The Sea Runners (7 page)

"Good-bye kisses aren't always happy ones,"

"Some truth to that."

"I'll miss the snuffboxes. They hop into a man's hand, here. What of you? What'll you miss?"

Karlsson shrugged.

"What, can't put a name to her?" Braaf queried.

Karlsson gave him a fast look. After a bit, said:

"Maybe she has a lot of names."

"All the more to miss."

"Braaf, easy with this. We may be heard."

"Only by heaven. The overseer's gone off to his bottle."

"You'd know."

"That iron puddler, Wennberg. Think he's to be trusted?"

"Do you?"

"I don't trust anyone whose cars arc buried in his whiskers."

"Melandfer has put trust in him."

"Melander isn't you."

Karlsson straightened a bundled pelt into line atop the others in the screw press. "We need trust Melander."

"Not much of a word spender, are you?"

"Not much."

"All right, try this hole: the voyage, can we do it strong as Melander says?"

"Braaf, you've more questions than the king's cat."

"Nothing knocks at the ear if it's never invited in. You still haven't said, you know."

"Said?"

"Why're you coining on the escape?"

Karlsson gave attention to peltry and screw press again. When he turned hack, his lean face was as little readable as ever but he peered more interestedly at Braaf. The angle at which the sight of the young thief entered his eyes seemed to have altered. After a bit, Karlsson said:

"Maybe to see how it'll be."

Braaf was not entirely sure whether this constituted answer or not. lint lie nodded now, as though it did.

The hardest wait among them was Braaf's. Melander forbade him from further stealing until the final flurry of muskets and food on the date of the escape. How, then, to keep his fingers busy?

Melander had a part answer: a hank of hefty rope he passed to Braaf. "Work this in those lily hands of yours, as much as you can every day. Get calluses started, else you'll bleed to death through the palms once we begin paddling,"

But a man can't twiddle rope al! day, and—

"An Aleut calendar," Melander at last came up with, the fifth or seventh time Braaf asked him if there wasn't just one further item wanted for the cache, "Carve us one, so we can number our time on the way to Astoria, aye?"

Braaf smiled like a boy given a second sugar cake. "I know where there's one, I can get it this after—"

"No!" Melander swept a harried glance around, Braaf blinking up at him. "No, Don't steal one.
Carve
one. You may have never noticed, but there is a dif ference. Keep those damn fingers of yours at home, hear?"

So began Braaf's pastime of car very, a fine Kolosh slat of red cedar—Melander would not have wanted to ask how it found its way to Braaf—about the size of the lid of a music box and a half-inch thick shaved and shaved by him. Then the twelve rows of peg holes across for the months, and in those rows one hole for every day of month, Braaf next discovered that on the best-wrought of these calendars—Melander had neglected too to forbid borrowing for the sake of a look—the Russians marked for their Aleut converts the frequent religious days, a cross-in-a-circle penciled around four or five of the peg holes each month; the notion being that wherever an Aleut huntsman might
roam in his fur harvest for the tsar, lie would have along this steadfast guide to orderly obeisance. Lazily crude, though, this penciling seemed to Braaf. He incised his crosses-in-circles. Finally, there was the peg, to keep track of the day of year much as count is recorded on a cribbage board. Braaf made his of walrus-tooth ivory, an elegant knobbed sliver like a tiny belaying pin.

"Aye, well," said Melander when Braaf shyly handed him the polished little board. "May our days be fit for your calendar, Braaf."

"Which is the one, now?" Braaf asked. "When we go?"

Melander plucked out the ivory peg, counted briefly along a row with it, inserted it.

"This one. Just here, Braaf. The day of days."

Night, the seventh of January, 1853. By the Russian calendar, the night after Christmas.

Karlsson staggered from the Kolosh village to the outside of the stockade gate, bounced hard against the wood, propped himself and threw back his head.

"'Be
GREET
ed joyful
MORN
ing
HOURR,
'" he bawled. "'A Savior
COMES
with
LOVE'
S sweet
POWERR ..."'

"Shúsh! Christ save us, man, you'll have that sergeant down here," Bilibin called urgently, hustled from the hut sheltering him from the rain, and hurriedly worked the gate, "Quick, in, in ..."

From the dark beside the blacksmith shop Melander
watched the gate crack open ever
so
briefly, then close. Two man-shapes bobbed together. Karlsson's slurred mutter and Bilibin's guffaw were heard, Melander swiveled his head toward the end of the smithing shop farthest from the gate and spoke:

"Now."

A piece of the darkness—its name was Braaf—disengaged itself and instantly was vanished around the corner.

Next Melander became motion. Across New Archangel for three hundred yards lie hastened, in black reversal of a route he roved one twilit evening a half-year ago. A different being, that Deacon Step-and-a-Half had been, not yet cumbered with a thousand miles of plan.

Outside the Scandinavian workers' barracks Melander halted and drew deep breaths.

For half a minute the rain ticked down on him.

Entering, Melander clattered the barracks door shut behind him, began to shrug out of his rain shirt, mumbled this or that about having forgot his gloves in the toilet, and was vanished out the doorway again.

A person attentively watching this arrival and departure would have had time to blink perhaps three times.

Wennberg had been idly stropping a knife as he spectated the card game being played by three carpenters and a sailmaker. Now he grunted that he too was off to mount the throne of Denmark, if the Russians allowed pants to be dropped on such a festive night, and to the chuckles of the cardplayers pulled on
his rain shirt and stopped into the streaming blackness beside Melander.

The pair of them, tree and stump somehow endowed with legs, moved with no word through the night for two minutes, three. Apprehension traveled with them both. Apprehensions rather, for their anxieties were sized as different as the men.

A several hundredth time Mela rider retold himself the logic by which he had singled this night. Christmas Eve the Russians hail begun, all going around solemn as church mice, crossing themselves tint il it seemed they'd wear out the air, eating no lute until "the first star of evening." (Which baffled Braaf no little bit : "They wait to see a star over this place, won't they have a hungry winter?") Yesterday, it had been a morning of liturgy murmuring out of the twin-crossed cathedral and then the Russian men paying calls on each other, toasting at every stop until by nightfall the streets were full of crisscrossing bands of them shouting back and forth, "You beat to windward, we'll steer to lee!" Now, the pious and visitâtional sides of Christinas having been observed, certain as anything this would be their night of celebrating and carousing and dancing their boots off—up there in Baranov's Castle at the governor's ball they'd be, all the officers and any of the company Russians who frequented their clubhouse for card games and tippling and monotony-breaking argument, every breathing one of them. And when the escapees' absence was discovered, what Russian among them was going to be eager to dash from snug activities to chase Swedes through the
damp black of Alaskan night? And meanwhile the Koloshes would he staying to their longhouses, leaning clear of drunk and boisterous tsarmen.... Confusion, alcohol, reluctance, Melander had them all carefully in rank as allies for escape. Iiut late-going Russians yet within the officers' clubhouse ... racket in the gun room carrying to a sentry at the eastmost blockhouse ... just here, on such points beyond logic, Melander's months of planning teetered, and the quiver of them touched him through the dark.

Wennberg's perturbance was purely with himself. Until he stood up from beside the cardplayers in the barracks the blacksmith had not been convinced he would go through with the escape. Why risk the tumble, ass-over-earhole, down this bedamned coast? Why trust even a minute to Melander or Karlsson or Braaf, these three orphans of Hell? So how came it. that now lie was traipsing off with Melander into disaster's black avid mouth?

Abruptly a barrier of building met the two of them.

As Melander and Wennberg hesitated before the officers' clubhouse, a third upright shadow joined them. Into Wennberg's hands it thrust a heavy sharp-pointed pry bar and into Melander's a pair of long-handled smithing snippers, and it muttered : "This way."

In the dark and rain Melander and Wennberg stayed stock-still for a moment, as though the cold feel of metal conferred on them by Braaf had iced them into place.

"Come on, you pair of lumps." Braaf's jab brought them to life, tumbled the big men inside the doorway
where he waited. "Stay an arm's length behind me, and try not walk on each other's ankles."

Braaf led Melander and Wennberg through rooms their eyes never really took in, so much focus were the two of them devoting to listening, breathing silently, and creeping.

Which may go to explain how the outer edge of Wennberg's left boot clanked against a hallway spittoon.

Braaf appeared more offended than concerned.

"Plowhorse," came his terse whisper to Wennberg.

The door of the gun room stood like the lid of a colossal strongbox tipped up on end. Heavy hinges, and a corner-to-corner X of strap iron to thwart notions of chopping in, and a powerful hasp, and a padlock the size of a big man's fist.

"Do your digging, blacksmith," Braaf said under his breath. "And pound quiet as you can."

Wennberg pulled from his breeches a mallet and a chisel. He stepped to where the padlock hung heavy in the ring plate of the hasp, put the chisel to the wood of the doorframe a few inches out to the side of the metal, and quickly rapped a groove in behind the ring plate.

"Now the other," Wennberg decreed huskily. "There'll be commotion to this."

"The rain'll drown most of it," answered Braaf. "Don't stand around telling stories, do it."

Wennberg worked the sharp point of the lengthy pry bar into where he had channeled behind the ring plate. Moved his thick hands toward the outer end of
the pry bar for all possible leverage. Was joined by Melander, grabbing beside him on the bar. And both strained outward.

The ring plate wrenched loose, its lag screws tearing wood as they came.

Braaf reached instantly and swung the ring plate and padlock away from the doorframe they had been freed from.

"Done, hair and hide," congratulated Melander. "And we didn't make any more noise than Judgment Day. Now one job more." The tall leader tugged open the powerful door.

Somehow rifles racked together multiply their power, akin to the way that cavalry does by drawing up abreast. The repeat of pattern, the echoing numerousness it implies, as though this concentrated squad is just a swatch from bigger trouble—such impress now met Melander and Braaf and Wennberg, black tubes of barrel and brass ramrod pipes in legions rising straight up from the chain that threaded through each trigger guard. Truth be known, except for an occasional Beaumarchais sportsman's weapon and one hefty American Hawken with an octagonal barrel, the guns here were eccentric old Bakers or Brunswicks bought from Hudson's Bay traders in years past; the Brunswicks in particular were hard-recoiling, scatter-barreled specimens given up on by the British army. None of this could be known to Braaf, Wennberg, Melander. Blast and thunder were their want, not ballistic nicety.

In went Wennberg, then Braaf.

Wennberg pushed down lightly, testingly, on the chain imprisoning the rifles and slid his snippers in atop it to the trigger guard of the first gun. An exertion on the long handles of the snippers, and tempered jaws crushed through the softer brass of the trigger guard.

With care, Wennberg now bent the trigger guard out from where he had made his cut, then cleared the chain through the fresh gap in the brass. Braaf plucked the weapon from him and handed it on out to Melander.

Four more rifles the blacksmith clipped and liberated in the same fashion. "Aye," Melander saying softly each time.

Sharing out their new armory, the trio readied themselves. Wennberg shouldered shut the gun room door, pushed the ring plate and padlock back where they had been, tapped them into place in the original screw holes. Any close cast of look would show at once that the lock was awry but a rare Russian it would be who came home tonight with a quick eye.

Braaf moved in front of the other two; advised under his breath to Wennberg, "Try pick up your hooves this time"; and led.

They exited the clubhouse and through the dark set off together, now west across New Archangel toward the stockade gate, Braaf like a bat choosing the most shadowed route.

The noise exploded atop them then.

Palong! Palong!

Braaf was four running strides away from the frozen Melander and Wennberg before he, and they,
realized—
Palong! Palong!
—how cathedral bells resound to those who sneak about the streets at night.

"Your Russian is fond of bells," a visitor who departed New Archangel with ringing ears once noted down, and the sweet-sad peals from the belfry of the Russian Orthodox cathedral as the hour was rung followed the tall figure and the shorter two across the settlement toward the stockade gate.

A few feet from the sentry lean-to the trio halted, and Melander called in huskily: "Karlsson?"

Out loomed a figure in sentry cap, with a rifle at port arms.

Wennberg grunted a curse and grabbed for the knife inside his rain shirt.

In Karlssons's voice the figure mildly eluded: "You don't find Bilibin's cap becoming on me, Wennberg?"

"Speaking of caps," Melander said as if announcing tea, "the time's come to fling our hat over the nunnery wall."