The Forest Horses by Byrna Barclay

Author:Byrna Barclay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 9781550504477
Publisher: Coteau Books

THE CITY IT EERILY SILENT behind them. No factory whistle, locomotive bell or church chime. Leningradski wait for another air-raid alarm. When she looks back she sees barrage balloons floating over spires and cupolas of the city.

They’ve just passed through rapids, around a great bend in the River Neva. From here, it’s only thirty or forty miles of open country to the Finnish lines, if she remembers her geography correctly.

Here, the Russians have blown the bridges, and she can see soldiers spread over what must be six or seven miles of the north bank.

Close to the south shore where the river highway runs to Leningrad, an island and a fortress flying a red flag comes into view. “Shlisselburg,” Pytor says, through the side window of the wheelhouse, and Lena remembers part of her own history. For a hundred years before Peter the Great, Oreshek, the ancient trade route from the land of the Varungians to the Black Sea, was held by the Swedes, and he who controlled Oreshek was in command of the flow of honey, spices, furs, slaves, gems, perfume, silks and flax to the Orient. After Peter wrested it back, he renamed it Shlisselburg, the Key City. Here, he incarcerated his wife, Yevdotiya. Here too, Nicholas i imprisoned six Decembrists for revolting in 1824 in the Senate Square. Pytor points out the marble plaque on the royal tower, but it’s too far away to read. “Lenin’s older brother,” he says. “Shrine to martyr. No guns in fortress since Peter. Now they call it the Eternal Prison. No return from it.” Pytor has the look of a sly and wary wolf. “In place like this I am born.” His jaw knots again. He might as well be talking to himself. She wants to say how sorry she is, but doesn’t know the words in Russian. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.

He says, “Ladoga Fleet,” and points at a dozen or more sailors setting up cannon and machine guns. “Rifle-firing points and snipers’ posts,” he says. But Lena feels sorry for refugees on the wharf waiting for two tugboats heading towards them. A gunboat and cutters load women, children, wounded soldiers on stretchers. Lena doesn’t need a general to tell her that if the Germans take this old Swedish fortress, the encirclement of Leningrad will be complete. Maybe she should have made a run for it when she had the chance.

Ahead, a lake without end. It must be Ladoga. Impossible to see the other side. “All night we cross,” Pytor says.

On opposite shipping lanes, barges heaped with grain or vegetables: cabbages, turnips, carrots, and Lena cannot help but count – one to forty-nine – not enough to feed a city of so many million. Pytor’s face is set, hard, and he still grinds his teeth, not speaking to Lena. Maybe he’s worried about his sister finding enough to eat.

Then she sees the wreck of a munitions barge, the hull of another boat sinking near the shore. The coal barge yields to steamers packed with people fleeing the city.

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