Dan Smith - Red Winter

‘—about Koschei?’ One of the women was speaking but the voice was like a distant whisper. An unimportant inconvenience. All that mattered was Marianna, and I began walking, moving towards the lake. It came to me that she might still be in there, moving gently in the depths with the other women, their faces white and bloated. Like my own mother, the lake had taken her in its watery embrace.

I repeated her name as I approached the water, saying it over and over, feeling the tightness of my heart and the overwhelming need to be with my wife.

The forest was no longer there. The wind stopped. The crows vanished. Nothing existed anymore. Only me, the lake and Marianna.

He likes to drown the women .

I was almost at the water’s edge when hands gripped my arms and pulled me back.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Tanya was saying. ‘I’m sorry.’

I fought against her for a moment, stumbling back and falling so that I was sitting, looking out at the lake as if I had come to watch it on a warm spring afternoon.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ Tanya said again.

‘You think she’s in there? Marianna?’

‘Maybe it was different here,’ Tanya said. ‘Maybe…’ but she didn’t finish. There was nothing she could say to change what had or hadn’t happened, and there was nothing I could do to find Marianna. If she was in the depths of the lake, she was gone for ever.

I pulled my coat tight against the cold.

‘Did the old woman tell you what he looks like? What’s his real name?’ Lyudmila spoke to me, but I kept my eyes on Tanya as I shook my head.

‘She said nothing at all?’ Lyudmila asked.

‘Nothing.’ I looked out at the lake again and wished the world were different. ‘I have to look for the others now.’

For a moment there was no sound but those that should be there: the sigh of the breeze in the trees; the gentle lapping of the water at the bank; the trickle of the river flowing into the lake.

‘Will you come with me?’ I asked. ‘To find the others?’

Tanya turned to the forest and raised her eyes to the treetops. ‘There’s nothing in there for me,’ she said. ‘All that matters is finding Koschei.’

‘Maybe he’s still there,’ Lyudmila suggested.

‘No, he’ll be long gone.’

‘And when you find him?’ I asked.

‘I’m going to kill him.’

They walked away, going to their horses and mounting up.

‘Which way will you go?’ I asked as they came back towards the path.

‘North,’ Tanya said, stopping her horse and looking down at me. ‘So far we’ve been following him north. What’s the next town from here?’

‘Dolinsk.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A few villages between here and there. Farms. Nothing else.’

Tanya considered me for a long moment then pulled my revolver from her pocket and dropped it on the ground beside me. ‘Good luck, Kolya,’ she said.

I didn’t turn to watch them leave. I stayed where I was, staring out at the lake, dreading what I would find deeper in the forest.

So it was that I went to my family home for the last time, crossing the bridge and walking the lonely road through the village. I found myself at my own front door, acting only on instinct as I went into the darkness within. I didn’t have a coherent plan in mind, but took a basket from the shelf at the far end of the room and collected every scrap of food I could find. In the drawer, I found a good knife that went into the basket, along with the food, a handful of matches wrapped in a cloth, candles and a single spoon. I collected the saddlebag I had brought from the outbuilding and threw it over my shoulder before picking up the blankets that had covered me during the night. Arms full, I walked back to the front door and pulled it wide, but something stopped me and I stood like that, with my back to the room, the door open to the cold.

I needed a reminder.

Of Marianna. Of Misha and Pavel. Of everything I was leaving behind and everything I had once been. Something was beginning and I had to prepare for it in the right way.

Closing the door, I put everything on the floor beside it and went through to the bedroom. I picked up Marianna’s chotki and wrapped it round my right wrist, tucking it into my sleeve, mouthing the words ‘Have mercy on me, the sinner’, just as Marianna would have done. Then I vowed to find my family, no matter what it took. And when I had found them, alive or dead, I would follow Tanya’s path to Koschei and I would kill him.

‘Nothing will stand in my way,’ I whispered.

Taking the small icon from the wall above the table and putting it in my satchel, I returned to the kitchen and sat down just as Marianna would have wanted. This was the traditional way. It was bad luck to go on a journey without sitting for a moment. Marianna made me do it every time I left to go anywhere and I had always come back.

I was anxious that Tanya and Lyudmila would already be off the road and hidden in the forest – they were my best lead to Koschei and I didn’t want to lose them – but I would take this time. It was the kind of superstition I used to tease Marianna about, but it had served me well enough until now. My parents had always done it, my grandparents too. Marianna said it was to trick the evil spirits into thinking the travellers had decided to stay, but whatever the reason for the tradition, I could spare a few moments if it was going to bring me luck.

I sat at the table and closed my eyes, and that simple act helped me to relax and rearrange my thoughts.

I focused first on Marianna and the boys. I touched the chotki on my wrist and prayed that they were not dead, as my worst fears tried to suggest, but that they were somehow safe and would stay that way until I reached them. I pictured each of them in my mind as best as I could. It was difficult, though, to hold an image of their faces in my thoughts. I focused instead on the quiet sound of Marianna’s understated laughter. I wrapped myself in the way I had felt the last time we had been together in our bed, her naked skin against mine. I remembered the way she scolded me for bringing dirty boots into the house and how I laughed when she broke up the boys’ squabbling by chasing them with a wooden spoon. I breathed deep and recalled the smell of Pavel’s hair, the smoothness of his cheeks, the brightness of his grin, the seriousness of Misha’s furrowed brow and the delight in my eldest son’s eyes when he first pulled a fish from the lake. I remembered my brother too, how he had been before the war, not as I had seen him this morning when throwing the cold dirt over his face. I remembered him as he was when we were boys and we ventured deeper into the forest than we were allowed, and the time when he was fifteen and stole vodka, which he drank until he was sick.

Then my thoughts turned to the darkness that had smothered this village.

For me, he was a shadow. Galina had called him Koschei the Deathless. She had put a knife in him and it had done him no harm, but the Deathless One was no more real than One-Eyed Likho, and no one is immune to the blade of a knife. She must have made a mistake.

Anyone can die. I had seen that often enough.

Even in the skazka , Koschei had a weakness. This one would have one too, and once I knew what had happened to my wife and sons, I would be sure to find it.

Kashtan was glad to see me. She’d been alone in the outbuilding for a while and she missed my company. She was a sociable animal and felt the loss of Alek’s horse. For days the two animals had shared the journey, walking side by side, and at night, they had been tethered close to one another. They had grazed and slept together.