The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [24]
"Speaking of caps," Melander said as if announcing tea, "the time's come to fling our hat over the nunnery wall."
Karlsson eased the gate open just enough for them to slip through with the guns. Minutes stretched, then the three were back from the canoe and the blackness of the Kolosh village.
"We're away to the cache," whispered Melander. "Stand ready with the gate."
Fewer than fifty paces later, Melander and Braaf halted beside the blacksmith shop.
"What're we doing here?" Wennberg rumbled low to Melander. "Where's this hidey-hole of Braaf's?"
"Here."
"Here? Here where?"
"In the sill loft. Up over your forge." The sill loft was a narrow platform, like a span of board ceiling, laid across the center of the rafters of the smithing shop. Wood to make windowsills and doorframes was dried there winter-long in the heat rising from the forges, and until the summer building season came, no one paid the loft any mind. Except of course Icelander, who observed now: "In Gotland, we say the darkest plage is under the candlestick."
"You pissants!" The stun of it set Wennberg I jack a step, these weeks of the war within himself, escape-or-betray, the lobes of his mind standing and fighting each other like crabs over the question, and all the while—"If the Russians'd looked up there they'd 've condemned me!"
"That thought did visit us. But you had luck, the Russians didn't peek. Shinny the ladder, Braaf, and begin handing down to us, aye?"
Six trips it took, Braaf and Wennberg lugging now while Melander stowed and stowed, to convey the trove that Braaf had accumulated like a discriminating pack rat.
Then all at once Icelander, alone, was back at the gate.
"We're cargoed," he said to Karlsson. "You'll be our last item, aye?" And was gone.
Karlsson began to wait out a span of becalmed time. The hammer chorale of the bells at hist had ceased, and the all-but-silence, just the soft rain sound, was worse. Too, there was an occasional stirring from Bilibin, trussed and gagged and bleary on the floor of the hut behind him. Karlsson decided it was best to keep busy within himself, saying and resaying the word.
There are moments, central moments such as what Karlsson awaits now, which form themselves unlike any that ever have issued in our lives or shall again. Ours might seem a kindlier evolution if what we know as memory had been set in us the other way: if these pith incidents of existence already waited on display there in the mind when you, I, Karlsson come into the world—a glance, and scene A ready to happen some certain Thursday; beyond it, B in clear view, due on a Wednesday two years and seventeen days off. The snag, of course, is Z, the single exactitude we could never bear to know: death's date. In order then that we can stand existence, the apparatus fetches backward for its rather than ahead. Memory instead of foreknowledge. So Karlsson on wait here in the Alaska night is like all of us in life's dark, able to know only that a moment is arriving due and to hope it is not the last of the series.
Then it came, as if in chorus to his silent recitings, the word flying out of the dark, in call down from the blockhouse on the hump of ridge above the stockade gate.
"Slushai!"
Otic time each hour the word made its relay from sentry post to sentry post. Not much of an utterance, no recital on behalf of tsar or God, perhaps the littlest cog id all the guardful apparatus of the capital of Russian America: simply the traditional reminding call, "Harken!" But try, a time, with throat dry and all of life riding there on your tongue, try then to echo such a word as if born to it....
Having been endlessly rehearsed by Melander, whose Russian was better than his own, Karlsson swallowed. Cupped his hands to his mouth. And as close as he could raise his voice to Bilibin's blurt, cried back the watch call.
Silence from the blockhouse.
Karlsson cracked the gate for himself.
"You're croaking like a raven down there tonight."
Karlsson spun to the resumed