Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (50 page)

“You have been observed,” Shura said after Svetlana left.

“Yes?”

“She has her sights on you and that means only one thing. Right now, she has a young one but she will soon discard him. But you,” Shura finished wrapping the gauze around Jamie’s thumb and tied a precise knot to keep it in place, “I am thinking, are no stranger to women so perhaps the task will not be troublesome.”

“I’m not in the habit,” Jamie replied, “of being commanded to service women.”

Shura looked at him, perfect seriousness in the crooked face. “It does not matter what you do or do not want. This is the Soviet Union. None of the rules of your old life apply here.”

At first, it had not worried him over much, for it was to be expected. Once Gregor had asserted his dominance and they had settled into a wary truce, he had thought he would manage. However, he felt Svetlana’s observation more than the watchful gaze of others, an observation that was neither distant nor benign.

He had seen from the first that the camp commander was weak. It showed in the filth of the camp environment, in the lawlessness that prevailed even within barbed-wire fences. What order did prevail, prevailed because of Gregor.

Svetlana was not weak, but she did not pair her strength with kindness or an ability to organize. However, it did not take Jamie long to realize that outside of Gregor, this woman was the true power in the camp. He knew well enough to keep her in his sights and do as little as he could to draw her attention to himself.

It was only a couple of weeks after the infirmary incident that he was commanded to stay behind one morning, for which small favor he was not terribly grateful, as it would not endear him to his camp mates. He would be suspected of everything from currying favor to outright spying. Either could cause a convenient accident with a saw, or a tree that suddenly fell in the wrong direction.

Since that first morning, he had been called in for numerous small chores—to mend a chair, to repair leaking faucets, to chop wood and stack it deep against the sides of the snug cabin—all while an armed guard trained an automatic weapon on him. Sometimes he was held back from his work in the forest for this. Other times he was ordered to use his evenings. This he resented, though one resented in silence in Russia. Today he had been called to fix her radio.

He was not anyone’s fool, and saw immediately that the radio had been tampered with, just as the washers on the faucets had been deliberately loosened. He knew there were prisoners who had earned the easier work of chopping wood or repairing such things as needed repair, whereas he had not. He had been chosen for these things for one reason only. He was fully aware that many would count themselves fortunate in his shoes. It was his misfortune that he did not.

She was attractive enough and kept herself as well as life in such a godforsaken post of the Empire had allowed. But it wasn’t her physical attributes that were the problem. It was her soul, and he meant that in the most Russian, emotional, dramatic sense of the word.

She walked toward him now, like the spider to which he had compared her, navigating the silk thread in her web. She was all red, in both character and physicality. Her hair was red and had been deepened to a scarlet flare with henna, her mouth full and crimson with some cheap rouge. Her body was full too. Not even the drab uniform she wore could hide that. She was carnal in that way he had encountered a time or two before, like fruit full and tempting, but once you bit beneath the skin, you discovered it had begun to decay. He met her eyes, for there was no other way. Deference did not serve with a woman like this one, at least not in his case.

“Today, you will stay and take tea with me in the afternoon.”

An innocuous enough invitation, but he understood the implication. Her appetites were not hidden and God knew he himself was no untried virgin. It shouldn’t be such a difficult thing. He was, most nights, too tired to ask himself why it seemed to be just that—difficult. For he had known this was inevitable, the way a man will who has known such a woman before.

Until today he had been able to deflect her but had known too that she was merely toying with him, drawing out her own pleasure. He sensed that pleading his Western ignorance would not help him, the language of the body being universal in its phrasings. Hers was speaking in full sentences.

He ignored her and replaced the back of the radio, putting the screws in with careful deliberation. She came around to where he sat, her hand running across the back of his shoulders. He went still, weary with the pantomime in which they were engaged.

“Did you hear me?” she asked, her tone that of a woman attempting to seduce, but only accustomed to one note, that of command. Her eyes held all the ice-blue hauteur of her ancestors. He wondered once again what egregious sin had landed her with such a weakling for a husband, in a remote outpost that had long been forgotten by central command.

“I heard you, but think I mistook your meaning. I am not, after all, a native speaker.”

“Do not even try to play the fool with me. They tell me you are extremely proficient in our language.” She had one red-tipped finger on his chin now, forcing him to meet her eyes.

“Alright then, I am saying no.”

“What?”

Jamie knew she had heard him but that it did not matter. His opinions were of no account in this matter but he could not desist from voicing them.

“No,” he repeated, just as quietly, but with more force than before. His temper was fraying rapidly. It was the first time in his life he had hated a woman. It was not a pleasant sensation.

She slapped him hard across the face, jerking his head to the side and filling his mouth with blood. The second slap promised to be even greater in force, but he stopped it by grabbing her wrist hard and holding it up in the air, suspended in mid-violence. He realized his mistake at once, for he saw the flare in her eyes and understood its meaning. She was breathing heavily through her nose, face flushed with excitement. He felt suddenly very weary, and wanted nothing more than to crawl back to the hut and pull the covers over his head. He did not want to deal with this woman.

“I can have any of them flogged or put into isolation. I believe the little one who works in the infirmary would suffer under such attention.” She let the words linger on the air, strong with import. “I think you understand my meaning.”

He did, and it hit him with force how narrow his world had become, how without choice or places to turn. She was still breathing in short, sharp bursts and he understood far too well what she wanted and how she wanted it.

Inside himself he shut a door, weary, for he knew when a man is forced into a corner and there is nowhere to run he must fight with whatever weapons are at hand or submit to what is demanded of him so as not to cost others. There was, as far as he could see, only one path currently open to him, and fury had its own intoxications.

He took a breath and bared his teeth in a bloody smile, hearing Vanya’s words in his head as he moved toward the woman.

It is only a body. It is not who I am.

Chapter Thirty-six
August 1973
Mother Russia

This country, this Russia, was a land beyond conception
—eleven time zones, six thousand miles from east to west and three thousand from north to south. It laid claim to the world’s longest coastlines and boasted every kind of geography known to man: arid desert, inland seas, frozen tundra, thick fairytale forests, semi-tropical beaches, long sweeping steppes that were so treeless that a man could be lost for days without sight of any sort of landmark, rivers that flowed on forever and surging rugged mountains. This land that made one feel the terrible frailty of existence as a man.

Did the brutality of such a landscape inspire brutality in man’s heart as well? For Russia had treated her children harshly, and as children will, they loved their mother all the more for her chill indifference.

If you listened long enough in the great silences such a land held, it would speak to you—of its past, of its future and of all that had sundered it. Russia speaks to him of the great horsemen that once swept her plains, and the armies that even now marched by the hundreds of thousands across her frozen heart. She tells of falling stars that laid waste to the abundance of her bounty and the rifts in her body where enormous stores of water, the largest in the world, are held. She speaks of her peasants, her shamans, her priests, her emperors and queens, her poets and musicians. She whispers of the long iron girders that trace her spine for the distance of seven days. She speaks of the empty spaces in her soul, of the migration of dancing cranes and herds of reindeer. She speaks of her amber hair—seductively, her pearls, her minerals and the rich, loamy fertility of her plains. She tells him the story of all her peoples: the haughty, mysterious Slavs; the silent Sibers; the earthy Ukraines; the Balts and Turks and Tatars; and the Yakuts, whom she claims can walk through hordes of white men like smoke and never be seen nor felt. She tells of the thunder of foreign troops who have come again and again, and of the vast silence of her winters that have inevitably defeated her foes. Her voice is as dark as a terrible perfume, as she tells of the secret police and the fields sown with the blood of the forgotten innocents. She speaks in contradiction and secret languages that have not been spoken in hundreds of years. And under all her words, her seduction, her coldness, her heat and succor, he hears her heart—the great, thundering heart of Mother Russia. And he hears that it is a heart forever in the process of breaking.

He understood such a country, for Ireland showed little mercy to her children either. It was an odd thing to love a land so, for it never loved one back. It too was prey to the vagaries of weather, meteorites, man’s misdeeds, fortune, or lack thereof, and that entirely fickle mistress—chance. And yet, each land had its own characteristics, due to the great shift of mountains and seas, and the inner boiling cauldron of the earth itself. Each land had its own nature, soft with heat or laid upon by winter’s iron hand, some fertile with life and pungent with decay, some with skies so large they made a man want to drop to his knees and hide his head for the terror it could inspire. Or a land could lull you, the way Ireland often did, hiding its capacity for the taking of blood and the breaking of hearts in the soft swell of its verdant green hills, and the windswept beauty of its coastal zones.

The forests here had silenced him with their grim, dark grandeur. They spoke of trolls and goblins, of the soft, sibilant cackle of the Baba Yaga. At twilight they were positively spooky with the dark falling long before it did on the open plain. Being Irish, and therefore no stranger to the idea of trees having a life and world of their own, he imagined they spoke to one another through the aspect of air, with the stir of leaves and the scratch of branches and the high wail they emitted during a storm, or the horrible grinding moan that echoed throughout the forest when they fell.

The resin was thick and heady as golden honey, the scent released by the day’s heat to linger in a still torpor in the late afternoon. He paused, allowing the group to walk some way ahead of him.

He longed for home in a visceral way, the deep-rooted longing for familiar surroundings, to be in a place where you understood instinctively what was required, where you could lie down in a patch of sunlight and not worry about being punished for it.

He still thought about escape each and every day, but where would that leave Violet, Nikolai, Shura—the motley crew of people that looked to him for sustenance to help them face another day? The thought of what vengeance might be wreaked on them always halted him when he felt the pull at the forest’s edge, the ever-present beckoning west, so strong at times that he had to wrench himself away to ignore its call.

And so for now, it would appear, Russia was his home. Russia was his country and he would have to hope that, as her adopted son, she would see fit to allow him one day to leave, taking his life with him.

Part Six
Soul’s Ransom
Ireland – January-March 1974
Russia – November 1973- April 1974

Chapter Thirty-seven
January 1974
Just Kate

It was a dark and stormy night, or rather, Pat Riordan
thought, gazing out his brother’s kitchen window, a somewhat poorly lit and intemperate afternoon. The air was heavy with the expectation of snow, the light that odd grey-pink that heralded a big fall.

He didn’t mind a good storm. It shut the world out and allowed a man to dwell with his own thoughts. Today, his own were to be confined to his law books. He sighed. The table was loaded with books and papers, and though he found the law in all its labyrinthine convolutions fascinating, this morning’s reading combined with the impending weather had given him a mild headache. He had already cut kindling, done dishes, taken Finbar for a long tramp through the moisture-laden woods, and made a sandwich. Half of it had been eaten by Finbar, who always managed to convey the impression that he was on the verge of starvation.