“I do want to live with you,” Nik said, “as man and wife.”
“What do you think, Grisha?” she asked. “Should a man and woman have to marry to share their lives?”
He shielded his chest with his hands. “You’re talking to someone whose wife left him for another man, and whose new companion got him thirty years hard labor for something she did. I think maybe you’re talking to the wrong Ivan.”
“I accept your reservations,” she said. “Now answer the question.”
Nik hid behind a flat stare and tightly crossed arms over his chest.
“Okay. After pointing out you two haven’t known each other very long, I guess the first question would be, how long do these two plan to share their lives?”
“Exactly!” Nik said with a fierce grin.
“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Cora said at the same time.
Grisha pursed his lips and nodded sagely.
“I think I see where the discussion has foundered.”
“He says—” “She says—” they blurted together.
Grisha held up his hand.
“Nik, you go first.”
“She says marriage is of no importance. If I love her I’ll be happy to just live with her, no threads, no ties.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No! I want to marry her. I want to formalize what we feel for each other, I want to have a wife and someday have children. If we just lived together we’d be no better than the Cossacks and their whores.”
Cora’s cheek turned red, and her smile went completely flat.
Grisha nodded to her. “Cora?”
“If a man and a woman love one another, why do they have to formalize it? We’re both soldiers in a rapidly changing world, in a revolution. Who has time for sewing, cooking, babies, and warm goat’s milk at night when there’s a war to be fought?”
Her eyes shone and Grisha realized she was about to cry.
“This is our lives! Right now.” A tear coursed down her cheek and dripped off her chin. “All of us could be dead tomorrow, or the day after, or… .” She turned to Nik. “There are no oaths or ceremonies that will stop death. I know. We must seize the time we have and live it to the fullest.”
“Will you marry me?” Nik asked.
“Not until the Dená Republic is a fact. Then I will marry you. I’ll marry you twice.”
Grisha felt caught in their emotional energy. Once, as a young man, he crewed on a boat that lost power and ended up on the rocks. At this moment he felt very much the same way he had before the boat actually ground into the teeth of that North Pacific island—completely alive and scared, and knowing things were going to change drastically.
“Okay,” Nik said. “When the Dená Republic becomes fact, we will be married.”
“You witnessed this, Grisha,” she said, glancing at him then back to Nik. “So when the time comes he can’t get out of it.”
“I’m done being a deserter,” Nik said with a smile for her.
Suppressing his envy as best he could, Grisha pushed away and ambled toward the kitchen. Neither of them noticed.
“Snagging usually doesn’t start until the ice goes out on the Yukon,” Wing said, coming up beside him.
“Snagging? What’s that?”
She laughed. “Mating season. You know, like the birds, go out and snag yourself a mate.”
“I always thought snagging was an unfair way of catching a fish.” Grisha liked looking at Wing and tonight she seemed more radiant than the last time he saw her.
“And your point is what?” They both started laughing at the same time.
“I haven’t had a chance to ask since you got back. How was your trip?”
“Good,” she said. Her eyes lost some of their sparkle. “There’s just so much to do and so little time.”
“So spread the work around, stop trying to do it all yourself.”
“Don’t worry, Grisha, there’s plenty for you, too. We realize how fortunate we were when you decided to join us.”
“Not as fortunate as I was when you saved my life. I’ll do anything I can to further the movement. I’m collecting old debts, too.”
“We know. Well, I have to meet with Chandalar before I can go to bed, so I’ll say good night.” She turned and went through the door.
“Good night,” he mumbled, feeling bereft. He assessed his feelings and didn’t like what he found. “Not good,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“You’ll just get hurt again.”
He pulled back into his mind where he sheltered his vulnerability. There was no time to waste being giddy and weak-kneed, he decided. Perhaps after the revolution.
Perhaps never again.
18
Tetlin Redoubt
Wolverine White, his skinning knife jutting from his gory throat, slapped Bear Crepov on the shoulder and demanded, “Where is their blood? You vowed to avenge me!” He slapped Bear a second time. “Where?” his voice gurgled with blood.
Again his shoulder jerked, more from the psychic blow than the physical one. The fourth blow made him dimly aware that it wasn’t Wolverine speaking from the grave.
“Bear! There is someone for you,” Katti said, slapping his beefy shoulder again.
“’Nuf, you can stop punching around on me now,” he mumbled. “Who wants to see me?” He opened his eyes slowly, knew the vodka hangover needed only movement to explode behind his eyes and take his scalp off.
“A Cossack,” she said, and he finally heard the fear.
“A Cossack wants to see me?” He sat up in the stained bed and dumbly endured the painful hammering in his head. “What for?”
“I don’t know. But he knows you’re here.” Katti’s chubby face usually maintained a shade of pink. Now the pink mixed with apprehensive gray and her wide-eyed gaze remained nailed to his face.
“Don’t worry about it, Kat. He’s just a damned messenger boy.”
“For you, maybe. But for me he can be big trouble when you’re not around.”
Bear yawned and scratched his hairy belly before pulling on the soiled cotton trousers constituting his uniform. He carefully rose and shuffled to the cabin door and opened it. The Cossack stood outside in the minus-thirtydegree weather.
“What do you want?” The cold air invaded the mat of hair on his chest and hardened his nipples. His bare toes tried to curl away from the cold but he wouldn’t allow them to move.
“The colonel wants to see you, now.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I get dressed.” Bear shut the door in the man’s face.
Now what do they want?
He pulled on his clothes while Katti hovered, looking anxious in her ragged dressing gown. He’d taken her out of an arriving coffle two years before. She would allow him to do anything he wished to her to keep from facing the Cossacks again.
She’d gotten fat, he decided. She really looked like a peasant now. Her eyes begged for answers, but he ignored her. Keep ’em off balance, that was the way. He pulled on his heavy socks and boots.
The cold bright daylight became knives that attacked his squinted eyes. He wanted a drink of vodka to numb the pain, but he’d emptied his last bottle the night before. Maybe the colonel would have some.
Despite his heavy coat, chill permeated him by the time the heavy barracks door shut behind him. He pushed into the colonel’s office, leaving the door open, and dropped his bulk onto the wooden bench. The colonel looked up from the papers on his desk.
“What’s the big hurry? I was in bed with my woman.”
The colonel kept his face neutral and nodded toward the door. “The captain here wished to see you as soon as possible.”
The door slowly swung shut to reveal a woman of medium size, a bit too much on the thin side to suit him, but not hard to look at. Her dark blond hair molded tightly around a face composed of angles and planes.
Her mouth was too wide for her face, he thought, and the dark eyes held more intelli
gence than he cared to deal with in a woman. He sat up straight.
“Well,” he said, “now she’s seen me.”
“This man,” she said holding out the photograph he’d seen in this office before. “You have seen him?”
“Da. I almost killed him in the bush.”
“How fortunate for all of us that you did not,” she said dryly. “Can you take me to the place where you last saw him?”
“Yes. Or I could show you on a map.”
She pointed to a large wall map. “Do so.”
He moved over and traced their trail with a dirty fingernail.
“This is where the construction site was attacked and destroyed. They went this way, along the Tanana River, there’s a very old trail. They camped here the first night and our party stopped here.”
“Didn’t you check the construction site first?” she asked.
“I sent in one volunteer, a Cossack, to look for fool traps.”
“And?”
“He found one. He exploded with the rest of the camp. Everything burned.”
Something moved in her eyes and she nearly smiled.
“So you sent in a fool to start with.”
Bear stifled a retort about all Cossacks being fools.
“Da, Captain. I did just that.” He turned back to the map. “We caught an Indian the next morning, but couldn’t get him to talk before he died.”
“There are techniques,” she began.
“He threw himself on my knife when I began skinning him.”
“Oh. Please continue.”
“That’s when they discovered we were on their trail and they split up their party. We did the same. I followed the group with your friend in it.”
“He’s not my friend,” she said in a flat voice.
“They set up an ambush here at the trail junction, right where I thought they would. We flanked them and moved in. Again I had a Cossack volunteer who agreed to be first into the open.”
Bear licked his lips and continued. “When nobody shot at him, he thought we’d been wrong. He walked up through the meadow toward the junction.
“But I had spotted the convict in the photograph. He also spotted me, so I pretended not to see him. When I wished to move, I stared at a tree behind him. As soon as he looked away in curiosity, I ran behind him and fired.”
“How is it that you missed?”
“When he looked back and I wasn’t there, he had the presence of mind to drop to the ground. My shot went over him. I fired a second time but he had already rolled clear, down the slope away from me.”
“Hmm, perhaps his old training has resurfaced after all.”
“He was scared pissless and reacting to the moment. Then much shooting happened and the Cossack dropped. I slipped into an old wolf den and waited with my knife and rifle for them to discover me.”
“You were outnumbered, weren’t you?”
“I would not have died alone.”
“They obviously didn’t discover you.”
“No. After they left I found my dead friend and then I returned here.”
“How many were in their party?”
“Four.”
“How many were in your party?”
“Four.”
“How many of your party came back?”
“Only me. What are you trying to say?”
“I thought you promyshlenniks were the best woodsmen in Alaska.”
“We are,” he said with a growl.
“After the Indians, it would seem.”
Bear glared at her but didn’t respond. Her words hit too close to thoughts he himself had endured.
“You can show me this place?” she said.
“Of course. But there is no reason.”
“Why not?”
“I heard them say they had far to go. They are probably in winter camp on the Yukon or lower Tanana.”
“Actually,” she said, “we know exactly where they are.”
“Where?”
“Right here,” her shellacked fingernail tapped the map once, “on the Toklat River at a village of the same name.”
“If you knew this before you came, why do you ask me where I last saw the man?”
“I wanted to hear your story, firsthand accounts are always revealing. Besides, we need qualified people in on this, and between your experience in the bush and your raging animosity toward our quarry, you fit right in. You begin collecting field pay as of now.”
“What do you plan to do about the traitor’s camp?”
“Actually, it depends on the traitors.” Her smile lacked warmth.
19
Toklat
“Often we send out two-man reconnaissance parties,” Chan explained. “So for your final field test, you two are to go across the Toklat and follow the big game trail to the East Fork of the Toklat River. Go north up the East Fork until you come to a wide valley.
“Turn west there and follow the trail through the mountains until you hit the Toklat again. Then follow it home. This is about thirty-five to forty kilometers and will be an excellent exercise for you.”
“How long do we have?” Nik asked.
“If we don’t see you after two weeks have passed, we’ll send out search parties.”
“Looks simple enough to me,” Grisha said.
“It always does, on a map,” Haimish said.
“When do we leave?” Grisha asked.
“Within the hour.”
“Can we use skis rather than snowshoes?” Nik asked.
“Whatever you wish,” Chan said.
Cora sat off to one side of the small group, her eyes fastened on Nik.
“Good. If we had to use snowshoes, it would take Grisha a month to make the trip.”
A few people chuckled. Grisha went into the main hall to get food for the journey. The tension generated by the meeting didn’t dissipate. He wondered at it.
Wing stepped out of the kitchen and gave him a bulky bag made from soft moose hide. He stared at her face. Over the past few weeks they had fallen into conversation many times, on many subjects.
He found her intelligence impressive, but her courage awed him. At this point there existed a palpable tension between them that both chafed and titillated him. He felt good whenever he saw her.
“There’s jerked moose, squaw candy, and trail mix.” Her eyes moved over his face. “Be careful, okay? I’ll miss you.” She leaned forward and quickly kissed him on the mouth.
Before he could say anything, she hurried back into the kitchen.
It took most of an hour to get their gear arranged. Finally, burdened with backpacks and bows, they skied off across the frozen Kantishna into the November afternoon. Grisha hoped the tension would vanish once they cleared the village. It didn’t.
After an hour passed, he pulled off the game trail they followed and waited for Nik to stop beside him.
“Are you worried because they made us take bows rather than rifles?” Grisha asked.
“No. I’m not worried at all.” Nik’s eyes constantly swept the land around them, his right cheek had developed a tic, and he chewed at his bottom lip.
“Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s all right with me.”
“Good,” Nik said, pushing off down the trail. Grisha stepped into the ski tracks and followed.
A man could come to love this sort of life. He thought back to his previous apprehension of the forest, of thinking himself unable to survive in it, and smiled.
It had all turned out like some fantastic hunting trip. His health had improved beyond previous experience. Not an ounce of fat could be found on his body, despite obvious weight gain.
He liked his new beard, but the things he missed most were his razor and beer. These people were worse than priests about alcohol. Wing told him once that vodka was liquid chains in a bottle.
“The promyshlenniks would get our men drunk before trading and then steal their furs and gold with more bottles.” Her voice rang with int
ensity in his mind.
“Wait a minute,” he said aloud to himself, faltering in his long, sliding stride. “She said ‘gold’! Why the hell didn’t I ask her more about that?”
He picked up his stride, remembering back to the afternoon. After snowshoeing all day he had been more interested in the immediate gratification of dinner than the acquisition of Athabascan Indian history. Gold?
Until this moment he hadn’t given the Dená Republic decent odds of becoming reality. But if they had gold reserves they could eventually obtain anything else in the world. In Japan and the California Republic there existed things that to him were nearly unimaginable.
Radio that told stories and played music, not just weather reports and military communications. More than that, they could get electricity up here. He wondered if electrical power could be had outside the redoubts, or if it was only for Russians.
If you had gold, you could buy helicopters. He wondered if Haimish knew the Dená had gold. Probably; despite his philosophy there had to be a compelling reason for the small man’s presence.
Ahead of him, Nik came to the base of a ridge and began to fishbone up the steep side. Why was Nik so nervous? Did he fear being away from towns or villages? He had said he was raised in the city of St. Nicholas on Cook’s Inlet.
The farther they moved away from Toklat, the more agitated Nik became. Light began to ebb in the subarctic afternoon. They needed to make camp soon. Maybe tomorrow they’d try to make camp in the dark.
Grisha skied to the bottom of the ridge trail and shouted, “Nik! Hey, Nik!”
Working doggedly sixty meters higher, Nik hesitated and then stopped, looked back.
“You ruined my momentum. What do you want?”
“Are you in that big a hurry to get back to Cora?” Grisha manufactured a grin. “We can go a little slower. Besides, it’s gonna be dark soon, we need to make camp.”
“Already?” He glared at the sky as if to intimidate it. “Okay. We’ll camp on the other side of the ridge.”
“Agreed.” Grisha started awkwardly up the hill. After flailing about on the skis for a few steps he stopped and took them off. The wind-packed snow easily supported his booted feet.
They were excellent boots. The Russian Army captain from whose corpse he had removed them had possessed excellent taste. The Russian Army did not issue hand-made boots to anyone below the rank of colonel.
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