Jasper Kent - Twelve

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.

'SO 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.'