Read Chapter 8: The Hunger

The snow had stopped falling by midnight, which made it worse. Without the clouds to hold the heat against the earth, the cold came down like a hammer. Marchetti woke with his eyelashes frozen shut and his fingers curled into claws that would not straighten. He lay still for a long moment, listening to the wind and to the breathing of the others buried in the snow hollow they had scraped beneath a fallen pine.

One breath was missing.

He forced his eyes open and counted shadows. Simon. Lefebvre. Jean-Baptiste. The girl, tucked against Lefebvre like a thawing bird. Captain Aubert lay apart from them, wrapped in his greatcoat and half-buried in the drift. His chest did not move.

Marchetti crawled to him on his elbows, the snow creaking under his weight like dry bread. He pressed two fingers to the captain's throat, and after a long, terrible moment, felt a pulse—weak, but there. The breath came then, shallow and rattling, and Aubert's eyes fluttered open.

"Marchetti," he whispered. "Still here."

"Still here, sir. Don't talk."

"You sound—" Aubert coughed, a wet, tearing sound that brought blood to his lips, "—like my mother."

"Your mother had better sense than to march to Moscow." Marchetti pulled the frost from Aubert's coat collar with numbed fingers. "We move at first light. Same direction. Vyazma. Don't argue."

"I wasn't going to."

The girl was already awake, watching them with eyes that seemed too large for her face. Her cheeks had gone grey beneath the grime. Marchetti looked away from her and found Jean-Baptiste sitting up, brushing snow from his shoulders.

"Hungry," the boy said. Not a complaint. An observation.

"We're all hungry," Lefebvre muttered from the burrow. He was still wrapped around the girl, or she around him—it was hard to tell which of them was keeping the other alive.

"We need to move," Simon said. He had not spoken all night, and his voice came out cracked and dry. "Walking keeps the blood moving. Resting is dying."

Marchetti nodded and began the slow, agonizing work of standing. His knees screamed. His gut, empty since the day before yesterday, made no sound at all. That was what frightened him most. The silence inside.

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They walked south along the frozen river, then cut east through birch forest when the ice began to groan under their weight. The trees leaned together like old women sharing gossip, their branches heavy with snow. No sign of the Cossack patrol. No sign of anyone.

The route to Vyazma ran toward the Russian interior, away from the retreating army, away from anything resembling food or shelter or hope. The map in Marchetti's head showed a scattering of villages along this road—burned or abandoned, if the pattern held. But they had to try.

They found the corpse at midday.

He lay facedown in a drift at the edge of a clearing, a French infantryman's coat frozen stiff around him. The wounds that had killed him were not visible—perhaps he had simply lain down and let the cold take him, which was how most of them would go. His haversack lay under him, half-buried.

Jean-Baptiste reached him first. The boy knelt, brushed the snow from the dead man's face, and closed the staring eyes with a gentleness that surprised Marchetti. Then he opened the haversack.

Inside: a crust of black bread, frozen hard as a stone. A piece of dried sausage. A handful of barley.

The boy's hand closed around the bread. He did not look up.

"It's his," Lefebvre said, coming up behind them. "He's dead. Doesn't need it."

"That doesn't make it ours."

"The dead can't eat." Lefebvre's voice was flat. "We can. That's the whole argument."

Jean-Baptiste stood, clutching the bread to his chest. His face was young and desperate and ashamed, all at once. "I found it. It's mine."

"It's not yours," Marchetti said. "It's ours."

The boy took a step back. "You'd share it? All of it? With the girl? With him?" He jerked his chin at Aubert, who leaned against a tree with Simon's arm around him, barely conscious. "He's dying. What's the point of feeding a dying man?"

The words hung in the frozen air. Simon's hand twitched toward his belt knife. Lefebvre's face went hard.

"The point," Marchetti said slowly, "is that we are not animals. Yet."

"Feels like we are," Jean-Baptiste muttered.

"It feels like that until your belly's full. Then it's easy to be ashamed of what you did to fill it." Marchetti stepped closer, not threatening, just taking up the space between them. "You think I haven't stolen from corpses? You think any of us haven't? The Emperor's army has eaten horses, dogs, rats, and worse. I've seen men eat their own boots. I've seen men eat other men." He let that land. "But the difference between feeding and devouring is the difference between living and surviving."

"What's the difference?" the boy asked. His voice cracked.

"Living is something you can tell your grandchildren about. Surviving is something you keep quiet in church." Marchetti held out his hand. "We share the bread, or we bury it. One or the other. Now."

For a long moment, the boy did not move. The wind moved through the clearing. Far away, something creaked—a tree, or ice, or a wagon wheel that had no business being out here.

Then Jean-Baptiste looked at the girl. She had not said a word, but her eyes were fixed on the bread in his hands with a hunger that was older than she was. He broke the loaf in half, hesitated, then broke the larger half again.

He handed the biggest piece to her.

She took it without thanking him, sank her teeth into the frozen crust, and chewed with her eyes closed.

Marchetti divided what remained. He gave the sausage to Simon, who pocketed it without a word—Aubert would need it when he woke. The barley went into Lefebvre's haversack for later. The bread crusts went to Jean-Baptiste and himself.

They stood in a circle, chewing the frozen bread, each lost in their own thoughts. The snow began to fall again, small hard pellets driven by a wind that cut through even their thickest garments.

"How far to Vyazma?" Simon asked.

"Three days, maybe," Marchetti said. "If the weather holds and we don't meet anyone."

"We're out of powder," Lefebvre said. He said it simply, as a statement of fact, but the meaning was clear. Out of powder meant out of protection. Out of powder meant that if they met anyone—Cossack, deserter, or worse—they would face them with knives and bare hands against rifles and sabers.

"We know," Marchetti said.

"And we're going the wrong way," Jean-Baptiste added. He had retreated to his usual sullen posture, but there was no anger in it now, just the flat exhaustion that came when hope ran out. "Vyazma's deeper in. We're walking away from every Frenchman between here and France."

"The Frenchmen are dying faster than the Russians," Marchetti said. "The prisoners in Vyazma might still be alive."

"A Frenchman who was captured spying for Napoleon?" Lefebvre shook his head. "My brother made poor choices. If the Russians haven't hanged him yet—"

"They haven't," the girl said.

Everyone looked at her. She had finished her bread and licked each finger clean with a dainty, thorough patience that seemed entirely at odds with her ragged appearance.

"How do you know?" Lefebvre asked.

She considered the question, weighing it the way a merchant weighs coin. "The prisoners in Krasnoye were scheduled for transport to Vyazma. Transport means they are worth something. Men who will be hanged are killed in place." She paused. "My father keeps records."

"Your father is the reason they took Gustave," Lefebvre said. Not accusing—just stating.

"My father is the reason I am alive." The girl looked at him without blinking. "He told me to watch for the red coats. To find the brother. To speak the words his friend would know."

"What words?"

She was silent.

"Enough," Marchetti said. "We'll find the words when we find the man. Get moving." He turned to start them walking, then stopped. Jean-Baptiste had not moved from where he stood over the corpse.

"What is it?"

The boy looked up. His face had lost its sullen cast entirely. It was white, grey-white, the color of a fish belly. "He was alive," Jean-Baptiste said. His voice was small. "When I opened his haversack. He was alive. He moved his hand. He tried to—" The boy stopped. Swallowed. "I took his bread and he watched me. And I walked away."

The silence stretched.

"Then he's dead now," Marchetti said. "And we did what we did, and we live with it, and we move on."

"Can you live with it?"

"No." Marchetti's jaw tightened. "But I live anyway. That's what we do. Now move."

They moved. But as they struck out through the falling snow, Marchetti found himself watching the boy's back, and he younger man's shoulders stiffened under his gaze.

He knew that look. He had worn it himself, twenty years ago, in the printing shop when the master had beaten an apprentice boy half to death and Marchetti had stood by, watching. He had worn it in Italy, in Spain, everywhere the Emperor sent them to kill and die and call it glory.

The look of a man who was beginning to ask questions he would never be able to answer.

Behind them, the corpse lay in the snow, his empty haversack open beside him, his staring eyes filling with frost. The snow covered him quickly, as if the earth was ashamed to show what men did to each other.

They walked east, deeper into the white, and the cold followed them like a thing with teeth.