It was thanks only to a lucky break in the wind that I didn't walk straight past the ruins of the small farmhouse. The snow had not completely covered the charred remains, which still bore some resemblance to the basic shape of the building, but shrouded in the blizzard they would have been hard to spot. Walking through the blackened timbers, I saw on the far side of the structure the remains of a more recent fire – this time a campfire. The gnarled shapes of snow-encrusted logs that had been pulled up to sit on partially ringed a wide patch of burnt wood and cinders. I put my hand to it and felt that the fire was now completely cold. It had been more than a day since it had been burning. However, I was now certain that Dmitry had been here. No one would cast more than a passing glance at this cold, deserted place, let alone stop and make a fire, unless they had reason to be there. I too had made it to the appointment, but I was too late.
I searched around the ruins of the farmhouse, looking for a message from Dmitry in the code that had served us so well, hoping to discover where he had moved on to. It did not take me long to find it. A blackened, half-burnt tabletop had been leaned against what was once a door post. It was plastered with drifted snow, but as I wiped it clean I found Dmitry's message scratched firmly into its surface:
Three days ago. Unquestionably, it had been too long to wait in this overwhelming cold, but there was no further message to indicate where he might have gone. I brushed off the rest of the snow from the tabletop and then did the same on the other side, but there was nothing more. I went back over to the place where Dmitry had made his fire and sat on one of the logs. Its hard, twisted knots dug into me and its coldness seeped into my flesh.
What was I to do now? Dmitry clearly had been here, but where had he gone? Had his plan to capture Foma succeeded, or was he yet to carry it out, or had Foma somehow turned the tables on him? Worse still, had Dmitry's plan gone even further? Had he successfully used Foma as bait, only to find himself defeated by Iuda? That could mean that Iuda was still somewhere hereabouts, waiting for my arrival. I thanked the Lord that I had arrived in the daytime.
I could only act on the assumption that Dmitry was still alive, otherwise anything I did would be futile. If I were in his circumstances, then what I would have done would be to attempt to join up with the regular army. From what I had heard in Orsha, they were heading for Borisov in an attempt to prevent Bonaparte from crossing the Berezina. That was only a couple of days' ride away. My best guess was that that would be where Dmitry would go, and so that was where I would follow.
The decision made, I drew in my feet to stand up. As I did so, I disturbed the snow beside the log I was sitting on, revealing something that glinted in the sunlight. I bent forward and cleared away more snow to discover that it was a fine silver chain, of the sort used for a necklace or bracelet. I pulled it out of the snow and found that it was caught under one of the stunted branches that protruded from the log. As I cleared the snow further, I suddenly leapt to my feet with a startled gasp.
This was not a branch; it was a human hand.
I had not been sitting on a log, but on a frozen, rigid, human corpse.
CHAPTER XXIX
EVEN BEFORE I HAD CLEARED THE SNOW AWAY, I KNEW THAT IT was Dmitry. His body was, in fact, lying alongside the log on which he must have been sitting. Once he had collapsed, the blowing snow had covered them both, making them appear as a single object. I brushed the snow from his beard and hair and eyes to reveal his face. His lips and his eyes were tightly shut and his expression revealed no agony of death, just the solid determination of a man facing up to a night in the cold.
The silver chain that had first hinted at Dmitry's presence still trailed from his tightly clasped hand. I prised his fingers open one by one and found within the icon that I had given him the last time we had spoken, just after we had buried Maksim. I had been proved right and Domnikiia wrong. It had offered him no protection from death. I decided against exposing myself to the cold by putting it back around my neck. Instead I wrapped the chain around the small image of Christ and put it in my pocket.
There were no wounds on Dmitry's body that I could see; none, certainly, to his neck. Dmitry had, like so many of the fleeing French invaders, succumbed to no more terrifying an enemy than the Russian winter – an enemy more powerful, more reliable and far more ruthless than the Oprichniki could ever be.
One question remained. Had Dmitry captured Foma, as had been his plan? I glanced around the other logs that lay beside the burnt-out fire with new eyes. Each one could be interpreted through the thick snow as a twisted corpse, crawling across the ground in the agonies of death. When my eyes finally fell upon Foma's body, the form of a man became irrefutably clear. Once the idea that it might be a body had been put in my mind, what I saw could be interpreted in no other way.
Foma was lying on his front. A nodule which protruded from his back at about the level of his hips I took to be his hands, tied behind his back by Dmitry when he was captured. It surprised me that his body could exist at all outside in the daylight. I had seen the effects of the sun on Pyetr and Iakov Zevedayinich, and knew that little should remain. I could only surmise that the snow provided sufficient protection for his body from the sun's rays, or alternatively that once he had died of the cold and his body had frozen solid, then it was impossible for the sun to have any further effect upon it.
The body was some way away from Dmitry's, back towards the burnt-out house. It looked as though Foma had been crawling – or rather wriggling, with both his hands and his feet bound – away from Dmitry and towards relative safety. Perhaps Dmitry had yielded to the cold sooner than Foma and he had been taking the opportunity to escape, though to where he could escape I did not know. It did not matter. Foma too had become a lump of solid, icy flesh before he had got any distance.
I poked Foma's remains through the snow with the tip of my sword. He was quite solid, like stone or ice. Two days outside in this weather could turn to rock any living thing that did not keep moving. I rolled the lifeless corpse on to its back and leaned over it, wiping a little snow away from the face to verify that it was indeed Foma. It most certainly was. He had died with his eyes open, and looking into them I recognized the blackness that in life had been no more expressive than it now was in death.
The eyes flicked suddenly to the left and then to the right. I started with surprise and then looked again. He repeated the action twice, with a pause in between. Foma was not human, he was a vampire. Just as a stab wound that would kill a mortal man had no effect on a vampire, so it was impossible that a vampire could freeze to death. Though his whole body had cooled to the temperature of the world around him at tens of degrees of frost, though every fluid that had once flowed within him had now turned to solid ice, still life, or the vampire equivalent of life, could not be extinguished.
Only his eyes remained movable, though they themselves must have been tiny, hard balls of ice. They now moved rapidly in all directions through the only gap in the outer skin of snow that he had acquired, like the eyes of a man peering through a frosty window at a cosy, warm, firelit room. I was reminded of how I had seen him once before, standing frozen against the wall of an alleyway in Moscow, only his eyes moving as he inspected the potential prey that walked past him. Then his immobility had been voluntary, to help him in his concealment. Now it was forced upon him.