Somewhere a bird sang, a quirky, warbling note. Then there was a sharp crack, followed by a second, then silence again.
“What the devil’s going on?” demanded Winterpole.
“Shut up,” said Christopher. He was trying to guess the direction from which the shots had come. They were gunshots, he could not have mistaken them.
Two more reports sounded nearby. There was something careful, something methodical about the shooting that Christopher did not like. It was not the seasons for woodcocks, and Mongols did not hunt birds with guns.
“Winterpole,” he said, ‘stay in the car with Chindamani. Keep your pistol ready and use it if you have to if anyone comes, frighten him off. Even if he looks harmless. We can’t afford to take chances. I’m going to check out those shots.”
“Why don’t we just drive on?” queried Winterpole.
“Drive on into what?” Christopher retorted.
“Before I go any further, I want to know just what they ‘re shooting out there birds or people. I doubt very much if it’s the first, and if it’s the second I want to know who’s doing the shooting and who’s being shot at.
I’m relying on you to keep Chindamani safe. You’re a man of action now, Winterpole. It’s time you got your lily-white hands a little dirty.”
“At least call me Simon, old boy. Do me that courtesy.”
Christopher said nothing. He reached down and found his pistol, the one he had brought from Dorje-la, Tsarong Rinpoche’s pistol.
They had been driving along the edge of a vast pine forest, which lay to their right. Christopher was sure the shots had come from there. His suspicion was confirmed when another two rang out in quick succession as he got out of the car. Making allowance for the trees, he guessed they had come from a spot about half a mile away.
“Be careful, Ka-ris To-feh,” Chindamani said in her quietest voice, addressing herself to him alone, in their private universe.
“I’m frightened for you please take care.”
He bent and kissed her cheek.
The trees swallowed him up instantly. He was like a diver entering the sea, plunging out of the sunshine into a green world fingered by narrow shafts of broken light that struggled past murky shadows. His footsteps died away into a thick carpet of pine needles.
Everywhere, fallen cones lay in profusion. Silence reigned like a mad king over an unpeopled kingdom, determined and murderous, eager to lay waste. His breathing was the only sound, raw and melancholy, vexed by the heavy scent of pine resin and dead undergrowth. If there were birds here, they were hidden away, voiceless and wingless, watching from secret branches. If there were other animals, they licked their teeth in dark burrows deep beneath the earth.
The forest went on, breeding itself with a green intensity on every side. He was enveloped in a lacework of boughs and low hanging branches. He cocked his pistol nervously. This must be near the spot from which the shots had come.
Nearby, a man’s voice sounded, barking out what seemed to be words of command. A brief silence followed, then two more shots shook the trees. He thought they came from a clump of trees to his left. A murmur of voices came indistinctly from that direction, but he could not make out what they were saying, or even what language they spoke.
He slipped into the close-set thicket and made for the voices.
The trees concealed him but they also concealed whoever was responsible for the shooting. Perhaps it was rabbits. Perhaps they were shooting rabbits. But nothing ran through the undergrowth.
If he had been a rabbit, Christopher might have bolted at the next shot and run straight into the clearing. But he froze and pressed himself against the trunk of a tree. Out in the clearing just beyond where he stood, night was being summoned into the world.
The last sunlight was being drained from the sky. It clung hopelessly to the branches of the trees, thinning, loosening, breaking apart. Soon it would be dark. It would have been better if it had been dark.
In a ring that stretched all round the clearing, stood about twenty men in dirty white uniforms. On their head they wore scarlet forage caps bearing a death’s-head symbol above crossed shin-bones: the uniform of Annenkov’s now-defunct Siberian units.
In their hands, they held 8mm Mannlicher rifles pointed inwards to the centre of the clearing. They had come a long way from home, and the road back was closed. They were living their apocalypse here in the Mongolian wilderness. Some of them had been fighting since 1914. Seven years, and it still had not ended.
In the centre of the clearing, along a low depression from which undergrowth had been meticulously cleared, about forty bodies lay tumbled in a ragged heap. They were dressed in grey uniforms with red triangles on their sleeves; most had astrakhan caps bearing red stars; a few wore helmet-shaped felt caps with a hammer and sickle device. Near the bodies stood another dozen men, dressed in the same basic uniform and lined up for the same fate.
But Christopher’s eyes were focused on one man alone. By the side of the heap of victims stood a small White officer. He was dressed in a tattered grey Mongol overcoat and an old green Cossack cap with a visor. His right hand was held in a black sling that looked as though it had been there since the man’s childhood if he had ever had a childhood. But on his shoulder he sported a general’s epaulet. And in his left hand he held a heavy service revolver. As Christopher watched, he turned and faced the next prisoner in line.
“Kak vas ha familia? What’s your family name?” he asked. His voice carried in the stillness, hoarse and menacing.
The condemned man shivered in the departing sunlight. In his eyes Christopher saw only an utter hopelessness of the spirit, as though life had drained away long before the bullet entered him.
He was young, a mere boy.
“Arakcheyev,” the boy replied. How old was he? Fifteen? Sixteen?
His voice was toneless; for him, identity meant nothing any longer.
“Itnya otchestvo? Christian name and patronymic?”
“Yuri Nikolayevitch.”
The general turned his head a fraction and barked a command at a second officer standing nearby. This third man was dressed in a soiled white uniform, a lieutenant fresh out of military academy.
In his hand, he held a large book in which he was writing.
“Write them down!” ordered the general.
The lieutenant wrote the names in the book, in their proper order, all according to form. No court, no tribunal, no sentence but death, but a record must be kept of the dead. When the new Tzar sat on his throne and thrilled his people with the glamour of his return, he would find all in order. A million dead. Two million.
Twenty million. But all in order: a graveyard with numbered plots and arrows pointing to the exit.
“From?”
“Gorki.”
“Rank?”
“Corporal.”
“Unit?”
“Second Squadron of the Communist Interior Defence.”
“Age?”
The boy hesitated.
“Eighteen,” he said. But it was a lie. They both knew that.
“You admit to being a Bolshevik?”
The boy paused again. For a moment, he saw something like hope. Would a denial not be enough? Then he looked into the general’s eyes and all hope faded.
“Yes.”
“And a traitor to the Tzar and Holy Russia?”
“Not a traitor,” protested the boy.
“I have been loyal to Russia. I have served the Russian people.”
“Write “Traitor”.” The general paused and looked at the boy.
“Have you anything further to say?”