Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (85 page)

“Gregor.” Jamie said his name quietly but with enough authority to make certain the man heard him clearly.

The man’s head rose slowly, like that of an aggrieved titan. His eyes in the dim of the banya were deep pools with neither fathom nor shore. Jamie sat down beside him. The animal reek of anger was thick in the air, under-noted with the sweet copper salt of fresh blood. The stones on the grates were smoking with heat, making the air thick and hard to breathe.

“What’s going on?” Jamie kept his tone as bland as if this were any ordinary night in the gulag. Which it was in many ways.

For a moment it seemed Gregor was not going to answer but then he sighed, expelling breath that was nine parts vodka into the thick heat of the banya.

“It is my mother’s birthday, or I think it is. I woke up with the echo of it in my head. This makes me sad and so I drink to drown it and when the sorrow drowns, the anger surfaces. She was a big woman, the sort that one sees on Soviet posters—as though if you scratched her skin—you would find the iron of the nation beneath rather than flesh and blood. I believed for a long time that she did have iron under her skin. She had beautiful hair though. It hung to her knees when she took it out at night. I remember lying beside her, wrapped in it. It was the color of sunrise, all red and gold.”

Jamie had a sudden clear picture of his own mother, one of those moments that the mind snatched and stored in the heart so that one could see it unroll years later as clear and sharp as the moment it happened. She didn’t move like other people. She barely seemed to touch the earth, as though the strings that bound and held others could not contain her. As though her elements refused such dull matters as gravity. She had been a being of grace and he missed her.

“I don’t know exactly when my mother abandoned me, but I think it was June because those first nights in the fields and ditches I remember the flowers that were blooming. At night they would be all wrapped up tight like they were holding a secret, but in the morning I would drink the dew from their cups. It was the only water I could find those first few days. I don’t even know how old I am. Isn’t that odd, Yasha? To not even know when one arrived in this world?”

“It is indeed,” Jamie agreed thinking of his own childhood and how there had not always been stability but there had always been love, a roof over his head, food on the table and someone to worry if he didn’t come home at night. This man had never had any of those things and the burden of it he would carry for a lifetime. And there was nothing anyone could say or do to lighten that load. There were some things that, because they were lacking, caused a person to carry them for the rest of his life. A parent unable to love her child was one.

“Why do you think she abandoned you? Isn’t it more likely that she was killed or taken away?”

“I don’t know why. Only that if I ever did know the truth, it left me long ago. Maybe I told myself that she abandoned me so that I would be angry enough to keep going, so the thought of one day finding her and punishing her would goad me to survive.”

“What do you remember of her?” Jamie asked.

Gregor did not answer the question at once, but looked long into the cup of his big hands as though he held the past there within them and could read and understand the lines of it only if he looked long enough. “Nothing, just echoes in my head, only half heard, a snatch of a song I think she once sang, a long story that she never finished telling about a boy who was born of a mother but had no father. I think, Yasha, even if I do not know, that boy was me. But how is a boy born without a father?”

Some men wore the protective clothing of quiet citizenship, of belonging to one tribe or another, but in their hearts they were fugitives and always would be. Some men had never known how to find nor wear that protective cloak that hid their inner life from the prying eyes of others, those who would hunt, who only understood the chase. Gregor, despite his bravado, was a fugitive and naked in the world. Jamie knew this because he was one too.

“I remember the forest—it was my first friend. I remember how the mosses whispered to me. Did you know that lichens only grow when a human voice is near? And that some flowers, the most beautiful, grow only in the rot of dead things. Or that some curl their petals up like a young girl ashamed just because of a man looking at her?”

“No,” Jamie responded quietly. “I did not know that.” He took Gregor’s hand, judging that it was safe enough at this point. The cut across the palm was deep and ragged, with the glisten of exposed tendon, pearl white amongst the rubies and garnets of torn flesh. However, it was not life threatening, and there was time for Gregor to say what he needed to say.

“I can still tell you what the light was like on those days, how it rippled and ran before me, and was a living thing, like a playmate that you could never quite catch. How it fell in the hollows and slid over the hills, and how it seemed to point out to me what I could eat—the gleam of it on a berry so that it shone like a jewel and attracted my eye and tongue, how it sparkled like a dance on the water so I would stop to drink. I look back and remember those days as if they are film, a strange story of a changeling like the ones you told us about. I don’t know though, Yasha, if I was the real child or the strange one left by the fairies.

“The world is so vast and strange at night, especially to a small person. There is nothing familiar, nothing to which one can hold. I would sing myself to sleep, lisping the words, my own voice seeming too small to be of much use. I remember the strangeness of the night sky, and counting the stars I could not name. But it was not long before the forest became home, before I could smell as the wolf does, and know as the deer when the rain was coming. I could spend hours watching fish swim in ponds and then kill one with my hands and eat it raw. I knew which mushrooms were poisonous, and which were not. I never made a mistake. How I do not know, only that the earth was my mother, the forest my guardian angel. 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. This happens after a long time with the land, and no human being to talk to, to hear. Language becomes something far more than words. It becomes everything.”

Gregor stood and threw the bucket of water onto the stones, now heated to a deadly temperature. The steam billowed out, the stones hissing violently in protest.The heat hit Jamie in a wave and he felt sweat bead instantly across his skin. Gregor sat back down beside him and leaned in, grasping the back of Jamie’s neck, putting his forehead, slick with heat, against Jamie’s own. Jamie could feel the man’s pulse pounding against his temples. The smell of blood and vodka rose between them like a musk, steam floating around them in thick tendrils.

“Tonight, between you and me, no masks, my beautiful harlequin, just truth.”

“Just remember that the truth, to quote Heisenberg, becomes less certain the more closely one attempts to know it. Like all stories, truth is subject to the interpretation of the teller.”

Gregor laughed, but it was a dark sound. “You are such a bastard, Yasha.”

“So are you,” Jamie replied.

“The woman will break your heart.”

“Perhaps,” Jamie said, the taste of blood and sweat in his mouth like an elemental ether. “It is a risk one takes.”

“Some stories are written in blood while it is still flowing.”

“Stories exist already. How they are written or told is merely a matter of mechanics.”

“Mechanics can kill you.”

“This I know as well as you do.”

Gregor released his hold on Jamie and the two men drew apart.

“You are a storyteller, Yasha, and so you know that even for one man there are many ways to tell one story. Perhaps, no matter how you tell it, it is still the same story at its heart, always.”

“Finish your own story,” Jamie said, perfectly still, his breathing matching that of the man across from him.

Gregor acquiesced with a sharp-toothed smile.

“I convinced myself that I too was iron beneath the skin, like my mother, that I could not bleed as an ordinary boy, that I was impervious to cold and snow and the dark, black nights. I think it is why I survived. I believed I could not die and so I could not. Then one day I was proven all too human. There they were, standing in the dust of a road, the fields stretched out behind them. They were filthy, clothes too small and torn, a ragged group of children. They were older than me and I saw them as I might have seen an alien from a distant planet. I had not looked in a mirror within my memory and it had been long since I had seen another human.”

Through the steam there were the jeweled tones of the man’s chest, the domed blue towers, the coiled tail and fiery breath of the dragon—the elements of a fairytale, the cruellest one ever told, because it was true. Indeed, there were many ways to tell a story. Words inside of words like an unending matryoshka doll.

“They were a feral tribe and I was not one of them. Nor could I be. I was frightened but so longed to be one of them at the same time. To no longer be alone. But they feared me as only a mob can fear a single person. They were of one mind and their leader did not want to find a challenge in her midst.”

Even at the tender age of five Gregor would have been a challenge, Jamie knew. Much as he himself had been. An entity that existed outside the norm and was thusly, and perhaps naturally, rejected.

“I wanted to show them I was special, thinking that would make them take me in. So I cut myself to prove it, so they would know I was like my mother, that I did not bleed, that I had silver beneath my skin, that I could not be broken no matter what they did to me. I cut too deeply, too bravely. I was foolish. I ran with blood in front of them. And they beat me for it. With sticks and stones and kicks and curses.”

“For, of course, there was no iron beneath the skin. There was only a child,” Jamie said, only his tone was not soft as it might have been for that long ago child.

“They left me there in that field to die. One could not expect more than that, for they were wild things just as I was, though I learned a valuable lesson that night. I could bleed. I could die. I would never let another person see me bleed. I would give them only the iron of my soul. But you, Yasha, to you I give blood. And to me, to me you give nothing of yourself.”

“You want my blood? I could open my veins to you, allow you to drink me to the dregs. It would not be enough to quench your thirst.”

The dark eyes were lustrous with memory and something more, the taut muscle of the big body still as stone. “I know this, my Yasha, but it does not stop me from the wanting of it.”

“Life often consists of wanting without having, or at least, I have found it so myself.”

Silence reigned for a long moment, their eyes holding through the steam and heat, neither flinching nor blinking. Obsidian to emerald, the language of the ether, no less powerful in its intent and meaning than all the words of the world’s infinite lexicon.

“My wolf that I told you of long ago, I found her when she was just a puppy, her mother killed by a hunter, she left for dead. I fed her on my blood those first days, until I could give her the blood of another. It is how she survived.”

“I was not aware that a wolf could be suckled on blood.” It was given the tone of a question but they both knew it was not.

“Oh yes, Yasha, they can smell it from thrice nine lands, just like in the old tales. And once they smell it, they will come for it, have no doubt.”

“Your story,” Jamie said, softly, but with a softness that held flint at its core, “is like a pearl dissolving in wine, a beautiful tale perhaps, though not based entirely in truth.”

Gregor looked at him long and deep, the dark eyes as unfathomable as the stars to which he could not give names. And then he used the language of the camps to give salve to the wounds of stories that defied all reason, all humanity, to stories that made the teller feel vulnerable.

“If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairytale.”

Chapter Sixty-three
April 1975
Phoenix in the Ashes

The world wheeled on, stars fell from the heavens
, tides crashed upon the shores, skirmishes took place upon borders: some lost, some won, some both. In England, there was inflation, scandal, corruption and collusion and a trembling ceasefire with the mad cousins from across the chilly sea. In Vietnam, a war ended and did not end—without resolution, without victory, a thoroughly modern war with all its hideous consequences. In the East, the flow of black gold to the West was lessened considerably. Prices soared and machines were silenced.

And as was wont to happen every year, poets and saviors died, as did musicians and spies, diplomats and artists, soldiers and con men. A President was toppled from grace and a nation lost what was left of its innocence.

The Cold War ground on as it had for many years. It too was a war with casualties, though these were rarely made public and often those who fell in the fight simply disappeared into a chill grave in foreign soil, with their family and loved ones never knowing the truth of their fate. Dissidents were caged in Emperors’ prisons under the guise of madness and the Soviet machine, grey as the dullest iron, ground on.

Sometimes men lived to tell their tales, but sometimes they did not.

And in a far corner of Russia, in a small labor camp forgotten by some and remembered by others, none of this was known, for perhaps little of it mattered, for none of those who dwelled there were going anywhere and the world seemed a distant place of little consequence. Time passed slowly here, and dates on a calendar page ceased to have the meaning they had once held. Time was measured by the growth of a child, by the change of seasons, by the falls of snow and the warm winds arriving from the south.

Perhaps these people were lulled by the rule of a benevolent dictator. Perhaps they had forgotten what they needed to, and remembered only that which seemed necessary to survival in a deep, dark forest, forgotten in the empire’s hinterland.