Nine Layers of Sky

by Liz Williams

  “What do you want, Ilya?”

  “I have more purpose now than I’ve had for years. A world to protect and someone to—” He hesitated.

  “To what?”

  “Someone to be with.”

  She wanted to think that he had been about to talk of love, but perhaps it was no more than her own desires putting words into his mouth. But his fingers tightened around her own. With his free hand, he wrote: Could be trap, we must be careful. But even so, I think we should follow Manas, go to Issy Kul. And Elena agreed.

  Before they left the guesthouse, she rang her mother from the telephone in the hall, but there was still no reply. Elena was torn between wanting to go back, to find out what had befallen her mother and sister, and not just because of the militzia. She hoped that they had gotten the money and were on their way to Moscow by now, though heaven alone knew what Anna would get up to in the capital. But her sister wasn’t the only one sleeping with men she’d just met. Perhaps Anna should be keeping an eye on her and not the other way around. Or maybe it was just that Elena was tired of the responsibility of keeping the family together and wanted, selfishly, something of her own. She went back to the room and found Ilya, putting her arms around him and resting her cheek between his shoulder blades.

  “We need to plan. How to travel, which way.”

  “I suggest the bus station or a private car.”

  “If we’re going into the back country, I might need to cover my head. Some of these parts are very Islamic.”

  Ilya gave her an odd look. “You come from an Islamic country.”

  “I come from a Soviet one. Kazakh women have never worn the veil.” She smiled, thinking of the miniskirted girls that thronged the streets outside the mosque. “Anyway, I don’t usually pay attention to that kind of thing. I don’t like all this talk of God.”

  “Because it isn’t rational, defies all evidence?” He was teasing her, but there was an edge to his voice all the same.

  She smiled. “Religion is the opiate of the people, you know.”

  “But they never complete that quote, do they? Religion is the opiate of the people, the heart in a heartless world. And isn’t it also said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything? … Do you believe me, Elena, when I tell you what I am?”

  “Over the past few days I have seen a lot that defies evidence. Including you.” She stood abruptly and held out her hand. “We should get going.”

  The bus station was crowded with people bound for the villages; there were no free cars. Elena and Ilya had to wait for the bus, perched on a bench next door to a chai vendor. Ilya was looking about him, tight-mouthed and wary, scanning the crowd for the glimpse of a familiar face. She knew he was looking for the volkh, or for the man she now knew as Manas. Ilya glanced at her and shook his head.

  Perhaps it was only her imagination, but he seemed less pale, and the trembling that had accompanied withdrawal had gone. She wondered if he had really managed to drive off the drug, and what circumstances might serve to turn him back to it. It was so seductive to think that all would be well as long as she stayed with him, but she knew that she was not a match for heroin. No love—that of her mother or Anna or herself—had been able to keep her father alive. Drowning in vodka or sleeping in the embrace of morphine, it was all the same in the end. She thought that human love was never enough. But maybe a world could compensate?

  She checked her bag again, obsessively, for the object, which now lay next to a newly purchased packet of condoms. Elena smiled. And now the bus was rumbling along, spewing exhaust and passengers. A mass of people surged toward the open doors. Elena elbowed her way forward, with Ilya at her heels. She found a seat near the back and collapsed into it, searching for a tissue to wipe the grime from the window. The bus smelled of sweat and food. Ilya leaned back against the seat, still scanning their fellow passengers. His mouth turned down with evident frustration and he closed his eyes. One hand gripped the sword in its traveling case, the other reached for her own and held it. Ilya, it seemed, had found some sort of anchor. Elena, in turn, clutched the bag. A short wait, turbulent with people fighting for the remaining seats, and then the bus was pulling out again, trundling through the suburbs of Bishkek toward the mountains.

  Two

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  Ilya dozed, waking to a glimpse of the high peaks. It was raining again. He could see it streaming down the windows of the bus, blotting out the view. If he did not close his eyes, he thought, he would do nothing but stare at Elena. She is a flame, and I am already too close. He might have lived a foolish life in these last few years, but he was still not entirely a fool and he knew what would happen. She would take the place of the drug for a little while, become the center of his world, and then she would grow tired of trying to love a hopeless cause and leave. Self-indulgent perhaps, but he had watched it happening in the bars along Leninski Prospekt: the arguments, the recriminations, the women walking out for the last time and the men turning back to the vodka with a curse and a sigh. He did not know if he could be better than he was, and he owed it to Elena to find out before too much damage was done. It was not likely that she would fall in love; she was being kind, that was all. But he knew that it was already too late for him.

  The bus was limping up the mountainside. Finally, it coughed and stopped. There was a murmur from the passengers: part anger, part resignation.

  “What’s wrong?” Elena asked. “Have we broken down?” She did not sound surprised.

  Ilya went with some of the other men to look. The driver had pulled into a space by the side of the road. Smoke poured from beneath the hood. It was evident that they would not be going any farther for some time. Ilya glanced uneasily around, wondering whether this was a normal fault or sabotage.

  “Don’t blame me,” the driver said, catching Ilya’s eye. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Can you fix it?” Ilya asked mildly.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do? There’s a place up the road; they sell food if you want some.” He turned his back on the assembled passengers. Ilya went back onto the bus and explained the situation to Elena.

  “He says there’s a cafe nearby. I’ll get you some tea, if you want.”

  She smiled at him. “Thanks. Yes, please. But be careful.” Other passengers, clearly Kyrgyz, were retrieving flasks and bundles of food from the roof racks, and opening their paper to the crossword puzzles. There was nothing to do but wait.

  “Don’t let the bus leave without me,” Ilya said to Elena. She gave him a look: What, are you mad? It was immensely reassuring.

  He made his way down from the bus. Outside, the road was slick with rain. The mountains towered above the little yurt of the cafe: a shadow of white upon whiteness. He could see the high chasms of glaciers, carved into indigo rock. It made him long for the enclosed confines of the bus, for the everyday. The yurt was as fragile as a mushroom against the vastness of the world.

  Ilya listened as he walked toward the yurt, keeping an eye out for the slinking forms of the rusalki or the dark shadow of the little ghoul. Manas’ words echoed in mockery: They are not your enemies. But he still did not know what to believe. It would not have surprised him to see the volkh spring up from the ground like a dark spirit, but the land was empty. He could hear nothing. The mountains swallowed sound. He bought tea and bread and carried it back to the bus.

  “Are we far from the lake?” Elena asked, huddled in her fur coat. The heating inside the bus was gone, and the windows steamed like a banya.

  “I don’t know. I think we’ll have another few hours to go. If we ever get moving.” He handed her the tea. Both of them, he knew, were thinking of what might lie ahead. Ilya leaned back and closed his eyes, and found himself remembering once more.

  He did not recall much about his early childhood; only the long pain-filled nights, and his mother bringing a handful of snow to cool his hot forehead when the fever st
ruck. The worst of it was being unable to move, having to be carried everywhere, seeing nothing but the wooden ceiling of the izba because he could not turn his head. At least he could hear, and he spent most of his time listening, giving forms to the creatures he heard deep within the forest, that he had never seen.

  Ilya, having no brothers or sisters, thought only that this was what it was like to be a child. When he grew up, he told his mother, he would run as fast as the little dog that crept under the izba at night to sleep, as fast as the wind. He did not understand why, when he said this, her face would grow still and fearful and sad. And then the visitors came.

  They arrived at the end of autumn, after a day of storms. Ilya liked the thunder, the pattern of light and shadow across the ceiling, the sudden flicker of lightning, the sound of rain on the walls of the izba. But this storm was different, terrifying in its intensity: the thunder rolling across the land and the wind snapping trees before it. Ilya might have expected it to deafen him, but in fact, it did not. It was so loud that it seemed muffled, like distant drums. But when the visitors arrived, everything became quiet.

  It was the silence that first attracted his attention. His mother had gone into the yard, taking advantage of the lull in the storm to feed the frightened chickens, and Ilya had been idly listening to her movements. Then, she was simply gone, and so was everything else. He could hear nothing. It was as though someone had thrown a blanket over his head. Then the door of the izba creaked open.

  “Who’s there?” Ilya asked, hearing his voice—high and frightened—and hating it. “Who is it?”

  There was no reply. Gradually he became aware of a strange singing note that shook the izba and made the walls rattle. He felt it travel all the way through his bones, moving up through his legs, making his flesh twitch and crawl. The inner sound reached his skull. There was a burst of light, so bright that Ilya cried out.

  A voice said, “Boy? We need water. Fetch it.” The voice rasped, as though forced out of a distorted throat.

  Ilya said, “I can’t move.”

  “Fetch it,” another voice said, soft and dreadful.

  And Ilya Muromyets found that he could stand up. His legs were weak, and he had to hold himself upright by clutching the few sticks of furniture, but he could stand and walk. In a daze, he fetched a horn cup of water. He tried to see who was speaking to him. There were three of them—all women, all beautiful—and the light bent and twisted around them. And something else was there, too: a glowing unseen presence that spoke to him without words.

  You have been born for me. We belong together; we are part of the same dream. I will wait for you.

  He held out the cup of water and something took it. He felt hot, dry fingers brush his own. There was again the high singing note and then they were gone. The cup fell to the floor. And Ilya’s life as he now knew it, began.

  He opened his eyes. The bus was moving, grinding up the mountain road once more. Elena was peering out of the window. Ilya’s thoughts, when he could wrench them from the wonderful distraction of Elena, turned again to the past: to Manas, to the Nightingale Bandit, to all the old heroes. And, finally, he listened to the instinct that had been nudging him ever since he had stepped through that rift in the air, to another world, the instinct that told him that Byelovodye was where his origins lay. The rift was not an anomaly. He himself was anomalous—he and all the other bogatyri, and the creatures that pursued him.

  After all these years, ironically thanks to Manas, he finally understood what Tsilibayev had been trying to achieve. Not a time machine, or some nonsense cooked up by the NKVD, but a way to enter a dream-world by mimicking older technology. But where had that technology come from? Ilya had destroyed his chance to find out, by following orders blindly and firing the lab. He wondered what had become of Tsilibayev, how long he had lived in Russia’s parallel. Was time even the same there? Could Tsilibayev still be alive? He’d surely had a better deal than Ilya, whatever had happened to him—and yet, perhaps Tsilibayev had still missed out, for the Great Patriotic War had made Russians what they were, had created the unity, the love of nation and of one another. Ilya sighed. But perhaps there was a nightmare dimension, too: nationalism, insularity, paranoia. Perhaps it is they who are real, and we who are nothing more than their dark dream. And what about the coil? For now, Ilya knew what had spoken to him all those years ago in the izba.

  We belong together; we are part of the same dream. I will wait for you.

  But if that was the case, how had that breach opened up in the hotel room, when Ilya himself had been across town, eavesdropping on Manas? He could find no answers.

  Elena dozed, her head on his shoulder. It was midafternoon by the time they reached Balykchy at the easternmost end of the lake. Issy Kul snaked into the distance, splitting the mountains with a marbled rift of water. The rain had swept down into the passes, leaving a pale spring sky in its wake. They left the bus at Balykchy, waited an hour, then caught the next bus to Karakol.

  Three

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  Karakol had changed little from Elena’s childhood. Here were the apple orchards, faint with the first haze of leaf, and the tall poplars overlooking gingerbread-carved houses. Some of the roofs bore sculpted dragons, a reminder of how far east they had come. After the concrete monotony of Bishkek, the town looked welcoming, in a shabby kind of way, and the air was fresh.

  The military installation lay some distance beyond the town; it was unlikely to be signposted, but anyone would know where it was. It had been shut down some years before, and there had been talk of selling it to a Canadian company for development into a leisure complex. She did not think anything had come of this.

  They found a room in a sanatorium, not far from the center. There was no sign that anyone was following, but that meant nothing. They had no reason to trust Manas. He could have set up the whole thing, spun a plot to lure them here. Perhaps it was a way of flushing them out, to draw Ilya into a situation where he would reveal whether or not he possessed the object. There could be a dozen people on their trail, all unseen. There were plenty of folk in Russia who had the opportunity of a great deal of practice over the years. She felt exposed and raw until she was inside the illusory sanctuary of the room.

  At first, Elena meant to do necessary, responsible things: wash her hair, go out and buy bread and a toothbrush. But after the long journey and two cramped buses, she found herself edgy and impatient. She did not know how much that related to the prospect awaiting them or the enforced proximity to Ilya, but as soon as they were through the door of the room, she reached for the packet of condoms. He did not need to take the lead. She made love to him with a relentlessness that afterward alarmed her, as though she had been possessed. It had not been like this with Yuri. It had not been like this with anyone.

  After, she looked at the needle tracks along his veins and wondered about the nature of addiction. He was holding her too tightly, as if he could not bear to let her go, but after a while she found it hard to breathe.

  “Ilya?”

  He murmured something in reply. He sounded half-asleep.

  “We ought to think about finding the place.”

  He sighed, releasing her into a tangle of sheets. “I know. Do you know where it is?”

  “I think so. It’s near an old fort of the Scyths, but it’s not close. It’s up on the hillside at the western edge of the lake, perhaps twenty kilometers or so.”

  Ilya peered at the bedside clock. “If we set off now and hitch a lift, we’ll make it before dark. I want to take a look at this place we’ve been invited to walk into. I do not want to take you into a trap. I don’t want to walk into one myself.”

  “I wish we had a gun,” Elena said.

  He squinted down at her. “What, me and my sword aren’t good enough?” It was a moment before she realized he was teasing.

  “No! I trust you, Ilya.” She did not want to deal with hurt masculine pride, and besides, it was true. It was not
from these situations of uncertainty and danger that she wanted a man to protect her, it was from trudnosti byta, the tough scramble of everyday life, and then they just didn’t seem to want to stick around. She added, “I’d like a weapon of my own.”

  “It should be easy enough to get hold of a gun,” Ilya said. “But we don’t have time. You’ll have to rely on me for now. And on your own wits.”

  Thanks for the concession, Elena thought. But he went on, “Elena, please don’t think I’m being condescending. I know how strong women can be. I’ve seen them in war, in famine, in times of great change, and they are always the strong ones. Men just don’t want to admit it. But now—I don’t know what we’re dealing with. I know how much I can take, but if anything happened to you …” His voice was muffled in her hair.

  She said, “Nothing’s going to happen to either of us,” and wished she could believe it.

  They found a car in the central square and asked to be taken to the village nearest to the installation. The driver was Tungan, not Kyrgyz, and he spoke of the lake by its Chinese name, Ze Hai. He seemed un-surprised to be asked to ferry two strangers to such a remote spot, but Elena chattered on anyway, talking about how they were to meet her sister at one of the sanatoria around the lake edge. She did not know the name of the place, she said; she would recognize it when she saw it. Ilya was watching the road. When he touched her hand, she waited until they came to the nearest sanatorium and told the driver to stop. They stood at the entrance until he drove away.

  The wind that blew down from the mountains was piercing, and the sky was deepening into green. Ilya and Elena made their way through apricot groves to the lakeshore.

  “Where’s the fort?” Elena asked.

  “I saw the ruins from the road. There’s not much left of it now. The installation lies behind it, in a little valley. I’ll keep an ear out. If Manas is here, I don’t want to be seen.”

  “Do you think it’s a trap?”