Nine Layers of Sky (7 page)

That had been over eighty years ago now, but the cold and the darkness were the same. Toward dusk, the train pulled into a small station, and the passengers were allowed out to visit the little kiosk that stood at the end of the platform. Ilya bought bread, and, despite his better judgment, a bottle of vodka. The heroin was wearing off now and he ached for it. There was no chance of scoring. He knew this was a good thing, but it did not feel that way.

The passengers milled about the platform, stamping their feet in the snow. Shivering, Ilya looked upward, but a light mist hung like a veil across the sky, blotting out the stars. They were traveling through the forests now, the deep black woods in which he had spent so much of the last few hundred years. It was good to get out of the city, away from the reek of petrol and pollution. Now, all he could smell was pine resin and snow. He thought again of the forests beyond old Petrograd, the marks of shellfire and revolution and the secret laboratory blazing among the trees. What had really become of Tsilibayev? Where had he disappeared to, and what had become of the thing at the heart of that strange spinning machine? Ilya could hardly believe he had followed his orders so blindly, but at that point, orders had been all that he had left.

Ilya stepped back onto the train. He sank down and took the sword onto his lap, cradling it like a child. His body ached for heroin. He opened the vodka and took a long, burning swallow. When the dour woman came back into the carriage, Ilya glared at her. Muttering, she collected her possessions and moved into the adjoining compartment so that he had the seats to himself. He could not sleep, in spite of the vodka. Instead, he rested his head against the icy window and sat, staring as the train pulled away toward the bleakness of the Kazakh steppes.

Two

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Elena finished cleaning the third-story offices and dragged the bucket out into the corridor, then bent down to wring out the cloth. Her head was splitting: the legacy of a troubling night. Once she had fallen asleep, she dreamed that she had walked into the apartment, only to find it empty: Anna and her mother and even the furniture were gone. But as she looked around her, Elena had realized that it was not the apartment in Almaty at all, but somewhere quite different: known to her, and yet strange. The walls were paneled in birchwood, and the sunlight that fell across them was deep and golden. Wondering, Elena walked over to the window and looked out into an unfamiliar world. Lilies the color of brass nodded by the window, and the sharp, pungent smell of nutmeg wafted in. But the leaves of the lilies were blue and razor-edged, and when she bent toward one, it twisted away from her with a delicate disdain, startling Elena so much that she woke up.

The dream kept returning to her during the course of the day, seeming more real than the dull, corporate surroundings of the oil company. She wondered with dismay whether she might be sick. Perhaps she’d picked up something in Tashkent. A few days off work now would mean a week’s wages down the pan—less money for Canada and she would probably have to buy medicine. She’d stick to dosing herself with green tea for a few days and hope it sorted itself out.

Uneasily, she thought again about the object and its heaviness. What if it was radioactive after all, and she was guarding some kind of toxic lump? Perhaps it was just stress. Mentally, she started the familiar calculations: another month’s wages for herself and Anna, plus the pension, and perhaps if she could talk Gulnara’s brother into another run to Tashkent before he left the country . . .

As she straightened up with the bucket, a familiar voice said in surprise, “Elena?”

She looked up, and there was Fyodor Tereschenko standing in front of her. Instead of the battered leather coat and the old
ushanka
hat with earflaps that he had habitually worn at the cosmodrome, he was dressed in a tight dark suit and he’d shaved off his beard.

“What in the world are you doing here?” Elena asked blankly.

“I’ve come about a job,” Fyodor said. His face crumpled with embarrassment. “Someone mentioned that you were working here. I thought I’d look you up.”

“Aren’t you working at the cosmodrome anymore?”

“Yes. No. Well, not exactly. I came back to see if there’s any work going.” He glanced dubiously at the dripping mop as though Elena might offer him a job on the spot.

“So what’s happening at the cosmodrome?”

“A lot of changes. NASA’s more or less taken over the running of the station, which, between you and me, is just as well. At least they’ve got the money. . . . We do updates for TASS, and we still service the resupply craft. There are a few launches—we’re doing it at bargain rates now: a million dollars instead of three million in Florida. It’s all right for the Americans, but we’re still getting our salaries from Moscow. Except, well . . .” He shrugged, smiling ruefully. “You know what they say. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. I haven’t had any money since January.”

“Well, you’ve heard that Georgian curse, haven’t you?
May you be obliged to live on your salary.
” She paused. “How are you managing?” Perhaps it was a rude question, but in recent years people had stopped caring too much about that. Delayed salaries were an all-too-familiar story.

“I’m moonlighting as a taxi driver in Leninsk. And we’ve still got that little garden. It’s not much, but at least we get to eat. Mind you, Leninsk’s a bloody awful place.” He gestured at his clothes and added bitterly, “Hence the suit. I’m applying for other jobs, anything I can find. But I’m not sure if I stand a chance—I’ve only got a doctorate and ten years’ experience in a redundant space program, after all. I thought there’d be more work once the new station went into orbit, but . . .” His voice trailed away.

“Well, you can see the sort of high-level intellectual tasks I’m engaged in these days,” Elena said wryly. “Little Havroshechka in the fairy tale has nothing on me.”

“And you haven’t even got a magic cow to help you. Elena . . .” He leaned across the bucket and gave her a quick hug, startling them both. There didn’t seem to be much else they could say. They were both embarrassed. They made some vague arrangement to meet up for a drink, but Elena knew it wouldn’t happen. They were too much of a reminder for each other of what each had lost. After a few halfhearted good wishes, Fyodor left.

Elena finished the cleaning and then walked home down Lenina. The sky was overcast and she could smell snow on the wind. Spring was so late this year. The first heavy flakes were falling by the time she reached the apartment. After the disquieting dream, she was almost relieved to step through and hear voices, but they stopped as soon as the door shut behind her. She went into the lounge.

Anna and her mother were sitting side by side on the couch. Their expressions were identical: a quivering, hidden excitement. The money box sat on the table.

“Mama? What’s going on?” Elena asked.

“Look,” Elena’s mother said, beaming. In silence Elena counted the money inside the box. There was more than there had been last night: almost two hundred dollars more. Enough to get to Moscow. Elena sat down, clutching the box.

“Wherever did this come from?”

Smiling, Elena’s mother patted Anna’s arm.

“My Anushka,” she murmured. “I have such good daughters.” She wiped away a tear and Elena stifled her irritation. Her mother meant well, and the years after her father’s death had been hard for them all. She should have more patience.

Anna said, “I got the money yesterday. A bonus, from work.” Her eyes met Elena’s in a sudden, baffling challenge. “I phoned Marina in Moscow. We’ve almost got enough for tickets and start-up money now. When we get to Moscow, we’ll be staying with her for a few days until we find an apartment. And she’s heard of a job, too. In an office.” Again, the challenging look.

“Anna, that’s marvelous,” Elena said. She reached out and hugged her sister, and Anna gave an uncertain smile. “Come and help me with the tea, and then— well, I suppose we’ll have to start to think about packing, won’t we?”

In the kitchen, she pushed the door shut and turned on her sister.

“Where did you get it? Waitresses don’t get bonuses.” She could see the truth in her sister’s face, but she did not want to look at it or let it in. It was like standing on the lip of a precipice. She could hear Gulnara’s voice as clearly as if her friend had been standing in front of her.
I saw her in the Business Club. . . . She introduced me to her boyfriend. He seems nice, doesn’t he?
For a German.

Anna stared at her defiantly. “It
was
a bonus. Sort of.”

“Oh,
Anna.
” Elena put her arms around her sister. “If I’d ever thought you’d—we’d have gotten there with the money. We nearly had enough.”

“It would have taken ages and you know it. I’m not getting any younger, Elena. I’m twenty-nine and I’m sick of it here.” Anna was stiff in Elena’s arms, unyielding.

“Who was he?” Elena asked.

Her sister’s voice was muffled, but Elena couldn’t tell if it was with defiance or shame. “An engineer. From Frankfurt. And there were others. I met them in the Business Club. I didn’t tell you before because I knew what you’d say.” She pulled back and looked Elena in the face. “Look, Elena, it was only a couple of times. Lots of girls do it. The first one said he’d pay me fifty dollars—I thought, that’s a
fortune,
it’s almost five months’ salary. It would just be stupid not to do it. And it was okay. They’re just men. They were nice, really.”

Elena did not know what to say, or to think. Anna, her little sister, suddenly seemed a stranger. “Mama mustn’t know,” she said. Her voice did not sound like her own. Anna nodded vigorously.

“Of course not. So you’ll back me up? Say you knew about the bonus, and we wanted it to be a surprise?”

“All right,” Elena said reluctantly. “But what about the rest of the money? You’re not—you’re not planning to do this again, are you?”

“If we could get another fifty—”

“Anna, no. Will you promise me?”

Slowly, Anna nodded. But a shared girlhood had left legacies: of hidden dolls, borrowed makeup, unfinished homework. Elena had always known when Anna was lying, and vice versa. And Anna was lying now. It wasn’t the issue of sex with strangers, but the familiarity of it that was so depressing. The twenty-first century and here was Anna, trained as a lawyer, but feeling obliged to do what girls had done for thousands of years to get their families out of a jam. And combined with that was the faintest trace of guilt, that she herself hadn’t found the money fast enough, or had the nerve to do what Anna had done. Perhaps she should have joined that dating agency after all, and found a rich foreign businessman. But confronting her sister would be useless; she’d have to think of something else. If she could get hold of a few dollars from somewhere, so that they could just get the tickets sorted out . . .

“Listen,” she said, as another thought occurred to her, “this job in Moscow. Is that real, or something else you made up?”

“No! It’s true.”

“But it’s not in an office, is it?”

After a long pause, Anna said, “No. It’s in a nightclub. But it’s just serving drinks. Nothing more than that.”

I’ll bet,
Elena thought. And she’d have more than a few words with Marina when they got to Moscow. She wasn’t letting Anna near any nightclubs, if she had to lock her in the apartment. But the damage was done; the main thing now was keeping it from their mother. Anna went back into the living room, and Elena leaned against the wall. The cold kitchen felt suddenly stifling. There had to be another way besides prostitution and drudgery.

She thought of Fyodor in his too-small suit; of herself standing in a corridor with an apron and a mop, and then she thought back to the days of the launches: the rocket blasting up from the grasslands in a great, rosy column of fire. You can’t see the stars very well from cities; there’s too much interference. You can’t see clearly at all, but Elena didn’t want to think about that. She stepped into the hall and went quickly toward her bedroom, to where the jewelery box sat on the chest of drawers. Elena sat down on her bed with the box on her lap, and investigated the contents. The ball was intact. At the bottom of the box lay three gold chains, a locket, the bracelet that her father had given her the year he died, and her grandmother’s gold cross. Not much, but maybe enough for a few more dollars. It wasn’t yet four o’clock; the place she had in mind would still be open.

“Anna! Mama! I’m just going out to the post office. I forgot to post the electricity bill,” she called, wrestling with her coat and boots. She stuffed the jewelry box into her bag and ran down the stairs into the street.

Three

KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

Ilya had lost track of the time. How many days had it been since they had left Moscow? Two, or three? He could no longer remember. The hours passed in a blur, but by the time the train pulled into Almaty, both the heroin and the vodka were long gone. Light-headed and shaky, Ilya dragged the sword out onto the platform and stood blinking in the early morning light.

He had visited Almaty years before, when it was still named Vernyi and nothing more than a Russian outpost on the far fringes of what was not yet an empire. How long ago had that been? A hundred and twenty years, perhaps. Coming out of the station, the grey streets with their lacing of bare branches looked like everywhere else, but then Ilya looked up to see the mountains floating high above the city, the dawn frosting their sides with light. A cold clean wind sailed through the streets, making Ilya shiver. But it was a good wind, bringing no sound other than the small rustlings of animals and birds far away in the rocks. Up there in the mountains, there was nothing for miles.

His brow was chilly with sweat. He had no suppliers here, no contacts, but it should be easy enough to buy smack—Ilya shivered again, this time with resolve. He would not go down that road; it led nowhere. He would avoid the bars and the dealers; he would stay clean until he had found what he was looking for. He swore under his breath. He knew he was lying to himself, and he knew what he must now do. He was aware that he was not thinking clearly, that the first priority should be finding the object, but this was a duty he owed to himself, not to Kovalin. Besides, he had no idea where to start looking.
Strange weather
conditions. Curious phenomena.
But the weather here was just the tail end of winter, and the only curious phenomenon in Ilya’s immediate locality appeared to be himself. All Kovalin had been able to tell him for certain was that the object was known to be here in Almaty—or had been several days ago. Ilya sighed.

There was a faded map on the public information board outside the station. Ilya peered at it until he found what he sought, then set off through the streets of this familiar, foreign town.

As he walked through the early morning light, Almaty began to wake around him. He saw an old woman scraping snow from the steps of an underpass. A group of schoolchildren gathered at the foot of a bronze statue. Ilya paused to read the inscription:
Abai.
Memory tugged at him. He remembered a man of that name: an old poet, out among the steppe dwellers, the horse clans, who had recognized Ilya for what he was and did not care. Ilya recalled a round face, Orient-eyed beneath a turban. Words echoed in his head:
Everyone who thinks differently is already an outcast, my
Russian friend. You are neither alone nor unique. You may
have had longer to wait than most of us, but perhaps it is
merely that your time has not yet come.

Abai had been a poet, not a shaman; a seeker of words, not an oracle. But Ilya now stared up at the half-remembered face and wondered whether there was any real difference.

Perhaps it is merely that your time has not yet come.

Ilya mouthed the words aloud, then realized that a group of young mothers was gazing at him in alarm. A woman drew her child closer to her and whispered in its ear. Ilya gave the child a wolfish smile and turned away.

It was a long trudge up the street to his destination, footstep after footstep, shuffling through the snow. He could feel the mountains at his back, a force as strong as the wind, holding him up and driving him on. Before him, past the rows of apartment blocks that lined the street, lay a dark edge of trees. Ilya stepped from the pavement and found himself in the park.

At this time of the day and year, the place was quiet. Ilya made his way between oaks and firs, past a great monument of rearing horses and a man with his bronze mouth open in a silent shout. A flame flickered over the surface of a marble plinth. Ilya stood before it for a moment, head bowed, remembering nightmares of a multitude of wars.

Snow muffled sound and the trees seemed to swallow the light. Ilya walked on until he saw the gleam of gold. The air was freezing, yet his hands and face were suddenly hot. How long had it been since he stood before a place such as this? Two hundred years or more, ever since the priest at the old cathedral of Kiev had cast him out, flung his beads in his face, and damned him for an abomination. Since that day, Ilya had avoided holy ground, and now here he was, seeking it out. Then the need for the drug—its sweetness, the only warmth he had come to rely upon—snatched at him. Ilya leaned, gasping, against the trunk of an oak. What time would the bars open here in Almaty? He was a fool. He should have waited around the railway station. Such places attracted dealers like flies drawn to fresh blood. Ilya swallowed and turned back to the church.

The cathedral floated above the trees, light as a dream. Its walls were painted a rosy pink, the color of a dawn sky. Golden cupolas shone against the clouds. Ilya took a shuddering breath and walked forward. Nothing happened. He was neither beset by priests nor struck by lightning. Moving jerkily, like a puppet, he climbed up the steps and put his hand to the wooden door. It swung open. He stepped across the threshold into a soaring room, and looked up to see gilded stars. They glittered in the candlelight, as though revealed by racing clouds, and the air was heady with incense. Ilya stumbled as if struck, and collapsed into a nearby pew. He was alone in the cathedral. He dragged his gaze upward, to meet the calm golden face of Christ.

The Lord was looking past Ilya toward the door. Ilya had dreaded the thought of meeting Christ’s eyes, and that God seemed prepared to ignore him made things easier. He did not think he could cope with being forgiven, not just yet. Holding tightly to the wooden rail, he pulled himself to his feet and fumbled with the sword. If the priest came in—well, Ilya would just have to start praying, that was all. He carried the sword to the altar and knelt before it. He could not look up, in case he caught Christ in a frown. Instead, he stared grimly ahead to where the golden cross sparkled on the altar.

He placed the sword in front of him, held upright by the hilt. This was an old practice, and perhaps unfitting for a Christian place of worship, but it seemed right. Ilya gritted his teeth and clasped the raw blade with his right hand.

Pain seared through him. He gasped, and his grip involuntarily tightened. A trickle of blood ran down the blade of the sword, and through the haze of pain Ilya whispered, “Lord, let this be a vow, sacred to you, that I will not touch the drug until my journey is over. Let me have a single clean death, not many small ones.” He thought of renouncing vodka, as well, but that was further than he was prepared to go. He needed
something,
he thought. If God were really Russian, then God would surely understand. He added under his breath, “Bring me to my destiny. Show me what it is.” His own words startled him. Years ago, it had been a preoccupation, but it had been a long time since he had considered the question of destiny.

He let go of the blade. It hurt, more than anything had done for years, even the knife in his chest. The whole cathedral swam red, as though the air had turned to blood. But the vow was made. Ilya bound up his hand in the sleeve of his coat and slid the bloodied blade back into its sheath. He would have to clean it later; there was nothing that could be done here. Then he fell back onto a bench and closed his eyes.

His hand throbbed. He tried to focus on the pain, diminish it, but it was overwhelming. Then, through the pain, he heard something. It was not a voice, and yet it spoke to him.

I am here,
it said.
I have found you. I am coming.

Who are you?
Ilya asked, puzzled.

But suddenly there was a hand shaking his shoulder, and a very human voice saying, “Friend? Is everything all right?”

The reflex was too strong. Ilya’s eyes flew open and his good hand reached for the man’s throat. The man stepped back with an exclamation and Ilya saw that it was the priest: a long equine face underneath the tall hat. He did not look old enough to be a priest. His beard was wispy, like coils of black fleece.

“Sorry,” Ilya muttered. “Must have been asleep.”

“It’s my fault,” the priest said quickly. “I shouldn’t have woken you like that. Is everything all right?”

“I—hurt my hand. I fell in the park on the snow, caught it on a broken bottle.”

“People will not use the litter bins,” the priest said in distress. “We put up signs, but everyone just seems to ignore them. I sometimes think that no one cares about anything anymore.”

“I know the feeling,” Ilya said with a thin smile.

“Come into the back office. There’s a toilet there, with a sink. I’ve got a first-aid kit. And tea—that’s always good for shock.” His gaze fell on Ilya’s shrouded sword and he gave a puzzled frown. “You were going fishing? In this weather?”

“Present for my nephew,” Ilya said, improvising hastily. “Birthday.”

“Oh, I see. Well, come on through.”

The thought of the tea was enough to draw Ilya to his feet. He followed the priest through the incense-laden vault, still echoing with the remnants of his vow. But then there was the sudden drumbeat of rain on the wooden dome above him. A flicker of lightning sparked from the gilded icons. Startled, the priest looked up.

“The weather’s broken.”

“Sign of spring,” Ilya said.

“About time. I thought the snow was never going to leave us.”

It felt right, Ilya thought. Whatever storms the spring might bring, winter was passing at last.