Nik sobered and gazed out over the flood plain. “Nice view from up here.”
The frozen Toklat River wound between snowy, tree-covered banks. Grisha constantly compared the land and vegetation with Southeast Alaska. The variety of trees and shrubs were as varied as those of his childhood home, and almost completely different.
Tamarack, white and black spruce, birch, and a wider variety of willows had all been new to him. The best part was the lack of devil’s club, the needle-spined broadleaf plants that grew in thickets in the Southeast. Grabbing the stalk of the plant would leave you with a handful of tearinducing spines nearly impossible to extract.
Surrounded by mountains, the small valley before them appeared piebald where willow thickets and stands of birch stood naked waiting for new spring leaves. The tamarack and spruce appeared furry and deceptively warm from this distance. Already the temperature hovered at minus twenty degrees Celsius and only the exercise kept their faces from showing the cold.
“What’s that?” Nik asked, breaking Grisha’s reverie.
“Where?”
“On the river.”
A row of dark spots well out on the ice snaked into view from behind the next ridge.
“Dog team,” Grisha said, squinting mariner’s eyes.
“Yeah, it is. I wonder.”
“Don’t you have your field glasses with you?”
Nik pulled off his backpack and unfastened the top cover, rooted frantically through the contents before triumphantly producing binoculars. He dropped the pack and focused on the distant team. The sled cleared the ridge, becoming visible on the seemingly glowing ice.
“The wide-shouldered Indian at the Cossack camp, what was his name?” Nik asked.
“The brother of Slayer-of-Men, you mean?”
“Da.”
“Mugly? No. Malagni!”
“Da, Malagni. He’s driving the sled. Looks like he has a passenger, full load anyway.”
Grisha watched the sled move steadily down the river ice. Another dark object popped from behind the bluff.
“What’s that? Sure isn’t a dog team.”
“Where?” Nik pulled the glasses away from his face.
“There, about two hundred meters behind Malagni.”
The glasses went up to his face again. Grisha watched Nik chew his lower lip. The tall man suddenly grinned.
“Wing! It’s Wing on skis!” He lowered the binoculars and grinned like an idiot. “She’s back.”
“Nikolai, my friend, don’t get your hopes up. She might not stay, and if she does, she might not help you with Cora.”
A shadow moved across Nik’s face.
“You’re right, damn it. I can’t take anything for granted. I must stalk Cora like the woods creature she is.” He bent over and put the glasses back in his pack, closed it, and lifted the straps over his arms.
“But I’m sure Wing will help me.”
Even though Grisha managed a ten-meter lead on Nik, the man passed him within minutes. By the time Grisha reached the bottom of the ridge only shoeprints remained to keep him company.
“God,” he muttered to himself, “I hope she can match them up.”
He maintained his pace and covered the last mile in under an hour. The unloaded sled lay on its side. The dogs, staked out and fed, slept curled on pallets of dried sedge with noses tucked under tails.
Grisha unstrapped his snowshoes and stepped away. He felt as if he could fly without the awkward bulk of them anchoring him. Leaning them against the wall, he pushed into the lodge.
“Here’s Grisha, now,” Chan said. Beside him, Nik, Malagni, and Wing faced the door. About half the village stood around the first two tables. All went silent.
A man Grisha didn’t recognize turned to peer at him. The man’s small stature, coarse, dark hair running down to the backs of his hands, and a clean-shaven, weather-beaten face that barely contained bright blue eyes gave him a fairy-tale aspect.
Grisha immediately thought of a gnome.
“So yer the Cossack killer, huh?”
The clipped aggressiveness sounded like an alien variant of Tlingit. Grisha knew it to be a dialect from the eastern part of Canada or the United States. He once served with a sergeant who spoke with the same choppy-flat speech.
The room seemed to hang there, waiting for his response. Abruptly Grisha felt nettled for being singled out.
Probably more training for the ex-officer.
“I have killed one Cossack. I was terrified at the time,” Grisha said.
“Then yer nae fool. Good.” He pronounced it “gud.”
“Is there food?” Grisha asked the group, ignoring the little man.
“Haimish McCloud,” the man said, holding a hand out to him. “Late of the great state of Vermont, U.S.A., proud ta be a Green Mountain boy.”
“You fled the United States to live in Russian Amerika?” Grisha asked. The fellow didn’t look like a boy to him, not with those raven’s tracks around his eyes.
“I’ve come ta help create the Dená Republic, the Russians jist don’t know they’re beaten yet.”
Everybody in the room laughed and the tension flowed out of Grisha. He shook the man’s hand.
“I like the way you think,” he said, smiling.
A tight, almost absent grin put even more creases in the man’s face.
“That’s good. I’m agonna be trainin’ ya.”
“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you,” Malagni said with a sniff.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” Grisha said, flattening his smile.
Wing led Nik over.
“You both have done well,” she said, bending the scar on her cheek.
“Tell me, Grisha, why is this one so distant?” She nodded at Nik.
“Do you want me to tell you right here?”
She peered into his eyes, frowned the scar into an arc again.
“No, I guess not.” Her eyes moved all over his face like a blind man’s fingers before she pulled her gaze away. “C’mon, Professor, take me for a walk.” She pulled Nik toward the door.
Grisha exchanged glances with his friend as they left. Nik seemed more upset than ever. Grisha shrugged mental shoulders.
I’m glad I’m not in love.
“Here’s food,” Karin said, handing him stir-fried moose and late vegetables.
“Thank you.” He watched her walk across the room. At eighteen she had attained complete physical maturity. The medical trainee, one of three being taught by Cora, easily claimed the title of prettiest woman in the village.
“I think if I were twenty years younger,” Grisha muttered to himself as he watched her, “… you could make me do foolish things.” He sat down and began to eat.
Chan sat down beside him. Haimish McCloud stood nearby, alone in the full room.
“Wing is correct. You both have done very well, all the trainees have,” Chan said. “Now your training takes on a different aspect. Now you discover what it is you are really fighting for.”
“I thought it was Denali,” Grisha said around a mouthful of food, “and to keep all that one earned. That’s what Wing told us.”
“Denali is our ikon, if you will. But the heart of our cause is much more elusive.”
“Chan, I’m just an old soldier and a new sailor. I’m here because I’m pissed off at the way things are in this country and I want to help change them. All that philosophy stuff is wasted on me.”
“It’s not philosophy, call it, ah, higher deductive reasoning.”
“I know even less about that than philosophy.”
“That’s because you’re not trained yet,” he said, beaming.
16
Tetlin Redoubt
Bear Crepov stared at the photograph and wondered what the words at the bottom meant.
“Yeah, he was one of ’em. In fact I damn near killed him.”
“Be thankful you did not,” the Cossack colonel said. “You’d probably have lost your balls.”
“This one is different. They want him alive.” The colonel snatched the photograph out of Bear’s hand.
“We didn’t wait to notify St. Nicholas about the ambush before sending you out. However, they already knew about it and were adamant that we not
’unleash’ any hunters.” He absently rubbed a knuckle under his heavy mustache.
“There for a minute, I thought they were going to have my balls.”
Bear didn’t like the total bewilderment he felt. Somebody was busy pissing on his boots, but he couldn’t figure out exactly who or how. Or what to do to stop them.
“Those bastards killed my best friend as well as another promyshlennik and a fuckin’ Cossack sergeant on top of that!”
“I’m sorry about your friend. Friends are much harder to come by than promyshlenniks‚ or Cossack sergeants. But for now you must not attempt revenge.”
“I swore on Wolverine’s body!” Anger surged through him. He’d have to visit Katti tonight. “How long do I have to wait?”
“I don’t know. They’re sending a Cossack captain out from St. Nicholas to talk to you.”
“I don’t care if he is a captain. If they don’t let me hunt those animals down, I’ll tear off his head and piss in the hole!”
“Her head,” the colonel said dryly.
“What?”
“The captain is a woman.”
“Even better.” Bear licked his lips. “I’ll tear off her head and—”
“Get out of my office,” the colonel said icily, “now.”
“—fuck the hole!” he bellowed. He stomped from the office. As he went through the door, the noise of the combination army post and prison washed over him.
The wind blew from the latrine today, unusual for this time of year. He also smelled meat cooking and went in search of it.
17
Toklat, November 1987
“Don’t rub all the bluing off, just pick up the piece and snap it in with authority,” Haimish said.
Grisha stifled a curse behind his blindfold and tried to remember where the piece fit in the automatic rifle; it had been a long time since he had done this.
“It ’as its place, just like a person in any society. The weapon needs all of its parts to work. If just one piece is missing, the weapon doesn’t function.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me that societies won’t function if one person is missing?” Grisha felt waspish. The dimly familiar pieces under his fingers eluded him. The scent of gun oil brought back memories, and beckoned with a promise of strength and a precarious future.
“Human societies aren’t nearly as perfect as the weapon in your hands. There are pieces beyond count that are interchangeable in our societies, and each piece slightly alters the direction, affects the warp and the weave of human enterprise.”
“Y’know, Haimish,” Nik said from across the small room, “you’re the first person I’ve seen who could wear a man out from three directions at once. Do you ever stop talking long enough to give a body time to think?”
“Don’t be cocky with me, Nikolai. You may be ahead of Grigoriy in field-stripping weapons, but yer jist as lackin’ in political science.”
“It all boils down to power,” Nik said. “Those that don’t have it, want it. Those that have it, want to keep it. What’s not understood?”
“How to share it, that’s what’s elusive,” Haimish said with authority.
“In Russia the Czar rules with the advice of the Duma—which means he rules as he wishes. But he really isn’t the power, he’s only the figurehead.”
Grisha pulled off the blindfold in exasperation and threw it on the table. He quickly reassembled the weapon and pulled the trigger. The hollow clack. filled the small room.
“Who rules in Russia if not the Czar or the Duma?”
“The bureaucracy, the system itself, is the power in Russia. The Russian Amerika Company, the army, the navy, the foreign service, cultural affairs, even the Cossacks, are all part of this huge mechanism continually fighting itself for dominance and it grinds up people like us to feed itself. Other countries have the same sort of mechanisms but wi’ different names.”
“What would be different about this ‘Dená Republic’ you keep nattering about?” Nik asked.
“Nattering, is it? The Dená Republic would borrow from every other republic in North America. But it would borrow only the best parts from each. Secret ballots, representational governments, an elected congress, absolute limits to elected terms, a separate, powerful judicial system, I could go on and on.”
“We know!” Grisha and Nik said together.
“But who decides which parts to borrow, to keep?” Grisha asked.
“We all do,” Haimish said with a wide grin, “by consensus.”
“Everybody just works together with no strife,” Nik asked.
“It’s not quite that simple. There will be political parties, and factions within those also.”
“Then why do we need to learn about weapons and bombs?”
“Because a lot of people don’t agree with Haimish,” Nik said dryly.
“Now you’re catching on.”
“But, Haimish,” Grisha said. “Have you seen Tetlin Redoubt? Or St. Nicholas? Or even Akku Redoubt? How can a handful of escaped convicts, deserters, and Indians beat that?”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that,” Nik said.
“To answer your first question, yes. I haven’t personally seen the fortresses in Russian Amerika, but I have seen photographs of them. Very detailed photographs, I might add.”
“So—”
“Wait, let me finish. We don’t necessarily attack them frontally, nor do we attack them all. We pick a number of weak targets, go in, destroy them, and be gone before they know we’re there.”
“Just—”
“I’m still not finished. We pick targets that have high international visibility. Odious targets, like slave camps, or prisons. We make sure there are foreign journalists in every location.”
“They don’t let foreign journalists into the country.” Grisha felt smug.
Nik shook his head. “You haven’t witnessed the ‘New Freedom’ proclaimed by international treaty. In Alexandr Archipelago alone there are nearly a dozen foreign journalists. The Russian Amerika Company wishes to make riches off our southern neighbors in the form of tourism.”
Haimish waved his arms around when agitated or excited. Now he appeared to be trying to fly. His face reflected an inner fire.
“They call this the ‘last frontier,’ wilderness unspoiled by man. That appeals to those in the North American Treaty Organization. They are crowded down there compared to the vastness of Alaska.”
“We’re going to attack prisons for tourists?” Grisha felt baffled.
“We are going to attack prisons because they are used to subjugate the people of the Dená Republic. If visitors are close and see the event, it will be widely talked about. If some of the prisoners escape, we have new recruits. Either way, the press will report it to their readers, and their governments. We will build international consensus to create a new republic.”
“So you believe the Czar will give up the Dená Republic just so tourists will spend rubles in what’s left of Russian Amerika?” Nik asked. His tone reeked with hostility.
“Nik, what’s wrong?” Grisha asked. “It really doesn’t sound all that far-fetched if you think about it.”
“They’ll send the Cossacks and promyshlenniks into your villages to live. They’ll rape your wives and daughters and make slaves of your brothers and sons. When they finally catch you they’ll use torture for amusement before they release you to death. This is a madman’s dream.” He stalked out and slammed the door behind him.
Grisha gave Haimish a beseeching look. “What brought that on?”
“I don’t know. But he’s right. They will do that, you know, if they can. We h
ave to pick our targets carefully and hit them all at the same time. The Russians can’t be everywhere at once with a large army.”
“Fragment them!” Grisha said. “Take bites and chew them up.”
“Yes,” said Haimish. “Now it’s time to master the bow.”
“Bows and arrows?”
“Exactly. They are deadly and quiet.” Out of a rubberized bag Haimish pulled a common recurve bow. “This is our most efficient weapon. It’s light, accurate at long distance in the hands of an expert, and absolutely silent.”
“We never used these in the Troika Guard,” Grisha said, running his hands over the smooth wood. “But we used pretty much everything else.”
Haimish stared at him. “You were in the Troika Guard?”
“Ten years and a few months. Didn’t Nathan tell you?”
“Nathan never tells me anything, him and his ‘shaman of mystery’ crap.”
“Okay, let’s go play with this and I’ll tell you about my military career.”
Haimish glanced at his wrist watch. “Too close to lunch. Let’s go eat first.”
The main hall swarmed with people. The rich aroma of salmon stew and baked bread filled the air. Nik and Cora sat at a small table in one corner, talking intently.
Wing’s return seemed to trigger a realization in Cora. She and Nik now spent a great deal of time together, their mutual attraction obvious to all. Yet Nik appeared to be more tense than ever.
At first Grisha escaped their notice, and he wondered if he should impose on their conversation. Then Cora glanced up and saw him. She energetically waved him to their table.
Nik glanced up at him and then resumed talking. Grisha could tell by the way Nik hunched over that his friend was in a serious mood. Feeling reluctant, Grisha went to the table.
“… the thing is either important or it’s not,” Nik said to Cora.
“That’s all I have to say.”
Cora looked up. “Would you sit with us for a minute, Grisha?”
He sat down and smiled at her. “How are you?”
“I feel really good,” she said. “I got good friends, and I’m attracted to a good man, despite the fact that he doesn’t want to live with me.”
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