Slater closed his eyes and wished that Knudsen, this angel of death, would leave him be. When he looked again, Knudsen was gone. Thank God for small favors. And then he realized that, through the fabric of his suit, his fingers were clutching the ivory owl.
The monitors kept up a steady beeping, the ventilator whooshed, the machines hummed, and Nika — silent, still, her eyes shut — fought on. He remembered the first time they’d met, when the helicopter had chased the Zamboni she was driving right off the ice rink. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot, especially when he was so slow to realize that she was the mayor of the town—and the tribal elder, to boot. He’d had a lot of catching up to do.
But he had quickly come to recognize her virtues, her skills … and her beauty. That last item he had tried to overlook — he knew he had serious work to do, and it was no time to become distracted. Slater had always maintained a strictly professional demeanor in the field, and on an expedition of this importance, it was especially critical. He had never intended to feel the way he did now, he had never seen it coming. Like that fantastic display of the aurora borealis they had watched together one night, it had taken him utterly by surprise.
And now … what did he do with these feelings? He had never told her how he felt. He had never told her that he had fallen in love with her. But if she died tonight, in this terrible place, away from her home and the people she loved, he did not know how he would bear it.
He had lost all track of time. There was a clock on the wall, but he had no idea if it was 10 A.M. or 10 P.M. There was only one window, down at the end of the hall, and even that one was tinted and permasealed. Meanwhile, the Alaskan daylight was coming later, and growing shorter, all the time. How the Inuit had survived in this intemperate world astonished him still, but they were a hardy lot … and that, in the end, was what he was counting on. Nika’s ancestors had been among the sturdy few to survive the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and perhaps that acquired immunity had been passed down to the young woman fighting for her life now.
He unzipped his suit enough to pull the ivory owl through, and then he snapped the cord. He smoothed a spot on her blanket and laid the bilikin down on top of it. He knew that she was in a very dark place, and if the owl could truly prove to be a guide, then now was the time.
Chapter 62
The deacon, not surprisingly, was the first to succumb.
It was he who had first embraced Anastasia on the beach, he who had held her hands — the very hands that had caressed the cheek of the dying Sergei — as he escorted her up the steps chiseled into the cliffs and through the main gates of the colony. The others, maybe three or four dozen in all, were beside themselves with joy when she arrived. She was brought into the church, where a supper had been hastily laid on a table in the nave, and the bell in the church dome was rung over and over. Her safe arrival was considered a harbinger of a bigger, and even better, thing to come. She was the long-anticipated psychopomp, the bird who heralded the return of Rasputin himself.
Anastasia was seated at the head of a long and narrow refectory table, and to her embarrassment an old peasant woman summarily removed the sopping boots from her feet, and soaked her aching, frozen toes in a bucket of warm, salted water. The embarrassment immediately gave way, however, to a tingling sensation, and a not-altogether-pleasant throbbing as the blood once again began to circulate in her feet and ankles. Deacon Stefan offered her a glass of something she imagined to be grog — Nagorny the sailor had described such stuff — as bracing as it was vile. Other women were still bringing hot bread and pots of stew to the table, and Anastasia, though so grief-stricken at the loss of Sergei that she could barely eat, took what she could, and thanked them profusely. All of them — men, women, and a handful of children — stared at her unabashedly, and she could not help but notice how often their eyes went to the emerald cross. Several times she saw the older colonists cross themselves while gazing upon it. They listened, enraptured, as she recounted the journey that she, and the missing Sergei, had undertaken. It was rare enough, Ana surmised, that they saw anyone new here, and rarer still when that newcomer was one of the grand duchesses of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.
Here, if nowhere in Russia anymore, that title commanded respect, even reverence.
A cabin was set aside for Ana, but when she saw that it was filled with someone else’s personal belongings — a hand-stitched quilt, an icon of St. Peter, pans and kettles on hooks above a potbellied stove, a dress in the armoire — she tried to decline. “I don’t want to put anyone out of her home,” she said. “I can sleep anywhere — the church would be fine.”
But Deacon Stefan had insisted. “The people vied for the opportunity,” he said. “Vera would be mortified if you didn’t accept her hospitality. She is honored.”
And so she had accepted. She did not even remember saying goodnight to the deacon. The second she had sat down on the straw-filled mattress, she had been overwhelmed by fatigue and fallen into not so much a sleep as a stupor. She had a vague recollection of the old woman who had bathed her feet coming into the room and removing her other damp clothes. The quilt was thrown over her, tucked tight to her chin, and a bearskin was thrown over that. Ana did not move a muscle; she felt she couldn’t even if she tried. For many hours — she never knew exactly — she lay there, half-asleep and half-aware of everything and everyone. Her mind traveled back over the endless journey that had brought her to the island at last, combing over every detail, revisiting every scene, from the attic room at Novo-Tikhvin to the cramped compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway (where a conductor had become so inordinately curious about Ana that Sergei had made them disembark in the dead of night at the next fueling station).
Sergei. One more name to add to the list of the dead and beloved in her life. The list was already so long, and she was barely eighteen. How long would it become? Forgive me, she prayed. Forgive me for the suffering my family and I have brought upon so many. She felt herself both blessed — she alone had survived the slaughter in the house with the whitewashed windows — and at the same time accursed. No one else would have to live on, knowing exactly what had happened there, reliving it in dreams … and nightmares.
Late the next day, when she arose, the few hours of sunlight had nearly passed. She ventured out of the tiny cabin and into a frostbitten twilight. All around her rose a stockade wall, and within it a small but tidy colony had been erected. Apart from the church, which stood at one end and appeared to serve also as a meeting house and dining hall, there were cabins and livestock pens, vegetable gardens, a blacksmith shop and apothecary, even a common outhouse, with separate doors for men and women. However bleak the surroundings, it was a world unto itself.
A man splitting logs looked up from his chores and touched the brim of his fur cap. Then he returned to his work. A woman in a long peasant skirt, with a woolen shawl drawn over her head and around her shoulders, carried a bushel basket of roots and mushrooms into one of the cabins; a pale and dismal light crept across the threshold before the door was closed again with a creak and a thump. A cold wind whistled between the timbers of the stockade, and Ana was inevitably reminded of the palisade that had been built around the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky had said it was for the protection of the imperial family as they took the air, but no one had been fooled by that. It might just as well have been iron bars.