by J M Hemmings
‘You have travelled long and far,’ she announced after the interpreter had finished his spiel, with words of welcome on her lips if not in her eyes. ‘Stay with us and rest for the night,’ she continued, opening her arms and sweeping them across the breadth of the camp in a grandiose gesture of hospitality, ‘before you turn and go back to where you came from.’
This response elicited only an aggressive, wordless snarl from Vasilevsky, but Higgins clasped his hands together and gave the old woman a subtle bow and a gracious smile.
‘Thank you for your hospitality, madame,’ he said, his tone imbued with expertly feigned warmth.
He then turned to address the men, a group of heavily-armed soldiers of various ethnicities and nationalities, along with two scientists and a mysterious prisoner who wore a long black cloak, baggy with many folds, which made it impossible to tell whether they were a man or woman. The large hood of the cloak veiled his or her entire face, shrouding it wholly in shadow. Shackling the prisoner’s ankles and wrists were a pair of extraordinarily thick chains, almost as stout and weighty as those used for boat anchors. He or she, strangely, did not seem too encumbered by what had to be a ponderous weight of steel, and moved as if the links were of constructed of a far lighter material.
‘Gentlemen!’ Higgins barked in English, the lingua franca of this diverse group of men. ‘We make camp here for the night. I will remind you that you are all to be on your best behaviour; treat the natives, their homes, their reindeer and other belongings with respect, and for God’s sake do not harass their women! I mean that; I’ll see any man who disobeys these orders flogged within an inch of his life! It is of the utmost importance that we win the trust of these people, that they may decide to provide us with a guide who will lead us through the great wilderness ahead. We’ve come this far, and I’ll not have anyone jeopardising our chance to make this mission a success. Is that understood?’
‘Aye sir!’ the soldiers all roared in unison.
‘Good, good,’ Higgins commented, nodding with approval. ‘Go on lads, set up your tents, then.’
Ao Maliya squatted between two of the Ewenki’s bark-covered tepees, keenly observing the outsiders as they erected their compact canvas tents in the spaces between the tall spruce, fir and pine trees of the endless taiga, while the band’s herd of domesticated reindeer grazed around them without any apparent interest in the newcomers. The young hunter had heard what the outsiders’ interpreter had told the medicine woman, and he thought her a fool to turn down such a generous offer. Granted, ancient tradition mandated that it was forbidden for outsiders to enter the land of the Old Gods … but the world was changing, and the old ways were dying. Ao’s band were one of the very last groups of Ewenki in whose collective memory and oral lore the Old Gods and Goddesses still drew breath, and most of what his distant ancestors had once known about these beings had been forgotten anyway; Ao, certainly, knew very little about them, save for the fact that they were said to walk the wilds in the living skins of beasts, although they could readily shed these and assume the forms of men and women if they so wished. In addition, they were thought to be immortal, and to possess immense powers, with which the strongest of them could flatten forests or crush mountains to dust. But the foreign missionaries, who had come even to these most remote Ewenki outposts, either from the west to preach of the lone Christian God, or from the south, to tell them of the godless wisdom of Buddhism, had all dismissed the Ewenkis’ belief in the Old Gods and Goddesses of the wilds as primitive superstition, and had urged them to abandon this supposedly misplaced faith.
The outsiders interested Ao as much as their weapons did. It was not as if he had been confined to this particular forest camp his entire life; indeed, by the very nature of his people’s existence – trekking across the taiga with their reindeer and setting up temporary camps according to the seasons – he had travelled hundreds, if not thousands of miles over the course of his twenty-three years. However, none of these journeys had ever taken him close to civilisation, and the only other people he had met along the way had all been of other Ewenki clans.
With his keen eyes – dark slits in shallow sockets set wide apart on his flat, tawny-skinned face – he studied the nearby soldiers. They were powerfully-built and hard-faced, all of them, with some standing a full head taller than himself – and Ao was considered tall for an Ewenki. The sharply-cut grey greatcoats and brilliantly glossy black boots that constituted their uniforms looked so starkly different from the furs and skins in which he and his people dressed themselves, and he could not deny that he found the bold and almost aggressive cut of these clothes quite attractive. In addition, the variety in terms of the outsiders’ physical features was astonishing to him; never before had he seen people like these. Their skin tones ranged from alabaster pale to near jet black, and their hair and beards seemed to come just as broad a variety of hues and textures, in contrast to the simple straight black hair of his people. The foreigners were at once exotic, intriguing, fascinating … and a little frightening. There was a flinty, menacing hardness in the men’s eyes, which seemed a uniform characteristic among them, whether their irises were green, blue, grey, brown or black – a hardness that Ao both feared and envied.
Of particular interest to him was the prisoner in the black robe, draped with massive chains. Not a single sliver of the person’s skin was visible anywhere; their hands were gloved, their feet clad in the same polished boots the soldiers wore, and from what he could make out of the shadow-shrouded face inside the hood, only their eyes were partially visible, glinting briefly in the light as the prisoner turned to face him. From the size of the person’s hands and feet, and the fact that they seemed a little smaller in build than the soldiers, Ao guessed that he was looking at a woman rather than a man. He only caught a fleeting glimpse of her eyes in the shadows of her hood, but in that flicker of a second a strange sensation coursed through his veins, and an eerie chill slithered down the length of his spine. There was something very unsettling about the prisoner, and Ao wasn’t entirely sure that he actually did want to discover anything more about who – or what – she was.
He stared for some time at their baggage too. There were the usual barrels, sacks and crates packed with supplies, which they had pulled into the camp on sleds, but what caught his eye were two small wicker cages among the baggage, each of which contained a homing pigeon: one white, one black. While staring at the birds, an eerie sensation tickled the nape of his neck with wispy feathers, and he looked up and saw the eyes of the prisoner fixed on him, uncannily bright within the heavy shadows of her hood. An unsettling feeling of discomfort rumbled deep within his guts, and for a second he felt almost like turning and fleeing into the forest.
Still, his curiosity about the outsiders proved to be stronger than his unease, and he got up from his squatting position and traipsed gingerly across the grass, approaching the nearest soldier, a tall, heavily-built Russian with nearly corpse-pale skin and a severe-looking face dominated by a bushy red beard. Ao swallowed slowly, his mouth suddenly dry as he stepped up to the man, who towered intimidatingly over him. Forcing himself to flash a meek, gap-toothed grin at the soldier while avoiding direct eye contact, Ao reached out to touch the man’s gleaming rifle, which was slung over his shoulder via a strap.
The soldier spun around, rage flashing like ignited gunpowder in his green irises, his right hand darting straight for the hilt of the cutlass bayonet sheathed on his hip, but a sharp word from Higgins froze his hand in mid-air before he could draw the weapon.
‘Easy there, Boreyev!’ the Englishman barked in flawless Russian. ‘Allow the lad to inspect your rifle, please. These tribesmen do not share our views on private property, and, after all, these weapons are the carrot with which we intend to tempt the mule.’
Boreyev scowled at Ao but nonetheless obeyed his superior, and he unslung his rifle and handed it to the young hunter, after removing both the magazine and the bullet that was in the chamber. Higgins
strode briskly over to the pair of them, eager to make some headway in terms of procuring a guide.
‘The latest, most advanced technology,’ Higgins said in Russian with a congenial smile to Ao, who was turning the weapon over in his hands, a look of quiet awe glowing on his coarse-featured face. ‘Winchester 1907 model, with a fifteen-shot magazine,’ Higgins continued, not bothered by the fact that Ao could not understand a word he was saying. ‘Semi-automatic, .351 calibre bullet. You could drop a deer from nearly a mile away with one of these, and should a bear or tiger ambush you in the wilderness, you’d likely walk away with its pelt slung over your shoulder instead of ending up in its belly.’
The interpreter hurried over to them and breathlessly translated what he had picked up of Higgins’ words. Ao nodded, stroking the polished wooden stock of the weapon with appreciative fingertips.
‘As I said to the elder of your clan,’ Higgins continued, the broadness of his smile half-concealed beneath his walrus moustache, but nonetheless shining brightly in his eyes, ‘if she changes her mind and allows one of you to guide us to the sacred site out there, all of these weapons will be yours when we have completed our mission.’
‘All of this?’ Ao murmured, his awestruck eyes fixed as if by cables to the rifle in his hands.
Higgins did not need to comprehend Ao’s words to understand the young man’s question.
‘All of this,’ he replied in Russian before the interpreter could say anything.
‘Forget what the old crone says,’ Ao hissed. The contempt flavouring his dismissal was biting, and his tone dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as he continued, while his eyes darted from left to right, as if checking to see if they were being watched. ‘She’s a senile fool, blinded by superstition and hamstrung by outdated customs. I’ll take you out there myself before the camp rises tomorrow.’
***
30th June
‘This damned savage better know where we are,’ Captain Vasilevsky growled, the low sun sparking a flare in his eyes as its rays bled through the endless vertical labyrinth of trees. ‘If he’s leading us in circles through this forest, I’ll rip his blasted entrails out with my bare hands! We’ve been traipsing along behind him like lost sheep in a winter night for nearly ten days now!’
‘Calm down, Vasilevsky,’ Higgins muttered. ‘He knows where he’s going. Haven’t you noticed him making a note of the landmarks and trees we’ve passed? You must understand, my good sir, that these people view the world through an entirely different lens to that which serves as a pair of unseen spectacles to us, who come from civilised places. To these people every tree in the taiga is an individual, its features as distinguishable to them as the faces of people in a crowd are to us. He knows the way, yes, this young man knows the way, of this I am assured. Besides, we’re close … by Jove we’re close, I can feel it in the air! Can you not feel it, my good man? That sensation of … of static electricity all around us, almost. I can feel it, Vasilevsky, in my blood, in my very bones.’
Vasilevsky turned away from the scattered shafts of sunlight that had managed to penetrate the tight-packed canopy of leaves and boughs, and stared ahead, looking past Ao – who was leading the expeditionary force – at the ominous, all-encompassing wall of shadow that seemed to be swallowing up the entirety of the forest ahead, turning day into night and creating an unsettling sensation of an inversion of time itself.
‘Bah!’ Vasilevsky snarled. ‘It feels like we’re lost, lost in this cursed wilderness! How long since we last saw a sign of any other people, huh? I’ll tell you when: when we left the savages’ filthy camp, that’s when! Nothing but trees and animals, trees and blasted animals out here! It was good sport to shoot bear, wolves, elk and deer for the first few days, but now I’m even sick of that.’ Vasilevsky’s voice then dropped in register, and his eyes narrowed and darted from side to side. ‘And what’s more,’ he continued, ‘the last day or two, I’ve felt like we’ve been … watched. I can’t shake the damn feeling, Higgins. It’s like this bloody forest has eyes. A million of them, observing our every move.’
‘We haven’t seen any signs of beastwalkers out here, and we have been looking,’ Higgins said calmly. ‘You know that every man in this unit has been selected from the ranks of the Huntsmen because of his skill and experience … and, of course, because that man is extremely effective at exterminating beastwalker scum. And have you not forgotten about the one in our midst?’ He jerked his head towards the woman in the black robe and chains, who was standing, as ever, apart from everyone else. ‘If the abominations were out there, she would have sensed their presence.’
‘You’re calling it a “she” now, are you?’ Vasilevsky scoffed icily, a sneer of contempt smeared across his visage. ‘Be careful, Higgins, be very careful. You know what the official policy is on those things.’ His voice dropped to a low register as he continued, and he flashed a suspicious glance at the woman. ‘Don’t get too close to it,’ he cautioned, and there was a threat as well as a warning in that utterance. ‘Remember what our orders are. Once it has served its purpose, we exterminate it. Immediately.’
Higgins smiled sourly at his compatriot, but his eyes were granite-hard in their sockets.
‘Do not presume to make assumptions about my feelings regarding the beastwalker, Vasilevsky,’ he replied coolly. ‘Do not. And do not question my loyalty to our Huntsmen masters either.’
The officers stared coldly at each other for a few tense moments before Higgins’ lips curved into a tight smile.
‘Come, Vasilevsky, let us break this foolish impasse,’ he said. ‘We must be united in our purpose, must we not? I implore you, shake off your worries and paranoia. Such sentiments serve only to divide us, and God help us if such things infect the ranks of our men. Let me make this as clear to you as I possibly can: this forest does not have eyes, and we are not being watched.” He paused here to chuckle and broaden his grin before continuing. ‘Relax, my friend! We are on one of the most important missions in the long history of our esteemed organisation, and when we return, triumphantly, with the creature imprisoned and bound in chains, great will be our glory. Great and vast will our glory indeed be, and the echoes of our splendid victory will ring through the hallowed chambers of every Huntsmen stronghold in every nation on the planet! We are about to change the course of history, Vasilevsky. We are about to change the course of history itself, man! Do not allow doubt to worm its way into your head. No, keep your eyes fixed on the prize – only on the prize – and we shall overcome any obstacles that may stand in our way.’
Before Vasilevsky could respond, the interpreter jogged over to them.
‘He says we’re almost here,’ the man announced to the officers, nearly breathless from both excitement and the exertion of the trek. ‘Just over this ridge.’
‘In the thick of those cursed shadows ahead,’ Vasilevsky muttered.
Higgins gave the interpreter a curt nod and then called a halt. When everyone had stopped moving, he beckoned to one of the scientists to come over to him. The man, a rail-thin old Arab with a shock of white hair, and an emaciated-looking face that was dominated by two protruding eyes and a hooked beak of a nose, hobbled up the slope from the back of the group, while the powerfully-built Central African soldier who was carrying the scientist’s equipment in his rucksack followed him, scowling and grumbling about the weight of the pack.
‘Do a reading here, Dr Khan,’ Higgins ordered.
The willowy Dr Khan – who, in his oversized military greatcoat and combat boots, resembled an adolescent boy dressed up for a pantomime, wearing an adult’s clothes and a mask of an old man’s face – eagerly snatched his rucksack from the soldier. With frantic, liver-spotted hands that were trembling with anticipation he retrieved a wooden box and flipped it open. He then rummaged around in the pack and took out a number of different antennae, which he attached to the wooden apparatus, inside which there were clocks and dials. With breathless keenness he wound up the device via a crank on
the side, but soon as the instrument began to run the needles on the dials started spinning madly. A sharp crack resounded through the chilly air as one of the dials broke.
‘Unbelievable,’ Dr Khan gasped, his large eyes growing even wider with astonishment and awe. ‘I’ve, I’ve never seen anything like this! This is impossible, this is amazing, this is, it’s, it’s unbelievable! This is, this is … this is simply unearthly. It seems that all the laws of physics, of the universe are, are being overturned here!’
Higgins seized this opportunity to flash a smug grin at Vasilevsky.
‘What did I just say to you, my good sir?’
Vasilevsky simply growled wordlessly as he unslung and readied his rifle, his expression stony as he ordered the troops to do the same. Ao, meanwhile, watched all of this unfolding with a rapidly increasing sense of alarm. He did not understand what the leaders of the expedition and the scientists were doing or saying, but their body language and facial expressions were easy enough to decipher, as were the actions of the soldiers as they readied their rifles with grim scowls on their faces.
In addition to all of this, an eerie sensation was rippling across his skin, scuttling beneath his furs and burrowing like a swarm of ten thousand microscopic beetles with carnivorous intent. Indeed, so intense was this uncanny feeling that his flesh and bones themselves felt as if they were absorbing the invisible energy, humming like charged transistors within the deepest core of his being. An unseen hand gripped his skull and swivelled his head upon his neck, until he found himself staring at the prisoner – whose face he had still not seen – and it suddenly seemed that her eyes, like bright jewels, were refracting focused light within the shadowy cavern of her hood. And, what was more, those shining eyes did not look any longer like those of a human being. Rather, they had taken on the ominous radiance of the eyes of a wild beast.
