“No. He’s my friend.”
“A foreign minister is no one’s friend. Surely you know that from the Frenchman Talleyrand. He led us on with moonbeams.”
“But why tip the Prussians? I could have lost the swords.”
She was quiet a moment. “Yes. It makes no sense. We’re being manipulated for reasons we can’t discern.”
We skidded as we descended a bank and skated across a frozen creek. Then a pause as the horse gathered herself to haul us up the far bank. The whip cracked. The sleigh lurched. We swerved and ascended.
“And Jelgava,” I said. “Will that be safe?”
“Of course not. But we need more supplies to get to Poland.”
“And why Gregor with an ax? Why not expert killers?”
“He didn’t know what you stole. Just treasure. Perhaps he hoped to take it for himself. Kill you and rob and rape me.”
“Gregor didn’t strike me as sly or vicious.”
“Yet he surprised you. Or maybe he had some motive we haven’t guessed. He thought you an enemy of Russia. Russians are mystic. Superstitious. Patriotic.”
“A serf? And then an anonymous savior?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s dead, we’re fled. The key now is to finish. Maybe everyone will forget us as Adam hopes.”
Neither of us believed that. And as if to betray our forced optimism, a glow appeared on the road ahead. I pulled the reins and our horse slowed.
“A fire?” Astiza said. “This late? It looks built on the highway.”
“Roadblock.”
“How could the police have gotten ahead of us?”
“Not police. Prussians. Or Russian thieves.”
We slid slowly nearer, still hidden by the dark. I saw that a bonfire indeed occupied the middle of the road, effectively plugging it. The blaze was built like a pyramid six feet high, sparks funneling into the night sky. Pools of melt-water reflected light at its base. Its builders were nowhere in sight.
“They’ve blocked all the roads,” I guessed. “Prussians are thorough.”
“Can we turn around?”
“We’d risk arrest. We could even be accused of Gregor’s murder.” I studied the terrain. A slight rise on the left side of the road, a slight dip on the right. “These scoundrels expect us to stop. Which means hang onto Harry.”
“Ethan?”
“And if you have to, use the swords.”
CHAPTER 9
Our only chance was surprise. I cracked the whip and the sleigh leaped forward, our mare galloping hard toward the flames. My reins were in one hand, the ax in another, and I lifted off the seat in a balanced crouch. I’d spied a keyhole to squeeze through.
The rogues lurked out of sight in ambush, counting on me to be lit and blinded by the fire. I relied on the surprise of charging out of the dark, and the devils didn’t start to shout until the final seconds of our dash. I slashed with the reins and yanked the mare toward the rising side of the road. Guns banged, flashes in the dark, but the shots were hasty and badly aimed.
We careened like a toboggan and swept just left of the bonfire, one runner tilted high on the road bank, the other slicing through melt water and coals. A bullet buzzed. I leaned and swatted at the fire pyramid with the ax, clipping a burning log and sending it arcing into the woods like a meteor. More cries of surprise and hasty shots. The fire collapsed in an explosion of embers. A man screamed. The fools were hitting each other! But I also heard lead smack our sleigh.
Past them! I glanced at my family. “All right?”
Astiza nodded.
Then something hurtled down at us from the road bank like a pouncing lion. A man crashed onto the back of our sled and clung tenaciously. I awkwardly swung at him with the ax and the assailant leaned backward out of reach, balancing on the runners as my weapon awkwardly hovered. He used one hand to grab Astiza’s hair and she shrieked as he hauled her backward, Harry gallantly pulling the other way. “Mama!”
The bastard let go of the sleigh, hanging onto my wife’s scalp, and drew a pistol to aim at me as I drove. I could see the white of his snarl.
There was nothing to shoot him with. “Harry, get down!”
The assailant cocked the pistol. Astiza was bent over backward, mouth open, eyes wide with pain, groping under the furs.
“Where are they, American?”
As if in answer a pitted sword struck from the blankets like an angry snake. Astiza rammed it with all her strength into the assailant’s grizzled throat, its point grating on bone. The man’s eyes rolled, his pistol went off harmlessly, and then the assassin was gone as abruptly as he’d come, thumping onto the frozen road. The sword had popped clear of his neck. Astiza fell back onto the seat, gasping, the old weapon dripping on her furs. She clutched Harry.
I lashed the reins.
More shots, aimed at nothing. The wrecked bonfire was far behind, the road bent, and finally darkness clamped back down like the lid of a pot.
“That’s the way,” I exulted. “And I think the fools shot one of their own men.” Then I remembered to ask to ask again. “Are you hurt?”
“Of course it hurts. But quite alive, thank you.” The sword lay across her lap and her expression was fierce. “Horus, are you safe?”
“You got rid of the bad man, Mama.”
We could still hear distant shouts. They’d probably mount horses.
I used the whip, keeping our exhausted horse at a gallop. The sleigh bounded over dips and rises, the animal’s nostrils exhaling big puffs of steam, her flanks heaving. Runners quivered when we glanced off rocks. We needed to hide, but the road trapped us like a tunnel.
“We can’t outrun them,” Astiza said. “The land is flat, the ferries frozen, the lanes snowbound. And we can’t win forever with an ax and antique swords.”
“So we have to truly vanish, my sorceress. We’ve gained precious minutes but they’ll run us down like hounds.”
“The devil they will.” My wife is ruthless when our family is threatened. “Is there a bridge ahead?”
“We’ll soon cross the Slavyanka River.”
“Let’s vanish there. But we need a wider lead to give us the necessary time. Ethan, watch for a tree leaning precariously over the road. We’ll set an ambush of our own.”
“I love your resourcefulness, my pretty Amazon.”
“I believe it’s called desperation. And you drive a sleigh like a charioteer, my handsome thief.”
“I believe it’s called terror.”
We halted at an aged birch that tilted as if drunk. “Undercut it,” Astiza directed. I swiftly wielded the ax while she tied our remaining lariat between the leaning tree and a stout fir on the other side of the highway. Astiza has taken a keen and necessary interest in sailor and teamster knots in our travels, and now she used a haymaker’s hitch to pull the rope as taut as a harpsichord wire. It was the height of a horse’s neck but virtually invisible in the dark. Harry used a fir limb to brush out our footsteps.
Then we sleighed on, slower now to rest our panting horse. The mare would be going further than we would.
Minutes later we heard the scream of horses and the crash of the undercut tree as it fell across the road. I could imagine the confused tangle.
“Maybe they’ll give up,” I said.
“No, but we’ve gained ten minutes. Horus, do you still have your fir broom?”
“Yes, Mama.” He enjoyed responsibility, not to mention the novelty of being up so late. Maybe he thought every family traveled this way.
“Help make us vanish.”
“Yes, Mama.”
The bridge over the Slavyanka was a hundred meters long, built on two towers of timber cribbing that rose from the frozen river. I reined to a halt at mid-span, we climbed off, and I gave a sharp smack to the rump of our horse. Off she trotte
d to follow the road, no doubt surprised at the sudden lightening of her burden. The tracks of the sleigh’s runners were like an arrow pointing into the dark. It disappeared.
We worked to do the same.
Fifteen minutes later there was a rumble of hoof beats as a dozen anxious riders pounded over the icy bridge to chase our empty sleigh. They never looked or slowed. Our mare must have gone on for some distance, because it was an hour more before our disappointed pursuers returned the way they’d come, after catching an empty conveyance. They rode more slowly this time, peering into woods that were going gauze-gray as morning slowly took form. Flakes drifted down like blossoms. Fog hugged the frozen river. The men halted in the middle of the bridge.
“They ran into the trees,” one speculated.
“Without making a track?”
“It’s snowing.”
“Not much. Not fast.”
“Or they climbed a tree,” another suggested.
“Or drowned in the river,” said a third.
“The trees are bare and the Slavyanka is hard as a rock. I am surrounded by imbeciles.” It was Von Bonin.
“Or crawled into a snowdrift.”
“If so they’re dead,” another man said. “It’s freezing out here.”
“We must have the swords,” the one-armed Prussian said. “Without them we dare not go back, not to St. Petersburg and not to Berlin.”
“There’s no proof that the American even has the swords. I say he lost them in the river, if he’s alive at all. Who knows who was on that sleigh?”
“The man who killed Heinrich, you fool.”
“Bah. The American is a ghost. He drowns, he lives. He sleighs, he vanishes. His bitch of a wife, too.”
“That woman is a witch,” another chimed in. “Everyone says so.”
“All of you sound like gibbering old maids! No. We don’t give up until we find them. Half of you this way, half that. Search the road margins for signs of where they abandoned their sleigh. Give a shot if you spot anything. And you two—down on the ice. See if they fled on the river.”
Hooves thumped as our grumbling pursuers moved off on assignment. Two slid on foot down the bank, cursing, and we watched as they walked under the bridge and stumbled away, one upstream and one down.
No signal shot was fired.
Our hiding place was the timber cribbing where it joined the beams of the bridge. I’d used the ax to chop and pry a timber so we could crawl inside to hide, scooping up the chips and swinging the log shut behind us. We lay on a bed of ballast rocks, the bridge deck inches from our noses. Astiza kept her hand close to Harry’s mouth, but he was already old enough to know not to cry out. Our boy will worry me someday, when his bravery becomes boldness and boldness makes him reckless. But for now he’s exemplary.
We lay and shivered until the Prussians gave up for good and clopped west. “We’ll ambush them again,” Von Bonin vowed.
And then it was quiet. We’d lost everything except the swords.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I whispered, as much to keep up my spirits as Astiza’s. “Catastrophe now, but soon we’ll have royal help, if Czartoryski is right. Then Adam’s mother Izabela will welcome us in Poland. A title can still be ours. Then our life will truly begin.”
“This is our life, husband.” Clinging to the underside of a bridge, inches from discovery, in a wintry forest, flakes drifting down. “This is our destiny.” And sadly, sweetly, with real love and real regret, she kissed me.
CHAPTER 10
We eventually arrived as beggars at Jelgava Palace, trudging on foot while swaddled in enough peasant coats to look like tubs of dirty laundry. Our journey had taken us more than four hundred miles southwest of St. Petersburg and thirty miles inland from the Baltic Sea. Our clothes were wet and dirty, our bellies empty, and my face crusted with stubble that Astiza assured me was entirely unflattering. Just as well not to have a mirror. Ethan Gage, ambassador to the powerful and aspiring prince!
I looked across Latvia’s Lielupe River to the island where Jelgava sprawls. Completed in 1772, the edifice is one of those bloated and bland baroque slabs of a mansion that Italian architects churn out for any aristocrat who can afford the vanity. Inherited taste is rare among the rich, so the highborn hire swarms of Romans to choose for them. The result is that one noble’s sumptuous pile looks pretty much like another’s, with coziness and sense sacrificed to grandeur and debt.
Not that I wouldn’t like to have one, if I could afford the wood to heat it.
The island is an easily guarded place where Tsar Alexander granted refuge to the future Bourbon king of France, would-be Louis XVIII. Louis is impatiently waiting for Bonaparte to fall, while Napoleon has asked Louis to renounce all rights to the French throne in return for being allowed to return home. Neither event—Napoleon’s fall or Louis’s renunciation—seems likely to happen very soon. So the brother of the beheaded king spends his days warily looking out on a snowy landscape for French spies, while fantasizing about his own crowning. This was the man Czartoryski told us to rely on.
Our escape from Von Bonin’s henchmen had been deliberately slow, in hopes that further pursuit would overshoot us. They’d galloped off in the direction of Berlin while we left the main highway and trudged on peasant tracks, winding from cabin to farm in a daze of disappointment. Our cautious route took us east of gigantic Lake Peipus and then southwest into wintry Lithuania and Latvia.
We were a world away from relations or friends. Astiza was a refugee from Egypt, I a pilgrim from America, and Harry had been forced to leave his only childhood companion. We knew we’d been betrayed, but didn’t know who, entirely, had done the betraying. We assumed my drowning was likely no longer believed. We had no sleigh, little food, and scant money, and were weary from tension. To be hunted is to never relax. To distrust is to sour every encounter. Hunger initially sharpens the mind with desperation, and then dulls it with exhaustion. The cold bites deeper. Winter nights are endless.
Two things saved us.
The first was rustic Slavic hospitality. We followed snowy tracks through rolling hills and coastal plains to avoid grand estates with their brick-walled gardens. We also cautiously skirted snug villages with their onion dome churches, haze of wood smoke, tantalizing scent of food, and too many people. Instead we called on rural peasants for help, and thankfully Astiza and Harry had the knack of winning over these simple farmers. The men were bearded like shaggy bears, grinning with missing teeth. The bright scarves of the women framed cherry-red cheeks and kindly eyes in chapped faces. I’d no weapon—we kept the swords carefully bundled—and the wary serfs quickly judged us harmless and needy. The poor often show more charity than the rich and so we journeyed from hut to hovel, explaining by signs that we were almost bankrupt and harried. Our hosts nodded in commiseration and shared beet soup, coarse bread, and honey mead without expectation of payment, watching indulgently as Harry gobbled. They even gave us old coats and cloaks.
Our second salvation was the abiding peace of nature. Winter’s beauty became our antidote to despair, its blacks and whites starkly scenic. Oddly and unexpectedly, I found our plight lightening my spirit as much as it depressed it. Instead of maneuvering for advantage in cutthroat Russian society, we’d escaped to fundamentals. We gave ourselves over to the rhythm of the earth, its pale dawns and pink sunsets, its bitter freezes and cheerful campfires. The outdoors was pure compared to the hives and muck of cities and castles. I liked the company of my family, which required no posing. I liked that choices became simple. Which lane? When to rest? Where to collect firewood? Which cabin to approach?
It reminded me of my fur trade days. While I didn’t confess to Astiza that I’d begun to secretly wonder how happy I’d really be with noble title and overseer responsibility, I did wonder if Rousseau was right that our natural state is a more primitive one. “He who multiplies riches multiplies ca
res,” Franklin once warned me.
Some nights the aurora borealis was on display. Harry was initially uncertain about its eerie shimmer, but I told him it was a promise of better days to come.
“Is that heaven, Papa?”
“Maybe heaven’s door.”
The winter days were slowly lengthening and brightening. Snow sparkled by day and glowed by night. The stillness let us listen to the woods slowly drip to life. The forest streams smoked at dawn, their water sharp as champagne. The first birds of the year called and flitted. Moss had the glisten of fine raiment.
Sometimes Astiza and I took turns carrying Harry, but most of the time he marched manfully in the snow, fatigued, hungry, curious, and rarely complaining. He had us all to himself, after all, until he could bask in the attention of the fussy farm matrons who spoiled him.
The peasant huts were low, snug, and colorless, given that paint is one of the boundaries between city and country. On the outside the logs were weathered as gray as the periodic overcast, and inside they were stained almost black by hearth fires and rush lights. Yes, the habitation was rude. But there was a Red Corner for guests beneath an icon of Mary, shelves for precious cups and pots, and pegs for guests’ fur coats and woolen mittens. The wealthiest peasants had a prized ancestral samovar from which they would serve tea in tiny cups, guests taking ten servings each during the long winter evenings. The blackened ceilings were lightened by burning eggshells in the hearth, the heat carrying the white bits aloft to stick overhead and sparkle like little stars.
The rudest huts had no chimney or windows and an open hearth, which meant the door had to be cracked for ventilation when the owners lit a fire. We learned to wait to enter until heat carried the worst of the smoke to the ceiling, and then not to stand lest we spend our visit coughing.
The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Page 8