by Ray Hudson
EIGHT
STRENGTH AND ENDURANCE
35. Anna
I didn’t understand how that cloud remained stationary in the face of all the wind that whipped the mountainside, but there wasn’t time to investigate. I turned back inside and hit the slope full speed. I was almost halfway down to the shore when Booker did a sealskin slide without the sealskin, on his rear; sometimes feet forward, sometimes head first, and frequently in circles. He almost passed me. As we neared the shore, the heavier grass slowed our sliding and we stumbled upright onto the beach, and there was Vasilii, holding out one hand while he held a rope tied to a skiff with the other.
“Ayaqaa!” he said “It’s about time. Get in!”
Without waiting to find out how and why he was there, we tumbled over the wooden sides, swirled upright, and sat down. Vasilii climbed in beside me and handed me a paddle. Further out on the water, the Eider swayed gently, wrapped by a tattered scarf of fog. Not a soul was in sight. Rowing side by side, we sent the skiff skimming away from the shore. We headed straight for the ship. Booker glanced nervously around, probably expecting a killer whale’s dorsal fin or the roar of a sea lion. We cut rowing and coasted to the port side of the ship where a rope ladder hung down. Vasilii steadied the skiff while I grabbed the ladder and started up, with Booker right behind. Vasilii joined us on deck after securing the skiff to the rope ladder.
We stood looking at each other.
“You had left with Captain Hennig,” Vasilii said, “by the time I learned what had happened to the book of mummies.”
“And what had happened to it?” I asked.
“The captain had come up to our house and borrowed it again,” he said. “You were sailing out of the bay by the time Mother came home and told me.”
“You mean it was here all along?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Come,” he finally said. “I have something to show you.”
The three of us stepped into the galley. The table was littered with hard-tack, a half-carved block of cheese, playing cards, three coffee mugs, several sheets of paper, and a nautical chart. Booker picked up a piece of hardtack as Vasilii lifted the chart.
There, resting under it, was
On the
Remains of Later Pre-Historic Man
Obtained from
Caves in the Catherina Archipelago, Alaska Territory,
and Especially from the
Caves of the Aleutian Islands
by
W. H. Dall
1878
“At first I thought you might have found it,” Vasilii said, “but when he came back and said he’d lost his skiff at Kagamil and you weren’t on board, well, I got a little suspicious. He was anxious to get another skiff and return. I asked to go along.”
Booker looked like this whole story was crazy. “Did you know we’d be here?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“How’d you know we hadn’t used the book and gone back to where we came from,” I asked.
“The small piece of your torn bookmark is still inside. I checked.”
All I could do was stare at him. “It is so good to see you.”
He stepped onto the deck and looked across toward Kagamil.
“They’ll be almost ready to come back,” he said.
“What do you want to do?”
Booker was devouring a piece of the hardtack, so I answered. “We need to try to get home.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “I’ve got a place prepared.”
He led the way as we hurried below deck. Booker and I walked into the room, but Vasilii lingered at the door.
“I guess this really is goodbye,” he said. “You’ll find some hard-tack and cheese on the bunk, along with a couple cans of sardines. I need to take the skiff ashore. You’ll be fine here.”
Booker reached into his pack and removed a folded touring compass and handed it to him. Vasilii studied the clear plastic base with amazement. He rotated the metal compass and smiled.
I gave him a quick hug and, Guuspuda!, as Old Man Peter said when he first saw the ivory fox, a kiss on his cheek. I don’t know if he or Booker was the more surprised and embarrassed. I know it wasn’t me. We followed him up on deck and watched while he rowed away from the Eider. Then Booker and I returned to the room. We sat on one of the bunks with the volume resting between us on our legs. He took the bookmark from his pocket. I thumbed through the pages until I found the small piece that had torn off. We slid the two pieces together. I really expected them to fuse like magnets.
Nothing happened.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” he said. “I’m tired. Let’s get a little rest and try later.”
I was too exhausted to disagree. I knew Vasilii would keep anybody from coming here. Booker wrapped himself in a blanket, and within seconds he was asleep. I unfolded a blanket on the other bunk just as a commotion on deck signaled that Hennig and his crew were back on board. I inched On the Remains away from Booker’s head—he was using it as a pillow—and replaced it with a folded blanket. I sat beside him and started turning the pages, one by one, with the two parts of the bookmark in my hand. On the back of the larger piece, the faintest echo of a scene was beginning to form. I turned it over to where the old Unanga letters were written. Those along the torn edge were little more than faint outlines. All the ink had drained away. I knew where it had gone, of course. My palms were as dark as ever. I held the bookmark in my left hand and dragged it across my right palm. A light path appeared on my skin. I did it again. The path widened. The torn letters on the bookmark were a hint darker. I ran it over my palm again. It was like a small vacuum cleaner sucking up the darkness. I cleared one hand and arm and started on the others. Before long, both hands and arms were almost normal.
“Now or never,” I said. I placed the two pieces of the bookmark together and laid them carefully between two pages. I touched Booker’s shoulder while I closed the volume.
Nothing happened.
“I’ve done what I could, Booker,” I whispered to him as I returned to the other bunk. The ivory fox is where it belongs. The Kagamil people have their courage. I lowered my head and used the book as a pillow.
The wind must have picked up while I slept. I awoke to the ship diving beneath the waves and surfacing, sending us over an acre of sea and into the air. The vessel tumbled sideways, like a paper cup. It careened down a steep watery trough and slammed into the base of an oncoming wave. The wall of water broke over us, smothering any light. I heard a high mechanical grinding as my body sailed off the bunk. I saw Booker spring awake as the ship dropped and he floated into the air. Then the air tilted, and he cartwheeled through the room just in time to knock me over as I struggled up. I rolled onto my knees as the floor pulled away. He braced himself upright but with every step, the floor evaded him. Overhead there was a prolonged splintering and then a deep gnashing as something large swept across the deck.
The single light bulb in the cabin flickered.
Light bulb? I thought. Light bulb?
“Booker!” I shouted and pointed.
He saw it and ran toward me. He threw his arms around me and we hugged.
“We’re back!”
The ship buckled and bore forward. And then it began to climb, angling so steeply that we were thrown backward and across the floor as though it were a slide. Booker hit the wall and crumpled. He unfolded himself onto his hands and knees. The wall was now under him, and he started crawling up it. And then he was on his back as the ship righted itself.
The tonnage of steel in the vessel echoed with every wallop the sea delivered, but it was music to our ears. We were back in the twenty-first century, even if the ship’s sides were about to spring apart. If the rivets exploded from their sockets, the whole vessel would sink like an iron bar.
“On deck!” I shouted. “Get on deck!”
Booker followed me as the ship rammed into another wave. Hand over hand and leg above leg as gravity pulled us
in random directions, we careened toward the ladder. I grabbed a rung with one hand while extending the other back to him. He latched on for an instant before we were jerked apart. Then we scrambled up and into a narrow passage. We burst into the galley just as Albert Hennig, our Hennig, the bastard, placed an old leather book on the table. He blanched when he saw me.
“How in hell!”
A blunt wave struck the starboard side and sent all three of us ricocheting off the walls and into each other. I sprang through the door onto the deck. Hennig was behind me as I fled toward the stern, holding on to anything within grasp. But Hennig was quicker, and in moments his massive hands circled my waist. I kicked and screamed. I twisted and scratched at his face. He lifted me above his chest as the gale roared around us. I saw Booker charge into the captain’s belly, bending him forward. Hennig kicked out, and Booker sailed across the deck.
As I pivoted in the air, the necklace of blue beads slipped from my pocket. They glittered like ice. Hennig grabbed for them, and I tumbled loose, falling backward. The strand caught on my jacket and broke apart. Hennig tore at the air as beads flew in all directions. I hit the rail on an inward tilt of the ship and then, for the second time that day, I slipped over the edge.
Hennig had caught two beads and was lurching for a third when Booker shot past him with his arms stretched out to grab me. The captain aimed a convulsive kick, lost his balance, and slipped on the loose beads under his other foot. There were half a dozen sharp metal corners on the deck, but one was enough. He crumpled, and the beads rolled from his hands into the sea, and the water became map-flat with sudden calm.
Booker gave a hard yank on my arm, and I toppled back over the railing and onto the deck. We stepped over Hennig’s unconscious body, collected every bead within sight, and hurried below before Torgey or anyone else discovered us. But there wasn’t anyone else, just Torgey, and Torgey was busy in the wheelhouse. The sudden and unworldly stillness of the sea had spooked him. He shouted for Hennig and waited and shouted again.
36. Booker
Anna put a hand into her pocket and took out two clear beads. Streams of familiar blue light filtered through them as they rolled around her palm. She handed them to me.
“Those are yours, Anna,” I said. We were sitting on her grandmother’s couch.
“I know. But you should have a couple. I have more. Who knows when you’ll need one?”
“Thanks.”
I placed them in my jacket’s left pocket because the right one bulged with the copy of Death and the Uphill Gardener that I had taken from the ship’s table so long ago. It had reappeared once we had returned to this century. I tapped it and stood up. “I need to get this back to the boat.”
“Gram,” Anna said as we walked into the kitchen, “we’re going down to the dock for a bit, okay?”
Her grandmother was whipping condensed milk into a bowl of canned pumpkin.
“Be back for supper, Old Lady,” she said. “You missed lunch already. And bring Bookey.”
“Booker, Gram. Booker,” Anna said as we stepped outside and she closed the door.
“Will your mom be there?”
“Maybe. Maybe so.”
Then she looked at me and said, “I hope so. We have some catching up to do.”
“Did your grandmother just call you an old lady?”
Anna just cocked her head a little and smiled.
“I’m curious, Anna,” I said, changing the subject. “If that boy Stink—“
“Chakna,” she said.
“—yeah, him, if he got his good-luck charm back . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, then, shouldn’t he have been okay? I mean, that sad story Vasilii told us about the boy drowning and the whole family dying, that shouldn’t have happened, right?”
“Maybe it didn’t.”
“But if it was in that old book—“
“Books are sometimes wrong,” she said. “You can’t trust everything that gets pasted between covers.”
“Do you have the book?” I asked. “The last time I saw it, it was flying through the air in Hennig’s galley.”
“I don’t,” she said, “but that must be how we got back. He must have been reading it in the wheelhouse.”
That made sense, it seemed to me, but I was still puzzled.
“But how did we get away from the killer whales and Raven and the volcano and all the rest of it?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “But Ash said something about magic charms. Do you remember? How you treat them is how you will be treated.”
“That old man said the same thing,” I said.
“We set the carved fox free. We returned it home and we returned home,” she said.
“And here we are,” I said and stepped confidently from the dock onto the familiar deck of the King Eider. I was becoming an old hand around ships.
Once inside the cabin, I bent down to the floor, slipped Death and the Uphill Gardener out of my pocket, and stood up as though I had just found it. Nicely done, I thought, until Anna gave me a weird look. I placed the book on the counter in the galley as she introduced me to an old man whose name was Sanders. On the way to the dock, she had told me he had been a crewman for Hennig, but that he hadn’t had any part in what the captain and his mate had done.
“Thanks!” he said when he saw the paperback. “I wondered where I’d lost it.”
He nodded at the old guy sitting beside him. “This is my friend from Nikolski,” he said. “I call him Old Man, ’cuz that’s what he is, but his name is Sergie.” He turned to the man whose face was lined by perpetual smiling. “Old Man,” he said, “this is Sophie Hansen. I mean, Anna Hansen. This is Sergie Rostokovich.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Sergie said.
And then Anna introduced me as her friend visiting from out of town.
Sanders limped over to the counter, opened a wide-mouthed jar and poured out a plateful of raisin and oatmeal cookies.
“Baked these this morning,” he said.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said the elderly man as he reached out his hand and laughed.
“You’ll need to go on a diet,” Sanders said as he insisted Anna and I help ourselves before he passed the plate to his companion.
“Is this your ship?” I asked. I thought I had better say something.
“No, no,” Sanders said. “I’m more of a caretaker. Hennig’s the owner. But I tell you, it’s strange. He and Torgey were out toward Kagamil in this horrible storm. I was supposed to go with them but I had twisted my ankle and was up at the clinic, so they took off without me. Torgey told me he was in the wheelhouse and Hennig was not and after a while he got concerned. The sea had gone deathly still all of a sudden, and he went aft and there he was, sprawled out cold. Well, Torgey, he’s a pretty good seaman, and he brought the ship in.”
I glanced at Anna, remembering the confusion at the dock and how we had managed to slip ashore.
“But once he got back into port,” Sanders continued, “well, the feds came around, made a search of Hennig’s cabin for looted artifacts. You know, oddest thing. They didn’t find much except a wooden crate in the captain’s stateroom—and I had seen that, once upon a time. Not much in it, if you know what I mean. But, he had a remarkable crystal spear point in his pocket. Remarkable thing. Anyway, after the feds found that spear point, they took Hennig and Torgey into custody and Torgey told them everything. They even arrested Mrs. Skagit, although that took a bit of doing.”
“Built like a tank,” said Sergie.
“Hennig was medevaced to the hospital in Anchorage,” Sanders said. “Gone a bit strange in the head from the sounds of things. I hear the feds might confiscate this ship and put it up for auction.”
“If they do,” Sergie said and helped himself to another cookie, “you can move to Nikolski.”
I could tell Sergie was studying Anna while he chewed. Then he asked, “A Hansen, eh? Any relation to that Bob Hansen?”
“My fat
her.”
“So that would make that old lady Margaret Petikoff your gram?”
“She is, but she wouldn’t appreciate being called an old lady.”
He chuckled and drank a sip of tea.
“Sergie here is the luckiest old guy I ever knew,” Sanders said. “His whole family was lucky.”
“Off and on, at least,” the old man said modestly.
“’Course, Sergie,” Sanders continued, “he’s the last of them, last of his family, that is. I’ve been telling him about you.” He looked at Anna.
“Margaret Petikoff’s family is from Nikolski,” Sergie said. “Long time ago, of course. I think her grandmother and my grandmother were cousins or some such thing. You know, some sort of distant relatives.”
He drank a bit more coffee.
I was getting anxious to leave. I touched Anna’s arm and we stepped toward the door. She stopped when Old Man Rostokovich raised his voice a little, “You ever see one of these?”
He had placed a small wooden box on the table. The rectangular container had been carved from yellow cedar, but years of handling had polished it to a dark rich brown. The cover slid between two grooved sides.
“It’s an old-time snuff box,” she said.
“I’m done with it,” Sergie said. “It should be kept by a real Unanga.” And he slid it across the table to her.
She seemed reluctant to touch it.
“For me?”
The old man nodded and laughed. “But I don’t want to hear that you started chewing tobacco!”
“Thanks,” she said. “Really. Thanks a million!” She picked it up.
Her eyes met mine. I guessed what was inside before she slid the cover open and saw, nestled in soft grass, a small ivory fox with circles on its back. It seemed to be smiling.
Sergie looked at Anna with a serious expression. “I’m afraid a name goes with it that you might not like.”
A while later we were sitting at the table in her grandmother’s kitchen. Anna had asked me to stay for dinner, but I had insisted I needed to get home.
“If you have the fox,” I started. I wasn’t sure how to ask this. “Are you, that is, I mean, can I call you—”