Soon, nothing remained but a pool of melted snow, some of which was warm enough to steam slightly. Within minutes, the winter had reasserted itself and the pool had frozen back to a gleaming sheet of ice.

I would have liked to bury Dmitry. He had been a friend for a long time; seven years. We had never been as close as Maks and I had been, but that was merely a result of our personalities, not of our hearts. He and I had trusted one another – we all had – and though, as with Maks, my trust had faltered for a moment, it had returned. I was blessed to have had the opportunity to be sure that Dmitry was aware of that. I hoped that somehow Maks was now similarly aware.

But to bury Dmitry was impossible. Even if I had had tools, the frozen earth was as hard as rock, and I would not have been able to dig deep. The best I could do was to cover him with snow and make a cross out of a couple of charred pieces of wood from the house. I hoped I would have the opportunity to return before spring and lay him to rest more properly.

I headed back to Yurtsevo. The wind, which had been against me as I had travelled away from the village, had contrived to change direction so that it was still against me as I went towards it. The snowy gale once more bit into my face, but the return journey was easier for the fact that I knew how far it was to my destination.

Once in the village, I knocked on the door of my saviours. The younger man answered.

'Did you find him?'

'No,' I replied, keeping it simple.

'I told you,' said his father, coming up behind him. 'I suppose you'll be wanting to stay here tonight as well?'

'No,' I said. 'I think I should be able to make it back to Orsha today.'

'You don't want to get lost like you did last night.'

'I'll try not to.'

'Show him his horse,' the man said to his son. The son, accompanied by the two huge wolf-like dogs, padding faithfully by his side, led me to a stable, where I found my horse fed and rested. We walked back to the house and the father handed over my bags.

'Thank you for your help,' I said to them both, as warmly as their gruff demeanours allowed.

'We're Christians,' said the father, the implication being that it was a duty, not a pleasure. I handed him some money. He looked at it with contempt – whether because it was too little or because I offered it at all, I could not tell – and then slipped it into his pocket. Their door was closed even before I had mounted my horse.

The journey back to Orsha was easy enough in daylight. The snow had already covered any traces of my journey the previous night, and though I tried to see where I had gone off the road, I could not. The sun was beginning to set as I entered the town. I gazed at it in the western sky, knowing that in that direction lay what was left of the French and with them, to the best of my knowledge, Iuda – the sole remaining Oprichnik. Back in the other direction, along the same road, was Moscow and in it Domnikiia. To the north was another road that stretched all the way to Petersburg – to my wife and my son. I returned to the same inn that I had been in two nights before. Any decisions about the day – and the days – to come could be deferred.

I ate and bathed and sank into an untroubled sleep.

When I awoke, I had come to a decision. The fine decision, the one in which would lie soul-searching and angst, was between Moscow and Petersburg, and so I chose the third path, to head west and rejoin the body of the army. It was the basis on which I knew many other soldiers had made their decisions to join up – to escape the complexity of trying to live their lives by opting for a world where they could simply pass the time trying to avoid their deaths. There was little chance, I thought, that I would be able to find Iuda (though some chance that he would find me), but even so, I could do some good helping to rout the French using the traditional methods of soldiery with which I felt the need to be reacquainted.

Still the refuse of the retreating French lay by the roadside, and became ever more sickening. Even before Orsha, I had noticed more and more that the dead horses had not simply died; they had been butchered. I could not blame the starving, desperate soldiers for turning to eating their faithful former companions in order to save their own lives. It would have started out with the horses dying of cold or of starvation; only then would they have been seen as meat. Later, though, even healthy horses had come to be regarded as a source of food, and were slaughtered deliberately. Again, I could not blame the men who did that. It was some slight respite that, as I carried on along the road, the bodies of mares and stallions became fewer and further between.

But as I headed towards Orsha, those tell-tale signs that I had seen on the carcasses of horses now became evident on the bodies of men. As the last horses died, so one food supply dried up. The living, who had already learned how to extract something nourishing from the body of a horse, had switched to applying the same skills to the bodies of their fellow men. Starvation had led to cannibalism. As with the horses, it would have begun with the violation of the bodies of those who were already dead. It would not have gone on to killing men for their meat – surely.

Was this the beginning of the path down which the Oprichniki, or their ancestors, had once, long ago, embarked? But no. As I had seen in the barn, and as Pyetr had told me, the Oprichniki ate not for sustenance, but for pleasure. They could not be compared with the degraded, starving men who had turned in desperation to the flesh of their comrades. But then, I too ate for pleasure. Nourishment is a requirement, but it was only the tiniest fraction of the motivation behind any meal I had enjoyed in the lowliest tavern in Moscow. Was there some parallel moment in the histories of vampires and humanity when consumption was transformed from a necessity into a vice?

I was closing now on the rearguard of our own Russian armies, and the road became busier with stragglers trying to catch up and with couriers ferrying messages in both directions. Still no one bothered even to begin to clear up the mess that the Grande Armée had left in its wake; and nor did I. Bonaparte had not yet been vanquished. There would be time for clearing up later.

Two days out of Orsha, and still some way east of Borisov, I came upon a fairly large encampment of Russian troops. I rode up to the sentries and dismounted. It had already been dark for some hours, and they were wary of a man who did not wear a uniform.

'Password?' one of them barked at me.

'I've no idea, I'm afraid,' I told him, 'but here are my papers.' I handed over my credentials, which he inspected. They were clear enough to convince him of my rank and also gave him some idea I was not a part of the regular army. Beyond that, he judged it better not to ask questions.

'Can you take me to your commanding officer?' I asked him once he had returned the papers. He ran to a tent and returned with a young man of about twenty, in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant of the imperial guard infantry.

'Captain Danilov, I take it?' I acknowledged his greeting. 'My name's Tarasov. Pleased to meet you. So what brings a man in your line of business to the front line?' There was no sign of resentment in his words. He was a professional soldier, and understood there are many ways in which a man can serve his country. With a gesture of his hand, he indicated that I should follow him through the camp.

'I've come to fight,' I explained as we walked.

'I see,' he said, with a hint of disbelief. 'Fed up with the spying game then?'

'There's no one left to spy on.'

'There'll be no one left to fight soon, either, thank heavens. If I'd been in your shoes I'd have given it another couple of weeks and Bonaparte would have been long dead.'