Alaska (37 page)

Long gone. Long gone.'

The hut was so filled with the sound of the mummy chuckling at her memories of retribution that no one hearing it could be aware of the skill with which Lunasaq used his voice to create the sound of laughter, nor when he had suddenly stopped being the mummy and spoke sternly in his own voice: 'I would remind you that Cidaq's problem is not vengeance but the continuation of her people. Her problem is to find a husband, to have babies.'

'Seals have babies. Whales have babies. Anybody can have babies.'

'Did you?' Cidaq asked, and the ancient one replied: 'Four, And it made no difference whatever.'

Again Lunasaq broke in: 'But you were living secure with your own people,' and the mummy said: 'No one is ever secure. Two of my children died of starvation.* And the shaman asked: 'How did they die and you survive?' and the old one explained: 'Old people can withstand shocks. They look past them. Young people take them too seriously.

They let themselves be killed.' She then spoke rather brusquely to the shaman: 'You deal with this child too harshly. Let her have her revenge. You'll both be astonished at the form it will take.'

'It will come?'

'Yes. Just as the Russians will soon be coming to this hut to thrash us all. But Lunasaq, my helper, has taken care of that, and your big help will come in ways you cannot guess. Three ways, coming from many directions. But right now, hide me.'

The mummy was barely secreted when two trader-serfs broke into the hut and began thrashing the shaman so brutally that Cidaq supposed he would d
ie.
But immediately the beating started, a group of five Aleuts with clubs rushed into the little hovel, and in the confined space struck the attackers heavily about their heads, and they did such a thorough job that the roughest one stumbled out of the hut with his head smashed and fell dead, while the other man ran screaming, with two Aleuts flailing at him from behind.

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Miraculously, the other Aleuts spirited away the corpse and disposed of it in a gully beneath a pile of rocks. The trader who survived his beating tried to incriminate 'some Aleuts who attacked me with clubs,' but his reputation and that of the dead man were so wretched that The Company was not unhappy to have the latter off their rolls, and a few days later they shipped the survivor off to a lifetime of duty with the seals. After watching with grim satisfaction as he was taken away, Cidaq returned to the shaman's hut, where, surprisingly, the mummy showed little interest in the incident: 'Of no consequence. Those two are no loss and you're no better off. What is important is that the three ways I promised you are about to come to pass. Prepare.

Your life is changing. The world is changing.'

The shaman now made the mummy speak in a voice which created the illusion that she was retreating from the hut, but Cidaq pleaded with her to stay, and when she did linger, it was the shaman who interrogated her first: 'Will the ways be helpful to me, too?'

'What is helpful?' the old one snapped, almost impatiently. 'Is Cidaq helped because one oppressor was slain and the other exiled? Only if she does something herself to profit from it.'

Through the years the mummy had acquired a personality of her own, and with it she often voiced opinions contrary to the shaman's. It was as if a willful student had broken loose from the tutelage of her teacher, so that occasionally, on significant topics, the shaman and his obstinate mummy actually conducted a debate.

'But will not the new ways be harmful?' the shaman asked, and again she answered with a snappish question: 'What is harmful of itself? Unless we allow it to be?'

'Can I use the new ways? To help my people?' Lunasaq asked, and there was no reply, for the old one knew that the answer rested only with the shaman himself. But when Cidaq asked almost the same question, the mummy sighed and remained silent as if in deep recollection, then sighed again. Finally she spoke: 'In all the years, and I have savored many thousand, the ones I remember are the ones that brought me challenges a husband I never appreciated until I saw the way he handled adversity . . . the two sons who refused to learn hunting but who became master builders of kayaks .

. . the winter when all lay sick and only one other old woman and I had to catch the fish . . . that awful year when the volcano at Lapak exploded right out of the ocean, covering our island with ash two elbows deep, and my husband and 233

I took survivors four days out to sea so we could breathe . . and the peaceful nights when I laid plans for a better life.'

She stopped, and seemed to aim her voice directly at Cidaq, and then to shift it toward the shaman, the one who had ensured her continued existence through this present span of years: 'Three men are coming to Kodiak. They bring the world and all the world's meaning. And you are to receive them, each of you in your own way.'

Then, with a much softer voice, she spoke only to Cidaq: 'Did it feel good when you saw that Russian slain?'

'No,' Cidaq said. 'It felt as if it were over. As if something had ended.'

'And you didn't gloat?'

'No, it was just over. Something evil was ended, and I had little to do with it.'

'You're ready for those who are coming.' Then she asked her shaman: 'How did you feel when he was slain?' and Lunasaq replied honestly: 'For him, I was sorry that he had lived so poor a life. For me, I was glad, for I have so much more work to do here at Kodiak.'

'I am glad for you both. You're ready. But nobody has asked me how I feel. The three are coming to me too, with their problems.'

'How do you feel?' the shaman asked, for the mummy's well-being fortified his own, and she said: 'I told you the good years were those when something brought challenges.

It is long overdue for something exciting to happen on this forsaken island.' And on that reassuring note she retired to prepare for the next confrontation in her thirteen thousand years.

THE FIRST OF THE THREE ARRIVALS WAS A MAN WHO WAS

returning illegally. Nobody on Kodiak Island had expected to see him again, and he appeared on a mission which astounded those with whom he came in contact. He was Yermak Rudenko, the huge, hairy trader who had bought Cidaq, and he had escaped from the Seal Islands a man determined to do anything rather than go back. When The Company officials found out that he had stowed away on a boat returning with a shipment of pelts, they arrested him, and he stood in the rude office at the head of the harbor and asked with mock contrition: 'Do you know what it's like up there? Before, no one ever lived on the islands but seals. Now a handful of Aleuts, a few Russians.

One ship every year. Little to eat. No one to talk to.'

'That's why we sent you there,' interrupted a young officer who had never known hardship.

'You proved incorrigible

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here, and you'll go back on the next boat, because that's your station now and forever.'

Rudenko blanched, and all the fury he had displayed when dominating the Tsar Ivan and the traders on Kodiak vanished. To face the awful loneliness of the Pribilofs for the rest of his life was more than he could bear, and he began to plead with the officials who controlled his destiny: 'Nothing but rain. Never a tree. In winter, ice binds all things, and when the sun returns, nothing but seals crowding the island.

A boy of six could kill the quota in a week. Then nothing.'

From his huge body with its large muscles and heavy shoulders the fight seemed to drain and certainly the arrogance seemed to vanish. If the judgment was to be that he must get on a small boat and sail back to that bleak land, he knew that he would jump off en route or kill himself after he landed; to waste the years of his life in such barren futility was more than he could absorb: 'Don't send me back!'

The officials were obdurate: 'We sent you there because we could do nothing with you here. There's no place for you in Kodiak.'

In despair, a man flailing about for any escape, he uttered a plea which, though irrelevant, would engage Kodiak for the remainder of his violent life: 'My wife is here! You can't separate a believing Russian and his wife!'

The news astounded his listeners, who turned to one another, asking: 'Has anyone seen this man's wife?' and 'Why weren't we told of this?' The upshot was that the officer in temporary charge of Company affairs said: 'Take him away and let us look into this.'

The investigation was put in charge of a junior naval officer, Ensign Fedor Belov, who initiated inquiries while Rudenko was kept in chains, and as a result of tedious interrogations the young officer learned that the prisoner Rudenko had-indeed purchased an Aleut girl on the island of Lapak and that although he had treated her poorly, he could be considered in some respects her husband. When Belov informed his superiors of this, they became actively concerned, for as the temporary head pointed out: 'We've been ordered by the tsarina to help Russians establish families in these islands, and she said specifically that if native girls converted to Christianity, marriage with them was to be encouraged.' And since the tsarina in question was Catherine the Great, Autocrat of Autocrats, whose probing fingers went everywhere, it was advisable that any ukase issued by her be enforced.

So Ensign Belov was sent back to work, and now the subject of his investigation was Rudenko's supposed wife.

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Did she exist? Was she a Christian? Could the marriage be solemnized by Kodiak's solitary Orthodox priest who was drunk most of the time? He tackled the last problem first, and when he found Father Petr, a broken-down clergyman of sixty-seven who had made repeated fruitless appeals for return to Russia, he found the old man ready to comply with any request made by The Company, to which he must look for his meals and lodging: 'Yes, yes! Our adored tsarina, whom God preserve, has instructed us, and our revered bishop in Irkutsk, whom God preserve, worthy man . . .' Mention of the bishop's name diverted his thoughts to the seventh appeal he was drafting to that worthy, praying for relief from his arduous duties on Kodiak. Now he lost this thread also, and with a blank stare coming from his heavily bearded white face, he asked humbly: 'What is it you want me to do, young man?'

'Do you recall the trader Yermak Rudenko?'

'No.'

'Big man, very difficult.'

'Yes, yes.'

'He bought a girl on Lapak Island. Aleut, of course.'

'Sailors will do that.'

'He's been on the Seal Islands for almost a year.'

'Yes, yes, a bad one.'

'Would you marry this Rudenko to his Aleut girl?'

'Of course. The tsarina told us toyes, she did.'

'But only if the girl became a Christian. Would you baptize her?'

'Yes, that's what I was sent here for, to baptize. To bring heathens into the love of Jesus Christ.'

'Have you baptized any?'

'A few, they're a stiff-necked lot.'

'But you would baptize and marry this one?'

'Yes, that's what the tsarina ordered. I saw the order, sent out by our bishop in Irkutsk.'

It was apparent to Ensign Belov that this old fellow knew little of what he was doing or ought to be doing. He'd been in the islands several years, had baptized few, married even fewer, and learned none of the languages. He represented the Russian civilizing effort at its worst, and it was into the wide gap left by his lack of missionary zeal that shamans like Lunasaq had been able to slip.

'I'll forward your request to the bishop at Irkutsk,' Belov promised. 'And will you prepare to solemnize this marriage?'

'Thank you, thank you for sending the letter.'

'I asked about the marriage.'

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'You know what the tsarina said, may heaven protect Her Royal Highness.'

So Ensign Belov reported to the officials that Rudenko did have a wife of sorts and that Father Petr was prepared to baptize and marry her, as the tsarina had instructed.

When the officials asked if Belov had seen the young woman and did he deem her worthy to become in effect a Russian citizen, he answered: 'Not yet, but I believe she's here in Three Saints and I'll pursue the matter diligently.'

Making further inquiries, he learned that her name was Cidaq and that she was living, if that word could be so used, in a hut whose former owner had been killed in some way; the details were cloudy. To his surprise, she turned out to be a modest young woman, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, not pregnant, exceptionally clean for an Aleut and possessed of an adequate Russian vocabulary. Realizing that she was terrified by his presence but unaware that this was because she feared being implicated in the murder of the trader, a matter which had been quickly dropped, he strove to put her at ease: 'I bring good news, very good news.'

She took a deep breath, for she could not imagine what it might be. 'A great honor is to be bestowed upon you.' He leaned forward when he said this, and she leaned to hear: 'Your husband wants to marry you legally. Russian church. Priest. Baptism.'

He paused, then said with great pomposity: 'Full Russian citizenship.' Holding his position, he smiled at her, and was relieved to see the huge smile that broke across her face. Grabbing her by the hands and suffused by his own joy, he cried: 'Didn't I tell you? Great news!'

'My husband?' she finally asked.

'Yes. Yermak Rudenko. He's come back from the Seal Islands.'

And here began the deception which would enable her to gain her revenge on Rudenko, for with the cunning of a knowing little animal, Cidaq masked any physical or verbal response which might betray her repugnance at the thought she might be rejoined to Rudenko, and in the pause she began to contrive a score of ways by which to pay back this horrible man. But realizing that she must know more before she could take the next step, she feigned delight at hearing about him: 'Where is my husband? How soon can I see him?'

'Not so fast! He's here in Three Saints.' Then the young officer said gravely, as if bringing ultimate dispensation: 'And The Company says that if you marry him properly, he can stay here.'

'Wonderful!' she cried, but then he added the caveat which would enable her to complicate things: 'Of course, you have