Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (115 page)

“So, tomorrow you go. Before dawn is the best time. We will say prayers that the real snow holds off a bit longer, yes? It is not a good time of year for travel,” he laughed. “Are you sure you won’t stay until spring?”

“I thought you didn’t talk to God,” Jamie said.

Gregor looked at him, dark eyes distant. “When I am little boy hiding in the forest, and wandering the roads of this land, I am always praying for someone to come and rescue me. Those are not the kind of prayers that a man forgets. Those I will say for you, Yasha, if you promise to say ones for me, for my black soul.”

“Always,” Jamie said, and meant it. “You could come with us, Gregor. There is always a place in the world for a strong man.” The offer was made in sincerity, even if Jamie knew their odds of getting out of Russia alive weren’t terribly high. Still, they were higher odds than staying in the camp was going to allow.

Gregor stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the hut, its coal eclipsed in the dim light, only a tendril of smoke to mark its passing. He took a deep breath and stretched his back, reaching his arms out wide.

“I am thinking Russia is only country large enough for Gregor. I am thinking that a Russian soul withers up and blows away in a foreign place. So I will stay, but you, Yasha, you will go home, because this land is not yours.”

“Gregor, if you stay—” Jamie stopped, no one knew better than Gregor what the cost of staying was.

“It is as you said to me—a man who lives by the sword must also die by it. This is justice. This is balance. This is what the Russian soul understands. This is a good death. Now give me your hand.”

Jamie put his hand out, feeling the brutal strength of the fingers that touched his own. Gregor sliced his hand before he realized that the man held a knife. Gregor then sliced his own, a thick line of dark blood welling up instantly across the broad, hard palm. He grasped Jamie’s hand tightly, the slickness of blood, hot and viscous, binding their two hands together. His eyes were hard as onyx as they held to Jamie’s.

“Soon, my brother, we will both be free.”

He pulled Jamie to him and gave him a hug that would have crushed him had he not been braced for it. Then he shoved him away toward the hut, voice rough. “Go now.”

Jamie walked away feeling slightly bruised, his hand burning like he held Greek fire in his palm.

“Yasha!”

Jamie turned back. Gregor stood tall, strong as an oak, giving off the illusion that he would always be so.

“When you say those prayers, stand beside the sea.”

Jamie nodded, for it was all Gregor needed. He knew as he walked to the hut for the final time that his freedom had been paid for in the most precious commodity of all, that of life itself.

They escaped in the pre-dawn hours
. The fires had begun in the deep of the night, set off like a chain of finely-tuned explosions. They had been ready to go, to slip, fine as sifted fog through the old chapel and down the long stairs into the bowels of the bell tower.

They were all sleepless and strung with nerves like catgut on a violin except for Kolya, who by grace was in the deep and silent sleep of the very young. It would not last. And so they must flee without a backward glance lest they be trapped forever in the underworld of the Soviet Empire.

Not to look back was impossible, for his eyes were drawn as he paused on the threshold of the chapel, back to where the flames shot high and gave the lie of a false dawn. There he saw Gregor, a Slavic Hephaestus, pure element, heat and forge, mercury spilling deadly and smoking into the forced channels of imprisonment.

But in the last moment, lit scarlet and searing, a burning chiascuro of outlawry and rebellion, stood a man who bowed to no authority greater than his own.

Soon, my brother, we will both be free.

Chapter Eighty-six
Beauty

He awoke just before dawn
. Shura and Vanya were still asleep, Kolya too, mummified in the skins that kept him warm through the bitter nights. Jamie took a deep breath of the chilly air and walked toward the rim of the lake, a silver scrim against the horizon.

An angular shape hovered at the edge, taking awkward steps on legs too long for anything but flight, a lone heron picking its way through the reeds. It was in silhouette, only the tips of its feathers delineated in the vague promise of dawn. He wondered if it was sick or wounded for it ought to have been long gone by now, flown south for the winter, not picking its way through icy water that would soon freeze at the edges. Jamie stood still, mesmerized by its alien presence.

The trip through the long dank tunnel underneath the crumbling monastery had been fraught with anxiety at every step. There had been no way to ascertain ahead of time whether parts of the tunnel had collapsed, or been flooded and washed away over the years. At more than one point, they had been in water up to their knees, and then had to crawl through other sections digging rock and soil out with their bare hands. Agrafina, the goat, had not been overly happy about the dark nor the crawling through narrow earth-choked gaps and bleated until they thought they would either go deaf or the guards would be able to hear her through the several feet of earth.

When they found the end of the tunnel, they had bided their time until dark would soon be falling, and emerged into the gloom of a stand of fir. It had been eerily quiet as they stood there under the great fronded boughs, drinking in the amber scent of them and working out which way to travel. They had to avoid patrols that might be out hunting for them while they kept to a northwest heading.

They set out at once, Kolya quiet and wide-eyed, belly full of rich goat’s milk. He had proved to be an exceptional traveler considering the brutal pace they had set from the beginning, and slept at his regular times strapped to Jamie’s front or Vanya’s back.

Last night they had stopped by the edge of this lake, mirror still and reflecting back a sunken world of crimson, scarlet and gold, the sinking sun mixing with the foliage in a dazzling display. He stood here now on its shore, uncertain what it meant to go home, particularly when you could not find any remnant of that place inside you anymore. But like this heron, he could not remain stranded here in this land for fear of being permanently frozen.

How long he stood there he did not know, silent, waiting for something he did not acknowledge but which he realized was speaking to him nevertheless.

The heron rose, carved against the sky in silver and ink, rose into the curtains of dawn, limned in mists of pearl grey and a strange shimmering verdigris that gave way to a stain of pink that spread and deepened, strengthening like a single chord rising above a symphony. The bird’s wings swept in tempo, rising, rising until the stain burst and became scarlet, vermilion, sienna and gold, and the world hung for an instant shivering on that one note, the heron flying into the face of the sun.

The sight of it cracked something inside him, something he had kept still and frozen since coming to Russia, that thing that resided within a man’s soul that stood in awe at the profound and churning beauty of the world. He had not wanted to know if he could still feel beauty, could still ache for all that the world was and all that it was not.

He had moments like this in his life, a handful, in which he felt as fragile and transparent as tissue, as though the universe flowed through him in all its beauty and transcendence. Against this he had no defense. It was as painful as it was beautiful, for such moments did not repeat themselves in their entirety, but came differently, giving him the understanding of how much he had changed in the intervening time.

He felt as empty and light as a milkweed pod scoured clean by autumn’s rough winds. He turned away from the lake and the heron as it floated up and away, a mere black speck against that violent and shimmering sun, to begin the day’s journey.

Chapter Eighty-seven
Bread and Salt

Their days had acquired a rhythm of sorts
, which helped to stave off the worst of the exhaustion that seemed to travel no more than a few steps behind them, a weighty shadow they could not shake but could not afford to have catch up either. He did not always know where they were. The need for stealth and passing villages in the night like a sneak-thief made navigating their way that much more difficult.Yet he found if he shut down the thoughts in his head and listened to what his body and skin seemed to understand, he knew instinctively which way to go. He had taken to standing at each invisible crossroads and closing his eyes. The other two knew to be silent and Vanya would take Kolya from him, walking off a way and singing in a low, gravely voice that Kolya seemed to find quite enchanting.

He would stand still and bring his instincts to the fore. He was reading the night sky in this same way, dividing it into thirty-two separate sections, able to impose the vision of those imaginary lines onto the sky itself and thus know exactly where a particular star would rise and where it would set, and use this lineation that arced across the sky as his baseline. It was not that hard once he got the worrying portion of his brain out of the way and relied on memory and the knowledge that was innate inside of a man. If he could steer a course on the trackless wastes of the ocean then he could do it in the trackless wastes of Russia too.

It was not all so easy. There was the day they almost ran into a squad of Red Army soldiers. It had been a near miss, for they were tired and had come to the stumbling point when no one spoke and they each just kept putting one foot in front of the other until they had to stop for the night or Kolya’s lusty cries forced them to.

They had been walking in heavy woods where the debris of the forest floor muffled sound and hid intruders. The canopy above their heads kept the weather off them and muffled every sound so it felt like walking on cotton. Unfortunately, if they could not be heard until the last minute, the reverse was also true.

They were on a twisting path, all of them silent with exhaustion, Kolya a dead weight against his chest when he had just known—there was a bend some small way ahead and he could feel a group of men coming. He turned, putting his fingers to his lips and indicating that they should all move quietly off the path into the dense trees. A fallen tree a few feet off the path became their hiding place. There was no time to go deeper into the woods where they might manage to lose themselves in the gloomy green twilight.

They crouched there behind the rotting log, the scent of moss and decaying wood heavy in their nostrils, hoping and praying that the soldiers would move past swiftly. But one stopped to smoke. He was young, as soldiers were, blond hair shorn close to his skull, the tip of his nose red with cold. His eyes were the ice-blue of the Slav and strangely innocent. Behind the tree, they all held their breath, the lazy curls of smoke from the soldier’s cigarette hovering around their heads. He leaned on the other side of the fallen log, so close that Jamie could hear the soft snick of his lips on the cigarette. Kolya stirred against Jamie’s chest, about to make the fretful noises of the not-quite-awake-but-assuredly-hungry. Jamie felt his heart seize in his chest and promptly lodge itself in the vicinity of his throat. He slipped off his mitten and reached into his pocket, heart pounding, for the crust of bread he replaced every other day. He crumbled it and slid his hand inside his coat, feeding it into Kolya’s mouth, and hoping to God it would be enough to stopper him until the damn soldier moved on. He kept crumbling the bread and feeding it to Kolya, one bite at a time, piece by piece, trying to buy their survival.

Kolya managed a squeak that floated out past Jamie’s thumb and they all ceased to breathe. Even the goat, Shura’s large hand around her muzzle, was round-eyed with horror.

The soldier, in the act of putting out his cigarette, looked around, eyes sharp now and seeming to hone in straight at their ragged group. Jamie wondered wildly if one could smell hunger because if so, he was sure the stink of the three of them would lead the soldier straight over the log and into their midst.

But the angels seemed to be on their side for the soldier shrugged and moved off down the trail to join his squad. It took another minute to resume breathing. Kolya was wriggling like an infuriated bunny trapped in a burlap sack and it was only a matter of minutes before he howled, the bread having done little to appease him. Jamie had his hand lightly over the boy’s mouth, feeling the small furious bursts of his breath on the edges of his cold hand. Their time had almost run out.

Shura milked the goat right there into their one bottle and maneuvered the nipple into Kolya’s mouth before Jamie took his hand away. Relief swept through them all as Kolya clamped fiercely onto the nipple without letting out another peep.

Three bodies collapsed limply against the log, damp with sweat and shaking at how near they had come to discovery. As soon as Kolya was fed, they moved back onto the path, walking as swiftly as they dared.

Later, when they had chosen a hollow in the forest for their bed and lit a fire, Vanya asked him, “How did you know, Yasha?”