I pressed on. Looking across the river to the far bank, I saw Vadim and Dmitry waiting for me. I raised my arm to greet them, but I was not sure whether they had seen me. At that moment, a hand grabbed my coat.
I turned and saw that it was a wounded soldier, lying on one of the open wagons which had been rattling past. The traffic had stopped moving once again and the man pulled me towards him.
'You!' He hissed at me with unspeakable hatred. 'You fiend! You monster! You devil!'
He lay back again, exhausted by the effort of speaking, but the fact that he had said all this to me in French reminded me of who he was; for, the last time we had spoken, he had revealed to me an expert knowledge not of the French language, but of Russian. It was Pierre, the young French officer whose camp we had infiltrated, and whom we had left to the absent mercy of the Oprichniki.
CHAPTER X
FOR GOD'S SAKE, SPEAK RUSSIAN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE ANOTHER five minutes,' I whispered to him fiercely.
'What do you mean?' he said, continuing to speak in French. He had acquired a Russian cuirassier's uniform from somewhere and so clearly had at some stage been trying to pass himself off, but it seemed to have been temporarily forgotten.
'You're in the centre of Moscow, Pierre. Speak Russian,' I continued under my breath, hoping that even if he didn't understand where he was, he would instinctively respond to my Russian with the same.
'Why am I in Moscow?' he asked, at last using the vernacular.
'You must have been taken for a casualty.' I still spoke quietly. Although he no longer spoke in French, anyone overhearing might soon work out his true nationality. No one seemed much concerned with our conversation however. Most of the crowd was pushing forward to see what was the cause of the latest holdup.
'Where did you get the uniform?'
'Uniform?' He looked down at his body and saw what he was wearing. Even then, he seemed to think my question trivial. 'I took it from a corpse after I escaped from you.' He looked at me again and his earlier vitriol re-emerged. 'You! Why did you do that? We may be the enemy, but we're not animals.'
He had a wound to his right cheek which made each word an agony to him. This at least meant that he was unable to raise his ' voice. The cheek was not quite cut through, but most of the skin was missing, carved away by two jagged, parallel score marks. Whatever had done it had both cut the skin and begun to flay it in a single stroke. He had a similar wound on the side of his neck – any closer to the front and it would have been fatal.
'It wasn't me,' I told him. 'When I left you, you were well. You'd just insulted the tsar,' I continued, encouraging him to remember. I was desperate to hear how the Oprichniki operated.
He raised his hand to his wounds as if trying to recall. His forearm bore an injury similar to the others. Clearly, Pierre had tried to fend off his attacker. Again a chunk of skin and flesh had been scraped off in a strip about the width of two fingers. It could have been inflicted by claws or teeth, but, knowing who it was that had attacked him, I immediately recalled the glimpse I had seen of Iuda's strange, double-bladed knife.
He peered at me closely. 'You're right,' he said. 'You and the other one did leave, and then some more of you came. But you must have been there!' He tried to raise his voice. I shook my head and put my hand on his shoulder to calm him. 'Or at least you paved the way for them.' That I couldn't completely deny.
'What happened when they came?' I asked, urging him on.
He fixed his eyes upon mine, but in his mind he was seeing that campsite near Borodino, five days previously. His description flickered between lucidity and incoherence. 'We didn't see them. Men started vanishing – over minutes, not hours. We were eating at the same time as they were. You'd turn away to get something and turn back and your neighbour was gone. Not everyone ate. Then Louis found them. And the bodies – among the bodies. We were so few left. They circled us. Stalked us. Weren't they satisfied? They moved so quickly. And killed. They could see through the darkness. I fought one off. Louis fought. It took two of them. I ran. They chased me. Spread out like wolves. Calling to each other like huntsmen. But I was fast – so fast – so afraid. They gave up. Louis screamed, but I was fast.'
He seemed proud of his speed. He had the build of a runner, and the Oprichniki looked to me the sort that would soon give up a chase if it became too swift.
Pierre's eyes focused on me once again. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. 'You weren't there. You couldn't have done that. But you knew. You must have known.' A realization dawned in his eyes. 'You sent them! They weren't Russian. We weren't their enemy. They had no reason to do that – not once they were satisfied.'
It was the second time he'd used the word. 'What do you mean – "satisfied"?' I asked him, but he had collapsed back on to the wagon. His eyes were still open, but his breathing was shallow and he showed no sign of recognition of the world around him. 'Pierre,' I persisted, 'what did you mean?' There was no answer. How could the Oprichniki be satisfied? What had he meant by that? A soldier isn't satisfied until the enemy is defeated – or surrenders. Did he mean that they wouldn't accept surrender when it was offered? Or had he meant that the Oprichniki had been after some sort of information – that they were satisfied once they'd been told what they wanted to know? I tried to imagine what the Oprichniki could possibly want to discover from the occupants of a French encampment – and what they would do with the information now they had it.
There was a slight commotion amongst the crowd and I saw that the traffic ahead was beginning to move again. It was clear that I would get no more from Pierre. I bent over and whispered in his ear, not knowing whether he could hear me. 'Next time you wake up, remember to speak Russian.'
The wagon began to roll away. It hadn't even occurred to me that this was a French soldier disguised in a Russian uniform – an infiltrator and a spy who should be arrested and executed as such. But I had felt no personal betrayal, as I had with Maks. It became clear again that there was no line of thought I could take that did not, eventually, end in Maks.
'Aleksei!' Vadim's voice was full of enthusiasm, and he grabbed me in a hearty embrace which I gratefully returned. It had been a long two days since I had seen him last. Dmitry stood beside us. He might not have shown his affection in that way at the best of times, but today he was wary of me. We quietly assessed each other; he trying to judge how much I knew; I trying to decide how I really felt about him. Initially he was just Dmitry – the same Dmitry I had known for years; slightly distant, sometimes selfish, sometimes blinkered, but fundamentally reliable. I had to remind myself that he had sent the Oprichniki after me to Desna and that was why Maks was dead, or at least dead sooner and less properly than he might otherwise have been. I had plenty of evidence now of how the Oprichniki worked. I could hold out little hope that they had treated Maks any differently. I had to remind myself that it was Dmitry who had left Domnikiia bruised and bleeding in order to get the information that he couldn't get from me. As we spoke, I let the memories and the images of Maks and Domnikiia flow over me in a rising tide of venom that I knew I would need if I was to take any action against Dmitry.
'So where's Maks?' asked Vadim.
'Why don't you ask him?' I replied, nodding towards Dmitry.
'No, Aleksei,' said Vadim sternly, sensing that order needed to be maintained, 'I'm asking you.'
'I went to Desna – that's where Maks had gone – and found him there.' I was looking at Dmitry throughout, trying to gauge his reaction to each thing that I said, searching for something that would help me to hate him. 'We talked for a while.'