gun fell to the ground.
The silence that followed was terrible. Whatever pleasure these men had had in their day’s work, whatever triumph they had felt meting out death in such measured handfuls all had been wiped out in a moment by one man’s gesture. The general bent down and picked up his pistol from the ground. His hand shook as he retrieved it and replaced it in its holster.
Christopher stood up slowly, eyes still fixed on the clearing, on the white uniforms of the living, the blood- stained forms of the dead. He turned to go, worried that he might not be able to find his way back through the trees in the dark.
A voice came out of the night, a soft voice speaking in Russian.
“Just drop your gun, tovarisch. We have you covered from all sides.”
He did as he was told. His gun made almost no sound as it fell to the floor of the dark forest.
Behind them, the sky was reddening, as though dawn were breaking in the south. From edge to edge of the horizon, hell was creeping on silent feet across a black sky. It was midnight. The little general Rezukhin was his name had ordered his men to set fire to the forest with their torches. The previous day, he and his unit of forty men had been ambushed passing through the forest on their way back to Urga from a six-day reconnaissance.
Half of them had been killed before they succeeded in luring their attackers out into the open and gaining the upper hand.
Now, Rezukhin had decided that the forest represented a danger to any White troops passing its edge: his solution was to burn it to the ground. But it seemed to Christopher that the general’s reasons for setting mile after mile of trees alight were not military at all.
The general and his men were no longer soldiers fighting a war.
They had lost their war long ago. Now they were actors in an apocalyptic drama, half out of their minds with drugs and alcohol and disease, half-crazed by bloodshed and destruction.
Here in Mongolia, they dragged out a phantom existence, banished forever from wives and family and sweethearts. They thought of themselves as the damned and lived accordingly. They had no fear and no morality, no expectations, no hopes, no reason to do anything but kill and loot and wreak a sort of vengeance on a world that had turned its back on them. They were the men of the brave new age now dawning. And they would spawn a brood vaster and more mysterious in its savagery than any that had ridden these same steppes with Genghis or Hulagu Khan.
Christopher rode with Chindamani. Winterpole was just behind.
They were at the head of Rezukhin’s column, near the general himself. Their car had been commandeered and driven off at speed to Urga by a Russian mechanic.
At first, Winterpole had argued with Rezukhin that he and Christopher were British agents sent to assist von Ungern Stern berg. But the general had only laughed and, when Winterpole persisted, told him sharply to shut up or be shot. Even Winterpole had known when to pipe down. But now he fumed and brooded, believing desperately that Ungern needed him and that he would discipline Rezukhin for discourtesy towards a representative of a friendly power.
Winterpole was a man of the world, but his worldliness, though vast, was of the wrong sort. The sins and vices of polite society, however interesting, are not those of the barracks or the open steppe. Where Winterpole came from, there were rules and conventions, even for the darkest of crimes; how otherwise could men of consequence be distinguished from common criminals? But here no code existed at all: here, desperation swept aside all the niceties and made brutish insanity of everything it touched. It was a fire raging in a doomed forest, out of control and consuming all it touched.
They camped late that night, well away from the blazing forest. A wall of fire shimmered on the horizon still, creeping with the prevailing wind across an unassuming backdrop of night sky. The three prisoners were kept together in a single tent under heavy guard. They slept fitfully or lay awake listening to the sounds of the darkness: birds calling, remote and tuneless; men calling out in their sleep; the crackling of camp fires lit to stave off the penetrating cold. The guards discouraged them from talking together when they woke, though they refrained from using any real violence against them. All that night, Christopher held Chindamani without speaking. She was silent in his arms, preoccupied with some private sadness, sleepless and dreamless.
Throughout the next day they rode on in gloomy silence, strung out across the empty plain like a broken necklace of cheap glass.
One man died of wounds sustained in the skirmish at the forest.
They left him on the grass, naked and pitifully pale. His horse came with them now, bearing an empty saddle.
By the second night, the men had started to grow restless.
Suffused with killing and the infant joy of setting alight a forest merely to lay black ashes on the scene of their crimes, they had ridden until then in a state of morbid contentment, their flagging spirits buoyed up by an infusion of vanity.
But during the second day’s riding, and certainly after the death of the wounded man, a terrible ennui had begun to fix its grip on them. They shifted in their saddles mile after mile, itching to be back in Urga or off on another hunt for Bolshevik infiltrators.
Someone rode out from the road to a nomad encampment and returned with a plentiful supply of han chi a local drink.
That evening, han chi Was passed round after supper and the men’s mood changed. They sang old songs, Russian songs about girls with flaxen hair and birches waving in the mists of autumn, and as they sang they grew sentimental and even maudlin.
The older men regaled their juniors with pathetic tales of valour that had grown tarnished from overmuch recounting. As the night progressed, stories of bravery gave way to accounts of bawdy excess. New songs replaced those of the early evening. In a spot set apart from the rest of the camp, Rezukhin sat by a solitary fire, his black sling invisible against the night, smoking hashish from a private supply kept in his saddlebag.
It was just after midnight when they decided to come for Chindamani. The fires had died down and clouds had come up from the south to cover the moon. Perhaps the han chi rendered them incautious, perhaps the darkness gave them a sense of security in what they planned. Rezukhin had ordered the woman off limits in spite of everything, he knew enough to cover himself against the possibility that the Englishmen might indeed prove of value to Ungern Sternberg. But he had gone to sleep in his tent and would be oblivious to anything that went on.
Some of the men had been watching her furtively all that day, but no-one had approached her or tried to speak to her. It had been years since any of them had had anything to do with a woman who was not a prostitute or the near equivalent. But, coarsened as they had become, in some part of them they retained memories, however dim, of the social conventions that had formed their upbringing. Some of them still had wives or sweethearts at home.
And Chindamani, unconsciously perhaps, but with unmistakable clarity, set up a barrier between herself and the men around her which, however imperceptible, served to restrict their activities to sidelong glances.
That had all changed with the onset of night and the powerful effects of the han chi From sentimentality they passed to self-pity and from self-pity to regret. It was not long before regret had wakened in them feelings of resentment against Germans, Bolsheviks, and anyone else responsible for the loss of Russia and its privileges. And out of resentment was born a curious and unreasonable lust, not merely physical but shaped out of the greed and bitterness that lay in the depths of wounded psyches.
Chindamani was to be their victim, not merely because she was the only woman there, but because she represented too many conflicting opposites for them to cope with. She reminded them at once of the women they had left behind in their homes in Moscow or St. Petersburg and of the eastern women they had known since then. She was physically attractive in a way that only their lost sweethearts had been, yet untouchable, a Madonna-like figure who inflamed them while making them feel like children or priests, castrated, pure, yet seething with impurities. They could not bear the contradictions.
Four of them came to the tent where she and the others had at last fallen into an uneasy sleep. Only a single guard was left, half asleep himself and a little drunk on han chi that some friends had brought for him.
They kicked Chindamani awake, and before she had time to protest, hauled her roughly to her feet. She could tell at once that they were in no mood to be reasoned with, and at once gave up the attempt to struggle.
