The Bear's Tears

became deadweight — across his shoulders, and rose from his squat. He staggered under the weight and the sudden assault of his own weariness, then he began climbing again, one foot slowly and carefully and numbly placed in front of the other; one, two, three, four, five, six seven…

Skirting trees, resting every twenty steps, then fifteen, then twelve, as he climbed into the darkness and silence of the forest. Often, he had to drop Petrunin's unconscious body into the snow and rest, waiting until the shaking weakness left his limbs and he could return his breathing to something like normal. Then, after checking the fluttering, fading pulse and the amount of blood soaking the uniform, he would heft him up again and continue his climb.

Two hundred and forty-three… four, five, six… seven… eight — nine, ten… eleven… He dropped the body again. When he had recovered sufficiently to look around him, the fort was invisible, and the forest was lightless and quiet. Distantly, he heard the rotors of a helicopter, moving in what might have been another world or time. It hardly impinged upon his awareness, and occasioned no sense of danger in him. His body was capable only of feeling weakness, of resenting the weight that burdened it. Hyde was incapable of emotion.

Seven hundred and sixty-two, three… one thousand-fifty, no, seventy, eighty-three… twelve hundred and eighty-three… four… four… five — six… Three thousand forty-one… One, two, three — six, seven…

Hyde lurched and fell. The trees were smaller, more straggling, upside-down. Something soft was falling on his face and hands. He crawled, clawing with his hands, pushing with his feet. He touched snow, pulled at it as at a lifeline, felt rock beneath, clung to it as if on some vertical cliff-face.

He drifted… attended… drifted — woke. His breathing was calmer, his body numb. Petrunin lay, staring upwards a few yards from him on the gentle slope. He had noticed nothing of the changing terrain. The thinner trees were stunted by altitude. Hyde turned on his back. Rock hung over him, a great shelf blacker than the sky. It frightened him before it slowly assumed the properties of safety and hiding. He listened. His fading heartbeat, his breathing, the soughing of the wind, the call of an animal. Then, silence. What was missing? What noise—?

There was no noise of rotors. His hands beat the snow at his sides in applause. Of course—! No helicopters. No noise. He could not consider his luck, or his direction, or why his footsteps had not been discovered. He looked at his snow-covered body, and licked his wet face. He blinked. There were no stars. Cloud—?

It was snowing. He hadn't realised until a gust of wind had blown the snow under the overhang and onto his face. He raised his head. Petrunin was slowly being whitened by the snow, as with a shroud.

Shroud—

Hyde got to his knees and crawled swiftly, scrabblingly across to Petrunin, shaking him by the lapels the moment he reached him. Cough, blood, eyelids flickering…

'Come on, you bastard!' Hyde breathed fiercely. 'Get out of the bloody snow, you tit!' He giggled to himself as he dragged Petrunin under the overhang. He propped him against the rock, and pulled his greatcoat tightly about him, in part to hide the bloodstained shirt. Petrunin's face was white, drawn. He was dying, was already close to death.

Failure filled Hyde, as if his exhausted body was a bay that had simply waited for the tide of that emotion to engulf it. The one man who understood Teardrop, who had created it, was dying at his side; bleeding to death with absolute certainty. Hyde could do nothing.

He clenched his hands into fists he could not feel, not even his nails digging into his palms. Cold or exhaustion, he could not tell. He could distinguish nothing except the sharp edges of the rock at his back and the curtain of snow falling, swaying in the gusts, moving aside, falling again. He could do nothing…

Except listen—

Petrunin was talking. His voice sounded calm, without delirium, but it was weak and interrupted by coughing. Hyde tore part of the tail of his blouse away and wiped at the man's chin after each bout of coughing. It was as if the words were mouthfuls of pureed baby food and the piece of cloth a means of removing any the baby did not swallow. Petrunin stared at the curtain of snow that must have hidden their tracks from the pursuit and was concealing them now, and spoke. It was evident he knew he was dying.

'I hate this place,' Petrunin was saying. Rather, his voice spoke; it was somehow separate from the man, almost the last surviving particle of him. The tone was tired, detached, almost affected. Hyde would have dismissed it, in other circumstances, as a lack of resource in a mediocre actor. 'I hate this place.' It was evident that he had repeated the phrase over and over again, until it caught his companion's attention. 'I hate this place…'

'Yes,' Hyde said quietly.

It seemed sufficient, for Petrunin's strange, calm, objective voice continued: 'I hate to end like this… I know I'm dying, Hyde. I know…' He coughed a small, polite cough. Hyde wiped the little dribble of blood from the Russian's chin. 'I am so — so angry…' It was the weary anger of a corpse. Yet Hyde knew the depth of Petrunin's feelings would have wracked a healthy body. He did not look at the Russian, merely nodded. He felt himself slipping into sleep, in and out of shallow, cold water. He shook his head and sat upright, pressing his back against the sharp creases in the rock. Petrunin's hand was waving feebly towards the swinging curtain of the snowfall. 'Out there — a shithouse, Hyde. Like nothing you would know…' He had spoken in English as he gestured, but his voice was as expressionless as that of a translation machine. Alternately, he spoke English and Russian, at times dividing the same sentence or phrase between the two languages. 'Like nothing I've known…'

Hyde knew time was slipping away as surely as Petrunin was moving towards his final evasion. Yet he could not interrogate the man, not even point his monologue in a more fruitful direction. Petrunin might simply give up, die the moment he was interrupted. Hyde had no idea how long remained. He was angry, and yet he simply listened.

'So many bodies — no rules…oh, yes, they knew what they were doing—' Hyde wiped the man's chin. The face was grey, the teeth outlined by a dark mascara of blood. Hyde looked away. Petrunin continued, thickly: 'Kapustin and Nikitin and the smug, smiling, certain others — they knew what they were doing. The boy has got too smart, too big for his boots — let's drop him right in the shit…' There was a grey self-pity in the voice now, though its tone was still remote. 'Let's send the smart-ass to Afghanistan. It might even save us a bullet!' Hyde wiped at the man's chin, but there was only a little blood. He began to worry now that the blood would stop, that the final internal haemorrhaging would begin, drowning Petrunin before his narrative was ended. He had changed from shock into the costume of self-pity. Hyde could only wonder when he would become more confidential, ready for another voice; needing company, needing comfort.

'Two years — two years I survived it… God — do you know how much I learned about killing, about slaughter, about mutilation—! And the rebels taught me everything. I threw up the first time I saw a patrol of ours that had been attacked by rebels…' No coughing; nothing but a loud, choking swallow. 'Napalm, burn them like rats, like dark things in corners, like lice… you can burn them all if you can find them…'

'Jesus wept,' Hyde breathed, but it might have been no more than impatience which prompted him. Snow flurried in a quicker wind and dusted them. Hyde tasted it, then smeared it across his face as if to wash, to freshen himself. His beard rasped. Its growth seemed more than a mere stubble; a change of identity. Petrunin, too, had suffered change. Yes, they had known what they were doing when they sent him into exile, to Kabul.

'You could burn them all if you could find them, if you had enough napalm,' Petrunin repeated. 'Kapustin — I can see his cunning peasant's face now — sitting on Nikitin's left, telling me I had overreached myself…' His English was more regular now; its tone more clipped, educated, as if the man were reverting to some former, more urbane self as he died.

'Come on,' Hyde whispered. The snow-curtain swayed, flickered, swayed, fell.

Overreached… even then, he must have been patting Teardrop on the head like a newly-adopted son… even then — peasant. His hissing voice was interrupted by coughing. Hyde almost covered his mouth with the bloodstained piece of shirt, suppressing the spillage. Hyde's lips moved silently, as if he were praying. Eventually, Petrunin's heaving chest subsided. When Hyde removed the cloth, the Russian's cheeks and chin were smeared with darker patches and stripes; an animal mask resembling the symbols that had decorated his blood-red helicopter as it hovered over the burning tribesmen. Hyde sat back, and almost at once his weariness made him close his eyes. He jolted back to wakefulness, his eyes staring at the falling snow. His boots and trousers were covered by a thin white blanket. He heard Petrunin's teeth chattering, and knew he could not let the man wander in the landscape of his self-pity any longer.

In Russian, he said with studied deference: 'They did badly by you, Comrade General — those Party hacks.' The words were out almost before he could consider and weigh them; yet he knew they were right. He remembered Massinger's voice from the rear of the Mercedes, interrogating the Vienna Rezident. Something like that — a last