Nine Layers of Sky (19 page)

Interlude

BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

Shadia Anikova drove her sister back to First City late on Sunday afternoon. She thought they were never going to get out of the dacha; Natasha kept forgetting one thing or another and running back indoors. Anikova sat impatiently in the driver’s seat, trying to appear unconcerned. She was watching the light, still a pale brightness in the west, but soon evening would fall and Anikova would not have confessed to any member of her family that she was afraid of driving back in the dark. She kept remembering the second breach, that unnatural hollow in the air and the shadowy room beyond.

As soon as she had realized what was happening, Anikova had to fight the urge to step through the gap and see what lay on the other side. She once again recalled what she had been told by Central Command about the Mother Country: that it was degenerate, falling apart, finished. That its influence could no longer be tolerated upon her own world, that all gates between them must be sealed, except one, and that the means to control that gate—the stolen distorter coil— must be retrieved so that Russia’s dreams could be bled through it. A pity for the government’s sake, she thought, that Tsilibayev’s duplicate coils had not been more stable. If they had functioned more successfully, Central Command could have relied upon one of them to power a gate, rather than chasing down this old, lost piece of technology. But Central Command would still have wanted the original coil retrieved, in case it fell into the wrong hands.

Their agents were working on that retrieval even now, dispatched into what was fast becoming hostile terrain. She had seen the latest report this morning: that they had hired locals to help them in their search for the coil, but also that they believed Byelovodyean insurgents had slipped through the gap and were working against them. Anikova’s sympathies slipped and slid; she concentrated grimly on the road ahead.

The road to the city took the vehicle past the long lakeshore and back through the forest. Though they were well within the boundaries of Pergama here, Anikova could not suppress an atavistic shiver. The
rusalki
kept to the deep woods, along with the northern predators—zhuren and packwolves. Pergama was supposed to be a safe and gentle province, but Anikova did not like the way that the trees bowed close to the sweep of the road, fading away into the darkness that covered half the world.

Finally, the glow of First City and its ring of refineries appeared through the falling darkness, familiar and comforting. Anikova pulled up outside the compartment, and the doors of the
siydna
whispered open.

“There you go,” she said to her sister.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Natasha asked.

“No, I ought to get back. I’ve got work tomorrow.” More sessions with Kitai, a dismaying prospect.

“Well, thanks,” Natasha said, leaning in through the car door to kiss her sister. “It’s been good to see you.” In the heights of the compartment block, a blind twitched. Anikova pulled away in a whirl of dust. On the wall of the compartment building, a word had appeared in fluorescent paint:
Pamyat.
It gleamed wanly through the twilight, the name of a dissident group. Anikova supposed that she should report it, but they usually used fadepaint and in the morning, she knew, it would be gone with all the rest of the dreams.

Part Seven

One

KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Elena awoke and lay blinking at the ceiling. A pale dawn light illuminated the room. Beside her, she could hear Ilya’s quiet breathing. She rolled over and raised herself up on one elbow. In sleep, his face seemed untroubled, younger. She regarded him with desire and tenderness and dismay. She knew what her mother would think: to sleep with a derelict off the streets, a madman. But if you could walk between one world and another, who was to say what was or was not possible? She believed Ilya’s story, and that was the disturbing thing.
Love will make you do this, believe all
manner of lies. . . .
Perhaps madness was infectious.

Ilya twitched like a dog, dreaming. Elena thought:
eight hundred years. That’s a lot of ex-girlfriends.
Or wives, even? The thought that there might be some
babushka
somewhere, still remembering the lunatic she had loved as a girl, was somehow a terrible one. She had seen a Hollywood film once, which also featured immortal men. Their relationships had, of necessity, become very complicated. All men had history, but surely never so much. It would take getting used to. Best to live in the present as much as possible.

Ilya, stirring, smiled when he saw her. It was the smile of someone who has woken up to find that he has won the lottery, and all at once Elena knew how much she had fallen in love.

She leaned across and murmured into his ear, “We’ll have to buy some condoms today.” He looked at her oddly and it took her a moment to interpret his expression. She sat up. “Did you think this was only for last night?” Or maybe that had been his intention after all, and she had been wrong. Like so many men, perhaps once was enough to move him on. She felt cold, but he said, “To be honest, Elena, I wasn’t sure if it was just out of pity.”

She lay down once more, her head on his shoulder. “No. No, it wasn’t.”

Don’t tell him how you feel,
her inner caution counseled. Early morning declarations of love were the one thing designed to bring masculine walls back up again. She had made that mistake with Yuri. The moment you let your guard down with a man, they began moving smoothly away. She slid an arm around him, trying to sound matter-of-fact and sincere at the same time. “I really wanted to. I still do.”

He made love to her again, with a new assurance in his touch: the gradual return of sexual confidence, and a kind of gratitude that ended in release for them both. When it was over, Elena lay thinking. She had heard that heroin could induce impotence as well as all the other losses it brought in its wake. She wondered whether that might have contributed to the sense of defeat in him. And she was as prone as anyone else to thinking that she could be the one to make it better.
All
he needs is the love of a good woman. . . .
But it wasn’t as easy as that and she knew it; she had fallen into that particular trap before now, and it always ended badly.
Because it always brings resentment, and if you need them
to need you, what happens when they stop?

“Elena? You’re frowning.” His voice was half-worried, half-amused.

“I’m hungry.”

“Well, then.” He kissed her, lingeringly, and reached for his clothes. “Let’s find some breakfast.”

Downstairs, they ate bread and jam in silence. Elena found that, despite her best efforts, her gaze kept straying to Ilya’s face, studying the sharpness of its planes and angles. When she discovered that she was becoming obsessed with the way he chewed, she told herself to snap out of it and looked out of the window instead, watching families heading to church. She could hear the bell ringing out over the town and wondered how many people would have attended the Friday service at the mosque as well. She knew a number of folk who went to both, hedging their bets. Not for the first time, she wished that she could believe in God; if ever she needed prayer, it was now. Her thoughts returned to the magnet sitting opposite her.

Men were supposed to have greater visual acumen, but if that was the case, why weren’t they the ones who sat staring like sheep at the women they’d just slept with? She turned abruptly back to the table and found that he was. It was his turn to flush and look away. He said carefully, “I need to know what you want to do.”

“About what? About us?” Her voice was too sharp.

“About us, and about the thing in your handbag. Do you have a pen?”

“Here.”

On the back of a paper napkin, he wrote:
I don’t
know who’s listening, following.

Do you think we should go to the lake?
She wrote in reply. When Ilya had spoken of it, she had realized that she knew where Manas might mean. It had been a military base, the kind of secret that everyone knew about. It had been said to test torpedoes for the Soviet Navy, and she remembered her father joking about how the Navy couldn’t afford an ocean, only a lake. She looked at Ilya.

He said aloud, “Elena—you have money now. That’s originally why you wanted to do this. You could go on to Moscow, take your family.” She could tell that it cost him to say this.

“I gave them most of the money. I can always follow on.” A tangle of feelings: responsibility; duty to her mother and Anna warring with this new, fragile love; a consuming sexual need; sheer curiosity and the allure of something glimpsed on the other side of life. It was unlikely that she would ever work on a space program again, and yet now there was this improbable chance of a new world just around the corner. Unless she had simply gone mad.

“Well, we can be mad together,” Ilya murmured, and she realized that she had spoken aloud. She took his hand, weighed it in her own.

“What do you want, Ilya?”

“I have more purpose now than I’ve had for years. A world to protect and someone to—” He hesitated.

“To what?”

“Someone to be with.”

She wanted to think that he had been about to talk of love, but perhaps it was no more than her own desires putting words into his mouth. But his fingers tightened around her own. With his free hand, he wrote:
Could be trap, we must be careful. But even so, I
think we should follow Manas, go to Issy Kul.
And Elena agreed.

Before they left the guesthouse, she rang her mother from the telephone in the hall, but there was still no reply. Elena was torn between wanting to go back, to find out what had befallen her mother and sister, and not just because of the
militzia.
She hoped that they had gotten the money and were on their way to Moscow by now, though heaven alone knew what Anna would get up to in the capital. But her sister wasn’t the only one sleeping with men she’d just met. Perhaps Anna should be keeping an eye on her and not the other way around. Or maybe it was just that Elena was tired of the responsibility of keeping the family together and wanted, selfishly, something of her own. She went back to the room and found Ilya, putting her arms around him and resting her cheek between his shoulder blades.

“We need to plan. How to travel, which way.”

“I suggest the bus station or a private car.”

“If we’re going into the back country, I might need to cover my head. Some of these parts are very Islamic.”

Ilya gave her an odd look. “You come from an Islamic country.”

“I come from a Soviet one. Kazakh women have never worn the veil.” She smiled, thinking of the miniskirted girls that thronged the streets outside the mosque. “Anyway, I don’t usually pay attention to that kind of thing. I don’t like all this talk of God.”

“Because it isn’t rational, defies all evidence?” He was teasing her, but there was an edge to his voice all the same.

She smiled. “Religion is the opiate of the people, you know.”

“But they never complete that quote, do they?
Religion is the opiate of the people, the heart in a heartless
world.
And isn’t it also said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything? . . . Do you believe me, Elena, when I tell you what I am?”

“Over the past few days I have seen a lot that defies evidence. Including you.” She stood abruptly and held out her hand. “We should get going.”

The bus station was crowded with people bound for the villages; there were no free cars. Elena and Ilya had to wait for the bus, perched on a bench next door to a chai vendor. Ilya was looking about him, tight-mouthed and wary, scanning the crowd for the glimpse of a familiar face. She knew he was looking for the
volkh,
or for the man she now knew as Manas. Ilya glanced at her and shook his head.

Perhaps it was only her imagination, but he seemed less pale, and the trembling that had accompanied withdrawal had gone. She wondered if he had really managed to drive off the drug, and what circumstances might serve to turn him back to it. It was so seductive to think that all would be well as long as she stayed with him, but she knew that she was not a match for heroin. No love—that of her mother or Anna or herself—had been able to keep her father alive. Drowning in vodka or sleeping in the embrace of morphine, it was all the same in the end. She thought that human love was never enough. But maybe a world could compensate?

She checked her bag again, obsessively, for the object, which now lay next to a newly purchased packet of condoms. Elena smiled. And now the bus was rumbling along, spewing exhaust and passengers. A mass of people surged toward the open doors. Elena elbowed her way forward, with Ilya at her heels. She found a seat near the back and collapsed into it, searching for a tissue to wipe the grime from the window. The bus smelled of sweat and food. Ilya leaned back against the seat, still scanning their fellow passengers. His mouth turned down with evident frustration and he closed his eyes. One hand gripped the sword in its traveling case, the other reached for her own and held it. Ilya, it seemed, had found some sort of anchor. Elena, in turn, clutched the bag. A short wait, turbulent with people fighting for the remaining seats, and then the bus was pulling out again, trundling through the suburbs of Bishkek toward the mountains.

Two

KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Ilya dozed, waking to a glimpse of the high peaks. It was raining again. He could see it streaming down the windows of the bus, blotting out the view. If he did not close his eyes, he thought, he would do nothing but stare at Elena.
She is a flame, and I am already too close.
He might have lived a foolish life in these last few years, but he was still not entirely a fool and he knew what would happen. She would take the place of the drug for a little while, become the center of his world, and then she would grow tired of trying to love a hopeless cause and leave. Self-indulgent perhaps, but he had watched it happening in the bars along Leninski Prospekt: the arguments, the recriminations, the women walking out for the last time and the men turning back to the vodka with a curse and a sigh. He did not know if he could be better than he was, and he owed it to Elena to find out before too much damage was done. It was not likely that she would fall in love; she was being kind, that was all. But he knew that it was already too late for him.

The bus was limping up the mountainside. Finally, it coughed and stopped. There was a murmur from the passengers: part anger, part resignation.

“What’s wrong?” Elena asked. “Have we broken down?” She did not sound surprised.

Ilya went with some of the other men to look. The driver had pulled into a space by the side of the road. Smoke poured from beneath the hood. It was evident that they would not be going any farther for some time. Ilya glanced uneasily around, wondering whether this was a normal fault or sabotage.

“Don’t blame me,” the driver said, catching Ilya’s eye. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Can you fix it?” Ilya asked mildly.

“What do you think I’m trying to do? There’s a place up the road; they sell food if you want some.” He turned his back on the assembled passengers. Ilya went back onto the bus and explained the situation to Elena.

“He says there’s a cafe nearby. I’ll get you some tea, if you want.”

She smiled at him. “Thanks. Yes, please. But be careful.” Other passengers, clearly Kyrgyz, were retrieving flasks and bundles of food from the roof racks, and opening their paper to the crossword puzzles. There was nothing to do but wait.

“Don’t let the bus leave without me,” Ilya said to Elena. She gave him a look:
What, are you mad?
It was immensely reassuring.

He made his way down from the bus. Outside, the road was slick with rain. The mountains towered above the little yurt of the cafe: a shadow of white upon whiteness. He could see the high chasms of glaciers, carved into indigo rock. It made him long for the enclosed confines of the bus, for the everyday. The yurt was as fragile as a mushroom against the vastness of the world.

Ilya listened as he walked toward the yurt, keeping an eye out for the slinking forms of the
rusalki
or the dark shadow of the little ghoul. Manas’ words echoed in mockery:
They are not your enemies.
But he still did not know what to believe. It would not have surprised him to see the
volkh
spring up from the ground like a dark spirit, but the land was empty. He could hear nothing. The mountains swallowed sound. He bought tea and bread and carried it back to the bus.

“Are we far from the lake?” Elena asked, huddled in her fur coat. The heating inside the bus was gone, and the windows steamed like a
banya.

“I don’t know. I think we’ll have another few hours to go. If we ever get moving.” He handed her the tea. Both of them, he knew, were thinking of what might lie ahead. Ilya leaned back and closed his eyes, and found himself remembering once more.

He did not recall much about his early childhood; only the long pain-filled nights, and his mother bringing a handful of snow to cool his hot forehead when the fever struck. The worst of it was being unable to move, having to be carried everywhere, seeing nothing but the wooden ceiling of the
izba
because he could not turn his head. At least he could hear, and he spent most of his time listening, giving forms to the creatures he heard deep within the forest, that he had never seen.

Ilya, having no brothers or sisters, thought only that this was what it was like to be a child. When he grew up, he told his mother, he would run as fast as the little dog that crept under the
izba
at night to sleep, as fast as the wind. He did not understand why, when he said this, her face would grow still and fearful and sad. And then the visitors came.

They arrived at the end of autumn, after a day of storms. Ilya liked the thunder, the pattern of light and shadow across the ceiling, the sudden flicker of lightning, the sound of rain on the walls of the
izba.
But this storm was different, terrifying in its intensity: the thunder rolling across the land and the wind snapping trees before it. Ilya might have expected it to deafen him, but in fact, it did not. It was so loud that it seemed muffled, like distant drums. But when the visitors arrived, everything became quiet.

It was the silence that first attracted his attention. His mother had gone into the yard, taking advantage of the lull in the storm to feed the frightened chickens, and Ilya had been idly listening to her movements. Then, she was simply gone, and so was everything else. He could hear nothing. It was as though someone had thrown a blanket over his head. Then the door of the
izba
creaked open.

“Who’s there?” Ilya asked, hearing his voice—high and frightened—and hating it. “Who is it?”

There was no reply. Gradually he became aware of a strange singing note that shook the
izba
and made the walls rattle. He felt it travel all the way through his bones, moving up through his legs, making his flesh twitch and crawl. The inner sound reached his skull. There was a burst of light, so bright that Ilya cried out.

A voice said, “Boy? We need water. Fetch it.” The voice rasped, as though forced out of a distorted throat.

Ilya said, “I can’t move.”

“Fetch it,” another voice said, soft and dreadful.

And Ilya Muromyets found that he could stand up. His legs were weak, and he had to hold himself upright by clutching the few sticks of furniture, but he could stand and walk. In a daze, he fetched a horn cup of water. He tried to see who was speaking to him. There were three of them—all women, all beautiful—and the light bent and twisted around them. And something else was there, too: a glowing unseen presence that spoke to him without words.

You have been born for me. We belong together; we are
part of the same dream. I will wait for you.

He held out the cup of water and something took it. He felt hot, dry fingers brush his own. There was again the high singing note and then they were gone. The cup fell to the floor. And Ilya’s life as he now knew it, began.

He opened his eyes. The bus was moving, grinding up the mountain road once more. Elena was peering out of the window. Ilya’s thoughts, when he could wrench them from the wonderful distraction of Elena, turned again to the past: to Manas, to the Nightingale Bandit, to all the old heroes. And, finally, he listened to the instinct that had been nudging him ever since he had stepped through that rift in the air, to another world, the instinct that told him that Byelovodye was where his origins lay. The rift was not an anomaly. He himself was anomalous—he and all the other
bogatyri,
and the creatures that pursued him.

After all these years, ironically thanks to Manas, he finally understood what Tsilibayev had been trying to achieve. Not a time machine, or some nonsense cooked up by the NKVD, but a way to enter a dream-world by mimicking older technology. But where had that technology come from? Ilya had destroyed his chance to find out, by following orders blindly and firing the lab. He wondered what had become of Tsilibayev, how long he had lived in Russia’s parallel. Was time even the same there? Could Tsilibayev still be alive? He’d surely had a better deal than Ilya, whatever had happened to him—and yet, perhaps Tsilibayev had still missed out, for the Great Patriotic War had made Russians what they were, had created the unity, the love of nation and of one another. Ilya sighed. But perhaps there was a nightmare dimension, too: nationalism, insularity, paranoia.
Perhaps it is they who are
real, and we who are nothing more than their dark dream.
And what about the coil? For now, Ilya knew what had spoken to him all those years ago in the
izba.

We belong together; we are part of the same dream. I
will wait for you.

But if that was the case, how had that breach opened up in the hotel room, when Ilya himself had been across town, eavesdropping on Manas? He could find no answers.

Elena dozed, her head on his shoulder. It was midafternoon by the time they reached Balykchy at the easternmost end of the lake. Issy Kul snaked into the distance, splitting the mountains with a marbled rift of water. The rain had swept down into the passes, leaving a pale spring sky in its wake. They left the bus at Balykchy, waited an hour, then caught the next bus to Karakol.