The stranger's face hadn't changed. There was no anger in the voice, no scowl to the wide mouth. The strange yellow eyes remained fathomless, inscrutable. But something was different. The young boy was so terrified that his bowels loosened and he fouled himself.
'He doesn't answer you, Uchitel,' called Bochka, the Barrel, a fat man on an equally fat horse.
'No. He must be taught a lesson in manners, after, all. But what of these poor? Can we help them seek a road from their poverty?'
The man was making a joke. The boy saw that, because many of the men were laughing. But he hadn't heard him say anything funny. He felt dimly that he ought to go and warn his father and mother about these strangers. But his feet seemed frozen to the ground.
It was the lean figure of Zmeya, the Snake, who answered. 'There is one sure cure for the poor, Uchitel.'
He reached inside his furs and drew out an oiled pistol — a 9 mm Makarov PM, manufactured in the hundreds of thousands in many state factories before the long winter began. It was a compact, handy automatic with a double-action trigger. The band had discovered a cache of them in a concrete bunker seven months before, and Uchitel had insisted that every member take one. Before that they'd had a variety of Stechkins, TT-33s, Radoms and Walther PPKs. Uchitel saw the value of them all carrying the same handgun, though each still carried his own favorite rifle or machine pistol or carbine.
The boy's eyes opened wider and he began to snivel. Some of the villagers had guns, but the weapons were old and battered, mended with baling wire. He'd never seen anything like this glittering, polished pistol. The slim man tossed it upward so that the dim sun was reflected in the silver stars on each side of the crosshatched butt.
Several of the horsemen drew their guns, laughing as the lad fell to his knees. The front of his breeches was now marked with urine; he'd completely lost control.
Out in the open, among the low scrub of the tundra, the cracks of the handguns sounded surprisingly flat and unmenacing. The first bullet hit the kneeling boy through the right shoulder, knocking him over. Blood gushed from his ragged clothes, staining the snow. A second shot tore through his left thigh, exiting and taking with it a chunk of muscle the size of a man's fist. Blood poured from this gaping wound and the boy screamed, a thin and feeble sound in the wind-washed wasteland.
'He is still poor, Uchitel,' yelled Krisa, the Rat, a tiny man with eyes as red as glowing coals. Krisa took careful aim, steadying his right hand with his left, then squeezed the trigger twice.
The first bullet tore into the boy's chest, snapping ribs, exploding the lungs into tatters of torn tissue, sending bright arterial crimson spurting from the gaping mouth. The boy's yelping ceased, and he made a desperate attempt to escape. But the wound in his leg unbalanced him and he fell.
By falling, he put the diminutive Kris off his aim. He had intended to shoot the dying boy again through the center of the chest. But the 9 mm round smashed into the lad's face, breaking his lower jaw and tearing it away on the left so that it hung, hideously lopsided, the row of jagged and broken teeth spilling out with the impact. Continuing, the lead sliced through the boy's tongue and the roof of his mouth, digging deep into the dark caverns of his brain.
The boy kicked in the snow like a rabbit with a broken spine. Watching, the horsemen cheered and laughed; a couple of them made wagers on how long the poor rabbit would last. After fifteen or twenty seconds the corpse lay still, looking oddly shrunken, its blood staining the snow.
Uchitel stood in the stirrups, waved a gloved fist and shouted above the eternal wind, 'He is poor no more, my brothers and sisters. Let us go now to his filthy hamlet of Ozhbarchik and help them all to escape from poverty.'
As he heeled his black stallion forward, he heard the group laughing. Uchitel smiled, relishing their happiness. In a harsh world, it was good to give pleasure.
The boy's corpse soon stopped bleeding and the wind began to cover it with snow. But not enough to hide it from the scavengers who came creeping from secret places to rend the flesh from the bone.
Uchitel knew that somewhere far to the west of them was a range of mountains, including several volcanoes, and beyond that the ruins of what had been a fine city that he had once visited. Called Yakutsk, it was near the left bank of the Lena River and had been home to over one hundred thousand people. Intercontinental ballistic missile bases near it had sealed its fate in 2001, and the Americans had used 'clean' missiles against it, which slaughtered human beings but left buildings more or less intact. But the change in the climate over the next four generations had made a ruins of the city. Uchitel had been there three times, once when he was only fourteen, then twice in his twenties. There he had found old books and had taught himself the skills that allowed him to lead the guerrillas.
He knew how the land had changed. Lakes had appeared and drained. Mountains had sunk and valleys risen. And in many places there were new smoldering volcanoes.
He sniffed the heavy, ugly smell of sulfur that hung in the air. The wind carried the pale yellow tint of the chemical, fouling the high Arctic, making breathing extremely unpleasant.
Angrily he tugged his thick scarf over his mouth and pulled down his fur cap so that only his amber eyes faced the gusting snow. The boy couldn't have been more than a few minutes walk from his home, he judged; these groveling mutant curs in the wilderness never went farther than a mile from their houses. Rarely did you hear of anyone journeying any distance. There might be a merchant, but to catch one alone was as rare as a day without ice. They traveled in armed convoys and there would be little to bring them this far from anything resembling civilization.
In a tavern a hundred miles southwest, a merchant had whispered disturbing news to Uchitel — news that the man had tried at first to sell.
'How much for word of a hunt?' he'd asked, his greasy head to one side, his little eyes blinking with greed.
Uchitel had asked him why he should pay for such news.
'Because of who is the hunter and who is the hunted.' was the reply.
Sitting on his horse, waiting while the stragglers in the band crossed the trackless terrain, Uchitel smiled beneath his scarf at the memory of the plump merchant. To prompt the little man, the tall chieftan had taken his left hand in both of his.
Squeezing.
Squeezing until the merchant whimpered and sweat burst from his temples.
Squeezing until blood came around the sides of the purpling fingernails and the man wept to his mother's grave for Uchitel to stop.
Squeezing until his own knuckles grew white with the effort. And the trader told his tale in a stammering rush of tears.
And still squeezing until every finger bone was cracked and splintered, one against the other. Then pushing the crippled man to the floor among the straw and spilled wine and vomit.
'Much farther, Uchitel?' asked Urach, the Doctor, reining his pony alongside Uchitel's. Urach was the only other man in the party who could read and write. But his nickname — it should have been Surgeon — came from his skill with knives.
'No,' Uchitel replied, annoyed at having his reverie interrupted. The fat little trader had given him news of a hunt. News that Uchitel had found most unwelcome.
Though the sun appeared intermittently, most of the day was bleak, with flurries of snow reducing visibility. It was bad, but they had all seen much worse. Occasionally a freak tornado came screaming from the north. The wind would be so strong that it would lift a man and his horse together and send them crashing to their death a mile away. Uchitel recalled being in a township to the south when such a storm arose. The buildings, tethered to bedrock with cables of spun metal, held safe. But one of the group, having drunk too much wine, was caught out in the open. The wind destroyed him, splinters of razored ice flaying the clothes from his flesh, then the flesh from his bones.
To the left, Uchitel spotted movement, white against white. He reached for the Kalashnikov AKM .62 mm, then saw that the bear was moving away from them in a lumbering, unhurried gait. It could be on its own, or it could be one of a large pack of bears whose tracks they'd spotted a day earlier.
