When the old man showed no interest, Sergei took out a sapphire so big and so blue it looked like a blueberry. “Both of them, you can have them both.”
But Kanut still didn’t budge. Ana didn’t know if this was some bargaining tactic, or if he was sincerely uninterested.
Sergei’s frustration was growing, but then he seemed to have hit on something. He dug deeper into the pouch and came out with three gold rings that had once belonged to Ana’s sisters. Her heart ached at seeing them. But Sergei was right — the moment the gold appeared, Kanut paid attention. He didn’t care about gems, but gold was the currency of the world, particularly in these regions where so much of it was mined.
“The rings — pure gold — you can have all three.”
Kanut held out his palm, and when Sergei had dropped the rings onto it, he left it there … waiting for the diamond and the sapphire to join them. So, Ana thought, he wasn’t so impervious to their beauty, and their value, after all. Sergei reluctantly handed over the jewels, too. They had just bought a sailboat for the price of the imperial yacht Standart.
The old man pocketed the booty in his vest, and perhaps afraid that these two fools might regret the deal, stood up and said, “You must go soon. The tides.” He shouted some instructions to the women, one of whom was just about to serve them some hunks of cured blubber, and motioned for Ana and Sergei to follow him.
Outside, the two men who had been accompanying Kanut were crouching on the tundra, tossing fishtails to the dogs, who were straining at their chains. The old man issued some order in their native tongue, and the men looked puzzled. The old man said something more, and Ana saw one of them, with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, look at her and laugh. She did not need a translator to grasp the gist of what had been said.
The trail down to the beach was steep, and with her bad foot, it was difficult to maintain her balance. Sergei put an arm around her waist and virtually carried her much of the way. At the bottom, he was winded, and bending over double, dissolved in a fit of coughs.
Under Kanut’s close eye, the two men unlashed the sailboat from the whalebone posts, flipped it right-side-up, and slipped its bow into the frigid, slushy water. One of them stepped between the thwarts, and pulling on a coiled rope, raised a limp canvas sail. The other produced a dented canteen — he shook it so that they could hear it was filled — along with a knotted handful of jerky strips and some cured blubber, then tossed them all into the stern of the boat. Enough provisions, Ana surmised, for them to make it to the neighboring island … or die lost at sea.
Sergei, looking alarmingly winded and pale, put out a hand and helped Anastasia into the boat, and once she was settled, he took a seat at the stern, taking the tiller in one hand and the rope connected to the sail in the other. Nodding at the two Eskimos, like a hunter telling the beaters to release the hounds, he wound the rope around his wrist as the natives put their shoulders down and pushed the boat away from shore. It bobbed in place at first, before Sergei pulled the sail higher and the wind suddenly caught it and snapped it tight. The boat veered away from the rocky beach, the cold waves lapping hungrily at its sides as Ana clutched an oarlock. Nunarbuk receded quickly, its squat stone huts lost in the gray cliffside, while St. Peter’s Island remained a black knob in the midst of the choppy sea. A flock of birds — all dusky hued and crying discordantly — flew around and around their feeble mast, as if issuing a warning of their own.
But Anastasia merely whispered a prayer under her breath and touched her hand to the place on her breast where the emerald cross hung. In what else could she put her faith?
Chapter 59
Alone on the open road, with Frank strapped to the gurney in the ambulance bay behind her, Nika drove on toward Nome, snow blowing straight into the car through the missing windshield. At times it was flying so thick and fast that it totally obscured the lanes, and Nika had to stop the car altogether and wait for things to clear before she could even tell which way the road was going. The highway reflectors winked red when caught in the headlight, but that was about the only help she got.
She knew there wasn’t much in the way of human habitation out here, and what there was would be invisible behind the swirling snow. She coughed behind her mask — at least it kept the snow out of her mouth — but she worried that she was starting to feel light-headed. The candy bar she’d eaten earlier might not be enough to sustain her, though the very thought of food made her nauseous, not hungry. She simply had to keep control of her nerves and stay focused, for another few hours. Frank’s life depended upon it.
Glancing in back, she saw that he was lying motionless under several blankets and a thermal cover, a stocking cap pulled low over his brow, all the while drifting in and out of consciousness. She was worried about a concussion, or worse, but what did she know? Despite what the patrolman might believe, she was no doctor.
If only Frank were fully conscious and aware, he could have assessed his condition himself.
She turned on the heater, full blast, but with the window gone, most of the hot air dissipated almost immediately; the rest simply melted the snow and ice piling up in the front of the ambulance until she found frigid water sloshing around among the foot pedals. Still, without the heat on, she felt that her hands, even in the gloves, might freeze.
Once the highway turned inland, the evergreens grew thicker, rising on both sides of the highway and affording some modicum of protection from the wind. They also helped her to see where the road was going, and she was able to pick up speed. She was even able to spot the occasional road sign — usually warning of some treacherous stretch ahead — but sometimes telling her how much farther it was to Nome. She’d have enough gas, she could see that, but keeping the ambulance from skidding off into a snowdrift, or colliding with some nocturnal creature out foraging, could prove deadly. She personally knew of three people in Port Orlov who had died from exposure, and one of them was an Inuit — Geordie’s great uncle — and he had lived there his entire life. His hungry malamute had wandered into the Yardarm, alone, four days later.
As she huddled over the wheel, pressing on toward Nome on her own desperate mission, she was reminded of the other malamute, the famous Balto, who had carried the lifesaving serum there almost a hundred years before. She thought of the terrible hardships those dogs and mushers had endured, and even as she suffered a bout of coughing herself, she tried to bolster her spirit with their own bravery and commitment. If they could do it on open sleds, across impossible terrain, why should she be questioning her chances? She had a car, albeit a lousy one. She had a heater — even if it was turning everything to porridge — and she had a doctor on board, despite the fact that he was injured and mostly unconscious. She should have had it made.
The pep rally didn’t help as much as she hoped it would.
She turned on the radio, and a country-western station kicked in, despite the storm. She didn’t really follow that kind of music, so the singer, crooning about a girl who got away, wasn’t familiar to her. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the connection to civilization, the voice from the void, the company it provided, as she drove on through the darkness and the freezing cold. It was a mental lifeline, and one she clung to … especially as she felt her own energy slipping.
How much time passed by like that, she didn’t know. She was so concentrated on following the road, keeping track of those elusive reflectors posted along the sides, that she was becoming snow-blind. And more than once, without knowing it, she must have closed her eyes for a few seconds, because when she looked up again something in her field of vision had changed — a sign was already rushing past her, or the road had started to bend through a grove of trees. She’d hastily wipe the snow from her goggles, pound her arms to get the blood flowing, and tell herself in a loud voice, “Wake up, Nika — wake up!”