“So you’re awake?” she heard, as Deacon Stefan strode through the main gates; he was carrying a fishing pole over one shoulder and a couple of halibut on a line. “I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a log.”
He wasn’t wearing his cassock anymore but a thick fur coat that fell to his ankles. Long strands of his hair, so blond as to be almost white, spilled from under his Cossack-style hat. “Are you feeling well?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think so.” She hadn’t even considered the question, there was so much else to absorb and take in.
“The man you mentioned at dinner — Sergei,” he said, his blue eyes cast downward, “there has been no sign of him. I have searched the shoreline.”
Anastasia nodded.
“But the sea often yields in the end,” he said. “We will keep looking.”
Ana thanked him, but he brushed it aside.
“We will say a mass for him every day until he has been returned to us.”
And then he coughed, just once, into the back of his clenched hand, and Ana felt her spine stiffen.
“You’ve been out fishing in this cold?” she said. “I hope you haven’t caught a chill.” She had not mentioned Sergei’s illness. She had only said he was thrown from the boat during the crossing.
“It’s nothing,” he said, but coughing again. “No one ever recommended this place for its weather.”
“No, I don’t imagine that they do.”
“Let me get these fish into a frying pan,” he said. “We all eat together in the church, as soon as it is dark.”
“What can I do to help?” Anastasia said. Although a grand duchess by birth, she had been brought up to treat the common people with respect and to share their burdens when possible. It was why their father had made them sleep for years in ordinary cots in plainly decorated bedrooms, and their mother had ferried them to the Army hospitals to tend to the wounded. It was a puzzle Anastasia would never solve, how the peasants and workmen and soldiers of Russia had been convinced by a heartless revolutionary named Lenin that her family had not cared for and loved — yes, “loved” was not too strong a word for it — all of them.
Needless to say, she no longer felt that way at all, and she wondered what Father Grigori would say if she were able to tell him so.
“Never fear,” the deacon said in answer to her last question. “There’s no shortage of things that need to be done in the colony. You’ll fit right in, Your Highness.”
He threw her a half smile over his shoulder as he marched on with the fish swinging on the line over his shoulder. She tried to return the smile, but her face smarted, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the cutting wind or the fact that she was so unaccustomed to the expression.
Chapter 63
Nika was running, running so hard the blood beat in her ears and muffled all other sounds. Running so hard the breath was raw in her throat and her lungs ached. Running so hard that her legs were starting to wobble and her shoulders to sag.
But she had to keep going, across the frozen hills, through the brush and barren trees, on and on … toward a low rise overlooking a tiny village huddled on the shoreline. There, she stopped, doubling over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.
It was late autumn, and while some of the natives had already erected their igloos, with domed roofs and walls of packed snow, others were still making do with the tents made of caribou skins, stitched together with long ropes of sinew and anchored with bones. She waited, watching, but even from the ceremonial hall — the qarqui—at the far end of the village, there was no sign of any human activity. There were no fishermen hauling their kayaks onto the rocky beach, no children playing, no women tending to the huskies. (And where were the dogs?) It was an eerie sight, the lonely village, lying under a fresh blanket of snow, with a dense, dark cloud bank advancing across the Bering Sea and swallowing the last pale rays of the sun as it came. The only sounds were the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, and the cries of cormorants circling overhead.
How odd, she thought, to hear cormorants. They had gone extinct years ago.
But then, this was years ago. Even now, Nika was aware that what she was experiencing was real, but unreal … that she was only a dreamer, inhabiting a dream, in which she nevertheless had a crucial role to play. She adjusted the straps of the knapsack digging into her shoulders, careful not to damage the precious ampoules that she knew — simply knew — were nestled inside.
She felt as if she had been traveling for days without stopping, all the while burning with fever, or racked with chills. She felt racked and depleted, and her mouth was filled with the acrid taste of her own blood. Her mukluks were slick with ice, her sealskin coat damp with her own perspiration. But she knew that she had to go down into the village. It was there her work had to be done.
Her boots skidding in the snow, she slid down the hill and approached the outermost of the igloos. The entryway was dug several feet down into the earth, and driftwood had been used to make a crude door. But when she tried to push it open, it stuck. Crouching down, she pushed harder, and something that was leaning against the other side gradually fell to one side, and she was able to peer into the gloom.
The kudluk, the lantern that was normally burning bright with seal oil, was extinguished, but the skylight let in enough illumination for her to make out several people scattered around the floor in contorted postures. Their faces were frozen in rictus, and their eyes stared blankly. Splashes of blood spotted the hides and straw that had been laid down on the hard sod. The body that had been slumped behind the door was a young man still in his rawhide coat, the hood raised, his hands clenched around a hunting knife buried to the hilt in his own gut. It appeared that he had chosen to take his own life rather than endure what the others had suffered.
Nika backed out, pulling the door closed behind her. Horrifying as the sight had been, she was not surprised by it; it was as if she had known what to expect behind that door, as if she had remembered it from some deep well of the collective unconscious. And as she stepped away, she felt her foot catch on something under the snow — a chain. She jerked it up, and found it was attached to a stake embedded in the permafrost … to which a husky had been tethered. She brushed some of the snow away, and found the dog, dead of exposure, or starvation. It lay there now like a concrete statue, its tongue, lolling from its mouth, as blue as the ice in a crevasse.
Looking around at the neighboring huts and igloos, she saw similar mounds, where other dogs presumably now lay dead and frozen solid.
As she moved among the dwellings, poking her head in one, then another, she saw similar grisly scenes, native people lying dead on blood-soaked sod and animal hides. As she came to the last one before the qarqui, she heard sounds from inside, and thought she might at last find some survivors. Throwing back the antelope skins that covered the doorway, she stepped inside and stopped dead as the startled dogs, their jaws and fur matted with blood, looked up from their feast. A couple of them still trailed the leashes and stakes that they had managed to rip from the ground. Mingled among their paws were the ravaged remains of the corpses they had been tearing apart.
A big white dog, its snout dyed pink by now, growled menacingly, warning her away from the banquet.
Slowly, she stepped back and let the antelope skins conceal her from view.
The clouds had filled the sky now, and the last of the daylight disappeared as she hurried to seek refuge in the ceremonial house, the town hall, as it were, of the Inuit people, where the villagers would traditionally come to sing and dance and perform their sacred rituals during the long, dark Arctic winters. It was a big, oval-shaped building, made from chunks of tundra and slabs of driftwood, knitted together with all sorts of skins and pelts, and the moment she ducked her head to enter the passageway that led to the narrow door — fashioned from what had once been the bottom of a kayak — she again heard noises. But not the sound of scavenging dogs this time. When she stood still, she heard a woman’s voice — faint and elderly — speaking in her native tongue.