Far North (23 page)

Yuri could see I was foxed, and he kept trying to distract him, but the old priest wouldn’t be told. ‘Here it is,’ he seemed to saying, ‘I’ve got it all squared away. Here are my jams, here are my jellies,’ as he dusted off another book, or roll of papers.

After about an hour, they locked up the church and we went back to the house. Yuri boiled up some kind of herb tea.

We couldn’t say anything to each other, but sitting among them felt like the first happiness I’d known for so long. I wished I had something to give them in return. Then it struck me that I did have some words in their language.

I took the memory stone out of my pack, set it on the table between us, and showed them the girl from Polyn. They weren’t happy until they’d seen it half a dozen times.

They loved it. The old priest most of all, slapping the other on the back each time they watched it.
Lyudi
budushchevo!
he laughed, as though it was the best joke in the world.

I was pleased to see him so lively, then a terrible feeling came over me. I understood that he’d taken it as a picture of the present. They thought that was an image of the place as it was today. If I hadn’t seen where it came from, I would have formed the same idea.

Here they were in their outpost, guarding their trove of holy books, waiting for news of the outside world, and it seemed that I’d brought them good tidings.

The misunderstanding made me heavy-hearted. I said to them, ‘You’ve got the wrong idea. This is a picture of the past. This girl is dead. The city looks nothing like this. I’ve been there.’

But the words I was saying were just so much noise to them. They believed what they wanted to. I was the harbinger of something good. Any day now, people would begin to drift back. There would be damp beds airing out in the street. Shovels would turn over the soil in long-neglected gardens. The silent bell in the cupola would call a congregation to service, and someone would pin a medal on the old priest’s chest for taking such care of his archive.

They made me a bed on a ledge above their tiled stove. I told them I’d be happier on the floor but they insisted. It was too warm and soft for me to sleep well up there, and I was troublelyn. They t I’d deceived them. Seeing what false hope had done to them lowered my spirits.

The next morning they were just as cheery. They gave me buckwheat groats for breakfast and asked to watch the memory stone again.

I gave the stone to the priest and told him he could keep it. He tried to press an old book on me in return, but I refused.

The two of them walked me to the edge of their empty village and kissed me three times goodbye.

I looked back half a dozen times and they were still there, watching me go.

 *

Spring was on the land. There was no snow to be seen anywhere. One hot noontime, I decided to bathe. I tethered the horse and stripped at the edge of a stream. My feet were so pale they looked bluish.

Although the river was shallow, it was swollen and faster than it looked. I almost took a tumble as I stepped in. I braced my legs against a rock as the current eddied around my knees, then squatted down to let the water wash all over me. The cold made my head ring.

After I’d got myself clean, I laundered my clothes on a rock and then left them to dry in the sun.

I lay on the bank soaking up the heat like a lizard, fighting the urge to drift off, but the sound of the river lulled me to sleep. I must have slept for an hour or more, because I woke up groggy, with my vision all bleached out from the sunshine.

It took me a moment or two to come to my senses: there’s the horse, munching green shoots off a tree, there’s my damp clothes, here’s me, naked, with dried mud up to my ankles that looks like a pair of socks.

And suddenly, over the sound of the river running, I heard a buzz, very, very faint, but growing stronger. Up in the eastern part of the sky, maybe a quarter of a mile up, was the silver glint of a plane.

I stood there naked, shouting myself hoarse and waving my clothes as she passed overhead.

Judging from the angle of her flight, it seemed like she’d come out of the Far North, maybe from Alaska.

By the time I thought to fire my gun, the plane was in the southwest part of the sky.

I loosed off four or five signal shots, but she gave no sign of hearing me. The bullets would have been barely more than faint pops above the sound of the engine.

The plane slipped away into the deep blue of the sky like a tiny silver fish. But as she vanished over the trees behind me, I was certain I knew where she was headed.

3

I
T
TOOK
ME
TWO
days to reach the base. I rode like a madwoman. I don’t recall that I ate at all. Sometimes I’d dismount and walk alongside the horse to let her rest. All that time, I could hear my heart banging in my chest with hope.

Seeing that plane the first time at the lake, I’d never known hope like it. I was a castaway. The plane was a sail, luffing and snapping to a new course as it came to find me. I would walk on its warm deck with my pretty feet. There was silk and cloves in its hold, coconuts, oranges. Well, I guess it brought on the hooey in me. There’s a little in there. I am a woman.

The second plane gave me a different kind of joy. This time it was the cavalry. This time it was the law in armour. I pictured it touching down on the base like a twister, ripping the huts out of the ground, scything down the guards. Imagine those captives free and bent on revenge: they’d kill Boathwaite like a dog and scorch his slave camp to the roots.

 *

I neared the base around noon and dismounted where the forest began to thin. The land around the walls was bare. It had been clear-cut in the early days for timber and to strip the cover from the approach. I hung back out of sight behind a stand of trees.

My first glimpse of the base was through the spyglass. I could see the mismatched felts on the roofs beyond the

palisade and smoke rising from the smithy and the cookhouse.

The wind brought the hum of the latrines across the open ground. Everything looked smaller and grubbier than I remembered. My eye was jaded after the marvels of Polyn, but it was also because the snow was gone. Snow flatters poor workmanship. It covers up dirt and makes the crooked look quaint. And it keeps things from stinking.

I started to make a circuit of the base, keeping close behind the fringe of trees. There were no men to be seen, but just beside the front gate, no more than twenty yards outside the walls, stood the plane.

What a beautiful thing it was, like a muscle or a blade – all purpose.

There was a ripple of heat haze above its top wing that made it look like it was still in motion.

As nearly as I could remember, it was the same as the one that had gone down by the lake. The colours of its hull were red and white, and it had a door in its tail like the one I had smashed open that time on the hillside.

It had a weathered look. The dents and patches on the wings hinted at the labour it took to keep it flying. And yet I could scarcely believe that the creatures who made that thing were human.

Everything at the base had a handprint on it. Everything took its scale from the shape of a man, and the work he could do in one day. I could judge with my eye how long it would take to raise a stretch of its wall, or level the simple road that ran around it. I could probably name every tool they used to build it.

But to make that plane – was it six months or a century? What mysteries were at work in its engine?

It looked as out of place standing on that bleached grass as the wristwatch had on the herder’s arm.

I am in awe of this broken pianola and the nameless craftsman who fitted her with brass wires and felted hammers and a spiked drum to read the piano rolls. I’ve saved these piles of books for the knowledge that’s in them. I’ve seen Polyn. I marvel dailying wermy morning rides at the beautiful skeleton of my dead city. But to turn words and numbers into metal and make them fly – what bigger miracle can there be?

It’s a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god’s handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There’s not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

But that plane in flight didn’t pump and lurch like a big bird does. It moved steady and level, and faster than any bird I’ve ever seen.

The truth is, I half-expected its crew to be gods.

And what would they know of us? What had they seen from the sky? What would men like that make of the brutal facts of our life at the base?

I thought they would feel about me the way I felt about the simple understanding of the Tungus, with their shamans, and spirits, and chuchunaa.

*

I rode back into the bush to wait that night and ponder. I am rash by nature. I act best in the heat of the moment. Given too long to think, I can fall to brooding.

More for company than anything practical, I set a small

fire, and fed it with long, slim twigs, holding onto the ends of them until they were almost consumed by the flame.

A dry wind blew and fanned the embers to orange.

Over the years since I’d seen the first plane, it had become my North Star. Just knowing about it was a comfort to me. I’d touched its hull with my own hands. I’d buried what was left of its crew. I had poured all my wishes into it. It was a vessel that held everything my world was not.

But now that it came to dealing with the living, breathing people that were on this new one, my nerve had failed.

All sorts of bewildered feelings were stirred up inside me.

Part of me was dying to know more. But another noisy part was saying it was better to leave now, knowing the first one wasn’t a fluke, and not go further, which was bound to lead to ugliness and disappointment.

Big as the plane looked to me, hope was too heavy a cargo for it to carry.

I still wonder if there could have been anything on the plane that would have made what I’d gone through seem worthwhile.

It’s so hard to think now what might have been on it, instead of what was.

 *

What happens lays down a steel track over all the flimsy forms of
what might have been
.

I’ve been around this many times. I see myself in the wood, feeding the twigs into my solitary fire. And I see the empty plane sleeping by the gates of the base. I move myself, like a picture on a memory stone, until I’m riding backwards to Polyn, giving Shamsudin the kiss of life on the way, trudging backwards to the base with Tolya and the prisoners, the years of confinement, the months of work retuning Boathwaite’s garden to a wilderness.

Back and back I go, to before Ping’s death, to when this city had life in it, to before the bad years, until I’m standing at the Bering Sea with my father, watching the Chukchi pack the innards back into a walrus and set him adrift on the water. And at each moment, I think, here? Or, here? Is this the choice that set the points for what followed?

Whatever way I come at it, it always plays out the same.The bad thing happens. The city burns. Those I love die. The plane crashes. I search for another. And when I finally find one, it has Eben Callard on it.

4

H
E
WAS
OLDER,
of course – yet somehow that surprised me. And even after spending some time with him, I found that his face was still overlaid by the younger one that I had spent so many hours remembering.

‘I knew a Makepeace once,’ he said. He snapped his fingers for someone to pour him a drink. The blind can have a bossy way about them. I lied and told him I was from a different city.

He sat in the chair behind Boathwaite’s tin desk wearing a dark broadcloth suit, staring straight past me with those cloudy eyes. His shirt was white and newly pressed.

‘Your voice is familiar,’ he said. ‘It must be that settler accent.’ He never gave any hint that he might have known me. ‘Boathwaite spoke highly of you.’

I still had the dust on me from my long ride. Six of his men were posted around the room. They were armed. Two wore bandoliers. They’d patted me down for weapons when I’d come in.

At dawn, I had ridden up to the gates. The itch to know had overcome any thought I had for my own safety. If I’d had any inkling who’d been on it, of course I would have made straight for home. But I never connected that plane with anything in my own past. In my mind, it came out of the orderly world of my parents with a promise as straight and green as the twig in that dove’s beak: dry land this way, turn your ship around.

The sentry knew me by sight, but another man, one of Eben Callard’s it turned out, was standing guard beside him.

They called someone out of the guardhouse to take the horse. I didn’t know the boy. There was straw in his hair and his face was crinkled from sleep.

I was sorry to see the horse go. There was no easy way out of there without her, but my desire to know about the plane had overmastered every other thought.

All the omens were poor. The sentry gave me a sly and uneasy look as he hauled the door open. And on the far side of the parade ground, a rough wooden cross had been dug into the dirt, and from it was dangling a body.

The wind had sprung up, and when it blew, it caught him like a sail and made the joints of the crosspiece creak.

Though the face was black and swollen, I could see from his build that it was Boahwaite. There were wounds to his body and head, and his arms had been nailed through the wrists. His belly was all bloated with gas.

From the manner of his death, I guessed the prisoners had chosen it themselves.

He looked like he’d been dead at least two days. They must have turned on him in a fit of revenge soon after the plane landed.

I’ll confess I was taken aback. I’m no lover of mob justice. People making their own law is an ugly sight – and it’s not what I had expected of the men in the plane.

Shamsudin had said that civilization meant city life. I wasn’t sure about that. To me it meant streetlights, plumbing, schools, and things worked out by reason. I can’t see the reason in deliberate cruelty. It makes a fetish of what’s most base in us.

But I had to trust that the men in the plane were wise enough to know what they were about. No one else had died. The walls were intact. The place had not been razed. Maybe the body on the cross was the price of that order.

 *

Whatever upsets there had been, I still held my old rank as a guard. My room was just as shabby as I’d left it. The dust on the window looked like milled gold in the sunlight.

Out of the window, I watched the place coming to life. First the reveille and the weary prisoners dragging their chains out the bunkhouse. How ragged they looked.

After fifteen minutes, one of the new guards came in and said Mr Callard would see me. By the time I reached the office, I had a pretty good idea what I’d find.

On the walk over, his man said to me that he’d lost his eyes defending a woman’s honour. That made me smile.

 *

The first meeting was short. He wanted to know where I’d been. How come I’d survived. I told him as little as possible. They excused me to go back to my room and clean up.

Someone brought food and water and a change of clothes. They gave me a rough towel with a tablet of green soap on it. I scrubbed myself and cleaned my hair with it in the washroom. I could only think that it had come on the plane. It had been so long since I’d seen any. We used to make our own in Evangeline. Fat and lye is what you use to do it.
Jezebel
.

There was a little scent in this one. It seemed to make my hair go stringy. As I washed, I thought of how I would escape. First light. I’d take another horse. I’d take two.

Tears made my eyes go blurry. It was the disappointment of it. After all this. I was the one holding a garbled message. I thought I was a caretaker, shoring up the few things I could against annihilation, trying to be worthy of the traditions of my ancestors. I’d always been so proud that I lived in this world. But I was just like pa. I needed another world to redeem the present.

I’ve looked back at my pages and found I’ve written:
I
don’t need it to be otherwise
.

You know how it is when the most cussed and determined bachelor falls in love, he colours what’s left of his hair and gets his heart broken? Or the total lady who does the flowers in the church, has her first sherry at sixty and dies a drunk?

I’d walked through life like a cat on ice, testing each step before I took it. Now it turned out I’d tiptoed into a beartrap.

It’s something when disaster walks in through an open window. But what could you do? Every life has some of that. But when you barred yourself into a strongbox, rubbed your hands, and spent years telling everyone how safe you are. That’s the trouble I’m talking about. Everyone sees it coming but you. That’s in the nature of a blind spot.

The years stretched off in front of me like a frozen winter road. The hope that I’d fed on, that I’d told in secret like a stash of hidden money, was gone.

How had I lived before Ping or the plane, without the sense that any other life was mortised to mine, or the thought that somewhere children were walking to school and the dead getting buried, and a pianola playing in tune? Sitting in the dark all winter, waiting for the candles to run out. Trying to catch an echo of the life that had been here. Waking in the dark. Cleaning my guns at night. Crunching out to the stable with the saddle over my shoulder.

My life didn’t even count as suffering. It was one long cruel joke that the wind had written on the snow.

5

T
HERE
WAS
AN
odd smell in the air which I remarked on to the guards who came to get me towards midday. They said the stills were going full pelt to brew fuel for the plane. It meant the kitchens were short-handed and most of the inmates on half rations.

I questioned the wisdom of that, privately. For all his shortcomings and cruelties, Boathwaite never let the prisoners go hungry. The food was often dull, but it was plentiful. He’d known as well as I did that well-fed people were more biddable.

They escorted me across the parade ground. I knew the way as well as they did, but I guessed they’d been told to keep a close eye on me.

Up in the fields, the men were labouring as slowly as ever, weeding and mending fences, grumbling and moving livestock.

Things looked much like they always had. And yet some odd changes had taken place in my absence. With Boathwaite and Tolya dead, the running of the base had fallen to a man named Purefoy. He was settler stock himself, but a shy man who I’d always felt Boathwaite trusted because he didn’t have the dash and swagger of a natural leader, or carry much weight with the other guards.

Empty bellies, the old boss gone – there was more than the fumes from the stills in the air. I was almost too cast down to smell it, but sure enough, alongside the stink of brewing, and the dirt, and the latrines, was a sharp whiff of mutiny.

They had laid out Boathwaite’s room for a banquet. I didn’t feel like eating any more. Purefoy and a half-dozen of the senior guards were there. They had shaved and put on their best coats and three or four of them had brought their wives. You could see by the way the men bowed and scraped t Eben Callard and his men that they felt themselves to be country cousins.

The women sat by themselves at a separate table, wearing old-fashioned formal clothes. I couldn’t help wondering about Boathwaite’s widow and that little girl of his.

 *

There was a place laid for me at the main table. Eben Callard sat at the head of it and there were fourteen or so places set round it. Much of the food had come from the base, but there was plenty there that must have travelled with them on the plane, since we had no way of growing or making it there. There was sweet wine for the women, little heaps of orange salmon eggs, bowls of lump sugar, candy, and canned crab meat, and bottles of cognac with labels on them.

At a signal from one of the guards, we took our seats.

It was a strained and nervy gathering. No one was sure if we were meant to start eating.

Eben Callard rolled a shotglass of cognac between his fingers. ‘We don’t visit often,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to leave a bad impression. Things have had to be done. Some harsh decisions had to be made. But I don’t want to dwell on that now.’

He was speaking of Boathwaite. Even now his body was tanning in the sunshine out in the yard. I wondered what they considered to be his crime. He must have run the base as they asked him: turning the raw prisoners into farmhands and sending gangs of them out to the Zone to scavenge from Polyn. Maybe he’d been a little softer in command than they wanted? Had he failed to bring enough back from the Zone? Or was his fate down to some lingering politics that I had no sight of, like what had seen me imprisoned by Boathwaite’s brother?

I guessed that whatever happened here was a sideshow to the world Eben had flown out of. Maybe his standing there hinged on his adventures here in the north. I knew now that on the other side of the straits something limped on. It hadn’t abandoned us – in fact, it seemed to look to us for its salvation.

My mind was snapped back to the room by his mentioning the Zone.

His white, sightless eyes had fixed on me at the end of the table. ‘The last trip to the Zone threw up some promising things. We’re looking forward to learning more before we leave.’

He proposed a toast and put his glass to his lips. The level in it barely altered, while all around the table the guards emptied theirs. Purefoy proposed a toast in return. People began eating, the drinking became general and loosened the mood in the room.

The guard next to me served me with roasted meat from a tray. I remembered him as a bully. Flushed with drink, he boasted of his young wife and whispered indiscreetly about what I’d missed.

‘They gave him a last chance one year ago. That’s when they sent the Jap out from Alaska.’ He nodded his head at Apofagato, who sat up at the far end of the table.

He’d been to the Zone himself, he said. Trouble was, Boathwaite was too damn soft. A dozen or so prisoners a year would never make a dent in that place. They needed to turn the whole base out, march them into the Zone en masse.

When he said ‘soft,’ I thought of the pile of ies in the snow-melt on the bridge.

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said.

 *

The afternoon dragged on. The bottles kept coming. I didn’t drink and nor did Eben Callard. By mid-afternoon, the noise in the room was a roar. Men took turns making outlandish toasts. The guards’ wives were flushed and giggly.

Suddenly Eben Callard’s voice cut through the buzz of drunken laughter. ‘We haven’t heard from Makepeace,’ he said.

I said I didn’t mean to give offence, but I’d drunk as much as I wanted.

The room quietened. He said he hadn’t had a toast in mind. He’d wanted to hear me speak about the Zone and what we’d found there.

So I told them what I’d seen, more or less, leaving out my own visit to the city. I told them about the Tungus boy, and the poison, and how we shot the prisoners on the bridge.

That phrase
too soft
that the man next to me had used kept coming into my head. I told them about Zulfugar and the soft-nosed bullet that had cored him like an apple.

I wanted them all to know, the women too, since it was done in their name. And I told them that we had come back empty-handed.

They heard me out politely and without interest, as if these were things that we didn’t speak of, but were plain to all of us.

When I was done speaking, Eben Callard thanked me for my account of the trip. ‘Sure you’ve been straight with us?’ he said.

I told him I had.

‘Because some of my men followed your trail into the bush and went digging.’

He signalled and someone brought a sack into the room. I knew what was in it. I’d buried it near the ashes of the fire the night before.

Eben Callard reached in and pulled out the mason jar with its waves of light. He held it up with both hands, as though he was going to bless it. The room went quiet enough that you could hear the faint hum of all that light moving.

‘I wish I had eyes to see it,’ he said, ‘because I hear it’s a pretty thing.’

6

W
HY
E
BEN
C
ALLARD
needed to make theatre out of proving me a liar, I don’t know, but after he had, he had his men take me down to a room in the courtyard where they left me for a while, bound fast, before they hauled me out to question me.

They took to me another room with shades over the windows, where, in spite of the heat of the day, they had a stove lit which they’d rake from time to time with pokers, with the plain intention of letting me think they were going to burn me. They said they wanted to know why I’d liand where the thing had come from and why I had hid it, but the truth was, I think they were just itching to knock me around the place.

One of them stepped forward with a roll of papers which he spread out in front of me.

‘I want you to look carefully at these drawings and tell me if any of the things the prisoners found are shown on it.’