© 2010

Through blood-dimmed eyes, the Tsar watched the man reload his gun. Empty cartridges, trailing hazy parachutes of smoke, tumbled from the revolver’s cylinder. Clattering and ringing, they landed on the floor where he was lying. The Tsar dragged in a breath, feeling the flutter of bubbles as they escaped his punctured lungs.

Now the killer knelt down beside him. “Do you see this?” The man seized the Tsar’s jaw and turned his head from one side to the other. “Do you see what you have brought upon yourself?”

The Tsar glimpsed nothing, blinded by the veil which filmed his sight, but he knew that all around him lay his family. His wife. His children.

“Go ahead,” he told the man. “Finish me.”

The Tsar felt a hand gently slapping his face, the fingers slick with his own blood.

“You are already finished,” said the killer. After that came the faint click as he loaded new cartridges into the cylinder.

Then the Tsar heard more explosions, deafening in the cramped space of the room. “My family!” he tried to shout, but only coughed and retched. He could do nothing to help them. He could not even raise an arm to shield himself.

Now the Tsar was being dragged across the floor. The killer grunted as he heaved the body up a flight of stairs, cursing as the Tsar’s boot heels caught on every step.

Outside, it was dark.

The Tsar felt rain against his face. Soon afterwards, he heard the sound of bodies dumped beside him. Their lifeless heads cracked against the stony ground.

An engine started up. A vehicle. A squeak of brakes and then the slam of a tailgate coming down. One after the other, the bodies were lifted into the back of a truck. And then the Tsar himself, heaved onto the pile of corpses. The tailgate slammed shut.

As the truck began to move, the pain in the Tsar’s chest grew worse. Each jolt over the potholed road became a fresh wound, his agony flashing like lightning in the darkness which swirled thickly around him.

Suddenly, his pain began to fade away. The blackness seemed to pour in like a liquid through his eyes. It snuffed out all his fears, ambitions, memories until nothing remained but a shuddering emptiness, in which he knew nothing at all.

THE MAN SAT UP WITH A GASP.

He was alone in the forest.

The dream had woken him again.

He pulled aside the old horse blanket. Its cloth was wet with dew.

Climbing stiffly to his feet, he squinted through the morning mist and beams of sunlight angling between the trees. He rolled the blanket and tied the ends together with a piece of rawhide. Then he slipped the roll over his head so that it draped across his chest and back. From his pocket he removed a withered shred of smoked deer meat and ate it slowly, pausing to take in sounds of mice scuffling under the carpet of dead leaves, of birds scolding from the branches above him, and of wind rustling through the tops of the pines.

The man was tall and broad-shouldered, with a straight nose and strong white teeth. His eyes were greenish brown, the irises marked by a strange silvery quality, which people noticed only when he was looking directly at them. Streaks of premature gray ran through his long, dark hair, and his beard grew thickly over windburned cheeks.

The man no longer had a name. Now he was known only as Prisoner 4745-P of the Borodok Labor Camp.

Soon he was moving again, passing through a grove of pine trees on gently sloping ground which led down to a stream. He walked with the help of a large stick, whose gnarled root head bristled with square-topped horseshoe nails. The only other thing he carried was a bucket of red paint. With this, he marked trees to be cut by inmates of the camp, whose function was the harvesting of timber from the forest of Krasnagolyana. Instead of using a brush, the man stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. These marks were, for most of the other convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.

The average life of a tree-marker in the forest of Krasnagolyana was six months. Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, these men died from exposure, starvation, and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.

Now in his ninth year of a thirty-year sentence for Crimes Against the State, Prisoner 4745-P had lasted longer than any other marker in the entire Gulag system. Soon after he arrived at Borodok, the director of the camp had sent him into the woods, fearing that other inmates might learn his true identity.

Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. Only rarely was he seen by those logging crews who came to cut the timber. What they observed was a creature barely recognizable as a man. With the crust of red paint that covered his prison clothes and the long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its flesh and left to die which had somehow managed to survive. Wild rumors surrounded him-that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a breastplate made from the bones of those who had vanished in the forest, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.

They called him the man with bloody hands. No one except the commandant of Borodok knew where this prisoner had come from or who he had been before he arrived.

Those same men who feared to cross his path had no idea this was Pekkala, whose name they’d once invoked just as their ancestors had called upon the gods.

He waded across the stream, climbing from the cold and waist-deep water, and disappeared into a stand of white birch trees which grew upon the other bank. Hidden among these, half buried in the ground, stood a cabin of the type known as a Zemlyanka. Pekkala had built it with his own hands. Inside it he endured the Siberian winters, the worst of which was not cold but a silence so complete it seemed to have a sound of its own-a hissing, rushing noise-like that of the planet hurtling through space.

Now, as Pekkala approached the cabin, he paused and sniffed the air. Something in his instincts trembled. He stood very still, like a heron poised above the water, bare feet sinking in the mossy ground.

The breath caught in his throat.

A man was sitting on a tree stump at the corner of the clearing. The man had his back to Pekkala. He wore an olive brown military uniform, tall black boots reaching to his knee. This was no ordinary soldier. The cloth of his tunic had the smooth luster of gabardine, not the rough blanket material worn by men from the local garrison who sometimes ventured as far as the trailhead on patrol but never came this deep into the woods.

He did not appear to be lost. Nor was he armed with any weapon Pekkala could see. The only thing he had brought with him was a briefcase. It was of good quality, with polished brass fittings which looked insanely out of place here in the forest. The man seemed to be waiting.

For the next few hours, while the sun climbed above the trees and the smell of heated pine sap drifted on the air, Pekkala studied the stranger, taking note of the angle at which he held his head, how he crossed and uncrossed his legs, the way he cleared the pollen dust from his throat. Once, the stranger launched himself to his feet and walked around the clearing, swatting frantically at swarming mosquitoes. As he turned, Pekkala saw the rosy cheeks of a young man barely out of his teens. He was slightly built, with thin calves and delicate hands.