The Age of Ice: A Novel (23 page)

By the time I thought it was possible to claim Robeck’s and Sawyer’s help, I had a lie pieced together out of the mammoth and Ulü-Toyon: Mr. Velitzyn had fallen into an underground cavity, a den, a
hibernaculum,
and there must have gone into a state of torpor. Merck shrugged. “This is still unheard of. A man is not a squirrel.”

Didn’t I know
that
! “Yes, but it’s less of a stretch of imagination. When I stumbled out, barely self-aware, I came upon you. If not for you, I would have died. I shall not remember how to find the way back to the den.”

He gave me a long, grave stare.

“Bears sleep through winter,” I said.

“A man is not a bear,” said he.

“Please,” I repeated.

And after that, there was Act Two. Merck left to call our hut-mates and returned accompanied. Oaths, exclamations, and the appropriate commotion ensued. At the end of it I was installed in our good old earthen hut, on my own pallet, in my own bedding of trusty old Fearnought wool that smelled so sharply of my own old self. Merck was giving me furtive glances throughout but held up reasonably well as a co-conspirator, with only a slight tremor in his smile when Sawyer called the occasion “an extraordinarily lucky change of fate.”

What I did not know was that at the darkest, hungriest, and coldest hour of the winter, Merck had made a pledge to God. He had begged for a happy ending, and in return he had promised to sacrifice himself to the work of curing humanity of its ills. I did not know that when he saw me frozen in ice, he thought of Providence, and when he heard me speak, he thought the Divine had accepted his pledge. What did it make
me
in the eyes of this beholder? I should have known better.

• • •

God loves a drunk,
it has always been said. Lately it is also said,
One is not dead until he is warm and dead.

My reality was restored to its last detail on the second day of my convalescence,
when I asked about Feodor. Robeck said, “He had an accident. Slowed him down a bit. Been getting perkier, though, lately.”

My hands clenched under the Fearnought blanket. Sawyer chimed in, “Oh yes, you wouldn’t have heard. It was the day Mr. Velitzyn disappeared, right, Mr. Robeck? The Christmas day. Feodor spent a whole night passed out in the shed—”

“You’d think one would be cold meat come morning,” Robeck said.

“—but not Feodor Feodorovich. Lord knows no tears would have been shed, should he have perished. But he only lost his nose to frostbite—” said Sawyer.

“—and some of his beef.”

“Temporarily. He has convalesced, though.”

Lord knows—not just my hands, my whole being clenched at the news. It hardly consoled me that my part in Feodor’s “accident” was yet unknown. Feodor had won. I had lost. He’d gotten frostbite—I’d gotten a tomb of ice; he had convalesced already—I was weak and prostrate. Sawyer seemed—happier? more distracted? diluted? distant?—than the last time I saw him. What if they just did not want to worry me?

“And Ouchapin?”

Said Sawyer, “It was better when Feodor was sick . . . Her child burden is coming along . . . Finish that soup, Mr. Velitzyn, or I’ll do it for you, I swear, and then you’ll never get your strength back. ”

I sat up, then got on my feet, swaying slightly. The reality was complete. I was in the same place as ever. Back where I started from.

• • •

Except that the season was changing, and this alone made one feel hopeful. The expedition had survived the winter, the ships were almost done. Snow still abounded, but there was plenty of sun, and at noon its warm radiance made one part with his winter garments. I was shedding skin—week after week it sloshed off as translucent peel. But my grip gained strength; my bodily functions restored themselves.

I remember one springtime moment—a dozen of the crew were sewing sails on a sunny day in the yard. The white canvas dazzled one’s eyes, laid across the men’s knees; those who stitched it bent over their task with a kind of tidy diligence that elicited thoughts of homeliness and kindness. Others spread and shook the sheets, and the unfurled canvas beat like angels’ wings.

I stood and looked upon the scene. Then I saw Feodor. His nose was
bluish-black still, skin burned by frost; his hands were covered in much of the same. He saw me. I squared up and so did he. So we stood, stares locked, while between us the white, angelical canvas swelled and flapped and alighted on rope lines.
I
knew that he hadn’t yet, and never would, tell anyone who mattered what I’d done with him.
He
knew—I was sure—that he only had to play it safe for another month or two. As soon as the expedition departed on its virgin sails, together with its
tempa-chura man,
he could return to his ways.

• • •

In mid-April, Merck and I went up the Yasachnoi to where he had found me. I still did not know what my ice had looked like, and could not have realized that what we beheld was but a shell of its former splendor. It was easy to feel no attachment to this stooping, tumorous jumble posed to be washed away in the spring meltdown. It couldn’t have issued
from
me, I thought, no, it had to have been a
trap laid by ice
. The burst of omnipresence that was still vivid in my mind had to have been a delusion. Had Merck not rescued me, I would’ve been flushed down the Kolyma come summer, spewed onto its banks, a mere drowned corpse, to sink into permafrost as time went by. Like Merck’s mammoth.

You didn’t get me,
I whispered.

On the way back I thought how I’d leave, put distance between myself and this ice trap, this whole winter. All I’d done was created problems for those whom I would have liked to call my friends. A maladapted nobleman, a loose cannon, a walking miracle, a sick patient. I had wanted to take a man’s life. Worse yet, I had failed.

But retracing my steps back to Okhotsk was a horrific prospect, particularly in summer—endless marshlands, swarms of bloodsucking insects. I had to stay with the expedition until we hit the land on the other side of the Northeast Passage. Then, I would leave.

• • •

In mid-May, the whole fort was kept awake at nights by the humming and groaning of the river ice. The Yasachnoi was tumescent and rising, a thick slush of ice and water pushing over the old ice, more ice arriving every minute, piling up dams of last resort, trapping and smothering the water. The drowned old ice bellowed from the depths as water gnawed at it. The hum and roar was such that one could barely hear what anyone said—let alone hear Ouchapin scream in childbirth.

Then one fine day, all of the water and ice started moving and never
stopped. It seemed that the entire history of the past winter was streaming by, everything that ice had ever captured in its collection of curiosities. Tree trunks, dead animals, lost baggage. Merck must have seen remains of his mammoth, and I could swear I saw pieces of my ice cocoon. A whole island floated past, complete with shrubs and perching birds, like a
tableau vivant
piece. The only artifact missing from the ice’s collection was me.

• • •

The freed river came in and flooded the fort. We pitched a tent on the roof of our earthen hut and watched the water enter through our door and make itself at home. The hut became an underwater cavern, all marks of our presence erased. Fish ventured out onto the flooded land, and the locals chased after them with cries of joy.

It was late afternoon; we were perched on our roof, and, with a degree of good humor, we were surveying the surrounding floodwaters and the limitations they imposed on everyone’s perambulations, when a
baidar,
a kind of canoe, pushed past us, propelled hastily by a woman. She rowed in strokes that may have wanted force though not determination, and her red kerchief had fallen back to release a shock of black hair, while her eyes were fixed on the forest line ahead. The baidar was loaded up with something like offal, heaped, slithery, and glistening. We observed it in silence.

Then—a movement at my side, a splash, and Sawyer was in the water. Off he waded, stumbling, splashing, elbow-flapping, falling, rising, swimming. “Ouchapin! Ouchapin!” he called after her. Some distance away from us he caught up with the baidar; she guarded against him with the paddle, almost struck him on the head—he could overturn her boat, after all, clinging to it so clumsily, trying to climb in—and he could drop in the water whatever that was, that offal. He negotiated with her, she went back to rowing, he stuck on to the side of her boat, he helped her get where she wanted to go. They were getting farther and farther away from us.

“Wasn’t she confined just days ago?” said Robeck.

“And now she’s rowing a boat,” I said.

“Besides the—” Robeck let the rest hang.

Sawyer returned some hours later. He changed into dry clothes and supped on hot tea. His affect was flat. We waited. Finally, Merck gave in to scientific curiosity. “Mr. Sawyer, what was it, in the boat?”

“Her afterbirth,” he said, and slurped his tea.

“Begad,” Robeck said.

Sawyer explained, “Yakuti women believe that if they don’t want to bear any more children, they need to leave the last afterbirth out in the woods for birds and beasts to eat it.”

“And you—”

“Helped her.”

Merck said, “But her newborn is—”

“A baby girl and doing well so far. She has her reasons.”

For a while we contemplated those
reasons,
in silence. Sawyer said, “She doesn’t want to go with us.”

Robeck whistled. “You proposed
that
? A mother with a newborn, on a ship, to the Icy Sea? Bad luck if I’ve ever seen one. The captain would never agree to it, you know that, right?”

“Doesn’t matter. She didn’t want it. Not to the Middle Kolyma fort, not to the next one down, the Lower Kolyma. To get away from here, never mind following us to sea. She didn’t want it.” He bottomed-up his mug and picked a shred of tea leaf from his teeth, then went to his bedding and curled up under the covers.

Robeck said, “How’d she feed herself and the babe on the Middle or on the Lower Kolyma? If no man’s taken her come fall, she’ll die. She knows that.”

Sawyer turned his back to us. “Only four days left.”

Four days to the 25th of May, 1787, when we would set sail.

• • •

We consecrated the ships in a ceremony at the Middle Kolyma fort a couple of weeks later, and named them
Pallas
and
Yasachnoi.
Middle Kolyma was also where we picked up Nikolai Darkin, a Chukchi translator for our impending transactions on the peninsula.

When we sailed the final miles through Kolyma’s discharge into the sea, the banks were tall and crowned with wind-carved rocks. They stood like giant sentinels—their topmost parts sat on their tapering pillars like heads on shoulders, all turned north. The sea dressed itself in mists and clouds—it seemed there never was a true boundary between ice, water, air—it was a single medium, in many guises. Air sweated moisture. Ice breathed fog. Water smoked swirls of cold vapor—pillars of white steam stood here and there across the horizon like umbilical cords between heaven and earth. In the mornings the ships’ rigging would be encrusted
in ice, and the rest of the time every unbound droplet of moisture in this world found us and settled on us. It seemed as if we all—man, ship, sail—were an alien object inside a gigantic, slow beehive, and the invisible bees worked day and night, encasing us in their secretions—layers of ice, water, and ice again.

In the Icy Sea at last! Everyone’s spirits were up. But the airs were contrary more often than not. We kept plying, and as we insisted on our easterly course, ice floes, big and small, kept going in the opposite direction. It began to seem to me these ice floes were people—blind, pale people wading past our vessel, touching it, running their fingernails along its fragile hull, scraping, like chalk on blackboard. And as I stood, sleepless, on the deck, the night sun low and yellow, I felt that ice people were here for me, that if they were allowed to take me, they would go away and open our path. That they were here because I had escaped the ice trap on the Yasachnoi.

What do you want from me?
I would whisper.

• • •

Once, we stood away from the coast, due north, in hopes of steering out of the ice mash. But as far as we went, we did not find clear water, only more ice—sheets, floes, slush, and broken pieces, some up to eight feet tall. The wind became fresh and then increased to squalls; we had to reef and then furl sails. We returned back to the coast and tried to trace it east for a few more days. All the while, endless ice arrived from the northeast to meet us, pushing against us, beaching, jamming the shore.

Barannoi Kamen, a precipitous cape in the shoreline, was as far as we got. I volunteered to climb to the top and scout what lay beyond Barannoi. As far east as I could see, the sea was teeming with ice, and our little ships—made by the first-timer work crew, as best they could with their frostbitten hands—were no match for it.

What do you want from me?

The day before Captain Billings ordered a retreat, the wind changed and the ice began to move offshore. Years later, Sawyer would still get bitter when recounting the circumstances: we could have sailed east right there and then! The locals had been saying the waterways in those parts were the best from early August on. Only two weeks to wait! But our captain was apprehensive of staying on water too late into fall, and he was always thinking of the way back, not the way forward.

There are times when I think we failed because our captain chose a
safe course, not because I refused to make a sacrifice of myself to floating ice.

• • •

We left the
Pallas
and the
Yasachnoi
at the Lower Kolyma fort in early August. We left the translator Nikolai Darkin there too, with orders to travel east to the Chukchi tribes, join them, and await our arrival by sea from the other, eastern side of the continent. In doing so, we created the very trouble we had to face four years later, in 1791. But first things first.