Siberia (18 page)

I sat up. I felt as if Rosita had joined me. A naughty, defiant little girl, with her own ideas about everything
. . .
“I am
not
helpless!” I whispered. “I
won’t
give up.”

I measured the cracked window with my forearm. It wasn’t big, but it was big enough. Then I quickly ransacked the bed box. I found a pair of gloves, a bottle of tea, and a stale pack of sliced black bread. The mattress had a blanket and a light thermal quilt (Fitness Police slept in style). I rolled the bedding up and strapped it on the outside of my knapsack, and stuffed the other things into my pockets. The parking lot was dark and deserted. I lay back and kicked the window with my left foot, until the cracked pane fell out. No one came running to see what the noise was: I wriggled through the hole, dropped, and scooted, limping hard, to the shelter of the bunkers full of rubbish that stood against the end wall of the shack.

It had been cold in the cruiser. It was a
very
cold night outdoors. I heard a rustling behind me, and peered into the shadows: surprised that even rats could be moving. Children’s faces, filthy, blue-shaded, pinched with cold, peered back at me. They’d seen me escape from the police van. They didn’t speak, and neither did I.

Silently, they burrowed out of sight.

I remembered what Satin had said: better to be a slave, than to be a stray child in the wilderness.
That’s what will happen to me,
I thought. Either Yagin will catch me again, or I will become one of the lost. I wanted my mama, more than I had ever wanted her.
. . .
But I wasn’t alone. Rosita was with me. “
Cheeep . . .,”
I whispered, and spread my arms, a little girl pretending to have wings.

I drank half the sweet tea in the bottle, ate two slices of the black bread, and left the rest for the stray children. I watched the restaurant doors: flapping my arms and whispering
“Cheeep”
occasionally. Maybe I was going a little mad, but it seemed to help. Before long two people came out alone, talking and laughing. The woman had an embroidered scarf. As she fastened up her coat I glimpsed a belt decorated with gold coins, and a swinging red and yellow skirt. The man had scuffed but flashy red boots. Bandit tribesfolk, I thought. My kind of people.

I ambled over to them, hiding the limp as best I could, and looking confident.

(
Cheeep . . .
I’m a strange and unusual wild creature.)

“Hey, you two. Can you give me a lift?”

Disaster struck. The woman peered at me, with slanting dark eyes like Satin’s in a brown face with rosy cheeks, and I
knew
her. She was from the caravan. She knew me too, at once. “It’s Little Father’s snow bunting!” she exclaimed. “What’s all this? You’re the kid who escaped from the slavers’ holding pen, and then the god-awful mutie police came asking questions about you. Little Father was mad as fire!”

“It shows how little you know about Little Father’s business,” I said. “That was the third time I’ve been sold this year. I was supposed to hide until the end of the fair, and get picked up again on the road. But those devils of mutie police picked me up, instead; for no reason. I’ve just got free of them. Where’s the rest of the caravan?”

The man laughed. “Oh my God, a scam. Trust Little Father!”

“You’re a bold kid,” said the woman who had recognized me. “We’re on our way to join them now. If you’re sure that’s what you want, you can come along.”

My friends were called Yulia and Aliek. Yulia had stayed on at the end of the fair with her boyfriend; now Aliek was taking her back to her family. They would meet Little Father’s trucks at Rocket Town—another abandoned town, where the bandits liked to gather in the winter. Rocket Town was in completely the wrong direction for me, but I could double back: I just wanted to get away from Yagin.

Their cab was warm, and full of color: painted panels, scarves and shawls and dangling ornaments. We caught up on the caravan gossip (and it was easy to behave confidently: I was
Chiroptera:
I was flying, strange and free). Soon Yulia decided she was peckish, though they’d eaten. She cooked boiled sausage, on a hot plate up on the bed shelf. We ate it with real mustard, washed down with vodka-laced fruit tea. I don’t know what was in the “meat,” but I had never tasted anything so greasy and delicious. The snow-tired truck bulldozed majestically through the little drifts, and swerved around the big ones: while the walls of grimy snow on either side of the road zoomed by, looming up in the light of our great headlamps, falling away again into darkness.

“We should be in Rocket Town by tomorrow noon,” said Aliek. “We’ll take you right to Little Father, I know where he camps.”

“Oh, there’s no need,” I said casually. “Drop me anywhere, I’ll find him.”

Aliek, who was driving, glanced at Yulia with a crooked smile.

“Little snow bunting,” said Yulia, kindly, “we don’t blame you for trying it on but you’re a runaway slave. Are you
sure
you want to be taken to Rocket Town?”

Every hand will be against me, I thought. I am finished.

I forgot about being
Chiroptera.

“No,” I said, coming down to earth hard. “I don’t.”

I was sitting between them, I couldn’t reach either of the doors, and anyway Aliek drove fast, even over ice in the dark. They looked at each other over my head.

“So, where do you really want to go?” asked Aliek, calmly.

“I want to go north, to the frozen sea. I
. . .
I was trying to get there, when I got collected by Little Father. My mother had escaped from a prison Settlement, and crossed the sea. I was trying to join her.”

The road plunged just then, as if straight into the center of the earth. We went down into darkness. Aliek hit some smooth ice and rode into a magnificent skid.

“Drive into it! Drive into it!” shouted Yulia. “Don’t brake! Change gear!”

The big truck buried its armored muzzle in a wall of rock-hard drift. Aliek laughed, put it into reverse, and it did the same wild gyration backward: except now we were missing one bank of headlights.

“Backseat driver,” he shouted. “Get into the backseat, or drive yourself!”

“You know my night vision is no good!”

Then Aliek stopped the engine, and the silence of the cold, cold night out there gathered around us. “We’ll catch hell if Little Father finds out,” he remarked, after some moments’ thought. “But we could take her to the Depot. It isn’t so far.”

“Why should he find out?” said Yulia. “
I’m
not going to tell him.”

I fell asleep. Yulia woke me up, and coaxed me onto the bed shelf. I lay curled up with my back to the cab, and dreamed of flying. In the gray dawn Aliek shook me awake, and put a mug of very hot, bittersweet dark liquid into my hands. Yulia was driving.

“What is this?”

“It’s called
coffee.
It’s very good, and rare as hens. It will wake you up.”

I got into the front seat again. There was no sign of the forest, no high walls of frozen snow, only a flat, wind-scoured heathland in every direction. We drove for another hour, until we reached a wide pan of concrete, swept bare by the wind. There was a row of sheds. Around them, piled up anyhow, partly buried in snow, partly stripped naked, there were heaps and heaps and heaps of different-sized boxes.

“Where are we?”

“This is the Depot,” said Yulia. “The Commission Supply trucks come here. Folks say it used to be an airstrip, but there are no planes anymore. There’ve been no planes for years and years. No fuel they can use, or no parts, or something. Now the trucks just unload for no reason. Caravans come here, to see if there’s anything useful.”

She pointed, over the ramparts of boxes.

“The narrow sea is that way. Not far, about a mile, I think.”

“You go to the Observatory,” said Aliek. “That’s where people meet, who are going to cross. Don’t try it on your own! It’s very dangerous.”

“Are there guards?”

Aliek shrugged. “No need. Who cares if you cross, it’s still the Wilderness on the other side, unless you have city papers.”

“There used to be guards in the Observatory,” said Yulia.

“But not anymore.” She gave me a hug, and tucked a greasy paper parcel into my pocket. “Good luck, little snow bunting. Enjoy your freedom.”

Aliek opened the cab door and let me down; and tossed my jacket after me. “Don’t cross alone! Wait for other people, they’ll turn up. People like you!”

I stood looking up at their smiling, weather-worn, carefree faces.

“Come with me. I
. . .
I have something like city papers. I can get you in. You can be free too, and live in comfort, and not be outlaws.”

Yulia laughed. “We are free already.”

Their truck had looked big when it was beside me, racketing and shuddering. It looked very small before it disappeared, but I was much smaller. I was freezing, in my pretty clothes. I picked up my jacket, and put it on. It had been lying on the floor of the cab, and the folds were stiff with rime. My leg was stiff too. I didn’t have wings anymore.
Chiroptera,
the furry animal who flies, needs a lot of energy, and I suddenly had none. I hobbled over to the nearest boxes and sat down to rub my knee. I wondered if I could even walk as far as the sea. And what then?

What then?

The boxes were stamped
WS,
for Wilderness Settlements, with a Brigade, a Sector, and a batch number. Long before they’d been sealed with tape, but it had withered and fallen away. They looked oddly familiar. I pried open the lid of the nearest one, wondering what I would find. Maybe I should search this “Depot” for useful supplies.

It was full of nails.

I put my head in my hands, and cried.

I cried for my mama, and all the years she’d been chained to that workshop bench, all those hours of useless toil under the red rat’s eye. For the magic that couldn’t really save me from loneliness or helplessness. For the countless lives wasted, so that the cities could stay warm and bright. I cried for everything hateful about my world, and everyone who had struggled and hoped and
tried,
and finally failed.

Then I got up and set off, limping and very stiff in the cold morning, to see if I could find this mysterious Observatory.

* 11 *

Carnivora

There was only one building. It stood on a headland, at the farthest point of a wide bay, where the white waste of the heath met the pale sky. It had a domed roof, and windows all around; the double glass crusted over with snow. It must have been a lookout, or maybe a weather station, when people still lived on this coast. In front of it a concrete path—partly blocked by drifts—cut through the low, reddish cliffs, down to the shore. I had never seen the sea before. But all I could think, as I stood there, was that the lumpy gray ice that stretched to the horizon looked like ugly walking.

The door was on the landward side, in shelter. When I knocked the snow off it, I found it was fastened with a padlock and chain. But it was only a Settlements Commission sort of chain. I hit it with a rock until it snapped. There was a short, shadowy passageway, with old framed photographs of ships on the walls, and then the main room, about twice the size of Mama’s hut. Dim light came through the veiled windows. The dome, high overhead, was made in sections that looked as if they were supposed to move. There was a gallery, around the base of it, reached by a wrought-iron staircase. There was a stove, with a stack of wood (I was very glad to see that), and bunks around the walls, with cupboards under them. Some of the bunks had tattered mattresses. A child’s mitten, covered in dust, lay on the dusty floor.

“Mama?” I whispered. I felt her presence so strongly. It was as if we had agreed to meet here: but where was she?

I lit a fire, with one of my last precious matches: ate half the boiled sausage Yulia had given to me, and drank some of my last water. Gradually warmth crept into me, and a little courage. I began opening the cupboards. In the first one I tried, I found a cardboard box full of pots and pans. “That’s
good
!” I muttered, trying to be positive. The next cupboard held canned food, that looked quite fresh; a coil of rope; and a lamp that was also a stove, with a supply of little blocks of fuel. A heap of slick, folded fabric proved, when I pulled it out, to be an inflatable bivvy-tent.

I knelt there with my mouth open, dazzled by this plunder.

I was saved!

I went back to the stove, took the nutshell out of my knapsack, and opened it for the first time since the morning before Toesy died. The four remaining kits were at their full size. They looked up at me, bright eyed. “Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been talking to you. Toesy and I ran into trouble, and Yagin caught me again. But I got away and everything’s all right now. We’re in a good place, just where we’re supposed to be, and we’ve got everything we need for the last part of the trek.”

I looked in the other cupboards, and found a good box of matches in one of them, and a few very rusty, swollen tins in another. There were two trapdoors set in the floor. When I pulled up the larger one I saw a ladder going down into darkness. A gust of deadly cold rose up: it was a cellar, cut into the frozen earth. I decided to leave that for another time. The smaller trapdoor had only a shallow space under it, that held a dark-covered exercise book, and a pencil. I opened the book, and found dated entries, like a diary.

19th December . . . Ice gauge reading satisfies our guide at
last. We embark on the sea crossing tomorrow.

I didn’t have a guide. Where did the guides come from?

16th March . . . Blizzard continues, but we must leave tomorrow, or we won’t have enough supplies. Smaller sledge lost when
crossing the bay, a blow . . . Pray for us. Saskia Lensky, Jacob
Lensky, Shastha Sigratha, Victorine Sigratha (aged eight)

That one scared me, but some were even worse.

12th February . . . Little Ekaterina died today. She will join
her brother. How terrible to leave our babies on this desolate shore.
We leave as soon as Papa’s feet are better, walking gives him great
pain.

Some of the entries were in faded ink, some in pencil. They went back for years. All of them the last messages of people like me, who had reached this far in their desperate escape from the Settlements, or some other kind of trouble. Though Mama had never told me about this place, and it wasn’t marked on her map, there was no doubt I was where she had planned to be.
. . .
The supplies I’d found must have been spares, excess baggage left by some other party of fugitives.

7th March . . . We will leave as soon as Manya has recovered
from her fever. The season is late, but Vadim says the ice will still
be good for two more weeks.

Could that
Manya
have been my mama? There was no year, but it was one of the last entries. She had been ill.
. . .
Oh, but she’d been here!

I told myself I couldn’t be sure. But the hope I’d been clinging to since I left New Dawn had never burned so strongly.

I took a pan outside and packed it with snow for fresh water, and put a mugful of it to heat for some tea. Then I spread my stolen quilt and blanket by the stove, and settled there with a tin of jam and a spoon, and the nutshell open so I could have the kits for company. They pushed their paws and noses against the shield, but I wasn’t going to let them out. I didn’t feel as secure as all that.

I was very tired. My arms and legs were aching. I sipped hot berry tea, and turned the pages of the record book. There were charts and useful tips, but I wished so many people hadn’t reached here, and then died. Especially the children
. . .

I started awake.

The room was dark and cold. I grabbed the nutshell and sealed it, shocked that I’d fallen asleep and left it open, and fed the stove until the fire burned brightly again. There had better be more wood somewhere.
. . .
But what was that? I had glimpsed something moving, out of the corner of my eye. There was something white, moving creepily slowly across the floor. Oh, no, please, not a ghost. Was that a child’s white hand, groping out from the trapdoor that led to the cellar
. . .
? I grabbed a burning stick from the stove, and held it up.

The white thing was the package of boiled sausage. It was moving because it was being dragged away by a huge gray rat. I yelled and threw my torch
. . .
and then had to run after it, stamping out sparks. Then I heard a rattling, rolling sound behind me. I spun around to see two more rats,
making off with
the nutshell!
I swooped on them, grabbed the shell, and stuffed it into the front of my blouse, snatched another burning stick from the stove.

A carpet of little red eyes glinted back at me. The floor was swarming with rats. For a moment I was paralyzed. Then I ran around in a frenzy, screaming and beating at them with my torch. Very soon they had all vanished, into cracks and holes I couldn’t see. Unfortunately, they would surely be back.

Rats! I
hated
rats. I couldn’t stay here. But I had nowhere else to go.

There was only one thing to do. I retreated to the wrought-iron staircase with my quilt and blanket, and the knapsack, and the rescued sausage. I had solemnly promised myself, after Toesy, that I was not going to take another kit to second stage. But I hadn’t reckoned on rats. I opened the shell, and the shield. Three of the little ancestor creatures were burrowed deep in their nest. The fourth was sitting up, bright eyed, very interested in all the excitement. The kits still looked identical: but I was beginning to feel the hidden differences.

“Mama said I should be very careful about growing you, Mr. Carnivora. She said you could be dangerous. But that’s for the rats to worry about.”

I took him out, sealed the others away, and gave him some of the rescued sausage, torn into tiny scraps. He liked that a lot.

I spent the rest of the night on the stairs, wrapped in my quilt and blanket: alternately dozing, and feeding my new Lindquist. When the gray dawn came he was looking very like the animal I’d found on the doormat, all those years ago. I took him with me when I went in search of more plunder. I needed fuel, and much more important, I needed a sled. I could not carry everything I needed. I wasn’t strong enough, even if I could have found a pack for it.

I tried the cellar first. There was nothing down there except empty boxes. Three of the walls were frozen earth. The fourth had been blocked off by sheets of metal. I lifted my lamp, wondering if they could be useful, and saw a cross had been drawn there, maybe in charcoal; the wilderness sign against evil. Then I understood. You can’t dig graves, in the winter. I stood for a moment, thinking of the dead.

“Come on, Nivvy. This is not for us. We shouldn’t be here.”

The cupboards in the gallery held old broken pieces of scientific equipment: nothing I could use. I wrapped myself up and went outside. It was another calm day, but fiercely cold. “I hope this good weather lasts,” I said to Nivvy, who was tucked inside my blouse and jacket. Had anyone else been here this winter? I didn’t think so, the last entries in the book seemed to be older than that. I kicked around in the new snow, looking for footprints, but I couldn’t really tell. The woodpile was beside the door. There were no trees on the heath, it was all scavenged timber. One of the pieces caught my eye at once. I pulled it out and stood it up: a flexible board, about as wide as the length of my arm, and almost as tall as me.

“Nivvy! This is our sled! All it needs is some holes, for fastening the harness and roping things down.” Something glinted, out on the heath. I looked again, and it was gone, but I was sure I’d seen a flash of light, like a reflection on glass.

But rats love woodpiles. Just as I was searching for that glint of reflection, a great big daddy rat, disturbed by my poking, came jumping out, right in my face. I fell backward, and a slender, russet brown body leapt from my jacket. The rat disappeared, with Nivvy in pursuit. There was a terrific squealing and scuffling, then a small, sleek head popped out from among the timbers: bright eyes, round ears, and a fierce, bloodied grin. Nivvy licked my fingers, chirruped, and dived out of sight. He quickly reappeared dragging the daddy rat. He laid the body in front of me, smoothed his whiskers modestly with his front paws, and vanished again. Another terrific scuffle, and another rat was carried out. He repeated this process once more, and then he seemed satisfied. He took a few token bites, and rippled up to my shoulder, purring and nuzzling my ear.

My Nivvy was back! My dearest, first companion.

That night, I built a good fire, and cooked up a can of con stew. Of course the rats soon gathered, but we were ready: and Nivvy wreaked havoc. I had found a shovel in the woodpile, which I used to move the casualties. I built a triumphal pyramid outside in the snow, and counted twenty-seven corpses.
. . .
I thought of Yagin, and almost wished that strange man had been there to see the joyous slaughter. A little rampant predation, he would have said, never does nature any harm.

After that the rats didn’t bother me. I found a metal spike in one of the planks on the woodpile, heated it red-hot, and used it to punch holes in my flexible board. I made a sledge harness, with shoulder padding from a scavenged bunk-mattress. I packed my supplies, and repacked them. I memorized the notes and charts in the diary book. No one came, nothing moved on the heath or the frozen sea. The weather stayed fine and calm, I ate well, and slept well. Nivvy rarely left my shoulder, except when he was ratting. I played with him and talked to him, the way I had done when I was four years old. At night (I slept by the stove, I didn’t fancy those rat-gnawed bunks) I would wake, with Mama’s nutshell hugged in my arms and Nivvy in the crook of my shoulder, and think I was a little girl again, in the bed-cupboard with my mama: dreaming of the great journey we would make, to the shores of the frozen sea.

I felt watched, all the time. But I thought it was my imagination.

Or maybe the ghosts, or my mama; thinking of me far away.

On the fourth day I packed my sled and dragged it down the cliff path. There was a bank of frozen shingle, clotted with snow, and then the ice. I stood with the sled at my feet, staring. Yulia and Aliek had said wait for company. But what if nobody came? Anyway, I couldn’t wait, because of Yagin.
. . .
I was rested. I had everything I needed. Except maybe the courage to set out alone. It was about sixty miles across the strait. According to the diary book, I should be prepared for at least ten marches, ten days and nights on the ice. I thought of being out there all alone. The ice failing: me waking up in the freezing water, my knapsack sinking, nobody to help me.

“This is our trial run,” I said to Nivvy. “Across the bay, and back overland.”

It took me several hours to cross the bay: including a stop in the middle, when I practiced putting up my tent, made myself some tea: ate a meal and packed everything up again. I was tired, but pleased with myself when I reached the western shore. There was no path here, but the cliffs were much more broken. I hauled and struggled, cursing the rocks and the sudden drifts. Eventually I reached the heath again, drenched in sweat. I set off for home at once. It’s best not to stop when you’re overheated, you’ll get a chill. There was a tingling like invisible messages in the frozen air, and on the eastern and western margins of the sky stood two pillars of light, unimaginably tall, shading from pink to green. A great silver arc unfolded between them, the point of the curve seeming to dip into the sea. I had not seen the northern lights since the time I met the wild snow hare, on the plain beyond the fur farm.

“That’s got to be a good omen!”

Nivvy made a grumbling noise, from the warmth of my greasy, dirty layers. I gazed until the magic faded. How beautiful the winter world is, I thought. In spite of everything. Then I realized I could still see lights in the sky, dull yellowish lights, that seemed to be coming from the ground.
. . .
I heard a murmur,
a human voice.
I could see nothing, but sound travels far, on cold dry air. I slipped off the sledge harness and crept toward the skyline.