White Blood

by James Fleming

  Exile! Again! Of course this animated a new and vigorous front. She'd been brooding. Americans were coarse—they were all Swedes or Poles. Americans were addicted to money, Americans were insincere, they fomented revolution—look at what they did in Cuba in '98 . . .

  We were like two dogs contesting a shin bone to the death. Nothing of what we said was important and little of it true. But the words were ready and available to each of us and say them we did until we were shouting like the crashing sea and Bobby tapped on the floor above.

  "I'd have been better off married to Andrej, a thousand times better," she declared and climbed into our marriage bed, which was as welcoming as the tundra.

  We occupied opposite sides, separated by a Gulf called Frigid that we were too proud to bridge. We lay there doggo, pretending to care so little that we'd fallen instantly asleep.

  Sixty-five

  Through the wool of my doped sleep it sounded like the weathervane—the dolphin twisting in the blizzard. It came again, directly above us—a shorter scream—abrupt—no tail, that part of it sliced off. Poor Bobby, some nightmare that.

  A door slammed. I thought, That was no dream.

  There were quick footsteps on the attic stairs. They crossed the landing outside our room—did they pause? I had my Luger from under the pillow and was out of the door. He ran down the main stairs into the hall. He looked back and up at me. He was fully dressed. I raised the pistol. He grinned—and pinched out the night candle with a butterfly pluck of his hairy fingers. His cavalry boots went thumping down the corridor towards the kitchen and the back door.

  I raced upstairs to Bobby's room.

  A meagre light was coming into the house off the snow. I put the time at around five o'clock. I tripped on the top step of the attic stairs and smacked into the pine-planked wall in front. It somehow bounced me back upright. I shouted to Kobi to wake up and pounded along the cold linoleum.

  The candle was burning. But Bobby's book was tight shut and still on his table. It was Glebov who'd lit it. So that Bobby could see what was coming; would awake blinking and confused, look out from the shelter of his dreams and espy revenge leaning over him like a crimson blister, and the flickering steel of the descending bayonet, its blood-groove facing his bewildered eyes.

  He'd plunged it vertically through the base of Bobby's throat, pinning him to the mattress. Bobby's thin blood had spurted a good yard, streaking the grey pillow. His eyes were staring at me, shocked by the betrayal.

  I looked swiftly round. Nothing had been moved. Revenge for what? Which remark had so touched Glebov?

  I pulled down the chicken skin of Bobby's eyelids. Kobi came into the room, glanced at him, took it all in.

  There was no point in disturbing Misha.

  "Go! Go immediately!" Nicholas said, rousing himself from sleep the moment I spoke his name. "Take another of my rifles. Misha and I'll manage till you come back. There's Louis and the grooms as well. I'll have one of them go up to Popovka with the news and then on to Smolensk. Now go, Charlie, find Glebov and kill him. I want him dead and I want proof that he's dead."

  Liza reached up her long arms and bound me to her. I said nothing about Bobby or about going into the forest after Glebov. Only that Kobi had need of me and we'd be back by luncheon.

  "We kissed. I held her sweet face between my hands. She pulled the counterpane over our heads, shutting out the candlelight. We kissed savagely, mixing our foul night-breath. I stroked her belly, where Dan Doig was cooking.

  "Kobi is waiting?"

  I said yes. She pushed me away. I rose from her.

  "Don't be late," she whispered. Her hair and the hollows of her face were black as trumps against the pillow. "Lilacs in May, that's all I ask of America. There's so little worth taking into exile when one thinks about it carefully."

  "We leave this afternoon."

  She nodded. "I can hear Kobi outside with the horses. The snow sounds hard. You'll travel fast. Charlie?" She raised her arms and drew me down again. She rubbed her smooth, warm, sleepy cheek against my bristle. "You are my life and my soul, wherever we go. I am yours unalterably, as you would ever have me be. Let me bless you." She drew the sign of the Cross on my back, with her left hand. "Now go, and leave me to our packing. It'll make me cry."

  Sixty-six

  Ten minutes later Kobi and I were riding past the stables. I had the Mannlicher .Z56 with the vee sight and barleycorn across my back, and in my belt the Luger Kriegsmarine. Kobi had an old Nagant .300 that took five in the magazine.

  The light was just sufficient. We picked up the track of Glebov's pony at the iron gates, at the bottom of the pleasure grounds, exactly where he and I had first met. Kobi grunted. It was also the same way he'd tailed him two days earlier.

  Kobi led, sometimes halting to examine other hoof marks. Within the forest the snow was less but it still covered the ground. I said to him, Hurry, if we can see the marks they must have been made this morning, why stop? He pointed to fresh snow and he pointed to old snow which I'd taken for fresh. It's the way snow falls in a wood, patchily, because of the trees and the swirling quality of the wind. Kobi said, "Men muffle their horses' hoofs to disguise the truth. To avoid mistakes I must go slowly. Do you want to be the first to get shot at, Doig, or will you ride behind me and be quiet?"

  Thereafter we moved with care and skirted the clearings we came to. He could have been waiting for us to cross the open ground: two plump targets in the snowlight. Easy enough for stopping shots.

  "Is he fleeing or leading us somewhere?" I asked.

  "He's riding steadily, not in a panic. I'd say he's going to a rendezvous. His horse is carrying no extra weight. Someone else has the food. He's going to his soldiers, that's where he's going."

  Our horses moved crisply and silently through the trees. Mine was a bay, Kobi's the grey called Xylophone. There were no branches to snap underfoot so close to the village: they'd all been gathered for firewood.

  Kobi stopped. Glebov had been joined by his soldiers. He supposed from the number of footprints and wandering hoof marks that they'd been a while waiting for him.

  He said, "It's them. No morning shit left around. Good discipline. What do you want to do, Doig?"

  I couldn't see the tone of his eyes. It wasn't light enough for that yet. I said, "You mean, how do we do it." Glebov had wanted me to see him at the foot of the stairs. He'd waited for me to appear. He wished us to follow him. "How far are they ahead?"

  Kobi had at last found a knob of shit. "Half an hour?"

  "How well do you know this ground?"

  "Very."

  "Can we get in front of them?"

  "Yes. In about two miles there's a place they used to quarry stone. There's a way through their old workings, though we'd have to lead the horses. We come out on top of the track they're using. It's the best chance."

  "They may have thought of it too."

  "Of course."

  "So we'll decide when we get there. You lead."

  But we actually rode one on either side of the woodcutters' sledge track they were on, in case they played tricks on us and split up.

  After half an hour we halted to confer. Nine ridden horses, he said, two packhorses. He could recognise Glebov's pony by the put-on of its near-front horseshoe. He was leading. But there was something funny going on. "Maybe one of the men is wounded," he said.

  We rode slinking through the still wood, peering and stooping, for behind every tree there was a dark space.

  Dawn came up—or rather, a lessening of night. The sky was sheeted with cloud—a continuous menacing roll, the roof of a prison. Our breath was like grey smoke. It was too cold for snow. A vast of cold, Bobby would have called it in his olden speech. God knows we didn't feel it but the air must have got warm enough to rouse the animal kingdom. Suddenly we began to hear the gloomy, raking calls of the eaters of carrion, the crows and the ravens.

  To hurry along and fall upon Glebov and his men and rout them as they idled would ha
ve been perfect. I ached to do it: to gallop after him, shoot him dead and gallop home to Liza. To make him disappear, become zero, vanish. But always there was Kobi to check me. Riding on the other side of the track, slumped in his saddle and occasionally flicking a loop of the reins from one side of the horse's neck to the other and back again. Dozing, a fool might have said.

  He rode over to my side of the track.

  "Fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty in front. They're going slower now. Look," and dismounting he pointed out how the grains of snow that had been disturbed by the horses' hoofs began to slide down the sides of the hoof print and after a certain time to smooth out the irregularities. The time depended on the temperature. "The grains lose their grip," he said. "I expect if you sat and watched you'd see them do it. That's how I judge how far away they are."

  He got back on his horse. I thought it had been all he wanted to say. But now: "There's a man riding always very tightly in the centre of them. It has been like this since they joined up with Glebov."

  "Tightly?"

  "With someone close on either side of him. Almost knees touching."

  "He may be a prisoner," I said.

  "The hoofs are silent."

  This morning Kobi looked more like Genghiz Khan than I'd ever seen him. His face twitched with pleasure as he delivered the snub. He wanted only one thing: to kill these men and to kill Glebov last, to see the red froth billow from his gasping mouth. The identity of the ninth man was unimportant to him. If he was a prisoner then he was a chump. I knew Kobi's philosophy well.

  A little farther on the ground began to angle upwards. The track skirted an enormous slab of rock resting, tilted, upon a boulder the size of a cottage—relics from before measured time. Around this outcrop no trees were growing.

  Kobi carefully scouted the open ground. He returned to where he'd left me in the trees. "If we go uphill here we come to the old quarry workings. The way through's in single file. Glebov's gone the long way round. They don't want to have to trail one behind the other. They could be ambushed themselves. There are other men out here who may be their enemies—we don't know. Also the prisoner would impede them."

  "The prisoner may not be a prisoner. It may be a woman companion. She may be common property. Glebov has vices."

  "My woman thinks bad ones—not polite, she says."

  "Sonja didn't think that."

  Scarcely a muscle moved in his face. "Not ordinary screwing then, Sonja and Glebov . . . ? It was Count Nicholas who had Sonja executed. She wouldn't let him have her. That's what they say in Popovka . . . Anyway, it's not a woman—unless she's in child. The hoofs cut too deeply into the snow." He thought it over. "Their prisoner, perhaps their hostage."

  I said to him: "How long did they stop back there?"

  He clicked his tongue. "You noticed?"

  "There was horse piss in the snow. Two or three blocks of it, too much for a man. They're getting careless. Glebov never believed we'd come after him so fast."

  Kobi took the leather cap off the muzzle of his Nagant and slid the bolt out. He checked the barrel for snow, worked the foresight leaf a few times to prevent it freezing solid. "But why did they stop at all? A horse can piss on the move."

  Sixty-seven

  We rode up towards the saddle on the ridge, into an awkward jumble of boulders and spoil heaps, moss beneath snow, a difficult footing. The terrain changed its character, became more open, nearer to heathland with some birch and oak scrub.

  The sky fell down another notch. It pressed on us, occasional boils and swirls of light grey amid reefs of black and purple. It spread itself over the land like the sac of an octopus. The cold was intense.

  Out of the rocks and over the saddle we rode, fast, looking for a place we could spring the ambush. The track was below us. Glebov was still somewhere in the forest. But we didn't have much time. An advantage of minutes.

  A knoll with hazels on it, two hollies growing entwined, and a solitary birch: dead bracken hummocked beneath the snow but here draped over the lowest branch of the birch. We tied our horses in the gully at the back of the knoll. We were in our snow capes.

  Shrouded by the fronds of bracken, I knelt in the snap-shooter's position at the foot of the birch, the Mannlicher resting on that low branch. Kobi was a yard behind me and to one side. The bracken obscured us completely. To the woodcutters' track was a hundred and twenty yards. I was shooting over open sights. The ground was falling away gently: white with black tussocks and dark green clumps of rushes, quite clear of trees.

  The time was about eleven o'clock. The light was good enough. I could pick out the gold bead of the barleycorn sight.

  Kobi said, "Keep your trigger glove on until the last minute—-when you see him coming."

  We settled down to watch the edge of the fir trees. My heartbeat was steady. Pray God I kill him. So I thought and I repeated it often, moving my lips.

  There was no preliminary noise or sighting. We knew nothing about it until we heard him cry out to his horse. He was already out of the trees and galloping down the hill at an angle away from us. A three-quarter shot. I could be certain only of the horse.

  "Wait," whispered Kobi.

  I lined up the barleycorn on the hunched, plunging figure. The scarlet cockade on his shapka stood out like blood against the snow.

  Kobi whispered, "He's going down into the dip to cross the stream. The far bank's steep. The horse'll be puffed as it climbs it. It'll slow—or stop. Shoot him then."

  He came funnily out of the dip, not in the place or at the angle I'd expected.

  The pony faltered, struggling to get its wind back. Glebov showed well in the sights, plump and black. God go with that bullet. I squeezed the trigger. It whipped him out of the saddle.

  The shot faded into silence. Kobi let out his breath, placed his hand on my shoulder. "You're the horse's cock, Doig."

  But I'd hit him low, I knew it as I fired.

  Glebov's pony looked round, startled by the shot and by suddenly finding itself without a rider. It looked down at Glebov, who was on his knees and trying to haul himself up by a stirrup leather. It smelled the blood on him and bolted across the bleak landscape with the stirrups flapping against its ribs and wads of snow flying up from its hoofs.

  Glebov, Glebov alone, wavering in my sights. He got himself upright, hands clamped round the hole in his belly. His shapka had come off. His head was bent over watching the blood ooze through his fingers. His bald patch was as pale as the bottom of a saucepan.

  I shot him again. The force of the .256 bullet flung him into the air. It was as though he'd been asked to leap over an obstacle. Then he pitched to one side like a falling tree and rolled down the bank towards us, out of sight and into the stream.

  Kobi grinned at me, just like a boy. We flattened ourselves into the bracken.

  Its strong stems had made a tent when they folded under the snow. We lay in it like rodents. We couldn't have been better placed to command the track. An entire company of soldiers would have had a hard time of it against us.

  The echoes faded, Glebov's horse vanished, and the boiling clouds got a little lighter as we approached the middle of the day. But no one came out of the trees.

  Nothing stirred except the circling crows and buzzards.

  The silence was thick with meaning. Glebov's men, scattered along the edge of the trees, were daring us to make the first move. We waited, fingers crooked round cold triggers, flexing them to keep their warmth.

  Half an hour must have passed when Kobi nudged me. He flicked his eyes to the right.

  God knows where he'd got the strength or blood from. The dwarf had inner reserves that I would never have dreamed existed. It must have been the memory of his tubercular mother spewing her lungs over the kitchen table that kept him going. Maybe that second shot hadn't been in the chest, but in the shoulder.

  He'd climbed out of the stream, was teetering on the edge of the bank, one arm useless at his side and the other flailing the air. His c
ape clung blackly to his body and his face was streaked with dirt and blood. "India rubber, as bad as Rasputin," I whispered to Kobi and snuggled my cheek against the rifle stock.

  "Don't—the noise. It'll give us away."

  Glebov fell to his knees. He looked down at the guts cradled in his good hand, inspected them. He may have spoken to them— he had that look about him. We were too far away for these details, which would have been interesting. His head dropped onto his chest. It sank lower and lower. He was bowing to his guts—had his nose in them—was saying goodbye. Then he toppled to one side, kicked as though kicking a boot off, and lay still.

  Kobi nodded. "Where we can see him. Not any more like Christ, body moving around."

  His death passed the time. We watched Glebov's corpse and waited for his men to make a showing. The clouds continued to grow lighter. Around midday an angry sun appeared fleetingly behind them. It was a distraction to wonder what it portended. Then we didn't see it for a while.

  The minutes hobbled past. In due course I came to understand that we were the only watchers. With that advantage of numbers they'd have attempted some manoeuvre against us. Had Glebov been couped out of our sight? Sent out into the wilderness by his men—to be shot?

  Cautiously at first we returned the way we'd come and made a cast through the wood to see what the horse marks told us. Back! It was back they'd gone.

  "Back?" said Kobi, puzzled. We went a bit further, tallied the horses that were left. Everything was correct. Two packhorses, eight ridden horses, but not Glebov's.

  "Going fast," Kobi said. "Fleeing."

  "Then we'll take a look at Glebov. He may have papers on him."

  "Money," Kobi said.

  We rode back along the track and out of the trees. Glebov was where he'd collapsed and died. Thank God! Ever since we'd been in the wood and out of sight of him I'd had a bad feeling. I'd hit him the second time—whump and he'd leapt, like a shot rabbit, and rolled down the bank for dead. Then twenty minutes later he'd reappeared staggering around in front of me holding his guts. Was he a magic man?

  But there he was, heaped lifeless on the churned and bloody snow.