The Road of Bones Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Note to the Reader

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Fine

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Yuri, wake up! You know who’s coming for you . . .’

  In Yuri’s country, people vanish.

  And no one ever comes back.

  Now Yuri too is on a road to despair.

  A road built on the bones of those who dared to oppose . . .

  A chilling adventure from a multi-award-winning author.

  SHORTLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL

  For Sophie K.

  Note to the reader

  I have taken great liberties with history, geography,

  language and culture.

  Nonetheless, inside this story lies a part

  of the truth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  MY GRANDMOTHER SAID it each time. I see her standing beside the cracked iron stove my father half-killed himself in dragging home. In would come the news. ‘Chechov is gone.’ ‘Kerentz has fallen from favour.’ ‘It seems that Dolov has most conveniently had a “heart attack”.’ She’d snort with contempt and mutter bitterly into the pots she stirred.

  ‘Only a fool cheers when the new prince rises.’

  For years I mistook her meaning. I’d listened to her tales of fair princesses and malignant dwarves, and knew all the old stories about good-hearted giants and ice-crystal palaces hidden in mountainsides. So though I heard it often, her tart remark echoed only in the magically lit cave of my imagination. Gradually the image rose of some young prince rising, freshly crowned, from his throne, and I thought my grandmother was saying no more than that the new ruler’s subjects were supposed to know their part of the ceremony was to stay on their knees.

  And weren’t we all good at that! My father grumbled to my mother constantly. ‘Could we be forced to scrape lower? See? We are beaten to the ground.’

  She’d hush him. ‘Grigor, I beg you! Not so the boy can hear! And never outside.’ For even then there were whispers that people vanished on the way to work, and no one saw and no one heard.

  And no one ever came back.

  ‘That,’ said my father, ‘is because you’d grow a beard down to your feet even in getting there.’ (‘There’ being the far north-east, above the great dividing range and over the frozen bays of Kolskaya and Vlostok, where even the fishing stops for half the year as the waters ice over.) Grandmother would shrug. To her, one prison camp sounded much like another. And to a woman who had never left our province, all places seemed as far away and no further than where the sun sets over the Chelya hills. She’d scrape the skeins of grey mould off the last turnips with a blackened fingernail, and tell for the thousandth time the story that always left her wheezing with amusement, and me in shudders of distress.

  ‘No need to tell the Kulik twins how far to those camps. Poor souls. Alike as two nuts on a twig, but oh, so different inside. Victor now, he was like Yuri here.’ She’d tip her thumb at me. ‘All ears. All eyes. And always “Why this?”, “Why that?” Oh yes, young Victor’s brains whirred round all day. But it was Stephan who was the apple of his mother’s eye. A soft lad. His only thought was to get down to the river to fish.’

  I’d sit with my head well down over my schoolbook, willing my grandmother to scald herself or cut her finger – anything, even spill the thin soup, rather than go on with the story.

  ‘Then the Czar’s men came to arrest young Victor. So there he stood, this captain, reading to Victor’s mother from the charge sheet, and she not understanding a word, of course, not being bright or schooled. And he looked up to see her staring at him, all slack-mouthed and drooling from utter fright. “Sedition,” he said again, and then took pity on her. “Bare-arsed rebellion,” he explained. “Undermining the Czar’s authority.”’

  I hated the story so much, I wanted its telling over. ‘So off the soldiers went—’

  ‘So off the soldiers went, to find young Victor. But no one was helpful. Some of the villagers did go as far as murmuring that Victor’s twin brother might be down at the river, fishing as usual. But where the lad the soldiers had come to arrest might be, no one would even venture an opinion, for fear they might be right.’

  I’d worked out years ago that everyone in the story had to be dead by now. But still my stomach churned.

  ‘And in the end, of course, the captain lost patience. Three hours out of a morning, to find a boy who couldn’t grow a beard. “Go fetch the other one,” he told his men. And they rode down to the river and took poor Stephan – and his fine fish, they say – and carried him off. Three days later, young Victor came home. His foolish mother must have spat toads at him. “This is your fault! All your fine speeches in the market place! All your petitions and meetings!” Lord knows what curses she must have heaped on his head. All I can tell you is that, within a day, the boy had left the village – gone off to find his brother and exchange himself.’

  Again, she’d snort.

  ‘And neither ever came home. More fool their mother!’

  For Grandmother, this was the end of a very fine story. She’d cackle away, thinking Victor and his mother prize dolts. (And, as she said so often whenever I cracked a plate or let the fire go out, ‘No need to sow fools. Like weeds, they come up of their own accord.’) She didn’t think, as I did, that maybe Victor had come home, not to a heap of curses, but only to his mother’s tears. It never occurred to her that a young man who cared enough about justice and fairness to risk his liberty speaking his mind in the market place and handing out pamphlets might follow his brother willingly over the frozen wastes to try to save him from seven long years of drudgery he hadn’t earned for himself.

  So I was used to tales of men and women who slid away from towns and villages and hid from the Czar’s men for years and years. Some of her stories worried me. But till I went to school, Grandmother’s memories of life in her village were much the same to me as tales of pirates and highwaymen and bandits. After all, the Czar was long gone – his throat slit and his family scattered even before the Five Great Leaders signed the Republic into life. (‘A fine day!’ grinned my father. ‘We fooled the class simpleton into believing that all the firecrackers and the flags were there to celebrate his thirteenth birthday.’)

  In any case, ill luck could fall on anyone. Even in my class at school, there was poor Vladimir with his useless, crippled legs, sweet-natured Ludmilla with her endlessly suppurating face, and Fyodor Kalinsky, whose family all died of cholera within a week, leaving him so shocked and dumb he earned a beating daily.

  ‘A few simple words!’ our teacher would howl at him, his nostrils flaring red with rage and frustration. ‘Can you not march in time and get a few simple words in the right order?’

  We’d raise the banners and start to practise the anniversary procession again.

  ‘On this great day, we hail Our Beloved Leaders, and step out willingly on the Long March to a Better Future for All.’

  Fyodor would only tremble. At times, his tears ran. Sometimes
his face became so blank you’d think he’d gone deaf as well as silent. In the end, one of the other teachers would pull him aside and leave him standing while we marched briskly up and down on the packed snow, and Fyodor froze faster than his banner.

  Those banners! Half our lesson time was taken up with cutting them out and printing the words. Before I was even seven, I swear I could spell “The Glorious Revolution”. (‘“The Glorious Lie”, more like,’ my grandmother muttered with a scowl the day they told us that part of our family’s contribution to the Next Steps for Progress was to share the floor of our block with three other families.)

  So there was always schoolwork to do in the evenings to make up for the hours spent on our flags and parades. And nowhere to do it away from Grandmother and her stories. I suppose that, to someone standing stirring away the rest of her life, old times are all that’s left. So as I sat over our brand-new history book, learning about all the countries around us that had welcomed our soldiers with songs of liberation and bright spring flowers, her witterings dripped into my brain. I didn’t listen, but every few minutes my ears would unstop enough to hear yet another snippet from Grandmother’s village childhood.

  ‘And by the time he was released, of course, his mother was dead.’

  ‘After seven years, she despaired and married someone else, only for him to arrive the next morning, footsore and bleeding.’

  ‘And he never came back.’

  ‘Stop with the tales!’ I remember my mother once begging her. ‘Just for one night, can we sit and eat without the troubles of the world heaped on our plates as well?’ She looked at my father as if to say, ‘Support me here, Grigor. This is your mother, not mine.’

  But he was flicking through The Wonderful Story of Our Motherland, his eyebrows raised. ‘Is this what they’re telling you now? Our soldiers welcomed with songs and flowers?’ Dropping his voice to a whisper, he turned to my mother. ‘Best not tell Grandmother! Or she might wonder what sort of flower it was that blew out her husband’s brains.’

  ‘Hush, Grigor! Not in front of Yuri!’

  But I’d been deaf so often from colds and agues when I was smaller that they were easily fooled by a blank face. And as soon as they thought I was asleep under the rugs, their whisperings would start again – and these were not old tales like Grandmother’s, but things that had happened only that day to some journalist who had written of one of the Five Great Leaders with too sharp a pen, or to the editor of some journal called New Directions or A Better Path.

  One night the news came from so close to home, my mother couldn’t wait for a prudent time to tell it. Seeing my hands were over my ears as usual while I was reading, she risked saying softly to my father, ‘Novgorod’s gone.’

  ‘Novgorod?’

  ‘Yesterday evening, they came.’ She shook the snow crystals from her headscarf towards the fire, making it hiss and spit. ‘Through a mercy his boys had gone off early, so there was only him beside the printing press. The guards broke up the type. Natasha says he smashed his own spectacles trying to stop them. And then two of the taller ones lifted poor Novgorod between them, arm in arm, and carried him off. Natasha’s mother said his legs were so far off the ground he looked like a child refusing to go to the priest for a blessing.’

  My father frowned. Since all the churches had been sacked and locked, even second-hand talk of priests was unwelcome. ‘Any word from him since?’

  ‘Nothing. He shouted down the empty street, of course. “Keep up the work! Keep up the work!”’ She stared at the one smoking ember in the grate and added bitterly, ‘A fine message to leave the neighbours to pass to your sons. Practically a death sentence.’

  My father tried to comfort her. ‘No, no. Their mother won’t let them take the risk. She was against the business of the journal from the start.’

  They shook their heads, and spoke of passing the news to friends the very next morning. And as the tale of Novgorod’s arrest spread out from those who knew each other well to those who barely nodded in the street, no doubt fewer and fewer dared venture the general opinion: ‘What sort of idiot can’t tell the difference between the “right to publish” and a steel-capped boot?’ But back then everyone who’d been told would at least dare to slow their stride next time they passed the kiosk where People Before Party had been heaped in a pile, fruitlessly waiting for customers. I expect that, to some, it barely seemed possible that the earnest, owl-eyed man someone had pointed out to them once in a teashop was even now rattling his way in chains towards some prison camp.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be back,’ my grandmother would scoff on such occasions. ‘The fighting kitten’s not so easily drowned.’

  And in her day, perhaps, most did come back, even if it was years later, and perhaps with a foot gone from frostbite that ran too deep, or one arm swinging uselessly, from being the worst person in the world to trade a journalist’s pen for a prison axe. ‘They recognize you first,’ she told me once. ‘Always. There you are, hurrying down the street with your basket, and you sense something in a stranger going past.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  Grandmother had no education (‘Nor any brains,’ my mother always said, ‘if she can cling to all that mumbo-jumbo about God and his saints’). So all she could do was turn from her pots and show me: first, a flicker across the face, then a questioning look; a moment of hesitation.

  She picked up her story. ‘You peer at the stranger more closely. “Can that be Leonie?” you ask yourself. “There’s no longer a picking on her!” Or, “How could a bear like Boris come to look such a splinter?” You say their name. And when they see that you’re not going to walk straight past, their tears well over, and they clasp you so tight you’d think it was you, not them, who’d been away so long up where the nights are white.’

  ‘White nights?’

  ‘In summer. So far north. And black as pitch all winter. Oh, a terrible place to count out seven years with the blows of a pick, then come back to find your family scattered and your life’s work gone.’

  ‘Lucky to come back at all,’ my mother muttered. She didn’t think I heard. But it made no difference in the end because, slopping food from the pot to the dishes, Grandmother emptied enough of the sludge of her spirits on us all to last the whole meal through:

  ‘In this benighted country, you can call no man lucky till he’s dead.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  I DON’T REMEMBER noticing when things began to change. I knew one of the Leaders had been accused of doing his utmost to wreck the Glorious Revolution, and had been sent to an ignominious end, hanging from his heels. (How all my schoolmates cheered. How hard we waved our flags. How grateful we were to see the traitor and all his sly henchmen winkled from where they’d been hiding.) I knew our nation’s saviours had warned us that there were more enemies of the state still to be rooted out – we must be vigilant, vigilant – and that the path of Our Long March now ran through rivers of blood. I knew that we faced enemies on all but one of our borders, and that the army had become as hungry for men as we were for something – anything – more than the meagre ration of herrings and beans and mouldy root vegetables.

  So it seemed natural that my parents worked longer and longer hours. The day the china studio was closed (‘Uneconomic frivolity!’), my mother found herself on the list of common workers sent to one of the new munitions factories springing up around us. My father’s shifts at the sawmill were extended by hours. Even my grandmother suffered. Now, far from spending her days warming her fingers by prodding the stubborn vegetables that stuck to the bottom of her pans, she took to trailing round the town in search of wood to burn or queues to join where there were rumours of food.

  Dragging me with her, she did her best to stand up to shopkeepers who quickly learned which customers could slip them a few extra coins for better produce, and which couldn’t.

  ‘Your weights are short. And look at these turnips you’ve given me! They’re soft with rot.’

&
nbsp; The shopkeeper leaned over the counter to sneer. ‘I can see you were raised on milk and gingerbread. Take it or leave it. That’s all there is.’

  We had no choice. Already he’d snatched her ration paper and rammed it down on his spike. Even if she could persuade him to give it back, no other shopkeeper would dare take it.

  Furious, Grandmother spat an insult back. ‘Easy enough to be Man of Thunder behind your counter along with all the food. Try joining us here in the queue. You’ll soon find out you’re nothing but a common cur!’

  He thrust his greasy face closer, oozing threat. ‘Are you dissatisfied with what your country has to offer you?’

  Grandmother stiffened. Perhaps she sensed what I saw – that people who’d been standing in line behind her in the face-biting wind for two full hours were suddenly melting away as if they’d that very instant decided their family had no need of food that day. Coming to her senses, Grandmother grabbed my arm and moved as quickly as her stiff legs could carry her, not towards home, but up one alley and down another, and in and out of courtyards, till she was sure no one was following.

  Then, gasping until she breathed more easily, she raised her wrinkled monkey face to look me up and down as if to check I really were no longer the little boy whose hand had to be held the whole way home.

  ‘Go on ahead,’ she told me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘“Why? Why?”’ Sheer irritation made her slap out at me. ‘Must you always be wise as a tree full of owls? Stop asking questions! Do as I say! Go home.’

  I didn’t argue. The way led past Alyosha’s house. He’d been my friend as long as I could remember. We had a thousand ways of passing time together. In summer we chewed stalks on the canal bank. In winter he let me take turns on his sled with him and his sister. Always, at school, we fought to sit side by side. Ordered so firmly home, I didn’t think I’d dare knock on his family’s door. But maybe he’d be in the street, out on some errand, and we could spend a bit of time down at the river watching the breaking ice float past in giant lumps.