Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

Revolver (3 page)

BOOK: Revolver

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1910 Giron

68 LATITUDE NORTH

Sun Day, morning

“S
on?”

It was a strange first word to utter, and it wasn't meant as any name or manner of introduction. It was an interrogation, a question, and it meant,
Are you the son of Einar Andersson?

Sig looked up into the face of the man who'd knocked on the door. This in itself was odd, since no one ever knocked on their door. Only once in their three years in Giron had anyone come callingâPer Bergman, the chattering owner of the mine, and he'd come by special arrangement to share lunch one Sun Day.

No one else came by, and otherwise Einar, Nadya, Anna, and Sig would announce their arrival by the stamp of their boots on the porch.

“The Andersson boy?”

Mute as a tomb, Sig stared at the man. He made to push past Sig, who for some reason found he'd wedged
his foot against the inside of the door. The door shoved against it, but it resisted.

The man was a giant. Behind him in the yard between the cabin, the outhouse, and the dog huts, stood a giant horse, breathing great clouds of steam into the morning air. The frost crackled in the trees, and a crow cawed a harsh call across the frozen lake. The first crow of the year.

The man's face was like nothing Sig had ever seen, even in their years of travels around the rim of the world. He'd seen the Esquimaux and the Athabaskans; he'd seen Samoyedes and Sami, but he'd never seen anyone look like the man at the door. His features were coarse, his eyes far apart, his nose broad, his mouth hidden by a rough beard of ginger and white. His head, when he removed his fur hat, was shaven to his scalp. His skull was a disturbing shape, flat at the back, his ears too small. It was not a face stroked into creation by God's loving hand, but battered into shape by the Devil's hammer.

He pulled off a glove and put a fist of meat against the edge of the door, and Sig knew he could pull it off its hinges if he wanted to. With a twitch of his lip, Sig noticed that the man was missing the thumb of his left hand.

“Who are you?” Sig said, dragging his eyes away from the deformity, breaking the silence. “Have you come to help?”

He looked past the man, hoping to see Anna and Nadya there, putting the dogs away, having brought help. But his sister and stepmother were nowhere in sight.

The man leaned forward, looking past Sig into the cabin. His heavy black-skin greatcoat swung aside like a theater curtain, ushering on stage a new character.

There, in the inky shadow at the man's hip, sat the butt and grip of a revolver.

“Einar?” said the man. It was all he needed to say.

“No. No,” said Sig hurriedly, panic rising inside him. “No, he's not here. He'll be back.”

The man kept staring over his shoulder.

“When?”

Sig tried to place his accent but with so little to go on, it was hard to tell. He might have come from any country of the North; he might be American, maybe Dutch-American, maybe German. But the man was waiting for an answer, and the longer he left it, the more obvious Sig's lies would seem.

“Don't know. Later. Maybe.”

“I'll wait.”

For a moment it seemed as if the man would barge past him into the cabin, but instead, he turned, slowly mounting his horse, flicking the beast to a walk. He was looking straight ahead, back at the path to town, but then his gaze shot to Sig, just as he was about to close the door.

“Alone?”

And for some reason, Sig could only tell the truth this time.

“Yes,” he said, though the word died in his throat.

The man nodded.

Sun Day, noon

Y
ou might never know what it was that killed you. You might not see it coming; it might strike like the proverbial lightning bolt from the blue.

Or you might have some inkling of your doom. You might suspect the cause; that it is your greed or your lust for revenge or your blind faith that is to be your undoing.

Or you might see it clearly, running over the horizon toward you. Death on a pale horse.

Sig spent all morning pounding the blade of the shovel through the snow to the icy ground beneath. The snow was cleared in moments, but after an hour of frantic attempts to dig a hole, the tongue of the shovel gave up and snapped, the old metal fatigued in the cold, the ground as hard as bitterness.

He'd been standing in the cabin, and more and more,
had been unable to take his eyes off the corpse. Suddenly the vision from the day before returned, and he saw his father as the reindeer carcass, his ribs picked clean, and a deep cavity already hollowed out behind them by ravenous birds. He couldn't bear it and had rushed out to find the shovel, intent on burying the thing that had been his father.

Now, exhausted, he collapsed sobbing in the snow, his hands scraping at the grave he'd tried to dig for Einar, a dozen inches across, and a few less deep. Angrily he threw the handle of the shovel away behind the dog huts. He picked up the blade to follow it, then felt the anger drop from him, and with it let the blade fall in the snow by his feet.

But what was he going to do with the body?

Surely Anna and Nadya should have returned by now? At least Anna should. And Nadya, too. Of course she would come back.

But into his mind came the sight and sounds of their jealous fights, tongues spiteful and eyes cruel, when he couldn't believe he was seeing his singing sister before him. Sig, innocent and young, could never understand why they argued over Maria, so long gone. And the things Anna said about Nadya were harsh, and not true, not true, but where then, was she now?

He shook his head and stood, pushing the doubts away.

If Nadya had wanted to leave, she could have done so at any moment in the last couple of years, and she certainly hadn't stayed for Einar's wealth; they owned nothing, even the cabin they lived in, the tools they used, the food they ate, it all came from the mine, from the Company. The Company owned everything.

Any minute now, Sig told himself, both Anna and Nadya would appear around the track, bringing some company men to help them.

Sig staggered back into the cabin, shattered, dragging his boots off as he closed the inner door behind him. He tried not to look across at his father on the table, but he couldn't help it. He had to do something. He pulled a blanket from Einar and Nadya's bed and threw it across the body, trying but failing to avoid his father's eyes, which were still open, giving Sig the terrible feeling that Einar was watching him from beyond death.

With the body covered, he tried to roll it over to adopt a more natural position. Then he gently rearranged the blanket into a more fitting shroud.

With a moan in his heart he saw that the logs were almost eaten up, and turned to the door, when through the window he saw someone.

There, framed like an oil painting, sat the man on his horse. It was a pale horse.

The man stared right through the glass at Sig, then he
swung his leg over the beast's back and dismounted. Sig again caught a flash of the nickel backstrap.

The man walked steadily toward the cabin door.

These men are mad with lust for Gold. Conditions will be desperate unless a restraining influence can be exerted. You can hardly imagine to what depths a mining camp, shut away from civilization for eight months by a thousand miles of impassable ice, may descend.

GOVERNOR JOHN G. BRADY
GOVERNOR OF ALASKA,
1897 â 1906

1899 Nome

66 LATITUDE NORTH

Faith

“M
ay God protect us now.”

Einar always remembered the first words Maria whispered when she learned that the boat had sailed without them.

He'd come for the gold, and he hadn't meant to stay. These things never lasted long, Einar knew. Just like the Klondike, by the time the rest of the world got to know about the gold, it would be too late; all the best strikes found, the land claimed, the easy pickings gone. All that would be left would be the struggle to survive in a world of danger, both natural and man-made, with the occasional speck of gold dust coming his way. Just enough to keep that stupid dream of easy money alive, the dream of fantastic wealth, of ease and luxury and fine things for the rest of his days, but in reality not enough to live on for even a week.

“Yes, my love,” Einar said, sitting down on the floor by the makeshift cabin bed, stroking Maria's forehead. Sig lay curled up by her feet. There was nowhere else for him to sleep. Anna stood, holding a ragged old doll, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to see through the frost-rimmed window, stealing a glance at her mother from time to time, trying not to think thoughts she didn't like.

“Yes, my love,” Einar said softly. “God will protect us now.”

Maria's fever was high again, and sweat poured from her face though she shuddered as if icy winds gripped her. Suddenly she winced, screwing up her face, her eyes shut fast.

“Anna,” Einar called. “See to the fire.”

The girl stared at her mother, not hearing her father.

“Anna!” he called, louder now. “Anna, make up the fire. We must keep your mother warm.”

Still she ignored him. She hopped onto her other foot and began to stroke her doll's tattered dress and wooden head, with its few strands of real horsehair.

“Anna!” Einar shouted this time.

She jumped and stood straight like a soldier but still didn't move. Sig woke and almost immediately began to cry.

Einar cursed and shook his head.

“Anna,” he said, more softly. “Anna, see to your brother while I see to the fire.”

Anna nodded, dropping her doll onto the bare wooden floor and picking up her little brother bodily. She was tall for her age, he was small for his, and she held him like a baby against her chest, singing to him, till she could hold him no more.

She put him down and with surprise saw her mother looking at her, a weak smile on her lips.

“Have faith,” she whispered, so quietly that Anna didn't really hear.

The Frozen Sea

N
ever was there a winter like the winter in Nome as, somewhere over the course of seven months, 1899 became 1900.

As the sea froze, a great cavernous silence descended on the town, an eerie nothingness, in which the few sounds there were traveled unnaturally far. It froze so hard that the enormous pressure of ice from far out to sea threw huge slabs of shore ice up onto the beach, twenty feet, thirty feet, even fifty feet. The Esquimaux called it
ivu
, “the ice that leaps,” but Einar took it as another strange omen of the desolate world to which he had foolishly brought his family.

Was it good providence or bad that his cousin was a friend of one of the Three Lucky Swedes, the infamous trio who'd been sent to breed reindeer as an alternative food source for the Esquimaux but had instead found a hunk of gold the size of a man's head?

Good or bad?

Einar and his family had been among the very first to arrive that summer, eager for a quick strike and retreat before the hordes descended. But Einar had found nothing, then winter had closed in just as Maria got ill, stranding them. Einar could do nothing to support them. While some men still tried to prospect for gold through the early winter, even if only by stalking along the beach hoping to repeat the Swedes' success, Einar had to stay with his family.

His were the only children in Nome, his was the only white woman. There had already been a death from a fight over a local woman, and aside from that Einar knew he couldn't leave Anna to look after both her brother and her mother for more than an hour or so.

Later that week, another man was found behind the dog sheds with his throat slit, all for a pinch of tobacco, someone said.

So they clung to the inside of the shack, and as the price of coal went to a hundred dollars a ton, and eggs to ten dollars a dozen, Einar spent their last twenty dollars buying a slim but broad box from an old-timer, who went and drank the whole twenty dollars worth in whisky at the half-built building that was to become Dexter's saloon.

Anna stared at her father as he stomped back into the cabin with the box.

“What's that, Pappa?” she whispered, her eyes wide.

Maria woke and propped herself up. Her movement disturbed Sig, who woke too, to witness one of the few scenes from his early childhood that he would remember forever, and clearly.

He remembered the look on his mother's face as she saw what Einar had bought. Only many years later would he finally be able to put a word to that look. Despair.

“What is it?” Anna repeated. “Is it food? Is it for when the food runs out?”

“No,” Einar muttered. “It's something else. For when the faith runs out.”

BOOK: Revolver

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