The Age of Ice: A Novel (9 page)

“We have to get to Orenburg . . .”

In a while he said, “And how do you propose we get there?”

“Just get up and go.”

“Just go,” he mocked. “Ha! Just get up and go.”

• • •

It may have been on our second or third day in Bugulma that I walked in on Svetogorov and Freiman arguing. “You are on a personal adventure, Guards Captain, and I shall not condone it!” Freiman was saying, his emphatic consonants causing spittle to leave his mouth, while Paulie, hot with pathos, insisted, “General, the longer you sit here, the less battleworthy your troops are and you know it—”

“What I do know, young man, is that my soldiers will turn on me the moment they’re anywhere near that rebel gang—”

“Strike out and Prince Alexis and I will help you reap the victory. Act now—or watch Orenburg violated and pillaged as you’re cowering a safe distance away—”

What are you doing, Paulie?
I wanted to say.
Why are you alienating him?
Freiman’s voice sizzled up an octave, “Who are
you
and your
Prince Alexis
to tell me what to do? Where is your leave from your regiment? Your dispatch? Your haphazard escapades are not welcome here, you’re a nuisance to morale! This is a war zone, young man, and I am under orders. You’d better stop right here”—he jammed his index finger into the tabletop—“or you shall be put under arrest!”

“Then go ahead and do it! Do it, if only to stop us from reaching Orenburg and telling its defenders that reinforcements were always there, they just did not bother to move!”

“Paul!” I cried—and the opponents finally acknowledged my presence.

“This is insanity,” Freiman said, and Svetogorov spread his arms. “Just look at this, Alexis!”

“General, please,” I pleaded. “We will do no such thing. We are in no position to judge, we’re grateful for your hospitality, and we are not asking for any assistance. We’ll leave quietly and at the first opportunity.”

But it was too late. “Not on my watch,” Freiman said, and put us under arrest.

• • •

The bathhouse—from which Cyril and his cohabitants were expelled first—became our detention cell. They locked the door but did not take away our sidearms, which was either sloppiness, or a sign that Freiman
trusted us to be men of honor. Svetogorov stretched out on a shelflike bench that went round the chamber, and fell quiet. A foot-square canvas-paned window made day into dusk.

“Paulie—that wasn’t a wise move,” I said.

He dismissed me. “I’d almost turned him, if not for your intervention. Nothing we can do now.”

I found it difficult to see things the way he saw them. “From where I stood you hadn’t turned him in the least, only aggravated him.”

“You weren’t there for the whole thing. Stop pacing, will you?”

I obeyed and sat opposite him. I had to at least consider that he might be right. I said my next words more peaceably. “He has to understand that keeping us under arrest is just as troublesome for morale. We take up space—five men could have lodged here if not for us. Tomorrow Freiman will calm down and release us, and let us be on our way. The less attention is drawn to us, the better. He ought to know that.”

Paul didn’t answer. With his eyes shut and his hands clasped over his chest, he lay like a holy relic of his own best intentions. His quarrel with Freiman seemed odd, but who was I to say? I kept sensing a nagging presence in the corner of my mind’s eye, as if reality itself kept smearing; I was having thoughts of snow and had trouble focusing. Paulie was trying to do what he thought right, I told myself. If he’d acted alone, it was only because he thought me too proud or too shy to ask Freiman for help.

Just when I sorted it all out, he perplexed me again. “Jesus Lord,” he said, tossing to his side, “if you only waited for official papers!”

How could he have forgotten?!
“Paul,” I said, “you know why we left Saint Pete’s in a hurry—”

But he wasn’t listening: “—then Freiman would’ve taken me seriously!” And then he interrogated me. “Tell me, Alexis, are you not
afraid
? At all?”

“What do you mean?”

“Afraid of— Do you really want to get up and go to Orenburg—and what’re you going to do there—if you get there alive—just sit and wait for Pugachev to roll over you and your family?”

Truly, he puzzled me. My mind’s eye darted from him to myself: whom to trust? Who had changed, I or he?
Be responsible,
I urged myself.
Do no harm
. “I don’t know,” I muttered, “if I am afraid or not. But I hold you under no obligation to follow me.”

He was laughing, not listening. Laughing in wild spurts and jabbering
away as he hammered the log wall with the side of his fist. “All right then! We get up and go! Prince Velitzyn is not afraid! Neither am I. How’s this—we make a break for it. I know just what to do—”

He sketched out his plan. I objected but he would not be swayed. He looked desperate and earnest now. “I got us into this, Alexis, let me get us out.”

Toward the end of the day they let Cyril in with a meal, and Svetogorov told him to have horses and sleighs at the ready. Cyril gave me a quizzical look and I shrugged. “Do what you can. None of them is keeping an eye on you.”

Late that night the door opened shyly and in squeezed the apologetic band of the former denizens of the bathhouse with their bedrolls and knapsacks—no other sleeping arrangements had been made for them, apparently. A bearish Cossack subaltern, a
desyatnik,
plodded in last and advised us to retire to the wardrobe-size enclosure behind the stove, the actual steam sauna, if we wanted to sleep in privacy. The squatters livened the fire in the stove, making the whole place stifling hot, then one by one succumbed to sleep, while Svetogorov and I, refusing to retreat into the claustrophobic sauna, kept to the bench farthest from the door. The desyatnik propped his body against the door and began to snore. Before long we heard a soft scratch at the door. Poor Cyril was impatient either for escape or for shelter.

Svetogorov seized the moment. “Alexis,” he whispered to me, “I’m going. Feel free to follow whenever I clear the way. Meet you by the sleighs.” As the desyatnik was sorting Cyril out, Svetogorov waded forth over the mounds of sleeping bodies and asserted, “You—take me to the latrine. Not your shithole. The one officers go to. Chop-chop, now! Do it!” I marveled at Paulie. So effortless and so authoritative—truly, I wouldn’t have been able to deliver the lines so well! The desyatnik grumbled some, but did as he was bidden. The door, now unprotected, lured us; Cyril hovered there, unsettled. I stood up and, careful not to ding anyone’s head with the tip of my scabbard, tiptoed out.

Outside, the stars were out but not the moon. Here and there somebody could be heard crunching through snow, and many huts and hovels still glowed with candlelight or hummed with voices. I urged Cyril to take the five-minute trip to the stables—and our sleighs—in no hurry. He had managed to ready only one of them. “Now what?” he said.

The only reason I kept going was because I did not believe we were
actually executing our escape. The logic of it was ridiculous—I was leaving one portmanteau’s worth of my belongings in Freiman’s house. But here I was in the stable, ushering out the nearest horse. Our harness to the second sleigh, though—we could not find it, and so we consolidated our sleigh loads, all the while Cyril getting more and more grumpy, and—where the hell was Svetogorov?

A door was flung open in a hut opposite us some yards away; somebody tumbled out with a lantern and raced off, steadying his hat. Elsewhere, dogs burst out barking. Cyril fidgeted. “If you want to leave, we’ve got to begin leaving, Your Nobleship.”

How long could we sit undiscovered, in a sleigh hitched to a horse and with another one tethered in tow? What happened next would later be hotly contested, but I swear, this is what I remember, clear as day. I waited, feeling in turns a betrayer or betrayed, but what gave me the final impetus was a flash: Paulie hadn’t even taken his sword when he’d left the bathhouse! That’s what turned my doubt into certainty, I swear, not the lingering itch for snowy fields!

“Let’s go,” I said to Cyril.

• • •

So we went.

We trooped on all night and most of the day, if only for the lack of alternatives. The mood was low. I needed closure. “In truth, Guards Captain Svetogorov was reluctant to go on without a convoy,” I said.

Cyril snorted. “His nobleship? He was shitting his pants ever since those hanged people.”

This would have been a punishable case of disrespect—in another world, but right now I was just grateful to Cyril that his observation matched my suspicions. Yet I had to give Paulie the benefit of the doubt, for nothing is ever this simple. “There are many reasons one may not want to be on this road. I do think that in his heart he wishes he were with us. ”

Cyril snorted again. “That’s your nobleship
nesses
’ kind of talk. I don’t get it.” After a long pause he sighed and added, “I’m shitting my pants too.”

And that was that.

By the end of that day we came to a lone hut on the bank of a frozen creek. A thatch fence let in to a small yard covered in footprints. In the middle stood a brass tripod. A candle’s glow outlined a shuttered window;
I asked Cyril to knock on the door, and when no one answered, we entered. Inside it smelled strongly of blood; one man lay prostrate on the floor, another sat over him on a bench by a table. One was too still to be alive, the other sniffled into a crumpled handkerchief. He was maybe eighteen years of age. “Who is it?” he said, staring at us as though responding belatedly to our knock on the door. I said, “It’s us. What happened?”

“A conflict, dear sir,” the young man said, “between science and war.” His voice trembled and his words felt composed in advance. He blew his nose and finished, “We are astronomers, sir. We harm no one. We observe the movements of celestial bodies. We saw the transit of Venus, the last one in this
century
! And they, sir—they took our telescope. To use as a spyglass!” He paused and snuffled. “Professor von Bragge died protecting it!”

“Who are they?” I asked. It wasn’t too hard to assume the worst, but I wanted certainty. “Where are
they
now?”

The young man looked at me as if I’d misunderstood him, then extended a hand. “Ivan Kuznetzov, by Lord’s will a student. Pleased to meet you.”

I hesitated, wondering how cold my hand may be, but before I could make up my mind, student Kuznetzov changed his. “Oh, right.” He studied his palm and scratched at it. I noticed that it was covered in dry blood, as was the student’s jacket. “Sorry,” Ivan babbled. “Nosebleed, sir. I get those. I blow my nose too hard.”

Cyril behind me snorted, “ ’Tis no nosebleed,” while Ivan seemed to forget all about us, moistening his handkerchief in his mouth and rubbing his hands with it. I told Cyril to go let the horses into the stable, and sat down at the table opposite the student. I waited till he stopped rubbing and scratching and looked back at me; his face bore a mix of helplessness and annoyance. I introduced myself. He said, “Oh,” and asked whether my detachment was waiting outside.

“What?”

“Your soldiers, sir.”

“There is no detachment.”

“Oh,” he said again.

Cyril returned and loitered by the door, looking at Ivan with disapproval.

I tried to broach the subject again. “Is anybody else around?”

“No. Just me and Herr Professor. And a servant, but he was taken away. He and the mare. Well, then . . . How was your trip?”

“Can we help stow away the body?” I asked.

The student nodded and did not move.

“Ivan? Where should we carry it?”

“Yes, yes.” He smiled politely.

I’d had enough. I stood up and waved to Cyril. Together, we closed in on the “Herr Professor.” Ivan shuddered and shouted out, “No!”

“Good grief !” Cyril backed off.

“Why can’t we move him?” I crouched over the body.

Ivan’s tormented whisper was but a confirmation of what I could now see myself. “Because his face will fall off.”

Now at least I knew what I had to do. First, we nudged Ivan onto his feet, then led him behind a curtain where the sleeping quarters were, and where he burst into tears. Second, we ripped the said curtain off, covered the unfortunate professor’s face—
they
had meant to decapitate him, but landed a saber too high and at too steep an angle—and carried the wrapped body out, placing him atop the firewood pile. And then—a long, long night to endure.

I spent some hours calming Ivan down. I managed to tease out of him that
they
were a gang of bandits, now gone. But even after Ivan stopped sobbing and shaking, I remained awake until after six in the morning. Naturally, I was also the last to wake up, and when I did, I overheard the conversation the shaken, stuffy-nosed Ivan held with my Cyril. Ivan must have shown interest in joining us, and Cyril did not think it was a good idea. “You can’t, ’cause he’s going to Orenburg,” Cyril declared.

“But that’s . . . that’s where the
rebel
is!” Ivan said in an awed half-whisper. “Does he know it?”

“Like hell he does!” The frustration in Cyril’s voice was impossible to miss.

The two were silent for a while. Then Ivan sighed, “Sweet Jesus,” and in another while asked, “Why does he have to go there?”

Cyril answered, “You mister
astoronomer,
why don’t you go and ask his nobleship yourself. I am just an orderly here.”

When at last I made my appearance, I’d already come to a decision. “Cyril, you’ll take Ivan back to Bugulma,” I said. “And the professor. Ivan has another sleigh; we have a horse for it. You have my leave.”

The magnanimous Cyril voiced a concern about my well-being, but I
cut him short. And after that—well, we had to turn our attentions back to Ivan. When he learned that all this time help and safety had been only one good day’s travel away, he broke down all over again.

To this day I wonder, was my letting Cyril go a moral choice, or simply an irresistible urge to be left alone with the snowy fields?