Nine Layers of Sky Page 4

  She walked up the silent stairwell and unlocked the familiar steel door. Moscow, then Canada. Anywhere but here.

  Four

  ST. PETERSBURG, 21ST CENTURY

  When Ilya reached his tiny apartment, he sank down onto the iron-springed bed and reached beneath it for the sword. He sat with it resting across his knees and looked at it for a long moment: at the curve of the hilt, the gleam of the blade, waiting for memory to creep over him. He remembered the nights on the Siberian taiga, filled with small sounds: pine resin snapping in the summer sun, the rustle of dragonflies’ wings as they swarmed up from the lake, the precise march of ants in the grass, and, beyond all these, the endless, ageless silence of the world.

  Now his ears were filled with new sounds: the hiss and crackle of static, the grinding roar of traffic. If he listened hard enough, he could still differentiate, hearing the rumble of an army truck in Vladivostok, thousands of kilometers away, or a sudden, startling snatch of song in Murmansk, laden with cold and bell-clear through the frosty air. Ilya put his hands over his ears and sank deeper into remembering.

  He was standing among the Siberian pines of his childhood, on the edges of the lake. It was long before the Soviet Union, long before the rule of the tsars. To the east stretched the long spine of the mountains, rosy with the last of the winter sun. As he watched, the light faded and the forest was folded into the dusk. Ilya crouched by the spring that fed into the lake, broke the cat-ice that had settled along its rim, and cupped his hands to drink.

  The song began just beneath the edge of his hearing. At first he thought it was the voice of the forest itself, or perhaps the sound made by the stars as they flickered above the mountains. He waited, listening. The song rose and fell: high and wordless, singing of the black depths of the lake, and the starlight, and the winter air. As Ilya listened, it changed, sliding into warmth, speaking of afternoons golden with pollen and the scent of May.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it, and then another sound joined the song: footsteps hastening through the long frosty grass. One of the girls from the forest villages was coming toward the lake. Her eyes were half-closed and she was smiling. She walked with sure-footed confidence. And then Ilya saw the rusalki.

  There were three of them, perched in the branches of a pine that overhung the lake. Their long white hair was intertwined, moving as though they were still beneath the water, and their eyes were blank as ice. They looked through Ilya with indifference. Their gaze was focused on the girl. The song congealed in the twilight air, curling toward her. Ilya’s sword came out of its sheath and whirled down, cutting the filaments of song in a blaze of sparks. The girl’s eyes flew open and her face filled with dismay.

  Ilya Muromyets stepped between the girl and the rusalki. Two of the beings shrank back against the tree, but the third swarmed down it headfirst, her hair floating out into the grass. She sidled out of reach of Ilya’s sword and hissed. He saw pointed teeth, and between them, the grey tip of her tongue. Over his shoulder, Ilya shouted, “Run!”

  After a frozen moment, the girl did so. He could hear her panicked flight as she stumbled back through the forest. Her escape seemed to bring the rusalki to life. The sisters in the tree dived, gliding slowly through the air and ice, to be swallowed by the lake. The third rusalka smiled.

  “Put up your sword, Ilya Muromyets,” she murmured. Ilya flinched at the mention of his name, and the rusalka’s smile widened. “Oh,” she whispered. “Who hasn’t heard of you? One of the bogatyri, the Sons of the Sun, the heroes of all Russia …”

  Ilya’s ears were filled with a noise like the humming of bees, as though he had put his cheek to a hive. Slowly, he let the tip of the sword fall. He could have sworn that the rusalka did not move, but suddenly she was standing in front of him, her hands slipping around his neck. Her wet hair brushed his face.

  “Do you know what it’s like to drown, Ilya Muromyets? It’s the greatest pleasure of all—the warmth of water in your mouth. But we have other plans for you than drowning. Listen to what I have to tell you… .”

  He did not wait to hear it. The ice snapped under his boots as he flung himself away from her. His sword came up to sever the rusalka’s throat and then her spine, which broke like rotten wood. The head flew in a great curve across the lake, scattering drops of mercurial blood, and the rusalka’s body shattered into slimy ice. Ilya fell to his knees, letting the heat from the sword warm him. He waited for a moment longer, but the lake was still.

  Slowly, he made his way back through the forest, stopping at the village to warn the priest of the rusalki’s presence, and receiving the grateful thanks of the girl’s family. And that, Ilya Muromyets had thought in the manner of heroes, was that.

  Ilya looked down at the sword for a long time, remembering. So long ago that it seemed like the dream of a different man: a man who believed in God and the Zorya, a man who slew demons in the forests of old Russia. He glanced up at his reflection in the shaving mirror, at the bloodstained shirt beneath the long leather coat. In the snowlight, he looked as insubstantial as a ghost.

  He placed the sword back into its sheath, lit a cigarette, and, still in his coat, went to the stove. He stood there for a moment, warming his hands. He cut a piece of bread from the loaf on the table and ate it, staring out of the window at the lights along the Neva before reaching for the vodka.

  Five

  ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  It was Elena’s sister, Anna, who once again suggested leaving for Moscow, one Saturday, a week after Elena had returned from Tashkent. They had just gotten off the Medeo bus and were standing outside the ice rink: Elena, Anna, and their mother. Down in the city, the air was filled with the haze of unfiltered petrol, but here on the edge of the mountains there was a cold breeze blowing, smoky with the barbecued odor of mutton shashlik. Looking back, Elena couldn’t see Almaty at all, only a blur across the whiteness of the steppe, ending in the snowy curve of the foothills. She blinked. For a moment, looking out across that empty stretch of country, the city might never have existed.

  At the bottom of the hill a wedding party came into view, the bride hoisting the skirts of her white Western-style dress and toiling up the road to the cafe. The sight made Elena feel cold. She pulled her thick scarf more tightly around her throat.

  Then, out of nowhere, Anna said, “Why don’t we just go?” The words burst from her. Her family stared at her in amazement.

  “Go where, Anna?” her mother asked blankly. Anna’s face was red and angry, screwing back tears.

  She said, “Just—just leave. Now. Think about Canada later and just go back to Russia. Go home. We don’t belong here anymore.” She turned on Elena. “All your talk of the future and the stars, and where’s it got you? Cleaning the floor at Mobil Oil. There’s nothing here. There never will be.”

  Elena could think of nothing to say. Her sister turned and began stumping angrily through the snow toward the ice rink. Her mother shrugged, turned to Elena and murmured, “Your sister’s just upset. I wouldn’t worry about it. At least you’ve got a job. At least they pay you. There are people who haven’t had any money since Christmas.” Elena looked at her doubtfully. Her mother shrugged again, then drifted off up the hill in Anna’s wake.

  Disregarding the cold, Elena sat down heavily on the low wall. From here, she could see the icy peaks of the mountains, as remote as the stars against the winter blue of the sky.

  She had never been a political animal. Obviously, she had belonged to the Party, but that was more for the usual practical reasons rather than ideological conviction. Any government that felt obliged to call the national newspaper Truth must have something to hide, Elena thought. Yet, like most Russians, she was a romantic as well as a cynic. Somewhere deep inside, there was still a part of her that believed in the Soviet Union: in the ideas behind it, anyway, if not the messy, wrecked reality.

  If you were a Christian, you had heaven to look forward to. Denied that, Elena believed in the future,
in tomorrow. For a while, she had really thought that they were going to make it, and even after everything that had happened, she couldn’t help the hope. She still carried her Party card in her handbag: a talisman against too much change. Sitting on the wall, thinking about what Anna had said, she found herself looking at the little slip of laminated cardboard as though she had never seen it before.

  The wedding party had come level with her now, the girls laughing and joking while the men, uncomfortable in their best suits, walked a few paces behind. They were Kazakhs; they and their ancestors had lived here for hundreds of years, ever since Genghis and his tribesmen had swept down out of the north. Once more she thought of Tamerlane, Genghis’ even more terrifying successor, and felt suddenly out of place: tall and fair and foreign. A Russian; almost a Westerner. The wedding party glanced at her as they passed, and she thought she caught the word “Round-eye.”

  They were all a little drunk, she thought, trying to make excuses for them, but she still felt blank and strange. A few years ago, no one would have given her a second glance, but now she had become a foreigner in her own country.

  This was her home, wasn’t it? But people weren’t even sure who they were anymore. Fifteen years ago they had all been Soviet, and now … Sometimes it seemed to Elena that the only way to go was up and onward: into space, into the future, trying not to make the same mistakes.

  The wedding party had reached the terrace of the ice rink now, and were arranging themselves for a commemorative photograph. Far ahead, Elena could see the retreating figures of her mother and sister, heading into the cafe and the warmth. There seemed nothing to do but go after them.

  That night, when the chatter of her mother and Anna began to grate on Elena’s nerves, she stepped out onto the balcony for a cigarette. She remembered her father doing the same thing when he had bothered to come home. Occasionally, if he had not been too drunk, she had joined him. In summer, the night air had been loud with the sound of cicadas and the distant music from the cafe: Turkish pop with a heavy bass beat. Yet it felt claustrophobic, hemmed in by the trees.

  Now, behind the winter-bare branches, Elena could see the snowlit switchback of the Mountains of Heaven, stretching all the way to the Chinese border, and felt that she could breathe at last.

  After the trip to Tashkent, the money had gone into the box under the bed. Elena, Anna, and their mother counted it every evening over tea, in a ritual that never varied. They had almost five hundred dollars in total. Another hundred would get them to Moscow and a rented apartment for a couple of months, plus the visa fees for Canada. Elena was trying not to think about the airfares. We’ll manage, she thought. We’ll have to.

  She had placed the ball inside the jewelry box on her chest of drawers. In odd moments, she took it out and studied it. It remained hard and unnaturally heavy, although its warmth had changed to an icy chill. It numbed her hand so much that she could not hold it for more than a few minutes.

  As a scientist, she was intrigued by it. She still had no idea what the object might be, though she had spent as much time as she could afford on the Internet at the library, searching for possibilities. She had called around to former contacts, seeking information, but no one had any plausible ideas. The object did not look like anything technological, or any kind of component, yet it seemed to have physical effects. Occasionally, she wondered whether she was simply imagining its weight and coldness, but these qualities seemed too definite, too apparent.

  She had even gone to the museum, wondering whether it might be some ancient artifact, but it resembled none of the meager Kazakh relics behind their glass cases. Then, gradually, she forgot about it, and left it alone in its box.

  Lighting a cigarette, Elena looked up toward the stars, picking out traces of the winter constellations. There was another faint light shining through the haze, traveling slowly across the sky. Elena watched it pass. She had helped to put a light like that up there once, years ago, when there had still been a Soviet Union. But that light had been Mir, now long since gone to a watery grave, and this was the new ISS, funded by the Americans and the occasional space tourist.

  Mir had been the biggest project Elena had ever been involved in, a thing of which she had once been proud, but it had already become a grim joke. The Americans at Baikonur had talked about it in the same way that the owner of a new Mercedes might speak of a horse and cart: wonder, horror, a kind of contempt. They had never grown used to the risks that the Russians had run; had never fully accepted that if you were prepared to put people into space, then the likelihood was that someone on the station would eventually be killed.

  They wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, Elena thought. They did not understand sacrifice. But Mir had been a Soviet project from the outset. The Russians had put it up there, and it had stayed, long past its sell-by date. That should have been worth something to the Westerners, but somehow, it was not. Elena swallowed her bitterness in a drag of her cigarette.

  The new station gave her some comfort. At least the cosmodrome was still part of something, even if she no longer could be. And Yuri Golynski had been up there, too, for a time, slowly orbiting the world. Elena had written him a letter when she’d been told that she was to leave the project in the latest round of funding cuts, giving him her mother’s address and telling him he’d be welcome in Kazakhstan one day. He hadn’t replied; had not even phoned at Christmas. Elena wondered whether he had even received it. She had said things in that letter that were perhaps best left uncommitted to paper: nothing romantic, just dreams, reflections on a changing world, and thoughts that now embarrassed her.

  Yuri had not been amenable to romance, except perhaps in bed. Their affair now seemed improbable, as though she had imagined it: the Soviet cosmonaut hero and herself, tagging along behind, grounded now forever. She thought of Valentina Tereshkova’s portrait on the Tashkent Metro: a little glimpse of a future that might never now be theirs.

  The cosmodrome had been a bleak place even in summer. Once you got past Leninsk and the gantries and launchpads of the cosmodrome, there was nothing for hundreds of kilometers except grass and stones and sky. But at night, it changed. Then, if you stepped outside, you could see all the way to Andromeda and beyond; galaxies uncoiling clear and distant in the vastness of an ocean of darkness, suns like sparks on the water.

  Memory took her further back. When she had first arrived at the cosmodrome, winter was just ending and the steppe had been a wasteland of snow. It was twenty degrees below zero; hurrying from one office to another after dark, she happened to look up and was lost forever. Yuri had come out to look for her and he had gotten stuck as well, standing out there in the winter darkness, staring at the miracle of the stars. After that, Elena knew there was no hope for her. She fell into the sky and she still hadn’t come down.

  But her sister’s voice still echoed in her head: All your talk of the future and the stars, and where’s it got you? Fired in a post-Perestroika funding crisis, that was all.

  From inside the apartment, she could hear her mother. “Elena? What are you doing out there in the cold? Shall we have some tea?”

  But Elena stayed for a moment, watching the orbiting spark until it disappeared behind the bare and frosty trees, and then she went inside.

  Six

  ST. PETERSBURG, 21ST CENTURY

  The dream was always the same, conjured up from memories of the far past. Ilya was standing beneath a mulberry tree as the blossoms scattered down around him like snowdrift. His sword was drawn, fiery in the afternoon sun. Before him, the long line of tombs marched up the hill above the city of Samarkand: turquoise domes crowning the baked ochre brick. Somewhere, in one of the dark doorways, the dead were waiting. The dead, and the bogatyr named Manas.

  The challenge had come the day before. Ilya was far from his own lands, down in the south of the Bukhara Khanate, searching for the stolen son of a prince. He was uneasy here, disliking the southern heat and the dust, the way men looked askance at hi
s pale skin and eyes, the reassuring touch of their hands to the daggers that they kept beneath their robes. But he had promised to find the boy, and it was not a promise he was prepared to break.

  Ilya’s first meeting with Manas had been on the previous evening, as he sat sipping mint tea in the middle of the caravanserai. It had been an ordinary enough scene: a throng of traders jostling with camels and horses, the veiled women weaving their way through the melee like ghosts. Ilya heard a hundred different tongues: Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and the Turkic speech of Western China. He was assailed by the odors of dung and dust, blood and resin, opium and ash and charred meat. The towering walls and turrets of the madrasas loomed above his head, gold sparking in the firelight, the blue domes darkened to indigo. He was concentrating on the conversations around him, listening for a hint of the missing prince, when a hand fell upon his shoulder.

  “You.”

  “Yes?” Ilya looked up. He saw a young man, dressed in the manner of the Kyrgyz people in a belted tunic and boots. His eyes were as black as a raven’s, tinged with crimson in the light of the traders’ fires. He had an arrogant arched nose, a mountain face: all sweeping angles, with a flamboyant moustache.

  “You are like me.”

  “I am?” Ilya could see few similarities, but the stranger was grinning.

  “A hero—a bogatyr, in your tongue. Not much of one, perhaps—it’s clear that you’re a Northerner—but a Son of the Sun, nonetheless. What’s your name?”

  “I am Ilya Muromyets.”

  The stranger gave a harsh crow of delight. “Why, I’ve heard of you! Better and better. Where’s your flying horse?”

  Ilya sighed. “I left him at home.”

  “And I am Manas, of Kyrgyzia. You’ve heard of me, of course.” It was not a question.

  “I may have come across some mention, here and there,” Ilya replied as dryly as he could, because Manas was, after all, a legend in the South. It was always possible, however, that this man was not Manas, since there were all manner of lunatics making a living by passing themselves off as bogatyri and fleecing the peasants, but there was a quality to Manas’ speech and figure, a kind of snapping elan, which struck a chord in Ilya.