The Apothecary Page 0,89
and a man with a fur hood around his face had pulled us into it. He had a coat made of skins and a double-bladed paddle, and when he had stashed us both in the bow, he started to paddle hard towards the shore. My wet eyelashes froze in the wind, and I couldn’t see clearly, so I closed my eyes, just for a second, to melt the ice.
Then I sank into a darkness far deeper than the cold ocean, and everything was gone.
CHAPTER 36
Escape
The voyage to Norway is, to this day, like a terrible dream, only partly remembered. I was in and out of consciousness, sometimes shaken awake by someone who wanted to feed me or to know that I was still alive. I was dimly aware of being in a smoky hut, wrapped in blankets and warmed by an enormous white dog lying on top of me. There was a round-faced woman who gave me soup. I saw Benjamin’s face, unconscious and pale, cocooned under a second dog. Then I was in the bow of another boat that rode low on the water, hearing the sound of paddling behind me, and feeling rocked by the swells.
I woke when the sun rose, and saw that our rescuer was asleep sitting up, with his paddle resting across the gunwales. He had a round face like the woman who had fed me, although he was taller than she was, and he had dark skin with mottled marks across his cheekbones from frostbite or sunburn. His fur hood was tied tightly under his chin, and his mouth was set in determination, even as he slept. The boat was like a canoe, and one of the white dogs was in the stern behind the man. It lifted its head and whimpered when it saw I was awake, then settled its chin back on its folded paws.
Benjamin slept beside me in the bow, wrapped in blankets. The sea was vast and blue-grey in all directions, and I felt very small and insignificant. No one would notice if a wave swallowed up our little boat, and no one would know if Benjamin slipped away into his fever. He looked terrifyingly grey. I felt his forehead, which was cold, and he didn’t respond to the touch. His eyes stayed closed.
Our rescuer woke up and said something in his language.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Do you think he’ll live?”
The man didn’t understand what I’d said.
I pointed. “Benjamin,” I said. For some reason it seemed important, if Benjamin was going to die with only two witnesses, that both of them knew his name.
“Benjamin,” the man repeated. Then he put a hand on his chest. “Hirra,” he said.
“Hirra,” I said. I touched my coat the same way. “Janie.”
“Janie,” Hirra said. The js in both of our names seemed to give him trouble. He reached forward to feel Benjamin’s forehead, then made a longish statement. I decided he was saying something hopeful, even though his tone wasn’t reassuring.
I pushed Benjamin’s fever-damp hair inside his fur hood, curled up close to him, and slipped back into a hallucinatory sleep.
The next time Hirra shook me awake, I saw a boat towering above us, and voices were shouting from her rail. I struggled to sit up, thinking that the Soviet destroyer had found us, but then I realised that the boat was red, not grey. It was the still-disguised Anniken, and the apothecary and Count Vili were calling to us over her rail. I had a hazy memory of trying to describe the red icebreaker to the Samoyed woman who gave me soup, and trying to draw a map of Kirkenes on the floor, but I hadn’t really thought we would get there. Some kind of hammocklike rig was lowered to the kayak, and I was put into it and lifted up into the boat, still wrapped tightly in blankets. I tried to tell the others that Hirra had saved our lives, and that Benjamin needed medicine, but people kept hushing me.
The last thing I remember was being carried below to my old cabin and put in my sleeping bag, and the apothecary measuring something out of a little bottle in the lamplight. The other bunk was bare.
“Where’s Jin Lo?” I asked.
But the apothecary only gave me something bitter to drink, and then I was asleep.
When I woke, we were on a tiny aeroplane, and the apothecary was sitting beside me. He was grim-faced and remote, and he was writing