Read Chapter 14: The Rations Decree

The wind had stopped. That was the first thing Marchetti noticed when he crawled out of the ice cave at dawn. The sky hung low and gray, thick with the promise of more snow but not yet delivering. The silence pressed against his ears like wool.

Inside, the squad huddled in the hollowed ice, breath fogging in the weak light. Aubert lay against the far wall, his face the color of old tallow, his breaths rattling like dry leaves. Petit sat beside him, holding a strip of rag to the captain's forehead. The boy's own shoulder was wrapped tight, his arm bound against his chest.

Lefebvre was trying to snap a frozen crust of bread with his teeth. He gave up, spat a crumb, and tossed it away.

"Stop wasting it," Marchetti said.

"It's frozen solid. Can't chew it."

"Then suck on it. It's all we have."

Gerhard had been quiet since the cave. He sat apart from the others, his big hands resting on his knees, his eyes fixed on something none of them could see. He was Austrian by birth, conscripted into a regiment that had melted into the Grande Armée's endless appetite for bodies. He rarely spoke about anything but the weather or his feet.

Now he cleared his throat.

"I was quartermaster. Third battalion, Linz. Before the Russians decided we were friends worth marching to Moscow to see."

Marchetti turned. "You never said."

"No one asks the mule what it carried." Gerhard shifted, wincing as his frostbitten toes pressed against the ice. "But I know provisions. I know what a man needs to march, and what he needs to merely survive. They are not the same thing. You've been dividing food like a priest dividing the host—equal shares, equal bites. That's how you watch men die one by one."

"What would you have us do?" Lefebvre's voice carried an edge.

"I'd have us not die all at once." Gerhard pulled a small leather purse from his coat. He emptied it onto the ice between them: four strips of dried meat, a handful of hard beans, one blackened heel of bread, and a lump of something that might once have been cheese. "This is all that's left. Not counting what's in your packs, which I'd stake my soul is less than you think. We've got—" He counted on his fingers. "—maybe three days of near-starvation food if we eat like kings today. Or six days of misery if we eat like the dead men we're pretending not to be."

Petit looked up. "The dead don't eat."

"Exactly." Gerhard nodded. "So we eat like them. One meal a day. At dusk. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, no more. Water we can melt from snow, but that costs fire, and fire costs fuel, and fuel costs time we don't have. So we eat cold. We chew slow. We don't burn anything we don't have to."

"Austrian arithmetic," Lefebvre muttered.

"Survival arithmetic." Gerhard's voice was flat. "I've kept three hundred men alive through a retreat on half these rations. I'll keep five alive on worse."

"We're six," Marchetti said.

Gerhard glanced at Aubert, whose chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular breaths. "Is he eating?"

"He can't keep anything down," Petit said. "We tried."

"Then we're five." Gerhard began dividing the food into small piles with the precision of a man who had done this many times before, in many different winters. "One pile each. You don't touch yours until dusk. You don't trade, you don't share, you don't beg. That's how it works."

Marchetti watched him work, then nodded once. "Do it."

The girl appeared at the mouth of the cave as the division finished. She was young—perhaps sixteen, perhaps younger, it was hard to tell beneath the grime and the layers of wool she'd scavenged from the dead—and she had been following them since the village, silent as a shadow, asking for nothing but never far behind. She moved like something wild, head cocked, listening to sounds the rest of them couldn't hear.

She pointed northeast and said something in Russian that none of them understood.

"What does she want?" Lefebvre asked.

Marchetti shook his head. He had picked up fragments of the language over months of marching, curses mostly, and the words for "bread" and "surrender." But the girl's speech was fast and low and full of sounds he couldn't catch.

She pointed at him, then at the sky, then at the ground. She made a shape with her hands—a long, flat oval—and then a cutting motion across it.

"Water," Marchetti said slowly. "She's talking about water."

The girl nodded, mimed a fishing line with her fingers, then pointed east again.

"There's a lake," Petit said. "Frozen. She says there's a lake."

"How do you know that's what she said?"

Petit shrugged with his good shoulder. "I don't. But it's either that or she's telling us where the wolves are."

They moved at midday, when the cold had loosened its grip just enough to make walking bearable. Aubert was slung between Marchetti and Gerhard, his arms draped over their shoulders, his feet dragging furrows in the snow. The captain's head lolled, occasionally lifting with a flash of awareness before sinking again.

The girl led them through a stand of birch trees—white trunks against white snow, so that the forest dissolved into a blur of light—and then they were on open ground, a wide flat expanse that reflected the pale sky without color.

The lake.

The ice was thick, marbled with cracks like veins in old cheese. The girl walked out onto it without hesitation, testing it with a heel, then stamped once, twice. She smiled—the first smile Marchetti had seen on her—and motioned for them to follow.

"How do we get under it?" Lefebvre asked.

The girl solved that herself. She found a spot where a spring fed the lake from below, keeping the ice thinner, and she kicked at it until it cracked. Water rose dark and cold in the opening, breathing a mist into the air.

"You want us to fish?" Gerhard looked at the hole, then at his hands. "With what?"

The girl already had an answer. She pulled a length of gut string from her coat and a small bent nail, which she worked into a crude hook. She baited it with a piece of the cheese Gerhard had just rationed, ignoring his protest, and dropped it into the water.

They waited in silence.

Marchetti crouched at the lake's edge, watching the girl's face as much as the string. She was focused, patient, utterly present in a way that made him feel the waste of his own fear. She had lost everything—home, family, probably her name for all he knew—and she was fishing with a bent nail to feed six strangers who had marched across the world to burn her country.

The string shuddered.

She pulled, hand over hand, and a fish came up through the dark water—gray, silver-flashed, heavy as a brick. It flopped onto the ice and froze almost instantly, still twitching.

She looked at Marchetti and smiled again.

In the hour that followed, she pulled out five more. Enough, Gerhard calculated, careful and quiet, to stretch their rations a week or more. Enough to keep Aubert's fever-fed body from devouring itself.

Marchetti looked at the fish lying on the ice, their deaths still fresh, their eyes filming over in the cold. Then he looked east, where the road to Vyazma lay hidden under the snow.

"Fish in a frozen lake," he said quietly. "And there's a whole army marching to nowhere. If we can catch fish, we can catch up to them."

Lefebvre scraped his knife along the scales of the nearest fish. "You mean catch the bastards who shot us."

"I mean we still have a mission." Marchetti looked down at Aubert, who had drifted into unconsciousness again, his lips blue. "He told us about the crates. Eagle crates. Going east. Whatever's in them is going to Vyazma, and so are we, and so is that prisoner column with your brother's coat in it."

The wind picked up again, whispering across the ice.

"And now we know the ice can feed us," Marchetti said. "But it can bury us just as fast. We move at first light."

The girl was watching him. She did not understand his words, but she understood his tone. She nodded, once, and turned back to the fishing hole.

Gerhard divided the catch in careful piles, then looked up. "The cheese is gone. She used it for bait."

Marchetti smiled, the first time in days. "Then we'll eat fish."