by Alex Dryden
Anna clung to the rock above her, her feet tight on the ledge, her ears burning from the sound of the fuel explosion. The remains of the helicopter tilted on to its side, somehow remaining perched on the tiny meadow, and she saw the thick, black cloud of burning fuel rising up into the sky like an invitation.
She looked around and beneath her, to a sheer drop that fell away into a gorge a hundred feet below. No ropes for climbing, no path down. She hauled herself over the lip on to the meadow and past the blackened, burning beast, following the lip, looking down for any route away from the meadow. Here, if they saw her, she was a target in a shooting gallery, and she didn’t want to climb up from the meadow on to the tabletop. That would only expose her more. She saw a cut in the rock where she could wedge her legs on each side to prevent her fall and she climbed down into it and began the precarious descent hoping the cutting wouldn’t fizzle out and leave her hanging in limbo with no way out, down or up.
She levered herself down the first ten feet. Maybe they would think she’d died in the crash, though they wouldn’t trust it. But as long as she could disappear from view, there was that chance. They would have seen the smoke by now, diverted their hunt to the canyon, and they would drop men down on ropes. They would see the carnage of the helicopter, examine inch by inch the terrain and the near impossibility of escape from it. If they didn’t find her, they would hope, though only hope, that she was dead. But they wouldn’t lower their search. She had gained the plateau; before her, a thousand-mile stretch of wilderness devoid of roads or habitation – just the secret base and the nuclear research station where Professor Kryuchkov was their prisoner.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THROUGHOUT THAT LONG, white Arctic night, Petrov sat with his dying grandfather. Gannyka lay on wooden sled runners with packed grass bound into sheaves over them and then a reindeer hide over them to keep him away from the dew. His eyes were suddenly bright, Petrov noticed, and had lost the cloudiness of before, earlier in the bright night, but he still insisted he was dying.
‘This is my death bed,’ he told Petrov. ‘It is my time.’
At one point he looked up at Petrov who was sitting on a wooden stool beside him and asked, ‘Who will carry on the tradition? Who will perform the magic now?’ But Petrov had no reply. Shamans were grown by their elders early on, he knew that, or they simply appeared, either from birth or later in adolescence. Those who become shamans were the most sickly or those affected by severe nervous disorders – the ‘Arctic Madness’, as Slav academics called it, but it wasn’t that. After all, there were shamans all over the world. And the native tribes in Siberia felt no nervousness living in the Arctic. But the sickness that was common to a shaman’s initiation was part of the ritualistic necessity of becoming a shaman. The sickness took them to places ordinary mortals never went. And if they survived whatever ailed them, they became stronger than anyone in the tribe and then they could heal the sick themselves. Gannyka, Petrov remembered, had started his secret life as a shaman in the 1940s when he had cured two children with smallpox and some syphilitics who’d escaped from the Gulag camps.
The long day of night was completely silent. Somewhere, wolves would be tracking a moose, or trying to get inside the reindeer corrals, and the bears and foxes would be hunting, but Petrov heard nothing. At some time between two and three in the morning, Gannyka began to talk in a low voice, almost as if he were speaking in a trance of words. Petrov recalled that the Evenki had around four thousand words in their language, but the shamans of the tribe spoke in a secret language with more than ten thousand words. The shaman speaks the language of all nature, as his grandfather had told him when he was a boy.
‘My story began when I was sick with smallpox as a boy,’ Gannyka said. ‘I was unconscious for many days, so near death that my family almost buried me. In my sickness and raving I was carried to a great sea. It was there that the smallpox spoke to me. “The Lords of the Water will make you a shaman,” the sickness told me. Then the husband of the Lady of the Water, who is Lord of the Underworld, gave me a sable and a black rat who guided me to the underworld. There, those who had died from smallpox, syphilis, plague and other deadly diseases to humans, first tore out my heart and then they tore the flesh from my bones and they put all my bones in a boiling pot of water. They boiled them for three years. Later, they took out my bones and counted them to make sure they were all there and then a smith in the underworld welded them together again with metal plates and put new flesh on me. He gave me new eyes so that I could see differently and he forged a new head for me so that I could understand what is inside it. Then he made me my shaman’s costume, which is hidden near here in the cave where you will bury me. It is this smith who forges the shamans. I was born then as a shaman. After that, the other sicknesses of humanity that live in the underworld taught me how they tortured mankind. The sicknesses of the head, as well as of the body. The Lord of Madness taught me how he, too, tortured humankind. They all taught me these things so that I would be able to cure men.’
He seemed to come out of the trance and looked at Petrov, perhaps to see if he was listening. From beneath the wooden sled runners Gannyka took his own drum. ‘It is made from a tree struck by lightning,’ he said. ‘Like the one I gave you. Rub vodka on the skin.’
Petrov took a small vodka bottle from his pocket and filled the palm of his hand. Then he rubbed the deerskin top of the drum with the vodka.
‘You have your drum that I gave you?’ Gannyka asked him.
Petrov took the small tambour drum that he’d kept in his apartment all these years from beside him and showed it to Gannyka. The old man studied it and then looked at Petrov with a piercing stare.
‘This is all finished,’ Gannyka said. ‘With me. There is no one else.’ He fell back on his shoulders. ‘The black rat and the white sable then escorted me from the underworld,’ he continued. ‘They took me to the Tree of the Lord of the Earth who, as you know, is the eagle, and he taught me about the nine herbs and their healing qualities. After that, my escorts then took me to a cave in the mountain where there were two naked women, their skins growing reindeer fur. One of these women was pregnant and would give birth to two reindeer, the animals that give us food and help us in everything we do. The cave has two openings, one to the east and one to the west. Through each gate, the young woman sent a reindeer to serve the people of the forest.’ He looked up at Petrov again. ‘I have had three wives, all orphans, as it should be. But the Great Mother of the Animals is my true wife.’
Petrov placed his hand on the old man’s forehead. It was burning.
‘I have many souls,’ Gannyka said. ‘Many, many animal souls.’
Then Gannyka sank back as if for the last time. Petrov saw a great peace descend over his forehead and into his eyes. It was like a bright sun cloud. The burning on his forehead eased.
But the old man opened his eyes again and fixed them on Petrov with all the harshness he’d ever possessed. ‘You, Munnukan,’ he said. ‘You have a great secret. But you don’t know that you possess it. You are like the shaman before he becomes a shaman. The old ways are gone, my ways, but you possess the secret of the new ways.’
Gannyka turned his eyes away to the sky towards the east. Without looking at Petrov again, he said, ‘After my death, you will see a wolf. Then you will find and finally believe in the secret you possess.’
The wolf, Petrov thought. Irgichi in the Evenki language Gannyka had spoken. They were his last words on earth. Irgichi was also the word for ‘son’, Petrov remembered. A sacred creature, the wolf, whom it was a sin to kill. Like a son.
The funeral took place in the early morning at around six o’clock. Though it was daylight, it was still night in terms of the dead man who was being guided by his spirit to the underworld and who was joining the spirits of his ancestors, the other shamans.
The whole camp was dressed in ceremonial clothes of deerskin and eagle feathers, small metal charms hanging from their clothes in imit
ation of their shaman. Some of the metal was just bottle tops, or small bits of ironmongery they carried with them on their nomadic journey. As if in a dream, Petrov found that he too was dressed in the deerskin leggings he’d brought, and moccasins and a deerskin jacket he’d been given for the ceremony. He carried the drum Gannyka had given him in his hand, while the old man’s drum was placed on his body which was now carried on the bed which had become a bier. It was carried by four men who were not of the shaman’s family.
They walked in a slow, winding procession up through the meadow towards the rising mountain and the cave. Some of the people carried flaming torches, others beat ordinary drums in a monotonous rhythm that sent the senses to sleep. The walking and the drumming were in themselves trance-like. Occasionally, one or other of the participants broke into an Evenki funeral song, and the others stamped their feet to the rhythm as they walked. Petrov discovered he could remember little of the songs, but soon he was able to join, from some distant childhood memory, in one or two of the choruses.
The procession stretched for a hundred yards, with the old man on the bier at the front and Petrov – at his mother’s and Gannyka’s insistence in their conversation during the night – behind it. By now they were on a slow, wild sheep path that climbed in switchbacks up the side of the mountain and the men carrying the bier had trouble keeping to it. Everyone else walked in single file. Back and forth across the mountain they walked for an hour until they were at the entrance to the cave.
There they stopped, the bier was laid down, and the people gathered around while prayers were said and some chants were sent to the sky and to the earth below. A tree had been planted at the entrance of the cave, with its roots facing to the sky. There was an east and a west entrance, Petrov noted, just as the old man had told him there had been in his long dream nearly eighty years before.
Finally, at some undetermined signal, the bier was lifted and carried into the cave. It was a huge cavern stretching back some fifty yards into the mountain. The rock was wet with ice and water from the streams and lakes on the plateau above and Petrov saw various charms and small flags, bowls of incense and wood carvings. He saw the carving of a man’s hand, huge, with its palm open. It had been made in the previous week at Gannyka’s instruction. It was the symbol of his parting.
Finally, the bier was hoisted by ropes on to a high ledge where animals couldn’t reach it. More prayers were said and Petrov saw his mother disappear into the back of the cave, the only place of total darkness on this Siberian summer morning. When she returned, she was carrying a coat. It was of faded red material and had a great number of metal discs attached to it, with feathers on the arms for flight and a wolf’s skin around its collar. She walked up to Petrov and gave it to him.
‘He kept it here since 1941,’ she said. ‘When the persecutions were at their height. He came up to this cave to conduct his ceremonies alone, his ecstasies, and to commune with his spirits. He told me to give it to you.’
Petrov looked at it, first in amazement, then embarrassment. Finally, he saw that the others were all looking at him. He took the coat from his mother and they stood in silence while herbs were burned around the rock at the foot of the ledge where the body was laid.
‘You must leave last,’ his mother said.
Petrov stood in the semi-darkness as the others filed outside.
‘Wait until we reach the foot of the cliff,’ she said.
Petrov stood still. His mind was empty and he seemed to see with eyes other than his own.
Down in the valley, coming on to the meadow where the reindeer were, the procession went. Petrov stood at the front of the cave now, in the sunlight, the coat over his arm, like a businessman, he thought, on the way to a meeting, and who was prepared for rain.
When he saw they had all reached the meadow below, he came out of the cave, pausing once to look back at his grandfather. He couldn’t see that far back into the dark cave, high up on the ledge where the old man lay. It was a look that required no eyes.
From the top of the sheep path, he looked to the left, towards the eastern gate. There, around a hundred yards away from where he stood, he saw a wolf. It was standing stock still, though unthreatening, not in a crouch or making to run and attack. For an uncomfortable moment, Petrov felt that the wolf was just there to see him and to be seen by him.
Then he felt a dull boom that shook the air. He turned to the right, the west, and, after a few moments, he saw a black cloud of smoke rising straight up into the skies in oily billows. Petrov stared in astonishment, the wolf for a moment forgotten. The plume of black smoke was some way off, coming from burning fuel, by the look of it, aviation fuel, Petrov guessed. It was coming from one of the countless canyons that lay deeper inside the plateau.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ANNA STOOD UP on the escarpment, thirty feet above the military road that led to the Putorana nuclear research station. Beyond the road, the land stretched away on a flat plateau as far as the distant mountain where the ICBM silos were located, where the research facilities were also buried in the earth, and where Professor Vasily Kryuchkov was being kept prisoner.
She’d rolled two large boulders down the slope on to the road, at a juncture in its twisting path through the higher ground she now stood on; an arc in the road where the boulders would be concealed from traffic coming in either direction, until they were almost on them. Using heavy branches, she’d also managed to manoeuvre several smaller boulders in a line on the escarpment that would take only a small amount of leverage with the branches to tip them down the hill and on to the road. Whichever way a jeep or a military vehicle or two came, she was ready to attack. Only if a troop carrier or several jeeps came along the road would she hold back. The odds against her were high enough as it was. But if she could take a vehicle and then head for the nuclear base, then she would be ever closer to the man she needed.
It had been a long and dangerous scramble down the sheer cliff face from where the helicopter had crashed. She’d slipped twice and fallen heavily on to a ledge on one occasion, her death only prevented by a last-minute grab with her left hand on to a rock that jutted outwards. But she had cut the left hand to the bone and there was a deep gash in her left thigh. She had stemmed the blood eventually, swamped the wounds with bandages from her pack, and then reached the foot of the cliff. She’d lost a lot of blood and she knew she was weak.
It was only when she’d reached the foot of the cliff that she’d heard the sound of the first helicopter, arriving to investigate the smoke and finding the crash. It hovered high above her, above the rock wall she’d scaled down and high, too, above the small meadow where she’d landed. Down in the canyon now, hundreds of feet below it, she’d been able to stay out of sight, dodging around overhangs and protruding rock walls until she was at least a mile away. When she looked back, she saw three other helicopters arrive and then ropes coiling downwards towards the stricken helicopter. But by that time, before the men began to descend down the ropes, she was around a dog-leg in the canyon and on her way north. Northwards, that was where the road to the research station lay. It crossed just on the other side of this stretch of plateau which she’d walked beneath as the canyon turned north.
She waited now on the escarpment, two, then three hours. She ate from two of the remaining tins in her pack that she’d stolen from the dacha and drank from a stream. She felt some strength returning, but it was feeble compared to her usual strength. After some time between four and a half and five hours she finally heard the sound of an engine. And then she saw in the far distance on the lower-lying ground before the road began to wind up towards where she stood, three vehicles. Three. Too many, that was her initial reaction. She could maybe take out two, but three…
But with her strength ebbing again and the pain of her wounds throbbing and tearing at the nerve endings, she decided it had to be now.
She watched carefully through the binoculars, keeping them away from any flash from the sunlight. There w
ere the three vehicles; two jeeps and, in the middle, another vehicle, a low, covered truck. The jeeps seemed to be the truck’s escort. They were coming from the direction of the research station.
In the first jeep were just two men, a driver and passenger, and in the second the same. In the truck between the jeeps, she saw a driver only. But were there more men hidden by the truck’s cover, a platoon even? Yet the slow cortege was odd, she thought. If it had been a bureaucrat’s limousine rather than a truck between the two jeeps, it would have looked more natural. There was something in the truck that needed an escort of sorts, but not a heavy escort. Whatever the truck contained couldn’t be so important, then; and anyway, as many troops as possible were now either diverted in the search for her, or would be guarding the fences of the research station. She decided there were no troops under the truck’s canopy, and she would have to deal only with the five men she could see.
