, it was the general opinion that the beastliness had ended with it. As if that could ever be.
“The war to end wars” that’s what we called it. But how can war end?
It’s part of us, it’s in our blood.
“If the Bolsheviks spread their creed any further, there’ll be another war, one worse than the last. My job is to prevent that, at any cost. Our people back home have just won a war, and peace has never seemed so good to them. They want it to go on forever:
poppies in the fields, photographs of Uncle Arthur wearing his medals on the mantelpiece, the flag unfurling day after day in a stiff breeze, the home fires burning all winter long. And I’m afraid for them. They’re about to be overtaken by Zamyatin and History, and they don’t even know it. That’s why Ungern Sternberg is necessary. Regrettable, but necessary, I assure you.”
He cleared his throat.
“He won’t last long, don’t worry. Men like him serve a purpose in times like these. He cleared the Chinese out of the way and did a good job of it. There would have been an incident if we’d done the same Diplomatic rows. Reparations.
“He’ll hold off the Bolsheviks until we can organize something better, something more permanent. Then we’ll put our own man on the throne in his place. The Tibetan boy, perhaps. We’ll supply arms and advisers, monetary reserves. We’ll put up telegraphs and open banks and start trade flowing. It’ll all work out in the end you’ll see. Believe me, people in very high places have discussed this thing. Very high places indeed. Discussed it inside and out.
It’s for the best. You’ll see. All for the best.”
The roaring of the engines filled the world. In front, the darkness was forced aside only to fall in again behind them, thick and unappeased.
Chindamani turned and spoke to Christopher.
“It’s like magic,” she said.
“Lamps that can turn the darkness to daylight. Boxes that can run faster than wind-stallions. You never told me about any of this, that your people could do such wonderful things.”
“No,” said Christopher, staring into the darkness.
“I didn’t tell you. Everything we do is magic. One day we’ll turn the whole world into fairyland. Wait and see.”
They halted that night in the centre of a vast depression one hundred and eighty miles north of Sining-fu. A large moon gave them light out of a cloistered sky, turning the sand to silver and the hollow in which they rested to a giant, polished bowl. Without the sun, the sands had given up their heat. They lit a fire with charcoal bought in Sining-fu and ate in silence, shivering.
Christopher was unable to explain his worries properly to Chindamani. He told her they would be in Urga in a matter of days. Brought up to believe in miracles, and entranced by the magical pulse of the motor vehicle that had already carried her so far into this ice less and snowless land, she believed him.
He told her what he knew of Ungern Sternberg, not to frighten, but to warn her. He said the Russian had kept a pack of wolves in Dauria so Winterpole had told him and that he had fed his victims to them on occasion. But she had never seen a wolf or even heard one calling in the stillness of the night, and thought he was telling her tales like those she had once delighted Samdup with in his lab rang when winter was at its height.