The Sea Runners (16 page)

Firm dirt over Melander, they hefted stones from the beach and piled them onto the gravetop to discourage—more likely, merely delay—animals.

In the unending windstorm of history, how Sven Melander of Gotland and the sea was put to earth could not possibly make a speck's difference. Vet to these three this forest grave seemed to matter all. They had done now what could be thought of, except—

Karlsson and Braaf looked to Wennberg.

The broad man licked his lips as if against a sour taste, and much white was showing at the corners of his eyes.

"No. Goddamn, no. I don't believe in that guff anymore. Particularly after this."

"Just do it for the words," Braaf murmured. "Do the words for Melander."

Wennber greyed Braaf; Karlsson. Then in a low rapid rumble he delivered the psalm:

"... A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.... We spend our years as a tale that is told.... So teach us to number our days ...'"

***

The next bad time was quick to come.

They needed a meal, and somehow pieced one together. Just after, crossing the campsite on one fetch or another—all the budget of fuss Melander had attended to now needed to be shared out—Wennberg clomped past the sitting Braaf. Stopped, and examined.

"What's here on the back of you, then?" Wennberg demanded.

Braaf glanced dully up toward the blacksmith. Slipping his arms from the Aleut parka, lie brought the garment around for a look.

Across the shoulders and the middle of the back showed small dark splats, as if a rusty rain had fallen.

The three men stared at the stains where Melander's blood had showered forward.

At last Wennberg shifted awkwardly. "Maybe it'll wash—"

Twin glistens of tears laned Braaf's round face. "Say anything, either of you," he choked out, "and Til gut you."

After, Karlsson never was sure what the flag had been between Wennberg and him, how it happened that they faced each other, off along the brink of shore from the weeping Braaf.

Wennberg began fast, as if the words needed to rattle their way out of him. "Karlsson, listen now—we've—
Hell's own clung ditch, we're fallen in now. The lucky one of us may be Melander. So—"

"You didn't trade places with him there at the grave."

"What? No!" Wennberg seemed startled by Karlsson's rejoinder. Then tried to muster: "No, bad choices're getting to be a habit with me. As when I went out that gate with you damned three."

"But out it you are." Karlsson scanned from Wennberg away into the forest, the constant shaggy nap of these islands. Tried to find concentration in the convoking of all the green beings, the way they touched each to each. Karlsson's head swam a bit and ached a lot and he was wearier than all the axwork of his life ever had made him, and here loomed Wennberg to be dealt with, and Melander dead, and..."And a far swim to get back in," Karlsson bought a further moment with. God's wounds, think now, how to halter this damned bull of a blacksmith....

"Karlsson, hear me. Just—just hear me, will you? We can't go at each other like cats with tails tied together and slung over a fence. Not now, not after—Someway we've got to make miles along this God-lost coast. So somebody needs to load. Decide, this way or that, or we'll meet ourselves in a circle in these bedamned islands. Not even Melander's going to make himself heard up through the earth."

Karlsson's weariness abruptly doubled. "So you're lifting yourself to it."

Exasperation flooded Wennberg. "Karlsson, goddamn—you won't see a matter until it lands on your nose and has a shit there, will you?" With effort, Wennberg tried to steady his tone. Karlsson remembered the same ominous tremor through the blacksmith, the earthquake in a man when temper fights with itself, the time Melander informed him the cache had been spirited away. "No, not—not me to lead. You."

As Karlsson tried to lay hold of the seven words he had just heard, Wennberg discharged more.

"It's sense, is all. There're the maps to be savvied and tin's bedamned canoe to be pointed, and you've done some of so, out with the bear milkers. So it's sense, you in charge of that."

Wennberg scratched his sidewhiskers as he sought how to put his next premise.

"All the other, we'll just—we don't need a sermon at every turn, like Melander gave. Divvy tasks without all that yatter, we can."

Wennberg paused. Something was yet to pry its way. Finally—

"Braaf, there. He'd never take to me as leader. Be happy to see him left here to bunk with Melander, I would, but we need the little bastard."

"And you." Karlsson someway found the mother wit to say this more as statement than question, "You'll take to me."

Another effort moved through Wennberg. He lifted his look from Karlsson, bent a bleak gaze to the ocean. He said: "I need to, don't I?"

Close by that night's firelight, Karlsson in kneel.

Untying the flap of the waterproof map pouch.
Bringing out the scroll of maps. Performing the unrolling, then the weighting of each corner with an oval pebble from the beach gravel.

Into view arrived all their declension of the coast, an amount of ti ck across white space that surprised Karlsson, as though he Were gazing on sudden new line of tracks across snow.

Only the top map of the lot had Karlsson ever seen, the one on which Me lander's pencil route took its start at the square house-dots of New Archangel. That once, Melander had been borrowing opinion, and here was traced Karlsson's advice, the canoe's side loop around Japonski Island and then veering down and down, at last out the bottom of Sitka Sound. The night forest of a continent ten paces on one side of him and half a world of night ocean thirty paces on the other, Karlsson could scarcely credit it—that there had been time when he, when any of this canoe's adopted men, existed at that regiment of dots, answered work call, dwelt in barracks, fought fleas, wintered on salt fish ... set honey for a gate guard named Bilibin.

On the next map the penciled line hugged the west shore of Baranof Island to Cape Ommaney; then, as if deflected by what waited south, struck east to Kuiu. Because of Melander's route sketch in the dirt and the knowledge that their port of destination lay southward Karlsson had supposed that they were going along the escape route much like men shinnying down a rope—maybe a sidle of effort once and again, but the total plunge into one direction. It was a revolution in his
thinking to sec now that all the time they were canoeing south they also were sidestepping east.

More of angling down the North Pacific, map three brought. The Kuiu-Heceta-Noyes-Suemez-Dall skein of islands and the crossing of Kaigani Strait to the horn tip of the Queen Charlottes. Those days of voyage Karlsson tried to sort in his mind. In the waters along Heceta, was it, where they caught the ugly delicious fish? On which island did the carved creatures rear over Braaf? The great trees beside that dome of cliff, the water diamonds dropping in dazzle, had they been—? Hut the days of this coast blended like its trees, none could be made to stand in memory without the others.

Karlsson unscrolled to the fourth map, the one showing how they crossed Hecate Strait, stairstepped the islands of the past several days, and then, just more than halfway down this chart, at a rough-edged small island with no name written in beside it, Melander's penciling halted. Yes, well...

Melander. In every corner of Karlsson's thoughts, Melander. A painful stutter in the mind, him, his death, the cost to it. Melander with that abrupt alert face atop his length, like the glass cabin up a lighthouse; Melander who believed that an ocean can be fended with, ridden by a Kolosh saddle of wood and reined with these Russian maps. But Melander no longer on hand to dispense such faith. Too well, Karlsson understood that he and Braaf and Wennberg, none of them anything of a Melander and as different from each other as hip-high and upstairs and the moon, needed now to find their own resources to endure this sea run.

At least Braaf had wrinkled smooth again. When Karlsson and Wennberg returned to camp and the who-ought-lead proposition was put to him, it took the young thief an instant to realize he was being polled at all. He blinked then and said as if it were common fact: "You've to do it, Karlsson. I can't read the maps and Wennberg couldn't lead his shadow. You've to do it."

And at least there were the maps, these extra eyes needed to know the intentions of this coast and ocean. Glancing to the bottom of this fourth map, down from where Melander's tracery of route left off, Karlsson saw that the coastline was shown as far as the north most tip of Vancouver's Island.
Cape Scott,
Melander had penciled in beside the ragged thumb of land. Karlsson recalled Vancouver's Island to be the third of the landforms, those wheres of their escape, scratched into the dirt by Melander the day of last summer. The maps next would bring Vancouver's shore and then the final southering coastline from the Strait of Fuca to Astoria.

Karlsson slipped his fingers beneath the top and bottom edges to lift away this map to those next ones. And was fixed to that motion, as if the chill of beach gravel against Ins knuckles had conducted petrifaction into him.

Beneath the fourth map lay nothing but that gravel.

Karlsson drew in a breath which met his heart at the top of his throat.

Came to his feet, yanked a brand from the fire for light, and was gone past the sheltered sleeping lengths of Braaf and Wennberg on his way to the canoe.

There he dug through the entire stowage. Then dug again, and still found only what lie dreaded most, confirmation.

There weren't more maps. The fourth map was the last of the scroll.

"Narrow enough matter it was ... Needed to paw through every bedamned scrap of sheet..." Melander's words spun through the months to Karlsson, their shadow of meaning huge behind them now. "Skimpy bastards, these Russians ... Should have figured ... Should have figured—that the pilothouse of the steamship did not hold the further maps; that since the cumbersome
Nicholas
never voyaged far enough south to go beyond these four, the Russians simply didn't provide more. So Melander during his theft himself was robbed; had to glom just these four maps and clamber away from discovery. And then, being Melander, at once fathered a judgment; that when these charts of the tangled top of the coast were expended the rest of the voyage could be borne on by his sailor's sense; that he would bother the heads of the other three escapees with this only at some far-downcoast bend of time, when necessity showed itself. Through and through Melander would have worked it, and when time came would have made the further maps seem as little vital as extra whiskers 011 a cat.

But Melander was stretched under that heap of stones, and Karlsson it would be to point the prow of the canoe into maplessness.

The sensation going through Karlsson now was of
being emptied, as if his body from the stomach down had vanished, the way the bottom of the fourth map dissolved their route of escape.

This Karlsson now. Circumstance's man.

... Do It? Do I say, Braaf, Wennberg, surprise in the pot this morning, we haven't the maps we need? Going to voyage blind soon now, we are....

More than any of the other three runners of the sea, a man too of the countryside of Sweden which had birthed him. Karlsson was of the Swedish dispersion that began with the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, the bitter years of bad weather and worsening harvests. Rye thin and feeble in the fields, cows like walking boneyards for lack of hay, potatoes rotten lumps in the earth—as though the elaborate clock of the seasons was awry, whatever could happen wrong did so sometime in those years, and all too much of it repeatedly. Karlsson's father Was confounded by the coil of the times, generations of landholding now crimping to futility before his eyes. But bafflement was no helpful crop either. Like many another, young Karlsson in that harsh time became extra to his home soil of Småland, early was uncoupled, simply cast to drift, from his family's farmstead. The two brothers older than lie caught America fever, put themselves into the emigrant stream coursing to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes. At their urging that he come along this brother of theirs shook his head in his parson-serious way and said only : "I am no farm maker."

... Melander had reason, whatever to Christ it was, for saying nothing of the maps. Melander had reason for what direction he stirred his tea. So he said nothing. And now I, I'm the Melander of us, is that the matter of it? Or...

But just what he was, seemed to take the young Karlsson some finding out. While he turned the question he set to work as a timberman on the largest estate in the parish, and there the forester's first words to him, after a look up and down this silent youngster, were: "Hear what I tell you, lad. I don't boil my cabbage twice." His next: "Wedo the day here. Up like lamplighters we are, and late as a miser's tithe." Stropped by that forester's relentless tongue—until he encountered Melander, Karlsson thought it the most relentless possible—Karlsson began to come keen, learn all of axwork, of woodcraft, of a pace to life.

... First hour on the gallows is the worst, Melander'd have said. We are still three, we're strong enough yet. We've the chance....

The merchant arrived to the estate in the winter of 184–9, another crows' winter in that corner of Småland, bleak cold week on bleak cold week, with the announcement that he was looking for supple wood for sled shafts. His true eye, though, was for the grain on men. What he saw in Karlsson suited very well. Karlsson's lovely thrift at work, that knack of finishing an ax stroke and drawing back for the next before it seemed the first could be quite done. The self-sufficiency of him, working his own neighborhood of timber, the forester never needing to hawk over him. Even the still—water-touches-deep reputation of the these young timberman, that parents of blossoming daughters—and perhaps too husbands of certain ripened wives—would not weep to see Småland soil go from under Karlsson's feet; even this augured for the purpose of the merchant.

There was this, too. The merchant was not entirely at ease about trafficking in men, and Karlsson he could account as a salving bargain. The Russian-American Company would gain an excellent workman, a seven-year man, as consigned; but evidently one With enough flint in him to maybe strike the Russians a few Swedish sparks someday, too.