Watson, Ian - Novel 11 (19 page)

 
          
“I
don’t care, as long as he guides us!’’ said Mirek.

 
          
“We
all have problems,’’ Konstantin said. “It’s a question of rising above them.’’

 
          
Oh
yes indeed: rising above them on a toy hydrogen balloon— or in a
‘jet-propelled’ rocket ship . . .

 
          
So
now, dear Masha, after another strenuous and freezing trek, we find ourselves
in a genuine Tungusi tent on the south bank of the Chambe, accepting
hospitality overnight before pressing on into the unknown—with or without our
guide. Tolya, the long-lost prodigal, is back in the bosom of his people; and
in this setting he seems a different breed of fellow from the one who
accompanied us hither. He’s in his proper place at last. And this place
possesses him—just as
1
would be
possessed by a little country farm with a few fruit trees and a decent angling
stream . . .

 
          
The
Tungusi camp is passably habitable, if you’re a savage. Which is another way of
saying that life is no more degraded here, than your average Great Russian
village. Instead of houses made of mud and wood, there are in this clearing
half a dozen large conical tents sewn from reindeer hide. Instead of a church,
there is . . . well, the mighty forest, I suppose.

 
          
These
Asiatic herdsmen are amiable enough—because we have brought their lost son
home; though we cannot exchange a single word with any of them, except through
Tolya. But they have set a whole tent aside for our party, and they have
feasted us royally on fish soup; and now it’s time to sleep.

 
          
Goodnight,
dear Masha.

 
          
“It figures
! ”

           
Kirilenko asked Sergey, “How do you
mean?”

 
          
“Isn’t
it obvious? No sooner have you dubbed Mikhail a ‘medium’, than that Tolya
fellow turns out to be a Siberian shaman—how about that, eh? Suggestible isn’t
the word for it.’’ “Please,’’ asked Osip, “what’s a shaman?’’

 
          
“It’s
a magician,’’ Sonya explained. “In a primitive tribe like the Evenki: the
Tungusi, as they used to be called. Of course there aren’t any shamans
nowadays. But back in 1890 there would have been—it isn’t implausible at all.”

 
          
Osip
squinted. “Maybe . . . it’s a case of ‘Set a thief to catch a thief?”

 
          
“What
do you mean by that?” There was a note of derision in Sergey’s voice.

 
          
“Well,
if Professor Kirilenko says Mr Petrov’s a medium, and if that guide bloke back
in 1890 is one of them an’ all—if that’s what you mean by ‘magician’, Miss . .
.”

 
          
“Bravo,
Osip! You amaze me.” Kirilenko looked genuinely pleased.
“
‘Set
a thief to catch a thief’, eh? A medium will be drawn to another
medium ... A good piece of reasoning. Ah, but there’s a snag. Mike’s supposed
to be identifying himself with Chekhov, not with Tolya.”

 
          
“I’d
say he’s identifying himself with every damn character in his head,” Sergey
said.
“Why not one more?
Let’s really crowd the stage!
Joe Stalin was exiled to
Krasnoyarsk
, wasn’t he? When would that have been?”

           
“Later on,” Felix said. “Stalin was
born in 1879.”

 
          
“So
what’s wrong with that?
Makes him twenty-one in the year in
question.
Young firebrand like him: spent half his youth escaping from
one place or another. Come on, Mike: let’s have the man of steel fleeing
through the forest, and bumping into our brave band. Tolya can tell his
fortune.”

 
          
“I
told you, I don’t have any
control
over this.”

 
          
“Excuse
me,” said Osip, “but in my opinion we ought to leave Joseph Stalin right out of
it.”

 
          
“Very
wise,” agreed Felix. “That’s irresponsible talk, Sergey.”

 
          
“Very
sorry, I’m sure.”

 
          
“Anyway,”
went on Osip, “if we could stick to brass tacks fora minute, we’re all in a bit
of a fix, in’t we? There’s some kind of mass suggestion going on, right? What
you might call a collective mesmerism? Like in a theatre, with a hypnotist up
on a stage. Only, this time the hypnotist has fooled the whole audience, not
just one dupe up front. What’s more, he’s hypnotised his self into the bargain.
No one’s in charge any longer—and there’s no way out of the theatre, either.
Nobody can see the exits.”

 
          
“Perhaps
you’d like to be the usher?”

 
          
“Somebody’s
got to be, but it in’t me, Mr Gorodsky.” Osip rubbed his bristly chin. “I’m
just saying, who’s going to clap their hands and cry, ‘Wake up!’?”

 
          
“But
we don’t want to ‘wake up’ yet,” said Kirilenko. “It’s too soon. The expedition
hasn’t reached its goal, and the ship hasn’t exploded. Well, in a manner of
speaking it
has
exploded—”

 
          
“Only
it’s back in one piece again. Unfortunately,” said Felix. “For
us,
and for all on board, and for Anton Chekhov, and for my
great-aunt Anastasia.
Do
make a
better go of it next time, Mike! Any clever American headshrinker could tell
you that a spaceship is a great big phallic symbol. This failure to explode
could do awful things to your love life—right, Dr Suslova?”

 
          
Sonya
blushed. “Freudianism is a—”

           
“Jewish bourgeois
mystification, eh?”
Felix chuckled.

 
          
“More
to the point,” snapped Sonya, “the
K. E.
Tsiolkovsky
doesn’t remotely resemble a phallus.”

 
          
“How
do I know what Mikhail’s dong looks like?”

 
          
A
jingling OF
metal woke Anton.
This,
and the sound of his name being called in a strange,
faraway voice. But then he realized that the summons came from quite close by,
only it seemed pitched for his ears alone.

 
          
A
shimmering ghost stood in the open flap of the tent. Bright moonlight on the
snow illuminated it. Anton grunted in alarm at the sight, producing a noise in
his throat which sounded foreign to him, more like the cry or cough of some
doomed animal far away.

 
          
“Antosha,”
the ghost called. “Come along with me.”

 
          
Within
the tent a single candle was still burning, though it was almost down to the
stub. None of Anton’s companions stirred in their sleep. Hastily he fumbled for
the tin containing his pince-nez and slipped the glasses on.

 
          
Now
that he could see clearly, what confronted him was even more disconcerting than
a ghost might have been. The face of the apparition was that of a metal bird,
with sharp iron beak and cheek-feathers of rusty iron. Its eyes were dark
holes. On its head the creature wore a felt cap with kopecks sewn around it. A
caftan hung from its shoulders, decked with long ribbons upon which were sewn
dozens of pieces of metal shaped into suns and moons and stars. When the figure
shifted, these ribbons swayed like snakes, all the pieces jangling together.
What a firmament of stars and discs! What a weight they must be! Nor was that
the whole of the metal: an iron breastplate was fastened to the creature’s
chest with rope . . .

 
          
In
one hand the visitor held a little drum; and in the other a wooden staff—the
head of the staff was carved into a horse head.

           
And none of the other sleepers woke.
. . Obviously the monster must be one of the Tungusi, dressed up in the middle
of the night like a pagan Archimandrite. Why:
fo
kill
them and rob them? Nobody would ever find out. There would be no justice—only
murder. Anton’s thoughts raced fearfully.
‘
Where
the hells that revolver'V

 
          
“Jaroslav,
wake up!” He gripped Mirek by the shoulder and shook him; but the Czech only
grunted and slumbered on.

 
          
“He
won’t wake,” said the visitor. “None will.
Only you.
I
only called you.”

 
          
“Tolya,
is that you? But you’re speaking Russian—quite passably!”

 
          
“A
man understands all tongues when he speaks the tongue of Nature.”

 
          
“Really?
Alors, parlez avec moi en frangaisV’

           
“Russian’s good enough.”

 
          
“You
are
Tolya—that’s your voice.”

 
          
“I
am Shaman.”

 
          
“Who?”

 
          
“You
don’t speak Tungus’k. Never mind. Give me some tobacco and come outside.”

 
          
“So
you want me to hand over my tobacco!”

 
          
“Just a mouthful, no more.
I need tobacco to chew. You give
it—it has to be your tobacco.”

 
          
“But what for?”

 
          
“To let me dream.”

 
          
Reluctantly
Anton searched his bag in the candlelight for his precious stock of decent
Ukrainian weed, mailed by Masha. Tolya—who else would it be?—trotted over.
Depositing staff and drum briefly, he scooped up a handful of tobacco. Raising
the metal bird-mask a little, he crammed the spoils between his lips and began
noisily masticating them. Then he beat a hasty retreat back to the tent flap,
and held it wide. “Come!”

 
          
Non-plussed,
Anton donned his boots, hugged his clothes about him, and followed.

           
Tolya skipped away smartly into the
centre of the clearing and began dancing slowly round and round—but with the
light step of a ballet dancer, not like someone encumbered with such a weight
of metal. The iron stars clashed and sparkled in the moonlight, but in spite of
the clanking of all these medallions nobody peeped out of any of the tents.
Even the hobbled horses stood like statues. A trance had fallen upon the world,
beyond the trance of sleep.

 
          
The
great pines and larches that hemmed the clearing were frost- giants crowding
together to watch. Anton could just see the river beyond, in one direction.
Little ice floes raced along it, spinning and colliding.

 
          
‘Dream
people will slip out of the trees soon,’ he thought to himself. ‘And out of the
past they’ll slip, too—grinning and sneering, their hearts full of intrigue.
Then I’ll look around, and Masha will be there and everybody else I love, all
of them suffering stupid cruelties at the hands of my bogies . . .’

 
          
However,
nobody came from the world of memory; and Tolya spun himself to a standstill.
Flopping cross-legged on to the snow, his metalled ribbons spreading round him
in a tiny tent, he began to rap his drum with a stick pulled from inside his
caftan.

 
          
Rut-tut-tut! Rut-tut-iui! Rit-tit-tit!

           
Then he tossed his drumstick into
the air. It turned over and over, and fell at Anton’s feet, where it jerked
about for a moment like a compass needle before coming to rest, pointing north
by south.

 
          
“Heat!”
moaned the strange Figure.
“Unbearable heat!
The heat of Ogdy burning all the trees which are the roadway from
Earth to Sky.
But Shaman don’t feel
no
heat!”

 
          
Tolya
jumped up again suddenly, as if his tail was on fire. Racing towards the
closest of the towering, snow-draped firs, he ducked underneath the bottom
branches, then heedless of all the pounds of metal he was wearing, he leaped,
caught hold, and scrambled up the trunk from branch to branch—showering snow
down—till he sat perched on a high limb.

 
          
Staring
up at the brittle, ice-flake stars in the sky, he cried,

           
“Lord Buga! Here I am, back where I
was before my birth! Before the time my soul got hauled down from the branches
of the World Tree—oh, Tree of
all the
World! D’you
hear
me?”

 
          
Amazed,
Anton walked forward a few paces.

 
          
“Lord
Buga, all your trees lie flat! What does it mean? Has Ogdy won out over you?
Has He thrown down the sky-ladder? Must we all decay into beasts of no wisdom?”

 
          
The
iron bird cocked its head, listening. Then it shinned down the tree trunk
again, and ducked out into the clearing to stand rocking and jingling before
Anton. Somewhere inside the dark holes of its mask, glassy eyes stared into
his own
eyes. Tolya tipped the mask up momentarily, just a
little, and spat a brown spent wad into the snow.

 
          
Confronted
by this tribal gibberer—who was undeniably impressive in an eerie, primitive
way in the haunted moonlight— Anton felt as if time had been dislocated, and he
had been suddenly plunged a thousand years into the past. Here was the real
World Soul that
Lydia
had invoked so lyrically and fatuously as they floated down the
Yenisey!

 
          
Superstition
. . . and absurd ecstasies . . . and weary despair— and sheer terror of some
malicious spiritual foe lurking in the vastness of the land: these were all the
common currency of average Christian souls, at the best of times! Was Tolya
really any different from
them—or they
from him? There
was a suspicious similarity between Tolya’s ‘Lord Buga’ and the Russian word
for God . . .

 
          
“I
hear you!” the figure cried. It performed antic capers. “He shall see! And only
he! Then he will turn his steps away from the accursed place!”

 
          
Tolya
whipped out an oval mirror from inside his caftan. It was the size of his palm,
and framed in bronze. Puffing, he polished with his cuff before his breath
could freeze.

 
          
“Antosha, look!”

 
          
And
Anton looked. To begin with, it appeared that the silvering behind the glass
was badly tarnished; he could only make out a snowstorm or white fog, in place
of the clearing . . . But then the fog (or whatever) dispersed suddenly. To his
surprise he saw what must
be the bridge of a ship, in
miniature
within. At least so he assumed from all the glass dials,
instruments and controls. As the mirror tipped slightly in Tolya’s hand, he
could see a man strapped in a seat. The man wore a worried expression on his
face—and that face, astonishingly, was
Anton's
own.

 
          
Who
was
the man?

 
          
He
could hardly be a naval officer. He was wearing such a peculiar uniform:
silver-grey, and all of a piece, with strips of metal on the pockets. A red
flag was sewn to his sleeve, near the shoulder, sporting a star and a hammer
and sickle. What kind of flag was that?
Turkish?
No .
. .

 
          
As
Anton watched, the other man who wore his face fumbled with the buckles holding
him—and floated up above the seat.
Weightlessly.

 
          
Was
this not a ship at sea at all—but one of Tsiolkovsky’s spaceships? But if there
were people on Mars—where they must fly the red flag—why should they look
exactly like people on Earth? Was a twin born on Mars, to every soul on Earth?

 
          
This
had to be a hallucination—a person could be mesmerised by a mirror! Anton shook
his head, to regain clarity; and in response Tolya shook the mirror from side
to side . . .

 
          
Anton
blinked. The scene had changed. His double was lying on a tatty old sofa in a
wood-panelled room. A burly man with curly black hair and a thin nose, dressed
in a suit of indefinably strange cut, was sitting astride a cane chair
nearby—like a doctor by his patient’s couch. The ‘double’ must have hurt his
eye; he was wearing a black patch over it . . . His head rested on a folded
jacket; otherwise he was dressed in a woollen jersey and a pair of coarse blue
trousers apparently cut from sailcloth or tent canvas.

 
          
A
peculiar box stood on the floor beside the sofa. It was the size of a small
suitcase, and what appeared to be glass discs joined by a length of grey tape
were turning round on top of it while the doctor
listened
intentlv to the words of the invalid . . . Since Anton couldn’t lipread,
whatever was being related remained a mystery— or why the doctor should be
glancing at the box from time to time, as though this was his tool of
diagnosis.

 
          
Suddenly
Anton began to feel that he was falling forward weightlessly—and that in a very
short while he would
be
that figure
lying on the sofa! He cried out incoherently.

 
          
A
jerk upon his wrist broke the enchantment. He discovered that Tolya had cast a
little noose of twine around his wrist, with his free hand. The Tungusi was
playing him as an angler plays a fish . . . And the mirror was all snow or fog
again; quickly Tolya tucked it back inside his caftan out of sight.

 
          
“So
you’re back?’’ said Tolya. “Make sure you
go
back, where you belong.’’

 
          
“What
did I see? What was it? Where was it?’’

 
          
“You
should rather ask:
When
was it?’’

 
          
“When?
What do you mean by that?’’