Springtime was coming to the Arctic. When Kate stirred out of her quarters at last, she felt a mild air moving throught the icy cavern. She climbed up to the last tracks of Hans' clockwork train, and was astonished to see grass starting to peek through the snow.
"Kate Walker?"
Kate jumped and turned around. The Youkol Chief stood there, looking up at her.
"You are thinking about going back," he remarked.
"I am," she admitted. "The adventure's over."
"One adventure," the Chief pointed out.
Kate looked longingly at the clockwork train, sitting idle on the elevated platform down below her in the ice cave.
"Train not work anymore," said the Chief.
"No, I suppose not. Even if it did, I'd probably drive it off a cliff! I hope it isn't in your way?"
"No," he said. "Hans built always with kindness."
Kate's vision blurred again, "Yes. Yes he did." She regained her composure and went on, "Chief," she said softly, "Thank you so much for your hospitality. I've been such an imposition for you. Is there anything I can do to make myself useful?"
"Kate Walker, you have released the Mammoth Ark, you have shown the Youkols mammoths still live! You have done much for Youkols!"
"I...you mean you didn't..." And then Kate remembered something she'd read, "Yes, it used to come and go regularly didn't it?"
"Once, long ago," the Chief said somlemnly.
Memories began stringing themselves together in her mind, "When we arrived on Syberia, I found a...a body. Someone who'd been looking out to sea, and they'd died that way."
"One of Youkol ancestors," the Chief said, looking at Kate in amazement. "Those who went on the Ark thousands of years ago!"
"I guess so. And I found other things: writing on stones, and machinery just like some of the things you have here. Like Hans' machines but made of wood and bone, and ancient. I almost think Hans was meant to be born a Youkol!"
The happiness that suffused the Chief's face almost made him glow. "Thank you for telling me these things, Kate Walker."
"Are you going to put a crew aboard the Ark and send them to Syberia," Kate asked, "start it up again?"
The Chief's expression was noticeably eager, but his words were more restrained, "Not sure, Kate Walker. Such a long time since our people walked with mammoths. Spirit Woman is concerned."
"Is she?" Kate asked, surprised.
"Dangerous journey, to find out will of first Youkols, from mammoth age. Must travel far, far down Tunnel of Dreams."
Kate shivered. The last time she'd made that journey, it had been the strangest experience of her life, and had left her feeling sick, dizzy, and it had cost her Oscar.
"I wish I could help with..."
Kate's swirling memory suddenly froze around a new stimulus: a sound, a birdsong. She's heard it once before, and it seemed important. Not the hoot of the harfang, something else. Merula...something.
"Merula alba," she breathed, "the white raven!" Her eyes snapped up the horizon. In amongst the sparse, scrawny trees, shapes stood out: figures in furs, and some others, in black robes!
"Chief, we've got to get back..." Kate began, and then a crack rang out, and a puff of snow spat up from the ground a few yards in front of them. Kate didn't know much about guns, but she'd lived in New York long enough to know what was happening. Without thinking, she grabbed the much shorter man by the sleeve and half-dragged him back down into the Youkol cave-village.
The chief regained his balance and shouted something, and drums began thundering around the cavern.
"Men with guns, took-took met-al!"
Kate's heart pounded as well. She asked, "I don't suppose you have any guns, do you?"
"Guns the weapon of Soviet, of Czar," the Chief said, apparently not overly flustered by Kate's manhandling him. "None in Youkol Village."
"Sorry," Kate said sincerely. She pointed at the great sloped doorway the clockwork train had entered the cavern through. "Can that be closed?"
"Not fast enough," the Chief said. "Hans repair it for us, said go slow, or break it."
Kate looked around wildly, seeing people, some taking up spears, hammers or other weapons that looked frankly pathetic in the face of rifles, and others were looking hurriedly around for loved ones. Kate saw that, and her heart seemed to blaze. She sprinted for the train.
Climbing up onto the immense wood and bone platform it was parked on, she sprang to the controls, and tried to remember the sequence she'd used to free the Mammoth Ark from the ice.
She glanced over her shoulder, through the back of the train's cab, and saw shapes silhoutted in the cave entrance. And she recognized one of them. The dark robe, swirling around below a tall hat. It couldn't be!
Hurriedly, she worked the controls, trying to remember the exact timing she wanted. First, the coal intake, right?
A long, articulated pipe snaked out over her head from the front of the train, its bird-shaped head opening its mouth to suck up coal from the car behind. But she kept working the control back and forth, making the bird head halt, rear up and then lunge toward the coal again. She cursed the fact that the boiler was cold, maybe she could have found a way to shoot steam at the attackers. But then again, the bird-head was coughing a good deal of coal smut into a cloud above the train. Now, she seized the speed control and threw the train into reverse.
The train lurched backward, the bird head still flailing as it advanced on the attackers. Kate curled up on the footplate as the rapid clangs of bullet ricochets peppered the train. Glass shattered as bullets hit the gauges on the controls. Then the firing subsided, and she heard voices shouting in both Youkol and Russian. Kate took a chance to glance out of the side door, and saw she was coming up the tracks again, and icy rubble was level with the train wheels again. She seized her chance and jumped. Chunks of ice slammed into various parts of her, and she tumbled off onto the smooth pathway up the side of the cave, and she looked up toward the daylight, and nearly cheered.
The platform behind the train, where the massive winch had been set up to pull the train inside, was crowded with Youkols. In the distraction they must have made it up there, and now they were launching slingshot pellets and lobbing spears or darts, while the intruding figures scattered before the lumbering train, waving their arms in the clouds of coal dust.
Kate jumped as she felt something nudge her, and turned to find Youki pawing at her. She gave his ears a reassuring ruffle and got shakily to her feet and headed to the platform.
All the Youkols were looking out with expressions of satisfaction or of relief. Kate looked out over the snowscape outside. Figures were scattering to the horizon, some of them hunched or limping.
"The Patriarch," Kate whispered.