Jasper Kent - Twelve

He (I presumed it was a he, although my hearing is not quite up to making such distinctions) settled down some way ahead of me, directly on the path that I would be taking the following morning, and did not move for around half an hour. Tactically, now was the time to act, but I needed no tactics to know it. Human instinct – human fear – told me that I did not want to be found curled up on the ground, exposed and asleep and at the mercy of whoever was out there. If I was to die, I would die while conscious.

I headed out towards roughly where I believed him to be and relieved myself against a nearby tree. I stood there longer than I needed to, taking the time to let my eyes adjust to the darkness away from the fire, letting the cool air prime my body for action. Walking back, I caught a glimpse of him directly in my path, pressed into a hollow in the ground, trying not to be seen. I stepped over the figure as if I hadn't noticed him, but immediately I had passed him, I turned and gave him a heavy kick in the side of his stomach.

He groaned and rolled quickly away, but not so quickly that I didn't have time to place another boot in his ribs. By the time he had got to his feet, my sabre was drawn. In the vague light of the distant fire, there was still little to see of him, but I caught the glint of a knife in his hand. My sword seemed no deterrent to him and he threw himself at me, knocking me to the ground and pinning down my sword arm with his left hand as he raised his knife to strike. Only when he was this close did I recognize him as the Oprichnik, Iuda. His eyes showed no recognition of me, only the intensity of a man intent on another's death.

My knee connected with his groin and I managed to throw him off.

'Iuda!' I shouted at him, rising to my feet, but he still seemed not to recognize me and lunged once again with the knife. I smashed the flat of my sword against his wrist and the knife flew into the darkness. My boot in his chest forced him to the ground and I held the point of my sabre to his throat.

'Iuda! It's me. Aleksei Ivanovich.' The frenzy gradually began to fade from his eyes, to be replaced by recognition. At the same time I felt a chill of fear. The last time I had seen Iuda, he had not been alone. On his own I may have beaten him, but where were Matfei and Foma? In the dark woodland, they could have been feet away and I would not have known until it was too late.

'Get over to the fire!' I indicated the way with the point of my sword. He sat down beside it and rubbed his injured wrist.

'I'm sorry, Aleksei. When you attacked me, instinct just took over.'

Such an instinct to kill seemed to me to be inhumanly strong, but I let it pass. 'Why were you following me?'

'I only caught sight of you just before you made camp. There are French soldiers around here. Your fire might have caught their attention. I thought I'd better keep an eye on you.'

'Keep an eye on me?' I laughed. 'And then try to kill me.'

'It was you that attacked me.' He sounded genuinely offended. 'If we wanted to kill you, don't you think we would have done it while you lay there unconscious back at Gzatsk?'

It was a fair point, but his 'we' had reminded me of another issue. I looked as deep as I could into the darkness around us, but saw nothing. 'Where are Matfei and Foma?'

'I left them this morning,' he said. As he did so, he too flicked his eyes from side to side about the woodland, as though expecting to see his friends. 'They're making a few attacks on the French.' He looked straight back at me, his expression giving the slightest hint that he was merely teasing me. 'We're supposed to meet up again tonight.'

'Where?'

'Further on.' He nodded his head to the east.

I knew I wouldn't discover anything if I tackled him directly. 'The countryside here must be very different from what you're used to,' I said.

He considered for a moment, as if he'd never thought of the question before. 'In some ways. We come from the mountains, but down in the lowlands, things aren't so different.'

'You must have seen a lot of our country on your journey here.' He seemed talkative, certainly by the standards of the other Oprichniki, so I hoped a few general questions might elicit a little more of their background.

'We came by boat, so there wasn't much to see,' he said. In talking of his homeland, I thought I had perceived some hint of affection in his voice, but now he was once again terse and uninterested.

'I'm from Petersburg, so I know the sea pretty well.' This was something of an overstatement. I'd swum in it, but I'd never sailed.

'You have family there?'

'Yes.' I smiled, thinking of young Dmitry, and perhaps even a little of Marfa. The image of her retroussé nose and dark eyes looking up into mine filled my mind. I might have indulged myself in talking about her, but little as I had wanted to do so with Domnikiia I desired to even less with Iuda. I stuck to my line of questioning. 'But you would have come from the south, of course. Where did you sail from? Constanta?'

'Varna. We sailed over the Black Sea to Rostov.'

I felt suddenly cold. Rostov was near the mouth of the Don. Domnikiia's stories of death travelling upriver towards Moscow fitted neatly with the journey of the Oprichniki. 'And then carried on sailing up the Don?' I asked, hoping to confirm their route.

'I should get going.' He had realized I was trying to gather information. 'I have to meet up with the others.'

'Still doing all your work at night?' I said with a sarcasm that was born of regret. I had been trying, however obliquely, to interrogate him, and as a result I had lost him as a companion. In the dark Russian night, in woods crawling with wolves and Frenchmen, friendship might be of more value than intelligence.

'It's effective,' he replied.

There was nothing I could do to keep him there. It was too late, on that occasion at least, for an olive branch. 'I'm heading for Goryachkino,' I told him. 'I should be there the day after tomorrow. The others will be there.'

'We'll try to be there too,' he said as he stood to go. Then he put his hand to his belt. 'My knife!'

I remembered catching a glimpse of his strange knife as we fought. It had a serrated top edge with backward-pointing teeth, like a huntsman's knife, but there had been something else – something odd about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

'It won't be hard to find,' I said, picking a branch of pinewood from the fire to give us some light to search by.

'No, I'll go,' he insisted, setting out into the darkness without me. His concern to keep me out of it naturally made me all the keener to see this knife. I ran after him, holding up the burning branch to see the way. It wasn't far to the spot where we had fought. I had the advantage of having seen where the knife fell as I struck it from his hand, but I caught sight of it only moments before he snatched it up. I had just time to notice what made it so strange.

It had two blades; not one from each end of the handle, like with some oriental weapons I have seen, but two parallel blades, as though two identical knives had had their handles strapped together. He slipped it into his belt before I could get a better look. Then he stood and offered me his hand.

'Well, goodbye then, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said as we shook hands. 'I'll see you again in two days, I hope. But when we do meet, don't attack me. You may not be so lucky a second time.' His final words started as a joke, but ended as a threat.

I went back to the fire, but didn't much feel like sleep. When I did doze off, it was with my sword drawn and in my hand. It was, though, I thought, unfair to worry about Iuda returning to attack me as I slept. As he had said, he'd had plenty of opportunity to kill me earlier had he wanted to. And why should he want to? The Oprichniki were on our side in this war. It seemed a long way to come just to turn on your allies. Thinking that reminded me of the route by which they had come, up the Don – the same route along which Domnikiia had described first a plague and then changed into attacks by wild animals. The Oprichniki had brought no dogs or wolves with them that we had seen, but remembering the way Iuda and the others had fought, had they needed to?