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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
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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
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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 golubtsy and 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 golubtsy to his lips.
Then he was lying on his back in the trampled snow, staring blankly up at the
dull sky.
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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,
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