The Romanov Cross: A Novel (55 page)

Sergei. One more name to add to the list of the dead and beloved in her life. The list was already so long, and she was barely eighteen. How long would it become?
Forgive me
, she prayed.
Forgive me for the suffering my family and I have brought upon so many
. She felt herself both blessed—she alone had survived the slaughter in the house with the whitewashed windows—and at the same time accursed. No one else would have to live on, knowing exactly what had happened there, reliving it in dreams … and nightmares.

Late the next day, when she arose, the few hours of sunlight had nearly passed. She ventured out of the tiny cabin and into a frostbitten twilight. All around her rose a stockade wall, and within it a small but tidy colony had been erected. Apart from the church, which stood at one end and appeared to serve also as a meeting house and dining hall, there were cabins and livestock pens, vegetable gardens, a blacksmith shop and apothecary, even a common outhouse, with separate doors for men and women. However bleak the surroundings, it was a world unto itself.

A man splitting logs looked up from his chores and touched the brim of his fur cap. Then he returned to his work. A woman in a long peasant skirt, with a woolen shawl drawn over her head and around her shoulders, carried a bushel basket of roots and mushrooms into one of the cabins; a pale and dismal light crept across the threshold before the door was closed again with a creak and a thump. A cold wind whistled between the timbers of the stockade, and Ana was inevitably reminded of the palisade that had been built around the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky had said it was for the protection of the imperial family as they took the air, but no one had been fooled by that. It might just as well have been iron bars.

“So you’re awake?” she heard, as Deacon Stefan strode through the main gates; he was carrying a fishing pole over one shoulder and a couple of halibut on a line. “I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a log.”

He wasn’t wearing his cassock anymore but a thick fur coat that
fell to his ankles. Long strands of his hair, so blond as to be almost white, spilled from under his Cossack-style hat. “Are you feeling well?”

“Yes,” she said, “I think so.” She hadn’t even considered the question, there was so much else to absorb and take in.

“The man you mentioned at dinner—Sergei,” he said, his blue eyes cast downward, “there has been no sign of him. I have searched the shoreline.”

Anastasia nodded.

“But the sea often yields in the end,” he said. “We will keep looking.”

Ana thanked him, but he brushed it aside.

“We will say a mass for him every day until he has been returned to us.”

And then he coughed, just once, into the back of his clenched hand, and Ana felt her spine stiffen.

“You’ve been out fishing in this cold?” she said. “I hope you haven’t caught a chill.” She had not mentioned Sergei’s illness. She had only said he was thrown from the boat during the crossing.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but coughing again. “No one ever recommended this place for its weather.”

“No, I don’t imagine that they do.”

“Let me get these fish into a frying pan,” he said. “We all eat together in the church, as soon as it is dark.”

“What can I do to help?” Anastasia said. Although a grand duchess by birth, she had been brought up to treat the common people with respect and to share their burdens when possible. It was why their father had made them sleep for years in ordinary cots in plainly decorated bedrooms, and their mother had ferried them to the Army hospitals to tend to the wounded. It was a puzzle Anastasia would never solve, how the peasants and workmen and soldiers of Russia had been convinced by a heartless revolutionary named Lenin that her family had not cared for and loved—yes, “loved” was not too strong a word for it—all of them.

Needless to say, she no longer felt that way at all, and she wondered what Father Grigori would say if she were able to tell him so.

“Never fear,” the deacon said in answer to her last question. “There’s no shortage of things that need to be done in the colony. You’ll fit right in, Your Highness.”

He threw her a half smile over his shoulder as he marched on with the fish swinging on the line over his shoulder. She tried to return the smile, but her face smarted, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the cutting wind or the fact that she was so unaccustomed to the expression.

Nika was running, running so hard the blood beat in her ears and muffled all other sounds. Running so hard the breath was raw in her throat and her lungs ached. Running so hard that her legs were starting to wobble and her shoulders to sag.

But she had to keep going, across the frozen hills, through the brush and barren trees, on and on … toward a low rise overlooking a tiny village huddled on the shoreline. There, she stopped, doubling over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

It was late autumn, and while some of the natives had already erected their igloos, with domed roofs and walls of packed snow, others were still making do with the tents made of caribou skins, stitched together with long ropes of sinew and anchored with bones. She waited, watching, but even from the ceremonial hall—the
qarqui
—at the far end of the village, there was no sign of any human activity. There were no fishermen hauling their kayaks onto the rocky beach, no children playing, no women tending to the huskies. (And where
were
the dogs?) It was an eerie sight, the lonely village, lying under a fresh blanket of snow, with a dense, dark cloud bank advancing across the Bering Sea and swallowing the last pale rays of the sun as it came.
The only sounds were the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, and the cries of cormorants circling overhead.

How odd, she thought, to hear cormorants. They had gone extinct years ago.

But then, this
was
years ago. Even now, Nika was aware that what she was experiencing was real, but unreal … that she was only a dreamer, inhabiting a dream, in which she nevertheless had a crucial role to play. She adjusted the straps of the knapsack digging into her shoulders, careful not to damage the precious ampoules that she knew—simply knew—were nestled inside.

She felt as if she had been traveling for days without stopping, all the while burning with fever, or racked with chills. She felt racked and depleted, and her mouth was filled with the acrid taste of her own blood. Her mukluks were slick with ice, her sealskin coat damp with her own perspiration. But she knew that she had to go down into the village. It was there her work had to be done.

Her boots skidding in the snow, she slid down the hill and approached the outermost of the igloos. The entryway was dug several feet down into the earth, and driftwood had been used to make a crude door. But when she tried to push it open, it stuck. Crouching down, she pushed harder, and something that was leaning against the other side gradually fell to one side, and she was able to peer into the gloom.

The
kudluk
, the lantern that was normally burning bright with seal oil, was extinguished, but the skylight let in enough illumination for her to make out several people scattered around the floor in contorted postures. Their faces were frozen in rictus, and their eyes stared blankly. Splashes of blood spotted the hides and straw that had been laid down on the hard sod. The body that had been slumped behind the door was a young man still in his rawhide coat, the hood raised, his hands clenched around a hunting knife buried to the hilt in his own gut. It appeared that he had chosen to take his own life rather than endure what the others had suffered.

Nika backed out, pulling the door closed behind her. Horrifying as
the sight had been, she was not surprised by it; it was as if she had known what to expect behind that door, as if she had remembered it from some deep well of the collective unconscious. And as she stepped away, she felt her foot catch on something under the snow—a chain. She jerked it up, and found it was attached to a stake embedded in the permafrost … to which a husky had been tethered. She brushed some of the snow away, and found the dog, dead of exposure, or starvation. It lay there now like a concrete statue, its tongue, lolling from its mouth, as blue as the ice in a crevasse.

Looking around at the neighboring huts and igloos, she saw similar mounds, where other dogs presumably now lay dead and frozen solid.

As she moved among the dwellings, poking her head in one, then another, she saw similar grisly scenes, native people lying dead on blood-soaked sod and animal hides. As she came to the last one before the
qarqui
, she heard sounds from inside, and thought she might at last find some survivors. Throwing back the antelope skins that covered the doorway, she stepped inside and stopped dead as the startled dogs, their jaws and fur matted with blood, looked up from their feast. A couple of them still trailed the leashes and stakes that they had managed to rip from the ground. Mingled among their paws were the ravaged remains of the corpses they had been tearing apart.

A big white dog, its snout dyed pink by now, growled menacingly, warning her away from the banquet.

Slowly, she stepped back and let the antelope skins conceal her from view.

The clouds had filled the sky now, and the last of the daylight disappeared as she hurried to seek refuge in the ceremonial house, the town hall, as it were, of the Inuit people, where the villagers would traditionally come to sing and dance and perform their sacred rituals during the long, dark Arctic winters. It was a big, oval-shaped building, made from chunks of tundra and slabs of driftwood, knitted together with all sorts of skins and pelts, and the moment she ducked her head to enter the passageway that led to the narrow door—fashioned from what had once been the bottom of a kayak—she again
heard noises. But not the sound of scavenging dogs this time. When she stood still, she heard a woman’s voice—faint and elderly—speaking in her native tongue.

She opened the door, which swung on a hinge made of caribou gut, and saw the old Inuit woman, short and squat, stirring a pot with a long ivory spoon. In the yellow glow of the fire, several children—their black eyes filled with grief—gathered around the old woman like bear cubs keeping close to their mother.

When Nika said, “Thank God some of you are still alive,” they all turned and stared at her as if she were a messenger from a foreign planet. Stone benches lined the walls, and the ceiling was hung with antlers and ornamental figures carved from whale baleen and walrus tusks. A totem pole, identical to the one in the center of Port Orlov, stood proud and tall as a mast at the far end of the lodge. Looking at its vivid colors and erect carriage, Nika was reminded of all that it represented, and felt a wave of shame. If she were given the chance, she resolved to do what she should have done long before.

“Nikaluk,” the old woman said in a weak but tender voice, “I knew you would come.” She had high, Asiatic cheekbones and her few remaining teeth were worn down to yellow nubs. “I knew it.”

If only Nika herself had been so sure. The flu had burned through her as it had burned through nearly everyone else, but somehow, she—like the children and the old people, whose frail bodies could not mount such an overwhelming, and self-destructive, resistance—had lived through it. Her chest, which had once felt like it was filled with smoldering coals, was cooler now. Her throat was no longer choked with a rising tide of her own blood. Her eyes, which had burned like shining pebbles on the beach, felt as if they had been bathed in a stream.

The old woman came toward her, the children clinging to her ragged skirts, and said, “You will save us.”

“Yes, yes,” Nika said, remembering her mission and slinging the knapsack off her shoulders. Quickly kneeling to undo the straps, she dug inside for the ampoules of serum … but to her horror they weren’t there. She dug deeper, but all she found inside was icicles, clattering like glass. How could she have been so deceived?

She had failed. At this, the most critical time, she had failed her people, and the shame, even greater now than it had been when she first saw the totem pole as it should have been, made her almost unable to look up into the old woman’s eyes.

But then she felt a hand on her head, like a benediction, and when she did look up, the old woman said, “You will save us,” and pressed something into Nika’s palm.

It was small and smooth, a piece of ivory, simply carved. In the flickering firelight, Nika saw that it was an owl, a guardian spirit of the Inuit people. Nika wasn’t sure if she should accept it—perhaps it was the only thing of value the old woman possessed—but she knew it would give offense if she tried to refuse it.

The old woman stroked Nika’s hair and smiled. A smile that reminded her of her own grandmother. Or, could it be … her own great-grandmother?

In that instant, Nika suddenly understood that she had not come to this place to give at all. She had come there to receive.

Bowing her head, she said, “I will try … I will try.”

But then, as if from the end of a long tunnel, she heard her name.

“Nika?”

This was not the old woman’s voice anymore, nor did she feel her hand on her hair. A white light suffused the room, a light too bright for her eyes, and a different hand—in a cool glove—was smoothing her brow.

“I will try,” she said one last time, before the old woman faded away, along with the children, the campfire, and the ancestral carvings hanging from the beams of the
qarqui
. The last thing to disappear was the grinning otter on the totem pole.

“Nika,” she heard again, and cracked her eyes open enough to see Frank, perched beside her bedside, surrounded by blinking screens and softly beeping monitors. “Nika,” he said, pulling off his visor and tossing it aside.

His cheeks, she could see, were wet with tears.

“You’re all right now,” he said, though somehow she knew that already. “You’re going to be all right.”

He lifted her hand off the blanket and pressed his lips against it, and she could tell that she was holding something tight. When she opened her palm, she saw the ivory
bilikin
that she had once given him. It seemed like ages ago.