Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories

by Bradley P. Beaulieu

  He had no doubt that without Yevgeniy’s clouding presence he could return to his past success. Perhaps he should release the boy, concentrate on his own studies and return to Shimon the level of success he’d had in years past. He could do so as soon as they reached Narodnaya. He would not be working against the augury. Their fates had already been sealed by the Moirae—he knew this—but in the understanding of one’s fate, one might blunt the impact. Surely the gods would not begrudge him that.

  Even as these thoughts were settling in his mind, footsteps approached from behind. Maks knew without turning who it was. Yevgeniy had a gait as tentative as his craft.

  “Return to your watch, Yevgeniy.”

  “Forgive me, Master, but we must speak.”

  Maks turned and found him standing outside the thicket, wrapped in his dark red robes. His hands were hidden inside his sleeves, no doubt wringing around one another like snakes.

  “Nyet, Yevgeniy. Return to your post.”

  Yevgeniy seemed rigid, both in stance and expression. “Master, the mining is still hours from completion, and we are so rarely alone. I would speak with you of a formation I’ve found.”

  “In the stars?”

  “In the snow. The rocks, to be more precise. They’re just over—”

  “How many times have I told you that such things are nonsense?”

  “But the oracle—”

  “You are no oracle, Yevgeniy.”

  Yevgeniy ducked his head. “Of course, Master. I only meant—”

  “Go,” Maks said as he turned around and resumed his watch of the far slope. “Keep your watch or return to Shimon and have yourself replaced.”

  “I’ve used the orrery...”

  The words hung in the chill air, as brittle as the surface of the snow. The hair along Maks’s forearms rose as he turned and regarded Yevgeniy as coolly as he could manage. “You what?”

  “Several times since leaving Syktyvkar.” He glanced to one side, as if he wanted nothing more than to survey the land behind him, perhaps to look upon the stones in which he’d read his future.

  Maks crouched out of the thicket and marched forward. Yevgeniy, to his credit, did not wilt. “You were never to do such a thing.”

  Yevgeniy bowed his head. “I know, Master, but...”

  Maks grabbed his robes and shook him. “Explain yourself!”

  A crack sounded above them on the slope. Maks recognized it immediately as the sound of a stout leg of wood giving way to some greater force. It was followed by a cacophony of lesser snaps and splinters and the screech of metal against stone. The tops of the young trees above them swayed as if the arms of Heracles himself were spreading them apart.

  Then Maks saw it: a walker, obscured by the trees, sliding with ever greater speed. It came closer, more and more of it coming into focus.

  It had eight legs, all of which were pulled as high and as tight as possible against the rounded hull, allowing it to slide down the snow-covered slope on its thick underbelly, a maneuver common among the pirates.

  With Yevgeniy close behind, Maks ran as the nearest of the trees split wide. The walker continued as Maks and Yevgeniy dove to the ground. The crack of a musket, then two more, sounded behind them. Snow puffed into the air near Maks’s face, spraying him with biting chips of ice and snow. The walker continued on, sliding directly over the thicket in which Maks had been hiding only moments ago.

  “Hoy!” Maks yelled, following the trail he had forged through the thick blanket of snow on his way here. He waved his arms over his head, keeping as many trees between him and the pirates as possible while still remaining in view of the Braga.

  The walker slid into the valley, coming to a rest near the bank of a river. Three men held tight to the gun emplacement at the rear, but as soon as the walker ceased rocking, they swung the cannon around and trained it on the Braga.

  “Hoy!” Maks continued to yell. He reached the open grassland just as the pirates’ cannon barked and belched black smoke.

  A scream of metal and sparks centered on the foremost of the Braga’s starboard legs. It caught the first joint squarely, sending the entire armature forward with a spray of sparks and an explosion of sound that echoed along the valley walls. The leg crashed against the hull—ruined—but thank the gods the hull and the other five legs had been left intact.

  More musket shots rained in, one whizzing over Maks’s head, but the pirates had the crew of the Braga to worry about now. Three of Shimon’s men had regrouped behind the hull and were returning fire while the kapitan and Vitaliy hoisted themselves up to the primed and loaded cannon. The kapitan took a moment to sight down the barrel before bringing a waiting brand to the touch hole.

  The cannon thundered. The shot struck the pirates’ walker, but too far forward. It glanced off the forward hull and exploded into the stony earth along the bank of the river.

  The crack of musket fire filled the air. The pirates were focused solely on the men surrounding the Braga now. One of them crumpled as he was struck, but their cannon was ready to fire once more. It shot, this time striking the Braga dead center, causing the entire ship to shake and rattle. The Braga was stout, but still a hole the size of a powder keg was left in the hull. Maks prayed that the boiler hadn’t been struck.

  Maks and Yevgeniy finally reached the Braga. They ran behind the hull for cover, their breath coming in great ragged gasps. More than a dozen pirates had poured out from the belly of the walker and were moving forward with muskets at the ready. They stayed in a spread formation, disciplined, firing and reloading as others moved forward and did the same to cover them.

  The crew of the Braga was small—only ten men in all. They couldn’t hope to stave off so many, and even if they managed to, what shape would the Braga be in by the time they did?

  Danila, standing behind the prow, stepped out and brought his musket up quickly, but before he could pull the trigger, a shot tore into his shoulder with a meaty thump and spun him around. He fell to the ground, the snow breaking his fall.

  Maks grabbed for Danila’s trouser leg. Another musket shot came in, striking near his feet. “Help me!” he shouted, but Yevgeniy was already there, grabbing Danila’s other leg, and together they pulled him to safety.

  Most of the pirates were flanking wide to the left; another four had broken away and were crossing the river to the right.

  Another cannon shot came in with a deafening roar right above Maks. Vitaliy screamed. A moment later, Kapitan Shimon was beside them, rolling away and then to his feet. In that one instant, he gave Maks a vicious look, as if he were to blame.

  Vitaliy dropped behind Shimon. He screamed, gripping his left hand tightly. Blood poured from his ruined hand, staining the trampled snow beneath his feet.

  “What shall we do?” Leonid said. He was gripping his musket fiercely. His entire body was shaking.

  Shimon, breathing heavily, looked up to the ship and out toward the grassland where the pirates would soon be. He was clearly debating whether he should surrender, but what choice was there?

  The boom of another cannon came from behind them. Maks thought it might have been an echo from the pirate ship, but Iosef shouted and pointed to the valley’s northern slope. At the crest, already making good headway as it slid down a shallow slope toward the river, was another walker—a miner, not a pirate. And it was big—one cannon at the front, another at the rear, and nearly twenty men at the gunwales, muskets at the ready. Maks recognized it immediately as the Drozhnost, the ship his brother, Savil, had been serving on for the past eight years.

  Three strikes of a bell cut through the cold air, a signal from the pirate kapitan to his men. Maks dared a glance beyond the prow and saw them beating a hasty retreat back to their ship.

  Another cannon shot from the Drozhnost narrowly missed the pirate ship, and soon after their walker was steaming away, crawling beyond the river and into the nearby trees. By the time the Drozhnost had launched one last warning shot, the pirates were lost
from view, a column of steam rising high into the air, marking its passage as it crawled up slope and away from danger.

  For long moments all Maks could do was breathe. The men raised their hands in the air and cheered. Yevgeniy, however, ran to Vitaliy’s side and dropped to his knees.

  For a moment—a moment only—he stopped. He became still, and there came a look on his face that made Maks’s breath catch. It was a look of regret, as if Yevgeniy felt responsible for what had happened to the man lying before him.

  The moment passed, and Yevgeniy moved quickly, unwinding Vitaliy’s scarf and wrapping it tightly around his bloody hand. The other crewmen swarmed in to carry Vitaliy up to the ship, to get him warm, and as soon as they had moved to the far side of the Braga, Maks grabbed Yevgeniy by his coat. “You knew!”

  Yevgeniy’s cheeks were red with shame. “Knew what?”

  “You knew they were coming! How?”

  “I didn’t know exactly.”

  Maks worked it out in his head, realizing that this went much farther than Yevgeniy was letting on. “They knew we would be here. They knew where our first strike would land.” Maks worked backward through time. They hadn’t known until after leaving Syktyvkar the region they would be heading toward, but they had stopped at Narodnaya, a small mining village, two days into the mountain passes. “You sold my findings, didn’t you?”

  Yevgeniy shook his head violently. “Nyet, Maksim, I would never!”

  “You did! And the word from the oracle as well.”

  “Maksim, I told you, when you were sleeping I looked at the orrery.”

  Shimon stepped from around the front of the walker and bore down on them. “What is this?”

  “It’s my fault, Kapitan,” Maks said. “I should never have agreed to take him on. He is from a poor family, and his father is sick. He’s sold the only thing of worth that he has.”

  “What do you mean?” Shimon asked.

  “The list of sightings from the oracle, and the ones we’ve collected since.”

  Shimon stared down at Yevgeniy, his unshaven jaw working back and forth. “You have proof?”

  “I need no proof, Shimon. He is guilty.”

  Shimon turned his stare on Maks, his breath white on the wind. This was a man that years ago would have trusted Maks implicitly, but now there was doubt in his eyes—skepticism for a man who had failed him more often than not in the past few seasons. He looked up to the woods, where the pirate walker could still be heard. Then he looked to the meteorite, black and glimmering in its blasted hole. “Come, Yevgeniy, we have work to do.”

  Maks raised his hands. “Kapitan—”

  “You have work to do as well, Maksim. Speak to your brother. Get the sightings you need.”

  Shimon left to continue work on the meteorite. Yevgeniy paused, looking to Maks as if he regretted what had just happened, but then he followed in the kapitan’s footsteps, leaving Maks alone with only the gentle wind and the sound of the nearby river to comfort him.

  Maks sat beneath the boughs of a tall larch as a healthy fire spat and sparked a few feet away. Maks tipped his head back and allowed a healthy swallow of vodka from Savil’s pewter flask to burn down his throat. Across from him Savil was just finishing his task of copying Maks’s most recent sightings into his thick, leatherbound journal. The sun had long gone down. The stars and moon were bright, and Maks could see the silhouettes of the Braga and the Drozhnost against the white field of snow as the crew of both walkers fed the last of the meteorite into the mills. The sound of stone being crushed rose high into the valley air, making Maks nervous that the pirates would hear it and return to catch them off guard, but the ore was simply too lucrative to abandon, even splitting it with the Drozhnost.

  Savil continued to scritch and scratch at his journal, taking detailed notes on Maks’s observations and how they squared with his own. It was something seers did for one another, this trading of information. It was essential; without reliable updates as to the patterns of starfalls one could not predict the future. For anyone else Maks would have copied his sightings down—perhaps four of every five sightings—and given them over, but this was Savil; he was family, and even though the two of them worked for competing mining outfits, neither owner would grumble. It was understood that family warranted special consideration.

  The years had not been kind to Savil since Maks had last seen him. His face was ragged, his eyes worn and defeated. Savil was fifty-four, three years Maks’s senior. Maks remembered him as a stout old oak, but here he looked bent and broken, like a tree that had finally given in to the storm.

  Footsteps approached, crunching over the snow. Kapitan Shimon stepped into the firelight, his face grim. “You wished to speak?”

  Maks stood, preferring to stare Shimon in the eye. “It’s Yevgeniy. He confessed—”

  “That he stole a look at your orrery? What of it?”

  Maks stared, unable to collect himself for a moment. “Kapitan, the orrery is a delicate instrument. Yevgeniy may very well have fouled its calibration.”

  “And he may very well have seen something that you did not.”

  “That’s just it, Shimon. I don’t think he saw it at all. I think he’s in league with them.”

  “In league?”

  “He’s selling information to the pirates. My sightings.” Maks tipped his head toward Savil. “Those of others.”

  “And if he had, why would they have attacked the very ship that was supplying them with information?”

  “He would have sold it to middle-men, men who could easily have resold it to the pirates who attacked us.”

  Shimon pulled his heavy fur coat tighter over his frame. The night was growing cold. “This sounds desperate, Maksim.”

  “I—” He was referring to Maks’s own difficulties over the past few seasons. “I would never blame another for my own—”

  “Inabilities? The truth of the matter, Maks, is that you’re readings have become more and more erratic. We barely saw profit last year. With the repairs the Braga needs now, if this season goes the same way, we’ll lose money. I can’t have it, Maks. I can’t.”

  “It has been difficult, but now that I have Savil’s sightings, I can correct.”

  “I would prefer that there was nothing to correct.”

  Maks shook his head. “Kapitan, I’m sure that Yevgeniy—”

  “Yevgeniy may be your apprentice, but he’s helped the crew more than you ever have. He stays.” He turned to leave, taking several long strides back toward the ship, but then he stopped and turned around. “And Maks?”

  “Kapitan?”

  “You had better find us meteorites, and more than this cartload we found today.”

  When the kapitan’s tall form had long since melded into the darkness, Savil pulled the spectacles from around his ears and closed his journal. He stared deeply into Maks’s eyes. “What has happened to you, Maksim?”

  Maks sat, feeling sick. “Yevgeniy—”

  “Yevgeniy or not, you are master of your orrery, are you not? You are a seer trained by the oracle Vadrim, himself, are you not?”

  “It is a run of bad luck, Savil. Nothing more.”

  “There’s no such thing as luck.”

  “I need no reminding of that.” He motioned to the Braga, where the men were beginning to stow the equipment. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  Savil stood and stared, a confused look playing over his face among the shadows of the nearby fire. “We’ll see each other again, da? After the season? We have some things to talk about.”

  Maks stood and embraced him. “Such as?”

  “After the season, Maks.” Savil hugged him and slapped his back. “I’m glad we came upon you in time.” His words were strangely spoken, as if Savil felt them more deeply than he had a right to.

  Maks pulled away and stared into his brother’s eyes. “You saw it, did you not?”

  “Still”—he winked—“a bit of luck never hurts, da?”

&nbs
p; Maks laughed and embraced him one last time.

  Within the hour, the Braga and the Drozhnost had gone their separate ways.

  By the edge of a tranquil mountain lake, Maks sat before his orrery, confused. The stars and the delicate gauze of the universe that lay beyond them were bright, casting a perfect reflection over the placid surface of the lake. By the light of a bulls-eye lantern, he studied the detailed notes he’d taken of his own sightings and those of Savil. The dials had been set and reset, but the location it was giving for the next meteorite strike was over a thousand miles to the southwest, placing it somewhere along the northern coast of the Black Sea. The orrery had been built in Delphi by women handpicked by the Pythia herself. It could not be the fault of the machine. And yet Maks was doing nothing different than he had for years. He had gauged the amount of sunlight, he had measured the wind, he had taken the mood of each and every crew member. Even Yevgeniy and the angst and uncertainty he brought had been taken into account. His use of the sextant was impeccable despite his aging eyes.