Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (116 page)

“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 angry 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.

But for now, it was their best chance. They struck out northwest, where the rail line ran through the thick stands of overgrown pine. Vanya had taken Kolya back and Jamie missed the weight of the baby, for the boy had become both a comfort and a part of him over this last year. He felt so protective that he could not sleep at night unless Kolya was tucked up beside him, his heavy breathing weight the thing that kept Jamie tethered to the planet, traveling along this invisible road leading, he hoped, out of the Soviet Union—hopefully before the wolves shed their reservations about eating them. They walked heads down, for the snow had begun to fall thick and fast, large, wet flakes that clung to their clothes and eyelashes. They walked in silence much of the afternoon and Jamie was considering that it was time to stop and set up whatever sort of camp they could manage when Vanya exclaimed aloud.

“Yasha—look!”

Jamie looked up, wondering what the hell it was now: a tribe of bears, a herd of moose, half the Soviet Army? He cleared the ice from his eyelashes, peering through the thick fall of snow to make out the humped form of something very large ahead… and smiled.

There it was, one of the abandoned rail cars that apparently dotted the countryside, right here with pine trees growing up to the doors and rust coating its sides. Tonight they would sleep soundly and not have to worry about either the wolves or their fire dying down.

The doors were stiff with long disuse and screeched as Jamie and Vanya pried them open, setting off a shower of rust into the pristine snow that coated both the car and the tracks below. Inside it was filthy with time and neglect but it was only a matter of securing a few pine branches and sweeping things down. A tiny stove stood in the corner and a clouded mirror hung askew on one wall. There was a table too, and a chair that had long ago succumbed to the depredations of rot and insects, suggesting that someone had sought sanctuary here for a time and made of this rusty car a home. It begged the question of what had happened to that person, though no one voiced the question aloud, for superstition about their own fate prevented such queries.

Shura took Agrafina with him to find some leaves and shrubbery that she could eat, while Vanya went to forage for more wood. There was a small pile of dry kindling and split birch to start a fire, which Jamie did before changing Kolya and feeding him.

They ate sparingly but well that night. Shura managed to trap a wild hare in the woods and cooked it with some roots, which were bitter, but at least filling. An old tin bucket proved sturdy enough to hold water so they filled it with snow and melted it down enough times for each to have a bit of a wash.

It was Jamie’s turn to take the first watch so Shura and Vanya bedded down right after dinner and were asleep in a matter of minutes.

Jamie sat on an upturned birch log and hoped that he could stay awake until it was Vanya’s turn, for the warmth and relative safety of the train car had a soporific effect. The night breathed out chill vapors but inside the train car it was warm next to the potbellied heater, glowing red with birch logs. Kolya was fed and Agrafina was curled up in a corner sleeping the sleep of a righteous goat. Shura had found her some grass in a relatively snow-free patch under a birch tree. Kolya slept deeply, face gilded soft in the light of the fire. His hair was coming in thickly, a rich, deep red-gold like coins immersed in whiskied honey. His weight was low but should they survive this trip, that could be remedied swiftly enough.