I skirted around the square, returning three times that evening, but saw no sign of Vadim, or Dmitry, or of any of the Oprichniki.

I returned to the house that I'd been staying in only to discover that it was already a temporary barracks for a dozen or so French officers. Wisely, I had not left those few possessions I had inside. Climbing up to the roof, I found the small bundle I had hidden there, along with my sword, safe and intact. None of those inside heard me as I retrieved them. I headed further south and found somewhat less luxurious, but still serviceable accommodation, which the French had decided was beneath them. I was not the first man in history, nor would I be the last, forced to sleep in a stable.

The following day, there was little I could do but wander around the city. Food was still reasonably abundant, but at a price. Those Muscovites who had stayed behind may have had numerous reasons for doing so, but for some there was a profit to be made. An invading army could, of course, simply requisition every item of food, every bottle of vodka and any other victuals that they desired, but though they would get what they consumed for nothing, it would also be the last they would get. A moving army can pillage, but a resting army must trade. It must employ others to go out of the city and resupply what it requires. This, at least, was the conventional wisdom. I believed it and, to my best estimation, Bonaparte believed it too. As ever, we had both underestimated the resolution of the Russian peasant. A few fresh supplies found their way into the city, but precious little. The French – and their horses – in the end had to survive on what was already stocked up in cellars and storehouses. It would not be enough. Had the French realized this, their stay in Moscow might have been even shorter – and that might indeed have saved them, if they had left in time to get out of Russia ahead of winter. Not all of the French army did understand the need for trade, but the few remaining Moscow tradesmen supplied those who did as well as, conveniently, supplying me. I suspect that, had I chosen to disguise myself as a French officer while I stayed in Moscow, then I could have fed myself at half the price. There were few discounts offered to an abandoned Russian butler.

Compared with two days ago, Moscow was once again teeming with life. Bonaparte's army was, at this stage in his campaign, perhaps 100,000 strong – appallingly fewer than the number that he started out with, but enough to give the city some pale shadow of revivification. Still they were fewer than half the true population of the city, but they spent more time out on the streets than had the real Muscovites, who had homes to go to, so Moscow seemed busy, superficially.

I remember once, when fighting south of the Danube, I surveyed through my spyglass an abandoned battlefield, scattered with the corpses of both friend and foe. Suddenly, I had seen movement. A soldier, lying on his back, his face covered with blood, whom everyone had taken for dead, was moving his hand. It had been the slightest of motions, made through the terrible pain of his injuries, but the fact that he could confront that pain and vanquish it sufficiently to make that feeble signal showed how much he wanted to indicate that he was alive – how much he wanted to live.

The field had still been under Turkish fire, but I had dashed out, oblivious to the shouts of my commanding officer, bending low as if it might save me from enemy gunshot. I had to rescue that poor, injured man. I made it to where he was and threw myself to the ground. I could hear the whizzing of bullets around me, but I don't think that they were aimed at me. My first intention was to murmur some words of encouragement into the soldier's ear; to let him know that if he wanted to live, then I was there to help him. Then I had to find a way to drag his weak body across the vast expanse of land that separated us from our own lines.

And then I saw his hand.

It was still moving, but the movement was not a desperate signal for assistance – the last plea of a dying man clinging to life – it was simply the wriggling of a hundred maggots. They had eaten most of his hand away, but their gluttonous writhing had, to the eyes of a man who had wanted to see life where there was none, seemed like a coherent motion; a twitching of the fingers that the maggots had long since assimilated.

In just such a way might the casual viewer conceive that life had in fact returned to Moscow. The streets were once again filled with vitality, with bustle, with commotion. But looking closely they would see that those figures that filled the streets, though they might on the surface look like the city's former inhabitants, were living on the city, not in it. Their purpose was to consume what they found (notwithstanding that trade rather than pillage might be a more efficient approach to the task of consumption), not to nurture for the benefit of their successors or for the benefit of the city itself.

Moscow was as full of life as a cadaver on the embalmer's table. The fluids and chemicals that had been introduced into its veins can engorge it sufficiently to give it some vague semblance of the living creature that it once was, but they would never have the ability to provide the vital essence that once made that body a man. The image brought to my mind the Oprichniki. They passed themselves off physically as men, but I had never seen in any one of them a hint of the desires and loves and anguishes of living beings.

Did the French occupiers, I wondered, perceive themselves as parasites feasting on the corpse of a once-great city, or did they believe that they were the vanguard of a new wave of life that had revitalized all the rest of Europe and was now supplying the physical reality of the Enlightenment to Russia? I think that Bonaparte himself probably believed that, but I also think he was deluding himself. Maks had shared Bonaparte's delusion.

It had been almost four hours since I had thought of Maks.

It was in the mid-afternoon of that day, the third of September, that I heard the first stories of fires raging in Moscow. I had invested in a substantial quantity of tobacco and was furtively offering it at an entirely unreasonable price to any French officer or soldier that I came across. The most unanticipated thing that I learned from this was that I had missed my calling. By the time I had sold scarcely a third of my stock, I had more than made back what I had paid for it. I understood how those few thousand who had remained in Moscow, however much they feared for their lives, must have been tempted by the profit that was to be had.

The profit which I was seeking was in the currency not of gold, but of knowledge. I still maintained the simplistic façade of a man who spoke no French, and so I was able to pick up all the news of plans and deployments that the French were discussing, as well as the gossip and tittle-tattle.

Fires were springing up all over Moscow. The French stories were that former convicts in the prisons of Moscow had been released and instructed by the departed governor, Rostopchin, to burn down the city, rather than let the French occupy it. The Muscovites I spoke to told, predictably, a different story: it was the French who were starting the fires, intent not just on occupying the city, not just on raping it, but ultimately on destroying it. This made little sense to me; no maggot could ever be pleased to see the corpse on which it fed cremated. Another point of view was that the fires were simply accidents. The French cared less for the city than did its inhabitants, so they would be less concerned about a toppled candle or a leaping cinder. In addition, with no civil authorities in place, there was no organization – nor any impetus – to put out any fire caused in such a way. Formerly, Moscow had been well stocked with hoses and pumps and men who knew how to operate them, but all had vanished with the evacuation. The Russians and the French stared at one another over the blazing city, each blaming the other, and neither was prepared to blink.