Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (46 page)

Andrei quoted, his Russian vowels rich and black with a strange yearning. “I long to be that snow upon the raven’s back, Yasha. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing that matters.”

Jamie did not need to ask what that one thing was, for there was only one subject on which Andrei waxed poetic, and that was freedom. Freedom of a sort that men with countries, with blood ties, with love hardly ever knew. Perhaps only in the heat of battle, at the edge of a death that seemed certain, there one could drink from the well, never more than a taste, but enough to addict one for life.

“What about you, Yasha? Would you fly with me?” Andrei’s eyes gleamed in the cutting light, and Jamie felt an electric surge in his blood that such moments had occasioned in him times before. The same surge flowed in Andrei. It was like a call and response between the two of them. It was the thing that made his tongue hesitate.

“Not tonight,” Jamie said, tasting a strange regret, sharp as the taste of metal, sweet as the taste of love.

Andrei smiled, a gesture that held a wealth of ghosts in the mere turn of his lips. “Perhaps tomorrow then.”

“Tomorrow we have to see that friend of John’s,” Jamie said, in an attempt to return some practicality to the conversation.

“Must we?” Andrei blew out a cloud of blue smoke that twined with the crystals of breath Jamie had exhaled. “You know what sort of afternoon it’s bound to be, Yasha. Some dried out old
pedik
who will serve us tea that tastes like horsepiss and then try to get us drunk in the hopes that we’ll let him screw one or both of us.”

Jamie blew on his hands in an effort to warm them. “I promised John,” he said, bound even at nineteen by his word.

“He’s in love with you,” Andrei said, blue eyes piercing as an ice-tipped arrow.

“I know,” Jamie replied as quietly as the wind would allow. “I feel sorry about it, but I don’t want to give up his friendship either. Is that selfish?”

Andrei shrugged, a gesture of Russian absolutism. “Of course it is.” He rapped Jamie’s aching knuckles hard. “Come on, you selfish Irish bastard. Let’s climb up the rest of the way.”

Jamie looked up to where the spire trembled in the wind. “Race you!” he shouted and began the mad, suicidal scramble across and up the iron bars.

The wind slapped sharply against him and for a fleeting second he was weightless and he felt it—the brutal glory of youth, of being strong and seemingly invincible. He looked over at Andrei, who was just moving from one strut to the next. Their eyes met and they both grinned, eyes streaming in the bitter wind—and that was when Andrei, normally nimble as a goat, lost his footing.

To catch him meant risking death for them both. It meant risking the plunge into that starry field with no knowledge of what came after. Or if indeed there was an after at all.

Jamie sucked in a breath of air and flung himself across the divide, grabbing Andrei’s hand just before he hit the iron hard enough to knock his wind out. His own fingers were sliding, slipping and numb, though he could feel the slick of blood and knew they were cut. If Andrei gave into the temptation he would kill both of them, and Jamie’s risk would be for nothing.

He slammed Andrei’s hand into the iron and bent his fingers to the strut, Andrei’s hand slippery with blood beneath his. He held their two hands there together until he felt Andrei’s grip assert itself.

Andrei’s face was frost-limned against the cold air, his eyes hot as the heart of a blue star, and the man behind them just as inclined to self-immolation. Jamie’s eyes held Andrei’s for a space of eternity and around them there was only this—the still beating core of the universe, no world at their feet, neither light nor time, merely space, dark and limitless below.

“Not tonight, my friend,” Jamie said through clenched teeth. “Not tonight.”

Andrei must have seen something in the green eyes that made him understand. If he went over the edge, tipped toward that starlit abyss, he would make the journey alone. He nodded and then found his footing, easing his cut hands and cracked wrist off the iron for a moment, his face paler than normal.

“Can you climb?” Jamie asked, giving his own hands ease before the trip down to the second balcony.

“I think so,” Andrei replied, uncharacteristically subdued. The journey down was long, and Jamie cursed Andrei soundly every bated-breath, crawling inch of it. Rather than cursing him back, Andrei bore the abuse in silence. This told Jamie that the man had scared not only him, but himself as well. Good. The bastard could stew in it, could drown in it for all he cared.

They came off the last strut simultaneously and Jamie, taking one look at Andrei’s calm appearance, promptly hit him on the chin, knocking him flat on his cashmere-clad bottom.

“You bastard,” Jamie yelled. “You did that on purpose!”

“I needed to know if you’d save me,” Andrei said calmly, as if he weren’t lying flat on his back, fingers bleeding and his face already flowering with bruises as multi-hued as an Impressionist’s garden. And yet there was an exhilaration pulsing off of him, that Jamie knew the taste of all too well.

“Why?”

“Because someday, Yasha,” Andrei replied, “someday I will fly and I will need you to catch me. I cannot make that leap in faith, unless I know I can trust you absolutely.”

“I’ll be there,” Jamie said, and meant it.

Andrei had been forcefully returned to Mother Russia shortly after that. Jamie had not seen him for five years and then suddenly had come a message, through Yevgena, that Andrei was living in Zvyozdny Gorodok, which literally translated meant ‘little town of stars’. It was Russia’s ultra secret cosmonaut training center. Jamie understood at once that the very thing that gave Andrei the freedom to dream had also taken away his freedom entirely.

Neither would forget though, for on each man’s shoulder they bore witness to that night’s promise in the form of an angel rising from a spray of stars—a spray of deepest night blue flowing upward over shoulder blade with a lone star tipping onto the shoulder itself. A moment of madness that had become a pact.

With age, he understood that when Andrei had offered to step off into the dark with him it had been, for both of them, their last chance at freedom—the sort which addicts forever, but rarely offers more than one taste.

A strange taste of regret, sharp as metal, sweet as love.

Chapter Thirty-two
May 1973
The Crooked Man

Violet Stephanova Mattveeva was extremely annoyed
with herself. For weeks now, she had been conducting an internal argument between her own good sense and native Russian suspicion against her inevitable downfall in any situation—a large dose of good old-fashioned curiosity. The object of this curiosity was the man her lover had called the only true friend he had ever known.

Physically she had avoided entering into the charmed circle this man seemed to create everywhere he went. She felt that many in the camp had lost their minds and reserve far too quickly. For all they knew, this James had been planted inside to ferret out their secrets and before they knew it they would be headed to Lubyanka to have their secrets pulled out in a much less charming manner.

She found herself objecting to everything about him and surreptitiously studying those qualities at the same time. To begin with, he was not Russian. He could not even know what it was to be Russian, to always have to separate the personal from the public. To have two lives that did not mesh, that barely touched at the edges despite being lived in one body.

But he did not have the open book quality that most Westerners had. He knew how to wear a mask so smoothly it appeared entirely at one with the man he presented to the world. She wondered what had made such a thing so. For Andrei had told her that Jamie had all the world could offer: wealth, women, intellect and beauty. The latter two were already apparent to her. She had never heard a non-Russian speak like a native, but this man did. The beauty too, despite his shaved head and lack of proper nutrition, could not be hidden. In fact, it was of a sort that seemed ridiculous—that the universe should lavish such care on one individual whilst others ran about with harelips and bulbous noses, hunched backs and wandering eyes. She had felt something of the same when she met Andrei, as if his physical beauty were an affront to humanity, for he too had been carved by a generous hand. But there was something more to this man, a strange sort of light that drew everyone. She saw the results of it even in Nikolai, who was as hardened by tragedy as anyone she had ever known. It was, she knew, what saved Jamie from much harsher treatment at Gregor’s hands, and what had pulled Shura and Vanya to his side almost immediately. He inspired an intense loyalty, and though she found it annoying, she could feel the siren call of it herself. Thus far, she had resisted the lure. She was determined to do so for as long as she was able.

It was his storytelling ability that proved her undoing. At first, she avoided the fire at which he sat telling his tales to a few, but gradually the circle grew, and the spinning of his narratives grew in accordance. She understood that he was gifted this way, as though the fairies of whom he sometimes spoke, the dark ones of his own land, had both blessed and cursed him in his cradle. Some nights she drew close enough to hear a sentence or two, of things both dark and light, of eastern winds and sweet spices, and magical birds risen from ashes, of mares whose milk poured across the heavens and gave rise to a foaming river of stars.

He seemed to draw his words from the wind and the earth, the water and the fires. He moved his hands in accordance with the rhythm of those words, and creatures came forth and lived in the ears and eyes of his audience for that enchanted hour or two: deer with silver-white coats, wolves made from star-spittle, great slumbering mammoths who, when awakened, could shiver the earth with their roars, and silken-eared hares that contained the wisdom of the ages. There were astrologers and princes and stubborn girls with hair like crow feathers and nimble minds, there were dwarves of good intent and shape-shifting wild things that could not be counted upon in times of trouble. There were fields of blue poppies that gave clouded, lovely dreams and sleep that lasted a hundred years. There were ponds of black lotus that pooled like ink, in which shadows lived and frogs lurked that held golden keys within their oily bodies.

Her own father had told stories well, had made them for her out of what fabric she knew not, for Soviet Russia did not lend itself to enchantment.

But this man made stories for the lonely, to draw each shade into the warmth of the fire, then give them something they lacked, even if the lack was not recognized before.

He knew the old Russian tales and understood quite well the Russian need for blood and bones and caves and cold dark forests, for bears that governed great iced lands and deformed old women with spiteful wisdom gnawing at their gaunt frames. He understood the peasant that lurked under the most sophisticated of Russian veneers and so gave these tales earth and grain and hovels dug into hillsides. He told of a great Mother who slept in such silence that even a spider’s weaving might be heard within it, and when that Mother awoke it was with torrents, twisting roots and smoking soil.

Some nights his stories felt like mist curling around her senses, intoxicating but invisible. Other nights it was as if threads both dark as secret mosses and bright as spun gold wove themselves into her brain and her heart, pulling her inexorably to the fire where he sat. The stories wound one within another, the teller speaking through the mouth of one far older, and that one speaking through gold-furred foxes, arctic-eyed wolves and old women who knit the threads that held the world together. It was as confusing and as wonderful as the results of drinking too much vodka, mixed with cloudberry wine.

She drew even closer to the fire when he told tales in which his own land figured, tales of bright, shining people who lived beneath the hills and mermaids with glass green eyes and night-furled hair that lured men into vast cold waters where soul cages slept at the bottom of the sea. Tales of a land where the green was like no other, and small cottages were wreathed in earthy smoke and fresh misting rain. There were enchanted pots with strange brews in these tales, and lineages of common folk who had mixed and mated with the Auld Ones and bore odd, gifted children as a result. Stories of swans frozen into winter lakes and stolen feathers that kept them from flight. And always, always in these tales of his own land, there was the sea, as present as a missing mother, tracked silver-blue by the passages of whales and mermaids, dazzling with seals’ diamonds in the daylight. She had never seen the ocean but she dreamed of it often, so to hear it woven so casually through his stories was to understand that it was part of him, just as were his blood, breath and golden hair.

The night he lured her fully and finally, as a master would pull his falcon to his arm with a note or two, was the night he began to tell his own tale. How she knew this story was particularly his, she could not have said, but it had a dark ring to it, a truth that could not be denied, for it came from a deep wellspring within this man and he did not look happy nor comfortable in the telling. There had been something in his voice, some strange incantatory quality that had made his listeners shiver and hug themselves tight and look over their own shoulders into the dark night.

I am the Crooked Man and I come by crooked ways, along the phantom roads of a country that is no more. I walk by night, under the moon, both dark and full. I have seen all the foibles and furies of man, his tempests and his tragedies. I have known what it is to lose all and gain it back, only to lose it again. I remember a time when my country was still in the mists, before history, when the white stag roamed in the forests and the wolves called from hilltop to hilltop.

I am the Crooked Man and I carry within my bones the shells of the seas and the dust of the heavens. In my blood are the waters that covered the land long ago, the ice that gouged the canyons and hills, the valleys and streams, the lakes and rivers.