Eight Stars of Gold

Eight Stars of Gold

            Old Charley backs water, and the bow of the boat comes across the fetch of the waves.  The plashing against the hull changes its note, the keel lifting and breasting in the swell as the line begins to draw taut; Nikolai shifts in his seat.  The second boat rocks in the irregular cross-chop of the waves beside Agvik, as Andreas leans out to secure his line.  Hikaru watches the movement of the water, bites into a wave with his paddle to brace the boat more steadily for him.  Pretty well done for a chichak.  Bright blood has speckled the sleeve of his coat.

            Gray mist moves over the heaving water with the wind, disappears against the gray horizon.  Gray water, gray sky – the only color a couple of orange-painted floats bobbing by Agvik’s darkness.  Above, a brighter spot in the enclouding marks the position of the sun, coming about toward the northwest on its long slide.  Still many hours before darkness.  Nikolai hears the yelping of brant on the move, somewhere back on the coast.  Andreas, Ivan, and Hikaru bend to their oars and the other boat comes out toward them, Little Charley paying out the coiled line as the slack is drawn up. 

            Old Charley and Andreas call out to one another across the water, conferring.  “We pull straight, but not too close to each other.  And keep the pull matched up even.”

            Andreas says, “Oh, we’ll keep it easy for you.  Don’t want to spend all day going in circles out here.”

            Old Charley laughs.  “I’m saying, you all keep up!  I know you got two chichak to our one.”

            “That’s fine, I’ll spot you one.”

            Ivan’s English is still so-so, but he understands this okay.  He swells and thumps his chest, maybe mocking affront for them, or maybe for real.  “You think I’m a chichak?  I’m Rosh!  You watch, see how a real Rosh pulls.”

            Old Charley elbows Nikolai.  “Well we’re still even.  We got our own Rosh fellow.”

            Nikolai mutters, “Half.”

            “We’ll see then, eh?”

            Nikolai draws out his compass on its chain – a relic of his father, with a tarnished brass housing and a makers mark engraved in Cyrillic lettering.  He considers for a moment their last sighting of land before the fog, the set of the current, the angle of the sun, the substantial declination of the magnetic pole (this year drifting fast across Severnzemlya); raises one arm out straight to indicate the bearing for Port Tagera.  Andreas nods and sculls a moment to shift direction.

            “All ready?”  Old Charley reaches out and taps Isaac and Selden.  Both are travellers themselves.  Isaac’s a gray-haired sardo from up river in the Laska back country (down here at the coast visiting his daughter, who’s married to Little Charley – there’s a grandkid on the way any day).  The other one is a world-wanderer, claiming to hail from the country of the Nihonjin, and before that from distant Merica.

            “Put your back in then... hut!”  The men heave, and eddies spiral backwards from their oars.  Agvik rolls in the swell, shifting not at all.  Twice and again, and slowly the black bulk turns, the waves beginning to lap it at a different angle.  There is nothing like a wake, but one float and a second begin to drift trailing astern.

            “Slow and steady.  Hell to get it moving again if we stop to rest, hey?  Just keep on going slow.”  They settle in for a long pull, muscles working, with the promise of aches to come branching out through their shoulders, arms, thighs, calves.   Old Charley mutters to himself, “Yeah, wishing now we’d waited on that third boat.”  Behind their backs the slow, irregular clang of the gong buoy over Hope, ventriloquial in the fog.  Before their faces, the dark island-like mass of Agvik, slowly drawn to follow them by the lines fixed to his lip.  A spreading fan of black baleen juts from his half-open mouth; his flukes sway loosely in the swell.  The oily smell of his blood is brought to them on the wind.

            None of them is weak on his oar, Old Charley’s jibes notwithstanding.  But it’s true Selden is not bred to handle boats like the others, and from time to time he misses the rhythm of the stroke, jerking high across a wave or biting too deep.  Not too bad, and he’s in good humor.  Beside him Isaac gives a companionable jeer when he fumbles.  Still, they may be drifting south of their best course.

            Now a different bell begins to ring in the fog, distant, steady and high.  It grows louder, approaching.   In response Andreas whoops, blows sharp on a tin whistle.  “Ahoy!”  They begin to hear voices calling over the water.  “Give way,” in Rosh.  Some ship out of Murmansk or the Lena.

            Nikolai shouts back, “Give way yourselves, we’re tethered!”  The Rosh vessel appears – triple masted, moving under moderate sail – and ghosts toward them in the fog.  Going slow, yet too close for comfort; they can see the sailors working the rigging, the metal cladding of the ship’s hull scratched by a thousand growlers from each passage of the northern ocean.  Leaving it a bit late, the helmsman turns the wheel and angles away from them.  The bow wave rocks them a moment later.  Sailors wave, point at Agvik, call out to them from the ship’s stern as it settles back onto its course, toward the straits and the Pacific.

            Ivan has pulled his hood up, bent forward so as to watch the ship without showing his face much.  His chance of being taken up is not great, to be sure, but no doubt Nikolai would have done the same.  “See any old shipmates of yours?” Nikolai calls over to ask him, still in Rosh.

            “No.  Not any more.”

            “Neither did I.  Of course it has been a long time since I sailed with my father.”

        They pull harder for a while, hoping to come out of the sea lanes soon.  Nikolai remembers those childhood journeys on the Davidov, now twenty years gone.  Baffin Island, Helsinki, Vrangelya.  Cruising off Greenland, hearing the perpetual roar of the water-torrents and the thunder of ice-mountains crashing into the sea.  Pondering the mysteries of the sea-charts, the interplay of cosines and tangents, the use of the sextant.  The slow synchronous dance of the moons of Jupiter, seen through telescopic glass.  Lying out on the deck at night, watching Polaris poised at the zenith.

            The gong buoy is ringing louder to starboard.  Nikolai tosses out the lead for a sounding, and suddenly they are at four fathoms.   This is the tough spot to judge.  They are out over the old spit now, most likely, and the deepest crossing is a bit north of Hope; but the bottom is unconsolidated, still shifting under the changing currents.  And they may have veered too close in.  This would be no danger for the boats themselves, but even with the floats Agvik must draw at least two fathoms.   Worriedly Nikolai makes another sounding – three and a half now.  A few grains of beach sand adhere in the seal-grease on the lead.  He looks at Old Charley, who shrugs, gestures to port.  They change their course a couple points, and pull.

            Three and a half fathoms.  The tide, weak as it is in the northern ocean, is now falling; if they ground they cannot count on it to float them free.  Three and three quarters.  Three and one quarter.  Four, and smiles appear on the men’s faces.  But they hear or feel a scraping, transmitted to them across the taut lines, vibrating through the water and hull into their feet.  Their motion slows.  Yet it does not stop.  Andreas calls, “I don’t think that was a gravel strike.”  Old Charley nods.  Maybe Agvik has brushed against a structure.  The framing of an old military installation, or the remnant walls of a house from the drowned village of Point Hope.

            The next sounding shows four and a quarter.  If the bottom is flat here, okay.  Maybe they are past the village.  Or maybe they are just over an old street...  

            At last the bottom drops solidly away, down to six and seven fathoms.  Old Charley whistles, and they all draw in oars and allow themselves a rest.  They munch on jerky and pilot bread as the boat rocks beneath them.

            Nikolai passes round a canteen of fresh water, and they drink.  He asks Selden, “Where is it  you’re from originally?”

            “Minsota.  The lake country.”

            “Is that over by New York?” Isaac asks.

            “A bit farther inland, you might say.”

            “Long ways to come,” Old Charley says.  “What really brings you here?”

            Isaac says, “He’s here to collect fifty years of back taxes!”  His laughter creaks.

            “And I know you’d be good for it, man.”  Selden chuckles, then looks downward into the belly of the boat.  “No.  But it’s true, I am here because of... ” He pronounces it deliberately.  “America.”

            Old Charley cocks back his head at that, uncertain.  Selden turns in his seat toward the others.  “Listen.  I don’t care whether there’s one president or fifteen.  And we must be getting close to that.  What have we got now?  The good old United States.  Minus the Southern Revival.  Minus the big dust, minus Deseret, Cascadia, the Calfornia fiasco.  And Laska.  I expect the New Englanders will be bidding us fare-thee-well before long.  They always know what’s best, eh?”

            “We always did see things different, right from the beginning.  We came from different places round the world.  It used to be one country just because we agreed it was.  Maybe agreed after getting kicked in the ass, sure.  But we all knew the same stories in those days.  And not so hard for that to happen when someone could talk into a mike in New York and have a million people hear him in Georgia, Oregon, Maine.  But the thing is, that was an artifice.  What people heard talking was a machine.  Not another person’s real voice and breath.  So when all that began to go away, those stories broke up like old plastic in the sun.  And what was left was not so much the same everywhere any more.  The country they had, it wasn’t as real as they thought.”

            Isaac says, “Laska’s real enough.”

            “That’s why I travel.  That’s why I walked over the big dust.  I’ve watched the hurricanes driving Florida under.  I’ve seen the Sphinx in Vegas.  I’ve had audience with the Empress of the Nihonjin.  I want to hear your stories in Laska.  I want to bring them back home and tell them.

            “It won’t stop the fighting.  Sometimes I hope it will. But probably not.  Hell, my cousin, my uncle died in the Second Civil War.  You bet I feel that, every day.  I know that goes on, that will go on.  But whether it’s brothers fighting, or strangers, that’s because of the stories you both know.  Maybe if we do, we can be a country again someday.  A real one.”

            He grins.  “Hope that doesn’t make you want to toss me out of this boat.  If it does, well, in that case I’m just a simple trader who doesn’t know a damn thing about Laska.  That’s true too.”

            Old Charley says, “I hear you.  Don’t worry, we’re not tossing you out.”  He chews meditatively on a stick of jerky, stone-faced.  Nikolai can see this one coming.  “You still got to row.”

            So, after a bit, they do again, creeping onward in shifting fog with Agvik following them astern.  They pull across the deeper water another hour or so, angling on a bearing toward the mouth of the Kukpok.

            Andreas suddenly curses.  Nikolai follows his gaze, sees nothing for a moment.  A bulky movement and splashing back behind Agvik, obscured in the fog.  Bearded seal?  Then Isaac whistles.  “That’s a damn griz, way out here.”  A robust, water-slicked pale head bobs up, well back behind, and the bear regards them.  “Oh, damn he’s big.  Christ.  Biggest griz I’ve ever seen.”

            Old Charley says, “Probably you don’t have slope griz up the Kobuk, Isaac.  They got the blood of the ice.  This guy’s more than half nanook.”

            Andreas takes up the harpoon, though the range is much too great for a cast.  Little Charley has their only gun – currently loaded with duckshot.  The griz considers the boats, swims with little hurry back toward the rear of Agvik.  It’s a poor angle for any shot, low in the water and with considerable cover from the great body.  The griz paddles against Agvik’s side, braces with a clawed forepaw, and bites at the flank, wrenching away a mouthful of blubber.

            Hikaru whoops, bangs his oar against the hull, to no great effect.  Little Charley shrugs, raises the shotgun, and fires into the air.  The report rings out sharp, dies away flat in the fog.  The griz pauses, looks at them, lowers its head to take another bite.  But the shot has made it uneasy, and its efforts to open a wider gash in the body are distracted by keeping an eye on the men.  After swallowing a few more bites it growls and pushes back into the water.  The men see it swimming away behind Agvik, glancing back at them now and again, head low in the troughs of the waves.  Gone into the fog.

            The encounter with the griz has slowed them, and they labor to bring Agvik back into motion.  But they are closer now.  The fog begins to clear, first in ragged gaps blowing past above that show glimpses of blue sky, then in an opening-out of the water horizon.  A flock of cackling-geese passes, moving for the south.

            Then they can see land to the east.  Low clouds creep across the hills of Lisburn.  Pale patches of tundra remain on the heights, but fresh dark forests clothe all the slopes.  Spruce trees grow thick as hair on a dog.  The line of the sky dips toward the valley where the Kukpok flows out of the hills.  In many places along the shoreward water there are fields of fresh snags, where forest has briefly claimed the tundra only to be drowned.

            It is none too soon to make it to land.  They are all bone-tired now from their hours of pulling at the oars.  And the sun is skating low toward the ocean horizon.  Late August, so the night will be short enough.  But a real one, a dark one, not like the brief twilights that punctuate the perpetual day of July.     

            The buildings of Port Tagera come into view by the Kukpok.  Back toward the foothills some hay meadows show pale green swaths against the forest; a few hardy horses and cattle amble and graze at pasture.  In the harbor, fishing boats with their sails furled; the moored hulk of an old Rosh ship; the Gennida trading vessel that has been in port a few weeks for repairs.  A little farther out, a Laska coast guard cutter rides at anchor, the blue starry flag fluttering from its mainmast.  Andreas fires a flare, and after a few minutes they see minute figures running toward the water; one ignites an answering red flash.  Children climb on boulders, jump and wave to them.

            Some folks come out in boats to greet them.  There are cheers, congratulations, high fives mimed across the water.  A girl in a kayak paddles round Agvik, trailing a hand on his black side.

            A few more lines are set into Agvik, and the new boats help pull him into the shallows, by the gravel bar at the edge of town.  Andreas and Old Charley cast loose, and they row the last few yards up to shore.  Heavily they get out, boots sliding on the slick cobbles.  The men stagger up-beach to sit on a driftwood log, exhausted; Little Charley lies down flat on his back in the gravel, arms out wide.  Selden says, “I will be sore.”

            More onlookers are arriving from the village every minute.  Port Tagera is a town of little wooden buildings, many salvaged and barged over from Point Hope and Kotz over the last few decades.  There’s been no point in setting down solid foundations; most of them are planted on skids.  A team of Percherons has been working to haul one up a few more yards from the waterside; their owner unhitches them, lets them drink for a bit, leads them down toward the gravel bar. 

            Hikaru’s wife comes flying up to them from town, cutting across the crowberries and cotton-grass, beaming.  Halting, she speaks to him in bursts of rapid, excited Japanese with a few pauses for short breath, dances from one foot to another.  Then she collects herself, bows.  “Kujira-tori!”  And promptly she whirls and dashes back.

            Hikaru says, “She forgot to shut up the mercantile.”

            “Well tonight no one will be there, pretty sure,” Andreas says.  “I think we should make sure and tell her it was all down to you, eh?”  Hikaru grins.

            The sky and ocean flame red and gold as the sun slowly angles toward the horizon, skims the water, touches in the northwest and begins to sink.  Cables have been looped around the flippers and stretched to shore.  When the horse-team is hitched up, at a word they lean into the harness and heave.  Their hooves punch sharp dark dents into the gravel bar.  Agvik shifts, slides massively in toward shore behind them.  But he grounds out in the shallows before they can pull him quite all the way onto the beach.  After a few more tries the horses are let to rest. 
They’ll pull best at high tide, in a few hours.

             Old Charley rouses himself and wades out knee-deep, puts his hands on the black hide, looks into the great eye.  For a moment he speaks, softly.  He glances at Selden splashing up beside him, shrugs.  “Thanking him.”

            The sun gone, the sky darkens toward blue-black; Venus begins to shine out bright.  Children are running up and down the gravel beach, having been deputized to go gather sticks of driftwood.  They bring them back, some working in pairs to haul the bigger awkward branches.  Some folks have scraped out a quick fire-ring, and they pile up twigs to kindle a flame.

            The men sit out on the log, watching the fire grow.  Lots of people have come down to look, pacing off Agvik’s length along the water’s edge, the crowd-noise chattering louder.  Someone sends a toy firework zipping into the sky.  Isaac gropes about in his bag and pulls out a metal flask.  He unstoppers it and takes a quick drink, holds it out.  “Hey, you want some?  Good Sen Petersburg vodka.”

            Nikolai takes a sip.  Alcoholic fire traces the shape of his throat.  He coughs; beside him Little Charley stands up, glowering at Isaac.  “You got nothing better to do than sit and drink?  Don’t you know any better than to bring out liquor?”  He was “Little” when he was a kid; these days a head taller than Isaac, and disgusted mad.  Isaac waves his hands to ease him, but Little Charley turns on his heel and walks away.

            Isaac looks after him awkwardly.  Old Charley says, “Yeah, he’s not wrong.  But I guess I’d have one swallow.”

            They pass the flask about.  The fire’s got a good blaze going now.  Someone’s picking out a tune on an old guitar; a few couples are dancing back in the shadows where the ground’s more flat.  On an old length of mast a Laska flag has been raised up.  Fluttering above the firelight, the seven stars of the Big Dipper, with Polaris opposite.

            Ivan scowls.  “Dancing under their pirate flag,” he mutters.  Nikolai puts a warning hand to his elbow.

            Andreas has overheard, unfortunately.  “Watch your mouth there.” 

            There’s no big trouble with the Rosh these days.  But it’s not so long ago there were plenty of folks who might put out false lights on a foggy night; or take some small boats out in the dark to board a Rosh merchantman just passed through the strait.  Most especially down near the Waikeh, the new shallow sea with its broad fields of eelgrass, its shoals shifting every month, its maze of deltas and distributaries from a hundred rivers, where no deep-draft ship could ever pursue.  Andreas doesn’t talk much about those days, but Nikolai’s pretty sure he knows plenty.

              Once word got out, it became the practice to form up in convoys with naval escort.  It never quite got to what you would call a full war, but there were plenty of skirmishes at sea, before folks finally came to a settlement.  And before the Waikeh finally went deep enough under.  A few ships were sunk on the Laska side, a few on the Rosh.  Including the Davidov, lost with all hands off of Sen Lawrence Island.

            Ivan lurches up, goes sourly down to the fireside to warm his hands.  Selden leans back against the driftwood log, looking up.  “I think this is the first time it’s been dark enough for me to see the stars since I’ve been up here.  Never thought I’d see the North Star up so high.  Right at the pole, eh?”

            Nikolai says, “Almost at the pole, anyway.  Really he does make a circle round the point of the pole every day like the other stars, but a tiny one.  Just half a degree off.  My father told me it was the year he was born the North Star came closest to the pole.  Ever since then, been drifting away.”

            “But not fast, I guess,” Selden says.

            Nikolai laughs.  “Not too fast.  Come two thousand years, though, the pole will be over by... him.”  He points upward.  “Alrai.  Maybe we’ll need a new flag then, eh?”

            It’s full dark now, no moon, and uncountable star-fields are speckling the sky.  Great curving luminous shapes have begun to twist and glide above the ocean.  Far-flung are the banners of the northern lights.

            Selden says, “When our ship came in from Kodiag, the captain told us we were supposed to make Port Tagera on Friday, and I woke up Thursday morning, what I thought was Thursday morning, and here we are coming in to port.  I was, what the hell?!  Was I so seasick I slept away a day and a night?”

            Andreas laughs.  “Nobody told you we keep Rosh time here?”

            “They told me nothing!  I’m still not sure I got it right.”

            Andreas says, “There’s a good story about that.  So we used to have the line between today and tomorrow out on the strait.  You saw the Dimee islands when you came through?  Right between them.  You could stand on one of them and look cross to tomorrow on the other one.  So there was this fisherman Peter Corrin, he’s still around, and he had the biggest fishing boat on the coast, he’d go out with his crew and chase pollock out on the Chokchi.  A big wheel.  And there was this woman he knew over in Provdenya, that’s on the other side in Chukotka.  On the Rosh side, but you know Chukotka folks aren’t particularly Rosh any more than us, we all got relatives back and forth over the strait.  Anyway the two of them had this long time thing, and what he’d do is stop by Provdenya on the way out, spend a warm night, go on out fishing next morning. 

            “Well she ended up getting married to another fellow, but she still did like Peter, so they carried on like before – she’d leave word for him when her husband was going to be out of town.  Worked okay for a while, but then he got confused about the day, some say too much to drink the night before, I don’t know, but for sure he came sliding in to bed right beside her husband.  Got the hell beat out of him, came back to Nome with his tail between his legs, and this is actually true, he decided from now on, hell or high water, he was going to be on the Chukotka day of the calendar.  Not only that, he made it stick with his crew, and pretty soon the other boats took it up, and within a couple years it was general all along the coast.  You can ask Old Charley, he’ll tell you it’s true.”

            Selden says, “Hey, Old Charley.  Tell me about Agvik now.  What do the people say about him?”

            Old Charley drinks a long swig of vodka from the flask, winces, passes it over.  “Truth is, most of the real stories are gone.  We lost them with the language.  With the troubles with the Rosh.  Now, with the water.  Asking me about Agvik.  I’m Yupik myself, mostly.  I was born in Bethl, my brothers and me grew up fishing salmon and hunting geese.  First time I even saw Agvik I was over forty.  Well, we couldn’t stay in the Waikeh once it went under, could we.  But this here was all Inupia country once.   Point Hope was Inupia.  This place, Port Tagera, it wasn’t even here when I was a kid, there was nothing -- now look at it.  And half the people here Yupik, half Rosh, half Nihonjin or Gennidan or whatnot.  Too many halves, I guess.  But you get me.  That fellow over there, he’s all the way from Zealand, his family had trouble with the Chinese and he lit out.  Can’t go much damn further than that, can you.

            “So no wonder if we don’t know who the hell we are.  You’re right, you know.  But all those old stories are gone.  Washed away…  Down under the ocean with Agvik.  But if we wait, hey?  If we listen right.  Agvik will bring them back to us.”

            Isaac has gone down to the crowd around the fire.  He slaps Andreas and Hikaru on the back, hacks out a fierce laugh.  Suddenly they hear his voice lifting up in song.  “Eight stars of gold on a field of blue.  Laska’s flag may it mean to you.” In fact, the old sardo has a surprisingly fine baritone.

            Others have been drinking too.  They sing along with him, plenty loud, more boisterous than in tune for sure.  Ivan shakes his head, still annoyed, but Nikolai sees his lips following the words.

            “The Bear!  The Dipper! And shining high!  The Great North Star with his steady light!  Over land and sea a beacon bright!”

            Nikolai stands, walks back over the cobbles into the darkness.  Vodka burns in his belly.  By the firelight he can see women clambering onto Agvik’s back, loosening long strips of pink blubber with their knives.  Up above, the curtains of the aurora ripple and glow green against the brilliant constellations.  He cranes his head back, glances along the pointer stars to find Polaris.  Still slowly spinning over the northern ocean, above Agvik’s realm, suspended between Laska and Rosh for the balance of this age of the world.

He watches there, guiding all alike.