Prologue
May 23, 1764
Spitzbergen Archipelago
The bow of the ship’s tender grated across broken shale and frozen sand, making landfall on the rocky island of Spitzbergen. Those aboard had come to seek the counsel of the damned, for even dead men had tales still to tell.
“We shouldn’t be here,”PoruchikOrlov warned, clutching a Russian Orthodox crucifix to his chest.
Commandant Vasily Chichagov couldn’t argue with his lieutenant, but that didn’t change matters. “We have our orders,” he reminded him with a bitterness as icy as the morning breeze.
Behind them, three large frigates—theChichagov, thePanov, and theBabayev—rocked amidst shattered ice floes that covered the seas. Though it was spring, the Arctic remained trapped in winter. Most of these waters would not melt until midsummer—if even then.
Vasily clenched his fists as much against the numbing cold as in frustration. He pulled deeper into his fur-lined coat, his lower face wrapped in a wool scarf. He waited for the oars to be stored and the tender to be secured before heading ashore.
While waiting, he glanced back to the trio of ships. The lead one bore his name, which was both an honor and at times an embarrassment. Vasily had joined the Imperial Navy when he was sixteen, quickly gaining fame and rank, and now served as deputy commandant of Arkhangelsk Port on the coast of the White Sea. The three frigates had left the port a fortnight ago. Their assignment was to survey and inspect the whaling camps that were established across this frozen archipelago each spring.
As soon as the seas began to melt, the competition here grew fierce for the best spots—not just by Russians, but also by Norwegian and Swedish whalers. During this volatile period, Vasily’s naval forces wouldmaintain order and protect the Russian stations. Within a month’s time, after each camp had dug in and established itself, his ships could head home. Skirmishes would continue throughout the summer, but nothing that would require the intervention of Russian imperial forces. After this crucial period of settlement, the whalers would begrudgingly respect one another’s stakes and claims. So it had always been, going back two centuries, to the time when Willem Barentsz, a Dutch mariner, discovered these islands while searching for the elusive Northeast Passage to China.
Vasily sighed and stared across the ice-choked seas to the east. Last summer, he himself had tried to find that route, but to no avail.
Gruff voices drew him around to the island. Across the beachhead, men gathered around a bonfire set before a scatter of stone shacks. Arms pointed toward them, surely wondering at the tender’s arrival.
According to reports, this station had been set up a month ago. Already, a carcass of a bowhead whale floated in the shallows. Even with its flukes sawed off, its body stretched fifty feet. The tons of blubber flensed from its body lay stacked in dark hillocks. Elsewhere, crews manned copper pots, boiling oil from the fat. Closer at hand, racks dotted the shoreline, hung with drying U-shaped drapes of baleen. Off the beach, the remains of the stripped whale had become a floating feast for hundreds of seabirds, which wildly assailed the carcass with raucous cries.
The presence of the whale continued to serve another purpose. It was the anchor to which this camp was set. With this success, no other crew would dare accost or contest this beachhead. Among this superstitious breed of hard men, it boded ill luck to trespass upon another camp after they’d had a successful hunt.
Even Lieutenant Orlov knew this. “Why have we landed here, Commandant? These whalers seem adequately settled, are they not?”
“Da, but it is not these men we seek.”
With the tender secure, Vasily waved Orlov ashore, ignoring the man’s curious glance back. Vasily had not shared the true reason they’d come ashore.
As Vasily climbed free of the boat, he absently patted his jacketpocket. It held a letter from Empress Catherine II, written by her own hand. It contained a secret directive that had only been handed to him after his trio of ships had set sail across the White Sea.
The man who had delivered that missive sat at the tender’s stern.
As if sensing Vasily’s thoughts, Mikhail Lomonosov stood and crossed the boat. He was a sepulchral figure dressed all in black, from heavy frock to a wide brimmed hat. He had kept to his cabin during the journey here, ensconced with books and maps. Only a handful of people knew he had traveled from Saint Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, bearing the empress’s decree.
Though only in his fifties, Lomonosov had already earned the civilian status of state councilor—equivalent to that of brigadier general in the army or captain-commander in the navy—outranking even Vasily. The man had achieved this lofty position by proving himself a genius in a wide spectrum of pursuits. He had a long list of accomplishments across esoteric fields: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, minerology, even history and poetry.
Lomonosov joined him on the beach. “I’ve forgotten how frigid it is this far north.”
This was not stated as a complaint but spoken with a wistfulness. It reminded Vasily of a detail in the man’s biography. Lomonosov hailed from these icy lands. He had been born in the village of Mishaninskaya in the Arkhangelsk Oblast. As a boy, he had traveled with his father, a prosperous fisherman, across these very seas on trade missions. So, this journey here was as much a homecoming for the man as it was in service to the empress.
“Now that we’ve made landfall,” Vasily groused through his scarf to Lomonosov as the councilor joined him, “perhaps you could share what was left unwritten in the empress’s letter.”
“Once we’re alone,” Lomonosov stated with a taciturn expression. He pointed to a tall figure approaching them. “That must be Captain Razin, head of the whaling crew.”
Vasily agreed. The heavily bearded Cossack appeared oblivious to the cold, wearing only pants and an open-collar shirt. What little skin showed was salt-scarred and burnished to the color of dark copper.There was nothing welcoming in his manner, a sentiment reinforced by a sheathed saber at his side and a holstered pistol over his shoulder.
He spit into the sand before speaking, a heavy gobbet that splattered near Vasily’s boot. Orlov took a threatening step forward, but Vasily motioned him back.
“Finally,” Razin said, “I sent word of the bodies a month ago. Before much longer, they’ll be thawing and stinking. My men won’t go near that cursed stretch of beach until they’re all hauled off, and I need that space if we hope for a successful hunting season.”
“We will secure the dead in short order,” Vasily assured the captain. “But first we wish you to show us what you found among them.”
Razin sneered, glanced around the five-man party, then mumbled under his breath as he turned away. “Should’ve burned them all when I had the chance.”
