Twelve

I let out a short laugh.

'Maybe not,' he muttered.

Dmitry was up before me and I was woken by the sound of him harnessing his horse.

'You're in a rush to get going,' I said to him.

'I'm not coming with you.'

'I see,' I said.

'I'm scared, Aleksei.' His voice quavered as he expressed the terror inside him. 'They'll not show any mercy to me – or to you. Come with me, Aleksei, back to Moscow. You don't have to face them. We can't bring back Vadim or Maks. All we can do is die like they did. They wouldn't ask us to.'

His diffidence was quite reasonable. Maks would not have seen the logic in taking revenge – in threatening it, yes, but not in taking it. Vadim would have understood the instinct, but would have counselled restraint. But I was motivated not by reason, but by hatred. I could no more rationalize the passion which drove me to pursue and erase the surviving Oprichniki than I could that which drove me to make love to Domnikiia when I had a loving wife at home. Hatred is a most powerful emotion. Leaders use it to stir up aggression in their armies and men use it to force themselves into actions that they would not contemplate without it. Hatred was the inseparable companion of the very thing that Iuda had said made me weak. While scruple could make me spare a man when every rational voice screamed to kill him, so hatred could make me kill when the arguments and reasons for doing so had long been forgotten. To divide them was impossible. Iuda might despise me for having one, but he would learn to regret my possessing the other.

'Do as you wish, Dmitry,' I said. 'I'm going to face them.'

'If they were French, or Turks, you know I'd be with you,' he tried to explain.

'We owe each other nothing, Dmitry. You know it doesn't work like that.'

'I want to help you, Aleksei, but I know them better than you do. I've seen what they do.'

'So have I. Remember?'

'You've seen nothing. What they did in Moscow? A fragment of what I saw them do to the Turks. Even side by side, the two of us could never beat them.' There was an edge of panic in his voice as he tried to convince both me and himself that what he intended to do – to desert – was in some way less than totally dishonourable.

'If it helps, Dmitry, I'm not convinced that I'd want you by my side.' It was more hurtful than I had intended it to be. Dmitry fell into an immediate silence. There was truth in what I had said on two counts. One was that, even after his apparent change of heart, he was still too close to the Oprichniki for me to trust, and the other that in his state of panic he would be of little use to anyone in a tight situation. But I had said it to try to help his decision; to make it me that decided he should not stay, rather than him.

'Thank you for that, Aleksei,' he said at length, without bitterness. 'I'm not much of a soldier any more, I know. Better to hear it from you, I suppose.' He was like a spurned lover, holding back his tears and clinging pathetically to the last vestiges of his pride. I took a step towards him, to embrace him before he left, but he raised his arms to fend me off. 'I'll just go,' he said with attempted nobility. 'You have things to do.'

He mounted his horse and began back towards Moscow at a gentle trot. Standing in the place where I had last seen Maksim alive and watching Dmitry depart, I was filled with the premonition that this would also be the last time I saw Dmitry. I recalled the miscommunication of my last words with Maks and the casualness of my farewell to Vadim. I knew that I could not let Dmitry leave quite like this.

I climbed on to my own horse and caught up with him. Perhaps if I had pleaded with him then, I would have been able to persuade him to stay with me. His joy at knowing I wanted him would have overcome his fear. But the truth was, I didn't want him with me. I just wanted him to leave on better terms.

'Take this,' I said, taking the icon from around my neck and handing it to him.

'It's no protection from them,' he said. 'You know that.'

'Do you think I'd be giving it away if it were?' I laughed, and was pleased to see something of a smile in him. 'It's a symbol, not a talisman.'

'A symbol of what?'

I did not have an answer. He put the chain around his neck and tucked the pendant into his shirt. 'When you're in Moscow, go to Ordynsky Lane,' I told him.

He looked puzzled. 'And why's that?'

'That's where Boris and Natalia are.'

He raised an eyebrow and then smiled at me. 'Thank you, Aleksei. I hope to see you soon.'

'You will,' I replied. We shook hands, and then he departed with the same steady trot of a few minutes before, but with his head held inestimably higher.

I rode back to the hut and packed my few possessions; then I turned and headed south towards Kurilovo.

It was around noon the following day, the twenty-eighth of October, when I finally reached the village. The blizzards of the past few days were beginning to abate, leaving the whole landscape as a desert of white. The crossroads where I was due to meet with Iuda that evening was a little to the south of the village. The sun was already low on the horizon by the time I inspected it. Already I could see a narrow crescent moon in the sky and even that would be following its brighter cousin round to the other side of the world before long.

As I had remembered, the crossroads was at the top of a slight hill. To the north, the buildings of the village were small and distant. To the east and west, I could see down the roads even further. The fields between the roads were smooth, blank and white. Anyone attempting to approach the crossroads by them would not only be hampered by the deep snow, but would also be seen long before they got anywhere near. The closest cover was to the south – a small coppice of trees which spanned the road almost a verst away – still far enough so that any approach from there would be seen long in advance of its arrival.

The crossroads itself was undistinguished, but for one thing – from a makeshift gibbet hung the gently swaying body of a hanged man. It was stiff from the cold and caked with snow, but I only needed to brush a little of the snow aside to discover beneath the dark-blue uniform of a French infantry captain.

I went back to the village and sat in the sole hostelry, drinking vodka until the appointed hour.

'I judge from your sword that you're a military man,' said a voice from a nearby table. I turned. It was just a couple of peasants, bored with each other's conversation and looking for an alternative. The one who had spoken was in his forties, with straggly, long red hair and bloodshot green eyes. His friend – possibly his father – was well past sixty. He had few hairs left on his head and even fewer teeth left in it.

'That's right,' I replied brusquely. My thoughts had been happily settled upon the image of Domnikiia, and I was irritated to be distracted from them.

'A bit of a forgetful one though,' said the older man.

'How do you mean?' I asked.

'Forgot your uniform and turned up two weeks late for the battle,' he laughed.

'You know – the battle. At Maloyaroslavets,' the first man explained, eager to start a conversation. Maloyaroslavets was the site of the first battle between the Russian and French armies after the latter had quitted Moscow. Like Borodino, it had been an encounter in which Bonaparte's tactical victory was to assist his strategic defeat. Though they were the victors, the French were turned back north, to retreat west along the road down which they had advanced – a road which they had already sucked dry of supplies. The town of Maloyaroslavets was almost forty versts away from Kurilovo, but it would be the closest to actual conflict that they had ever come, so it was not unnatural that it should become to the locals 'the battle'.

'I'm afraid I didn't fight there,' I said. 'I haven't been in a battle since Borodino.'

'Well, Bonaparte's probably back beyond Borodino by now,' laughed the second man. 'Maybe you should get back over there and relive your glory days.' These were the men for whom I had spent my adult life fighting. They had probably never left this village, certainly never gone outside the oblast, and yet they could criticize me for what they saw as my cowardice. That is the cross that must be borne by every spy, I heard Vadim's voice silently tell me. He is never given laurels – he must wear his medals inside his tunic. And what choice do they have? They're serfs, Maks now joined in. If they have fought, it was at their master's command. If they stayed home, it was that their masters preferred farmers to fighters, not that they preferred life to death.