There is the sound of popping wood on the fire and the persistent crash of the sea upon the rocky shore. Embers drift upwards. If not for the mist, these little embers would reach to meet the constellations that arc above, those giant embers unto themselves that hang in the heavens. But the heavens are obscured, veiled. They are lost in the bitter winter winds that blow across the obsidian waters of the Pacific Northwest. All is lost to these winds.
Tomislav stares as the flames wash over the wood from the wreckage like waves of amber light. A week has passed already on this tiny strip of land, which, save for a quarter mile of sand, rocky outcroppings, and a few windblown pines, isn’t much more than a suggestion of an island. He shudders in the cold and in the memory of the storm that consumed his vessel. Of all the 16 Russian sailors who fought the tempest aboard their ship headed South from the Alaska colony, he alone survived. This thought will not leave him, though he tries to cast it into the fire each night in a hope that this could be temporarily forgotten - that somehow this could be untrue, if even for a moment.
The wood hisses ever so slightly as the mist bears down for a moment in a faint rain. Tomislav crouches down and tries to offer air to the fire, like a mother cooing its child to keep from bursting into upset. This fire is precious. It will be the last, as there is nothing left of the bits and pieces of ship that washed ashore with him expect that which is currently being consumed in the flames. If not for these scraps, he’d have frozen a week ago. With no axe, those solitary towering pines are of little use, nor is the driftwood dotting the beach that refuses to burn. Of course, there is the icon of the Christ that had miraculously survived the storm – a large wooden panel gilt in gold leaf, with shades of maroon, indigo, and olive green painted in some impossibly distant iconographer’s studio in St. Peterburg. But this is untouchable. He would let himself freeze before he brought harm to the icon, he resolved. What was the use anyways of one more piece of wood, even if it wasn’t holy. This is it. Better to keep the faith and die in dignity and prayerfulness.
The fire grows dimmer, tiring itself out in the drizzle of rain above and Tomislav begins to weep the painful and hoarse wailings of hopeless men. Suddenly, an indescribable voice, somehow at once both human and cosmic, fills the stretch of sand upon which Tomislav sits in his anger and loss. It is the voice of the icon.
Burn it.
“What?”
Burn it, my son.
“My Lord, I can’t… I could never do such a…”
Is a map the same thing as the ocean that it describes?
“What?”
I ask you, is a map of the sea the same as the sea itself?
“Well, no, of course not”
Then how can a piece of wood be your God? Your heart is pure. Now take up your faith in Heaven, and be not attached to forms like wood and paint.
Tomislav hesitates, looking at the icon across the fire which he has placed safely against a cluster of rocks to prop it upwards in reverence.
“I can’t. I cant.” he whispers in low, unconscious speech. Then thunders the voice again, as the waves intensify in their crashing.
NOW, my son.
Suddenly, Tomislav finds himself embedding the icon upright in the flames, without thought. Then, the fire explodes into a giant, roaring torrent of light. He falls backwards with force into the nearly frozen sand. Lifting himself up from the ground, he watches as the fire grows upward into the darkness as a towering column of a dozen feet or more.
“Lord forgive me for this.” he whispers again.
Aboard a distant Hudson’s Bay Company ship far offshore, the night watch squints to the east. He spies a beam of light. And so, in the possibility that this is in fact the signal of a castaway lost to these dark Northern Pacific waters, he calls below to the man at the helm, and the British sailors steer their vessel towards the spec of saffron light that dots the inky horizon.