The boy remained silent. He was shaking, trying to control himself. The light was going out of the world. In just another moment he would see the day ending. Suddenly he wanted very much to see the last of the light. It was unbearable to have it snatched away from him by an executioner’s bullet. But he could not bring himself to say anything, not even to ask for another minute of light.
“Very well,” the general said. Some made last speeches, others remained silent. It made no difference. He and his men were impervious to both.
“In the name of the princess Anastasia, Tzarina of all the Russias; in the name of the blessed Tikhon, Patriarch of our Holy Mother Church; in the name of Baron Roman von Ungern Sternberg, Protector of Khalka and Supreme Commander of Russian forces in the East: I sentence you, Yuri Nikolayevitch Arakcheyev, to death. May your soul find mercy with God.”
He raised the pistol to the boy’s trembling head. His victim’s eyes were open, staring, lusting after the dying light. He fired and the boy jerked and toppled backwards on to the heap of corpses.
The general bent down, saw he was still moving, and fired again.
The boy became still. It was growing dark.
“Light torches!” shouted the general.
In a matter of moments, lights flared in the circle round the clearing. Every other man held a torch high in the air. The red flames flickered against white uniforms and long bayonets, and in the centre of the clearing, arms and legs and heads would be singled out momentarily before slipping back into a merciful darkness.
Christopher watched transfixed. Who was his enemy? That was what he wanted to know.
The killings went on. One by one, the prisoners would be led up, questioned, and inevitably shot, usually twice in quick succession. It was a nightmare that repeated and repeated itself.
The last prisoner to be questioned was a thin, stooping man with iron-rimmed glasses, a commissar of the Cheka who had been caught with the military unit whose surviving members had just been executed. The others had been soldiers, but here, thought Christopher, was a real revolutionary. His face was white and drawn, plainly visible in the light of a nearby torch.
Even before the general had a chance to pronounce his death sentence, the man stretched out a hand. With his eyes, he held his executioner fixed, willing him to pass over the gun. A minute passed, two minutes, during which neither man spoke. It was clear what the prisoner wanted. And at last the general gave way.
Using his single hand, he emptied the chamber of his revolver of all but a single bullet, reclosed it, and handed it to the commissar.
Even at such an ideological distance, they understood one another.
All round the clearing, rifles were raised and pointed directly at the prisoner.
But he had no intention of attempting a clumsy escape. He raised the pistol to his head, slowly and deliberately, while all the time his eyes held those of the little general. There was a look of terrible disdain on his face, disdain less for what the general and his men were doing than for what they were, or what they had become.
Watching from the trees, Christopher felt it like an icy blast, the power of this man’s contempt. In a moral sense, he had already escaped his captors. He made no speech, he called down no retribution. It was enough, watching him, to know that the whites were defeated. It was only a matter of time. He held the gun firm against his temple, so that it would not slip. A single motion and all would be well again. He pulled the trigger, and the gun fell to the ground.
The silence that followed was terrible. Whatever pleasure these men had had in their day’s work, whatever triumph they had felt meting out death in such measured handfuls all had been wiped out in a moment by one man’s gesture. The general bent down and picked up his pistol from the ground. His hand shook as he retrieved it and replaced it in its holster.
Christopher stood up slowly, eyes still fixed on the clearing, on the white uniforms of the living, the blood-stained forms of the dead. He turned to go, worried that he might not be able to find his way back through the trees in the dark.
A voice came out of the night, a soft voice speaking in Russian.
“Just drop your gun, tovarisch. We have you covered from all sides.”
He did as he was told. His gun made almost no sound as it fell to the floor of the dark forest.
Behind them, the sky was reddening, as though dawn were breaking in the south. From edge to edge of the horizon, hell was creeping on silent feet across a black sky. It was midnight. The little general Rezukhin was his name had ordered his men to set fire to the forest with their torches. The previous day, he and his unit of forty men had been ambushed passing through the forest on their way back to Urga from a six-day reconnaissance.
Half of them had been killed before they succeeded in luring their attackers out into the open and gaining the upper hand.
Now, Rezukhin had decided that the forest represented a danger to any White troops passing its edge: his solution was to burn it to the ground. But it seemed to Christopher that the general’s reasons for setting mile after mile of trees alight were not military at all.
The general and his men were no longer soldiers fighting a war.
They had lost their war long ago. Now they were actors in an apocalyptic drama, half out of their minds with drugs and alcohol and disease, half-crazed by bloodshed and destruction.
Here in Mongolia, they dragged out a phantom existence, banished forever from wives and family and sweethearts. They thought of themselves as the damned and lived accordingly. They had no fear and no morality, no expectations, no hopes, no reason to do anything but kill and loot and wreak a sort of vengeance on a world that had turned its back on them. They were the men of the brave new age now dawning. And they would spawn a brood vaster and more mysterious in its savagery than any that had ridden these same steppes with Genghis or Hulagu Khan.
Christopher rode with Chindamani. Winterpole was just behind.
They were at the head of Rezukhin’s column, near the general himself. Their car had been commandeered and driven off at speed to Urga by a Russian mechanic.
At first, Winterpole had argued with Rezukhin that he and Christopher were British agents sent to assist von Ungern Stern berg. But the general had only laughed and, when Winterpole persisted, told him sharply to shut up or be shot. Even Winterpole had known when to pipe down. But now he fumed and brooded, believing desperately that Ungern needed him and that he would discipline Rezukhin for discourtesy towards a representative of a friendly power.
Winterpole was a man of the world, but his worldliness, though vast, was of the wrong sort. The sins and vices of polite society, however interesting, are not those of the barracks or the open steppe. Where Winterpole came from, there were rules and conventions, even for the darkest of crimes; how otherwise could men of consequence be distinguished from common criminals? But here no code existed at alclass="underline" here, desperation swept aside all the niceties and made brutish insanity of everything it touched. It was a fire raging in a doomed forest, out of control and consuming all it touched.
They camped late that night, well away from the blazing forest. A wall of fire shimmered on the horizon still, creeping with the prevailing wind across an unassuming backdrop of night sky. The three prisoners were kept together in a single tent under heavy guard. They slept fitfully or lay awake listening to the sounds of the darkness: birds calling, remote and tuneless; men calling out in their sleep; the crackling of camp fires lit to stave off the penetrating cold. The guards discouraged them from talking together when they woke, though they refrained from using any real violence against them. All that night, Christopher held Chindamani without speaking. She was silent in his arms, preoccupied with some private sadness, sleepless and dreamless.