The Sea Runners

by Ivan Doig

  Abruptly a barrier of building met the two of them.

  As Melander and Wennberg hesitated before the officers' clubhouse, a third upright shadow joined them. Into Wennberg's hands it thrust a heavy sharp-pointed pry bar and into Melander's a pair of long-handled smithing snippers, and it muttered : "This way."

  In the dark and rain Melander and Wennberg stayed stock-still for a moment, as though the cold feel of metal conferred on them by Braaf had iced them into place.

  "Come on, you pair of lumps." Braaf's jab brought them to life, tumbled the big men inside the doorway where he waited. "Stay an arm's length behind me, and try not walk on each other's ankles."

  Braaf led Melander and Wennberg through rooms their eyes never really took in, so much focus were the two of them devoting to listening, breathing silently, and creeping.

  Which may go to explain how the outer edge of Wennberg's left boot clanked against a hallway spittoon.

  Braaf appeared more offended than concerned.

  "Plowhorse," came his terse whisper to Wennberg.

  The door of the gun room stood like the lid of a colossal strongbox tipped up on end. Heavy hinges, and a corner-to-corner X of strap iron to thwart notions of chopping in, and a powerful hasp, and a padlock the size of a big man's fist.

  "Do your digging, blacksmith," Braaf said under his breath. "And pound quiet as you can."

  Wennberg pulled from his breeches a mallet and a chisel. He stepped to where the padlock hung heavy in the ring plate of the hasp, put the chisel to the wood of the doorframe a few inches out to the side of the metal, and quickly rapped a groove in behind the ring plate.

  "Now the other," Wennberg decreed huskily. "There'll be commotion to this."

  "The rain'll drown most of it," answered Braaf. "Don't stand around telling stories, do it."

  Wennberg worked the sharp point of the lengthy pry bar into where he had channeled behind the ring plate. Moved his thick hands toward the outer end of the pry bar for all possible leverage. Was joined by Melander, grabbing beside him on the bar. And both strained outward.

  The ring plate wrenched loose, its lag screws tearing wood as they came.

  Braaf reached instantly and swung the ring plate and padlock away from the doorframe they had been freed from.

  "Done, hair and hide," congratulated Melander. "And we didn't make any more noise than Judgment Day. Now one job more." The tall leader tugged open the powerful door.

  Somehow rifles racked together multiply their power, akin to the way that cavalry does by drawing up abreast. The repeat of pattern, the echoing numerousness it implies, as though this concentrated squad is just a swatch from bigger trouble—such impress now met Melander and Braaf and Wennberg, black tubes of barrel and brass ramrod pipes in legions rising straight up from the chain that threaded through each trigger guard. Truth be known, except for an occasional Beaumarchais sportsman's weapon and one hefty American Hawken with an octagonal barrel, the guns here were eccentric old Bakers or Brunswicks bought from Hudson's Bay traders in years past; the Brunswicks in particular were hard-recoiling, scatter-barreled specimens given up on by the British army. None of this could be known to Braaf, Wennberg, Melander. Blast and thunder were their want, not ballistic nicety.

  In went Wennberg, then Braaf.

  Wennberg pushed down lightly, testingly, on the chain imprisoning the rifles and slid his snippers in atop it to the trigger guard of the first gun. An exertion on the long handles of the snippers, and tempered jaws crushed through the softer brass of the trigger guard.

  With care, Wennberg now bent the trigger guard out from where he had made his cut, then cleared the chain through the fresh gap in the brass. Braaf plucked the weapon from him and handed it on out to Melander.

  Four more rifles the blacksmith clipped and liberated in the same fashion. "Aye," Melander saying softly each time.

  Sharing out their new armory, the trio readied themselves. Wennberg shouldered shut the gun room door, pushed the ring plate and padlock back where they had been, tapped them into place in the original screw holes. Any close cast of look would show at once that the lock was awry but a rare Russian it would be who came home tonight with a quick eye.

  Braaf moved in front of the other two; advised under his breath to Wennberg, "Try pick up your hooves this time"; and led.

  They exited the clubhouse and through the dark set off together, now west across New Archangel toward the stockade gate, Braaf like a bat choosing the most shadowed route.

  The noise exploded atop them then.

  Palong! Palong!

  Braaf was four running strides away from the frozen Melander and Wennberg before he, and they, realized— Palong! Palong!—how cathedral bells resound to those who sneak about the streets at night.

  "Your Russian is fond of bells," a visitor who departed New Archangel with ringing ears once noted down, and the sweet-sad peals from the belfry of the Russian Orthodox cathedral as the hour was rung followed the tall figure and the shorter two across the settlement toward the stockade gate.

  A few feet from the sentry lean-to the trio halted, and Melander called in huskily: "Karlsson?"

  Out loomed a figure in sentry cap, with a rifle at port arms.

  Wennberg grunted a curse and grabbed for the knife inside his rain shirt.

  In Karlssons's voice the figure mildly eluded: "You don't find Bilibin's cap becoming on me, Wennberg?"

  "Speaking of caps," Melander said as if announcing tea, "the time's come to fling our hat over the nunnery wall."

  Karlsson eased the gate open just enough for them to slip through with the guns. Minutes stretched, then the three were back from the canoe and the blackness of the Kolosh village.

  "We're away to the cache," whispered Melander. "Stand ready with the gate."

  Fewer than fifty paces later, Melander and Braaf halted beside the blacksmith shop.

  "What're we doing here?" Wennberg rumbled low to Melander. "Where's this hidey-hole of Braaf's?"

  "Here."

  "Here? Here where?"

  "In the sill loft. Up over your forge." The sill loft was a narrow platform, like a span of board ceiling, laid across the center of the rafters of the smithing shop. Wood to make windowsills and doorframes was dried there winter-long in the heat rising from the forges, and until the summer building season came, no one paid the loft any mind. Except of course Icelander, who observed now: "In Gotland, we say the darkest plage is under the candlestick."

  "You pissants!" The stun of it set Wennberg I jack a step, these weeks of the war within himself, escape-or-betray, the lobes of his mind standing and fighting each other like crabs over the question, and all the while—"If the Russians'd looked up there they'd 've condemned me!"

  "That thought did visit us. But you had luck, the Russians didn't peek. Shinny the ladder, Braaf, and begin handing down to us, aye?"

  Six trips it took, Braaf and Wennberg lugging now while Melander stowed and stowed, to convey the trove that Braaf had accumulated like a discriminating pack rat.

  Then all at once Icelander, alone, was back at the gate.

  "We're cargoed," he said to Karlsson. "You'll be our last item, aye?" And was gone.

  Karlsson began to wait out a span of becalmed time. The hammer chorale of the bells at hist had ceased, and the all-but-silence, just the soft rain sound, was worse. Too, there was an occasional stirring from Bilibin, trussed and gagged and bleary on the floor of the hut behind him. Karlsson decided it was best to keep busy within himself, saying and resaying the word.

  There are moments, central moments such as what Karlsson awaits now, which form themselves unlike any that ever have issued in our lives or shall again. Ours might seem a kindlier evolution if what we know as memory had been set in us the other way: if these pith incidents of existence already waited on display there in the mind when you, I, Karlsson come into the world—a glance, and scene A ready to happen some certain Thursday; beyond it, B in clear view, due on a Wednesday two years
and seventeen days off. The snag, of course, is Z, the single exactitude we could never bear to know: death's date. In order then that we can stand existence, the apparatus fetches backward for its rather than ahead. Memory instead of foreknowledge. So Karlsson on wait here in the Alaska night is like all of us in life's dark, able to know only that a moment is arriving due and to hope it is not the last of the series.

  Then it came, as if in chorus to his silent recitings, the word flying out of the dark, in call down from the blockhouse on the hump of ridge above the stockade gate.

  "Slushai!"

  Otic time each hour the word made its relay from sentry post to sentry post. Not much of an utterance, no recital on behalf of tsar or God, perhaps the littlest cog id all the guardful apparatus of the capital of Russian America: simply the traditional reminding call, "Harken!" But try, a time, with throat dry and all of life riding there on your tongue, try then to echo such a word as if born to it....

  Having been endlessly rehearsed by Melander, whose Russian was better than his own, Karlsson swallowed. Cupped his hands to his mouth. And as close as he could raise his voice to Bilibin's blurt, cried back the watch call.

  Silence from the blockhouse.

  Karlsson cracked the gate for himself.

  "You're croaking like a raven down there tonight."

  Karlsson spun to the resumed voice. Down from the blockhouse, here it blared yet again. "Something got you by the throat?"

  Motionless, Karlsson frantically rummaged the times he had shared the hootch jug with Bilibin, tried to draw to mind the old guard's gossipy gab, pluck words out, but what words...

  Then from beside Karlsson in the blackness, a bray in Russian:

  "Nothingfifteen drops won't cure!"

  Karlsson's right elbow was being gripped by the largest hand imaginable, which told him what his eyes could not in the dark : Melander.

  Fresh silence at the other guard post. Deeper, tauter silence, it seemed to Karlsson, unrelenting as Melander's grip.

  At last:

  "Swig fifteen more for me and make a start on my woes as well. Christ's season be merry for you, Pavel Ivanovich!"

  TWO

  AS IF in mock of some dance the Russians just then were gyrating through in the Castle, the Swedes' vast voyage southward started off with an abrupt two-step to the west.

  On the first of the Tebenkov maps, Melander had shown Karlsson the pair of south-going channels threaded like careful seams among the islands of Sitka Sound. Karlsson had glanced down and immediately up: "At night? Likely in rain?"

  That granite nubbin of opinion pivoted the escapees to the third possible route, veering up the channel from the Kolosh village, around Japonski Island, then outside the shoal of Sound isles. Such a loop was longer than the other channels and unsheltered from the ocean currents, hut at least it was not a blindfolded plunge into Sitka's labyrinth.

  This was however the inauguration for Braaf and Wennberg into paddling in untame waters, and as promptly as this, it began that these men were brave and afraid and back and forth between the two.

  Both Braaf and Wennberg were chocked with anticipation that the canoe was going to buck, slide down nose first, rock to one side and then the other, then start over, on and on in a nautical jig horrifying to join in the wet dark. None such ruckus happened. Ballasted deep by the provisions, the canoe rode steady, almost with nonchalance, in the night water of Sitka. What proved obstreperous instead were the paddles in the hands of Wennberg and Braaf. The pair of novices splashed much, and more than occasionally whunked the canoe side. Then Braaf caught the tip of his paddle amid a stroke, spraying water forward onto Wennberg's back and down his neck.

  The blacksmith's devoutly muttered string of curses inspired counsel from Melander. "Steady up, don't beat the damn water to death." But the paddling efforts of the pair in the middle of the canoe still were stabs into the sloshing turmoil until Karlsson directed:

  "Spread your hands wide as you can on the paddle and stroke only when I say. Now—now—now—now—now—"

  The contrived tick and tock, Karlsson's nows and the breath space between, advanced them through the blackness until Melander spoke from the bow of the canoe.

  "Hold up, bring us broadside a moment, Karlsson. We've at least earned a look."

  As the canoe swayed around, the other three saw his meaning. Back through one of the channel canyons amid the islands of Sitka Sound, an astonishing wide box of lights sat in the air. Baranov's Castle, every window bright for this night of Christmas merriment, sent outward through the black and the rain their final glittering glimpse of New Archangel.

  By and large, a boat ride is a cold ride. From launching the canoe, the men's legs were wet to just above their knees, and it took the first half hour of paddling to warm themselves.

  The night was windless, which they needed. The rain was not heavy, and gift above all, it was not snow. A few weeks earlier December's customary snowstorm had arrived, a white time when ice plated the tops of New Archangel's rain barrels and Melander went around looking pinched. But then thaw, and the Sitka air's usual mood of drizzle ever since.

  Their course out. of the harbor looped the canoe toward the ocean, then swung southeast, to bring the craft along the shore of Baranof, Baranof's coastline the canoemen could estimate by the surf sound, and occasionally by a moving margin of lightness as a wave struck and swashed. Their night vision was decent, accustomed by New Archangel's dim wintertime. But even so, any effort to see to their right, the ocean side, drew only intense black of a sort modern eyes have been weaned from: starless, so much so that it seemed nothing ever had kindled in that cosmic cave, and vast, beyond all reason vast. New Archangel apart, the next lamp in that void flickered thousands of miles across the Pacific, if indeed the residents of Japan lit lamps.

  Of all the kinds of toil there are, the ocean demands the most strange. A ship under sail asked constant trussing and retrussing; the hauling about of ropes and sailcloth was like putting up and taking down a huge complicated tent, day and night. Advent of the steamship changed the chore to stuffing a mammoth incessant stove, between apprehensive glances at clock-faces that might but more likely might not indicate whether matters were going to go up in blast. Both of these unlikely sea vocations had drawn sweat from Melander, and now he was back to the ocean's original tool, the paddle. He was finding, with Braaf and Wennberg—Karlsson already had been through the lesson—that the paddler's exertion is like that of pulling yourself hand over hand along an endless rope. The hands, wrists, arms—yes, they tire, stiffen. The legs and knees learn misery, from the position they are forced to keep for so long. But where the paddling effort eats deep is the shoulder blade. First at one, then when the paddle is shifted to the other side of the canoe for relief, the ache moves across to the other: as if all weariness chose to ride the back just there, on those twin bone saddles.

  Water rippled lightly at the bow. Against the canoe's cedar length, the steady mild lap of waves. Now and then a Braaf or Wennberg stroke going askew and Haida paddle whacking Tlingit craft.

  The four men in the darkness stroked steadily rather than rapidly. Not even Wennberg was impatient about this, for he knew with the others that they needed to pull themselves as far from New Archangel as possible by daybreak, and that meant pace, endurance. The invisible rope of route, more and more a hawser as you worked at it, was nothing to be raced along.

  Perhaps fifteen strokes a minute, four men stroking, rest pausing as little they could, seven—eight hours to daybreak: an approximate twenty-five thousand of these exertions and they could seek out a dawn cove for hiding.

  Hours and hours later, near-eternities later to Melander and Braaf and Wennberg, darkness thinned toward dawn's gray.

  Karlsson, glancing back to judge how far his eyes had accustomed to the coming of day, was the first to see the slim arc of canoe, like a middle distance reflection of their Own craft, closing the space of water behind them.

  "You long-ass bas
tard, Melander!" This was Wennberg. "'The Russians won't follow us,' ay?"

  "They haven't," Melander retorted. "Koloshes, those are. We'll see how quick they are to die for the far white father in St. Petersburg, Braaf, load the rest of those fancy rifles of yours, then pass Karlsson his hunting gun."

  Carefully the Kolosh chieftain in the chasing canoe counted as Braaf worked at the loading, and did not like how the numbers added and added. The half-drunk Russian officer who had roused the Kolosh crew told them the escaping men were only three—Braaf at first had not been missed, his whereabouts as usual the most obscure matter this side of ghostcraft, Hut plainly there were four of the whitehairs, they possessed at least two firepieces each, and this one doing the loading was rapid at his task. Against the four and their evident armory the Kolosh chieftain had his six paddlers and himself, with but three rifles and some spears.

  "Fools they are, you'll skewer them like fish in a barrel," the Russian officer had proclaimed. "If they haven't drowned themselves first." Rut fools these men ahead did not noticeably seem to be. They had paddled far, almost a surprise how far. A canoe chief of less knowledge than his own would not have reckoned them yet to this distance. They seemed inclined to fight, and held that total of rifles in their favor. Tobacco, molasses, even the silver coins had been promised by the angry tsarman. Those, against the battle these whitehairs might put up. Once wondering begins there is no cure, and here was much, firepieces and molasses and Russians and the nature of promises and tobacco ami coins and four steady-armed whitehairs instead of three exhausted timorous ones, to be wondered about.

  While the leader of the Koloshes sought to balance it all in his mind and the exertion of his crew shortened the water between the canoes, the craft in front suddenly began to swing broadside, a bold-necked creature of wood turning as if having decided, at last, to do fight even if the foe was of its own kind.