And above it all, the serene life of the sky went on unheeding, the clouds passing over the sun, the sun tracking slowly across the autumn sky. High up in the air, an eagle soared and drifted on fringed wings, and tilted its head in distant wonder at the clamour of death in the valley below.
‘Horsemen, Barina,’ said one of the men suddenly. It must have been about noon. Anne was dazed with the weariness of standing so long, and the exhaustion of too much emotion; his words brought her fully alert as though she had been slapped.
He was pointing away down the hill – and yes, there were the small moving shapes of horsemen on the track which wound through the trees. Six of them, she thought, presumably deserters fleeing the battle.
‘We’d better get ready. They may not come here, but if they do…’
There was a flurry of movement on the terrace. Within minutes the three men and Anne were all armed and ready, and standing at the parapet’s edge, watching to see what the horsemen would do. The path disappeared into the trees, and Anne found her hands growing damp with apprehension. There was no reasons to suppose they would come here – but what could they be doing? They were riding purposefully, but not fast. They came out of the trees again, and she saw now that the leading pair was carrying something between them. That accounted for their lack of speed; but what could they bring away from a battlefield? Was it plunder?
Now they were coming to the place where the path branched, one track continuing round the hillside towards the village of Novoye Syelo, the other branching steeply upwards towards Koloskavets. A breathless pause. The small moving shapes of the horsemen reached the fork – and turned upwards. Someone drew in an audible breath. The path led nowhere but to the house.
But Anne was staring hard at the leading horsemen. The thing they carried, slung between them, was a litter of some sort.’
‘Madame,’ said Pauline, sounding puzzled. ‘I think that is a wounded man.’
‘Yes,’ Anne said. ‘Why would they bring a wounded man up here, and not to one of the dressing-stations?’
But she knew. They were near enough now to pick out the colours of their clothing. They were not regular cavalry: they were irregulars, Caucasus men. She knew before she could properly distinguish his cap that the one on the left of the leading pair was Akim Shan Kalmuck; and her heart turned sick in her. She knew who it was that he was bringing to her.
He told her he would be safe, that he would not take part in the battle! She had believed him, because there was no other way she could face the long wait for news. But in the back of her mind there had always been the dread, and now it came surging like Leviathan from the black depths to torment her. Akim Shan was bringing him to her to die.
The entrance to the house was at the back, through a small courtyard which led directly off the track down the hill. Anne was waiting there when the men, at her order, swung back the gate, and Akim Shan and his men filed through on their dusty, sweating horses. Even in her state of anguish, Anne could not help a twinge of admiration. It required a considerable feat of horsemanship to keep the two lead horses the right distance apart for carrying a litter, and they were not easy horses to ride in any circumstance, still less when upset by the noise of battle and the smell of blood. Akim Shan and his companion halted their mounts and kept them surging in phase with each other. As they came to rest blood could be seen dripping slowly from the litter on to the cobbles of the yard.
Anne’s eyes met those of the Prince; hers in mute supplication, his veiled and hard. She found her voice, waved a hand to the men who were standing gawping at the tribesmen.
‘Lift down the litter – carefully, carefully!’
‘I have brought him to you,’ Akim Shan said, checking his horse with one spurred heel as it tried to back away. ‘His wound is severe – it will need all your skill, I think, to save him. But I could not leave him where he was. His courage deserved better than that.’
The absurd consideration – that he deserved to be brought to her because he had been brave; when if he had been less brave, he might still be unwounded – maddened her: anger, fear, anguish, outrage, closed up her throat. She tried to swallow, tried to thank the Prince for what he had done; but her mouth was dry, and she could not find any words. The servants took hold of the litter, tilting it perilously, but managed to lower it to the ground. The man-shape lay there motionless, under the covering of a black burka.
She forced herself to go forward; and then a hand slid from under the cover and slipped bonelessly to the ground. Anne’s eyes widened. She knew his hands, as she knew every part of him, better than her own.
‘But that’s not–’ she began, puzzled; and stopped abruptly. Now she understood. She crossed the few feet to the litter, was down on her knees beside it in an instant, pulling back the stiff mantle, gently turning the dust-coated face towards her. He looked, in the repose of unconsciousness, heartbreakingly young; he looked very like Sashka, asleep.
‘Oh, Seryosha,’ she murmured. Her eyes burned with pity, and with hideous guilt that her first reaction, for just the fraction of a second, had been a surge of wicked relief.
They were carrying him inside. She issued a flurry of orders to them, and turned back for an instant to thank the Prince for what he had done.
‘Won’t you rest, take something to eat and drink?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We begin our journey at once. It is a long way to the mountains.’
‘You’re going home?’
‘Yes. There is no honour here.’ He leaned down and fixed her with a fierce gaze. ‘I will tell you what happened.’
In a few, vivid words he conjured the scene for her. It had been a colourful manoeuvre: the Dragoons in dark green, the hussars in yellow, the Cossack regiments in red and blue, and the irregulars in many colours, with the red Caucasus flashes; united in being, every one of them, superbly mounted. They bore down, shrieking, on the town of Borodino, whose trim white walls were looking increasingly battered. The dust from the baked-out earth rose in spurts at every hoof fall, and drifted into a knee-high fog. A diversionary tactic is meant to divert: noise and movement, a great deal of both, are of the essence.
‘When the One-eyed ordered the attack, I thought, here at last is the place in the battle for me. Our charge would draw away the enemy, and though we died, we would have saved the day. This was the death that called me so many hundreds of miles!’
The Bavarians, unnerved by the sudden and violent attack, broke and ran for cover; Napoleon’s Young Guards were hastily marched up to reinforce them, and then another regiment, easing the pressure, as had been intended, on the hard-pressed Russian Eighth Corps. The manoeuvre, as far as it went, has been a success.
But Akim Shan had wanted more. The Cossacks were skirmishers by nature and experience. They were not accustomed to pitched battle. They had joined the initial charge with enthusiasm, but when they came under fire, they had obeyed their instincts and taken evasive action, cantering about in and out of the bushes, avoiding the bullets and raising a great deal of dust, but achieving nothing.
‘I felt their shame on me,’ Akim Shan cried, and turning sideways, spat eloquently on the cobbles. ‘They had sullied the action to which I had committed my honour. And the fair one – I could see he felt it too, for the Russians, his own people, charged only so long as the enemy ran. When the enemy turned and stood, they turned too, and fell back.’