Jasper Kent - Twelve

The only trail that Iuda had left was that he had planned to cross the Berezina with Bonaparte at Studienka. It was quite possible that this had been a lie, or that he would now change his mind, but my only option was still to try to intercept him there. I had not had time to properly consider what Iuda had said to me, but now as I rode through the quiet, frozen woods, I began to think.

The less painful matter to deal with was that Iuda was not a vampire. I had already concluded that this made little difference to my opinion of him. If a man chooses to become a vampire so that he may behave like a monster or if he finds himself quite able to behave like a monster anyway, he is still a monster and still happy so to be. Iuda remained a danger to all those he came into contact with. One question that had to be asked was whether any of the other Oprichniki was also not a vampire. Iuda had implied that they all were, but was Iuda to be trusted? The evidence of my own eyes convinced me of most of them – after their deaths I had witnessed their immediate bodily decay. I had not seen what became of Ioann or Filipp once they had perished. The deaths of Simon, Iakov Alfeyinich and Faddei had, if Maks was to be believed, been caused by sunlight. I felt confident that all eleven had indeed been vampires. If not, what was I to care? Just as it did not fundamentally matter with Iuda, neither did it with any of the others.

But what of Domnikiia? The idea of being tricked – of being betrayed – by her of all people was the true nightmare from which I saw no prospect of awakening. When she teased me it revealed her wit and her spirit, but to play games with me like this over such issues showed in her what almost amounted to insanity. 'I'm not surprised Iuda found it so easy to fool you.' Those had been her words. She and Iuda both delighted in playing me for the fool, and I had so far been gullibly eager to oblige them. But I also remembered what Maksim had once said, about the best place to hide a tree being in a forest, the best place to hide a lie being amongst the truth. Why had Iuda allowed himself to be captured?

To speak to me. What was it that he wanted to tell me? Not about Bonaparte's plans. Not about his views on chess. Not even to tell me he wasn't a vampire. It was to put the thought into my head that Domnikiia had chosen to become a vampire. Amongst that forest of truth, that was the single fact that he had wanted to convey. It was not even a fact – it was a piece of information that might be true and might not be. The truth could never be known and so the doubt would haunt me for ever.

Iuda's game, either through planning or through extemporization, had unfolded layer by layer in front of me, like a journey up a mountain when every false peak, once conquered, reveals another higher peak behind it. First I believed he had turned Domnikiia into a vampire. Then I discovered that, even so, I could not kill her. Then I discovered that she was not a vampire and that, had I killed her, it would have been as a mortal woman. This morning he had convinced me that she had all along wanted to be a vampire, even though he could not make her one. He could not go on forever pushing on one side of the scales and then the other and switching my view from one side to the next, but now he did not need to. He had found a perfect balance point. I could never know the truth and so, whatever I chose to do, I would spend half my life regretting. If I abandoned Domnikiia, then I would worry that I had done her wrong, that I had believed Iuda's final lie about her when she had behaved throughout in perfect innocence. If I stayed with her, I would be forever looking at her, wondering what happened between them that night in Moscow.

My perception was so battered by my constantly changing view of the truth – not just over Domnikiia, but over Maksim, over Dmitry, over the Oprichniki and over Iuda himself – that I was no longer able to find certainty in anything. Vadim's advice, I knew, would have been to go back to Petersburg, to go back to Marfa. She was someone in whom I had never had any doubt, nor had I any reason to. With her I would find a safe, content retreat. But then even Vadim's advice became ambiguous. How he would have despised any concept of retreat.

I was nearing the village of Studienka. I dismounted, tied up my horse and, despite the freezing cold, changed from the outer layers of my clothing into my French uniform. Skirting around the village, hidden by the woods, I made my way to a small hillock that overlooked the river itself. There I lay, concealed almost instantly beneath the falling snow, and observed the tattered remains of the Grande Armée.

Tattered and yet magnificent. There must have been fifty thousand before me; half of them soldiers, half non-combatants, all desperate to get across that river, to get out of Russia and to get home. Bonaparte's great campaign lay in ruins, the conquering ambition of every man transformed into self-preserving terror. None could have dreamed that the largest army ever assembled in the world would be reduced, in scarcely six months, to such a shambles. And yet it had happened, and I was thrilled to witness it.

But for an army slashed to less than a tenth of its former size, beset by the hellish cold of a foreign winter and caught between three Russian armies, each on its own the size of theirs, they had performed a remarkable feat. Two bridges had been built across the river. Even now I could see sappers and pontoniers up to their armpits in the icy water, strengthening and repairing the bridges as thousand upon thousands of men broke step to march across. Every building in the village had been torn down to provide timber. On the high ground on the far side of the river, the advance guard had already set up a defensive position. They were being engaged from the south. Tchitchagov, realizing his error, had travelled back north to the real crossing point. The French deployments already across the river were holding him off and allowing the remainder of the army to slip away to the west unmolested once they had crossed.

On the eastern bank, an innumerable multitude waited to cross along the two narrow, manmade isthmuses – not just soldiers, though of those there were many, but the entire entourage that any army requires to survive, particularly one so far from home. Men and women waited to cross the river, and those whose duties, however vital they might be, did not require them to carry a sword or a musket found themselves reckoned least in the pecking order. Cooks, washerwomen, smiths and armourers were among those who waited to cross and, even amongst them, an order of merit would be established. Would an army in hopeless, frozen retreat favour those who maintained its weapons or those who filled its belly?

My intention of spotting one man amongst the tens of thousands was not as futile as it could have been. Though it would be impossible to scan the crowds of weary-faced troops that milled and bustled on the riverbank, the bridges themselves were narrow and all had to cross by one or the other. Indeed, most crossed by the smaller bridge, the larger being used for guns, wagons and cavalry. When I had last seen him, Iuda had no horse. Whether he had acquired one by now, I could only guess.

Although, with the help of my spyglass, I could inspect the face of each man as he approached the bridge, I was so far away that Iuda would be across the river by the time I could get down to the bank. My only prospect was to get down there amongst the French.

However determined the French were in getting as many men across the river as possible, it was at the expense of every other feature of military discipline. I was not challenged for any password or credentials as I picked my way first through the crowds of casualties and camp followers who would be the last to cross the bridge, if at all, and secondly through the teeming infantry who waited impatiently for their turn to cross. I looked out of place; any idea of uniform had been abandoned by the majority of the Grande Armée, in favour of more practical clothes – any clothes – that might keep out the cold. Even so, nobody paid me any attention.