The Sea Runners Read Free Page B

paddling."
    "No," Melander agreed. "Our other man is Braaf."
    "Braaf ? That puppy?"
    Melander tendered his new coconspirator a serious smile in replica of Karlsson's own aboard the schooner in Stockholm harbor.
    "We need a thief," Melander explained.

    That is the way they became two. Disquieted shipman, musing woodsman, now plotters both. Against them, and not yet knowing it, although habitually guardful as governing apparatuses have to be, stood New Archangel and its system of life. The system of
all empires, when the matter comes to be pondered. For empires exist on the principle of constellations in the night sky—pattern imposed across unimaginable expanse—and the New Archangels of the planet at the time, whether named Singapore or Santa Fe or Dakar or Astoria or Luanda or Sydney, were their specific scintillations of outline. Far pinspots representing vastly more than they themselves were.
    That voyage which deposited Melander and Karlsson into their indentured situation illustrates that here in the middle of the nineteenth century, this work of putting out the lines of star web across the planet had to be done with the slow white wakes of sailing ships. Hut done it was. Sea-lanes were extended and along them the imperial energies resolutely pulsed back and forth, capital to colony and colony to capital. Africa, Asia: the lines of route from Europe were converging and tensing one another into place for decades to come. North America: the gray-gowned wee queen of England reigned over Ojibwas and Athapaskans and Bella Coolas, the United States was taking unto itself the western vastness between the Mississippi and the Pacific, the tsar's merchants of Irkutsk and St. Petersburg were being provided fortunes by bales of Alaskan furs.
    Such maritime tracework seemed, in short, to be succeeding astoundingly. Yet ... yet all this atlas of order rested on the fact that it requires acceptance, a faith of seeing and saying, "Ah yes, here is our Great Dipper, hung onto its nail in heaven," to make constellations real. So that what the makers of any imperial
configuration always needed be most wary of was minds—such as Melander's, such as Karlsson's, such as the one Melander was calculating upon next to ally with their two—which happened not to be of stellar allegiance.

    Braaf would have given fingers from cither hand to be gone from New Archangel. He had after all the thief's outlook that in this many-cornered world of opportunity, an occasion would surely arrive when he could pilfer them back.
    Put it simply, stealing was in Braaf like blood and breath. He was a Stockholm street boy, son of a waterfront prostitute and the captain of a Baltic fishing ketch, and on his own in life by the age of seven. Alaska he had veered to because after a steady growth of talent from beggary to picking pockets to thievery the other destination imminently beckoning to him was fängelse: prison.
    So Braaf turned up as another in the 1851 contingent to New Archangel, and at once skinning knives and snuffboxes and twists of Circassian tobacco and other unattached items began to vanish from the settlement as if having sprung wings in the night. The Russians vented fury on the harborfront natives for the outbreak of vanishment, but the coterie of Swedes and Finns rapidly made a different guess, the new young Stockholmer among them having set up shop as a kind of human commissary in the barracks. Because Braaf stayed reasonable in his prices—interested less in renumeration than in chipping the monotony of Alaskan life, which he found to be a rain-walled prison in its own right—and was diplomatic enough not to forage from Ins own barrackmates, nothing was said against him.
    How hard it would have been anyway to lodge a believable case against Braaf. At twenty, he displayed the round ruddy face of a farmboy—an apple of a face—and in talking with you lofted his gaze with innocent interest just above your eyes, as if considerately measuring