Marcel Theroux - Far North

Tolya split the guards at daybreak and rode back with half of them to find out who had set the fire. They rode the long way round, staying away from the grey banner of the poisoned smoke.

I stayed back with the prisoners. Tolya had left me the spare cerberus for finding firewood. I went with Shamsudin and Zulfugar to get it.

I took them further from the camp than we needed so as to be more private.

Watching the two of them sweat over the saw, and sweat again as they loaded up the sled, I felt a little bad inside myself. Because of me they’d been dragged out of the warm on a lie to face who knew what?

I swung down off the horse. She nuzzled a tuft of grass at the foot of the tree. I looped the reins round a branch so she wouldn’t go off and eat the dirty stuff.

Zulfugar had walked a little apart and was breaking branches for kindling off a dead birch. I went over to speak to Shamsudin.

He was working with a hand-axe, stripping logs so they’d sit more easy in the sled I hauled a couple of pieces alongside him, and I told him that I was sorry he’d been deceived, that I knew as little as he did, and that I gave him my word that I would let nothing bad happen to him.

‘That’s not in your power,’ he said.

I didn’t disagree, but I was thinking to myself that with a couple more horses we could all three of us get clean out of there before Tolya returned with the other guards.

Life at the base depended on separating the guards from the prisoners by the fact of their privilege. I wanted to tell Shamsudin that Boathwaite hadn’t been able to buy my loyalty with the promise of a whorehouse and coffee made out of dandelion roots.

He dumped a load of wood with a crash onto the sled. ‘Zulfugar says there is a plague city north of here. He says we are being sent as grave-robbers to steal from the dead.’

‘How does he know a thing like that?’ I said. It sounded like it might be true, but it also sounded like the kind of wild rumour that the men liked to scare each other with. There was a kind of prestige attached to being the man with the darkest view of Boathwaite’s motives.

I bent to pick up a stray branch and I found myself sliding backwards. The treads of my leather boots had filled with snow that spread out in a pancake of ice around my feet and wouldn’t bite. I fell forward onto my front into the snow, almost laughing at myself, because the fall was comical.

Shamsudin drew nearer and I thought he was going to offer to help me raise myself up out of the deep snow, but then I saw the hand-axe glint by his side, and instead of laughter in his eyes there was something deadly serious.

I could never hate him for it. He had the look of a hungry dog, measuring the length of his chain against the distance of a juicy bone, wondering if he was about to feed or choke himself.

He took one step forward. I had fallen awkwardly and my gun sat under me, so that I would need to wriggle to get it free — and even then, there was a chance it would fail to fire, and he could brain me. I wonder what restrained him for those seconds. I’d like to think it was his affection for me, his decency, maybe his religion, or his training as a doctor — ‘First, do no harm,’ they say. Maybe running it through his mind gave him second thoughts and his intelligence got the better of him: the two of them, one horse, no easy way to break their shackles. Maybe he just lacked courage.

Shamsudin was the kind of man the old world must have turned out in millions. Smart and charming, but with such a slim connection between him and the earth. He had more stuff in him than a book does, and if you cared to listen he had a better sense than most how we’d ended up in this world, but still a beast like Hansom was better able to live in it. Those soft hands delayed a moment too long. And then Zulfugar was back, panting and tugging his load of branches, and Shamsudin looked aside like a guilty thing. And in that second, I rolled over and freed my side-arm.

Shamsudin raised his arms over his head. I wagged the gun at the two of them. ‘Get this thing loaded up,’ I said. A glance passed between them. There was an after-smell of danger in the air.

We went back in silence.

*

Tolya rode back into the camp late that afternoon with a Tungus boy stumbling along behind him, his wrists tied and roped to Tolya’s saddle. One of the boy’s eyes was puffy and closed and he had dried blood in his nostrils. He looked to be no more than fourteen.

‘This is who set the fire,’ Tolya said.

The guards circled the boy. He trembled as they looked at him, his eyes cast down at his ragged fur boots that were held together with strands of rawhide. Everything he wore seemed on the brink of falling apart. He reeked of woodsmoke and his face was blotchy with smuts. He called to mind a tiny mouse that might die of fear in your hand if you picked him up.

Tolya cuffed the boy round his head and the others set on him with kicks and blows.

He let himself be hit, standing listless and soft — whether from real hopelessness or because he was smart enough not to stiffen at the punches, I couldn’t say. After a few heavy shots, he flopped into the snow. His greasy shapka plopped down a little further off.

The men beat him for a while. What is it about a prone body that makes men so murderous? Lucky for him, the snow where he fell was deep, and their felt boots muffled their blows. Also, unlike the prisoners, the guards were fat and idle, and they got tired after a minute or two of wading and kicking in the deep snow.

They left him and stood cursing and catching their breath. Tolya explained that the boy had been smoking meat in the forest at a little camp of his own that had been all burned out, and by the looks of things, he’d been there months at least.

I picked up his hat with the barrel of my gun and dropped it closer to him. It didn’t do to look too tender-hearted in front of those men, but I felt pity for the poor creature. I crouched down and spoke to him the few words of Tungus that I knew. He lay curled up in a ball and didn’t even raise his head to meet my glance. He was dazed and it seemed like his nose was broken. There was a spray of blood and dribble around his mouth. I couldn’t help thinking of Ping. It seemed like every encounter with a stranger spelled death or injury to someone.

Tolya and one of the guards called Stepan came up close behind me and asked what I was saying to him.

I told them they were fools for knocking him silly, because now we’d never get sense out of him. Stepan said he’d make him understand and he shook him and yelled questions at him: ‘Where you from? Where’s your friends hiding at? Who you spying for?’

This Stepan wasn’t a bad sort, but like the others he was scared. Outside of the base, they knew nothing of the land they lived in, and their imagination peopled the place with monsters. Here, only a few hundred miles north of where they lived, they felt as far from home and as uneasy about it as if we were on the moon.

One of the guards said to be careful because he might be a Wild Boy. Some of these Wild Boys lacked speech, he said, and ate meat raw, and some of them walked on all fours and could take out your throat with their bare teeth if they had a mind to.

I almost laughed in his face. I’ve been all over the Far North and if there are such things as Wild Boys, I ought to have seen at least one of them.

It seemd clear to me the boy was simple-minded. So I said to them that he was an idiot and that it would be bad luck to harm him. There wasn’t much that they held sacred, but anything in the way of a superstition had a lot of power over them. They were apt to believe all sorts of nonsense about charms, and omens, and black magic.

They kept him tied, but they let him be after that.