The Sea Runners Read online

  And second work too, for as lie squatted, Karlsson from the corner of his eye studied the Kolosh canoes, prows rising in extension like the necks of fantastic horses, in their graceful rank along the beach.

  All of New Archangel, stockade and cathedral and Castle and hulks and enterprises and dwellings, sat dwarfed this day by the Alaskan mountains, Verstovia and its throng of minions. Virtually atop the town in the manner that the spire and dome crowned the cathedral, the peaks were those a child would draw. Sharp tall pyramids of forest, occasionally a lesser summit rounded as a cannonball for comparison's sake. Topknots of snow showed here and there, but the color everywhere else on these stretching peaks was the black-green that only a northern coastal forest enmixes. A kind of colossal constancy breathes at you from form and tone of this sort, the surety that beyond such mountains, wherever you could peer there would stand only more such mountains. Except, of course, west into the ocean, where there was only more ocean.

  As Karlsson set at his shipyard hewing, Braaf materialized at the western extent of the settlement, beside the elder most of two schooner bulks beached there.

  When Braaf arrived to New Archangel and it became evident that he was not, as listed on one manifest, a shipwright, nor, as supposed on another item of record, a shoemaker, and Braaf with shy innocence denied knowing how such misunderstandings possibly could have come about, a perplexed Russian-American Company clerk assigned him to the readiest unskilled job, as a cook's helper. Daily Braaf managed to use this livelihood to manufacture free time for himself, much of it spent hiding out somewhere within this maritime carcass. The hulk neighboring it yet was in service as a cannon battery aimed into the Kolosh village, but dry rot had made a casualty of this vessel of Braaf's.

  After a moment of endeavor at the doorlock with a small hook of metal, he slipped through the gangway carpentered into the ship's hull when it became a storehouse and crept to the forecastle. Within a particular one of the several stave-sprung barrels there he made a deposit, a walrus ivory snuffbox which hitherto was the possession of a Russian quartermaster.

  Then, per Melander's instructions, Braaf began to measure by handwidths the depth and breadth—which is to say, the cache capacity—of other of these abandoned and forgotten receptacles.

  Perpetually at combat with the massed mountains around Sitka Sound was the weather, darkening even now, for New Archangel lived two days of three in rain and oftener than that in cloud. "Always autumn," it was said of this diluted climate. One minute, vapor would flow along the bottoms of the mountains to float all the peaks like dark icebergs. The next, the cloud layer would rise and immerse every crag, leaving a broad, broad plateau of forest beneath. Or imprint of stranger sort, clumps of wan light, warmths fallen through chinks in the overcast, now would pinto the forest flanks. Between times a silken rain probably had sifted into the New Archangel air, a dew standing in droplets on clothing before anyone quite became aware of it, and it could be a hundred hours before a man cast his next shadow. Yet the diminutive port within all this swirl was a place of queer clarity as well, its rinsed air somehow holding a tint of blue light which caused everything to stand forth: smallest swags of spruce limbs on mountains a mile off, rock skirts of the timbered islands throughout tho harbor, the gold-and-russet trim of seaweed along those stone hems. Voices and the harking of dogs carried extraordinarily.

  At midmorning; Braaf reluctantly emerging toward chores for the noon meal, Melander on workbreak presented himself from within the saltery being constructed on the point of shoreline southeast of the cathedral. Sitka Sound shares amply in the wide tides of this region of Alaska, and on the broad exposed tideflat a pig was rooting up clams. His finds, one after another, were snatched from him by crows.

  Melander watched for a moment, then laughed.

  Other workmen inquired to him over their mugs of tea.

  Melander pointed to the raucous gulping birds: "The Castle Russians at one of their banquets."

  In complication and unlikelihood, New Archangel's tenantry was fully equal to its architecture and geography and weather. The settlement was ruled by the Russian navy, the governor an officer agreed upon by the Russian-American Company; was administered by a covey of company clerks and other functionaries; seasonally abounded with Aleut fur hunters; relied for most of its muscle work upon Creoles—those born of Russian fathers and Kolosh mothers; of New Archangel's sum of about a thousand persons, this added up to far the most sizable group—or upon Russian vagabonds given the push out of Okhotsk; and for its craftwork, such as carpentry and smithing, it imported the seven-year men from Scandinavia. Colony within a colony, the hundred and fifty or so Scandinavians mostly were Finns; one sift more, and the few dozen Swedes such as Melander and Braaf and Karlsson were at last accounted.

  Yet not even this social pyramid, sharp-tipped and broad-bottomed as the triangle peaks above the little port, indicated the most numerous populace on Sitka Sound, The Koloshes, the Sitka Tlingits. By their own legend People of the Frog, a restless and vivid clan who had migrated to Sitka Sound with their great-eyed carved emblem in tow behind their canoe fleet. Now their low-roofed longhouses straggled for nearly a mile along the beach west of New Archangel's huddle of buildings; and the stockade wall of defense, strategic batteries of cannon, four blockhouses built of fat logs, and a couple of dozen full-time sentries constantly expressed the colony's wariness of the natives. With cause. This very year of 1852 the Sitka Tlingits had sent word to a Stikine clan that at last a perpetual quarrel might be called quit. When the Stikine peace delegation arrived, thirty-five of them were slain quick as a butchering, the few others managed to beg sanctuary within New Archangel, Long memories on these Sitka Tlingits, then. Of amplitude to recall that when Baranov implanted his first settlement here at their bay, they obliterated it and put the Russian heads up on stakes.

  Precisely this prudence toward the Koloshes, the way New Archangel each and every day needed to set its most vigilant face toward those who might scheme to get in, it would take someone of Melander's angle of mind to count on as advantage for getting out.

  Steam whiffed around Karlsson as lie stepped into the workmen's bathhouse. Every seventh day the vat of water was heated to boil, bucketsful then sluiced onto the hot stones ringing the vat. By this far in the night, man after man of the New Archangel work force having sought to scour weariness from his muscles, the steam densened to one great cube of saturation.

  Karlsson stood within the heavy warmth for a moment, slender and very white in his nakedness, before bringing the small woven reed breathing mask to his mouth and holding it there within his cupped right hand.

  "At least this cloud is a hot one. We could use a few such outside, ave?"

  Melander's voice, deeper for being muffled, resounded from across the room, and in three steps Karlsson could sec the hazed man, his body alone in long boned angles on the bathing bench. Melander's reed respirator mask all but disappeared in the big hand palmed around it, so that be seemed to be covering a perpetual chuckle.

  "Are you tasting it yet?" Melander went on. "Our venture, I mean? I find myself thinking of salt air. Ocean air. Better than sniffing fish guts, I can tell you."

  "Where's our pickpurse?"

  "He will come. The hours of Braaf's day are not like any other man's."

  "How far do you trust him ?"

  "Ordinarily, only a whisker's width." Melander had known Braaf's clan all too well on shipboard, men with the instinct always to vanish just before a topsail needed clewing up. "He'd steal the milk out of your tea, aye? But Braaf wants to shake New Archangel from his boots as badly as we do. He'll do much to manage that. Much that neither of us can do, just as he can't canoe himself down this coast. The three of us are like a shock of rye when your Småland fields are harvested, Karlsson. Together we lean in support of one another. Take any one away and we fall."

  "And are trampled by the Russians."

  "Aye, well." Melander swabbed sweat from himself with a spruc
e whisk. "The answer to that is not to fall, nor let each other fall."

  "I need to know one matter about you, Melander. Why didn't you stay on with the schooner?"

  "Yes, I can see that might be a matter to know. Promise me not to laugh. But I stayed ... I stayed, I suppose, for a pretty sight. Pretty face, it'd been, you might understand better. But it was this. What took my eyes was the Nicholas, these islands and mountains and the Northern ocean. I saw myself on that steam whale, going places of the world here I could never have dreamed of. Up into the high north, there. Ice high as a church eave, they tell of along those shores. And creatures. Carpenter of a brig I shipped on, an old man-of-war's man, had been high north once on a whaler. Said whales stink like Hell's cess, but iv a I ruses were worth the trip to see. I've never forgot—'They have noble bones in their teeth,' lie said to me. And to sail it ali by steam, just this fog around us now,...So I looked 011 the Nicholas and saw luck, right enough." Melander's eyes tightened above the reed mask. "What I forgot to look at was the wormy souls of these Russians, aye?"

  "And wasn't that a fall, of a sort?"

  "A stumble, my friend, a stumble. The strides we'll take together along this coast will make up for it,"

  "A stumble, that's nothing," said a third voice. "Unless a noose is around your neck just then."

  The steam thinned as the opened doorway brought into view Braaf. With his clothes off, lie looked more than ever like an outsized boy rather than a man. Both Melander ami Karlsson noticed that Braaf did not even pause to accustom himself to the cumulus of heat before crossing the room to them, nor bother to put the steam-sieving mask to his mouth until he was seated, a little way from the other two.

  "Our commissary officer. Welcome, Braaf. Let's have no more thoughts than necessary of nooses and the like, though." Now that all three of them were at hand, Melander was, for him, singularly businesslike. "What we need to talk through is our divvy of tasks. Braaf, we're going to want—" and here Melander recited in crisp fashion which would have done honor to a king's remembrancer the list of supplies for the escape, "Any of this you can't put your fingers to?"

  Braaf contemplated the steam overhead.

  "No. Some harder, some easier. But no."

  "Good. Tomorrow, begin your harvest."

  "A tiling more, Melander." Karlsson, afresh. "How is it we're to get ourselves and all this plunder out of the stockade, when time comes ?"

  "Oh, aye, did I not tell you? Through the gate."

  "Through the...?"

  "Well that you asked"—Melander's voice clarifying as he took aside the reed mouth mask to display a growing grin—"for you're the one with the lever to work that gate open for us." Melander instructed Karlsson with monumental joviality now. "It's there between your legs."

  In New Archangel's next days, a gleaner drifted about within its walls like a cloudlet of steam freed from the bathhouse. So adept a provisioner did Braaf prove to be that, lest the Russians become suspicious about the fresh blizzard of thievery, Melander had to ration out his stealing assignments.

  By the end of July, Braaf's cache for the plotters held a compass, two tins of gunpowder, one of the three-pound boxes of tea the Russians used for trade with the natives, some fishing lines and hooks, a blanket apiece, and a coil of rope.

  During August he added a gaff hook, three excellent Kolosh daggers, a number of candles, a couple of hatchets, a fire steel and flint apiece, another blanket each, and a leather map ease waterproofed with birch tar.

  September's gleanings comprised a second compass—double certain about navigation, Melander wanted to be—a small three-legged iron ketle, a spyglass, another box of tea, and a water cask.

  Early in October, New Archangel's month of curtaining rain, the plotters convened about the matter of a canoe.

  The Koloshes had them in plenty, the slim vessels lying side by side in front of the longhouses as if drawn up to the starting line of a great regatta, canoes for hunting and canoes to carry trade and canoes for fishing and canoes for families and canoes for war, a navy of all canoes.

  Karlsson had eyed out a choice—a twenty-foot shell with a high bold bow, the sheer of its hull rising and sharpening into this cutwater as a scimitar curves in search of its point. High and pointy the stern, too, as though both the ends of this canoe were on sentry against the sea. Gunwales rounded and deftly lipped. Four strong thwarts. And encupping it all, that most beautiful stunt of wood, a great cedar taken down with reverence and wile—I shall cut you down, tree. You will not twist and warp, tree. You will not have knotholes, tree. Black bear skins have been laid in the place where you will fall, tree. Fall down on them, tree—and then hollowed and shaped and stretched by heated water into a sleek pouch of vessel, its wooden skin not much more than the thickness of a thumb: exaltation of design and thrift of line, the jugglery of art Somehow perfected by this coast's canoewrights. Karlsson's tongue was not the one to say it, but if the standing cedar tree had decided to transform into the swiftest of sea creatures, this craft of alert grace would have been the result.

  Too, Karlsson's candidate lay amid the beached squadron of a dozen nearest the stockade gate, convenient enough, and Karlsson attested that lie had watched to ensure that its possessor was scrupulous. On New Archangel's rare warm days the native sloshed water over the cedar interior to prevent its drying out and cracking; in normal damp weather, heaped woven mats over the craft for shelter.

  A canoe of fit and style and fettle, endorsed Karlsson.

  Melander and Braaf took turns at casual glances down the shoreline to Karlsson's nominee.

  True, the canoe had so sprightly a look that it seemed only to be awaiting the right word of magic before flying off upward. By any man's standards, a most beckoning tool, keen blade for clearance of a route of water. But Melander believed he too knew something of canoes from having paddled a number of times with Kolosh crews to the herring grounds off the western shorefront of Sitka Sound; indeed, it can be realized now that those journeys were first filaments in the spinning of his decision that seven-yeardom could be fied by water. The fishing canoes were half again the length of this keen-beaked version singled out by Karlsson, and this question of size balked Melander.

  Asked his opinion, Braaf mumbled that any canoe was smaller than he desired.

  Karlsson maintained that his nominee had all the capacity they needed. What did Melander have in mind, to stuff the craft like a sausage?

  Melander could not resist asking Karlsson if he was arguing that his wondrous canoe was bigger on the inside than on the out.

  No, goddamn Melander's tongue, Karlsson retorted, it simply was a matter of water worthiness, this canoe would amply carry their cache of supplies and be livelier to steer than a larger canoe and less Weight to propel and...

  Grinning, Melander was persuaded. Rarely did Karlsson trouble to assert himself about anything, so if he waxed passionate for this particular canoe, that was stout enough testimony.

  Braaf requested to know what all the jibber-jabber at the front and back of the canoe was.

  Bow and stern, Melander rapidly advised him before Karlsson got touched off again, and the canoe's painted designs, oval outlines with black oval centers to them, like egg-shaped eyes, likely were Kolosh symbols to ward off evil.

  Evil whats, demanded Braaf.

  Evil minnows that would leap from the sea and piss hi Braaf's ear, Me lander said in exasperation, how in hell's flaming name was he supposed to know what evil whats the Koloshes were spooked by ?

  Now: the three of them were of one mind for the canoe, was there any other—

  Paddles, Karlsson announced, and insisted they be Haida paddles, a deft leaf-bladed type carved by a tribe somewhere downcoast and occasionally bartered north as far as New Archangel as prized items of trade, and one of them further needed be a long steering paddle of perfect balance.

  Hearing this, Braaf frowned.

  He had full reason. It took him all of the next week to accumulate a trio o
f Haida paddles from the natives along the harbor.

  "Three?" said Karlsson when they met again. "What if we lose one over the side?"

  Braaf cursed in his sweet voice, and went off to start the thief's siege of watching and waiting which would accrue a fourth paddle.

  Like the single eye of some great guarding creature, each morning at six the stockade gate near the west-most corner of New Archangel came open, at six each evening it swung resolutely shut.

  Only during those hours of day were the Koloshes allowed into the settlement, in scrutinized numbers, and the market area where they were permitted to trade was delineated directly inside the gate, so that they could he rapidly shoved out in event of commotion, Moreover, the first of the four gun-slitted blockhouses buttressing the stockade sat close above the area of market and gate on a shieldlike short slope of rock, miniature of the strong knob uplifting Baranov's Castle. Scan from inside or out, here at New Archangel's portal Russian wariness held its strongest focus.

  Except. Except that, bachelor existence on a frontier being what it was, the gate sometimes peeped open in the evenings. Until dusk went into solid night, it was not unknown that a recreative stay might he made among certain bargainable women in the Kolosh village. For those dwelling within New Archangel rather than without, then, the gate's second and unofficial—and by order of the governor, absolute—curfew was full dark.

  Karlsson quirked his mouth enough to show skepticism, for him a typhoon of emotion. Melander was one who would have you believe that sideways is always true north. But Karlsson was a vane of stiffer sort. He possessed a close idea of his own capabilities and could gauge himself with some dispassion as to whether he was living up to them. (That he bad not much interest in people who lacked either capability or gauge, his stand-off style more than half hinted.) What Melander was proposing in this gate enterprise, Karlsson doubted he could fashion himself to.