THERE WAS NO way that Myusena would let him live. Svyatoslav understood that by the end of their first day alone together.
They had managed to get the mule upright with its load of tusks. The damage to it was minimal—as if the mammoths had not wanted to disturb the tusks, and so had spared this one. The other mules were crushed and mangled beyond repair, but Myusena had stripped them for parts, and collected what he salvaged in a bag he strapped to the one that was preserved. He had also gathered rations—mostly just compressed energy cakes, many crushed. The rice bags had been burst, the rice scattered. Much of the equipment that had been in the tent, Svyatoslav understood, was destroyed. But there was an emergency tent still strapped to the mules that had survived. Beyond that, they had the plastidown blanket Svyatoslav had taken with him, and Myusena’s sleeping bag, retrieved from the tent. The sleeping bag was punctured and stained with blood, but salvageable. A backpack holding Svyatoslav’s clothes, which had been strapped to one of the mules, was intact except for a tear in the bottom. They had managed to retrieve a few other tools intact from the tent: an axe, a few multitools. Of the rifles, only one was left unbroken—the old .375 Ruger M77 that had belonged to Svyatoslav’s father.
They spent much of the morning gathering the supplies, stripping the mules, and loading up. Svyatoslav tried not to look at the tent. The trampled, bloodstained sack like some great, downed animal, mangled beyond recognition.
A mass grave, now. A collective shroud. They thought of burning it, but there was not enough fuel to be found here to get it alight. They might have buried it, but both collapsible shovels were bent beyond use.
In the end, they just walked away, with Myusena in the lead, carrying the rifle, and Svyatoslav trailing behind the mule, with its load of curving ivory and their salvaged supplies. The steppe here rolled off in a nearly featureless plain, punctuated here and there by a kurgan, or a depression through which a narrow stream flowed. In the distance were mountains, blue in the morning and then gray-brown in the afternoon, streaked here and there by snow. By noon it was hot, and difficult to imagine that frost had covered the ground the night before, or that in the winter everything would be smothered under meters of snow.
“How do they eat? In the winter?”
Svyatoslav had caught up to Myusena as they were fording a muddy rivulet, where swamp sucked at their boots.
“The same way the bison eat, or the reindeer, I suppose. They push away the snow and find the grass underneath. Don’t you know these things?”
“We don’t hunt in the winter.”
We. Now, for the first time since that morning, he thought of his father. His dead father. There was no we anymore. He didn’t feel anything—nothing like sadness, or grief. Nothing like he had felt when his mother had died. But one of his knees almost buckled, and Myusena steadied him. His grip was a clamp, without mercy. The sudden pain of it brought Svyatoslav back to the now—the sun on the back of his neck, the hum of mosquitoes, the suck of mud at his boots.
“I forgot,” Myusena said. “You Russians just hide in the winter. Like bears, huddled in your apartment caves. Drinking, telling stories, smoking cigarettes. You stay in your cities and hope the power and the heat stay on. And if one day they don’t…”
“Aren’t you half-Russian?”
Myusena turned and looked him in the face.
That was when Svyatoslav knew it. Myusena would kill him. He would not have been able to tell how he knew—but he was certain. He saw that Myusena had decided it, and that it would mean nothing to him at all.
“I say ‘you’ to whoever I want. When I talk to a Nenets I say, ‘You just stay up here with your reindeer herds, pretending the world hasn’t changed, banging on your shaman drums and fearing Madna and Hansosyada. You don’t know fuck-all about the real world.’ And when I come down among you Russians I say, ‘All you can do is ruin things. You would take a shit in the only spring you have to drink from. You sit in the middle of the world’s richest forest—a forest that stretches forever—in your concrete boxes, playing durak with a greasy deck of cards all winter and eating tinned meat.’”
The mule got a foot stuck in the mud, and Myusena yanked it out and shoved the drone up the incline.
“You don’t get to tell me who I am, boy. I say ‘you’ to whoever I want, and nobody tells me I am half this, half that. Do you know what my name means? Nomad. Born on the move. I decide where I stand. I decide where I go, and why.”
“I apologize. I didn’t mean anything by it,” Svyatoslav said.
“Nobody means anything.”
A few hours later they stopped to eat—compressed energy cakes, but it was an opportunity to sit down, at least. They were walking in the right direction: Svyatoslav had memorized the face of one of the mountains, with a landslide on it like a wound. When they had come into the preserve, they had come through a low pass out of a larch forest, and put that mountain at their backs. But they had been in the preserve for days after that. How far away was it?
“They say here in the preserve they have an autorifle that fires a bullet that can tune itself to a man’s DNA. Like a little rocket that can sniff him out and kill him twenty kilometers away.”
“They say a lot of things.” Myusena was on his back, his eyes closed. “You should learn to look with your eyes, not with rumors.”
“What do you mean?”
Myusena sat up. “You seen any drones in the sky? Since we’ve been here?”
“No.”
“But in every dirty little hole of a restaurant, they were talking about drones. A thousand miles from here, every kid kicking a ragged football in the street knows—suicide drones thick as mosquitoes, DNA-tuned smart bullets…”
“They must protect the mammoths with something.”
“I just told you what they protect them with. You don’t listen.”
They walked endlessly, their progress impeded by wet ground and mud, until the day began to fail. In the evening light, shadows shuddered where the wind hit the grass. Could it be that late, already? How much farther had they walked after lunch? Another five kilometers? Ten? Sometimes Myusena drew so far ahead of Svyatoslav that he was just a smudge, but the mule kept pace with Svyatoslav, or Svyatoslav kept pace with the mule—he wasn’t sure which was the case. And Myusena wouldn’t go anywhere without the mule.
He’d never called Dmitriy “papa”—never even thought it in his mind. And his mother had never said anything like “your papa”—something a mother would usually say. It was always “your father”: “Your father is coming home today.” “Your father is out with his friends.”
My father is dead.
He caught up with Myusena as the sun was setting.
“We’ll put the tent up here.”
There was a depression, a muddy hole in which a dead tree stood, a circle of packed earth.
“We’ll have a fire,” Myusena said. “We can burn that dead tree for fuel. I managed to save a few bags of dehydrated soup. We need a hot meal. You did well, you know—after what happened. Get the tent set up.”
“Have you ever heard of mammoths doing that … attacking people like that? It was like they hunted us.”
“Mammoths are extinct, boy. Nobody knows anything about what they might have done when they were around. And these things are not mammoths: they are just some kind of copy. I think they just stumbled across us in the dark, and got scared.”
“It didn’t seem like that,” Svyatoslav said. He glanced at the mule, standing near the dead, bleached tree with its load of ivory, which was stained where it had been hacked out of the mammoth bulls’ faces.
Myusena followed his gaze.
“I keep reaching for my terminal,” Myusena said. “Keep wanting to open up Kommodifi, see what the market price is. I keep forgetting I don’t have it here. Addictive, those things.”
“Markets?”
“Terminals. But yeah. Markets, too, I guess.”
Svyatoslav’s eyes wandered to the horizon. All day he had found himself staring at hummocks, kurgans, thinking they had shifted—lumbered out of place.
“Look—they’re not tigers,” Myusena said, as if reading his thoughts. “They’re not stalking us, hiding in the grass. These things are big, and slow, and easy enough to hunt. They are prey, not predators. There’s a reason they are extinct.”
The mule shifted its weight, like a living thing. Its burden of curving ivory glowed in the evening light. Dim, warm, like a lamp behind a curtain. Was it beautiful? Beautiful enough for the price it would fetch on the market?
Yes, there was a reason mammoths were extinct.