"Feedin' on Nul?" he said.
"That's the cry of hunger. When that stops, then maybe they will have found Nul."
"Britva will lose toes after falling through that pool this morning."
"He can use his own razor. It'll teach the imbecile a lesson. Trying to gallop when there is no trail! There may even be live mines this close to the ocean. I have read how they sowed these hills. MZDs and AKSs all over the place."
"What if the Americans are waiting for us, Uchitel? Then?.."
The reply was a silent smile.
"You think there is no danger?" asked Urach, holding out his hands to the flames.
"I know there is no danger. If they were a powerful country, do you not think they would have overrun this land by now?"
"I suppose..."
"Of course. Brother, go and fetch me some of that fine meat we took from that dung heap of a village. I am hungered." Then, as Urach was leaving, Uchitel added, "The Communists have gone from this country, Urach. And the Fascists have gone from over there." He pointed to the east. "They have lost, as they always will. Only we remain. As we always will." And he began to laugh.
The pony was growing weaker rather than stronger. It was impossible to ride it, and Nul plodded alongside, cursing in an endless monotone. Like Uchitel, he carried a Kalashnikov AKM and every couple of hours he was forced to fire off a short burst to chase a pack of wolves away.
But they returned, circling closer, bellies low to the ground, their gray-white coats melding with the sulfur-stained ice.
The snow had eased, and the wind had also died down. At least he was no longer in immediate danger of freezing to death. The middle-aged man trudged relentlessly eastward, his face set to the ground, one foot following the other, trailing the rest of the party. Every step left him a little farther behind.
Apart from checking the endlessly weaving pattern of the wolves, Nul never looked back.
High cliffs stood like jagged teeth above the packed gray-green ice of the Bering Strait. The sea was covered in a dense mist, overlaid with volcanic fumes. The air was heavy and caught at the back of the throat, producing coughs and reddened eyes.
Somewhere beyond them was what had once been called Alaska. Now it had no name at all.
In the year 2000, half a million people had been scattered over the six hundred thousand square miles of this inhospitable land. Now there were less than a couple of thousand people in the whole barren waste. To Uchitel and his band, the country that lay hidden in the acrid fog was the promised land, containing legendary treasures and riches. The books all said so.
"We go that way, Narodniki," shouted Uchitel, waving his Kalashnikov above his head like a crusader's sword.
There was a bellow of support from the men and women at his heels, the Narodniki.
Uchitel had found the name in the ruins of what had been the central library of the Communist Party amid the wreckage of nuked Yakutsk. He had come across a passage about the populist movement in old Russia. Over two hundred years before, in the late eighteen hundreds, there were terrorist and guerrilla organizations with names like Black Repartition, and Land and Liberty. But the parent of them all was the Narodniki.
It was a name that came to mean terror and blood, a name that appealed to the dark side of Uchitel's nature, which truly had no light side.
"We camp here in the cleft of the rocks that will keep us from the worst of the wind." Above him there was a deafening crack of thunder that made some of the ponies rear and whinny. There was a searing glow of deepest purple from chem clouds that raced hundreds of miles high.
"And tomorrow?" asked Bizabraznia, lashing at her horse with a whip of braided wires.
"Down there, and across into the land of the brave and the home of many, many dead."
Nul was feeling happier. The pony's fetlock was mending, and in the last twenty-four hours he'd made better time than he had for days. A biting fog had come down from the direction of the icy sea, making progress difficult, but from the fog's salty taste, he guessed that he couldn't be too far off.
The dried beef was lasting well. In one of the huts in Ozhbarchik he'd found some delicious golubtsyand had taken enough to last him weeks. The thought of the food safely wrapped in his bag made him hungry, and he reached in, taking one of the cabbage rolls stuffed with fried turnip, biting voraciously into it. The jolting of the pony made him choke on a mouthful. Cursing at the animal, tugging brutally at the reins, he brought it to a dead stop.
"Better," he said, his voice muffled by the food. The fog had drifted away to the south, and visibility was unusually good. He stood in the stirrups, wondering whether he might make out the rest of the Narodniki.
Uchitel urged his stallion on. The sea cliffs of Alaska were towering ahead of them, snow tipped, only a hundred paces away. Birds resembling gray gulls, but with a vastly larger wingspan, circled and wheeled from their eyries, their echoing cries like the moaning of long-drowned sailors.
Behind him in single file, came twenty-eight men and women, their horses advancing through the crumpled sheets of jagged ice, watching for the softer contours and crystalline outcrops that might hide gaps in the surface and for hidden crevasses through which a man and horse might easily slide, vanishing completely and irrevocably into the sucking waters.
For the hundredth time that day, Uchitel turned in his saddle, feeling a crick in his neck from continually looking back. Once they were across, they would be safe. He had never heard any legend or read any account of any Russian crossing this narrow shifting neck of ice. If it were true that they were being pursued, then the land ahead of them promised safety.
Nul raised the last mouthful of the golubtsyto his lips.
Then he was lying on his back in the trampled snow, staring blankly up at the dull sky.
There had been no sense of time passing. No sense of falling.
No pain.
The only feeling was shock; a sensation that someone had managed to creep up unseen and strike him in the middle of the chest with a huge mallet. He was aware that his feet were kicking and twitching. It felt odd, as though his feet belonged to someone else. With gloves that seemed to be filled with iron, Nul carefully touched the numb center where the hammerblow had come.
He suddenly felt very cold.
A full fourteen hundred paces to the southwest, the tall sniper lowered the Samozaridnyia Vintovka Dragunova rifle. The rimmed 7.62 mm bullet had done its work. Through the PSO-1 telescopic sight he'd seen it rip explosively into the target's chest. The man wasn't going to move very far with a wound like that.
"Good shooting, Corporal Solomentsov. An extra ration of food this month from the grateful party."
The speaker was about thirty, with a long, drooping mustache that hid a pockmarked chin. He stood five inches below six feet and wore a gray uniform of thick material, with long boots of tanned hide. Removing his high fur cap, which bore a single silver circle at the front, he revealed a totally bald head.
"Thank you, Major Zimyanin," said Solomentsov, giving a click of his heels and a sharp bow.
"Holster the Dragunov rifle, Corporal. You know what ice can do to the sight. Last time you left it uncovered the frost cracked the bulb of the reticle lamp."
"Yes, Major," the corporal replied, taking the long gun and pulling a cloth shroud over the neat sight.
"And send Tracker Aliev to me."
The tracker was less than five feet tall, with the slanted eyes that revealed his heritage. He had the waddling gait of a Mongolian who'd spent most of his life astride a barrel-chested pony. A thick woollen scarf was wrapped about the lower part of his olive-skinned face.