The Sea Runners (8 page)

Karlsson eased the gate open just enough for them to slip through with the guns. Minutes stretched, then the three were back from the canoe and the blackness of the Kolosh village.

"We're away to the cache," whispered Melander. "Stand ready with the gate."

Fewer than fifty paces later, Melander and Braaf halted beside the blacksmith shop.

"What're we doing here?" Wennberg rumbled low to Melander. "Where's this hidey-hole of Braaf's?"

"Here."

"Here? Here where?"

"In the sill loft. Up over your forge." The sill loft was a narrow platform, like a span of board ceiling, laid across the center of the rafters of the smithing shop. Wood to make windowsills and doorframes was dried there winter-long in the heat rising from the forges, and until the summer building season came, no one paid the loft any mind. Except of course Icelander, who observed now: "In Gotland, we say the darkest plage is under the candlestick."

"You pissants!" The stun of it set Wennberg I jack a step, these weeks of the war within himself, escape-or-betray, the lobes of his mind standing and fighting each other like crabs over the question, and all the while—"If the Russians'd looked up there they'd 've condemned me!"

"That thought did visit us. But you had luck, the Russians didn't peek. Shinny the ladder, Braaf, and begin handing down to us, aye?"

Six trips it took, Braaf and Wennberg lugging now while Melander stowed and stowed, to convey the trove that Braaf had accumulated like a discriminating pack rat.

Then all at once Icelander, alone, was back at the gate.

"We're cargoed," he said to Karlsson. "You'll be our last item, aye?" And was gone.

Karlsson began to wait out a span of becalmed time. The hammer chorale of the bells at hist had ceased, and the all-but-silence, just the soft rain sound, was worse. Too, there was an occasional stirring from Bilibin, trussed and gagged and bleary on the floor of the hut behind him. Karlsson decided it was best to keep busy within himself, saying and resaying the word.

There are moments, central moments such as what Karlsson awaits now, which form themselves unlike any that ever have issued in our lives or shall again. Ours might seem a kindlier evolution if what we know as memory had been set in us the other way: if these pith incidents of existence already waited on display there in the mind when you, I, Karlsson come into the world—a glance, and scene A ready to happen some certain Thursday; beyond it,
B
in clear view, due on a Wednesday two years and seventeen days off. The snag, of course, is Z, the single exactitude we could never bear to know: death's date. In order then that we can stand existence, the apparatus fetches backward for its rather than ahead. Memory instead of foreknowledge. So Karlsson on wait here in the Alaska night is like all of us in life's dark, able to know only that a moment is arriving due and to hope it is not the last of the series.

Then it came, as if in chorus to his silent recitings, the word flying out of the dark, in call down from the blockhouse on the hump of ridge above the stockade gate.

"Slushai!"

Otic time each hour the word made its relay from sentry post to sentry post. Not much of an utterance, no recital on behalf of tsar or God, perhaps the littlest cog id all the guardful apparatus of the capital of Russian America: simply the traditional reminding
call, "Harken!" But try, a time, with throat dry and all of life riding there on your tongue, try then to echo such a word as if born to it....

Having been endlessly rehearsed by Melander, whose Russian was better than his own, Karlsson swallowed. Cupped his hands to his mouth. And as close as he could raise his voice to Bilibin's blurt, cried back the watch call.

Silence from the blockhouse.

Karlsson cracked the gate for himself.

"You're croaking like a raven down there tonight."

Karlsson spun to the resumed voice. Down from the blockhouse, here it blared yet again. "Something got you by the throat?"

Motionless, Karlsson frantically rummaged the times he had shared the hootch jug with Bilibin, tried to draw to mind the old guard's gossipy gab, pluck words out, but what words...

Then from beside Karlsson in the blackness, a bray in Russian:

"Nothingfifteen drops won't cure!"

Karlsson's right elbow was being gripped by the largest hand imaginable, which told him what his eyes could not in the dark : Melander.

Fresh silence at the other guard post. Deeper, tauter silence, it seemed to Karlsson, unrelenting as Melander's grip.

At last:

"Swig fifteen more for me and make a start on my woes as well. Christ's season be merry for you, Pavel Ivanovich!"

A
S IF
in mock of some dance the Russians just then were gyrating through in the Castle, the Swedes' vast voyage southward started off with an abrupt two-step to the west.

On the first of the Tebenkov maps, Melander had shown Karlsson the pair of south-going channels threaded like careful seams among the islands of Sitka Sound. Karlsson had glanced down and immediately up: "At night? Likely in rain?"

That granite nubbin of opinion pivoted the escapees to the third possible route, veering up the channel from the Kolosh village, around Japonski Island, then outside the shoal of Sound isles. Such a loop was longer than the other channels and unsheltered from the ocean currents, hut at least it was not a blindfolded plunge into Sitka's labyrinth.

This was however the inauguration for Braaf and Wennberg into paddling in untame waters, and as promptly as this, it began that these men were brave and afraid and back and forth between the two.

Both Braaf and Wennberg were chocked with anticipation that the canoe was going to buck, slide down nose first, rock to one side and then the other, then start over, on and on in a nautical jig horrifying to join in the wet dark. None such ruckus happened. Ballasted deep by the provisions, the canoe rode steady, almost with nonchalance, in the night water of Sitka. What proved obstreperous instead were the paddles in the hands of Wennberg and Braaf. The pair of novices splashed much, and more than occasionally whunked the canoe side. Then Braaf caught the tip of his paddle amid a stroke, spraying water forward onto Wennberg's back and down his neck.

The blacksmith's devoutly muttered string of curses inspired counsel from Melander. "Steady up, don't beat the damn water to death." But the paddling efforts of the pair in the middle of the canoe still were stabs into the sloshing turmoil until Karlsson directed:

"Spread your hands wide as you can on the paddle and stroke only when I say. Now—now—now—now—now—"

The contrived tick and tock, Karlsson's nows and the breath space between, advanced them through the
blackness until Melander spoke from the bow of the canoe.

"Hold up, bring us broadside a moment, Karlsson. We've at least earned a look."

As the canoe swayed around, the other three saw his meaning. Back through one of the channel canyons amid the islands of Sitka Sound, an astonishing wide box of lights sat in the air. Baranov's Castle, every window bright for this night of Christmas merriment, sent outward through the black and the rain their final glittering glimpse of New Archangel.

By and large, a boat ride is a cold ride. From launching the canoe, the men's legs were wet to just above their knees, and it took the first half hour of paddling to warm themselves.

The night was windless, which they needed. The rain was not heavy, and gift above all, it was not snow. A few weeks earlier December's customary snowstorm had arrived, a white time when ice plated the tops of New Archangel's rain barrels and Melander went around looking pinched. But then thaw, and the Sitka air's usual mood of drizzle ever since.

Their course out. of the harbor looped the canoe toward the ocean, then swung southeast, to bring the craft along the shore of Baranof, Baranof's coastline the canoemen could estimate by the surf sound, and occasionally by a moving margin of lightness as a wave struck and swashed. Their night vision was decent, accustomed by New Archangel's dim wintertime. But
even so, any effort to see to their right, the ocean side, drew only intense black of a sort modern eyes have been weaned from: starless, so much so that it seemed nothing ever had kindled in that cosmic cave, and vast, beyond all reason vast. New Archangel apart, the next lamp in that void flickered thousands of miles across the Pacific, if indeed the residents of Japan lit lamps.

Of all the kinds of toil there are, the ocean demands the most strange. A ship under sail asked constant trussing and retrussing; the hauling about of ropes and sailcloth was like putting up and taking down a huge complicated tent, day and night. Advent of the steamship changed the chore to stuffing a mammoth incessant stove, between apprehensive glances at clock-faces that might but more likely might not indicate whether matters were going to go up in blast. Both of these unlikely sea vocations had drawn sweat from Melander, and now he was back to the ocean's original tool, the paddle. He was finding, with Braaf and Wennberg—Karlsson already had been through the lesson—that the paddler's exertion is like that of pulling yourself hand over hand along an endless rope. The hands, wrists, arms—yes, they tire, stiffen. The legs and knees learn misery, from the position they are forced to keep for so long. But where the paddling effort eats deep is the shoulder blade. First at one, then when the paddle is shifted to the other side of the canoe for relief, the ache moves across to the other: as if all weariness chose to ride the back just there, on those twin bone saddles.

Water rippled lightly at the bow. Against the canoe's cedar length, the steady mild lap of waves. Now and then a Braaf or Wennberg stroke going askew and Haida paddle whacking Tlingit craft.

The four men in the darkness stroked steadily rather than rapidly. Not even Wennberg was impatient about this, for he knew with the others that they needed to pull themselves as far from New Archangel as possible by daybreak, and that meant pace, endurance. The invisible rope of route, more and more a hawser as you worked at it, was nothing to be raced along.

Perhaps fifteen strokes a minute, four men stroking, rest pausing as little they could, seven—eight hours to daybreak: an approximate twenty-five thousand of these exertions and they could seek out a dawn cove for hiding.

Hours and hours later, near-eternities later to Melander and Braaf and Wennberg, darkness thinned toward dawn's gray.

Karlsson, glancing back to judge how far his eyes had accustomed to the coming of day, was the first to see the slim arc of canoe, like a middle distance reflection of their Own craft, closing the space of water behind them.

"You long-ass bastard, Melander!" This was Wennberg. "'The Russians won't follow us,' ay?"

"They haven't," Melander retorted. "Koloshes, those are. We'll see how quick they are to die for the
far white father in St. Petersburg, Braaf, load the rest of those fancy rifles of yours, then pass Karlsson his hunting gun."

Carefully the Kolosh chieftain in the chasing canoe counted as Braaf worked at the loading, and did not like how the numbers added and added. The half-drunk Russian officer who had roused the Kolosh crew told them the escaping men were only three—Braaf at first had not been missed, his whereabouts as usual the most obscure matter this side of ghostcraft, Hut plainly there were four of the whitehairs, they possessed at least two firepieces each, and this one doing the loading was rapid at his task. Against the four and their evident armory the Kolosh chieftain had his six paddlers and himself, with but three rifles and some spears.

"Fools they are, you'll skewer them like fish in a barrel," the Russian officer had proclaimed. "If they haven't drowned themselves first." Rut fools these men ahead did not noticeably seem to be. They had paddled far, almost a surprise how far. A canoe chief of less knowledge than his own would not have reckoned them yet to this distance. They seemed inclined to fight, and held that total of rifles in their favor. Tobacco, molasses, even the silver coins had been promised by the angry tsarman. Those, against the battle these whitehairs might put up. Once wondering begins there is no cure, and here was much, firepieces and molasses and Russians and the nature of promises and tobacco
ami coins and four steady-armed whitehairs instead of three exhausted timorous ones, to be wondered about.

While the leader of the Koloshes sought to balance it all in his mind and the exertion of his crew shortened the water between the canoes, the craft in front suddenly began to swing broadside, a bold-necked creature of wood turning as if having decided, at last, to do fight even if the foe was of its own kind.

As the canoe came around, the figure in its stern leveled a long hunting gun.

Startled, the range being greater than they themselves would expend shots across, the Kolosh paddlers ducked and grappled for their own weapons. But the chieftain sat steady and watched. Here was an instant he owed all attention.

The slender white hair swung his rifle into place, on a line through the air to the Kolosh leader.

The chieftain knew, as only one man of combat can see into the power of another, what Karlsson was doing. The whitehair was touching across distance to the chieftain's life, plucking it up easily as a kitten, either to claim or to let drop back into place.