How long he stood there he did not know, silent, waiting for something he did not acknowledge but which he realized was speaking to him nevertheless.
The heron rose, carved against the sky in silver and ink, rose into the curtains of dawn, limned in mists of pearl grey and a strange shimmering verdigris that gave way to a stain of pink that spread and deepened, strengthening like a single chord rising above a symphony. The bird’s wings swept in tempo, rising, rising until the stain burst and became scarlet, vermilion, sienna and gold, and the world hung for an instant shivering on that one note, the heron flying into the face of the sun.
The sight of it cracked something inside him, something he had kept still and frozen since coming to Russia, that thing that resided within a man’s soul that stood in awe at the profound and churning beauty of the world. He had not wanted to know if he could still feel beauty, could still ache for all that the world was and all that it was not.
He had moments like this in his life, a handful, in which he felt as fragile and transparent as tissue, as though the universe flowed through him in all its beauty and transcendence. Against this he had no defense. It was as painful as it was beautiful, for such moments did not repeat themselves in their entirety, but came differently, giving him the understanding of how much he had changed in the intervening time.
He felt as empty and light as a milkweed pod scoured clean by autumn’s rough winds. He turned away from the lake and the heron as it floated up and away, a mere black speck against that violent and shimmering sun, to begin the day’s journey.
Chapter Eighty-seven
Bread and Salt
Their days had acquired a rhythm of sorts, which helped to stave off the worst of the exhaustion that seemed to travel no more than a few steps behind them, a weighty shadow they could not shake but could not afford to have catch up either. He did not always know where they were. The need for stealth and passing villages in the night like a sneak-thief made navigating their way that much more difficult.Yet he found if he shut down the thoughts in his head and listened to what his body and skin seemed to understand, he knew instinctively which way to go. He had taken to standing at each invisible crossroads and closing his eyes. The other two knew to be silent and Vanya would take Kolya from him, walking off a way and singing in a low, gravely voice that Kolya seemed to find quite enchanting.
He would stand still and bring his instincts to the fore. He was reading the night sky in this same way, dividing it into thirty-two separate sections, able to impose the vision of those imaginary lines onto the sky itself and thus know exactly where a particular star would rise and where it would set, and use this lineation that arced across the sky as his baseline. It was not that hard once he got the worrying portion of his brain out of the way and relied on memory and the knowledge that was innate inside of a man. If he could steer a course on the trackless wastes of the ocean then he could do it in the trackless wastes of Russia too.
It was not all so easy. There was the day they almost ran into a squad of Red Army soldiers. It had been a near miss, for they were tired and had come to the stumbling point when no one spoke and they each just kept putting one foot in front of the other until they had to stop for the night or Kolya’s lusty cries forced them to.
They had been walking in heavy woods where the debris of the forest floor muffled sound and hid intruders. The canopy above their heads kept the weather off them and muffled every sound so it felt like walking on cotton. Unfortunately, if they could not be heard until the last minute, the reverse was also true.
They were on a twisting path, all of them silent with exhaustion, Kolya a dead weight against his chest when he had just known—there was a bend some small way ahead and he could feel a group of men coming. He turned, putting his fingers to his lips and indicating that they should all move quietly off the path into the dense trees. A fallen tree a few feet off the path became their hiding place. There was no time to go deeper into the woods where they might manage to lose themselves in the gloomy green twilight.
They crouched there behind the rotting log, the scent of moss and decaying wood heavy in their nostrils, hoping and praying that the soldiers would move past swiftly. But one stopped to smoke. He was young, as soldiers were, blond hair shorn close to his skull, the tip of his nose red with cold. His eyes were the ice-blue of the Slav and strangely innocent. Behind the tree, they all held their breath, the lazy curls of smoke from the soldier’s cigarette hovering around their heads. He leaned on the other side of the fallen log, so close that Jamie could hear the soft snick of his lips on the cigarette. Kolya stirred against Jamie’s chest, about to make the fretful noises of the not-quite-awake-but-assuredly-hungry. Jamie felt his heart seize in his chest and promptly lodge itself in the vicinity of his throat. He slipped off his mitten and reached into his pocket, heart pounding, for the crust of bread he replaced every other day. He crumbled it and slid his hand inside his coat, feeding it into Kolya’s mouth, and hoping to God it would be enough to stopper him until the damn soldier moved on. He kept crumbling the bread and feeding it to Kolya, one bite at a time, piece by piece, trying to buy their survival.
Kolya managed a squeak that floated out past Jamie’s thumb and they all ceased to breathe. Even the goat, Shura’s large hand around her muzzle, was round-eyed with horror.
The soldier, in the act of putting out his cigarette, looked around, eyes sharp now and seeming to hone in straight at their ragged group. Jamie wondered wildly if one could smell hunger because if so, he was sure the stink of the three of them would lead the soldier straight over the log and into their midst.
But the angels seemed to be on their side for the soldier shrugged and moved off down the trail to join his squad. It took another minute to resume breathing. Kolya was wriggling like an infuriated bunny trapped in a burlap sack and it was only a matter of minutes before he howled, the bread having done little to appease him. Jamie had his hand lightly over the boy’s mouth, feeling the small furious bursts of his breath on the edges of his cold hand. Their time had almost run out.
Shura milked the goat right there into their one bottle and maneuvered the nipple into Kolya’s mouth before Jamie took his hand away. Relief swept through them all as Kolya clamped fiercely onto the nipple without letting out another peep.
Three bodies collapsed limply against the log, damp with sweat and shaking at how near they had come to discovery. As soon as Kolya was fed, they moved back onto the path, walking as swiftly as they dared.
Later, when they had chosen a hollow in the forest for their bed and lit a fire, Vanya asked him, “How did you know, Yasha?”
“Know what?” Jamie asked, the heat of the fire making him drowsy. He didn’t have first watch so he could lie down with Kolya and sleep for a few hours.
“That the soldiers were coming. We had just enough time to hide and then there they were.”
“I—I’m not sure,” Jamie said. Now that he thought about it, it had just been a feeling or rather, he had been able to feel them coming—through his feet and on the surface of his skin—and he had known it was a large party of men. It was as Gregor had said; You learn to live in your body rather than your head. You listen to your ears but also to what your skin tells you. You understand what the birds are saying and can talk to a wolf merely by looking her in the eyes.
That night it snowed, the first serious snow of the season and a good eight inches of it. Now they would be far easier to track if indeed someone was on their trail. The snow was going to make everything a great deal more difficult. Jamie only hoped that the cold would not follow on its heels because in the state they were in, a few cold nights were likely to kill them.
Shura noticed the wolves first, five of them, wraiths that slid in and out of the blue shadows cast by the birches and firs. Jamie had once heard that wolves could smell death’s approach and he worried that this was why the pack trailed them.
But he could no longer remember if this was fact or something he had read long ago in a fairytale. One thing he knew for certain, wolves understood fear, and could feel the fine trembling threads of it on the air each time it fluttered inside a man’s heart.
“I don’t think it’s usual for them to follow men like this,” Shura said, dark eyes troubled. One did not need, Jamie thought, to be a mind reader to understand what he was thinking. If the wolves were tracking them, it was because the wolves had decided they were worth the risk of attacking. “They are generally timid around men. If they attack it is usually children or women they go after. But I am small and so is Kolya. Vanya is pretty enough to be a woman and Agrafina—close your ears, my little darling—is not even a substantial breakfast in their view. Maybe they are thinking you are the only man here, Yasha.” This did little to quell the icy feeling in the pit of Jamie’s stomach. “Also I fear it is because we have the perfume of weakness,” he ended grimly, and no one needed his speech corrected to understand exactly what he meant.
The forced march was taking its toll on all of them. They were weary, hungry and afraid that they would perish one by one with no one to mark their passing but each other. The wolves on their trail underscored the general feeling of desperation. It had been impossible to catch any game with wolves so near and they hadn’t had a decent meal in several days. If Agrafina hadn’t been so necessary to Kolya’s survival, Jamie knew the goat would have found herself over a fire by now.
Four days after their encounter with the soldier, they stopped mid-afternoon on a large outcropping of rock. Kolya needed to be fed and changed from the small store of cloth diapers that they washed and hung to dry each night over the fire.
Jamie also needed to regain his bearings, to know how many degrees to tack into the wind (to use terminology with which he was comfortable). A thick silence had fallen over all of them some hours back and he knew they needed to rest and regroup before continuing.
“Yasha.”
Jamie turned, hearing the warning note in Shura’s voice.
Not far away was a ridge thrusting out of the snow, bony as a hunched spine. On it the wolves stood still as gelid water, their fur silhouetted in the blue light of Russian winter. The leader, a big male, had a huge ruff the color of smoke and long, white legs. Jamie could feel the wolf’s contemplation upon his skin, that act of instinct that allowed the wolf to decipher weakness, to judge when and how best to strike.
It seemed hours passed before the big male broke his stare and turned away. The rest of the pack followed, slinking through the gathering shadows, layered now in deeper blues and bruised greens as night approached. Not weak enough yet, not yet ripe enough with the reek of hunger, Jamie thought. But soon they would be, and when they were, the wolves would be ready and waiting.
Jamie breathed out the frosted air he had held during the silent standoff with the wolf and turned to Shura and Vanya. They presented a woeful picture, exhausted to the point of standing still and allowing themselves to freeze. The only visible bit of Vanya was his eyes, rendered a darker amethyst by the contrasting blue of his face rag. Shura, who had to struggle with both the goat and the truncated length of his legs, sat in the snow, hat skewed to one side as if even its normally unsinkable pompom was defeated. Kolya lay against Vanya’s chest, head on his shoulder, in a silence that was unnatural in one so young. Even the goat looked melancholy, and Jamie knew they had to snap themselves out of the mind set into which they had fallen. Were the wolves to eat one of them now, the animals would likely commit some form of lupine hara-kiri, from ingesting the black gloom that seemed to infest all their cells.
“I suppose,” Vanya said in the vague, weary tone they had all adopted, “many of them are dead now.”
Jamie did not respond and Shura merely looked down at his mittened hands. Vanya did not need anyone to agree with him. They all knew it was true. They had to put aside the sacrifice that had put them on this road. It would drive a man crazy to acknowledge it too soon and they could not afford such things just now. Certainly, he could not think of Andrei, yet… Andrei, who had provided the fire to release the phoenix… Andrei who had not intended that he should leave the camp that day after he had come with men well-bribed to help him create the distraction that would release his son and his friend.
Jamie took Kolya from Vanya. It wasn’t his turn but the young man’s face was pinched with cold and exhaustion and he gave Jamie a weak smile of gratitude.
“Get up. We need to keep going,” Jamie said, though he wasn’t certain he could find his feet at this point. Still, if they moved, they would stop brooding and it was imperative that they find somewhere better than this windswept rock to break for the night. Ahead was an unbroken line of pine trees. They would head there where the thick stand would provide both shelter and fuel for the night. He stood, grateful that Kolya had succumbed to the prevalent mood and gone to sleep. Now he would only have to put up with Shura’s monk-like chanting, an act, which he claimed, kept his spirits aligned with the universe, and Vanya’s grim mood.
The wind was picking up, blowing sheer against their faces and nipping sharply at their ears. Not sharply enough to drown out the bickering twosome behind him, but at least he was spared every other sentence or so.
“…I swear if you quote that damned poet to me one more time, I will show you what sacrifice is—literally.”
“Ours is not a caravan of despair, my friend,” Shura said, and even Jamie thought he might choke him. Some months ago Shura had discovered a volume of Rumi in the Commander’s library, and had been quoting it liberally ever since.
He turned to tell them both to shut up, before he knocked their miserable Slav heads together when the ground abruptly vanished from under his feet. One minute he was on solid ground and the next he was falling through space, clutching Kolya as tightly as he could to cushion the impact. He hit the ground on his rear end and fell backwards, the baby bumping against his chest but not taking any of the brunt of the fall. He looked above them and saw three gaping holes. They had wandered off the edge of a sharp-edged bank that had been hidden by the fresh snow. Jamie looked around. They were in a shallow valley, filled with snow and pine trees.
Vanya caught his breath first and came to check if the others were safe. Kolya had been stunned into silence and Jamie checked him over immediately. Other than having had a good fright, the baby seemed to be fine. Jamie was marginally less so. It felt as if he had been pulled over a bed of large stones by his feet, which wasn’t too far from what had happened. He sat up carefully, one hand still cupped firmly to Kolya’s head. He hurt all over, but no bones seemed to be broken.
“Shura?” he said, for he could not see the man anywhere. “Where the hell is he?”
Vanya shrugged, his eyes scanning every bush and shrub. “How far could he have rolled? I know he’s built like a barrel but you’d think he would have bumped into a tree along the way.” Vanya’s tone was dry but Jamie saw the tension in his face as he looked around. There was a long slide in the snow and then a blank space as though the man had slid all the way down and then bounced off into invisibility. Jamie stood, joggling Kolya instinctively though the baby was still quiet, his dense blue eyes enormous in his face and his bottom lip, red as a cherry, starting to wobble the slightest bit. Jamie rubbed his back, hoping to forestall a full-blown wail, though the poor lad deserved one.
“Hush, moya sladkaya,” he said, softly, for Russian was the language of comfort to Kolya. He continued to murmur silly things in the pidgin mix of Russian, English and Gaelic he had been speaking to the boy from birth. It calmed Kolya and he put his arms around Jamie’s neck, clinging tight as an eel round a mussel, but he did not cry.
Without warning, Shura popped out of a dense stand of pine, his hat, woolen bobble in place, now righted on his head. He had a smile on his face.
“Where were you?” Vanya demanded, tone angr
y and accusing.
“I merely rolled somewhat further than you,” Shura said with great dignity, “but that is to be expected given my resemblance to a barrel with legs.”
Vanya had the grace to flush.
“Wait until you see what my tumble has uncovered, though! Come! Come!” Shura gestured with impatience, his face alight. Jamie and Vanya followed, ducking under the snow-laden branches and through the dense patch of pines. They came out into a space that was a clear and narrow ribbon through the trees, perfectly straight in its lines. Jamie felt a small thrum of excitement low in his belly.
Shura had uncovered a few railroad ties, half rotted away, but instantly recognizable.
“It’s a rail line, one of those ghost ones that Stalin had built,” Shura said. “Don’t you see? We can follow it. It should take us right to the border, or close enough. We’ll have to leave it before we get there, it’s too dangerous on the border itself but for now it’s a marked trail. This has to be one of the lines meant to reach Leningrad.”
They could indeed follow the rail line, but it might lead nowhere. Under Stalin, many such rail lines had been built with zek labor and they had simply gone nowhere but into the wilderness, ending abruptly. It was rumored that more than one hundred thousand prisoners lost their lives building rail lines that were never used—made to work in all conditions, temperatures below minus sixty in the winters, swarms of flies in the summer that drove men mad, mud into which a man could sink and drown. Sufficient time had not been granted to construct the lines properly and as a consequence bridges collapsed, embankments washed out and bogs swallowed the lines whole. Cars had often been abandoned mid-track in the middle of a wilderness that swallowed them within a few years.
Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Page 91