He slipped into the close-set thicket and made for the voices.
The trees concealed him but they also concealed whoever was responsible for the shooting. Perhaps it was rabbits. Perhaps they were shooting rabbits. But nothing ran through the undergrowth.
If he had been a rabbit, Christopher might have bolted at the next shot and run straight into the clearing. But he froze and pressed himself against the trunk of a tree. Out in the clearing just beyond where he stood, night was being summoned into the world.
The last sunlight was being drained from the sky. It clung hopelessly to the branches of the trees, thinning, loosening, breaking apart. Soon it would be dark. It would have been better if it had been dark.
In a ring that stretched all round the clearing, stood about twenty men in dirty white uniforms. On their head they wore scarlet forage caps bearing a death’s-head symbol above crossed shin-bones: the uniform of Annenkov’s now-defunct Siberian units.
In their hands, they held 8mm Mannlicher rifles pointed inwards to the centre of the clearing. They had come a long way from home, and the road back was closed. They were living their apocalypse here in the Mongolian wilderness. Some of them had been fighting since 1914. Seven years, and it still had not ended.
In the centre of the clearing, along a low depression from which undergrowth had been meticulously cleared, about forty bodies lay tumbled in a ragged heap. They were dressed in grey uniforms with red triangles on their sleeves; most had astrakhan caps bearing red stars; a few wore helmet-shaped felt caps with a hammer and sickle device. Near the bodies stood another dozen men, dressed in the same basic uniform and lined up for the same fate.
But Christopher’s eyes were focused on one man alone. By the side of the heap of victims stood a small White officer. He was dressed in a tattered grey Mongol overcoat and an old green Cossack cap with a visor. His right hand was held in a black sling that looked as though it had been there since the man’s childhood if he had ever had a childhood. But on his shoulder he sported a general’s epaulet. And in his left hand he held a heavy service revolver. As Christopher watched, he turned and faced the next prisoner in line.
“Kak vas ha familia? What’s your family name?” he asked. His voice carried in the stillness, hoarse and menacing.
The condemned man shivered in the departing sunlight. In his eyes Christopher saw only an utter hopelessness of the spirit, as though life had drained away long before the bullet entered him.
He was young, a mere boy.
“Arakcheyev,” the boy replied. How old was he? Fifteen? Sixteen?
His voice was toneless; for him, identity meant nothing any longer.
“Itnya otchestvo? Christian name and patronymic?”
“Yuri Nikolayevitch.”
The general turned his head a fraction and barked a command at a second officer standing nearby. This third man was dressed in a soiled white uniform, a lieutenant fresh out of military academy.
In his hand, he held a large book in which he was writing.
“Write them down!” ordered the general.
The lieutenant wrote the names in the book, in their proper order, all according to form. No court, no tribunal, no sentence but death, but a record must be kept of the dead. When the new Tzar sat on his throne and thrilled his people with the glamour of his return, he would find all in order. A million dead. Two million.
Twenty million. But all in order: a graveyard with numbered plots and arrows pointing to the exit.
“From?”
“Gorki.”
“Rank?”
“Corporal.”
“Unit?”
“Second Squadron of the Communist Interior Defence.”
“Age?”
The boy hesitated.
“Eighteen,” he said. But it was a lie. They both knew that.
“You admit to being a Bolshevik?”
The boy paused again. For a moment, he saw something like hope. Would a denial not be enough? Then he looked into the general’s eyes and all hope faded.
“Yes.”
“And a traitor to the Tzar and Holy Russia?”
“Not a traitor,” protested the boy.
“I have been loyal to Russia. I have served the Russian people.”
“Write “Traitor”.” The general paused and looked at the boy.
“Have you anything further to say?”
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
