Twelve (8 page)

After two more days of walking and one more night's cautious sleep, I made it to Goryachkino. Our prearranged meeting place was a farm outbuilding near the main road. The French were only a few versts away when I arrived late in the afternoon, so the people of the area had already abandoned their homes, evaporating into the hinterland before the scorching wave of the French advance.

I scouted around, and soon found a message scratched into one of the walls.

8 – 24 – 18 – M

Maks had been there, on the eighth month, the twenty-fourth day, the eighteenth hour – scarcely a day earlier. It was a system we had worked out back in Moscow, even before the Oprichniki had arrived, to cope with the problem of trying to meet up and communicate while we pursued the moving target of the Grande Armée.

The idea had been Vadim's. He had taken it from the experiences of the 'little warriors' of the Spanish peninsula, who had been harassing Bonaparte's troops for years without ever forming up into an organized army. (Though the joyous news had not yet reached us, the tide in Spain had at last turned against Bonaparte. Only days earlier, Wellington had occupied Madrid.) We had studied maps of the whole area where we thought we might be operating, most of which we were quite familiar with anyway. We chose small villages, geographical features and isolated buildings and made a long list, assigning each one a unique combination of a letter and number. Thus any meeting we chose could be described simply by a date, a time and the code for the location. It took just four pieces of information: month, day, hour, location.

If one of us arrived at a meeting place, we could simply leave a message, scratched into a tree trunk or chalked on a wall, as to when we had been there, and another telling when and where the next meeting should be. A message would be signed with the author's initial. If more information needed to be conveyed, then a letter could be hidden. The character 'G' – for
peesmo
– would indicate the presence of such a letter.

We had chosen meeting places as far afield as Orsha, Tula and Vladimir, but even in the city of Moscow itself, much as we hoped the French would not get that far, we had put dozens of locations on the list. Once the Oprichniki arrived, we had given them copies of the list as well.

And so Maks' message told me that he had been here, but not where he had gone. There was no sign of him now. He might have moved on or he might return, and Dmitry and Vadim could still arrive, so I waited.

Vadim arrived first, and Dmitry soon after. They had been luckier than I in keeping hold of their horses, and thus they were both less exhausted. I showed them Maks' message and briefly told them my adventures since we had last met. Vadim found much that was familiar.

'Well, at least you've seen more of yours than I have of my lot,' he said. 'I woke up after our first night's camp, and they'd just gone.'

'What about all that "We sleep by day and kill at night"?' I asked, badly impersonating Pyetr's accent.

'I thought I'd managed to dissuade them from that, at least until we'd got close to the enemy,' Vadim replied, 'but I guess they were just playing me along. They probably rode off the moment my eyes closed.'

'So what have you been doing since?'

'Nothing of much benefit. Keeping an eye on the French. I could have gone back to Moscow for all the use I've been.'

'And what
are
the French up to?' asked Dmitry.

'All set for a big battle tomorrow, around a village called Borodino – just south-east of here.' He opened a map and showed us.

'And we're going to engage them?' I asked.

'Looks like it. It's all Kutuzov's idea.'

'Will we win?'

Vadim shrugged his shoulders. 'If we do, it will halt them. If not – well, we had to make some sort of stand before they reached Moscow.'

'What about you, Dmitry?' I asked. 'How quickly did your Oprichniki give you the slip?'

'They didn't,' he replied. 'I mean, they go off and do what they do, but they've kept in touch. I know where they are now, for instance. They're setting up an ambush on one of the roads the French are using to bring in more troops. It's not far from here.' Our expressions must have conveyed scepticism. 'I'll show you,' he insisted.

Dmitry led us south, on foot, closer to the French lines, until we came to the edge of a small ridge. It was completely dark now, with still no moon to shed any light on what Dmitry wanted us to see, but beside the road that the ridge overlooked was a farmhouse and light shone from the window. The road was quiet.

'So where are they?' asked Vadim.

'Wait,' replied Dmitry. 'The road's being used by French troops. See what happens when they come along.'

Ever since my first brief battle alongside the Oprichniki, I had wanted to ask Dmitry what he knew about them – what he had held back from us. It seemed that I would not need to ask; I would be shown. We had been waiting for almost half an hour when we finally heard the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet. A small group of French infantry, perhaps thirty in all, was advancing down the road. The men at the front and back of the platoon each carried a lantern, adding to the light from the farmhouse. The men marched onwards and had almost completely passed when, in total silence, a door to the farmhouse opened and out raced two dark figures. They grabbed the hindmost man – who carried one of the lanterns – and dragged him back inside. The whole incident took place without a sound and in mere seconds. It was like the tongue of a toad flicking out and grabbing an unsuspecting fly.

Someone towards the back of the platoon noticed first not that his comrade had gone, but that the light had gone. He turned, and then shouted to his lieutenant to stop.

'That was Varfolomei and Ioann, I think,' Dmitry told us, by way of commentary.

'Hardly a significant loss to the French army,' said Vadim sardonically.

'It's not over yet,' said Dmitry.

The platoon had broken ranks to see what had become of the missing man. As we looked, we saw the same two dark figures erupt from the house again, this time taking back with them the lead man – the man with the remaining lantern. At almost the same instant, the light inside the building was extinguished. We, and the French platoon, were suddenly made blind by the darkness. But we could still hear.

The Frenchmen began calling to one another; at first, simply remarks along the lines of 'What happened?' and 'Are you there?' Then the shouts began to be interrupted by screams, most of them the short, curtailed screams of men taken by surprise and dying quickly. As each scream denoted the death of a man, so the number speaking to each other became fewer, but also louder and more desperate. Towards the end, only one young French voice remained.

'Are you there? Lieutenant? Sir? Who's there? Jacques? Who is there? I'm—' and then a brief yelp ended his one-sided conversation.

I have seen and heard hundreds of men die, many by my own hand, but those thirty deaths and that friendless, lone voice were as sickening as anything I had witnessed up until that time.

Dmitry, on the other hand, expressed his admiration. 'Impressive, eh? Thirty men taken out by three. And in, what? Two minutes? Not enough to win us the war, I know, but it can only help.'

We had only seen two figures, but Dmitry evidently knew better. Once the lights had been extinguished, there could have been any number of Oprichniki out there, attacking those soldiers, and Vadim and I would have been none the wiser.

'Frenchmen,' was all Vadim could mutter grimly, but it was some consolation. They were the invaders. We could defend by any means we chose.

'Let's go down there,' said Dmitry, eagerly. We followed him down the ridge and to the road. The impression that the whole scene had been presented for us – for Vadim and me – was growing within me. The Oprichniki probably did work in exactly this way at other times, but on this particular occasion they had known that they had an audience, known that Dmitry would lead us to see them at work. The intent was as much to conceal as to reveal, but I realized I would get nothing more by asking Dmitry directly.

By the time we got to the road, my eyes were becoming used to the darkness. A dim light emanated from the open door. Around us there were only about half a dozen bodies remaining. A figure – I think it was Ioann – scuttled out of the farmhouse and began to drag one of the remaining dead soldiers inside. The soldier's leg twitched with some last vestige of life. Ioann shouted something back towards the house and I heard the other two laugh from within. Again I was reminded of the fresh-faced recruits outside the brothel back in Moscow.

Dmitry trotted over to the farmhouse, and I saw him talking intensely to Pyetr – the third man – at the door. At something Pyetr said, Dmitry stiffened and looked over his shoulder towards us. He turned back and spoke to Pyetr, who nodded and went inside, returning with a bundle, which he gave to Dmitry.

Dmitry came back over to us. 'They're just clearing them off the road so that they won't be seen by any other patrols that come by,' he chose to explain, although the reasoning was obvious enough to anyone with the slightest military experience. It gave me cause to wonder if this explanation was offered only to disguise some deeper, more shameful reason, though I could not suspect what. Or perhaps not shameful, but simply, as I had suspected earlier, secret. I could understand their desire for secrecy – my own life had often depended on it – but that did not mean I was going to suppress my own curiosity.

'Pyetr's given me these,' added Dmitry, holding up the bundle. Then, before we could say a word, he was scrambling back up the ridge.

None of us said very much until we were well away from what we had just witnessed. Soon we were back in Goryachkino and able to rest. Vadim's mood seemed to have lightened. His rationalization, practised over so many years and so many campaigns, that the enemy is the enemy – that their deaths were their responsibility, not ours – seemed to be winning the upper hand. I understood the arguments, I'd told myself the same story after every battle I had been in, but still something about what we had just seen made it for the first time unconvincing.

Dmitry lit a lamp and excitedly showed us the bundle that Pyetr had given him. It was made up of two French light-infantry uniforms.

'You know what you can do with these?' Dmitry tonight seemed more enthusiastic than I had seen him for many years. 'You can go into the French camp – find out what their plans are.'

'You're not coming with us?' I asked.

'Oh, you know
my
French. They'd spot me a mile away, but you two could wander into the Tuileries without anyone raising an eyebrow.' He was almost gabbling, talking as if that was the only way to keep unwanted thoughts from his mind.

'It's either that, or go straight back to Moscow,' said Vadim, soberly. 'I'd rather do
something
useful while we're out here.'

I thought for a moment and then nodded. 'Where shall we meet up with you again?' I asked Dmitry.

'I'll wait at Shalikovo.' He was calmer – perhaps as a result of our agreeing to leave him. 'If we stop the French advance then that should be safe enough. If not, well, I suppose it will have to be Moscow.'

'Until then, Dmitry.' We hugged, but for some reason he was in a dreadful hurry. His embrace with Vadim was scarcely a pat on the back.

As he dashed off into the darkness I was almost tempted to spy on him instead of on the French, but I knew my duty. Vadim and I began to change into the French uniforms that he had provided, preparing to place ourselves deep inside the enemy's territory.

'S
O HOW DO I LOOK?' I ASKED VADIM AS I BUTTONED UP MY NEW
uniform. 'Do you think I'll pass muster?'

'In French from now on, if you please.' His reply was, somewhat hypocritically, in Russian. I repeated my question, this time in French.

'I think you'll do,' he replied, at last switching language himself, 'although there's a lot of bloodstains on your jacket.'

'Yours too.' Around the neck, the stains were virtually invisible against the red of the collar, but on the blue of the jacket, they were easier to see. The uniforms themselves were undamaged, with no cuts or piercing that we could find.

'We'll just make up some story about holding a dying comrade in our arms,' suggested Vadim. I tried to laugh, but the memory of where the clothes had actually come from was too close and too real.

We strode off towards the French encampments, without much concern for exactly where we were going or even what information we were trying to discover. For me, at least, I think the purpose of the mission was to prove myself once again a soldier and a man.

'It's a miracle that Pyetr even managed to get two intact uniforms off that lot,' said Vadim.

I shivered as I felt the hug of the cold uniform, so recently the shroud of a corpse. 'The little-known Miracle of the French Uniforms?' I joked.

'He
is
named after a saint.'

Our mood lightened a little and our pace quickened. 'You think he could walk on water then?'

'I'd like to see him try,' muttered Vadim.

'Of course, the Bible gets it wrong there.' It was Maks' voice, recalled into my head as part of a conversation years before on that very subject of Saint Peter walking on the Sea of Galilee.

'I thought you believed that the Bible gets it wrong everywhere,' I had told him.

'Not everywhere. There's lots of good stuff in there, but that's just a ploy to fool people into thinking that it's all good. It's an old trick. The best place to hide a tree is in a forest. The best place to hide a lie is in a forest of truth.'

'And how do we know which is which?' I had asked him.

'You ask a priest.' I looked at him, stunned. He burst out laughing. 'Or you could ask me,' he continued. 'Or you could try working it out for yourself.'

'Sounds like a lot of effort. And since you evidently know the answer already, I'll ask you.'

'About Saint Peter?' he asked. I nodded. 'Well,' he explained, 'the point that they were trying to get across was one about faith. Peter steps out on the water, walks around for a bit, then loses faith and falls in. But the idea should be that faith is what gave Peter the confidence to step on to the water in the first place, not the thing that supported him once he was there – it was God Who did that. It was faith that made him trust God. But when he loses faith, God should still be there to support him, once he's made that step out on to the water.

'It's supposed to be telling us to put our faith in the invisible God, but instead, because Peter starts to sink, it just presents faith as some sort of magical mumbo-jumbo.'

'So you think God supported Peter on the water?' I asked, with mock incredulity.

'No, of course not. What I'm saying is the story's about faith, not about God. The faith part is the nugget of truth and people get duped into believing the God part too.'

It was lucky that we had been alone. Maks might well have got away with saying that in England or France, but not here in Russia.

'Faith's the interesting bit, though,' he had continued. 'Faith's what allows people to feel certain about things that they can never know for sure. And that's an important idea to get across, however much the Bible fluffs it.'

'An important idea?'

'For the masses – and for politicians. For anyone who's afraid of knowledge, either in themselves or in others. For anyone who sees happiness as the be all and end all of life.'

Maks' view of faith was as a fool's paradise; living in happy ignorance for fear of discovering the truth. It might work for some, but I despised the concept no less than he did.

'But isn't the story just relating the events that happened?' I asked, more to goad than to enquire.

Maks tutted. 'Why is it that people believe that the Bible is the one book in the history of mankind that doesn't use allegory? Did Gulliver really go to Brobdingnag? Did Candide really visit El Dorado? It's like all those folk tales our grandmothers tell us. None of them ever happened. First you decide the point you're trying to get across, then you make up a story that gets it over. You have to look beyond the ghosts and the vampires and the miracles and see the moral message.'

He had pulled up, remembering he had to breathe as well as speak. His enthusiasm bordered on anger, but the pleasure I took in listening to him was only outdone by the pleasure he took in talking. He smiled ruefully, seeing that he had contradicted himself in a way that I would not have spotted. 'Well, just because some of the folk stories are made up doesn't mean they all are. Trees in the forest, you know.'

Now, as I walked alongside Vadim towards the French lines, recalling the conversation, I wondered if, somewhere out there in the dark Russian countryside, Maks was regaling the three Oprichniki under his command with similar polemics. They didn't seem the type to engage in theological discussion, which was all the better for Maks – he wouldn't be interrupted.

'I just had a thought,' whispered Vadim, disturbing my remembrances. We had made our way back on to the road where we had earlier watched as the Oprichniki slaughtered the French platoon. We were at most a verst beyond the farmhouse.

'What?' I asked.

'That we might be mistaken for the enemy by our own side.'

'Or by the Oprichniki, at least,' I added.

He stopped and turned to me. 'They
are
on our side, Aleksei. It doesn't matter what they do; they do it for the best of reasons – for Russia.'

Once again, the hackneyed, old argument reassured me, but as we walked on it struck me that while their interests might coincide with those of Russia, that didn't mean that they fought
for
Russia in the way that we did. One might as well say that we – Vadim and I – fought for England. At present we fought on the same side, but a simple signature on a treaty might in an instant change everything. And I doubted whether it would need any written treaty for the Oprichniki to change their allegiance.

The enemy seemed to have little concept of security, and it proved to be a trivial matter for two Russian officers with French uniforms and passable French accents to wander into a camp of perhaps two hundred men on the very eve of what could prove to be the decisive battle of the campaign. From experience we kept away from the tents where the more senior officers would be barracked, knowing that they would have tighter lips and sharper ears than the lower ranks. We ended up sat around a fire with four young artillery officers who introduced themselves as Stephan, Guillaume, Pierre and Louis. For the evening, I was André and Vadim was Claude.

Like most soldiers at the battlefront, they knew little of the overall strategy of their masters. They understood it at the highest level – that the plan was to take Moscow – and, even higher, that this was because the perfidious Russians were trading with the English. They understood it at the most basic level; that in the morning they were supposed to attack the Russian emplacements directly in front of them. Somewhere in between those two, in the region of how the following day's battle was to be conducted and of how the French planned to get from Borodino to Moscow, was where we discovered the gaps in their knowledge. Those gaps were easily filled with gossip and rumour.

Some of the gossip was very domestic and very French. The hottest topic was the fact that the emperor had received that very day a package containing a portrait of his young son – the so-called 'King of Rome'. It was a pleasant conversation for me to engage in, since it reminded me of my own son in Petersburg and of my own 'Marie-Louise' in Moscow.

Pierre had the same idealistic simplicity that I loved in Maks, although being younger than Maks, he had not yet found it diminished by any sense of political reality.

'Napoleon may love his son, and that's fine, but I doubt he really sees him as an heir.' He looked around us for agreement. 'He has made himself emperor purely as a temporary measure, to keep the Republic on track through difficult times, but he knows the next emperor, or whatever he may choose to call himself, must rise on merit, as he did, not by virtue of a serendipitous birth.'

Unusually, Vadim took up the political point, although from a typically domestic angle. 'But if you believe that, you're saying that Napoleon married Marie-Louise for love. From everything I've heard, he truly loved Josephine and still does.'

'I agree with Claude,' said Guillaume, speaking for the first time. 'Napoleon has made a great sacrifice in leaving the woman he loves so as to provide the country with an heir to replace him.'

'Leaving the woman he loves for a girl half his age,' added Louis cynically.

I took a risk. 'The same sacrifice every patriotic Frenchman makes when he leaves his wife to visit his mistress.' It paid off. All four of them laughed in agreement.

Vadim, never the best at expressing his undoubted Russian patriotism, suddenly found the words to pretend he was the truest of French patriots. 'And yet Napoleon is happy to leave them both to lead us here for the sake of France.'

He had hit exactly the correct tone and everyone's agreement was expressed in a profusion of Gallic nodding all round the fire.

'Do you suppose he knew what the enemy had in store for us?' asked Louis after a thoughtful silence.

'They don't seem to have put up much of a fight yet,' I said.

'Not the fighting,' explained Stephan. 'This new weapon.'

'Haven't you heard?' added Guillaume. 'It's some kind of sickness. They're trying to spread it amongst us.'

'No, it's not a sickness,' said Stephan. 'It's animals – packs of trained wolves that they're setting upon us.'

'If it had been wolves we'd have seen them,' said Pierre.

'Perhaps, perhaps not,' said Guillaume. 'Wolves hunt at night, and there's precious little to see round here when darkness falls.'

'And how would they spread any sickness, anyway?' asked Stephan.

'It only takes one or two infected corpses,' explained Louis. 'They don't have to be catapulted over the walls of a besieged castle – just slipped amongst the bodies of our own dead and wounded.'

'I heard this morning that three of them – Russian saboteurs – walked into a camp with their pockets and their knapsacks full of gunpowder. When they were captured, they just blew themselves up, and those around them,' said Pierre. 'No one was hurt too badly – none of our lot, that is. The Russians were done for. But if they don't even care to protect their own lives, then how do we combat that?'

'It all sounds like the rumours of war to me,' said Vadim, being both rational and trying to defend his country from the accusation. 'I've heard them on every campaign I've been on. The enemy has to be made more than just an enemy. It's not enough that he opposes you; he has to be wrong as well. And if his cause is wrong, then his methods must be wrong too. And nobody likes to disagree and appear to be supporting the enemy, so the rumour grows and spreads.'

All four of the French soldiers eyed Vadim intently as they listened. 'So, to deny the rumours is to support the enemy, is it, Claude?' asked Pierre coldly. 'As you just did?'

I resisted the urge to put my hand to my sword, but prepared myself for action at any moment. The suspense was broken as Pierre began to laugh, followed by his three comrades and then by Vadim and me.

'You're probably right, my friend,' continued Pierre. 'They are rumours and so, by definition, they
must
be exaggerated. It's probably just Cossacks marauding and picking off our men.'

'Anyway,' said Louis, 'who could blame the Russians for using a new weapon if they have one? Every campaign is won by bending the rules of war just a little. There would have been men complaining, just like us, at the first use of a musket, or even a longbow – and now we wouldn't be without them.'

'I'll stick with my musket, Louis,' said Stephan, laughing, 'and you can have your longbow.'

I kept quiet through all of this, knowing that there was some truth behind these French rumours and noticing a frightening similarity to the stories I had heard from Tula. The Oprichniki were on the Don and there were rumours from the Don – and now the Oprichniki were here and those same rumours stayed with them. Towards the end of the conversation, however, I was beginning to feel more reassured. I knew that we were dealing not with a plague or with wolves, but with extremely skilful, dedicated, violent men; men whose attacks were all the more potent for the fact that they spread fear as well as death. I wasn't sure how the Oprichniki caused the rumours about themselves to be so exaggerated, but hearing the stories repeated from the mouths of these superstitious French soldiers made me realize that stories was all they were. The Oprichniki were great soldiers and they were on our side. That, as Louis himself had just said, was validation enough for us to use them.

Vadim made a move to leave. 'Well, good evening, gentlemen. We must be away and prepare for the battle tomorrow.'

We both rose, and there was a general shaking of hands and saying of goodbyes between us and the four of them. As we turned and walked away, a final shout came to us from Pierre's lips.

'
Zhelayoo oospyeha!
'

Vadim and I stopped still. The meaning was straightforward enough – 'Good luck!' Yet it was not the meaning of the phrase that surprised us, but its language. Pierre had spoken in Russian.