The Boat of a Million Years

by Poul Anderson

  Her destination wasn’t far. That would have been madness. She would not have been sent even this deep into the German-held sector, had she not repeatedly shown she could get about unseen as well as any commando—and, she knew, those expert killers were less expendable than she. If the recommended site proved unduly dangerous and she couldn’t quickly find a better,,she was to give up and make her way back to the Lazur.

  From behind one of the trees that still lined a certain boulevard, she gazed across a bomb crater and two crumpled automobiles. The building she wanted did appear safe. It belonged to a row of tenement houses, slab-sided and barrack-like. Though in sorry shape, it rose above what was left of its neighbors, a full six floors. The windows were blind holes.

  Katya pointed. “Yonder,” she told the young man. “When I signal, get over there and inside fast.” She took her binoculars from the case hung about her neck and searched for signs of enemy. Only broken panes, smudges, pockmarks came into view. Snow whirled dry on a gust that whistled. She chopped her hand downward and led the sprint. In the empty doorway she whirled about and crouched ready to fire at anything suspicious. The snow flurry had stopped. A scrap of paper tumbled along before the wind.

  Flights of concrete stairs went steeply upward. Their wells were full of gloom. On the lower landings, doors blown off hinges lay in a chaos of things and dust. Above, they remained shut. On the top floor, she tried a knob. If necessary, she would shoot out the lock, but that door creaked faintly as it yielded.

  Here the dimness was less. Smashed windows admitted light as well as cold. The apartment had been fairly good, two rooms plus a kitchen alcove. To be sure, the bathroom was a flight down, shared by the tenants of three floors. Concussion had cracked plaster off lath and spread chunks and powder across furniture and threadbare carpet. Rain blowing in had made a slurry, now hardened, under the sills. Mildew speckled what was left on the walls. The stains also marked drapes, bedclothes, a sofa. Blast had acted as capriciously as usual. A Stakhanovite poster clung garish and two framed photographs were likewise unfalien: a young couple at their wedding, a white-bearded Uncle Vanya who might be the grandfather of bride or groom. Three or four others had crashed. Some strewn books and magazines moldered. A small radio lay among them. A clock had gone silent on its table. Flowers in pots were brown stalks.

  Apart from utensils and the like, Katya didn’t notice more personal possessions. Maybe they had been meager enough for the family to take along at evacuation. She had no wish to investigate, when she might turn up a little girl’s doll or a little boy’s bear. She could merely hope the owners had escaped, all of them.

  She went through the rooms. People had slept hi both. The first faced approximately north, the second east. With the door open between them, she could scan a full half circle, springing from window to window. That vision covered a dozen streets in both directions, because most of the vicinity was a crumbled wasteland. Yet it had never occurred to the enemy either to occupy or to dynamite such a watchpost. Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war. This time Soviet intelligence had spied a Nazi blindness.

  Returning to the room of entry, she found the infantryman hunched on the sofa. He had taken off his helmet and outer coat. The sweat in his shirt was rank. (Well, Katya thought, I’m scarcely a rose garden myself. When did I last have a proper bath? Ages ago, that night in the forest when I went to earth in a peasant’s hut—) His hair was curly. A hint of color had risen in his face.

  “Beware taking a chill, comrade,” she warned. “We’ll be here a while.” She set her rifle down and unshipped her canteen. “You must need water worse yet than I do, so you first, but don’t take much. Swish it around in your month sfore you swallow. It has to last us.”

  While he did, she squatted, took his injured hand in both hers, shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Nasty,” she said. “Those bones are a mess. At least no major blood vessel was cut. I can do something for it. Hold still. This will hurt.”

  He caught his breath repeatedly when she cleaned and wrapped the wounds. Thereafter she gave him a piece of chocolate. “We’ll share my rations too,” she promised. “They’re scant, but hunger is a joy set beside our real problems, no?”

  The bite revived him somewhat. He managed a shaky smile. “What is your name in Heaven, you angel?” he quavered.

  She checked both the windows. Nothing, except the distant cannon fire. “Me an angel?” she replied meanwhile with a grin. “What kind of Communist are you?”

  “I’m not a Party member,” he said humbly. “I should have joined, my rather wanted me to, but— Well, after the war.”

  She put a chair in front of him and settled down. There was no sense in constantly staring ouU She’d hear any important movement, as quiet as things were. A glance every few minutes would serve. “What are you, then?” she asked.

  “Pyotr Sergeyevitch Kulikov, private, Sixty-Second Army.”

  A tingle passed through her spine. She whistled softly. “Kulikov! What a perfectly splendid omen.”

  “Eh? Oh ... oh, yes. Kutikovo. Where Dmitri Donskoi smote the Mongols.” He sighed. “But that was ... six hundred years ago, almost.”

  “True.” I remember how we rejoiced when the news reached our village. “And we aren’t supposed to believe in omens any longer, are we?” She leaned forward, interested. “So you know the exact date of that battle, do you?” Even now, exhausted, in pain, penned up to wait for possible death. “You sound educated.”

  “My family in Moscow is. I hope someday to become a professor of classics.” He tried to straighten. His voice took on a ghost of resonance. “But who and what are you, my rescuer?”

  “Ekaterina Borisovna Tazurina.” The latest of my names, my serf-created identities.

  “A woman soldier—”

  “We exist, you know.” She mastered her annoyance. “I was a partisan before the fighting swept me here. Then they put me in uniform—not that mat’s likely to make any difference if the Germans catch me—and when I’d passed Lieutenant Zaitsev’s course, they raised me to sergeant because a sharpshooter needs some freedom of action.”

  Pyotr’s eyes widened. They had heard about Zaitsev from end to end of the Soviet Union. “This must be a special mission for you, not just sniping.”

  Katya nodded. “Word came from Pavlov’s House. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course. A building hereabouts, right in among the Germans, that Sergeant Pavlov and a few heroes have held since—the end of September, hasn’t it been?”

  She forgave him repeating the obvious. He was hurt, bewildered, and oh, how young. “They maintain communication with us,” she explained. “Certain things they’ve noticed give reason to believe the enemy plans a major thrust into our end of town. No, I wasn’t told what things, no need for me to hear, but I was sent to watch from this point and report whatever I see.”

  “And you happened to pass by when— Incredible luck for me.” Tears welled. “But my poor friends.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our squad went on patrol. My unit’s currently in a block of detached houses well south of Mamaev. We didn’t expect trouble, as quiet as it’s gotten.” Pyotr drew an uneven breath. “But all at once it was shooting and screaming and— My comrades dropped, right and left. I think I was the last one alive after ... a few minutes. And with this hand. What could I do but run?”

  “How many Germans? Where did they come from? How were they equipped?”

  “I c-couldn’t tell. Everything went too fast.” He sank his face into his left palm and shuddered. “Too terrible.”

  She gnawed her lip, angry. “If you’re with the Sixty-Second, you’ve had months of combat experience. The enemy drove you back from—Ostrov, was it? All the way across the plain to here. And still you couldn’t pay attention to what was going on around you.”

  He braced himself. “I can, can try to remember.”

  “That’s better. Take your time. Unless something dis
lodges us first, we’ll be sitting where we are till we’ve seen what headquarters ought to know about. Whatever that may be.”

  She checked the windows, came back, sat down again before him, took his good hand. Now that he was out of immediate danger, nature wanted him to sleep and sleep and sleep, but that couldn’t be- allowed. What he had suffered wasn’t overpoweringly severe, he was young and healthy, and when she spoke soothingly she saw how her femaleness helped rouse him.

  Fragment by fragment, a half-coherent story emerged. It appeared the Germans had been reconnoitering. Their force was small, but superior to the Russian squad. Knowing themselves to be in hostile territory, they had kept totally alert and seen an opportunity to ambush Pyotr’s group. Yes, clearly they wanted prisoners to take back. Katya knew a grim hope that he was in fact the single survivor.

  A scouting mission was a strong indication of a major attack hi the works. She wondered if she ought to consider that this information fulfilled her task, and return with it at once. Of course, when the squad failed to report, the officer who dispatched it would guess the truth; but that might not be for a considerable time. No, probably the story wasn’t worth as much as tile possibility of her gaining more important knowledge here.

  Send Pyotr? If he didn’t make it, the Red Army wouldn’t have lost much. Unless he blundered into captivity. Could he hold out a while under torture, or would his broken body betray him into betraying her? It wasn’t a chance she wanted to take. Nor was it fair to him.

  Helping him summon forth what his whole being cried out to forget—that wrought a curious intimacy. In the end, while they shared water and bread, he asked shyly, “Are you from hereabouts, Katya Borisovna?”

  “No. Far to the southwest,” she answered.

  “I thought so. You speak excellent Russian, but the accent— Though it isn’t quite Little Russian either, I think.”

  “You’ve a sharp ear.” Impulse seized her. Why not? It was no secret. “I’m a Kazak.”

  He started. Water spluttered from his lips. He wiped them, a clumsy, shaken gesture, and said, “A Cossack? But you, you’re well educated yourself, I can hear that, and—”

  She laughed. “Come, now. We’re not a race of horse barbarians.”

  “I know—”

  “Our schooling is actually better than average. Or used to be.” The ray of mirth vanished behind winter clouds. “Before the Revolution, most of us were fanners, fishers, mer-“chants, traders who went far into Siberia. We did have our special institutions, yes, our special ways.” Low: “Our kind of freedom.”

  That was why I drifted toward them after I ceased teaching embroidery at the cloister school in Kiev. That is why I have been with them and of them, almost from their beginnings, these four hundred years. A scrambling together of folk from Europe and Asia, down along the great rivers and over the unbounded steppes of the South, armed against Tatar and Turk, presently carrying war to those ancient foes. But mainly we were smallholders, we were a free people. Yes, women also, not as free as men but vastly more than they had come to be everywhere else. I was always a person in my own right, possessed of my own rights, and it was never very hard to start a new life in another tribe when I had been too long in one.

  “I know. But— Forgive me,” Pyotr blurted. “Here you are, a Soviet soldier, a patriot. I heard that, well, that Cossacks have gone over to the fascists wholesale.”

  “Some did,” Katya admitted starkly. “Not most. Believe me, not most. Not after what we saw.”

  At first we had no knowledge. The commissars told us to flee. We stayed fast. They pleaded with us. They told us what horror Hitler wreaks wherever his hordes go. “Your newest lie,” we jeered. Then the German tanks rolled over our horizon, and we learned that for once the commissars had spoken truth. It didn’t happen only to us, either. The war threw me together with people from the whole Soviet Ukraine, not Cossacks, ordinary Little Russians, little people driven to such despair that they fight side by side with the Communists.

  Even so, yes, true, thousands and thousands of men have joined the Germans as workers or soldiers. They see them as liberators.

  “After all,” she went on hastily, “it’s in our tradition to resist invaders and rise against tyrants.”

  The Lithuanians were far away, they mostly left us alone and were content with the name of overlords. But the Polish kings goaded us into revolt, over and over. Mazeppa welcomed the Great Russians in and was made a prince of the Ukraine, but soon he found himself in league with the Swedes, hoping they might set us free. We finally made our peace with the Tsars, their yoke was not unbearably heavy any more; but later the Bolsheviks took power.

  Pyotr frowned. “I’ve read about those Cossack rebellions.”

  Katya winced. Three centuries fell from her, and she stood again in her village when men—neighbors, friends, two sons of hers—galloped in after riding with Chmielnicki and shouted their boasts. Every Catholic or Uniate priest they or the serfs caught, they hanged in front of his altar alongside a pig and a Jew. “Barbaric times,” she said. “The Germans have no such excuse.”

  “And the traitors have less yet.”

  Traitors? Vasili the gentle blacksmith, Stefan the laugh-terful, Fyodor the fair who was a grandson of hers and didn’t know it— How many millions of dead there they seeking to avenge? The forgotten ones, the obliterated ones, but she remembered, she could still see starvation shrivel the flesh and dim the eyes, children of hers had died in her arms; Stalin’s creatures shot her man Mikhail, whom she loved as much as the ageless can love any mortal, shot him down like a dog when he tried to take for his family some of the grain they were shipping out in cram-full freight trains; he was lucky, though, he didn’t go on another kind of train, off to Siberia; she had met a few, a few, who came back; they had no teeth and spoke very little and worked like machines; and always you went in fear. Katya could not hold herself in. She must cry, “They had their reasons!”

  Pyotr gaped at her. “What?” He rumbled through his mind. “Well, yes, kulaks.”

  “Free farmers, whose land that they had from then- fathers was torn from them, and they herded onto kolkhozes like slaves.” Promptly: “That was how they felt, you understand.”

  “I don’t mean the honest peasants,” he said. “I mean the kulaks, the rich landowners.”

  “I never met any, and I traveled rather widely. Some were prosperous, yes, because they farmed wisely and worked hard.”

  “Well, I—I don’t want to offend you, Katya, you of all people, but you can’t have traveled as much as you think. It was before your time, anyway.” Pyotr shook his head. “No doubt many of them meant well. But the old capitalist regime had blinded them. They resisted, they defied the law.”

  “Until they were starved to death.”

  “Ah, yes, the famine. A tragic ... accident?” He ventured a smile. “We’re not supposed to call it an act of God.”

  “I said—No matter.” I said they were starved to death. The harvests never failed. The state simply took everything from us. That brought us at last to submission. “I only wanted to say that many Ukrainians feel they have a grievance.” They never quite gave up hope. In their hearts., they resist yet.

  Indignation flashed. “They are stupid!”

  Katya sighed. “They certainly made a bad mistake, those who went over to the Nazis.”

  God help me, I might have myself. If Hitler had been willing, no, if he had been able to treat us as human beings, he would have had us all. This day he would hold Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk; Stalin would cower among his gulags in the farthest comer of Siberia, or be a refugee with the Americans. But no, the fascists burned, raped, slew, tortured, they dashed out the brains of babies and laughed while they machine-gunned children, women, the old, the unarmed, they bayoneted for sport, they racked prisoners apart or doused them with gasoline and set them alight, oh, it sickens me to think of them in holy Kiev!

  “You knew what was right, and did it,” Pyotr sa
id softly. “You are braver than I.”

  She wondered if fear of the NKVD had kept him from deserting. She had seen the corpses the Green Hats left along the roads by the thousands, for a warning.

  “What made you join the partisans?” he asked.

  “The Germans occupied our village. They tried to recruit men from among us, and killed those who refused. My husband refused.”

  “Katya, Katya!”

  “Luckily, we were newly married and had no children.” I was rather newly arrived there, bearing a fresh name. That has grown difficult under the Communists. I have to search out slovenly officials. But they are common enough. Poor Ilya. He was so glad, so proud of his bride. We could have been happy together for as long as nature allowed.

  “Luckily?” Pyotr knuckled fresh tears. “Regardless, you were very brave.”

  “I am used to looking after myself.”

  “As young as you are?” he marveled.

  She couldn’t help smiling. “I’m older than I look.” Rising: “Time for another survey.”

  “Why don’t we each take a window?” he suggested. “We could watch almost without a break. I feel much better. Thanks to you,” he ended adoringly.

  “Well, we could—“ Thunder grumbled. “Hold! Artillery! Stay where you are.”

  She sped to the north room. Early winter dusk was falling, the wreckage gone vague among shadows, but Mamaev still bulked clear against the sky. Fire flickered there. The crashing waxed, widely about. “Our half-truce is over,” she muttered when she came back to look east. “The big guns are busy.”

  He stood at the middle of the floor, his features hard to see in the quickly thickening murk but his voice uncertain. “Did the enemy begin it?”

  Katya nodded. “I think so. The start of whatever they have planned. Now we earn our pay, I hope.”

  “Really?” The question trembled.

  “If we can get some idea of what is going on. How I wish we had a moon tonight.” She chuckled dryly. “But I wouldn’t expect the Germans to pick their weather to oblige us. Keep quiet.”