Nine Layers of Sky Read online

  Soon they were halfway down the Fergana Valley, not far from Kokand. The Tien Shan were no more than a bright line far to the northeast; to the south rose the distant peaks of the Alai. Cotton fields, hazy with new growth, stretched out across the basin. It had changed little from the last time Ilya had been here, when the Fergana Valley had been split into a succession of bickering khanates, ruled by madmen. He doubted whether that had greatly changed, either. The region had always been a law unto itself. He remembered hearing of a local ruler whose gardens had been bright with peacocks and cranes, a man who had held court from a throne beneath a tree and who had thrown all who opposed him into the dungeons beneath his mansion and subjected them to refined forms of torture. That, Ilya recalled, had been in 1986. They were a long way from Moscow. Investigative Soviet officials had simply vanished. Ilya thought of Byelovodye and was again aware of that faint, dislocated sense of homesickness.

  The endless cotton fields rolled by; there was little evidence of any other crop. Ilya mentioned this to the driver and the man spat out of the window.

  “There are no other crops. The cotton has bled us dry and now it is starting to fail. No rain, you see, and what falls is poisoned.”

  “From the Aral Sea?”

  “From the Aral, where else? The wind picks up the dry sea dust and sends it down again as rain. And it’s polluted, of course. Radioactive, toxic with Allah knows what kind of chemical—no wonder the cotton is failing. And the politicians keep telling us that we’ve had a bumper year.”

  “They are all fools,” Ilya murmured.

  “Yes, they are fools. They do not ask the farmers; they just want to hear the sound of their own voices, like the donkey in the fable. The Russians were as bad—no offense—but these are our own people.”

  “Politicians are a nation apart. No allegiance to any except their own.” The driver touched a hand to the rosary. Close to nightfall, they reached Kokand.

  Kokand had altered beyond all recognition since Ilya’s last visit. Then, the city had been filled with mosques and madrasas; the golden crescents of Islam filling the sky like a hundred new moons. But the city had been sacked in 1918 by the Tashkent Soviets; thousands had died, and the holy buildings had been torn down. Now, as Ilya and the driver walked through the twilight streets, the faces that were turned toward them were still full of resentment and a dull anger. Ilya could not blame them. He put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

  “Where is this place?”

  “Not far, not far.”

  The tenuous rapport that had been established between them during the journey had gone. The driver seemed nervous and edgy. He darted through the streets like a thief. Ilya wondered if the man had other designs upon him than the simple scam of a bed for the night, doubtless in a place owned by one of his relatives. He still had the sword, Ilya thought. He wondered where the Mechvor might be now.

  “It’s on Abdulla Nabiev. I told you, it isn’t far. Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re right to be suspicious around here—they don’t like Russians. But you’ll be all right with me. I’m an honest man.”

  In Ilya’s long experience, people who made such a claim were almost invariably lying, but shortly afterward, they reached Abdulla Nabiev and a grubby hostel owned by the driver’s second cousin. A price was arranged at a level more satisfactory to the driver than to Ilya, who was certain that he had been overcharged but was too exhausted to argue. He lay down at once, curled around himself like an animal, but it was a long time before he lost consciousness.

  Eleven

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  Toward the end of the afternoon, the golden sunlight faltered and was gone. Rain spattered across the roof of the izba in a sudden squall.

  “The horse clan comes,” Mati said. She stood at Elena’s elbow, holding the leather bag that carried the distorter coil and watching the drops beating the furled heads of the lilies into submission. She had taken care to keep a close hold on the bag, and Elena wondered just how much Mati suspected. But perhaps she feared only that Elena would try to steal the thing, not use it. Elena tried to reach out with her mind to the coil, but the voice was silent.

  A wind passed through the clearing, bending the branches before it. The next moment, a restless line of horsemen stood beyond the kikimura ’s run. The Golden Warrior was riding forward, with the Shaman Altaidyn Tengeri on a pony at its side.

  “So, I see we have found you,” the shaman called to Elena. But the Warrior sat tall on the back of the white mare and Elena could not see inside its helmet. It remained silent and formless. Mati and the shaman began to speak, in a quick guttural tongue that Elena was unable to follow, or even identify. She wondered if it might be Evenk, or another of the Siberian languages. The girl, Masha, still in her jeans and apron, wove between the horses’ legs with a bucket of feed. She seemed determined to ignore the strangers that had so unexpectedly landed in her backyard, but perhaps she was used to it. She clucked and the kikis scuttled from their burrows.

  At the edge of the clearing, the horsemen were dismounting. Mati glanced at the Warrior, inclined her head. The Warrior nodded, as though they had communicated in some manner. She determined to ask Mati about the Warrior as soon as the opportunity arose. She followed Altaidyn and the rusalka inside. The Warrior lingered for a moment, looking back, then strode up the steps into the izba.

  Mati and the shaman had spent over an hour inside the house, closeted in some inner room with the Warrior. It was a conference to which Elena had not been invited. She was now sitting back out on the veranda, watching the kikimura scratch among the stones and growing increasingly annoyed.

  She could understand the stake that these people had in the distorter coil, in keeping open a gate between Byelovodye and the world, but they were not the only ones to consider. There were the millions of folk in Russia and its former satellite colonies, who would surely be affected by such a course of events. How far did Byelovodyean dreams affect Russian ones, Central Asian ones, and alter the course of what she still thought of as the real world?

  Elena did not resent the conference itself, but she resented her exclusion from it. Was it to be only Byelovodyeans, of whatever human or half-human persuasion, who were entitled to a say in matters?

  As if resonating to her thoughts, Mati appeared behind her on the veranda.

  “The decision has been made,” she announced. Elena, looking up at her, saw that her rusalka appearance was now more pronounced. Mati’s hair streamed down her back like moonlight; her face was skeletal. Elena swallowed a small lump of fear and said, as coldly as she could, “I’m glad you’ve managed to come to a decision without my input.”

  “We have been planning for this eventuality for years,” Mati said, frowning. “It is a decision in which everyone has a voice.”

  “Then why wasn’t I asked what I thought about the matter?”

  “The human world—Earth—can’t be the decider. And I would remind you that you are only here on our sufferance.”

  By which she meant alive, Elena thought with a chill.

  “We have to protect ourselves,” the rusalka went on. “We need an open gate.”

  “And what about us? I’m not saying you’re wrong, Mati—I basically agree with you—but I’m the only real Russian here. I think I’m entitled to make some contribution.”

  “You will be making a contribution,” the rusalka said. Perhaps she did not mean to sound so condescending, but Elena bristled nonetheless. “A human from Earth, from the other side of the border, with the dreams of your world to throw into the balance,” Mati said. “You are a person with strong ideals, aren’t you?”

  “I used to think I was.”

  “Some people are better at hanging on to their dreams than others. You are one of them, I think.” She reached down and took Elena’s chin in her hand; Elena jerked away. “I see more in you than just a love of money or power.”

  Elena smiled. “I thought money and power were powerful dreams.”


  “But they are not ideals, they are short-term goals. This human rush toward an imaginary progress—it has to be curbed, Elena. The machines that the humans have brought with them and invented, this drive to overcome nature—it must be turned back.”

  “I agree that some balance has to be set,” Elena said, thinking of the irradiated steppes, the sad salty hollow where the Aral Sea had once been. “But you can’t just get rid of all technology in one fell swoop. How will people live?” The realization dismayed her. She might be an idealist, just as Mati had said, but her ideals differed from their own. She wondered whether the rusalka truly understood this.

  For answer, Mati gestured around her: at the quiet forest, the neat rows of new vegetables, the kikimura pecking for corn.

  “We’ve been nothing but peasants for generations,” Elena said. “Do you want to bring us back to that, to some imaginary Slavic idyll?”

  “You should know by now not to use the word ‘imaginary’ lightly around here. Whoever controls the distorter coil controls imagination itself.”

  “What will happen to Byelovodye, if you’re successful? Will the machines just crumble and fail?”

  “Slowly, over time, they will decay.”

  “And what about Russia?” There was already a burgeoning environmental movement in the former Soviet Union, to which Elena was deeply sympathetic, but she did not believe that green totalitarianism was better than any other kind. She said as much.

  “You will see,” Mati said, serene once more. “It will be better. The steppes will be restored, the forests renewed …”

  “And we’ll all be living in huts and yurts. What about the people who don’t want that?”

  What about the people who want to reach for the stars?

  But Mati was already going back inside the house, to summon the Warrior.

  Twelve

  UZBEKISTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  When Ilya awoke, it was morning. He showered and dressed quickly, picked up the sword, and went downstairs. The driver was waiting dourly in the hallway. Their journey, so he told Ilya, would take another few hours. Once they were in the car, he demanded more money.

  “No,” Ilya said.

  “I’ll need more gas. And there’s the wear and tear on the car as well.”

  “We agreed on the price.” Ilya gave the driver the coldest, blankest stare that he could summon up and flicked the rosary with a finger. “What about this?” If Ilya on his own couldn’t intimidate the driver, perhaps the allusion to Allah might do the trick.

  “All right, all right, we’ll keep it at the original price. You’re a decent man; I can see that.”

  “I appreciate it,” Ilya murmured.

  Little lay between Kokand and the south. An endless panorama of cotton fields and bare earth un-scrolled along the road, alternating patterns of aridness and fertility. They stopped for food and gas at a place called Jizak, which was no more than a scatter of houses. A group of men sat on the raised platform of a chaikhana. Their dull tunics were belted with scarlet and orange sashes that glowed like coals in the shadows. Ilya was reminded that this was fire country, the land of Zoroaster and his followers. There were still said to be temples in the hills, with flames that had been burning for thousands of years.

  The driver ordered shashlik and tea. The men stared at them with unblinking eyes, their gazes devoid of hostility or approval, as though the strangers were of no more significance than the passing clouds.

  Past Jizak, the road ran arrow-straight through twisted apple orchards. They ran into police checkpoints every twenty kilometers, regular as the beat of a metronome. At each one, Ilya paid a dollar, with poor grace. The driver glanced at the bundle of notes and his mouth tightened.

  The flat plains trailed away into dust. To the south, Ilya could see the blue rise of the Fan Mountains, blocks of shadow in the late-afternoon sunlight. The villages through which they were passing grew poorer. Uzbek tunics gave way to Tajik dress. Near the last checkpoint, Ilya saw a group of women in long floral skirts and trousers; they stared at him as the car slowed down, blue eyes in dark faces, betraying Iranian ancestry. Chickens rooted about in the dusty earth at the foot of the checkpoint. The policeman who took Ilya’s dollar had a face like a Persian miniature: a mobile mouth, curls of black hair.

  They were waved on. The road wound up through black hills, past outcrops of stone. Ilya thought of bandits, of wolves. The land rose sharply, heaved upward by the distant presence of the Fan. Beyond lay Afghanistan; they were not so far from the border.

  At last the road dipped, cut sharply over a white torrent of water, and continued over the crest of a hill. The driver pointed.

  “There you are.”

  Samarkand. A hundred memories jolted him.

  Domes rose golden against the blue hills. The modern city was barely visible through the afternoon haze. Samarkand stood untouched by the everyday world: shadowy, seized from time. The road took them down past low houses and secret courtyards. Acacia and jasmine hung over the white walls.

  “Where to now?” the driver asked, as if he could not wait to be rid of his passenger.

  “The Registan, the great square. Leave me there.”

  “You don’t want to find a hotel before you start sight-seeing?”

  “No,” Ilya answered. “Take me to the square.”

  Thirteen

  BYELOVODYE, N.E. 80

  It was explained to Elena that Mati and the Warrior had chosen the site of the gate. Rather than trying to take the coil all the way south, to the lands of the horse clans, the gate would be opened on the steppe, at a special place at the edges of the forest.

  “We don’t have time to take it south,” Mati said to the shaman. From the fraying note in her voice, Elena surmised that this had been no small point of contention.

  “It would be safer in the south,” Altaidyn Tengeri argued. “We have the means to guard it there; we hold those lands safe against the Pergaman military.” It was clearly a point he had made a number of times already.

  “Maybe so, but you almost lost the coil in your last encounter with that military. If my wild sisters had not saved you—at great risk to themselves—if Elena had not seized the coil and been sent here to safety—”

  —at this, Elena’s ears pricked up. Mati continued, “—you realize that Colonel Anikova will be leading a rusalki hunt right now?”

  “We should not allow ourselves to be panicked into action.”

  “Who is panicking? No one knows the coil is here—yet.”

  “Is there a way of tracking the coil?” Elena asked.

  “Traces of it can be picked up, but it isn’t an exact science. Unless someone is attuned to it, it can only be tracked by the effects it leaves behind it. Central Command uses scanners, but they’re not very good, especially if the coil chooses to protect itself. But they’ll be searching for the horse clan, and a group of people will be hard to hide.”

  “My friend Ilya was told that in our world, the coil was taken from the body of a rusalka. Is that true?”

  “As far as we know,” Mati said impatiently, “this is true. The coil was stolen from the military and taken to your world for safekeeping. But the sister who carried it was killed, and it was once more seized by our enemies. Then it disappeared.”

  “I think I saw the man who took it,” Elena said. “It was on the border, on the road to Uzbekistan at the end of winter. He was dead.”

  “What did he look like?”

  As best she could, Elena described the dead man. “And he had strange dark eyes, with a bloom upon them.”

  “Mechvor,” the shaman murmured. “One of Kovalin’s men. Maybe heading for Samarkand, trying to get back. We’re not sure of the way they took to get to Earth.”

  “And that is where you found the coil?” Mati asked.

  “Yes—I think one of the ambulance drivers stole it, but then I found it in the snow. It’s a long story. I took it home, kept it safe.”

  “We co
uld not trace it for some time. When we picked up the trail again, your friend Ilya was already on his way to Almaty. The coil found him and he summoned us. He was injured.”

  “We are running short of time,” Altaidyn Tengeri said. “If we set out now, with half the clan sent in different directions to draw off any pursuit, we should have a clear run to the edge of the steppe—no more than a few hours. There, we have prepared a safe place to activate the coil. Once we are there, I and the Warrior will open the gate and seal it.” His gaze flickered over Elena and away, generating an unease that she did not understand.

  “How will you seal it?” she asked.

  “You will see.” But there was a sadness in the shaman’s face.

  This time Elena did not ride on the Warrior’s white mare, for which she was grateful. That honor was reserved for Mati, and Elena watched anxiously as the mare shied and balked in the presence of the rusalka. If the mare could carry the Warrior without flinching, then the animal’s disquiet at bearing Mati was troubling.

  Elena herself rode with Altaidyn Tengeri on an old grey pony that reminded her of the shaman himself. It seemed a curious way to transport a piece of cutting-edge technology, though in the light of the allies’ beliefs, it made a certain kind of sense.

  “Don’t worry,” Altaidyn Tengeri said into Elena’s ear. University education aside, he smelled strongly of horses and blood, and she was not entirely happy at being so close to him. “I’m sure they won’t let anything happen to you. You can watch it all from a safe distance.”

  Yuri had said something very similar to her just before the last launch. It had irritated her then, too. She was tired of being at the mercy of well-meaning men—with the exception of Ilya.