Dan Smith: Red Winter

Galina hesitated and glanced at me.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’ But a chill settled over me as we went on, Galina still grasping my hand, and I looked ahead, afraid to find what was waiting for me.

I used my free hand to hold the bridge rail, but as soon as we reached the shadowy mouth of the path through the forest, I let it fall to rest against the revolver in my coat pocket. The trees were naked, withdrawn from life while they endured the onset of winter. Their damp bark was black in places, but in others it was dusted with frost, glistening in the moonlight that broke through twisted and crooked branches. When I glanced down at Galina’s fingers closed round my own, I saw a similarity in the way her swollen, arthritic knuckles bulged beneath old skin and once again I remembered One-Eyed Likho and how the smith had fled from her through the forest to avoid the tailor’s fate, eventually cutting away his own arm to escape her.

We shuffled along the narrowing path, besieged on all sides by the oak and sycamore and hornbeam. Roots rose and fell from the frozen ground; rotting autumn-flamed leaves shifted across the forest floor as the wind crawled and swirled among the trunks. Somewhere close by came the cawing of many crows. Stark, agitated calls to the night.

When I heard those black birds, I thought I knew what was lying in wait in the darkness. The civil war had cut through the country like the Reaper himself had swept across it, and everywhere he cast his glance he left the dead lying in the fields and villages and forests. And wherever the dead fell so the crows came, obscuring the grass, turning everything black.

My steps faltered and I felt Galina grip my hand harder so that now it was she who was leading me. I shook myself, trying to lose the sickening feeling that swelled in my chest, and told myself I had to go on. I had to see. In the back of my mind, though, a voice told me that I didn’t need to see. Knowing was enough. I didn’t need to see .

When we broke from the forest into the clearing before the lake, the stars looked down with indifference and the trees stood silent.

The crows rose into the sky as one when Galina stepped forward, shooing them away. Their raucous complaints shattered the quiet of the forest like screams in the night and I knew what must have brought them here in such numbers. While their presence in fields far from here indicated sights against which I had hardened my heart, the massing of carrion birds so close to home filled me with dread.

Moonlight fell across the clearing, reflecting from the paper-thin ice on the surface of the lake, washing the area in a silvery glow, but even in daylight I would not have been able to make out the features of the man who lay in the frozen grass.

‘Sasha,’ Galina said, falling to her knees beside him. ‘My Sasha.’ She put her hand on her husband’s face as if she didn’t notice what the crows had done to him. ‘I tried to make him whole again.’

The body was dressed in black trousers and a shirt that had once been white but was decorated now with a dark stain across the chest. The skin was marked from the attention of the crows, and there was a dark sore in the centre of his forehead. As I came closer, I saw that when she stroked her husband’s damaged cheek, his head rolled in an unnatural way, falling to face us and revealing the place where it had been separated from his neck.

I took an involuntary step back and reached a hand inside my pocket to find the reassurance of the revolver’s handle. I scanned the clearing, watching the dark shadows on the periphery, searching for any sign of who might have done this. I had seen bodies before, but not often like this, and I knew this man.

A coldness froze my stomach as unwanted images of the possible fate of my family invaded my thoughts.

‘What… what about the others?’ I asked. ‘Where’s everybody else?’

I knew she’d been alone too long, that this must have happened some time ago, judging by the marks the crows had left on him, but it was almost impossible to know how long unless she told me. There was no smell, meaning the body had decomposed almost not at all, so it could have been quite fresh, but the weather was cold and I had to allow that as a factor. This execution could have taken place two days or two weeks ago.

‘Are they dead too?’ I asked, looking for other shapes in the clearing before turning my attention to Galina once more.

She cut a sorry figure in the gentle mist that diffused the moonlight. Shabby and pitiful. Her clothes upon clothes were dirty and ragged, making her bigger than she really was. Her lank hair, muddied and unkempt, writhed about her head like a witch’s. And in her madness, she sat at her husband’s side believing his head could be returned to his shoulders and that he would get up and walk.

‘Someone saw them coming.’ As before, there was a sudden clarity in her voice, as if she might have stepped from her madness into a moment of sanity. ‘A week ago, perhaps a little more. It was early and I was in the forest looking for mushrooms, just coming back as they were sending the children across the river to hide in the woods. That’s what we always did when they came, to stop them from taking the boys and… and using the girls. But they knew. They must have seen. I waited in the woods and watched them order everyone out of their houses and across the bridge.’ She brushed a hand over her husband’s clotted hair. Her fingers trembled. ‘They lined up the men and made them kneel, and then he drew his sword and said he would kill them, one at a time, until the children came out.’

‘Who was it?’ I almost didn’t dare speak. Galina was like a sensitive switch that had settled on sanity for a moment and I feared that if I disturbed her now, she would slip back to the confusion and bewilderment she’d shown before.

‘The men shouted to the children, telling them to run, but they didn’t. They came out because they were so afraid and…’ She took her hand away from Sasha’s forehead as if realising for the first time that he was dead. ‘And then he killed my poor Sasha anyway. He swung his sword over and over and over, and the children were screaming, and there was so much blood, and…’ She hung her head and sobbed, and I had to resist my need to press her.

‘I had a knife,’ she said, but I could barely hear her voice now. ‘For the mushrooms. I came out of the woods behind him. I should have done it earlier, but I thought he would stop. I thought he would stop before he did this to my Sasha, but he didn’t and then I had… I had nothing to lose anymore. He took my Sasha, so I came out of the woods and stuck it in him, but it just made him angry. The knife went in and came out, and there was blood, but all it did was make him angry.’ She ran her fingers along her dead husband’s leg and I saw the pain she felt at his loss. I had felt it too, with the passing of my brother, Alek, and I faced it again with the disappearance of my family.

‘I couldn’t save anyone. He just took my knife and did this…’ She turned to me, raising a hand to touch the cheek beneath her empty socket, and with that action, and the way the darkness fell across her face, the injury was obscured so that she was no longer a hag. Now she was just a helpless and distraught old woman who was forced to mourn her husband.

‘I should have buried him,’ she said. ‘I should have… You’ll do it, won’t you, Alek? You’re a good man.’

‘Of course. But tell me about the others. What happened to everybody else? The women and the children?’

She turned to look at me, her brow wrinkling in puzzlement. ‘They must have thought I was dead. I heard him say, “Throw her in the lake,” but I couldn’t see. There was too much blood and pain, and I tried to tell them I was still alive, but I couldn’t speak. I might have screamed. There was screaming, I’m sure, but it’s like I was dead already and then their hands were on me and I felt the water and…’ Galina stopped. ‘Oh.’ She said. ‘The lake. The water.’