“She’s all right too. Rezukhin’s shot grazed her arm and made her lose her balance. She’s not much of a horsewoman. Come on, we’ve no time to lose.”
Christopher hear ds shouts from the direction of the main camp.
Someone fired wildly in their direction. It would still be touch and go. He dashed with Winterpole to the horses. Chindamani had remounted her pony and sat clutching its mane. In one hand, she held the leading ropes of two medium-sized mounts.
“Be careful,” she said.
“The shooting has made the horses restless.”
“Let’s get those other horses loose first,” Christopher suggested, uprooting the peg holding the animal next to him. Winterpole followed suit. Closer now, the shouting had grown in volume and violence. A shot rang out and they heard a bullet whistle past.
“Hurry!” Christopher shouted.
Suddenly, a figure appeared out of the darkness, brandishing a sabre and shouting incoherently. Winterpole turned, drew his pistol and fired. The man crumpled, choking loudly.
“Get on with it!” cried Christopher.
The animals were loose now.
“Let’s go!” shouted Winterpole.
But Rezukhin’s soldiers were already on them. A burst of indiscriminate firing came out of the darkness, narrowly missing them, the bullets passing audibly just over their heads.
They took a horse each and mounted. Winterpole raised his pistol and fired four times in quick succession over the heads of the remaining animals. There was a frenzied whinnying and snorting, then they bolted. Their own horses rushed off along with the rest in a thunder of hoofs. Behind them, inarticulate shouts and loud gunfire chased them into the darkness. Someone started firing from their flank.
“Keep your heads down!” shouted Winterpole. But they were racing now, holding desperately to the naked backs of their mounts, feeling the darkness rush past in a roar of horses’ hoofs and frightened snorting.
Slowly, the un ridden horses outdistanced them, and bit by bit their own mounts slowed as the panic left them.
“Are we all together?” shouted Christopher as soon as the pace of their flight had steadied to a canter.
“Chindamani! Are you all right?”
Her voice came back to him, frightened but controlled.
“I’m here, Ka-ris To-feh. I’m all right, don’t worry about me.”
He rode across to her.
“Hold on,” he called to Winterpole.
“I want to move Chindamani to my horse.” He needed to be beside her, after what had happened.
They stopped and he helped her mount in front of him. They led her horse behind, its rope held in Christopher’s hand.
“Winterpole! What about you?” he shouted once they had got under way again.
Winterpole was fine. He had done his bit. There was no need to apologize now for anything: they were quits.
They rode on at a steady pace. Rezukhin’s men could not catch them now, without horses, in the darkness. But Christopher wished there was more light, that the moon would put in an appearance, however briefly. The sky was thick with clouds, through which not even the faintest glimmer of light escaped. They had no conception of the direction in which they were headed, nor could they easily measure how far they travelled. Time seemed to pass to a different measure, desperately slow and unrelenting. Only the horses were indifferent.
From time to time, one or another would fall into a fitful sleep, only to waken soon after, jolted by a change in the horse’s rhythm or a cry out of the darkness.
For a long time Chindamani did not sleep. Christopher held her about the waist, steadying her against the swaying of the horse, but he sensed that she did not wish to talk. Perhaps she would never be able to discuss the events of that night; but he wanted her to know that he would be there if she wanted to. A few times he felt her body quivering, not from cold though the night was icy but from unwanted memories suddenly crowding in on her.
A little before dawn, he felt her grow more relaxed and realized she had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep. Though desperately fatigued himself, he struggled to keep awake in order to prevent her slipping. The horses were walking now.
Dawn, when it finally came, was torn between splendour and drabness. On the edge of the horizon, directly ahead of them, a pale and insignificant light suddenly erupted in jets of red and gold only to be swallowed up lazily by sordid banks of tattered cloud. It was not a dawn in which to look for auguries. It promised neither peace nor war, but something infinitely more grotesque than either.
With the light, it was possible to make out the sort of country they were in, a barren scrubland, devoid of any interesting features or signs of life. It seemed to stretch behind and ahead of them forever. They were strung out across it, Winterpole far in front, followed by Christopher and Chindamani with their two horses.
Christopher called at the top of his voice to Winterpole, telling him to stop. It was time they halted and rested properly. At first Winterpole paid no need, then he raised a tired hand to show he had heard, reined in his horse, and slipped awkwardly to the ground. He waited for them to catch up with him, his arms folded across his chest, relaxed and apparently un flustered by their adventures. They did not hurry to reach him nor, when they did, did Christopher find anything to say to him. He dismounted and helped Chindamani to the ground. She yawned and held on to him tightly, shivering in the dawn breeze.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Christopher. He turned and spoke to Winterpole in English.
“Do you know where we are?”
Winterpole smiled.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said.
“I overheard some of them talking last night, before all the trouble started. I got a rough idea which way we were travelling.”
He turned and pointed.
“Do you see those mountains ahead of us?”
Christopher nodded.
“That’s the Bogdo Ula range. Urga is on the other side.”
“I’m tired.”
They had been walking for days now, but Zamyatm showed no signs of slacking off. Samdup had begun to wonder if he was human at all.
“Won’t you have another chocolate?” the Buriat said, holding out a large beribboned box to the boy. God knows where or how the man obtained the thing, but it had appeared one evening at Uliassutai, a burning temptation to a child who had scarcely tasted sugar in his life. The box bore the legend “Debauve & Gallais’, and had clearly originated in their little shop near the top of the Rue des Saints-Peres, whence it had travelled to St. Petersburg in the halcyon days before crowns and chocolates were together interdicted. But by what circuitous route the box now in far from pristine condition had come to the steppes of western Mongolia or how it had in the end fallen into Zamyatin’s egalitarian hands as an offering for his little god-prince, it was impossible to know.
Samdup shook his head and walked on in silence. He was not to be drawn so easily from his tiredness. It had not been petulance that led him to complain. The boy really was tired and needed more than battered chocolates to fortify his spirits or his body against the rig ours of another day. He hated Zamyatin with a raw and pitiless loathing, and longed to be rid of him. Yet a mutual dependence had grown up between man and boy, such that Samdup had little comfort in the thought of their parting.
Zamyatin fell back a little to where William was trailing along behind on his pony. They had agreed that he should have the remaining pony since he was in such poor shape. The bite he had received in the tunnels beneath Dorje-la had swollen out of all proportion. In the past week, it had become red and angry, the skin over it drawn taut like the skin of a drum. The boy suffered constant pain from it now and could scarcely sleep at night. At each of their recent halts, he had been examined by Mongol doctors, but all they had been able to do was to prepare herbal concoctions, which William drank without effect.
