The searchlights went dark.
Nikolai was already running. Lena followed in his footprints, jerking the smelly, half-cured sheepskin jacket from around her waist, letting it comb the ground behind her to smooth out their tracks and camouflage their scent from the dogs.
Too long, it’s taking too long.
Any second the searchlights would come back on, machine-gun fire would cut them down, and their bodies would be hung on the front gate for the wolves to eat.
She didn’t realize Nikolai had stopped until she smacked into him, hard enough he grunted and nearly stumbled into the rolls of barbed wire.
He signaled her to go first. She crawled through the gap on her belly, shoving their bulky gear ahead of her, all the while her mind screaming, Too long, too long. She was taking too long. The searchlights would flood over them, there’d be shouts, bullets …
Then she was free at last, on the other side of the wire. She scrambled to her feet and looked back. All she could see of Nikolai was his head, thrusting up out of the snow. He wasn’t moving.
For a moment she thought he’d frozen at the sight of a guard, but then she realized the hooked barbs of the wire had snagged the back of his coat. He shook himself, pulling, pulling, but he couldn’t get loose. Little pieces of ice tinkled down the coils of wire. An instant later, Lena heard the snap of a cartridge being levered into the breech of a gun.
“Halt!”
2
HER HEART nearly stopped with fear.
“Mother of God, don’t shoot,” she heard an old man’s voice whine from over by the latrines. “I’m not escaping. In truth the only part of me running at the moment is my poor bowels.”
Lena tried to rip Nikolai’s coat free of the barbs, but it was still stuck fast.
“Can’t it wait till morning?” the other, younger voice said. The one with the gun.
“In a word … no.”
“Well, hurry it up then.”
Lena jerked on the coat again, harder, and finally it snapped free with another crackle of ice.
“Hurry. Why is it always hurry, hurry, hurry with you people? The State gave me twenty-five years in this paradise, so why should I rush things—?” The old man’s voice cut off abruptly as the frozen snow around them exploded into a yellow glare.
The searchlights were back on.
Nikolai burst from under the fence at a dead run. He grabbed her arm, pulling her along with him. Out of the corner of her eye Lena could see a bright arc of light sweeping toward them over the snow, getting closer, closer. Fear shrieked through her. They weren’t going to make it—
The night suddenly exploded into a fury of howls and snarls and snapping teeth. The wolves had at last gone after the body of the dead zek. The searchlights swung around to flood the front gate. The guards in the towers fired. A man screamed.
Lena stumbled, almost fell, but she didn’t look back.
WHEN THEY GOT beyond the reach of the searchlights, they stopped just long enough to strap on their snowshoes. Lena listened for the bay of the dogs, for the rasp of the runners on the soldiers’ iron sleighs, but there was only the wind.
They’d gone barely a mile farther when the wind began to blow harder, driving pellets of snow into their faces, lashing the loose snow on the ground into ice clouds. Lena stopped to scrub her eyes with her sleeve, knocking the icicles off her eyebrows.
Nikolai staggered up next to her. He leaned over, bracing his palms on his thighs, gasping for air.
“The purga will be on us soon.” Lena had to shout a little to be heard above the wind. “It’ll be hard going after that.”
Nikolai tilted back his head to grin up at her. “Hard going, hunh? And what do you call this so far? A nice, warm day at the beach?”
Lena shook her head at him. It would take too much breath to explain, and there was no explaining anyway. A purga was something you had to experience to believe, and by then all you could do was pray the experience didn’t kill you. Soon there would be no tracks behind them, no horizon in front of them, no ground, no sky. Only snow and wind beyond imagining.
Nikolai’s whole body suddenly heaved as a fit of coughing tore through him. When he was finally able to draw a breath again, he said, “It’s the damn cold. It shreds your lungs into confetti paper…. How far away are we from this secret cave of yours?”
“Not far.”
He straightened slowly and looked around them, although she knew he couldn’t make out much this deep into the polar night.
“‘Not far,’ she says. Lena, love, please tell me we’re not lost.”
She’d heard the teasing smile in his voice, but that cough, the sudden wetness in his breathing, was scaring her. Had the exertion of their escape driven the fever into his lungs?
She pulled off her glove and reached out to touch his face. It was coated with a thin sheet of ice from his sweat freezing instantly in the frigid air.
Still, she felt him smile. “I’ll make it, love,” he said. “I’m one tough bastard underneath all my surface charm. But how can you be sure you know where we are? It’s black as pitch out here, and everything’s the same. Nothing but snow and more snow.”
“This land is bred into my bones. I can find my way over it blindfolded.”
Before they set off again, though, she used the rope from off the sheepskin coat to tie them together, for once the purga struck they’d be as good as blind, unable to see beyond the end of their noses. They could lose sight of each other in seconds, and if that happened, Nikolai would be a dead man come morning.
THE PURGA HIT two hours later.
The shrieking wind drove the snow into her eyes and mouth, the cold burned her lungs with every breath. She wondered how Nikolai was managing. She couldn’t see him behind her; only a steady pressure on the rope told her he was keeping up. A couple of times she knew he’d fallen, because the rope had suddenly jerked taut, but he’d somehow managed to get right back up again.
They had to have covered at least three miles since they’d entered the box canyon. The canyon was shaped like a boot and at its toe was the lake, the one place she thought of as home. It wasn’t the Ozero P’asino—she’d lied about that to the sergeant. The small Siberian lake she’d been born on wasn’t on any map. No roads led there, and in winter even the caribou trails were buried deep beneath the snow.
She’d told him other lies, as well. Her mother hadn’t been a Yakut. She’d been one of the toapotror—the magic people.
I need some of that magic now. Real magic to drive away the purga, to get us safely to the cave before Nikki—
The rope jerked taut.
Lena waited, but this time he didn’t get back up.
SHE USED THE rope as a guide, feeling her way back to him. Only seconds had passed since he’d fallen and already he was nearly buried in snow.
She grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and hauled him half-upright. His head lolled. He breathed and sounded as if he were drowning. “Nikki, get up. You’ve got to keep moving.”
A raw cough ripped through him. “Can’t. Chest hurts.”
She shook him, hard. “Nikki! Don’t you dare quit on me.”
“No. Don’t want to die….” He grabbed her arms and suddenly his face, crusted with ice, was only inches from hers. “If you love me, you won’t let me die.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise … Nikki, please. You’ve got to get up. It’s not much farther now, but I can’t carry you.”
“Da, da. Getting up … getting up …”
She thrust her shoulder up under his armpit and leveraged him onto his feet. He swayed, but didn’t fall back down.
She’d told him it wasn’t far, but she wasn’t sure anymore. They should’ve reached the lake by now, but the lake was nowhere, and they were nowhere, lost in a world of snow and wind and cold.
SHE LOST ALL sense of time as they slogged on, her arm around Nikolai’s waist, holding him
up against the blasts of wind.
She needed to get Nikolai to the cave soon, or he would die. She was tired, so tired.
Nikolai’s legs gave out beneath him and he lurched into her. She reeled, fighting desperately to keep from falling, screaming as his dead weight wrenched her arm nearly out of its socket. But somehow he got his feet back under him, and they staggered on.
Not much farther now. Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it. Don’t fall on me. Don’t fall—
He fell, and this time he took her with him.
They plunged through black space, hitting deep, pillowy snow and rolling to a stop. They landed in a snowdrift, and it was so warm and soft. She wanted to lie there and rest just a little while.
She knew that to stop was to die.
She thrashed her legs, fighting free of the sucking snow, and realized she wasn’t on the snow-shrouded tundra anymore. She was on ice.
They’d found the lake.
NIKOLAI STILL LAY in the snowdrift, unmoving. She fell back onto her knees beside him. She shook him, hard. She had no breath left to shout at him, he couldn’t have heard her anyway.
She shook him again, felt him move. Get up, get up, get up, she willed him, a chant in her mind. And somehow, with her half-lifting him, he got back onto his feet.
Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it, one more step.
Her own steps were happening on sheer instinct now. She was as good as blind, moving through a black nightmare of wind and snow. Just one more step, one more …
They hit a wall of ice.
The waterfall.
IN SUMMER, THE runoff from melting snow and swollen streams sent a cascade of water shooting off a tall, steep bluff and into the lake below. In winter the waterfall froze solid.
But no matter what time of year, the waterfall always hid the entrance to the cave. First, you had to know that it was possible to walk onto the narrow ledge between the waterfall and the bluff, but even then all you would see was a flat face of solid rock. Unless you were a daughter of the toapotror, the magic people.
A daughter of the magic people knew that what looked like a sheer wall of rock was really two walls, overlapping each other to form a slit barely a foot wide. And if you dared to squeeze yourself into that slit, to inch your way along it, with the space growing narrower and narrower until it seemed that you’d taken one step too many, that you were stuck, trapped forever … then suddenly the slit would widen again, opening up into the entrance of a secret cavern.
LENA DIDN’T KNOW how she got Nikolai through the slit to the entrance of the cave, and she would never have managed it if he hadn’t battled back through the fever and found the strength to hold himself upright mostly on his own. I’m one tough bastard, he’d said, and she loved him for that.
To get inside the cave, you had to climb down steep, shallow steps the magic people had carved long ago into the rock. By the time they hit bottom, Lena’s arms and legs were trembling with the effort and she didn’t know how Nikolai had done it, even with her trying to bear as much of his weight as possible. The blackness was absolute, and she had to feel around for the pitch torch she hoped would still be in its bracket on the wall.
She found it and lit it with the tinderbox she’d stuffed deep inside the knapsack. The pitch burst into flame, lighting up the round, underground cavern.
And there it was, where it had always been, set into the wall: an ancient altar made out of human bones.
The altar of bones.
She’d started toward it, her aching muscles seeming to move on their own, when Nikolai let out a terrible groan and sagged slowly onto the floor. For a moment longer, she stared at the altar as if mesmerized, then she looked down at the man lying at her feet, and what she saw nearly stopped her heart.
“Nikki! Oh, God, Nikki …”
She fell to her knees beside him. How had he even managed to get himself this far? His lips were swollen and blue, his eyelashes frozen to his cheeks. His breathing was ragged, dangerously shallow.
Quickly, she built a fire using pieces of decaying coffins. Once she got the flames hot enough, she used an offering bowl from the altar to make a thin gruel out of melted snow and bread and fat from her knapsack.
“You’re not going to die on me, Nikki. I promise. You’re not going to die,” she chanted, like a prayer, but he was out of his head with fever.
The bowl of gruel trembled in her hands as she looked from Nikolai’s face, white as death, to the altar made of human bones. Skulls, femurs, fibulas, the hundreds of bones fitted intricately together to form an elaborate and macabre table of worship. On top of it, among the stubs of hundreds of melted candles, and battered bronze bowls that had once held offerings, sat the Lady—a wooden icon of the Virgin Mary.
The Lady’s jewels sparkled in the firelight. Her crown shone and the bright folds of her robes—orange, sea green, and a bloodred—glowed as lush as the day they were painted, nearly four hundred years ago in the court of Ivan the Terrible. And it seemed to Lena that the Lady’s eyes glimmered wet with tears over what she was about to do.
“I love him,” Lena said. “I couldn’t bear it if he dies.”
But the Lady was silent.
“I promised him,” she said. And still the Lady did not answer.
Lena made sure Nikolai still slept as if already dead, then she brought the bowl of gruel over to the altar and the icon. Because only with the Lady’s help could she be sure that her promise would be kept.
WHEN SHE CAME back, she saw the fire had warmed Nikolai enough that she could rouse him some. She slid her arm under his shoulders and raised his head so he could drink. He took a sip. Then another.
His feverish eyes cleared a little and he looked around the cavern. She could see the wonder grow on his face as he took it all in, for this place, macabre and mysterious, had been a burial chamber for her people since the beginning of time. She watched him take in the deep, oily, black pool fed by water dripping from the ceiling, the stalagmites that covered the floor like rows of tombstones, the crude drawings of wolves etched deep in the stone walls.
Finally, he focused on the hot geyser bubbling and bellowing steam beneath the altar made of human bones, and she heard him suck in a sharp breath.
“My God.”
Lena set down the bowl of gruel and leaned over him. “Sssh, love. Never mind.” She brushed the wet hair off his forehead. “They’re just the bones of people from long ago who died during the winter and were put here to be buried in the summer, only some ended up forgotten. And then other people came along and put their remains to another use.”
“It’s real.” His voice was little more than a whisper, his eyes wild. “It’s the sketch come to life, I tell you—from the Fontanka dossier. I never believed it, not in my heart. A wild tale told in a tavern by a drunken madman? But it’s real … the altar of bones.”
His gaze came back to her, and on his face she saw not only wonder now, but fear, and a raw, naked hunger. “Give it to me, Lena. Let me drink of the altar. If you love me, you will—”
But then his eyelids fluttered, and he passed out again.
Lena sat back on her heels. She could feel the Lady’s eyes on her, but she couldn’t bear to meet them. She looked instead at Nikolai’s pale, fever-ravaged face.
His lying face.
IT’S ALL BEEN a lie. Every kiss, every touch, every word out of his mouth—it had all just been a way for him to find the altar of bones.
Don’t trust anyone, her mother had warned her, the day she had brought Lena to the cave and shown her its frightening secret. “You will be the Keeper of the altar of bones, my daughter, after I am gone, and your sacred duty will be to keep it hidden forever from the world. You must tell no one, show no one. Trust no one, not even the ones you love. Especially not the ones who say they love you.”
The ones you love …
Lena reached out to touch him, then pulled her hand back, balling it into a fist in her lap.
She
wondered if Nikolai Popov was even his real name, wondered now if he’d ever been a real prisoner. Most of the men at Norilsk were sent to slave in the nickel mines, but they’d made him the camp “artist” instead, putting him to work painting slogans and red stars outside on the infirmary walls. The infirmary where she conveniently worked, and he had the kind of ravishing good looks to catch any woman’s eye.
But it was his defiant courage that had had won her heart. He told her he’d been sent to the gulag for drawing cartoons critical of Stalin and the Communist Party. “They are parasites. They feed off the fruits of our labor, all the while telling us how we should think, how we should be. I refuse to be a happy slave, Lena. There’s another world beyond this place, for you and me. For us. A world of infinite possibilities.”
He’d made it seem as if the escape were her idea, but she could see now how easily he’d manipulated things, telling her about the gap in the fence, about the forty-five seconds of no searchlights while the sentries changed shifts. And the cave … But is there some place, Lena love, where we can hide until the soldiers give up looking for us? How eagerly, how stupidly, she’d told him about the cave, how it was so cleverly hidden behind a waterfall on the lake where she’d been born.
What a truly gullible little fool you were, Lena Orlova.
He’d already known about the cave, obviously—not where it was, perhaps, but he’d known of its existence, and that she alone, of all the stupid females in the world, could lead him right to it. She’d been so very stupid. Stupid with love.
And Nikolai? Had he ever loved her, even a little?
Altar of Bones Page 3
