The Romanov Cross: A Novel (25 page)

And so began their long journey eastward, into the wide and empty spaces of Siberia. The train itself was comfortable and well provisioned, and enough of the family’s household members were accompanying them—such as her father’s valet, her mother’s maid Anna Demidova, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, and best of all the cook—that the trip occasionally took on the aspect of an outing to the royal estates in the Crimea, or some other country retreat. Every evening at six o’clock, the train stopped so that Jemmy and her father’s dog, too, could be walked. Ana couldn’t wait for these little breaks, to feel the solid soil under her feet instead of the constant rumble of the train tracks. And she found a beauty in the green marsh grasses and endless vistas of the steppes. If a grove of white birch trees happened to present itself, she and her sisters sometimes played hide-and-seek, a child’s game that took them back to happier days. Her mother, laid up by her sciatica, would watch them from the train window, and Alexei, if he was feeling well enough, would stroll along the side of the tracks with his father.

Once, when Ana had strayed too far from the train while picking cornflowers, a young soldier, thin as a rail and with a struggling brown moustache, had warned her back. Anastasia, gesturing out at the vast wilderness, said, “You think I would make a run for it? Where do you think I would go?”

The soldier, who seemed flustered to be speaking to a grand duchess at all—even a deposed one—said, “I don’t know. But please don’t try.” His tone was less admonitory than it was pleading. He was doing his duty, that she could see, but he wasn’t entirely at ease with it. She smiled at him—he couldn’t be more than a year or two older than she was, nineteen or twenty at the most—and he held his rifle as if it were a hoe, something she suspected he was much more familiar with.

“Sergei!” another of the soldiers hollered from atop a nearby hill. “Get that limping bitch back here!”

Sergei blushed deeply; some of the soldiers enjoyed delivering insults to their royal prisoners. Ana, who had grown accustomed if not inured to it, glanced at the bouquet of bright blue cornflowers in her hand and said, “I have enough.”

When she dropped one on her return to the waiting train, Sergei picked it up and, bobbing his head as if in a furtive bow, tried to give it back to her.

“You keep it,” she said, and if she thought he had blushed before, it was nothing compared to the crimson flush that filled his young face now. He looked so much like a tomato she laughed and said, “Don’t let the others see that you have it, Sergei. They’ll call it imperial property and take it away.”

He stuck it into the pocket of his frayed military tunic as if it were made of gold.

After that, Ana got used to Sergei’s guarding her. Whenever she stepped off the train with her spaniel, Jemmy, she expected to see him trailing her at a distance, and the other soldiers, too, seemed to regard her as his charge. Her sisters kidded her that she had found a suitor. Usually, the train would not stop anywhere near a station or a town; Ana didn’t know if it was because the Red Guards thought the local people would attack the imperial family, or try to liberate them. On one day, a village was in sight—a prosperous-looking one, judging from the flower-filled window boxes, the green fields, and busy barnyards—but it was safely removed on the other side of the river. Ana noticed that Sergei was gazing at it longingly, his rifle drooping even lower than usual.

“What’s the name of that village?” she asked, and at first he was so lost in thought he didn’t answer.

When she repeated the question, he said, “That is my home.” And then he turned toward her and said, “It’s called Pokrovskoe.”

Now Anastasia looked at it, too, with special attention. Pokrovskoe. She had heard Rasputin speak of it often. It was his own hometown. And he had predicted that the Romanovs would see it one day.

Could he have imagined it would be under circumstances like these?

She did not need to ask the next question before Sergei said, “Father Grigori lived in the house you see with two stories.”

It was unmistakable, looming over all the other cottages in the town the way Rasputin himself had always dominated whatever company
he was in. Anastasia wondered who lived in it now—she had heard rumors of a wife and young son. But then there had been so many rumors, most of them scurrilous, that neither she, nor the Tsaritsa, to whom they were often whispered, knew what to believe. She was eager to alert her mother, who was still on the train resting her bad back, where they were; she would want to know.

Coming closer than he ever had before, but keeping an eye out lest the other guards grow suspicious, Sergei said, “There are those who still communicate with the
starets
.”

“What do you mean, communicate with him? Father Grigori is dead. He is buried in the imperial park.”

Sergei’s eyes earnestly bore into hers.

“I put a white rose on his coffin myself,” Ana said. Her fingers, without meaning to, went to her chest and touched the cross beneath her blouse.

“There are those who keep the fire alight,” Sergei said, just before the whistle on the locomotive screeched. Jemmy barked back at it.

“All aboard,” an officer hollered from on top of the royal train car, “and now!” The whistle went off again, and there was an impatient chuffing sound from the engine.

Sergei ostentatiously lifted his rifle barrel and nudged his prisoner in the direction of the train. Anastasia walked back toward the tracks, Jemmy trotting at her heels. Her sisters were already mounting the stairs, followed by her father in his customary khaki tunic and forage cap. He was holding Alexei, identically dressed, by the hand. The engineer was waving a flag.

Anastasia turned around to say something to Sergei, but he was sauntering back to the troop car with a pair of the other guards and pretended not to notice.

Moments later, the train resumed its journey, and as Ana watched from the window, the flowers and fields and whitewashed barns of Pokrovskoe slid from view. She had forgotten to ask which house had been Sergei’s, and deeply regretted that now.

“Kushtaka,”
Nika said, and Slater had to ask her to repeat it, partly to catch this new word again, and partly because he simply liked to hear her say it.

The lights in the mess tent were wavering, as the wind, only partially blocked by the old stockade, battered the triple-reinforced nylon walls with a dull roar. The temporary electrical grid Sergeant Groves had slapped together was still holding, but the lamps, strung up on wires, were swaying above their makeshift dinner table. Tomorrow, Slater thought, they’d have to get the backup generator online, too—just in case.

“Kushtaka,”
Nika said. “The otter-men. If you were an unhappy soul, still nursing some grievance on earth, you were condemned to linger here, unable to ascend the staircase of the aurora borealis into heaven. Or maybe you just drowned, and your body could not be recovered and properly disposed of—either way, your spirit could become a changeling, half-human and half-otter.”

“Why otter?” Dr. Eva Lantos asked, as she dunked her herbal tea bag one more time.

“Because the otter lived between the sea and the land, and now your spirit lived between life and death.”

“We have many such legends in Russia, too,” Professor Kozak said, mopping up the last remnants of his stew with a crust of bread. “I grew up with such stories.”

“Most cultures do have something similar,” Nika agreed. “The
kushtaka
, for instance, were sometimes said to take on the form of a beautiful woman, or someone you loved, in order to lure you into deep water or the depths of a forest. If you got lost, you could wind up becoming a changeling yourself.”

“So if I see Angelina Jolie in the woods,” Kozak said, “and she is calling to me, ‘Vassily! Vassily! I must have you!’ I should not go to her.”

“You might at least want to think it over,” Nika said with a smile.

Kozak shrugged. “Still, I would go.”

Slater leaned back against a crate and surveyed his team like a proud father observing his brood. In only a matter of hours on the island, they had begun to come together nicely as a team. Professor Kozak was an industrious bear, quickly unpacking his ground-penetrating radar equipment and itching to get started the next day. Dr. Lantos had checked all the crates of lab equipment and supplies, and advised Slater on where they should set up the autopsy tent. Sergeant Groves was off on rounds right now, securing the premises (from force of habit, since the island held no hostiles) and getting to know the Coast Guardsmen who had been left to complete the construction of the prefabs, lighting poles, and ramps the next day.

If the weather allowed, that was. A storm was heading their way, and already its winds were scouring the colony like a steel brush. Slater prayed they wouldn’t get a heavy snowfall, which would mean just that much more digging to get to the graves.

And then there was Nika, whose presence here he had so opposed at first, and who was rather like a spirit herself—a friendly, woodland sprite, filled with native tales and history and lore. Slater found himself immersed not only in her words, but in the light that seemed to be captured in her jet-black hair and eyes. Her tawny skin had taken on a positively golden cast in the glow of the lamps, and he noticed that she frequently touched a little ivory figurine, no bigger than a jump drive, hanging outside her blue-and-gold Berkeley sweatshirt.
He was grateful when the professor, perhaps noting it too, asked, “Is that a figure of a little
kushtaka
around your neck?”

“No,” Nika said, holding it out on its thin chain so that they all could see it better. “That would be bad luck. This is a good-luck charm. We call them
bilikins
.”

Slater leaned closer, his coffee mug still in his hand. Now he could see that it was an owl, expertly carved with its wings furled and its eyes wide open.

“The owl represents the perfect guide because he can see even in the dark of night. The leader of the hunt traditionally wore it.”

“Walrus tusk?” Kozak said, turning it over in his stubby fingers.

“Maybe,” Nika said. “But my grandmother gave it to me, and her grandmother gave it to her, and if the story is true, it’s made from the tusk of a woolly mammoth. They’re frozen in the soil all around here, and every once in a while one turns up.”

What else, Slater couldn’t help but think, was he going to find in the frozen soil of St. Peter’s Island? A perfectly preserved specimen, its viral load stored within the flesh like a ticking bomb, or a decaying corpse, whose deadly contaminant had been leeched away by decades of slow exposure and erosion?

“Yes,” Kozak said, “the topography and geology of Alaska is like Siberia, and is well suited to this sort of preservation.” Now that he knew its provenance, he looked even more impressed by the humble
bilikin
.

An especially strong gust of wind battered the tent, and the lights flickered again. Slater reached into his shirt pocket and removed several plastic packets, each one containing a dozen blue capsules and a dozen white.

“I think brandy is more usual after dinner, yes?” Kozak said, examining his packet.

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t mix well with these,” Slater said.

Dr. Lantos had opened her packet, and said, “Prophylactic measures?”

“Yes. The blue one’s a standard anti-influenza drug; you’ll need to take it every day for the next six days, whether we’re still working here
or not. The white one is a neuraminidase inhibitor that’s shown both preventative and therapeutic results in trials done at the AFIP.”

“I never heard of these trials,” Lantos said, examining the white capsule skeptically.

“The results haven’t been made public yet. And tomorrow,” he said, with a grin, “may be the best field test we’ve ever run.”

“So we are the guinea pigs?” Kozak said.

Slater nodded and washed one of each of the pills down with the last of his coffee. Kozak and Lantos did the same, but Nika sat silently, waiting.

“Where’s mine?”

Swallowing, Slater said, “You won’t need them.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not coming into contact with any of the bodies.”

“Who said so?”

“The exhumations are a very dangerous and very grim spectacle. There’s no need to subject yourself to any of that.”

But Nika dug in her heels. “Do we really need to go through this again? As the tribal rep, and a trained anthropologist, I insist on being there.” She held out her palm, flat.

Slater glanced at Lantos and the professor, and they both looked at him as if to say, “Not my call.”

Slater dug into his shirt pocket, removed the packet he was planning to give Groves when he got back from his rounds, and plopped it in Nika’s hand, instead; he’d make up another one later for the sergeant. She smiled in victory and held the little plastic baggie up like a trophy, and the others laughed. Slater had to smile, too; no wonder she’d become mayor.

“Now they might make you drowsy,” he advised, “so take them just before you go to bed.”

“And where would that be?” Dr. Lantos said, glancing around the mess tent, one of the few structures erected that day.

“I’m afraid this will have to double as the barracks for tonight.”

“Then I’ve got dibs on this juicy spot under the table,” she said, tapping her foot on the insulated rubber flooring.

“And I will put my sleeping bag on top of that fat pile of cushions,” Kozak said, gesturing at the stack of mats that would be laid down to make a path to the graveyard the next day.

“Nika,” Slater said, “I was thinking that you could—”

“I already know where I’m sleeping tonight,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

As they trudged across the colony grounds, covered with crates and bundles of supplies unloaded from the Sikorskys, Slater continued to argue with her, but Nika would have none of it. She felt it was her duty to make this gesture of atonement to the spirits who had once inhabited this place. There was no explaining such a “metaphysical” view, however, to a man as empirically oriented as Frank Slater. She recognized that it was his job as an epidemiologist to look at things as squarely and objectively as possible, and to keep all other considerations out of the equation.