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banquets."
    In complication and unlikelihood, New Archangel's tenantry was fully equal to its architecture and geography and weather. The settlement was ruled by the Russian navy, the governor an officer agreed upon by the Russian-American Company; was administered by a covey of company clerks and other functionaries; seasonally abounded with Aleut fur hunters; relied for most of its muscle work upon Creoles—those born of Russian fathers and Kolosh mothers; of New Archangel's sum of about a thousand persons, this added up to far the most sizable group—or upon Russian vagabonds given the push out of Okhotsk; and for its craftwork, such as carpentry and smithing, it imported the seven-year men from Scandinavia. Colony within
a colony, the hundred and fifty or so Scandinavians mostly were Finns; one sift more, and the few dozen Swedes such as Melander and Braaf and Karlsson were at last accounted.
    Yet not even this social pyramid, sharp-tipped and broad-bottomed as the triangle peaks above the little port, indicated the most numerous populace on Sitka Sound, The Koloshes, the Sitka Tlingits. By their own legend People of the Frog, a restless and vivid clan who had migrated to Sitka Sound with their great-eyed carved emblem in tow behind their canoe fleet. Now their low-roofed longhouses straggled for nearly a mile along the beach west of New Archangel's huddle of buildings; and the stockade wall of defense, strategic batteries of cannon, four blockhouses built of fat logs, and a couple of dozen full-time sentries constantly expressed the colony's wariness of the natives. With cause. This very year of 1852 the Sitka Tlingits had sent word to a Stikine clan that at last a perpetual quarrel might be called quit. When the Stikine peace delegation arrived, thirty-five of them were slain quick as a butchering, the few others managed to beg sanctuary within New Archangel, Long memories on these Sitka Tlingits, then. Of amplitude to recall that when Baranov implanted his first settlement here at their bay, they obliterated it and put the Russian heads up on stakes.
    Precisely this prudence toward the Koloshes, the way New Archangel each and every day needed to set its most vigilant face toward those who might scheme
to get in, it would take someone of Melander's angle of mind to count on as advantage for getting out.

    Steam whiffed around Karlsson as lie stepped into the workmen's bathhouse. Every seventh day the vat of water was heated to boil, bucketsful then sluiced onto the hot stones ringing the vat. By this far in the night, man after man of the New Archangel work force having sought to scour weariness from his muscles, the steam densened to one great cube of saturation.
    Karlsson stood within the heavy warmth for a moment, slender and very white in his nakedness, before bringing the small woven reed breathing mask to his mouth and holding it there within his cupped right hand.
    "At least this cloud is a hot one. We could use a few such outside, ave?"
    Melander's voice, deeper for being muffled, resounded from across the room, and in three steps Karlsson could sec the hazed man, his body alone in long boned angles on the bathing bench. Melander's reed respirator mask all but disappeared in the big hand palmed around it, so that be seemed to be covering a perpetual chuckle.
    "Are you tasting it yet?" Melander went on. "Our venture, I mean? I find myself thinking of salt air. Ocean air. Better than sniffing fish guts, I can tell you."
    "Where's our pickpurse?"
    "He will come. The hours of Braaf's day are not like any other man's."
    "How far do you trust him ?"
    "Ordinarily, only a whisker's width." Melander had known Braaf's clan all too well on shipboard, men with the instinct always to vanish just before a topsail needed clewing up. "He'd steal the milk out of your tea, aye? But Braaf wants to shake New Archangel from his boots as badly as we do. He'll do much to manage that. Much that neither of us can do, just as he can't