The Sea Runners (2 page)

These shipmates—Melander corrected himself: barrackmates—were an everysided lot. Finns and Swedes under this roof, about all they could count in common were their term of indentureship and the conviction that they were sounder souls than the Russian work force in the several neighboring dwellings. The Scandinavians after all had been pulled here. Most of the Russian laborers simply were shoved; stuffed aboard ship at Okhotsk 011 the coast of Siberia and {¡itched across the North Pacific to the tsar's Alaskan fur field, lie it said, these Siberian vagabonds had not been encouraged onward to Russian America for habits such as nudging ducks into puddles. Thugs, thieves, hopeless sots, 110 few murderers, the flotsam of any vast frontier, jostled among them. ("Where," an appalled governor of New Archangel once wrote home to a grandee of the Russian-American Company, "do you get such men?") But so did debtors, escaped serfs, those whose only instinct was to drift. Melander, by now no admirer of anything Russian, saved his contempt for the New Archangel officialdom. These others, the Okhotskans, simply had made humankind's usual blunder, forgot to get themselves highborn.

As for this crew in evening dawdle all around him,
they nested here idle as—Abruptly Melander stood up, a process like staves suddenly framing themselves together into a very large scarecrow. Amid a card game several bunks away a shipwright from Karlskrona flicked a nervous glimpse his way.

Grinning at so easy a giveaway, Melander awarded a mocking nod to his derider and in galumphing strides went from the barracks. Outside held another sort of confinement, but at least airier than in. Melander as ever glanced up, the way lie might have checked a topgallant sail, at the peak that thrust over all their lives at New Archangel, ungainly Verstovia, Its summit a triangle of rough rock atop a vaster triangle of forested slope, Verstovia presided up there broad and becrowned, the first presence each morning, the last at every dusk. And farther, snowier crags attended Verstovia on both sides. A threefold Jericho, this place New Archangel, walled first by the stockade, next by these tremendous mountains, and last, the distances to anywhere else of the world.

Odd, the deceit of distance. How it was that men would brave the miles to a new place, the very total of those miles seeming to promise a higher life than the old, and then find the work dull, the wage never quite totting up to what it should, the food worse than ever—the longing to be elsewhere now pivoted straight around. Yes, that was the way for a seven-year man, distance played these tricks as if a spyglass had spun end-for-end in his hands.

Melander moved off toward the central street of the settlement and encountered one of the company clerks,
no doubt on his way to the governor's hill garden. Many of the Castle Russians strolled such a constitutional at evening, any custom of home being paced through more devoutly here than in Muscovy itself. Melander considered that the man was wasting footsteps. More than beds of pansies and fuchsias were required to sweeten the soul of any Russian. Nonetheless—

"Drostia," the lanky Swede offered with a civil nod and was greeted in turn. Perhaps a Melander could not rise at New Archangel, but at least he could invest some care to stay level.

This was one of the lengthening evenings of summer of 1858, the moment of year when darkness seemed not to care to come and New Archangel's dusk took advantage to dawdle on and on. Before the season turned, eventide would stretch until close onto midnight. The long light copied Swedish summer. Which meant that while this slow vesper of the Alaskan day was the time Melander liked best, it also cast all the remindful shadows of what he had become absented from. His birthland. The sea. And his chosen livelihood. Triple tines of exile. Much to be prodded by.

Only because the route afforded the most distance for his restless boots, Melander roved on west through the narrow shoreline crescent of settlement. Past log building after log building, bakery, joinery, warehouses, officers' quarters, smithy; if bulk of timbering were the standard of civilization, New Archangel could have preened grand as Stockholm. Sea drifter lie was, Melander had never got used to tins hefty clamped
into-the-wilderness feel of the port town. "Log barns and sawdust heads," the style of Russian America was summed by Melander.

In about four hundred paces from his barracks departure Melander's traipse necessarily ended, the high timbered stockade with its closed sally port here stoppering Xew Archangel until morning.

Melander still needed motion. And so changed course to the north. Rapidly passed the gate watchman yawning within his hut. Climbed the short knoll where the first of the stockade's blockhouses overlooked the gate. In long pulls clambered up the ladder to the catwalk beside the blockhouse. Here met the quizzing glance of the Russian sentry and muttered: "The damned Finns are singing in the barracks again. They sound like death arguing with the devil."

The sentry nodded in pitying savvy and returned to his watching slot within the timbered tower. Melander was left solitary, scanning out beyond Sitka Sound and its dark-treed islands schooled like furry whales to the threadline of horizon that is the Pacific.

A time of studying seaward. The ports of all the planet were out there. Danzig and Copenhagen, Kronstadt, Trondheim, Rotterdam, London ... Men and women are hard ore, we do not go to slag in a mere few seasons of forge: Melander aland was yet Melander, First Mate.

A raven flapped past, pulled a glance from the tall man. These black birds ruled the roofs of New Archangel and their metallic comment up there somehow struck an odd humility into a person.

Finally, as if at last reassured that the water portion of the world still hung in place, Melander dropped his gaze. Now was peering directly down at the edge of shore subjacent to the outside end of the stockade.

Here his looking held for a good while.

Eventually, the tall man murmured something. Something so softly said that the sentry nearby in the blockhouse mistook the sound for another mutter against twittering Finns.

It was not that, though. This:

"Maybe not bladeless."

Do such things have a single first moment? If so, just here Melander begins to depart from a further half-dozen years of the salting of fish.

"Take our swig outside the stockade, whyn't we? The farther you can ever get from these Russians, the better anything tastes. Aye?"

Tin mugs of tea in hand, Melander and Karlsson passed the sentry at the opened gateway of the stockade and sauntered to the edge of the native village which extended in a single-file march of dwellings far along the shoreline. In front of the two Swedes now stretched Japonski, biggest of the islands schooled thick in Sitka Sound. The channel across to Japonski was just four hundred yards or so, but one of the quirks of New Archangel's spot in the world was that this moatlike side of water somehow emphasized isolation more than the open spans of the bay.

This Karlsson was a part-time bear milker. That is
to say, ordinarily he worked as an axman in the timber-felling crew, but also had sufficiently skilled himself as a woodsman that he was sent with the hunting party which occasionally forayed out to help provision New Archangel—to milk the bears, as it was jested. The sort with nothing much he cared to put to voice and of whom even less was remarked, Karlsson. It is told that at a Scandinavian free-for-all, Danes will be the ones dancing and laughing, Norwegians endeavoring to start a fight, Finns passing bottles, and Swedes standing along the wall waiting to be introduced. Melander constituted a towering exception to this slander, but Karlsson, narrow bland face like that of a village parson, would have been there among the wall props.

"They say it'll be rice kasha for noon again. A true Russian feast they're setting us these clays, anything you want so long as it's gruel, aye?"

"Seems so," answered Karlsson.

Sociability was nothing that Melander sought out of Karlsson. A time, he had noticed Karlsson canoeing in across Sitka Sound here, back from a day's hunting. Karlsson's thrifty strokes went beyond steady. Tireless, in a neat-handed, workaday fashion. The regularity of a small millwheel, Melander had been put in mind of as he watched Karlsson paddle.

What brought down Melander's decision in favor of Karlsson, however, was a feather of instant remembered from shipboard. Karlsson had been home to Alaska on the same schooner as Melander, and Melander recalled that just before sailing when others of the indentured group, the torsion of their journey-to-come tremendous in them at the moment, were talking large of the bright success ahead, what adventure the frontier life would furnish and how swiftly and with what staggering profit their seven years of contract with the Russians would pass, Karlsson had listened, given a small mirthless smile and a single shake of his head, and moved off along the deck by himself. Whatever directed Karlsson to Alaska, it had not been a false northern sun over his future.

"I don't see why that water doesn't pucker them blue. They must have skins like seals with the hair off."

As Melander and Karlsson stood arid sipped, a dozen natives had emerged from one of the nearest longhouses, men and women together and all naked, and waded casually hit‹) the channel to bathe.

Karlsson's reply this time was a shrug.

One further impression of the slender man's interesting constancy also was stored away in Melander. The observation that Karlsson visited more often to the women in the native village than did any of the merchants of wind who perpetually bragged in the barracks about their lust. Or as Melander mused it to himself, the mermaids had hold of Karlsson's towrope but he didn't go around yipping the news.

Melander swept the bay and channel east to west with an arm, as if in salute to the day. lie purposely had chosen this rainless morning of late June, gentle gray-silver overcast cupping the day's light to lend clarity down to the spruce islands of the harbor and the sudden spearing mountains behind the settlement, the usual morning wind off the bay lazed to a breeze,
to approach Karlsson before work call. His thought was that if Karlsson would entertain escape on this most silken of New Archangel days, he truly was ready.

Melander's words, however, began where his motion ended, "Those canoes are longer than they look, aye?" In a row on the beach the natives' cedar shells lay; the line of lithe craft, like sea creatures dozing side by side on the sand, which his gaze had been drawn to when he stood atop the stockade. "We could step into one here and step out at Stockholm."

Karlsson's face, all at once not nearly so bland, suggested the standard skepticism toward talk of uncooping oneself from New Archangel. Because of the isolation so far into the North Pacific and because muskeg and sinkholes and an alpine forest so thick it seemed to be thatched began just beyond the stockade wall, the matter of escape always narrowed instantly to the same worn point. Where, except up to the sweet blue meadows of heaven, was there to go?

"The world has a lot of wheres," vouched Melander now. "We need just four of them,"

He drained his mug in a final gulp, folded himself down to rest one knee on the dirt, and with a stick began to trace.

A first south-pointing stab of shoreline, like a broad knife blade. "This one, we've got"—Baranof Island, on the oceanward side of which they squatted now.

A speckle of isles, then another large landform, south-pointing too, like the sheath Baranof had been pulled from. "The Queen Charlottes."

Another brief broken isle-chain of coast, then a long blunt slant, almost sideways to the other coastal chunks. "Vancouver's Island,"

At last, fourth and biggest solidity in tins geographical flagstone of Melander's, the American coastline descending to the Columbia River. The place where the dirt lines of coast and the river met, Icelander Xed large. "Astoria," Melander said this mark was.

Map lesson done, Melander recited to the close-tongued Karlsson the main frame of his plan. That if they selected their time well and escaped by night they could work a canoe south along the coast. That there at its southern extent, down beyond the Russian territory and that of the Hudson's Ray Company, the place called Astoria was operated by the Americans as an entry port. From there ships would come and go, ships to the docks of Europe. To, at last, Stockholm.

Six weeks' canoe journey, Melander estimated, to Astoria. If they caught luck, could manage to sail part of the voyage, a month.

"You talk us in royal style from here to there, Melander. But this God-forgotten coast, in a canoe..."

Karlsson fell silent again, looking off around the island-speckled bay and up into the timbered mountains. Verstovia's skirt forest showed every branch distinct today, almost every bristle; vast green lacework, it seemed.

Melander knew he was going to have a wait. There always was about this Karlsson a calm just short of
chill. He was a Smålander, and that ilk were known to have in them whatever stone God had left over after He filled their fields with it. "One word, good as two"—• this was the anthem of Smålanders. Right now the lean man was appraising the horizon of Alaska as if someone had offered him the whole tumbled country for forty riksdaler.

Then again, Melander noticed Karlsson's glance come back twice and linger in the vicinity of the bathing native women.

On such a New Archangel day sound carried like light, and from the blacksmith shop within the stockade began to chorus the measured clamor of hammer against anvil.

As if roused by the clangor, Karlsson turned to the taller man.

"Two of us are not enough strength for that much paddling."

"No," Melander agreed. "Our other man is Braaf."

"Braaf ? That puppy?"

Melander tendered his new coconspirator a serious smile in replica of Karlsson's own aboard the schooner in Stockholm harbor.

"We need a thief," Melander explained.

That is the way they became two. Disquieted shipman, musing woodsman, now plotters both. Against them, and not yet knowing it, although habitually guardful as governing apparatuses have to be, stood New Archangel and its system of life. The system of
all empires, when the matter comes to be pondered. For empires exist on the principle of constellations in the night sky—pattern imposed across unimaginable expanse—and the New Archangels of the planet at the time, whether named Singapore or Santa Fe or Dakar or Astoria or Luanda or Sydney, were their specific scintillations of outline. Far pinspots representing vastly more than they themselves were.