Marcel Theroux - Far North

At the crack of the gun, Eben’s horse reared up and then slipped. For an instant he was fighting to stay on her. The two of them fell together in a blur of bodies, the horse twisting before she hit the ground. I thought at first Eben had broken his leg but he was back on his feet in a flash. Apofagato gathered the reins and was gentling the horse with his hand when Eben snatched them from him and yanked his crop from the saddle. He lashed at the animal. ‘You damn bitch,’ he cried, leathering her sides until her eyes rolled. It seemed like a few strokes would satisfy his anger, but his rage seemed to feed on itself, growing more savage, as though it had its roots elsewhere, in some ancient cruelty. The pain and the fear of pain made the guts of the horse tremble. He thrashed furiously, with an action that was suddenly so familiar I could almost hear the bedstead jingling. There was spit on his lips as they twisted into another curse. ‘You Jezebel!’

He turned to where he knew I was standing.

‘Give me the gun, Makepeace,’ he panted. ‘What you waiting for?’

Jezebel . The word crackled through my memory like a splash of acid. There was a bird call back in the city I had just left, and the eddying water behind him seemed to freeze for a second. My feet in the borrowed boots moved awful slow as I stepped to my right to find the clean angle. I heard Bill Evans’s voice in my head coaching me to move into a firing position: move to your right, lead with your right leg — never cross over yourself.

Two of the guards were still laughing. One had turned away to light a smoke. Eben frowned at me, impatient for the gun.

I put two shells in him before he had a chance to raise his eyebrows and the second of them pitched him clean over the side of the bridge.

The current swept him under us in a moment. He seemed to be laying face down in the water. I picked off another guard as he went for his side-arm. The others were slack-jawed with disbelief. Apofagato surrendered his horse to me without a murmur.

I HOPED TO ride hard like I had the last time, but in the days that followed I got sick like never before.

I started to puke on the morning of the next day. I couldn’t eat or keep food down.

I thought at first it was the sickness we’d all feared, but it wasn’t anything I had picked up in the Zone, it was something I had caught off Shamsudin, the oldest disease of all.

It didn’t seem possible that such a hasty intimacy could amount to anything. A month had passed and I had thought nothing of it. I was getting on in years and had never been regular, with the food and hardship we had at the base, and every month I half-expected my body to have shut up shop. But it was more tenacious than that, like some crazy innkeeper, laying out fresh linen each night for guests that never come.

I passed across the face of the land as summer came and went. By the time I swung north for the last stretch, there was frost at night and the first green showing of the Lights.

The last few years of weather had broken up the highway and in places I had to pick my way slowly, or dismount. It didn’t matter to me. I was in no hurry. I had plenty to contemplate on my journey back.

I’d never known the north so beautiful as it was then. I’d find myself rapt by the tiniest things: a stripe in a stone, the blue crown on a honeysuckle berry — the ones the Russian prisoners called a zhimelost. I saw a tabby cat stalking through the long grass, wild offspring of some long-dead pet.It fled when it saw me — no memory of a human face. There was a tumbledown house near by. I crouched in its foundations to pee and found a four-leaf clover.

At other times in my life, I’d seen animals or plants that had no business there, but now I seemed to come across them every other day: a parrot once — a flash of bright green the colour of pondweed and its unmistakable beak. Another time a plum tree. And once — I swear — a monkey, its pink face fringed with a tiny lion’s mane, chattering its bared teeth at me from a silver birch.

I have no idea how they got there, but it took hold in my mind that they were salvaged from a busted ark. I pictured it to myself, split or run aground somewhere, and the animals freed from the wreck, breaking out of crates — a whole menagerie crawling and hopping north, tracing the route of the rivers that flowed to the cold.

For the first time in as long as I can think, I knew a kind of contentment. And for once, the world wasn’t a thing to fight against.

Rain was falling when I reached my city.

I was lucky to have the business end of a long summer ahead of me. I worked like a crazy thing to get some food in the ground and a spare room ready. By the time the first snow came, I was too big for the morning ride.

In fact, I was in the stable when it happened. I stayed on my feet throughout, clutching onto the tack pegs to keep up and terrifying the horses with my screams. It all went quicker than the first time. Just as I was finally doubling up in pain, out popped a fierce-looking little thing with a shock of black hair and the dark face of a Tungus, paddling with its limbs and squalling, and a cry more like a mew than a scream.

I COUNTED THE BOOKS I’ve saved the other day. There are 2,075 of them stacked up in the armoury and 177 that I’ve laid by in the house. I also counted sixteen boxes of candles that I’ve stashed in Charlo’s old bedroom. They’re packed a gross to a box, and if you keep the wicks trimmed they burn for just above two hours. Each box is twelve days of constant light. There’s something more than six months’ worth of them altogether.

Of course, you barely need a light all the months of summer. You can read at midnight in June without one. If you read. It gives me a headache at any time of year.

The point about the candles is this: one day soon I’ll have to scavenge more boxes again. I have a good guess where I can find some more for now. But one day, there’ll be no more to be had. One day the candles will all be gone, and the wicks, and all the jars of spirit I have left.

I’ll have to make do with blubber lamps like the Chukchi have, or get used to living in the dark.

There isn’t a life to be had in this city any more.

*

We’re not the last just yet. About a year ago, I saw smoke coming from the chimney of the Velazquez house. It gave me a fright at first, but it turned out to be strangers, a man and a woman with a child of about five months old.

How they got here, I can’t guess and he wasn’t able to tell me. He’s Chinese, or maybe Korean. She looks part-Yakut, part-Russian.

We don’t have dealings with each other, but we nod when we pass. I left some cabbages and tiger balm on their stoop in the fall. And they left some kimchi for me.

Last winter was a fierce one, as bad as the ones in my childhood, but I know they lasted it, because at the end of March I saw him dragging a sled of ice-blocks back from the lake. I haven’t seen her or the child for a while.

If things go well for them, maybe they’ll hunker down, make a life here, have another child or two. But I don’t rate things better than fifty-fifty for them. That’s the way things are.

Since I was fifteen years old, I’ve been watching the world I knew go to hell. The only part of it that behaves how it should is the half-acre of vegetables in back of my house and even those have grown fickle as the seasons have altered.

Time is narrowing on me. I guess I could still leave here if I wanted. Try heading south again, or maybe find a boat to take me to the States. But I don’t expect I will now, knowing what I know. There are so many things that I wish could have turned out different. There’s no way back for me in this lifetime.