'March tidy!' Cidaq heard the soldiers growl in Russian as they prodded at him, and for just a flashing second she thought: Aren't they glad he's in chains! And she amused herself by wondering what Rudenko would do to these skinny, undernourished men if his hands were unbound. But then she remembered him as the animal he had been and smiled to think that he was about to endure some of the punishment he had visited upon her.
A whistle blew. Rudenko and the other stragglers were shoved aboard, and the file of eleven small boats sailed forth on a voyage that would have been a test for one large, well built one. Cidaq, watching the boats disappear, found herself alternately hoping that they would sink to give her revenge and praying that they would survive because of the poor Aleuts who were also being taken to lifelong imprisonment on the Seal Islands.
She had no such ambivalence about her own position, for each day she survived caused her to give more thanks that she had escaped the lonely terror of Lapak Island. Kodiak was vital; its people might be caught up in storms of hatred and frustrated vengeance, and its managers might be distraught over the decline in sea otters and the necessity to sail so far for seals, but there was energy in the air and the excitement of building a new world. She loved Kodiak, and even though she lived far more precariously than she ever had on Lapak, she constantly reminded herself that she was living.
And because she was now fifteen, with an intense interest in everything about her, she saw that things were not going well for the Russians, who faced open warfare with the Koniags and rebellion from natives on other islands to the east. Scores of men from Moscow and Kiev who had considered themselves superior in every way to the primitive islanders now died at the hands of those who showed that they had mastered night ambush and daytime surprise attack.
But what saddened Cidaq was the obvious deterioration of the Aleuts, who were being strangled by malnutrition, disease and abuse; their death rate was shocking, and the Russians did not seem to care. On all sides she saw signs that her people faced inexorable extermination.
For a brief while she lived with an Aleut man and a native woman not married, for there was no Aleut community to arrange or give benediction to marriages who strove to maintain a decent life. He obeyed the rules of The Company, going out day after day in search of otters, and he hunted with superior skills, conducting himself properly and living on what meager food The Company provided. He complained to no one lest he be sentenced to the Seal Islands, and his woman was equally obedient.
But then disaster of the most arbitrary and cruel dimension struck. The man was taken from his job of otter hunting and sent without warning to exile in the Seal Islands.
One of the worst traders from the Tsar Ivan raged into the hut one night looking for Cidaq, and not finding her, beat the woman about the head, hauled her off to where four of his companions were roistering, and all abused her through three nights, strangling her at the end of their celebration.
After two weeks of hiding alone in the hut, Cidaq was captured by the same five fur traders and raped repeatedly. They might eventually have slain her, too, at the conclusion of their sport had not an extraordinary man arrived quietly in Three Saints with a fiery determination to halt the slow death of his people.
He had appeared mysteriously one morning, a gaunt figure emerging from the forested area to the north as if he were a creature accustomed to woods and high mountains, and had the Russians seen him coming, they would surely have turned him back, for he was too old to be of service to them and too wasted to be of much use to anyone else. He was in his sixties, unkempt, wild-eyed, and brought with him only an outrageous collection of odds and ends at whose utility no Russian could have guessed: a pouch of agatelike stones polished by long residence in some riverbed, another pouch of bones; seven sticks of various lengths; six or seven bits of ivory, half from long-dead mammoths, half from walruses slain in the north; and a fairly large sealskin which covered a squarish bundle that gave him his unusual powers. It contained the well-preserved mummy of a woman who had died thousands of years ago and been buried in a cave on Lapak Island.
Slipping quietly into the northern edge of the village, he headed by instinct for the tall spruce whose spacious roots had been partly exposed by erosion. There he laid aside his precious bundle and started to dig among the roots like an animal burrowing. When he had produced a sizable excavation, he erected around and above it a kind of hut, and when it was finished he took residence inside, installing his bundle in a place of honor. For three days he did nothing, then quietly he began circulating among the Aleuts, informing them with funereal gravity: 'I have come to save you!'
He was the shaman Lunasaq, with experience on various islands where he had never accomplished much or attained real stature, for he had preferred living apart, communing with the spirits that govern mankind and the forests, the mountains and the whales, and helping where needed. He had never married, felt uncomfortable with the noises made by children, and did his best to avoid contact with the Russian masters, whose odd behavior bewildered him. He could not, for example, conceive how anyone in power could separate men from women, as the Russians had done in stealing all the men from Lapak Island and leaving the women behind to die. 'How,' he asked, 'can they expect to produce new workers for their boats?' Nor could he comprehend how they could kill all the otters in the sea, when by restraint they could ensure all they required, year after year to the end of time. Above all, he could not understand the crime of older men debauching the very young girls whom they must later marry if either the men or the girls were to survive in any meaningful existence.
In fact, he had seen so many things evil in the conduct of Russians on the various islands they occupied that he knew of no sensible thing to do but come to Kodiak, where The Company headquartered, to see if he could not bring some kind of relief to his people, for it grieved him to think that he must soon be leaving them in the sad conditions under which they now suffered. Like Thomas Aquinas, Muhammad and Saint Augustine, he felt driven to leave his world a little better than it was when he inherited it, and as he settled down amid the roots of the great tree that protected him, he realized that compared to the might of the Russian invaders with their boats and guns, he was almost powerless, except for one asset which he had and they did not. In his sealskin bundle he had the old woman, thirteen thousand years old and more formidable each year she existed. With her help he would save the Aleuts from their oppressors.
Quietly, like the stormless southern wind that sometimes blew in from the restless Pacific, he began to move among the little Aleut men who served so obediently the dictates of the Russians, always reminding them that he brought messages from the spirits: 'They're still the ones who rule the world, Russians or no, and you must listen to them, for they will guide you through these ugly days just as they guided your ancestors when storms tormented them.' He let it be known that among the tree roots at his hut he had the magical instruments which enabled him to communicate with those ever-present spirits, and he was reassured when men in twos and threes came to consult with him. Always he delivered the same message: 'The spirits know you must obey the Russians, no matter what insane orders they give, but they also want you to protect yourselves. Save bits of food for those days when none is issued.
Eat some seaweed every day, for strength lies there. Allow the baby seals and baby otters to escape. You'll know how that can be done without the Russians' seeing.
And abide by the old rules, for they are best.'
He helped when illness struck, placing the sick man on a proper mat and surrounding his head with shells so that the sea could talk with him, enclosing his feet with his sacred stones so that he might remain stable. And on those occasions when faced with problems for which he could find no answers, he produced the mummy, this withered creature whose sunken eyes in her blackened face stared out to give reassurance and counsel: 'She says that you will have to go to the Seal Islands, no escaping. But there you will find a trusted friend who will su
pport you through life.' He never lied to the men sentenced to the islands, or assured them that they would find wives and have children, for he knew that this was impossible, but he did tell them that friendships of the kind that sustain life were possible, and that men of good sense sought them out, regardless of the terror in which they otherwise lived: 'You will find a friend, Anasuk, and a kind of work that only you can do. And the years will pass.'
Now when boats set out for the Seal Islands he appeared openly on shore to bid the Aleuts farewell, and during the latter part of the year 1790 the Russian officials became accustomed to this spectral figure, wondering occasionally where he had come from and who exactly he was. They never suspected that he was restoring a tiny shred of decency and integrity to their establishment, for from what they could see of their own people Russian officials and trader-serfs alike everything was going pretty much to hell.
In due course the shaman Lunasaq heard of one of the saddest cases of Aleut despair, the girl Cidaq, who was being passed from one criminal to another despite Company rules forbidding this, and one day while her current trader-serf was absent unloading a kayak filled with furs, he presented himself at the hut in which she was temporarily living, and when he saw -her bedraggled hair, her wan face and the labret almost slipping from her lip, so emaciated had she become, he grasped her hands and pulled her toward him: 'Child! The good spirits have not abandoned you. They have sent me to help you.' And he insisted she accompany him immediately, and leave the moral squalor in which she had been living. Defying Company rules and the possibility that her Russian trader might beat him to death to recover his woman, he led her to his hut among the roots, and once they were inside, he uncovered his most precious treasure, the mummy.
Placing Cidaq before the wizened old face, he chanted: 'Girl, this old one knew far more terror than you ever have. Volcanoes in the night, floods, the raging of the wind, death, the endless trials that assail us all. And she fought on.' He continued in this way for some minutes, not aware that little Cidaq was trying hard not to laugh at him. Finally she put out both hands, one to touch his, the other to touch gently the lips of the mummy.
'Shaman, I don't need her help. Look at this labret. Whalebone. I helped kill this whale. The day will come when I'll kill every one of the Russians who have abused me. I am like you, old man, I am fighting every day.'
And then, in the dark hut, the connection of Cidaq and the mummy began, because the long-dead old woman from Lapak spoke to the young girl from her island. Yes, the mummy spoke.
Through decades of practice Lunasaq had perfected his gift for ventriloquism until he could not only throw his voice a considerable distance but also make it resemble the speech of different characters. He could be a child appealing for help, or an angry spirit admonishing an evildoer, or, especially, the mummy with her vast accumulation of knowledge.
In the first of their many discussions these three spoke of Russian tyrants and sea otters and men sentenced to the Seal Islands, and particularly of the revenge that Cidaq was planning to visit on her oppressors: 'I can wait. Four of them, including the worst, are in the Seal Islands already. We'll never see them again. But three remain here in Kodiak.'
'What will you do to them?' the mummy asked, and Cidaq replied: 'I am willing to risk death, but punish them I will.'
'How?' the ancient one wanted to know, and 'Cidaq said: 'I could cut them when they're asleep,' but the mummy said: 'Cut one, and they cut you. Forever.'
'Did you face such problems?' Cidaq asked, and the old one said: 'Everyone does.'
'Did you get your revenge?'
'Yes. I outlived them. I laughed at their graves. And here I still am. But they?
Long gone. Long gone.'
The hut was so filled with the sound of the mummy chuckling at her memories of retribution that no one hearing it could be aware of the skill with which Lunasaq used his voice to create the sound of laughter, nor when he had suddenly stopped being the mummy and spoke sternly in his own voice: 'I would remind you that Cidaq's problem is not vengeance but the continuation of her people. Her problem is to find a husband, to have babies.'
'Seals have babies. Whales have babies. Anybody can have babies.'
'Did you?' Cidaq asked, and the ancient one replied: 'Four, And it made no difference whatever.'
Again Lunasaq broke in: 'But you were living secure with your own people,' and the mummy said: 'No one is ever secure. Two of my children died of starvation.' And the shaman asked: 'How did they die and you survive?' and the old one explained: 'Old people can withstand shocks. They look past them. Young people take them too seriously.
They let themselves be killed.' She then spoke rather brusquely to the shaman: 'You deal with this child too harshly. Let her have her revenge. You'll both be astonished at the form it will take.'
'It will come?'
'Yes. Just as the Russians will soon be coming to this hut to thrash us all. But Lunasaq, my helper, has taken care of that, and your big help will come in ways you cannot guess. Three ways, coming from many directions. But right now, hide me.'
The mummy was barely secreted when two trader-serfs broke into the hut and began thrashing the shaman so brutally that Cidaq supposed he would die. But immediately the beating started, a group of five Aleuts with clubs rushed into the little hovel, and in the confined space struck the attackers heavily about their heads, and they did such a thorough job that the roughest one stumbled out of the hut with his head smashed and fell dead, while the other man ran screaming, with two Aleuts flailing at him from behind.
Miraculously, the other Aleuts spirited away the corpse and disposed of it in a gully beneath a pile of rocks. The trader who survived his beating tried to incriminate 'some Aleuts who attacked me with clubs,' but his reputation and that of the dead man were so wretched that The Company was not unhappy to have the latter off their rolls, and a few days later they shipped the survivor off to a lifetime of duty with the seals. After watching with grim satisfaction as he was taken away, Cidaq returned to the shaman's hut, where, surprisingly, the mummy showed little interest in the incident: 'Of no consequence. Those two are no loss and you're no better off. What is important is that the three ways I promised you are about to come to pass. Prepare.
Your life is changing. The world is changing.'
The shaman now made the mummy speak in a voice which created the illusion that she was retreating from the hut, but Cidaq pleaded with her to stay, and when she did linger, it was the shaman who interrogated her first: 'Will the ways be helpful to me, too?'
'What is helpful?' the old one snapped, almost impatiently. 'Is Cidaq helped because one oppressor was slain and the other exiled? Only if she does something herself to profit from it.'
Through the years the mummy had acquired a personality of her own, and with it she often voiced opinions contrary to the shaman's. It was as if a willful student had broken loose from the tutelage of her teacher, so that occasionally, on significant topics, the shaman and his obstinate mummy actually conducted a debate.
'But will not the new ways be harmful?' the shaman asked, and again she answered with a snappish question: 'What is harmful of itself? Unless we allow it to be?'
'Can I use the new ways? To help my people?' Lunasaq asked, and there was no reply, for the old one knew that the answer rested only with the shaman himself. But when Cidaq asked almost the same question, the mummy sighed and remained silent as if in deep recollection, then sighed again. Finally she spoke: 'In all the years, and I have savored many thousand, the ones I remember are the ones that brought me challenges a husband I never appreciated until I saw the way he handled adversity ... the two sons who refused to learn hunting but who became master builders of kayaks .
. . the winter when all lay sick and only one other old woman and I had to catch the fish ... that awful year when the volcano at Lapak exploded right out of the ocean, covering our island with ash two elbows deep, and my husband and I took survivors four days out to se
a so we could breathe . . and the peaceful nights when I laid plans for a better life.'
She stopped, and seemed to aim her voice directly at Cidaq, and then to shift it toward the shaman, the one who had ensured her continued existence through this present span of years: 'Three men are coming to Kodiak. They bring the world and all the world's meaning. And you are to receive them, each of you in your own way.'
Then, with a much softer voice, she spoke only to Cidaq: 'Did it feel good when you saw that Russian slain?'
'No,' Cidaq said. 'It felt as if it were over. As if something had ended.'
'And you didn't gloat?'
'No, it was just over. Something evil was ended, and I had little to do with it.'
'You're ready for those who are coming.' Then she asked her shaman: 'How did you feel when he was slain?' and Lunasaq replied honestly: 'For him, I was sorry that he had lived so poor a life. For me, I was glad, for I have so much more work to do here at Kodiak.'
'I am glad for you both. You're ready. But nobody has asked me how I feel. The three are coming to me too, with their problems.'
'How do you feel?' the shaman asked, for the mummy's well-being fortified his own, and she said: 'I told you the good years were those when something brought challenges.
It is long overdue for something exciting to happen on this forsaken island.' And on that reassuring note she retired to prepare for the next confrontation in her thirteen thousand years.
THE FIRST OF THE THREE ARRIVALS WAS A MAN WHO WAS returning illegally. Nobody on Kodiak Island had expected to see him again, and he appeared on a mission which astounded those with whom he came in contact. He was Yermak Rudenko, the huge, hairy trader who had bought Cidaq, and he had escaped from the Seal Islands a man determined to do anything rather than go back. When The Company officials found out that he had stowed away on a boat returning with a shipment of pelts, they arrested him, and he stood in the rude office at the head of the harbor and asked with mock contrition: 'Do you know what it's like up there? Before, no one ever lived on the islands but seals. Now a handful of Aleuts, a few Russians.