“‘Horse eaters,'” Minka quotes in a cold, flat voice. Her knuckles whiten on the haft of her hammer. Her eyes are unfocused. She takes a step toward the northwest. Another.
Leks moves in front of her. Stares her down. “We don’t do these things alone.”
Minka breathes deep and refocuses on Leks. “Fine. But I’m going to do this thing. I will crush every last one of them if they ate my fucking horse! I don’t even care what it is! I will kill them!”
“Okay. I’m with you.” Leks looks to Red. “But we do this the smart way.”
The physician nods. “The guy in there was wearing a Soviet unit patch. 89th Cavalry Division. Minka, you’ve said those were the guys who took your truck and Wiegel. What else do you remember about them?”
The equestrienne closes her eyes. “They were kind of shitty soldiers. Most of them were conscripts from after the war started. There was a lot of talk about finding somewhere to stay the winter, and then just quitting the war and going home. I think that was east of the Urals. When I ran into them, they were staying at Kowal, but I know they’d been at Lowicz for a while before that. I always figured they’d come back this way sooner or later.”
“Okay. So let’s get those kids to show us where this guy came from, and see if we can backtrack him.” Red looks around. “Who’s our best tracker?”
“Probably me,” Magda admits.
It doesn’t take long to find the children in question. They’ve been hanging around just out of earshot, doing a bad job of being subtle and avoiding work. The prospect of adventure – and of being listened to by Leks – gets their attention. They saw the stranger come in from the northwest, through the pastures beyond the beet fields.
The kids lead Magda to the stock pond where they first saw the stranger. From there, it’s trivial for Magda to pick up his trail. He was staggering from his injuries but, within the limits of his capacity, was making a straight line for the farms.
The trail leads out to a stone cairn – one of the outer boundary markers of the territory the North Farms families claim as their own now. Leks sniffs the air and frowns. Whatever Filip did to him a couple of nights ago, the vestiges of it still cling to him, and now he can clearly smell horses… and sickness and old blood.
Magda takes a knee. “Minka? Horse tracks.”
The two women confer, carefully walking back and forth, examining the hoofmarks. Their consensus is that the Russian was being chased by five riders – right up until the point he reached the boundary marker. Then the riders aborted their pursuit and headed away on a reciprocal course.
Minka walks over to the marker, with Magda in trail. It’s a stone cairn about a meter and a half tall, the age-old product of picking rocks out of fields. As she approaches it, a faint sensation of air pressure raises the hair on her neck and arms. Minka has been leaning into her private Slavic pagan practices since falling in with Wilhelm Ziołkowski and Aina Jaros, and Magda has started dabbling as well. This looks – and, somehow, feels – like a place of ritual. One of the outward-jutting stones is flat, with just the barest hint of concavity. Minka leaves an offering of food and water and closes her eyes. “A friend of mine might be here – a horse,” she murmurs. “I am looking for him, if he still lives. I hope you will let me walk here safely. Thank you. Be well, be happy.”
There’s no response, but there usually isn’t. Not immediately, at least.
The team heads back to the farm to tell their allies what they’ve learned. The farmers are none too excited to continue hosting; they’d rather been hoping that Red would take the Russian back to Ponikla. After some negotiation, they agree to drive the team’s ambulance to Von Bahr‘s compound. The East Germans have a former POW camp nurse among their dependents, as well as two soldiers who received basic ditch medicine training from a U.S. Special Forces 18D, so they should be capable of keeping the man alive – and they’re a much harder target than Ponikla.
With that decided, the team crams into the Hilux and rolls out. As they pass the boundary cairn again, Minka frowns at the hoof prints on the ground. “They could have caught him whenever they wanted to. They were playing with him.”
“Herding him,” Leks rumbles.
Magda looks at the cairn and catches herself forming a gesture she’s seen the village elders make when the subject of the world’s emerging weirdness arises. “I hope they’re not planning to use him, as a way to get past that border.”
Minka mentally rewinds and glances sharply at Leks. “Herding him to or away from what, exactly?” She jerks her head to the south. “Maybe they didn’t want him to get to the river.”
Magda’s eyes flicker as she catches the implication, and she shakes her head. “They didn’t have any problem crossing creeks and streams. They were keeping him away from woods, though.”
Progress is slow because, despite Magda’s general competence with fieldcraft, it’s damned hard to track through tall grass from the passenger seat of a Toyota pickup. Frequent halts to dismount become the norm, with Zenobia staying behind the wheel, Leks remaining at the AGS-17’s grips, and the rest of the team pulling 360º security while Magda reads the ground.
The trail remains mostly straight, subject to terrain and the occasional forced detour around a patch of woods. The five horses’ tracks remain present both coming and going. “It’s like they only know how to get where they’ve been,” Red observes.
“Like they’ve forgotten how to read a map,” Zenobia replies.
In the early afternoon, the team sights an abandoned farm. It’s smaller than the North Farms complexes, likely a single-family property. Only weeds grow in the fields now, and nothing moves in the pens and paddocks. The tracks lead straight to/from the farm – but the horses’ prints circle it at a wide remove. Only the runner’s tracks lead into the yard.
The team approaches cautiously and splits up, some maintaining security while others search the area. Minka and Magda take the interior of the farmhouse. It’s long-abandoned, but evidence around the hearth suggests someone stayed here last night.
Magda moves out to the barn. In a shadowed corner, she discovers a number of 20-liter plastic buckets of seeds: chili peppers, cucumbers, spaghetti squash, canola. All of them are logoed with the name and seal of the Institute of Cultivation, Fertilization and Soil Science. Something about the name is tickling Magda’s memory. She closes her eyes, inhales deeply, thinks back – yes. She’s seen that name before, on a faded sign outside the research station that the team found in late June. More to the point, she remembers that a major agricultural research institute was located in Skierniewice, not to far to the northwest.
Red taps Leks out from guard duty. The Estonian re-seats his gear so his Saiga-12 is close to hand and begins prowling around the outbuildings. Behind the machine shed is the expected farm fuel tank. Leks taps it and his eyebrows go up at the echo. Cracking the fill valve gives him a good whiff of kerosene. A quick check with a blade of grass turned dipstick shows it about half-full – maybe 150 liters.
Leks carefully replaces the cap, then turns and scans the surrounding countryside. The farm is in no way fortified. Five horsemen with at least lances and bows could have come in here any time they wanted but, from all indications, they were content to give their quarry a night’s respite. His lip curls.
Zenobia passes Magda, who’s making happy gurgling noises over the seeds, and moves deeper into the barn. In the last horse stall, long ago converted into a small workspace, a tarp is draped over something angular. Zenobia pulls it away and sucks in her breath. Shafts of afternoon sun glitter on the metalwork of an old but well-restored motorcycle. She pulls out a flashlight and kneels to make a closer inspection. It’s a BMW R32, bearing a production stamp from 1923. Zenobia runs a reverent hand along the seat leather and smiles.
Back in the house, Minka moves from room to room, touching nothing. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s being watched in this place… or maybe by this place. She goes back to the truck, rummages in her rucksack, and carries another offering of food and water to the hearth.
Checking the windows, she finds old wax on all of the sills. It’s not recent, but it appears the previous inhabitants made a practice of regularly burning candles. “Ah, what happened to your friends, who left you nice candles?” she asks the house. The sensation of scrutiny intensifies a bit, and she smiles. “You’re still used to people. Good. Here, this is for you, too.” She places a precious cigarette on the sill of the window over the kitchen sink.
By unspoken accord, everyone gathers back at the truck to share their findings. Red chews on it for a minute, then nods to Leks. “No defenses. No sign of a fight. They chased him in here, circled all night, resumed chasing him again in the morning.”
“This wasn’t any kind of actual pursuit,” the Estonian growls.
“Nope.” Red looks to the northwest. “They were hunting him for sport.”