April 1900

Chapter 1

Andrei slips out of bed before dawn on the morning the Baydas are to leave for Canada. Without waking his parents, his sister, or his grandfather, he tiptoes out the door. Surely he’s awake, yet everything around him is so still, the only sound a solitary chirp of a hidden bird, the only sight the shadow of village houses.

Today he’s about to embark on a journey across the world. Last summer he steered a raft on the river behind their house, but that’s nothing compared even to just the thought of crossing the ocean! It is the first day of April, 1900, and Andrei’s family is leaving their home in the Ukrainian village of Zabokruky in Horodenka province.

It’s in these final moments just before sunrise that he spots the light. Something is going on at the old graveyard, on one of the earthern mounds where Cossack warriors were buried three hundred years ago. Many times he has run up and down these hills. This morning as he leans against the willow fence, peering out at them, he notices a movement, the shadow of a man approaching a cross at the top. Then all at once the light flashes. Andrei rubs his eyes, then watches as it steadies into a golden halo circling the cross. At its centre throbs a red sparkle.

At first Andrei’s only puzzled. But all of the sudden his left temple twitches. His eyesight blurs as if a fog surrounds him, and he loses any sense of where he is. Slowly the fog lifts; the halo around the cross reappears, rolls down the mound and then to the river. He’s taken with it, transposed at once to walk along the river to where his grandfather has netted fish. He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking, or if he walks at all, or is he being carried? The dark water below him transforms into a road of gold bricks. The brush along its edges hangs heavy with branches full of coins of silver and gold. On a rolling plain beyond the river’s far bank, a herd of riderless Cossack horses runs in spirals like the wind.

Andrei rubs his eyes again. The vision’s disappeared and he’s back at the yard. The halo has returned to the cross and then a black figure takes it. Andrei reaches as if to grab a handful of coins from a willow branch, but instead he grasps a stick from the willow fence. What really has he seen? Has he been anywhere? Should he wake his grandfather? Would anyone believe Andrei?

He squints at the sharp sparkle of the sun’s rim on the horizon. He goes to the well and, pulling on the rope, he draws a pail of water and drinks. He wonders about the light. Was it a signal lighting his way to Canada? The gold a promise of fortune? Was it meant for him alone? Andrei sneaks back into the house and his bed. Maybe he can sleep for a little while yet.

•••

After an hour he rises. Was it a dream, the shadowy time before dawn, when he had gone outside? When he had seen the strange light around the cross? The moments when the night was ending and the day not yet starting and Andrei couldn’t be sure if he was awake or not. The river of gold? Had there really been a light, a golden halo and a red gleam, and had he really seen the fleeting shadow of a man? Had he really been outside and then gone back to sleep? Had he really left the yard? He thinks that he was awake, and now he hears the neighing of horses, and this time he’s awake for sure.

The neighbour’s wagon has come. He runs outside. Dido is standing in front of the horses, animals with coats as black as a Tartar’s eyes. He’s slicing a turnip. Andrei watches as his grandfather holds out his hand. He pats the horses’ noses and rubs their ears.

“Have you ever owned a horse?” Andrei asks. Dido pulls at the withered skin of his neck, a turkey neck, the old man skin and bone.

“Before you were born, Andrei. Before the Polish pahn fleeced the very land from under our feet. And then I worked the pahn’s horses. Groomed them, trimmed their hooves, hammered on shoes. A Cossack is not a Cossack without a horse. In Canada we will have no pahn landlord to rob us. In Canada I will buy a horse.”

He feeds the last of the turnip, then walks down the road toward the church. “Don’t leave without me,” he says.

Three men from the village and Andrei’s father, his tato, carry the trunk out of the house. They edge through the doorway, the two men at the front, hands gripped to the bottom of the trunk, struggling under the weight, stepping backwards with their heads turned to see their way, Tato telling them not to stumble. Neighbours gather to watch. Old ladies in a sea of white shawls, hands held as if in prayer, Oi, oi, oi, murmuring, wiping tears. Boys and girls jostling to see up close, waving to the waiting wagon, “Goodbye, Andrei, goodbye!” By himself, a neighbour boy Petrus Shumka, leans against the side of the house. He beckons to Andrei’s sister Marusia.

Andrei’s mother, Paraska, bows to kiss the door frame, hands held fast to the wood, wailing lamentations as she always did for others at funerals, though now weeping for herself, spilling her grief as if their leaving is death. Andrei follows his father into the house. Stefan Bayda stands, his fingers gripping his cap, pressed to his leg. He faces the wall, now empty of its Holy pictures. On this whitewashed wall, the yellowed squares where the pictures hung stare blindly like the eyes of ghosts. Tato turns, and jams the cap back on his head.

“Come on, Andrei. Why do you stand there? Do you think you have all day to gape at nothing?”

“Everybody on the wagon,” Tato says. “Where is Dido?”

“At the church,” Andrei’s mother says as she arranges a place to sit in the centre of the wagon. “He must have gone to pray at Baba’s grave.”

“And Marusia. Where is Marusia?”

“Where do you think?”

“The Shumka boy? Does she think she can take him with us?”

“No, but she can say goodbye. It’s all right for her to say goodbye. Don’t you remember when you were young?”

“And foolish,” Tato says. “Andrei, get your sister.”

He runs to the back of the house and to the river, his dog Brovko trailing behind, whimpering. Brovko knows we are leaving, Andrei thinks. He stops, turns around and rubs the big dog’s neck, his ears, his eyebrows...brova...the hair down over his eyes. That’s his name, Brovko, Andrei’s dog that looks like eyebrows. He runs in circles around Andrei. He wants to play, Andrei thinks, and he throws a stick into the river. The dog plunges into the water.

Marusia stands on the riverbank facing Petrus Shumka. She holds a branch of cherry blossoms. Neither says a thing while Petrus stares at her, and she gazes to the ground at her feet, tears forming in her eyes. She bends to set the blossoms on the rippling stream.

“Tato wants you,” Andrei says.

Petrus kicks at the dirt. He’s wearing his best clothes. Soft leather shoes with straps wound halfway to his knees. Red breeches, white linen shirt, embroidered vest, and a floppy hat with a sprig of the cherry blossoms in its band. He has just the start of a fuzzy moustache.

“Goodbye,” he says to Marusia. “Write me a letter as soon as you can. Maybe some day I will come to Canada.”

Brovko races up the bank, shaking and spraying water, stick gripped in his mouth.

“Get away with that shaking,” Marusia says. Petrus steps back, laughing. He faces Andrei. “Don’t worry. I will look after your dog.”

Andrei, Marusia, Petrus, and then the dog straggle from behind the house toward the wagon, now surrounded by the villagers.

“Paraska,” old lady Totchuk yells to Andrei’s mother, “how can I write to you?”

“I will write when we are settled.” Andrei knows his mother is proud to say this. For five years, as often as she could, she’d follow him to the reading hall, and she would stay a while to learn something herself. The village will miss her, and not only for reading and writing letters. She sings at weddings, and she cries at funerals.

The five Holochuk girls and Petrus’s older sister Martha stand in a row, each waving an embroidered cloth to Marusia, cloths each of them hope will one day bind their husbands to them. Poor Martha. She had to raise her own brothers and sisters after her mother died. She’s missed out on getting a husband, unless some old widower finds her.

Andrei thinks the youngest Holochuk, Natasha, is waving at him, her eyes blue, her hair the colour of wheat straw in sunlight. This year, would she have given him a specially decorated Easter egg if he wasn’t leaving? He’s too young to think about girls, but Natasha’s pretty all the same. Tekla, the third oldest and the prettiest, runs over to Petrus. She winks at Marusia and holds on to Petrus’s arm.

“I’ll look after him,” she says.

A neighbour, Olya Munchka, comes forward. “I never told you before, Paraska. I didn’t know how. But now I won’t see you again.” She breaks into a fit of sobs, wipes her face with the folds of her apron. “Last fall,” she says, “I was the one who took cabbage from your garden. Please, can you forgive me?”

“You?” Paraska says. “I thought it was somebody’s cow. She waves her hand and laughs. “It’s all right, Olya. What can I do now with cabbage?”

Dido returns with the village priest. The people gather around. The priest leads them in prayer, then sprinkles Holy Water to each corner of the wagon. Tato nods and the driver snaps his whip above the horses’ heads. The wagon jerks, its wheels rumbling in the slow movement out of the village toward the distant hillside of ancient Cossack battles, the direction of the mounds.

The valley fills with song. The people of the village follow the wagon, the melody of the Holochuks shrill in the air, deep male voices rumbling like the sound of cranes...Croo, croo, croo, like every spring and fall when the birds are moving across the sky. Croo, croo, croo. Croo, croo, croo, as if the sound shakes the hillsides. Croo, croo, croo. Petrus Shumka singing, See my friend, the sky. See, the cranes on high. Wing to wing they fly together, fading as they fly. His sister Martha, her song forlorn, its beauty in its sadness...Croo, croo, croo. Though the wings are true. You may perish on the ocean, like some weary crew. The wagon creaks and horses snort, adding to the sound.

“Brovko!” Andrei yells. Petrus rests on one knee, his arm around the dog’s neck.

“Goodbye, Brovko.”

The dog howls, lunging, Petrus holding him back.

“You’ll get another dog,” Dido says. “Forget Brovko. Petrus will look after him. Come on, cheer up.” He pats Andrei on the back. “Have a good look back there behind the dog and all the people. You won’t see the village ever again.” Twelve-year-old Andrei has climbed up on the trunk. He wants a view to the front of the wagon so he can see where their adventure is taking them.

He sits with feet splayed, then pushes down with his arms, raising his body. Lifting one hand at a time, he swings his legs back and forth like an acrobat.

But his grandfather looks back, his hand shading his brow. “We see everything from here.” He fingers his willow flute and plays a few merry notes, like an wizard casting a spell of blessing on the lands they are leaving. Andrei’s grandfather...his dido, Danylo Skomar, in his heart a Cossack, bends from the waist, feet dangling, pointing to the scenery with his flute. “Remember these pictures, my boy. Some day you will be Dido, and you will tell your grandson about the very last things you saw leaving your homeland.”

“Is it far to where we are going?”

“Far away, to some cowboy land.” Dido Danylo swings his flute above his head, round and round as if it were a lariat. “Saskatchewan River.”

“What is a cowboy?”

“A great horseman, just like a Cossack riding on the steppe, racing the wind across the plain.”

Andrei feels as if he’s flying through the air, a sky filled with a fragrance of cherry blossoms. He feels that he could ride a horse into the distance like a cowboy over endless plains.

“Careful you don’t fall off. Sit here.” Danylo Skomar strokes his hanging moustache. “Pay attention.” The wagon courses along the road, the horses stepping high in a jolting rhythm almost as if hesitating. The village ever so slowly grows smaller...the willow fences, the whitewashed houses, the fruit trees, the onion dome of the church, the fields in the rolling hills and valleys, the river trailing down from the Carpathian mountains. Croo, croo, croo, the sounds of the villagers growing faint. Croo, croo, croo.

“We travel across the ocean,” Dido says.

It’s real. They are leaving. When Andrei’s father, Stefan Bayda, had heard that he, a poor Ukrainian peasant, could buy a farm in Canada for ten dollars, how could he resist? All he had owned here was one acre and a half. All winter Mama and Tato argued.

“Why should I eat cabbage soup all my life?” Tato said.

But Mama was afraid. “What if a storm comes on the ocean? We will sink!”

“No more silly talk,” Tato said. “We cross the ocean. In Canada we will live like landlords.”

Andrei knows about the ocean. He was seven when the school opened in their village. He’s seen the world on a map. He has seen the ocean and Canada, but he wants to hear his grandfather tell it.

Andrei and Dido sit side by side, backs against the trunk. It’s huge. Andrei’s tato constructed it, and all day yesterday his mother and sister Marusia packed it with their winter clothing, the sheepskins, woven blankets, and feather-filled bedcovers to line the bottom of the chest. Holy pictures lay between pillows. Bowls, dishes, cups, and wooden spoons inserted here and there. A frying pan. An iron ring stand for cooking over an open fire. Tools...two axes, a hatchet, two sickles, a scythe, a drawknife, two spades, three hammers, two hoes and a rake, two handsaws, the shorter stick and leathers of their flail, Dido’s fishnet...all covered with a blanket.

On top of this Andrei’s mother laid their dress clothes, held her beads a moment pressed to her cheeks, then rolled them into a cloth pouch and laid it in. On the bench against the wall, under the empty spaces left from the removal of the Holy pictures, other cloth packets lay in rows. Marusia handed them to her mother, little cloth bundles of seeds to be placed among the clothes...onions, garlic, horseradish, corn, marigolds, sweet william, dried herbs. She wrapped candles, a prayer book, a small jar of Holy Water. Tato gave her a parcel. It was a handful of black soil wrapped in cloth, taken from the wheat field. It was midnight when finally Mama covered everything with her embroidered linens and the lid was closed.

As they approach the burial mounds, Dido talks on and on.

“Canada is on the other side of the world. There we will wear gold watches, just like the landlords.”

“Are there Cossacks in Canada, like cowboys?”

“Only cowboys,” Dido says, “and Indians.”

“At school our teacher told us about Indians.”

“What does the teacher know about Indians? How would he know?”

“He has a picture book from America.”

“And what does he say?” Dido shakes his head. His Cossack braid snakes across his shoulder. His shaved head appears as if it’s glowing in the sunlight.

“He says they ride horses.”

“Not like Cossacks.” Dido fishes a trinket from his vest pocket, a clay pipe he keeps tied in a cloth pouch. It’s Dido’s Cossack pipe, handed down from many generations. The pipe is of glazed white clay. The design of a poppy flower is carved on each side of the bowl. Dido never uses this pipe; he smokes with a regular one made of wood. The clay pipe is more like a treasure to him, and he has promised it to Andrei. Dido takes it out of the pouch as he often does, rolls it around in his fingers for a moment or two, then puts it away.

“Yes, Andrei, a Cossack can ride at full gallop, swing himself down and snatch a silk kerchief from the ground with his teeth. We have the world’s greatest horsemen. We were the first to tame the horse. Three thousand years ago, our Scythian warriors rode far and wide across the grasslands of Ukraine. They introduced horses to the world. Horseman-ship is in our blood.” He cups his hands, yelling to his son-in-law, “Stefan! Tell the driver to stop.”

Dido crawls down off the wagon and walks up to the stonework staircase of a burial mound. He stops at each step and kneels, bowing his head to the ground over and over, repeating the sign of the cross, thumb and two fingers touching his head, chest, shoulder, and shoulder. He prays each time with his eyes glued to the cross at the top of the mound. On reaching the summit he kisses the cross, picks up a clump of earth and crumbles it on his bald head, crosses himself three more times, each with a bow, then descends from the mound.

Andrei knows the history of the mounds. At school the teacher told of the ancient battles against Turks and Poles. He told of the Hetman Bayda-Vyshnevetsky with 35,000 Cossacks fighting on this hillside three hundred years ago. Sacred graves. Mounds like the graves of their Scythian forebears. No one plows the land of the battlefield. Andrei has often asked if the Hetman was his ancestor. And Dido Danylo has often said, “Of course!”

“Are there still Cossacks?” Andrei asks his grandfather.

“A few.”

“Should I pray for them too?”

“Maybe you should.”

“Where do they live?”

Andrei has asked these questions before. Dido never can say enough about Cossacks. How many times has he told the story of the Hetman Bayda-Vyshnevetsky? How many times has Andrei heard about the famous Cossack island fortress, the Seech, far to the east on the Dnipro River, and how the Hetman Bayda had started this brotherhood of Cossacks.

“Do they still live at the Seech?”

“No more,” Dido says. “Maybe some day again.”

“Who lives on the island now?”

“Farmers,” Dido says. “The Empress Catherine brought them from far away to plow up the Ukrainian Steppes.”

“Can farmers be Cossacks?”

“You should ask instead, can Cossacks be farmers? Could they have even wanted to be farmers when they could ride their horses across the steppes?”

Dido plays notes on his flute, then he sings a part of one of the many verses from the song of the Hetman Bayda. He doesn’t sing the verses that he usually does, the ones with the Hetman riding a horse, or shooting arrows at an enemy from the Empire of the Turks. Instead he sings as the Ukrainian women do at weddings, calling for the Cossack to quit his roaming, his fighting, his drinking, and return to his family. Dido must be feeling sad that the Bayda family is leaving their homeland forever and will not be coming back:

Go home and quit your wandering life

You’ve children and a lovely wife...

Dido sings on and on, and he hums. Not long after the wagon pulls away from the burial mound, from over a ridge on the hillside, as if out of nowhere an old man appears. He’s dressed in dirty grey sackcloth, his hair and beard straggling to his waist. He drags a cross hoisted on his shoulder, an assortment of stars and crescent moons carved into the wood. His eyes like cold crystal fix trance-like on Dido Danylo. Andrei remembers the moving shadow of early morning, the figure on the hillside just before the brilliant light appeared.

“Skomar!” In a hoarse whisper the old man repeats the family name of Andrei’s Dido. “Skomar! Skomar!” as if in death’s last gasps. He points at Dido. “I am your Uncle Skomar, and my time ends.” He stands behind the wagon thirty feet from Andrei, the mounds far in the background. He shakes his finger, then gestures for Dido to follow him. The Holy man Skomar and Andrei’s grandfather climb up the hill and disappear over the ridge.

The wagon driver and Andrei’s father say nothing. Mama has often said that you must never interfere with fools or Holy men. Mystics have wandered the land for centuries, and God blesses those who respect these Holy fools.

They wait a long time. Finally Tato shouts to Andrei. “Go get him! Does he think we have all day?”

Andrei’s familiar with the terrain, and even when he gets to the river, there should be nothing to upset his bearings. He’s positive there isn’t a spot anywhere along the river that he hasn’t previously explored...unless away further upstream into the mountains where the Hutsul people live. But Dido and the Holy man can’t have gone that far. All at once he feels again the strange sensations of the early morning. As he steps down a path through the shrubs to the river’s bank, the twitch in his temple returns, like a seizure. In Andrei’s vision the willow branches are laden again with coins and the river water’s turned to a broad path of gold. A fog rises swirling in circles, and like Aladdin, Andrei’s standing at the mouth of a cave. An energy like that of the morning draws him inside.

Through a fog of incense and rainbow colours, two Scythian warriors stand guard, each with sword, shield, and gold helmet, each with a horse at his side; a white horse and a red horse. For a moment Andrei sees the warriors as Dido and the Holy man, but each much younger. Then he recognizes himself on each face, himself a Scythian soldier, the earliest of Ukrainians. A halo glimmers on a flat stone altar, a red gleam at its centre.

The rainbow fog thickens and Andrei’s lifted, swirling round and round in its colours, until everything turns black. He remembers nothing more, only the vision in the cave, nothing more until he’s back at the wagon with his grandfather. Dido carries a goatskin bag with something bulky inside.

“What do you have?” Tato asks.

For a moment it appears as if Dido’s eyes are those of a madman. He stares back to the hillside.

“He is my uncle,” Dido says. “He is of our Skomar family that goes back to the ancients.”

“It’s true?” Tato asks. “The Holy one is your uncle?”

“Skomar of the Scythians,” Dido says, as if locked in a trance.

“What’s in the bag?” Tato asks again.

“A relic of the Scythians,” Dido says. Slowly the spell washes from his eyes. He rubs his hand twice across his chin as if brushing away a fly. “Maybe just from Gypsies.”

“Scythians? Gypsies? What have you got to do with Gypsies? Is this some kind of treasure? Magic?”

Scythia, Andrei thinks. The sight in the cave stays with him. Overwhelms him. Dido has told him that the making of burial mounds began with the Scythians. No one knows where the Scythians came from or where they went. Only that they were warriors and that they lived before Cossacks. What does Dido have in the bag? Is it the golden halo?

“What is it?” Tato repeats.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” says Dido. “Just a bag. What can be more homely than goatskin?” And then he laughs.

“Something is funny?”

Dido pauses for a long moment, all the while tugging at his moustache. “I’ll tell you,” he says, biting his lips. “Uncle told me that two hundred years ago a Skomar ran off with a woman. In Bukovyna...some Romanian girl. A Gypsy for all that, the fool said.” He holds up the bag. “Her people had carried this with them for centuries.”

“Scythians,” Andrei blurts, as if he’s taken up Dido’s trance.

Dido turns his attention to Andrei, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

“There is Skomar blood in you also,” Dido says. “You must hear. My Uncle Skomar said that there is a talisman in this bag that came from somewhere deep inside a Scythian burial mound. Robbed from the grave. He said it is a talisman that will reveal messages for lives yet unborn who will struggle far off in a new land.”

“Take the bag away,” Mama says. “Leave devil worship alone.” She makes the sign of the cross three times across her breast. “Better yet to bury it in a pile of pig manure.” She draws her shawl tightly over her shoulders.

“So,” Tato says as he rubs his moustache with his fingers. Then he turns his attention to Dido. “Let’s have a look in the bag.”

Both Dido’s hands clutch it to his lap. His eyes dart in all directions, and then he reaches for his own packing crate, opens it, and stuffs the bag under a bundle of clothing.

“I’m not to show a soul.”

Dido waves his hand for the driver to get going. “Aren’t we a fine bunch,” he says. “Here we sit gabbing as if the train is supposed to wait for us.”

Andrei tries to make sense out of what’s happening. The halo was guarded by the ghosts of Scythian warriors. It has a power, and it is possible that the power’s been assigned to Andrei himself, and it might give him the strength of a Scythian warrior. Andrei and Dido will carry the secret of this magic with them to their new place in Canada.

•••

They travel twelve miles to a siding on the railway to Lviv. From that city Dido says they will travel on a train across Europe all the way to Hamburg in Germany. There they will get on a ship.

They wait half an hour at the siding for the train to come. Three families from another village are waiting with them. Finally Andrei hears the train’s whistle, hears the chug of its engine, and sees the belching smoke, a grey passenger car, and a red-painted wooden car behind it. The chugs come farther and farther apart as the engine slows, and steam shoots down from somewhere under its black steel belly, down between the rails of the cinder track. Andrei smells coal fire.

Men lift the trunk off the wagon and carry it to the open door of the freight car. Tato and Dido help cart belongings off the other wagons. The men talk about how there has been little rain in Horodenka province this spring and the crops will likely be poor. Tato gives their tickets to a man standing at the passenger car doorway, and Andrei follows Dido, Mama, and Marusia up the steel steps into the train.