A ginger cat, hardly larger than a thimble, climbed up the worn linen of her sleeve and sat down upon her shoulder and proceeded to lick his paws with great gravity. Every so often, as the woman spun her tale along with her thread, the cat looked up and fixed Jack with an uncanny golden eye.
“I had gone out one afternoon, in the green time when the plants are waiting to be picked, just this side of the full moon when their medicine is most potent. It was my first time out gatherin’ alone an’ I was half excited, half afraid, for the woods are never empty even when it seems they are. I got lost in the searching and picking, an’ without my realizin’ it, the sun had sunk low an’ the shadows were grown thick and long. When I looked around me, I didn’t know where I was. Everything looked the same an’ yet not the same at all.”
Jack leaned forward, almost toppling off the stool in his eagerness to hear her next words.
“I’d strayed across the boundary between worlds, lost the path entirely an’ had no idea where I might be. ‘Twas soon full dark an’ there was mist comin’ up out o’ the roots of trees and from under the fallen leaves. Then the leaves started to move, though there was no wind, an’ the boughs of the trees creaked as though they were in pain.”
Jack sat bolt upright, the quiver of a cold arrow flying up his spine. It sounded like the same sort of mist and wind that he had experienced just before the Crooked Man appeared. The same dancing leaves.
“I was frightened near out of my wits, an’ clutchin’ the amulet my grandmother had made for me.” She patted the small silver vial that hung about her neck, near black with age and use, and strung from a bit of leather.
“Twas as if one minute there was little but leaves whirlin’ in the wind, an’ then before I knew it a man was standin’ in front of me.” She shuddered expressively. “An’ such a man too, dark an’ silent, but ‘twas as though I could hear a terrible laughter from inside him. My ears couldn’t hear it, still my spirit could. I wanted to run. My whole wee body was shaking, but I was rooted to the spot.”
Jack nodded without realizing he was doing so, for it mirrored his own experience almost exactly.
“He touched my forehead, an’ it was as though I could feel somethin’ wild within myself tryin’ to get out an’ follow him, or maybe ‘twas only the bit that he would take an’ tuck in his filthy bag. Is that what he did to you? Took somethin’ of value?”
“Aye, he stole some of my dreams—put them in his bag just as you said. Though I never saw him do that exactly…” Jack trailed off, suddenly confused.
The old woman looked at him sharply, and he could feel the prick of her eyes like a needle poking gently at his skin. “Oh, it’s likely he did exactly that. He’s a master of the sleight of hand is the Crooked Man. Steal the shirt off yer back an’ have ye lookin’ at the moon whilst he does it. I will tell ye this for free though, laddie, he cannot harm you, unless you allow it,” she said, and bit the thread off the spindle neatly, winding the remains into a tidy ball and tucking it into the pocket of her apron.
“I don’t understand,” Jack said. How was he, just a boy himself, supposed to fight off such as the Crooked Man?
The woman smiled, sadly. “You aren’t meant to understand. It’s a sort of knowing that goes deeper than that. When the time comes—and it will, for you have seen him already—you will either know what to do or you won’t.”
“That seems stupid,” Jack said angrily, turning his face away from the woman so she would not see the tears that stood in his eyes. He was tired, and the warmth of the fire, a full belly and the woman’s kindness had him undone.
“It’s long past time for you and your wee dog to be abed,” she said crisply and rose from her low stool, setting the spinning wheel neatly into its corner.
She put a pallet by the fire, sweetly stuffed with rosemary and lavender, and once he and Aengus were tucked up cosily on it she covered them with a quilt that made his throat go tight with thoughts of his warm bed at home, his blankets that smelled like sunshine and hay and the scent of lilacs that sometimes drifted through his windows at night. Maybe that was why he dreamed of home that night, of his mother crying and his father roaming the hills and valleys of the kingdom, calling his name. He must have cried out in answer to his father, for he awoke in the ashy light of dawn with the old woman above him, her hand on his arm, steadying him out of the dream world into reality.
In the morning, she fed him on oats and honey and filled a satchel with bread and cheese and goat’s milk for him to take away with him. During the night she had mended his breeches and the tear in his shirt, for which he was very grateful.
The sky was rosy with dawn when he was ready to leave. Aengus had been fed too, and stood eager to go, scenting adventure on the horizon once again. For a moment Jack felt a spear of ice drive through his stomach, for he was afraid of what lay ahead and wanted nothing more than to be here with the old woman, do chores for his keep and to stay well away from the borders of the forest. But he knew he could not, for though Jack was young and sometimes foolish, still he knew that some paths are chosen and guided by an invisible hand and cannot be avoided.
The woman halted him outside the door of her cottage before he set out upon his lonely road.
“I have three things for you to take on your journey. The first is a length of thread, the second a bag of bones and the third is a weight of salt.”
The length of thread was from the wool she had spun the night before, neatly coiled and, in the morning light, an odd green in color—not like a rainbow in the least—yet he knew it was thread of the same spinning. Jack couldn’t swear to it, but he thought it wriggled a bit when he tucked it into his bag. The bag of bones was light as air, and the bones rattled about inside as though chattering one to another. The sack of salt was a solid weight in his hand, yet when he put it into his satchel it was light as a feather.
“Now drink this,” the lady said, and handed him an old silver flask, dark with age.
“What is it?” Jack asked, for a very dubious smell was floating out of the neck of the flask, forming a small black cloud.
“It’s a potion, one that will allow you to see and hear and speak in a different way. These are skills you will need on the rest of your journey.”
Jack drank it and could not decide if it was the sweetest thing he had ever tasted, or the foulest. It tasted of earth and berries, pine needles and willow bark, of moonlight on the forest floor and of the things that scuttled there, but it also tasted of sunshine and afternoons spent haying, of ripe apricots and pomegranates and honeyed dates.
“There can be no honey without bitter gall,” the lady said, and put the cap back on the flask, though the tiny cloud of its scent still hung in the air. “No rose without thorns. You must always remember that. Now open your eyes.”
Jack felt a faint buzzing sensation in his forehead, as though a nest of bees were stirring lazily. He opened his eyes and closed them again, shook his head to clear his vision and opened his eyes again, but it didn’t help one whit. The forest was absolutely teeming with tiny people, animals, carts, chatter, laughter and the odd screech or two. These people were dressed much as the lady was dressed, in things that looked as if they were made of leaves and tiny skins, with willow wands for crowns and birch bark for hats.
The women—for they were women despite being no taller than his own longest finger—had baskets over their arms and babies on their hips. The baskets were filled with all sorts of things: lovely floury loaves of bread, stone bottles of whiskey and mead, tiny apples no bigger than a sparrow’s beak. One woman had a basket filled with sparkling powders: deep gentian, brilliant scarlet, gooseberry green, and pigments he could hardly have imagined before—stardust and the gentle pink of a mole’s paw. And there were pigments for things he had before only smelled or thought—like the scent of bread fresh from the oven, or the way rain felt on your s
kin on a hot day, or mud between your toes after you’d pulled off shoes and socks, and other darker colors that were like a good sharp bang on your head, or a deep bruise that hurt to touch, or the way that a cut felt when the air moved across it.
He turned to look at the lady and his jaw dropped open in shock. She was no longer the old, needle-faced woman with worn hands and stooped back. She was beautiful, like a queen in a tale told over and over, whose beauty is never diminished by the telling.
“Never judge someone by her exterior, Jack. It’s important to remember that as you go on your journey.”
“Aye,” he said, “’tisn’t likely I’ll ever see anything in the same way.”
“No,” the woman said, and touched a hand to his face gently, as his mother used to do. There was both kindness and sorrow in her voice, and Jack knew that he had crossed some boundary since his encounter with the Crooked Man that could not be uncrossed, and that he had left something precious behind in doing so.
Chapter Forty-two
November 1973
Red Raven
And then as it was wont to do in Russia, winter came once again.
The cold was so severe that breathing hurt and talk was unthinkable. Words would surely freeze and fall to the ground before ever making the journey to another’s ears. He had heard tell that the natives believed that each winter all laughter, tears, words and stories fell to the ground and froze, only to be awakened by spring’s thaw, when suddenly the air would fill with chatter, laughter, gossip and tragedy, a cacophony of humanity borne on spring’s gentler air. But what this ground would have to say was likely more than any human could bear to hear. For in what tone did blood and grief speak?
Fragments and tendrils of the people who had once walked here, lived here, died here were left behind. You could feel their ghosts walk in step with yours, like a shadow that you could not detach from yourself, until the time came when you wondered if you were seeing through your own eyes or viewing a vanished world through theirs. To be here was to live in a place apart, to feel as though you inhabited a planet out at the very limits of the solar system, where the sun’s warmth could not be felt and there was no home other than this.
Russian land was once measured by the counting of the souls that tilled its earth. Thus an estate with one thousand able-bodied male adults was valued at one thousand souls. The value of this earth since Stalin’s time was incalculable, beyond the measurements of feeble humans. Russians also referred to ghosts as ‘souls’, giving a whole other element to what a land was worth.
Russia had stripped him down psychologically until he felt there were no hidden crevices in his life or mind anymore. Some days, he felt as cold and as alien as the landscape. Life here was survival—bread rations and cutting above quota to increase that meager bit of food allowance. It was keeping an eye half open at all times because someone always wanted the little you had, and you had to be willing to kill to keep it. It was life at its most raw and fundamental.
It was late November and Jamie had now been in this camp for almost ten months. It had been a long and bitter day of cutting timber, and now they were returning to camp for the night. They walked in a shambling line, heads down, for the wind was too bitter to face. Even Gregor, normally one to spit in the wind, no matter how frigid, was silent today, merely putting one foot in front of the other on his way back to the camp, to a bowl of soup, a crust of bread and a chilly sleep in a drafty hut. Only to get up and go through this numbing routine again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that one, ad infinitum, a dreadful dark fairytale without a hero to ride in and rescue them, without an ending of any sort.
In Russia, however, there was no line between the here and there, between nightmare and waking. There was no way to tell when one had gone through the glass, for there was no glass, no partition between the creatures of the night and the realities of the day.
A close packed line of ravens sat on the ruins of some long dead peasant’s hut by the track they trod. The ravens were silent in the grey gloom of the day, huddled close for warmth, beady eyes intent upon the ragged line of humanity that filed toward and past them.
As they approached, the string of birds broke apart croaking into the twilight, an omen that shivered in a man’s spine. It was as though a voice, old and inhuman, had spoken aloud on the cold air and imbued it with the portents of tragedy on its way, drawn fast and light across the snow and tundra, but coming with merciless intent.
An involuntary shudder rippled through his body.
“What is it?” Vanya asked, trudging beside him.
“Nothing,” Jamie replied. “Goose just walked across my grave is all.”
Vanya raised his eyebrows at him in puzzlement. “I do not understand this, Yasha.”
They were nearing the camp gates and Jamie felt an odd relief. He would be glad to be in out of this day with its strange forebodings.
“It’s just a way of saying the day feels eerie and haunted. The weather and the light are giving me chills up my backbone.”
“Ah,” Vanya smiled. “This I understand. But it is to be expected, for there are many ghosts here, so many that we breathe them in each day. You can feel them in the forest, but where they speak loudest, where they are thickest is up there.” Vanya nodded his head toward the old bell tower that loomed over the camp, a huge, ugly Gothic structure that was the stuff of nightmares, even without its particular history. There, at the height of the purges, people had been led up the long hill in their underwear, for no camp uniform was to be wasted on a corpse, and shot at the top of the stairs to the tower’s cellar. The corpses would pile one upon the next, removed when the pile got too deep. No one in the camp ventured near the tower unless expressly ordered to, and even then, they travelled the pathway there with dread and slow feet.
“Shura is here because of a ghost.”
“What?” Jamie asked, startled out of his grim musings by Vanya’s words. Shura had never been forthcoming about how he had wound up in the camp. Jamie had suspected there was a story there worth hearing, and that it contained something dark that Shura was still haunted by. However, he had not thought a literal ghost was at the core of it. His face must have shown a hint of skepticism, for Vanya eyed him seriously and said, “You maybe don’t believe in ghosts? Once you hear Shura’s story you will believe in them. You ask him to tell the story tonight. Maybe for you he will.”
“Why would he tell it for me?”
Vanya laughed. “Sometimes I am thinking you are blind, Yasha. Many people would happily do whatever you might think to ask of them. It’s only that you never seem to ask.”
It was a night for ghostly tales. The wind had risen to a wail through the trees and it shoved through the tower, making the ancient bell echo with a strange metallic whine. Beyond that lay the dark, looming presence of the forest, the trees soughing eerily. There would be a storm before morning. He could taste it. But inside the hut it was warm, the potbellied stove glowing with heat. Nikolai sat next to it and Violet knelt at his feet, massaging the old man’s hands. Nikolai’s hands were horribly crabbed, and it was apparent that all the fingers on both hands had been broken—and badly—at some point. The harsh winters without adequate protection had done their share as well. Violet gave his hands a thorough check each and every night unless she was dropping from exhaustion, and then Nikolai wouldn’t allow it.
They made a beautiful picture.Violet’s copper hair floated in a halo around her face, the fire’s glow burnishing it a bronzed gold. Nikolai leaned back against his bunk, eyes drowsing with the pure pleasure of having the stiffness rubbed from his hands, and from the compassionate touch of another human being.
When Jamie made his request of Shura, the small Georgian had looked at him long and hard before answering. In the end, he had acquiesced in a manner that told Jamie it was not a story to be
shared lightly.
Shura now took his seat nearest the fire, as was his privilege as the evening’s storyteller. He took his feet from his boots and stretched them toward the heat. The stink of wet, scorched wool soon permeated the air. Normally voluble to the point that everyone in his vicinity wanted to suffocate him, tonight Shura seemed reluctant to begin. Jamie poured him a small glass of the peppered vodka he had been given in exchange for fixing an ancient transistor radio.
Shura took a long sip of the vodka and looked at the faces that surrounded him. He drew in a heavy breath and began.
“I was in the Merchant Marine and the ship I was on was called the Krasny Bopoh. I was junior to the ship’s doctor, a glorified sort of nurse.”
“The Red Raven?” Jamie said, thinking it was one of the odder names he had heard for a ship. It caused a ripple of unease, the ravens sweeping silent across the field coming into his mind’s eye. In Scandinavian folklore, ravens were thought to be the souls of the murdered, and in Germany the souls of the damned.
“Yes, it was a bad name for a ship, but the ship itself was ordinary enough. We sailed the commercial lanes all around the globe. I loved the life on board. I was kept busy enough, but rarely had to deal with a true emergency, though that changed near the end of my time aboard it. We mostly shipped coal to Japan, but plenty went to other countries. We picked up other cargoes to bring home, sometimes grain, electronic goods, sometimes other things that a man did not look at too closely. On this particular trip, we were coming back from a supply run to Cuba and we got caught in a terrible storm just north of the Faroe Islands. It was autumn and the seas were getting rough and cold anyway, but this storm was like nothing I had ever experienced before—snow and hail, and a wind that felt like Thor himself was howling down our necks. We put up near the northernmost Island and tried to weather it out. But we were driven onto some rocks and sustained enough damage that we needed assistance.
Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Page 45