Tin Sky Read Free Page B

that in fact he could almost walk in an unswerving line. Out east, as in the days of the German tribesmen and Romans battling at Teutoburg, forests were measured in hours, or days. Walking directly (not while reconnoitring, when the going was much slower), this was at most a couple of hours’worth of woodland, yet within its boundaries had thus far died five – no, six people.
    Bora knew that some of the murders dated to the last occupation of the area by German troops. It had been local krest’yane – farmers who hadn’t been killed, deported, or who hadn’t fled in two years of war – who reported the disappearance of this or that relative, a fact in itself that made it unlikely the missing had joined the partisans. In every case the woods, or the fields immediately around them, were the last places where the victims had been seen; and Krasny Yar was where their bodies were found by searchers.
    It was true what he’d been told: the magnetic needle trembled and gyrated. Eventually Bora put the compass away. According to the non-com, the mutilated corpse was discovered about a kilometre into the wood from where he’d entered (“always leave the patch of firs to your right. The spot’s on the rise with the lightning-blasted tree, near the hollow”). It must be close to a kilometre now. The firs were there, dark green. No rise, no tree and no hollow yet in sight. Fallen branches snapped under his boots; a tangle of creepers which had grown rank since the snow melt shot up through the first cleft in the ice. Wet spots, spongy and treacherous, were betrayed by the capricious mosses around them. Bora bypassed them to regain the elfish trail. Common birds called from distant trees. The soldiers before him had advanced in a broken line; Bora’s expert eye read small signs in the bruised greenery showing how they had fanned out.
    After a short time, in the thicket to his right, he spotted something moving, progressing against the dark of the ragged firs. Or not progressing, exactly: something that swayed, stealthily passing from one point to another. The Losukovka priest, he told himself, the one from Our Lady of the Resurrection of the Dead, Nitichenko. He’d come to pay his respects to Bora at his arrival in Merefa, because he now lived with his mother by the pilgrimage church in nearby Oseryanka.
    Russian priests were specialists at recognizing the authority of the moment; and besides, it had been the German Army that had allowed him to reopen his Ukrainian rite church, and to say mass. “Poor among the poor, called to serve at a great distance from my parish church, in Ostroh and Staraya Kerkove, Krasnaya Polyana and Sloboda Solokov…” For no specific reason, Bora did not care for him. It was not surprising that he moved so cautiously. It was the clergy’s way in this country. It is the attitude so many of us have in life, Bora thought. But not mine . He didn’t want to give the priest the satisfaction of thinking he could spy unseen, but didn’t feel like calling his name out loud either. He kept an eye on the black shadow in the trees while he continued steadily to the slope where he’d just noticed the blasted tree. Split and torn through, it leant over one of those hollows found in wooded areas not far from rivers (the Udy bordered Krasny Yar to the north-west): a pit like the hole that leads to hell, a magic kingdom, or a treasure cave. Thinking in mythical terms comes easy in a place like this .
    The rise sat in a blade of afternoon sun that cut through the foliage at a slant. Flies reeled in the light undisturbed; great clusters of them buzzed above the blood-soaked ground. Bora climbed the rise and slackened his pace. He chased the insects before reaching the edge of the hollow, but the flies hovered around him. In the snarl of grass and creepers, he noticed a coarse wooden button on the ground, which he picked up and pocketed. There were traces all around like those made by boars when they root for