David Robbins - Last Citadel

Anna shivered. Her hooves crawled in the dust, not understanding what had happened, believing that the answer was to run, always the state of a horse’s mind. Katya could do nothing for her horse but to die alongside her. She lay back down, looking at Anna’s panicked eye, unblinking and beseeching, You are the rider, you can lead us away from this. Katya stroked her neck and lifted her gaze from the dying horse to the stars. Her vision had cleared, the pain in her legs had gone numb. Anna breathed fast, in deep gulps, as though she were indeed running.

Why did the C-3 go before Katya was clear? What happened? Too late, she thought, it’s too late, she would die with questions. She tried to think of Papa and Valya and the war, how would they turn out, where was Leonid? The universe of stars and moon and the years of her life focused down to a pinpoint, a single dark mote here on the ground, Katya, living her last bits second by second in the dust. Enough. To end with a horse seemed right, a horse had been the dearest thing in her life, so this was proper, it was better than an airplane, after all.

The guards spoke out of the darkness. Katya heard the metal slap of a rifle bolt. Anna answered with a nicker, an absurd last appeal to the new human voices, maybe they will be better riders. Boots crunched in the gravel. Katya sat up again.

She drew the knife from her belt sheath. She would not let the Germans finish her horse, this was the Cossack’s final responsibility. With her left hand smoothing Anna’s ears, she slid the blade deep into Anna’s throat to open an artery. The horse did not jump at the new sting. Blood flooded over Katya’s fist and the horse’s head relaxed in her hands. The wild eye closed. She lay the horse’s unsuffering crown back to the earth.

The guards approached. The tracks had been blown fifty meters from them. Partisans were near, danger lurked, so they crept forward with caution.

Katya had only a few more seconds before the darkness was not enough to hide her. Anna’s blood dripped warm and sticky in her hand. She gasped, like a woman coming up from under water, then shut her mouth. She knew what to do.

She untucked her tunic. With the knife she cut a hole in the shirt above her belly. Sitting up as far as she could, careful to make no sound, she reached for a handful of Anna’s intestines, sorting fast through the wet morass to take only the small bowels. When she had a wet gob of them in her hand, she sawed the blade of her knife through the guts, slicing a portion away. She stuffed the entrails into the hole in her tunic, like stuffing a scarecrow, leaving a length of them dangling out. With both hands, she cupped blood out of the horse’s gaping cavity, fighting a need to retch at the heat of Anna’s bowels snuggled against her own warm skin and at what she was about to do. Holding her breath to keep her stomach from pitching, she smeared the blood over her face and neck to the sickening smell of copper, she cupped more and splashed blood around the hole in her shirt and Anna’s bulging bowel. Urgency and fear carried her past what she was doing, wallowing in gore, salt blood on her tongue and matting her hair. With only seconds before the creeping Germans were near enough to discern more than a dead horse, she drove her knife into a bulging section of Anna’s large intestine. The bowel burst at the prick with a gassy pop and a stench blew out that made Katya retch; she caught the vomit halfway up her throat and fell back, eyes closed, a silent prayer on her blood-painted lips.

‘ Ach ,’ said one of the Germans. The voice came from about ten meters away. Their boots stopped on the gravel. ‘ Was riecht so faul?’ The voice was nervous, and disgusted.

Another few wary steps.

‘Das Pferd.’

The dead horse across Katya’s legs began to hurt her again. She kept her breathing as shallow as she could, to still her chest, to play dead. She opened her mouth and put an agonized grimace on her face. The boots left the gravel by the rails and scraped in the dirt, joining closer to the horrid mound under which Katya lay pinned. Anna’s blood began to cool on her cheeks and neck.

The flashlight clicked on. Behind her lids Katya sensed the beam play over the dead horse. The light washed over her.

‘Partisan.’

‘Ja.’

‘Sie sind nahe.’

The two guards walked in a wide circle around Anna’s carcass; behind her lids Katya watched the beam move and fall on her. The stench of the open bowel was keeping these two at bay.

‘ Ach ,’ one said again, ‘ der Geruch .’ He cleared his throat and spat. ‘ Sheisse .’

The boots halted a few meters away. The flashlight played full on Katya’s face. She needed to breathe, her chest burned. The light searched her.

‘Genug.’

A pistol cocked.

Another step was taken in the dirt.

Katya longed to scream, to sit up and scare them away, bloody ghoul, suck in a great breath and call for help, something, anything except lie here posing as dead with her last moment! A bullet was aimed at her brain. No, no, she thought, panicking without moving a muscle, no flinch marred her brow, but her body was coiled to spring up and surrender, she held it back, she was a catapult, every fiber tensed to rise up and fling her hands in the air and shout No! She fought herself, she willed her body to stay rigid as the dead.

‘Nein, Hans, nein. Partisanen. Die werdeu uns hören. Shhhh.’

The light stayed pressing across her eyes. The world was at an end inside Katya’s yellow glowing lids.

The boots near her head stepped again.

‘ Ja ,’ the pistol said, ‘ ja, sie ist tot .’

The flashlight clicked off.

The guards’ boots moved back to the tracks, crunching again in the gravel. Katya’s body sagged with relief. She kept her eyes closed and sipped a long, greedy breath through her nose. She heard the Germans murmur, they were looking over the rail that had been severed by the blast.

She lay marveling that she was still alive. The blood coating her hands and face grew tacky, the odor of the popped intestine renewed itself in her nostrils now that she was breathing again. She could not imagine a way out of her predicament and did not waste her attention trying to figure, she waited in amazement that the clock still ticked on her life. She listened to the guards curse the partisans for the shattered rail.

One of the guards sounded as if he might puke, he made heaving noises behind a clamped mouth. The other voice went mute. Katya heard a brief scuffle on the gravel, something laid down. She kept herself still, she fought the strong urge to look, her only chance of survival was to be dead.

The bootsteps stayed near the tracks. Then, after a short silence, they tromped near her, two sets. They stopped on either side of her head. She kept the veil of a tortured death mounted on her face, the congealing horse blood began to itch. Her held breath burned in her lungs. Above her, a tongue clucked. The man standing over her sighed.

A call – a loud, raspy whisper – issued from down the tracks. ‘ Was ist los? Giht’s was ?’

The one who’d sighed answered. ‘ Nein, nein. Alles klar. Es giht ein totes Pferd .’

Katya trembled inside her frozen flesh. This was not the voice of either of the guards. This man was older.

The set of boots on the other side of Katya’s death pose made a nauseated sound, ‘Pfew.’ In Russian, the voice whispered, ‘Leave her.’

The old one murmured, ‘No. We can carry her.’

‘She stinks.’

Katya’s fear did not release easily. She recognized these voices, but cracked her eyes slowly, just enough to peer out under her lashes, to stay dead.