Nine Layers of Sky (14 page)

Two

KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Ilya spent the night in a fitful half-sleep, waiting for the dawn. Even here, high on the
zhelau,
he did not want to rule out the possibility that the
rusalki
might still find him, taste his pain on the wind, and seek him out. He was no longer worried about what they might do to him, but one of them had already attacked Elena and he knew that it had intended to kill. She had their property, and they wanted it back. And what of the
volkh
?

At last, a thin grey haze appeared, high beyond the little window of the hut. Ilya waited until the light had grown and then, stiffly, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and slung the sword across his shoulder. Elena was curled on the top bunk, asleep. He looked down at her peaceful face for a long moment, longing to climb in beside her, then made his way outside.

The storm had passed, leaving a chilly wind in its wake. Ilya went around the back of the hut to piss, then stood for a moment, leaning against the wall until his vision righted itself and the world stopped spinning. Hunger, fatigue, and the drug leaching from his veins were taking their toll. There was a ringing in his ears.

“Dobreden!”

Ilya spun round, reaching for his sword. He had heard nothing, but a man was standing by the side of the hut. He wore the knee-high, flat-soled boots that the Kazakhs had proved reluctant to relinquish, jeans, a jacket with an American flag on the breast pocket, and a Kyrgyz hat. His face was round and beaming; his smile revealed a row of gold teeth. He could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty.

“Good morning!” he said again.

“Good morning,” Ilya responded, warily. Friend or enemy, this person was cheerful and that was always to be avoided when one had just woken up.

“Lovely day.”

“I suppose it is, yes. Are you working up here?”

The stranger nodded. “Took the animals up last week for a bit of spring grazing. Thought I’d get away from the wife. No doubt she’s pleased to see the back of me, too. I’m in the hut over the ridge. You?”

“Car broke down,” Ilya said, improvising swiftly. “On the Kagornak Road. Over there somewhere.” He waved, indicating a vague sweep of countryside. “My wife and I were coming back from visiting relatives. We went looking for help, but then the rain came up.”

“What’s wrong with your car?”

“I’ve no idea.” True enough. He had learned to drive, more or less, back in the 1940’s, but that was about the extent of his knowledge. “It keeps stopping and starting.” He tried to look urban and ineffectual.

“Sounds like the timing’s gone, maybe.”

“I’m sure we can get it going again,” Ilya said, trying to discourage any impending offers of assistance. “But in the dark, with the rain—”

“Oh, best to find shelter. That’s what the huts are for, after all. Any number of folk have been saved from a night in the cold up here. Summer and spring, you’re all right—but winter, it’ll kill you, right enough.”

Ilya nodded politely.

“You don’t look so good.” The bright eyes creased with momentary concern. “You all right?”

“I’ve had the flu.”

“Want to watch that. Can turn to pneumonia. Can be nasty. Here.” The man produced a plastic bottle full of a white, viscous liquid. “Take it. I’ve been putting it up over the last week.”

Ilya looked dubiously at the bottle. “What is it?”

“What does it look like?”

“Milk?”

“You’re Russian, aren’t you?”
And unspeakably effete,
the following glance conveyed. “Of course it’s milk—of sorts.” He laughed at his own joke. “It’s
kymiss.
Have it. I’ve got plenty.” He undid the stopper and the unmistakable odor of fermented mare’s milk wafted forth. It could be some trick, but the man’s face was guileless and there was nothing of the supernatural about him. Besides, there was a comradeship in the mountains. People hung together against more impersonal enemies: wolves and the weather. Ilya thought next of his vow: no more heroin. But he had made no promises to God about drinking, and did this actually count as alcohol? It was practically a foodstuff. He gave a brief nod.

“Thanks.” He took a quick swallow. It smelled of meat. It tasted foul.

“Give it to your wife.” The gold teeth glittered in the light of the rising sun. “Wonderful stuff for breakfast. And bread. I have more back at the hut. I don’t need it, and you’ll be hungry.” He handed Ilya a half-loaf of flat
lepeshka.
“Good luck with the car. If you want to go to the village, there’s a path down along the ridge.” He pointed. “Keep heading south—that’s that way. Take you about an hour. Ask for a man called Nurzhan Alibek—he’s a milkman; he mends cars, too. Lives in a small red house on the left. You’ll see the goats. Tell him I sent you. I am Zhanat Bigaliev.”

“Thanks,” Ilya said. “For the bread, too.”

“Good luck,” the man said again, and set off across the
zhelau,
whistling and striking aside the wet grass with his stick. Ilya watched him go with envy.
This is
what I should do. Leave the cities behind, leave the world to
itself and come up here with the foxes and the eagles and
the small creatures.
But he had tried that, years ago, and though there had been peace for a time in the silences of the earth, it had not worked for long. He had grown restless, as if designed for action.

“Ilya?” He turned to see Elena coming from the hut, clutching her still-damp coat around her. Her makeup had run in last night’s rain, leaving dark circles around her eyes. She looked very pale. He felt a wave of protectiveness. “I heard you talking. Is everything all right?”

“I met a herdsman. He gave me this.” He held out the bottle. She looked horrified.

“Oh, God, what is it?
Kymiss?
For
breakfast?
Not that I’m turning it down. I’m hungry enough to eat the original horse.” She took a sip and made a face, then handed the bottle back. “
Repulsive.
But it’s what they live on up here, you know.
Kymiss
and horsemeat sausages and bread. It’s the worst diet in the world and they all seem to live to a hundred and ten.” Then she gave him an unsettled glance and stopped, as if fearing she had been tactless.

“There’s bread. No sausages.”

She wolfed down the
lepeshka.
“What did you tell him?” she asked between mouthfuls.

“Our car broke down. He gave me directions to the nearest village.”

“Do you think that’s where we should go?”

“If we’re still making for the border, yes. Find someone with a car, who doesn’t ask too many questions.”

“They won’t ask questions,” Elena said with certainty. “Not if we can pay. I doubt there’s a policeman for miles.”

“Let’s hope they still think we’re on the other side of the mountains,” Ilya said.

“Which is where we should be, after all.” Elena drew closer to him, wrapping herself in her coat. “Ilya—what if it happens again? What if we change worlds?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to see.” He had to fight the urge to put his arm around her; he did not think she would welcome it. “You still have the . . . thing? It’s safe?”

She nodded.

“We shouldn’t stop in one place for too long,” he said, though if he was honest with himself, what he really wanted to do was head back beneath the meager covers of the bunk and stay there. Preferably with Elena, but he stopped that line of thought before his unruly imagination got out of hand.

“Give me the bottle,” Elena said. She made sure that the stopper was tight, and put it in the pocket of her coat. “It’ll keep us going. Maybe we can get shashlik or something in the village. I’d kill for a bath. Does my face look awful?”

“No, of course not,” he said, and meant it.

She grimaced. “You’re lying. But thanks anyway. I’d kill for some proper food, too.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to.”

“I can skin a rabbit, you know. My dad used to take us camping when we were kids, before he disappeared into a bottle of vodka. Excuse me for a minute. I’ve got to find a bush.”

Ilya waited uneasily until she came back. The sun was now high over the peaks and the sky had the clear, blown look of early spring. With luck, the weather would hold. And they would find a car, someone to drive them over the border, and he could sleep.

He said nothing of his concerns to Elena, suspecting that she had worries of her own. The day before, when she had spoken to her sister, he had been able to feel the tension in her, like a thin steel wire under strain. He ducked under a spray of fir, sending a shower of raindrops to the wet earth. “Did your sister say whether she’d heard anything about the murders?”

“She said there was nothing on the news. And they’d had no word from the
militzia.
”

Ilya frowned. No move from the authorities was almost as ominous as a visit. He still did not entirely understand how the media worked, why certain stories were obsessively picked apart and others neglected. Some of it was political, clearly, yet to Ilya this did not explain the avid interest in actors and celebrities. Perhaps it was no more than the old need for fairy stories.

Elena went on, “If someone gets killed, it’s usually all over the news. It’s not all that common, even these days. Russia’s very violent, but it’s not the same here. I think the authorities prefer it if people feel unsafe.”

Ilya smiled. “You’re probably right. It justifies hard-line policing. It’s been the same since the first of the tsars.”

“They don’t need an excuse,” Elena said sourly. “But the papers—
Karavan
or
Pravda
—would all be investigating.
Karavan
has broken some real scandals, even though the authorities keep trying to close them down. Perhaps we can buy a newspaper when we reach the village. And we have to get some more boots.”

Ilya nodded. This sudden silence on the part of the authorities spoke to him of the
rusalki
and the
volkh,
of the old and buried secrets of the political past.

They had reached the end of the ridge now, and he could see the track running down through a bank of birches. New leaves shone green and some of the branches were decked with pieces of rag and cloth. A wishing tree. He remembered an old country code: a green ribbon for nature, blue for the sky, pink for the moon, yellow for the sun and the sisters of dawn. He had nothing to tie to the tree, but he tapped a branch as they passed, as if the luck might rub off on him.

They had now come some way along the slope. The peaks were receding against the morning sky, a pall of fumes marking the presence of the city below. Farther down, past a thick line of oaks and ash, he could see a roof.

“Maybe that’s the village,” he said, pointing.

Elena’s face looked pinched in the early morning cold. “I hope so. I’ve run out of cigarettes.” Realizing that he was not the only one with an addiction made Ilya feel less feeble.

“So have I,” he confessed. “Or I’d offer you one.”

“I ought to give it up. It costs me a fortune.”

“I don’t think this would be a good time.”

She smiled. “You’re probably right.”

The track led down through the woods and over a stream heavy with snowmelt and rain. Ilya crouched down by the bank and splashed his face with icy water, but it did little to dissipate the woolliness in his head. They came out onto a potholed curve of road and there was the village below, no more than a scatter of low houses with corrugated roofs and tilted porches, the gardens a tangle of cherry trees and old raspberry canes. Chickens picked along the roadside. There was no one to be seen.

“What should we do, knock on a door?” Elena asked.

“We’ll see if anyone’s about first,” Ilya said. He did not want to contact the milkman, the horse herder’s friend. Sooner or later, they would meet and perhaps talk. The stories would not add up, and in country districts people remembered such things, became suspicious. And if their descriptions were circulated at any point . . . It was not worth the risk.

“Look,” Elena said. “We can ask there.”

A kiosk stood by the side of the road and Ilya could see that the shutters were up. He followed Elena to the little booth and peered in. A teenage girl sat inside on a stool, reading a fashion magazine.

“Good morning,” Elena said. The girl grunted. “Ilya, what kind of cigarettes do you want?”

“All we’ve got are Polyot,” the girl said.

Ilya watched as Elena bought two packets. “Better than those American things. They give you cancer, you know.”

Ignoring this, Elena said to the girl, “We’re looking for someone with a car. We’re trying to get to Bishkek. We can pay.”

The girl stood so that her face was framed in the opening of the kiosk. She was Kazakh, with dark brows over green, Oriental eyes.

“I could ask my uncle. He’s got a car. He does taxi work sometimes.” She vanished through the back of the kiosk and reappeared a moment later, tottering on a pair of stiletto boots. Elena frowned.

“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked.

The girl looked at her as though she were mad. “It’s Saturday.”

“Of course it is,” Elena said faintly. It was the girl’s turn to frown.

“Why isn’t he wearing any shoes?”

“She’s wearing mine,” Ilya said. “I took her fishing. She broke a heel.” He looked pointedly at the girl’s boots, but her expression had changed to one of sympathy.

“I did that once,” she said.

How did women manage with these modern fashions?
Ilya wondered, but he already knew. They found men

and borrowed their shoes. They followed the girl around the back of a house. Goats looked up mildly, demon-eyed, as they passed.

“Mama?” the girl called. “Some people need a lift.”

The mother appeared, dusting flour from her hands.

“Where to?”

“Bishkek.”

“That’s a long way. Four hours, at least.”

“We can pay.”

The woman shrugged. “Well, it’s up to you. If it was me, I’d catch the bus.”
Mad Russians,
her expression implied.