The Sea Runners (6 page)

"Your goddamned tongue's fatter than your judgment, Melander," the blacksmith flared. "It's not for you to tell me who stands where. You forget. Walk straight out of here, I can, and show the Russians the hidey-hole in that hulk where you've had Braaf stashing, these months."

"But Wennberg, heart's friend," Melander said with such politeness it seemed almost an apology, "there's nothing there."

Wennberg stared at Melander as if the lanky seaman just had changed skin color before his eyes.

"Since you've invited yourself along with us we thought we ought get ourselves a new hidey-hole," Melander went on. "Braaf has the knack of stumbling onto such places, aye? So this new cache now, you can know where it is when we load the canoe, and not an eyeblink before. Trot to the Russians whenever you feel like it, but you'll have nothing in the hulk to show them."

"Except mouse turds." This unexpectedly from
Braaf, whose gaze now floated steadily along three foreheads instead of two. Wennberg shot him a look which all but thundered.

"Yes, except mouse turds." Melander chuckled. "And even the Russians might find it hard to believe that we've been busy storing away treasure of such sort. No, Wennberg, you against the three of us, that's the tilt of it, and we'll see who the Russians choose to believe. Our souls are fresh and there's spring green in our eye, so far as they know. Nor'd you be the first one here to he thought off his head, or a merchant of mischief for some other reason,"

Melander paused, then went on in Ins know-all fashion: "You play a hand of cards now and again, don't you, Wennberg? I suggest you take a second look tip the queen's skirt before you wager."

The blacksmith began to retort hotly: "Now listen, you walrus pizzles—" But Melander beat him to speech yet again.

"Careful of your words, Wennberg. If you're coming with us, we have a lot of time ahead together and don't need a sack of bad feelings. If you're going off to the Russians"—an even more eloquent Melander pause—"you don't want your last sentiments to your own dear countrymen weighing wrongly on your soul, do you now?"

Wennberg was boulder-still, in stare at Melander, Fury had him, but evidently something other, too, his mouth now clamped until his lips all but vanished. Words were having their spines snapped there, the other three could see.

Finally Wennberg broke his glower. Swung a heavy look to Braaf. At last, and longest, to the silent one, Karlsson.

"You goddamned set of squareheads may be better at this than I thought," he rumbled. "I'm with you, Christ help pie. Now you've to tell me, as if you know down from up. How do we go be pilgrims in the wilderness of water?"

Circle the plan as he would, like a farmer working at a stump, Wennberg found only a few questions to hack at when Me lander was finished.

"Why all this fuss with old Bilibin? Whyn't we just cut bis stupid throat when we're ready?"

This theorem shifted Karlsson forward in his seat a bit.

"Because if we kill one of his men, Rosenberg will have to have his people chase us," Melander said instructively. "If we leave Bilibin alive, Rosenberg will take it out on him."

"What of rifles? How many can Braaf here lay his fancy fingers on?"

Melander replied that they had the advantage of two read}' at hand: Karlsson's long-barreled .69-caliber hunting rifle and the military weapon that would be plucked from Bilibin. Then on the night of the escape, Melander continued, Braaf would gather them a few more. "Six, to be exact."

Braaf blinked rapidly and Karlsson looked mildly surprised, but it was Wennberg who blurted :

"Great good God, Melander, eight guns all together? We're going in a canoe, not a goddamned man-of-war!"

"Name me a better cargo, can you, Wennberg? Do you think the ravens arc going to feed us on this journey, and the bears will guard us with their kind teeth? We don't know what in hell-all we'll face, but I want plenty of ball and powder to face it with. Aye? If you wish to come along naked, so be it."

Wennberg grumbled, then offered that if Melander was so fanatic on firearms, lie was willing to help out. A sentry's rifle had been sent into the smith shop for a new butt, plate; He could hold the gun hack by saying he hadn't got around to affixing the repair yet.

Gravely Melander congratulated him on entering the spirit of their enterprise.

"There, Braaf, he's made you amends. You'll need to pluck only five firepieces when the time is ready."

Braaf said nothing.

Karlsson too stayed unspeaking, but he had begun to have a feeling about Wennberg. There was something not reckonable, opposite from usual, about this blacksmith. As when the eyelid of a wood duck watching you closes casually from the bottom up.

Wennberg was not done with the topic of weaponry.

"Just where'll our little storekeeper get these guns, anyway?"

"You do take three bites at every berry, don't you, Wennberg? But since you bring the matter up..." Melander turned his long head to Braaf in the manner
of an indulging uncle. "Braaf, what of it? Where can the guns best be got on our night?"

"The officers' clubhouse," Braaf responded with entire matter-of-factness. "The gun room."

For the single time in all the unfolding of the plan, Melander blanched. Karlsson pulled once at his thin nose. And sardonically, Wennberg: "Next, Braaf, you'll want, to parade up to the Castle Russians and ask can we have their underwear for warmth on our little journey."

Braaf shrugged. "Sauerkraut is in the smelliest barrels, guns are ¡11 a gun room."

Melander found voice, restrained Wennberg, chided Braaf, and the matter began to be argued out.

It emerged that Braaf likely hail it right. That the collection of rifles racked like fat billiard cues within the officers'gun room—on one of his invented errands that wafted him into all crannies of the settlement Braaf had spotted the weapons—and which were used for shooting parties when the governor's retinue went downcoast to Ozherskoi, this small armory was New Archangel's richest trove of firearms unguarded by sentries.

But, as Wennberg demanded, not without suspicion, why unsentried ...?

"Because of the padlock 011 the door and the chain through the trigger guards?" Braaf suggested.

This silenced even Wennberg.

Karlsson at last spoke up.

"There's a second stick to this cross. The officers
and company men coming and going. They flow in and out of that place day and night."

"I can mark us a safe time," Melander mused. "But snatching those guns loose..."

"Wennberg," murmured Braaf.

"Mister Blacksmith!" Melander proclaimed.

"You squareheaded sons of Chores," Wcnnherg said unhappily.

The waiting became a kind of ghost attaching itself within each of their lives, as if a man now cast two shadows and one somehow fell into his body instead of away. The outer man had to perform as ever—do bis work, eat, sleep, carry on barracks gabble—while inside, this sudden new shadow-creature, the one in wait, bided the next six weeks and six days wholly in thought of the immense voyage ahead.

Melander as he waited studied the Tebenkov maps ever more firmly into his mind. Before long, their descending coastal chain of islands Could have been recited out of him like Old Testament genealogy. New Archangel's island of Baranof would beget Kuiu Island, Kuiu beget Kosciusko, Kosciusko Heceta, and Heceta Suemez, south and south and south through watery geography and explorers' mother tongues until the eventual rivermouth port called Astoria. Perhaps it was because Melander had in him the seaman's way of letting days take care of distance, the necessary nautical faith that there is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end, that
these
stepping-stone details predominated in his thinking about the escape. Rarely, and then never aloud to any of the other three, did Melander mull the totality of the coastal journey ahead. This made a loss to them all, for Melander alone of the four had traveled greatly enough on the planet to understand the full scope of what they would he attempting. To grasp that their intended ten or twelve hundred miles of canoeing stretched—wove, rather, through the island-thick wilderness coast—as far as the distance from Stockholm down all of Europe to the sun coasts of Italy. Each mile of those hundreds, too, along a cold northern brink of ocean which in winter is misnamed entirely. Not pacific at all, but malevolent. And too, each mile maybe—or maybe not, this was the puzzle of ocean and oceangoer—each mile maybe working away at this three-man crew of his, Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson. Thief and oaf and clam: or acquisitionist and draft ox and canoe soldier; whichever each was now, he perhaps had sea change ahead of him. The great over-water passage between one life and another, Melander in his sailoring had been at an edge of the nineteenth century's immigration tides, the tens of hundreds of thousands who were the forebears of us, and so knew how voyage could tower in the mind of a first-timer. It couldn't not. Treadle of the waves week on week, the half-coffin berth to try to survive in, reliance for that survival on sailors who flew in the mast trees like clothed monkeys; a compressed existence, the voyage of a ship, like a battle or a hard illness or a first failed time in love, lodged in the memory at an
angle not like that of any other set of days. And that was shipboard; this would be canoe, splinter of a true vessel. Sea change could come all the more intense. But then sometimes it never came at all, or again it simply made a man more of what he was, carved the lines of him deeper. You never knew. Not even a Melander had the how of sea change. Vet ¡11 this season of wait Melander might have hinted toward what lay in store when one went out to live on waves. His knowledge of water enwrapping the world, the canny force of its resistance to the intentions of man, he might have used to put a tempered edge on the escape plan. To have said, in his silver style of saying, "Hear me on this, heart's friends. Things beyond all imagining may happen't" us down this coast, aye? But we'll have gone free into our fate, Resides, a man draws nearer to death wherever he strides..."

But no, and it may be necessity for those who choose vast riik, even Melander seemed not able to confront the thought of all the miles at once. Only those from island to island to island.

In his waiting. Wennberg too spent lung spells of calculation. Turning and turning the question of whether there could be found a way to betray the escape.

Certainty did not seem to be anywhere in the proposition. If the Russians could be convinced and then relied upon to reward him, say grant return to Sweden; but that the Russians would forfeit a blacksmith
so readily did not seem likely, whatever they might promise. If he told of the plan but Melander persuaded the Russians there was nothing to it, Wennberg would never after be safe in New Archangel. Karlsson and perhaps even that stealer of milkteeth Braaf would be steady threat to his life. If he fled with the other three, into freedom—or perhaps into the bottom of that ocean like cats in a sack—

All of it strummed a man's nerves, not to say what fret this place New Archangel played on you anyway. Example, the morning soon after Wennberg added himself into the escape plan. On the way to begin his day of smithing, he'd remembered leaving his new-sewn leather apron back at the barracks and there near Raranov's Castle reversed route to fetch it. Just then gulls on a breeze off Sitka Sound flashed across the breast of Verstovia. White as winter creatures they glided, as if shooed in from the other, snowier crags. Wennberg had cast them a glance—and up there the apparition reared, a Russian cross thrusting out of the dark north slope of Verstovia. A long minute Wennberg stared at this, Calvary arrived to the crest of Alaska, before he picked out that the cross was merely the Russian cathedral's topmost one, that in the morning dark the green-painted spire under it blended invisibly against the forest of Verstovia. As well as anyone, Wennberg knew that if you let yourself dwell 011 the menace of these mountains you would go around in terror all day every day, like a cowering dog. What jostled his frame of mind, though, was not just the surprise sky-planted cross, but that in his years
here lie had never noticed this illusion before. Every morning now, despite himself, Wennberg found himself stopping at the spot and casting a look back up there.

And all the rest of the day, if and perhaps. Coax at them how he would, Wennberg could make the pair do no more than somersault into perhaps and if.

This, this damned skitter of a matter—Wennberg did not at all have well-bottom faith in the prospects of Melander's plan, But neither did he see, now, any clear path out of it. What Wennberg imagined was going to be his say over Melander and the other two somehow, by some coil of the escape plan, was turning out to be their say over him.

Since Karlsson went through life anyway in the manner of a man in wait, to him the space of weeks until the escape was simply one more duration, and not so long as most. Time passed, or you put it past. All in all, he showed a good deal less edginess about New Archangel existence than any of the other three. A man built smoke-tight, as Melander had said of him. What then held Karlsson into the pattern of the escape?

Braaf too had wondered.

"Why're you?"

He and Karlsson were dutied, this day, to the warehouse where bundling was done. Beaver pelts had been brought in by the Koloshes. The light task Braaf took, folding each dried hide into a square, fur side in. Karlsson then stacked the bundled pelts into the big
screw press, to be squeezed into bales for shipment to China. Quite why it was that Swedes had been brought half around the world to pile together animal skins that would then be cargoed half around the world again to adorn Chinamen, neither Braaf nor Karlsson grasped. But here was the habiliment of several dozen former beavers, and here were they.

"Hmm, Karlsson? Why're you?"

"Same as you, I suppose." Karlsson did not seem much disposed to talk about their leave-taking of New Archangel, which of course focused Braaf onto it all the more.

"So then, why'm I?"

"To kiss good-bye to the Russians, and five more years here,"