The Road of Bones Read Online Free Page B

said. ‘Agreed!’
    His breathing slowed. His colour rose again, and after a moment of thinking, he bit his lip and nodded. There was no need to say what had been settled between us. I didn’t ask Alyosha what horrors in his street – or family – had set his nerves so on edge he’d end a friendship rather than hear a word about a man who’d once gone a step too far. And he didn’t volunteer to tell me.
    But curiosity is a weed that spreads. One night I said to my father in what I again pretended was idle innocence, ‘What if the last two Leaders should fall out?’
    â€˜Yuri,’ my father warned. Already his eyes were shifting to the door as if on the other side there might be someone with his ear to the wood. ‘Show more sense, son. Keep your eyes down and your ears closed, and we will all be safer.’
    â€˜But,’ I persisted, ‘no one imagined of the other three that they would prove to be traitors. So what’s to say—?’
    I got no further. The breath was knocked out my body. I found myself against the wall. One of myfather’s fists was close to my face, the other hand clenched round my throat.
    â€˜Enough!’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Not a word more. Your mother and I haven’t crawled like grubs all these long years to have you risk our skins now. This room of ours does not exist, you understand? It might as well be invisible. We wish it were. Your grandmother’s just some bumbling fool who scours the market for food we can afford. Your mother works like an automaton at the factory. She has no thought except to fill her quota of bullets like a good daughter of the state and get to the end of her week. And me? I have no opinions at all. I am a hollow man. I cut my lengths of wood exactly as I’m ordered. I ask no questions and I have no views.’
    He loosened his grip enough to let me take a breath. But he kept on. ‘And that, Yuri, is how we have survived this nightmare so far. That’s why your mother isn’t in a wagon rolling north, and I’m not lying with a bullet in the back of my head. That’s how we stay alive. And that’s how we intend to carry on.’
    â€˜All right!’ I pushed him off. ‘All right!’
    â€˜So no more talk of our remaining Leaders, except to say they are the fine protectors of their people.’
    I nodded. He’d at least offered me the dignity ofletting me know that I was right. ‘Nightmare’, he’d called it. But it was a clear enough warning. And I am grateful because it did make me wary. I waited longer and I listened more.
    And what I learned was something curious. That how you listen matters. Listen in one way and all you hear is praise and gratitude for whatever comes. Listen in another, and things appear in quite a different light.
    The very next week, at Pioneer training camp, Alyosha threw down his wooden rifle at the end of the practice and rubbed his shoulder.
    â€˜I’m so stiff the pains are running up as high as my ears.’
    Sergei, the team leader chosen for his devotion to the troop commissar, promptly rebuked him. ‘Alyosha, when our turn comes to defend the Motherland, the rifles we carry will weigh a whole lot more than these.’
    Behind me, a soft voice said: ‘If we have rifles at all.’
    Sergei spun round at once. All of us knew whoever had spoken was on dangerous ground. The troop commissar didn’t thank us for making jokes about our wooden weapons. That sort of thing was seen, not as high spirits, but as simple mockery – offensiveto the state and showing a lack of respect for all those fighting on our borders, whom we would join one day.
    â€˜Who said that? On your feet, whoever said it!’
    â€˜I said it.’
    The lanky boy who rose left only the shortest pause before carrying on with a broad smile. ‘Haven’t you heard, Sergei, of the glorious way the Thirteenth Volunteers