Hannibal Rising Page 0,11

leading a half-starved little deer, alive and stumbling, a tasseled swag from some looted mansion looped around its neck, an arrow sticking in its side. Milko picked up an axe.

"Don't waste the blood," Pot Watcher said with a cook's authority.

Kolnas came running with his bowl, his eyes shining. A cry from the yard and Hannibal covered Mischa's ears against the sound of the axe. The Albanian boy cried and gave thanks.

Late in the day when the others had eaten, Pot Watcher gave the children a bone to gnaw with a little meat and sinew on it. Hannibal ate a little and chewed up mush for Mischa. The juice got away when he transferred it with his fingers, so he gave it to her mouth to mouth. They moved Hannibal and Mischa back into the lodge and chained them to the balcony railing, and left the Albanian boy in the barn alone. Mischa was hot with fever, and Hannibal held her tight under the cold-dust smell of the rug.

The flu dropped them all; the men lay as close to the dying fire as they could get, coughing on one another, Milko finding Kolnas' comb and sucking the grease from it. The skull of the little deer lay in the dry bathtub, every scrap boiled off it.

Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Watcher gave gristle and broth to Hannibal and Mischa. He carried nothing to the barn.

The weather would not break, the sky low and granite grey, sounds of the woods hushed except for the crack and crash of ice-laden boughs.

The food was gone days before the sky cleared. The coughing seemed louder in the bright afternoon after the wind dropped. Grutas and Milko staggered out on snow-shoes.

After the length of a fever dream, Hannibal heard them return. A loud argument and scuffling. Through the bars of the banister he saw Grutas licking a bloody birdskin, throwing it to the others, and they fell on it like dogs. Grutas' face was smeared with blood and feathers. He turned his bloody face up to the children and he said, "We have to eat or die."

That was the last conscious memory Hannibal Lecter had of the lodge.

Because of the Russian rubber shortage the tank was running on steel road wheels that sent a numbing vibration through the hull and blurred the view in the periscope. It was a big KV-1 going hard along a forest trail in freezing weather, the front moving miles westward with every day of the German retreat. Two infantrymen in winter camouflage rode on the rear deck of the tank, huddled over the radiators, watching for the odd German Werewolf, a fanatic left behind with a Panzerfaust rocket to try to destroy a tank. They saw movement in the brush. The tank commander heard the soldiers on top firing, turned the tank toward their target to bring his coaxial machine gun to bear. His magnifying eyepiece showed a boy, a child coming out of the brush, bullets kicking up the snow beside him as the soldiers shot from the moving tank. The commander stood up in the hatch and stopped the shooting. They had killed a few children by mistake, the way it happens, and were glad enough not to kill this one.

The soldiers saw a child, thin and pale, with a chain locked around his neck, the end of the chain dragging in an empty loop. When they set him near the radiators and cut the chain off him, pieces of his skin came away on the links. He carried good binoculars in a bag clutched fiercely against his chest. They shook him, asking questions in Russian, Polish, and makeshift Lithuanian, until they realized he could not speak at all.

The soldiers shamed each other into not taking the field glasses from the boy. They gave him half an apple and let him ride behind the turret in the warm breath of the radiators until they reached a village.

9

A SOVIET MOTORIZED unit with a tank destroyer and heavy rocket launcher had sheltered at the abandoned Lecter Castle overnight. They were moving before dawn, leaving melted places in the snow of the courtyard with dark oil stains in them. One light truck remained at the castle entrance, the motor idling.

Grutas and his four surviving companions, in their medical uniforms, watched from the woods. It had been four years since Grutas shot the cook in the castle courtyard, fourteen hours