end, that these stepping-stone details predominated in his thinking about the escape. Rarely, and then never aloud to any of the other three, did Melander mull the totality of the coastal journey ahead. This made a loss to them all, for Melander alone of the four had traveled greatly enough on the planet to understand the full scope of what they would he attempting. To grasp that their intended ten or twelve hundred miles of canoeing stretched—wove, rather, through the island-thick wilderness coast—as far as the distance from Stockholm down all of Europe to the sun coasts of Italy. Each mile of those hundreds, too, along a cold northern brink of ocean which in winter is misnamed entirely. Not pacific at all, but malevolent. And too, each mile maybe—or maybe not, this was the puzzle of ocean and oceangoer—each mile maybe working away at this three-man crew of his, Braaf and Wennberg and Karlsson. Thief and oaf and clam: or acquisitionist and draft ox and canoe soldier; whichever each was now, he perhaps had sea change ahead of him. The great over-water passage between one life and another, Melander in his sailoring had been at an edge of the nineteenth century's immigration tides, the tens of hundreds of thousands who were the forebears of us, and so knew how voyage could tower in the mind of a first-timer. It couldn't not. Treadle of the waves week on week, the half-coffin berth to try to survive in, reliance for that survival on sailors who flew in the mast trees like clothed monkeys; a compressed existence, the voyage of a ship, like a battle or a hard illness or a first failed time in love, lodged in the memory at an angle not like that of any other set of days. And that was shipboard; this would be canoe, splinter of a true vessel. Sea change could come all the more intense. But then sometimes it never came at all, or again it simply made a man more of what he was, carved the lines of him deeper. You never knew. Not even a Melander had the how of sea change. Vet ¡11 this season of wait Melander might have hinted toward what lay in store when one went out to live on waves. His knowledge of water enwrapping the world, the canny force of its resistance to the intentions of man, he might have used to put a tempered edge on the escape plan. To have said, in his silver style of saying, "Hear me on this, heart's friends. Things beyond all imagining may happen't" us down this coast, aye? But we'll have gone free into our fate, Resides, a man draws nearer to death wherever he strides..."
But no, and it may be necessity for those who choose vast riik, even Melander seemed not able to confront the thought of all the miles at once. Only those from island to island to island.
In his waiting. Wennberg too spent lung spells of calculation. Turning and turning the question of whether there could be found a way to betray the escape.
Certainty did not seem to be anywhere in the proposition. If the Russians could be convinced and then relied upon to reward him, say grant return to Sweden; but that the Russians would forfeit a blacksmith so readily did not seem likely, whatever they might promise. If he told of the plan but Melander persuaded the Russians there was nothing to it, Wennberg would never after be safe in New Archangel. Karlsson and perhaps even that stealer of milkteeth Braaf would be steady threat to his life. If he fled with the other three, into freedom—or perhaps into the bottom of that ocean like cats in a sack—
All of it strummed a man's nerves, not to say what fret this place New Archangel played on you anyway. Example, the morning soon after Wennberg added himself into the escape plan. On the way to begin his day of smithing, he'd remembered leaving his new-sewn leather apron back at the barracks and there near Raranov's Castle reversed route to fetch it. Just then gulls on a breeze off Sitka Sound flashed across the breast of Verstovia. White as winter creatures they glided, as if shooed in from the other, snowier crags. Wennberg had cast them a glance—and up there the apparition reared, a Russian cross thrusting