Twelve

'Escaped?' he thundered.

'I'm afraid so, sir,' I replied.

'I'll have those guards flogged.'

'It's too late for that, sir.'

He glanced up at my face and understood. 'I see,' he said. 'Well, it's only one man, I suppose. All a bit of a waste of time, though.'

'Bonaparte's move south is a ruse, sir. The prisoner told me. The real crossing is to the north, at Studienka.'

'That's something at least. So you'll soon be joining us in action there then?'

'No, sir. I'd like to pursue the prisoner.'

'Is he worth it – just one man?'

'I believe so,' I said.

'Well, I suppose you people know your job. I can't lend you any men.'

'I don't ask for any, sir. Just a French uniform, if you have one.'

'We have dozens. Lieutenant Mironov, see that he gets what he needs.'

Mironov provided a dragoon uniform and a horse and some provisions, and I was soon heading out of what remained of the breaking camp. At first, I had to make my way alongside the advancing Russian troops (fortunately, I had not yet changed into my new uniform), but soon I headed off to the north of their path and the sound of marching faded behind me.

The only trail that Iuda had left was that he had planned to cross the Berezina with Bonaparte at Studienka. It was quite possible that this had been a lie, or that he would now change his mind, but my only option was still to try to intercept him there. I had not had time to properly consider what Iuda had said to me, but now as I rode through the quiet, frozen woods, I began to think.

The less painful matter to deal with was that Iuda was not a vampire. I had already concluded that this made little difference to my opinion of him. If a man chooses to become a vampire so that he may behave like a monster or if he finds himself quite able to behave like a monster anyway, he is still a monster and still happy so to be. Iuda remained a danger to all those he came into contact with. One question that had to be asked was whether any of the other Oprichniki was also not a vampire. Iuda had implied that they all were, but was Iuda to be trusted? The evidence of my own eyes convinced me of most of them – after their deaths I had witnessed their immediate bodily decay. I had not seen what became of Ioann or Filipp once they had perished. The deaths of Simon, Iakov Alfeyinich and Faddei had, if Maks was to be believed, been caused by sunlight. I felt confident that all eleven had indeed been vampires. If not, what was I to care? Just as it did not fundamentally matter with Iuda, neither did it with any of the others.

But what of Domnikiia? The idea of being tricked – of being betrayed – by her of all people was the true nightmare from which I saw no prospect of awakening. When she teased me it revealed her wit and her spirit, but to play games with me like this over such issues showed in her what almost amounted to insanity. 'I'm not surprised Iuda found it so easy to fool you.' Those had been her words. She and Iuda both delighted in playing me for the fool, and I had so far been gullibly eager to oblige them. But I also remembered what Maksim had once said, about the best place to hide a tree being in a forest, the best place to hide a lie being amongst the truth. Why had Iuda allowed himself to be captured?

To speak to me. What was it that he wanted to tell me? Not about Bonaparte's plans. Not about his views on chess. Not even to tell me he wasn't a vampire. It was to put the thought into my head that Domnikiia had chosen to become a vampire. Amongst that forest of truth, that was the single fact that he had wanted to convey. It was not even a fact – it was a piece of information that might be true and might not be. The truth could never be known and so the doubt would haunt me for ever.

Iuda's game, either through planning or through extemporization, had unfolded layer by layer in front of me, like a journey up a mountain when every false peak, once conquered, reveals another higher peak behind it. First I believed he had turned Domnikiia into a vampire. Then I discovered that, even so, I could not kill her. Then I discovered that she was not a vampire and that, had I killed her, it would have been as a mortal woman. This morning he had convinced me that she had all along wanted to be a vampire, even though he could not make her one. He could not go on forever pushing on one side of the scales and then the other and switching my view from one side to the next, but now he did not need to. He had found a perfect balance point. I could never know the truth and so, whatever I chose to do, I would spend half my life regretting. If I abandoned Domnikiia, then I would worry that I had done her wrong, that I had believed Iuda's final lie about her when she had behaved throughout in perfect innocence. If I stayed with her, I would be forever looking at her, wondering what happened between them that night in Moscow.

My perception was so battered by my constantly changing view of the truth – not just over Domnikiia, but over Maksim, over Dmitry, over the Oprichniki and over Iuda himself – that I was no longer able to find certainty in anything. Vadim's advice, I knew, would have been to go back to Petersburg, to go back to Marfa. She was someone in whom I had never had any doubt, nor had I any reason to. With her I would find a safe, content retreat. But then even Vadim's advice became ambiguous. How he would have despised any concept of retreat.

I was nearing the village of Studienka. I dismounted, tied up my horse and, despite the freezing cold, changed from the outer layers of my clothing into my French uniform. Skirting around the village, hidden by the woods, I made my way to a small hillock that overlooked the river itself. There I lay, concealed almost instantly beneath the falling snow, and observed the tattered remains of the Grande Armée.

Tattered and yet magnificent. There must have been fifty thousand before me; half of them soldiers, half non-combatants, all desperate to get across that river, to get out of Russia and to get home. Bonaparte's great campaign lay in ruins, the conquering ambition of every man transformed into self-preserving terror. None could have dreamed that the largest army ever assembled in the world would be reduced, in scarcely six months, to such a shambles. And yet it had happened, and I was thrilled to witness it.

But for an army slashed to less than a tenth of its former size, beset by the hellish cold of a foreign winter and caught between three Russian armies, each on its own the size of theirs, they had performed a remarkable feat. Two bridges had been built across the river. Even now I could see sappers and pontoniers up to their armpits in the icy water, strengthening and repairing the bridges as thousand upon thousands of men broke step to march across. Every building in the village had been torn down to provide timber. On the high ground on the far side of the river, the advance guard had already set up a defensive position. They were being engaged from the south. Tchitchagov, realizing his error, had travelled back north to the real crossing point. The French deployments already across the river were holding him off and allowing the remainder of the army to slip away to the west unmolested once they had crossed.

On the eastern bank, an innumerable multitude waited to cross along the two narrow, manmade isthmuses – not just soldiers, though of those there were many, but the entire entourage that any army requires to survive, particularly one so far from home. Men and women waited to cross the river, and those whose duties, however vital they might be, did not require them to carry a sword or a musket found themselves reckoned least in the pecking order. Cooks, washerwomen, smiths and armourers were among those who waited to cross and, even amongst them, an order of merit would be established. Would an army in hopeless, frozen retreat favour those who maintained its weapons or those who filled its belly?