Far North (12 page)

So many came that the meeting had to be held outside. It was a rowdy gathering. Tumilty’s son and widow were there. Mrs Tumilty made a passionate speech, naming the murderers and asking for justice. There were plenty that sided with her. But there was another faction who felt the call for punishmp id revenge would alter the spirit of our settlement utterly. At that time we had no police, no courts, no judges, no penal code. There had been deaths before now, but no crimes of violence. This was our Cain and Abel.

Many were waiting for my father to speak. He took his time. When he finally did, he spoke against punishment. Pa was steeped in the Bible and he wanted us to be moved only by love and compassion. He pointed to the feeding of the multitudes as a sign for how we should behave.

Tumilty’s widow shouted from her place in the crowd that we didn’t have six magic loaves that could feed five thousand.

Pa tried to handle her gently, but he pointed out to her that the loaves weren’t magic. The miracle was human nature, behaving in a spirit of good will that multiplied in the act. In simple words, he said, when each of the five thousand saw the fish and bread coming out, they reached into their robes and pulled out the food they’d been keeping for themselves. ‘Fear breeds fear,’ Pa said. ‘We have to offer our guests selfless support and expect nothing in return. We have enough food. The land around us is empty and big enough to absorb all that have come and more. We have to be soft enough to yield to what’s inevitable, but strong enough to hold tight to our doctrine.’

Tumilty’s widow and son took his words very badly. It seemed my father was blaming the dead man for being ungenerous. ‘They are not people like us,’ said Tumilty’s son, Eric. ‘Give them an inch, and they take a yard. They’re laughing up their sleeves at us and think we’re fools for parting with what we’ve sweated for. They’ll pay us back all right. You’ll each get what my father got. Six feet of ground for every one of you.’

Then a man called Michael Callard spoke up.

The Callards, Michael, Freya and their twins Eben and Liesl, were one of the settler families who had left their home further south. The Callards had arrived with almost nothing and had lived with us for a few months before Michael Callard put up a house of their own on the other side of Delamere Street. They were devout and hard-working, and well liked by the other settlers.

Eben and Liesl were eighteen. Liesl was shy and handsome like her mother. Eben farmed with his dad. He was proud of his strong shoulders and lean brown body. Sometimes after a day of work in summer, he would wander downtown and brave the midges with his shirt off. He was a good rider too, and once or twice we had raced ponies on the fields outside the city. A rumour found its way back to me that we were sweet on each other. But he had always struck me as ruthless and quick-tempered, and the truth is I have never liked a man who was too much like me.

Michael Callard spoke of how his farm in the south had been attacked by armed men, how they’d been rounded up at gunpoint and given an hour to leave. He said he, like the rest of us, had come here to live in a new way, free of the threat of violence, as equals. But he was damned if he thought that meant accepting the threat of being hounded out of his own home, or having his food taken, or his wife and children hurt. He called on the able-bodied of us to form and arm a militia to keep the streets safe, and eject or punish anyone who broke the codes of the town.

You could see that many were moved by his words, even those who had persuaded themselves that all forms of violence were wrong.

I watched my father as Michael Callard was speaking and I saw trouble flit across his face. I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind – perhaps all at once. But to pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of his reason.

They held a vote that time, and my father carried the day, but that was the start of two factions in the town. The one, led by Callard, was warm for the militia and us getting armed to defend ourselves. The other, which looked upon my pa as its head, wanted us to stick to the original spirit of the settlement.

Thinking of my pa just now, I see something childish in his need for things to be perfect. He was a clumsy workman and could labour for days over something that would get tossed out if he marred it. A thing would be worthless if it wasn’t just so. And that childishness fed his intolerance of people. He loved ideas more than men because they were less contradictory. And pa sometimes seemed to be able to forgive a thief or a murderer more easily than he could forgive lateness or backtalk. Murder or theft was less troubling because wholly bad. Variety and contradiction bothered him. He was like the god of the Methodists – one word could put you out of the Elect for ever.

I think in his love for the arctic you see the same hunger for simple truths: sky, snow, mountain, trees. What I found in a city – when I finally saw a real one – was disquieting. Nothing matched. It was a weird assemblage of things, but there was beauty in the oddness of it, and the thought that it was all man’s doing.

But the doctrine my father chose, like our landscape, had a crystal order to it: peace, self-reliance, love, submission to the will of god. The simple shape of it had a power to persuade. People were drawn to him. The force of his conviction made them trust him.

It puts me in mind of a piece of block ice, with its glassy sides shirred from the saw-teeth. When you melt one for water, for the longest time the block stays perfect. It just sighs and shrinks a little. But as soon as the heat finds out a bubble of air in it, it swells and bursts the whole thing into tiny pieces.

That year was one in a cluster of hot summers. The city was splitting at the seams like a fat man in his wedding suit – so many incomers, Quaker people and others, pouring up out of the scorched south, fleeing the famines. There had been squabbles all through July – people filching food from gardens, or squatting empty properties and refusing to go. And as it turned out, what happened to me was the tinder that set the haystack blazing.

Callard and Tumilty put their militia together, with weapons they bought off the incomers themselves in spite of the vote going against them.

The settlers who opposed them, which was the majority, led by my father, dogged them throughout the summer, followed their patrols shouting and ringing bells, and sat down in the streets so their horses couldn’t pass.

Over the coming weeks, the arguments went on, in the meeting houses, in stores, on the sidewalks, and between husbands and wives at dinner tables. Family by family, people were won over to Callard’s side. In our house, I was the cuckoo who spoke up against my own father. I had a simpler notion of right than he did. I think I was relieved when Michael Callard spoke: he gave voice to feelings I had had all my life. I said if someone slapped my face, I slapped back, no matter what the Bible said. My father went thinlipped with disapproval and ordered me up to my room. He felt the mood going against him in the town, and it was too much to have mutiny at his own table.

Those weeks were the worst I ever got on with him. The pressure he was under made him angry and bitter. He raged at Callard. He still had support among the settlers, but day by day it was ebbing away from him, and it didn’t take a wild leap of the imagination to foresee a day when he stood alone. He was losing authority and he was losing the city that he had struggled to build. He warned anyone that would listen what would happen if we followed Callard, but the number who would listen grew smaller and smaller every hour.

What had started out as a quarrel over interpreting our laws was turning into a straight fight for the mastery of the city.

In late August, my mother and father left the city for a few days. He liked to hunt and fish and took her when he could for company. Whenever they went away together I would sneak into their room to sleep. I loved their deep mattress and the jingling bed-frame they had brought from America.

Past midnight I heard the door open and the sound of breathing. I called out Charlo’s name. It was half a dozen men with pillowcases over their heads.

They had holes cut out for their eyes and mouths. There was froth on their lips as they shouted names at me.

I ran to the window to jump but they dragged me off it. Two of them held me down on the bed. I wriggled a hand free and slashed at my attacker with a water-glass. ‘Jezebel,’ he said. I felt something wet on my face and I thought he had cut me, but it was lye they’d picked up from our kitchen.

The mind is merciful in what it leaves you with. I don’t remember much of what followed and less still of the aftermath, but they left me alive for my parents to find, and apparently I told them Eben Callard had been the leader.

I’ve since wondered how I knew – and even why he would have done such a thing – but the years have taught me not to wonder too much at the dark things men do. Strange how it is that men never act crueller than when they’re fighting for the sake of an idea. We’ve been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don’t have the power over you they would like. That’s why they do what they do. And I’m not going to give them that power now. But it was a cruel thing that they did, and when they had finished hurting me, a splinter of loneliness seemed to break off and stay inside me for ever. Nowadays, I don’t think of it much, but I can never hear the bed-frame jingling without a sense of disquiet.

What happened to me killed the hope of our city and it killed my father too. He took a straight razor and cut his own throat in the forest. I was too badly hurt to see him buried.

For three weeks, I had to lay in bed with a wet cloth on my face to keep the skin moist and lessen the scarring. The pain was bad, but what I remember was the noisis that meioting in the street outside the window. The Callards were driven out of the city and in the upheaval many houses burned.

When the bandages came off, the skin was raw and my whole face was pulled out of true – left eye drooping, mouth awry. I’m not saying I was a looker before, but I wasn’t unhandsome and I had my good days when I could feel men respond a little quicker to me. But after that, I started wearing my hair short and mannish. When the city fathers agreed to start a militia, mine was the first name on the list.

 *

Our police rode armed, and had powers of arrest. We had a code that our magistrates were supposed to enforce, and cells to remand offenders. But all we had as actual punishments were orders of interdiction, which meant in practice being evicted beyond the city limits if you were found guilty of a crime. The city fathers didn’t have the stomach for anything stronger – an armed police force was bad enough.

At the beginning we were able to stand in the way of mayhem, but as time wore on there was just too much of it. And we were in the crazy position of a man finding mice in his larder, who picks them up by the tail, carries them outside, and then waits for them to dig their way back in.

And try how we might, the disorder multiplied. Once, there had been an understanding between us about how disputes should be settled. People were direct and approached each other boldly. They had staked their futures on this experiment. We didn’t all like each other, but we knew each other. Now there was a gap between us and our neighbours and it filled with fear and resentment. No one wanted to be the last unarmed man in the city. And if you looked for justification to arm yourself, there was plenty of it. If the Callards were capable of what they’d done, then no one could be trusted. ‘If the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’ people said. With my father dead, there was no one to speak up for the old ways. They junked the ideals they’d come with and bought guns. The city changed out of all recognition.

The chaos seemed to draw in a particular kind of vagrant. Everything was up for grabs. In peaceful times, the steady and patient thrive. But it takes a quick and ruthless type to flourish amid disorder. And we, the citizens of our own city, were co-conspirators with them.

The thing is, to people brought up on a diet of the Bible and the thought of their special place in god’s plan, a global disaster is something they’ve secretly been longing for. We’d been talking about the millennium for centuries. Now it seemed the End Times had arrived. Men like to meet a crisis head-on, wallop straight into it as though it’s a test of strength. Why? Surely it’s better to edge round it, fade into the background with the things you need. Spring will come again next year. There’s food in the woods if you’re sharp enough to know where to look.

The Scriptures were certainly fulfilled, though, just not in the way anyone had expected. There was no Second Coming, no lion and lamb lying down together. No. An orderly, modern city descended into a bunch of hungry tribes fighting over a desert. So I guess you could call the Bible a prophetic book in that sense.

Bill Evans had finished his work and was looking to find a way to travel back to his home in Alaska when he got killed breaking up a fight. But that was a long time later. It took a couple of years for things to descend to thatheight="0em">

13

T
HEY
KEPT
ME
in the dark in that hole above two weeks. It was cold enough not to stink too bad, but that was the best you could say for it. I kept myself sane by letting my mind wander. I built up a world in my head where things had gone otherwise and I spent my time there, instead of on the dirty blankets in the darkness. I liked to think of Ping’s child growing up strong. I could see her face and her straight black hair like her mother’s. I took her bathing at the lake in the mountains and though her chin trembled in the cold water, she had a strong kick like a little frog.

The food improved after the first ten days. The soup was thicker, with a little meat in it, and potatoes. I figured that they were trying to build me up for my hard labour. I wondered if they would be stupid enough to let anything resembling a weapon into my hands. Boathwaite didn’t look like a person who would underestimate somebody, but there was no harm in hoping.

Finally, one morning, they opened the door and instead of sliding in a tin plate of food, in came a man in a farrier’s apron holding a set of manacles and a length of chain. He was followed by two men with cudgels who held me down while the first man fastened me into the restraints.

I resisted a little, but just to keep the men occupied. One called me an ugly bitch and waved his cudgel at me, but it wasn’t heartfelt. He was just showing off to his friend, and though I was wriggling, what I really wanted was to get a good look at the locks on the manacles.

Unluckily for me, the men knew their work. They put me into a leather belt, and the chain passed through a loop in it to join the handcuffs with another set of restraints on my ankles.

When they left me alone again, I shuffled into the brightest part of my cell, and pulled a clanking length of chain into the light so I could examine it better.

It was of good-quality steel, heavy and well made, and it looked new. For all the hardship in Horeb, it was clear that Boathwaite wasn’t cutting any corners where his enemies were concerned.

I wondered about that steel, its provenance. Like the wheat flour in their stale bread, it was beyond what the people in the town seemed capable of. The farrier must have shortened it by a link or two, and worked the loop into the leather belt, but his handiwork seemed gross beside the fine workmanship of the steelmaker. It seemed an awful waste of metal to me, but then Boathwaite and I had different priorities.

 *

Sometimes, when you’ve suffered a lot, it turns out to be the small thing that breaks you. That chain almost finished me. It wasn’t so much the weight as the cold of it, drawing the heat out of me, and clanking when I moved. I started to reminisce about the good old days – I don’t mean at home, I mean before the chain, when the cell was still stinking and cold, and the food bad, but at least I had the freedom to move. Gradually, it felt more and more burdensome. And to stay comfortable, I had to slump, hunched up in the dirt in a posture of defeat, and too tired to budge.

All my dreams of escape came back to mock at me now. They seemed as unreal as my dreams of Ping and her child living. I am nothing when I can’t move. I refused to eat, and I’m stubborn enough to have starved myself, except that after two days more, one of the gaolers swung the door open and told me it was time to leave.

Someone threw me a ragged quilted jacket, a hat and a pair of greasy mittens. I thought of my warm snow-sheep gloves and my wolverine pants. I wondered who was wearing them now.

I put on the clothes and shuffled forward into the light, blinking like a thing that lives in darkness. The main square of Horeb was smaller than I recalled, barely the size of our backyard at home.

The gates were open and the people of the town drawn up in two rows, making a corridor for me to pass through. They stood in silence, watching me shuffle past, chains clanking.

I searched their faces for some clue to where I was headed but they were all grey and stony. Finally, I caught sight of Violet among them. ‘She’ll wish she’d been hanged after all,’ she announced to the crowd, and there was a murmur of agreement.

Boathwaite stood on a ledge high up on the wall of the stockade. He was dressed in a black surplice and he had his Bible tucked under his arm.

Just through the gateway, I could see men on horseback waiting for me.

Boathwaite never met my eye. He called on my guards to stop and he led his people in a prayer, entrusting me into god’s care and calling on him to be merciful to me.

As their voices mumbled away, I took a good look around me. It was coming up to April and you could smell the world coming back to life after winter. The floor of the stockade was melted to slush. It seemed a long way since all the hope of the spring before.

They finished their prayer with a throaty amen.

‘And god have mercy on
you
,’ I cried. It had been boiling up inside me throughout the prayer and it burst out in a crazed howl. It was so loud it split the air like a rifle crack, and those nearest to me flinched. But others muttered, ‘How dare she?’ and pushed towards me, not so much violently, but with the steady menace of a herd of cows that could trample you to death.

The guards dragged me on and I staggered, falling to my knees in the mud. They heaved me up and pushed me forward, through the gateway, and stopped, leaving me to walk on alone.

One of the men on horseback swung down from his saddle and slipped a rope through the loop on my belt.

He was practised and indifferent, as though he was wrangling livestock or shoeing horses. Then he was back in the saddle and gave his horse a whistle.

I worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, that I would fall in the slush and be dragged, but they walked on slowly. Even then it was hard work to stay with them.

They rode along the track through the woods, to where it broke out onto the main road – the place I’d come upon the men logging a lifetime earlier.

I was weak from bad food and being cooped up in one place, and after each set oua dozen paces, I’d think I wasn’t going to be able to make another. ‘The flesh is weak,’ they say. Me, I say the flesh is strong, but the mind is weak. It’s the mind that hisses at you to give up, lay in the snow. Only women know what the body is capable of. Pain that feels like it will tear you in half, but doesn’t.

So while my muscles cried out at me, I staggered on, counting my breaths, trying to rise out of my mind. At first I tried too desperately, and my thoughts had a sense of panic about them and wouldn’t settle in one place, because I was snatching at anything.

But then a kind of peace came over me. I lost track of my footsteps and gave myself up to the motion.

The woods were silent except for the tick of melting snow and I thought we were alone, but as we turned onto the road, we came upon a big crowd of people camped right there on the highway.

They were crouched down on their haunches, trying to rest and hold their clothing clear of the slush. One or two you could see were more hopeless and lay flat out exhausted in the wet, not caring how they would feel about it later.

Around them a dozen men slouched on horseback.

The captives were chained together in groups of ten.

One of my guards gave a whistle, and the group nearest to me stood up. The rider hopped down and padlocked me to the last man in the group, a fellow of about fifty with a matted beard and a worn rabbit fur cap. No one spoke.

The riders made the other prisoners stand and then positioned themselves along the flanks of the line and waited.

Finally, someone broke off from the front and rode up and down the line checking that everything was to his satisfaction. He barely glanced at me, but as he turned to ride up the other flank, I saw his face and recognized him as the man I had encountered on the highway outside my own city.

He galloped fast to the front of the caravan which lay almost sixty yards away from where I stood.

My companion turned to me as though he wanted to say something, but with a shout we were in motion, and we saved all our breath for walking.

TWO

1

T
HE
PLACE
THEY
called the base lay almost a thousand miles west of Evangeline, close to a tributary of the Lena.

We didn’t reach it until past midsummer. All that time we were just banging down the road, minding our blisters.

If anything, it was more desolate than the road to the east. We didn’t see a soul, just bleached bones on the road and deserted settlements beyond it.

They lightened our chains to keep us moving quicker and to save on food: each link of chain cost something in flour to carry.

The caravan travelled with its own food. The covered wagons carried sacks of flour which they mixed into porridge or cooked into griddlecakes for the prisoners.

Our guards broke off to hunt sometimes, and at night the smell of their meat cooking kept us awake, teasing our noses with the smell of burned flesh.

If you were quick enough at the reveille, there might be some scraps to chew on, bones or gristle to remind you what real food tasted of.

The man beside me was a Mohammedan called Shamsudin. Five times a day he’d crouch, wash his hands in the dust and aim himself to pray at Mecca, or where it used to be.

He’d been pals with a fellow called Zulfugar, but when any prisoners looked like they were getting too friendly the guards separated them to different ends of the line. How they thought any of us would survive with our bare hands, carrying twenty pounds of chain, in that wilderness, I don’t know, but they put me next to Shamsudin to break the two of them up.

The guards watched us pretty closely, so I had to glean information out of him a piece at a time. One day, crouching down beside him in the dust at one of the water stops, I found out that he was forty-six and that he had been born in Bokhara, one of the old silk cities in the south. He left to train as a surgeon in the Far East and returned to work at a hospital back in his home town.

He had been a wealthy man and had managed to bribe his way north when the troubles started.

I told him that from what I had observed, it only took three days before desperation and hunger overturned all civilized instinct in a person. He smiled and said I had a bleak view of human nature, and that in his experience, it was nearer to four days.

His chains clanked as he scooped up the water in his hands.

I asked him what kind of surgery he had done.

‘Noses,’ he said, and there was just the trace of a smile.

‘You were a nose surgeon?’

‘I made women more beautiful.’

‘Don’t muslim women go covered up anyway?’ I said, and he laughed.

The guards rode past, and chivvied us to move on. We ambled on, all eighty of us, getting into motion slowly like one big reluctant animal.

‘I don’t suppose you could do anything for me,’ I whispered to him with a wink.

‘There is nothing wrong with your nose.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of my nose.’

‘What were you thinking of?’ he asked, deadpan.

‘You’re very gallant,’ I said.

He looked me over carefully, as though it was the first time he had noticed anything odd about me. ‘An acid burn, I think?’

‘It was lye, but you were close.’

‘Yes, this is easy to treat. We use chemicals to restructureepidermis. I would take skin from your thigh to reconstruct the eyelid. I could make you even more beautiful.’

That was the nearest I came to laughing. You could see how he’d got rich – charming the cash out of wealthy women. It meant something to me that he knew I wasn’t a man.

There was a gentlemanly way about Shamsudin. He wore his rags well, and when he ate, he didn’t wolf his food the way we all did, tearing at it and burping. He ate elegantly, breaking off morsels of food with his long fingers, rolling it into little balls and eating them one by one. I started to do the same – apart from anything, the food went slower that way and so there seemed to be more of it.

The little I told him of my life struck him as insane. He couldn’t believe that my parents had willingly abandoned lives of comfort for the cold of the Far North.

Shamsudin’s own family were all dead, and he had left Bokhara with two companions. They’d been hoping to get to the coast to find a boat that would take them south to Japan or even up to Alaska. They’d come across very few living settlements in their travels, and fewer still who’d help them. One of his companions died of dysentery and the other was shot dead when they broke into a farmstead to steal food. Shamsudin arrived at his destination alone, almost starving, and all the banknotes in his pockets already worthless paper.

He said there was still the occasional boat on the Pacific coast, but the only trade as such was in men and women. About two-thirds of our fellow prisoners had arrived as cargo from Saint Peterpaul in Kamchatka. Shamsudin had watched on the quayside as they disembarked in manacles. If he was aghast at first, he soon got to noticing that the slaves were better fed than he was.

When night fell, he could smell the food cooking over in the slave camp. His guts ached with hunger and his muscles were wasting from slow starvation. He just handed himself over to the guards and begged them to take him. He said he sobbed over his first bowl of food with the shame of what he had done, and he thanked god his parents weren’t alive to see his weakness.

I told him he was being hard on himself. He wasn’t the only one. For every two that were bought, there was another that had enslaved himself because he couldn’t stand it any longer as a free man.

 *

Shamsudin aside, the self-enslaved tended to have a harder time of it. There were beast-people among us. One man called Hansom killed a man with a rock one night and strangled someone the second. The guards stripped their bodies of their clothes and left their grey corpses by the roadside.

Hansom went unpunished. The guards let him walk and sleep alone so they didn’t lose any more men.

 *

We were backtracking on the same road I’d ridden on through the fall, the commissars’ highway. It all looked different with the snow gone, but now and again I’d see places that I seemed to remember from my journey north. We passed Evangeline towards mid-morning round about the fourth week of the march. I’d known it was coming for days, and as we drew closer to it, my chains seemed to hang a little lighter on me. Just to be close to home was a comfort to me. I hoped we’d pass the night there. Like the rabbit orybook, I felt my chance of freedom would be greater in a place I knew well. I could slip away like Ping had, vanish into the storm drains until the men driving us grew impatient and moved on.