Under a Blood Red Sky

6

Pyotr Pashin felt his heart curl up in his chest. He didn’t move a muscle, not even to blink, just stared at the creature. Its mean yellow eyes were fixed on him and he didn’t dare breathe. Never before in his young life had he stood so close to a wolf.

Dead ones, yes, he’d seen plenty of those outside Boris’s izba down in the village where their pelts were hung out on drying racks. Pyotr and his friend Yuri liked to trail the backs of their hands through the dense silky fur and even stuff a finger between the razor-edged teeth if they dared, but this was different. This wolf ’s black lips were pulled back in a silent snarl. The last thing in the whole world that Pyotr wanted to do now was stick a finger in its mouth.

He’d jumped at the chance to come hunting when Boris asked him.

‘You’re a skinny runt,’ Boris had pointed out. ‘But you’re good with the hound.’

Which meant he wanted Pyotr to do all the running. But it hadn’t turned out to be a good day. Game was scarce and his other hunting companion, Igor, was tight-lipped as a lizard, so Boris had started in on the flask in his pocket which only sent the day tumbling from bad to worse. It ended up with Boris giving Pyotr a clout with his rifle for not keeping a tight enough hold on the leash, which made Pyotr scoot off among the trees in a sulk.

‘Pyotr! Come back here, you skinny little bastard,’ Boris yelled into the twilit world of forest shadows, ‘or I’ll skin the hide off you!’

Pyotr ignored him. He knew that what he was doing was wrong – it broke the first rule of forest lore, which is that you must never lose contact with your companions. Children of the raion grew up bombarded with bedtime stories of how you must never, never roam alone in the forest, a place where you will be instantly devoured by goblins or wolves or even a fierce-eyed axeman who eats children for breakfast. The forest has a huge and hungry mouth of its own, they were told, and it will swallow you without a trace if you give it even half a chance.

But Pyotr was eleven now and he reckoned he was able to look out for himself, and anyway, he was angry at Boris for the clout with the rifle butt. Also, though he wasn’t sure exactly why and he felt stupid even thinking this, in this part of the forest the air was different. It seemed to lick his cheek as daylight began to fade. Somehow, it drew him to this quiet circle of light that was the small clearing in the trees.

He caught sight of the back of the cabin, covered in bright green moss, and the fallen mess of branches sprawled lazily in the sun on the soft earth. His interest was roused. He took one more step and immediately heard a low-throated sound at his feet that made the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He swung round, and that was when he saw the wolf and his heart folded in his chest.

He didn’t dare breathe. Slowly, so slowly he wasn’t sure it was happening at all, he started to move his left hand towards the whistle that hung on a green cord round his neck.

Then, abruptly, a blur of moonlight-pale hair and long golden limbs hurtled into the stillness. A young woman was churning up the air around him, her breath so loud he wanted to shout at her, to warn her, but he could feel a wild pulse thudding in his throat that prevented it. She stopped, blue eyes wide with surprise, but instead of screaming at the sight of the wolf, she gave it no more than a quick glance. Instead she smiled at Pyotr. It was a slow, slanting smile, small at first, then broadening into a wide conspiratorial grin.

‘Hello,’ she mouthed. ‘Privet.’

She raised a finger to her lips and held it there as a signal to him to stay quiet, her mouth twitching as if in fun, but when he looked into her eyes, they weren’t laughing. There was something in them that Pyotr recognised. A quivering. A sort of drawing down deep into herself, the same as he’d seen in the eyes of one of the boys at school when the bigger boys started picking on him. She was scared.

At that moment it dawned on Pyotr what she was. She was a fugitive. An Enemy of the State on the run. They’d been warned about them in the weekly meetings in the hall. A sudden confusion tightened his chest. No normal person behaved so oddly – did they? So he made his decision. He raised the whistle to his mouth. Later he would recall the feel of the cold hard metal on his lips and remember the hammering in his heart as the two of them stood, saying nothing, in front of those mean yellow eyes in the shade of the big pine.

The young woman shook her head, urgent and forceful, and her eyes grew darker, their pale summer-blue colour changing as if someone had spilled a droplet of ink into each one. Just as the whistle touched his lips she gave a strange little shudder and moved her hand quickly. He thought at first it was to snatch the whistle from him, but instead it went to the blouse buttons at her throat and started to undo them. Pyotr watched. As each button revealed more, he felt the blood rush to his face, burning his cheeks.

Her skin was like milk. White and unused below the golden triangle at her neck where the sun had crept in. The blouse was shapeless, collarless, with short embroidered sleeves and, though it may once have possessed colour, now it was bleached to the grey of ash. As she slid the blouse open, he caught the flash of a knife at her waistband. It gave him a shock. Underneath the blouse she was wearing only a flimsy garment of threadbare material that clung to her thin body. The sight of her fragile collarbones made him forget the whistle, but it was her breasts he stared at, where the cloth outlined them clearly. His brain told him he should look away but his eyes took no notice.

Then once more she pressed a finger to her lips and gave him a smile that, in a strange way he didn’t understand, seemed to steal something from inside him. It left a hole in a secret place, which previously only his mother had touched – and that was when he was just a child. His chest stung so badly he had to crush his hand against his ribs to stop the hurt, and by the time he looked back, she was gone. A faint movement of the branches and a shimmer of leaves, that was all that remained. Even the wolf had disappeared.

He stayed there with the whistle in his hand for what felt like for ever but which must have been no more than a minute, and gradually the sounds around him started to return. The dog whining; the hunters calling and cursing him. A magpie rattled out its annoyance. He knew he should shout to them, it was his duty as a Soviet citizen to alert them. Quick, there’s a fugitive running down to the river. Bring your rifle. But something stubborn hardened inside his young chest when he thought of the moonlight hair, and the words wouldn’t come to his lips.