Lom and Maroussia stepped out of Count Palffy’s house into snow-bright cold.
‘Eligiya Kamilova lives in a wooden house on the fish wharf,’ Elena had said. ‘You need to climb the Ship Bastion and take the covered steps down to the harbour.’
The Ship Bastion was a massive granite outcrop, the highest point in the raion, the highest in Mirgorod. Street sweepers were out–giants shovelling snow with easy strength–and some people were clearing the paths outside their houses and shops, but it was hard climbing. They had to pick their way across rutted, compacted stretches of ice and wade knee-deep through heaps and drifts of snow.
There was a small cobbled square at the top of the Bastion rock, with a parapet where you could lean and catch your breath. Below them, the canyons and ravines of the raion fell way in a tumble of steep roofs, stepped gables, leaning pinnacles and slumping chimneys; and beyond lay the expansive, grey, snow-dusted, smoking vista of Mirgorod. The city roared quietly under the wheeling of the gulls. In the distance the thousand-foot-high needle-sharp spire of the Armoury, the One Column On Spilled Blood, speared the belly of the sky. The Lodka was a massive squat black prow, and the steel ribbon of the Mir rolled westwards, crossed by a dozen bridges, towards the skyline smudge of the sea.
In the far corner of the Bastion Square was a wooden door set in a pointed arch of weathered grey stone.
‘That must be the way,’ said Maroussia. ‘Down there.’
The door in the arch opened onto a steep winding flight of stone steps enclosed by wooden walls and a wooden roof. The stairway was in shadow, lit only by narrow slits cut at intervals in the wood, and the treads were worn smooth and hollow in the centre by centuries of footfall. It smelled cool and damp, like the mouth of a well. The steps wound and switchbacked steeply down. Hundreds of steps. Several times they had to stop and press themselves back against the wall to make room for someone coming up.
They came out into a huddle of warehouses, wharves and jetties. Boats crowded against the harbour edge, idle under a covering of snow. The River Purfas was a pale green porridge of slush and fragments of ice. Rigging clattered in the brisk river breeze. Nets were draped, black and reeking, from the weather-bleached warehouse walls, and the smell from gibbeted racks of drying fish and smokehouses hung heavy on the air. Yellow-eyed seabirds called from canted masts and rooftops, swooped on scraps and stalked the walkways, poking at the chum-buckets. Chalk-boards at the wharfside fish market promised eel and crab, flounder, zander, garfish, herring, bream and cod. But fishing was done for the winter. Harder times were coming. The market trays were empty, the sawdust swept and the shutters up. Men hung about, smoking, talking quietly in the throaty, fricative languages of the raion.
Lom and Maroussia picked their way between stacked baskets, salt barrels and coils of rope. They found the tall narrow building where Kamilova lived at the far end of the wharf, squeezed between a chandlery and a smokehouse. A frontage of overlapping timbers of tar-black pine and dark lopsided windows with many panes of thick green glass. Maroussia knocked. Lom pulled his woollen cap lower over his forehead.
The woman who opened the door must have been sixty years old, but she was tall and straight and wiry-muscular, with a traveller’s sparse, defined, weathered face. Iron-grey hair, tied severely back. Bright pale intelligent eyes. She was wearing a knitted sweater, dark canvas trousers, boots.
‘Eligiya Kamilova?’ said Maroussia.
‘Yes? Who are you?’
‘My name is Maroussia Shaumian.’
‘Shaumian?’ Kamilova studied her with narrowed eyes. ‘I see. Shaumian.’
‘Can we come in? We want to talk to you. We want to ask you about the forest. I think you can help me—’
‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I can’t help you.’
She began to close the door. Lom stepped forward and leaned against it.
‘We need to talk to you,’ he said.
Kamilova looked at him steadily.
‘You,’ she said, ‘should get off my door.’
‘We just want to come in for a while,’ said Lom. ‘To talk. That’s all.’
‘I said get away from my door.’
Kamilova’s eyes widened. There was a strangeness there. Wild distant spaces. Lom felt the air stirring. Responsive. Forest smells. Resin and earth. And suddenly the air around him was no longer stuff to breathe, it was his enemy. Heavy in his lungs, hard and cold about him. A stone fist of air punched him in the back of the head, sickening, dizzying, and he stumbled forward. The weight of solid air on his shoulders and back pressed down on him. All the mile-high heaviness of the air. Forcing him to his knees. A sudden wind whipped the snow from the ground. It smacked and scraped at his face, a bitter freezing hail, blinding him. He could hear Maroussia somewhere far away, shouting, but the wind destroyed her words. Panicking, he struggled for breath. He could not fill his lungs. He was drowning in the hostile air.
But he did not drown. There was a sentience in the air. It was alive and knew what it was doing. And he knew what it was.
Lom reached out towards it. Opening himself. Taking the barriers down. Not breathing in but breathing out. Remembering.
He was in the centre of a small hardened whorl of fierceness, but beyond it were oceans of atmosphere. Eddies and tides and deeps, layer over layer, air from the forest, air from the river, air from the sea, freighted with life and scent and the stories of themselves. He climbed higher. The air grew thinner, colder, clearer, more beautiful, bright and electric the higher he climbed. He opened himself to it. He was air himself, air in the air. The squalls that battered him were part of him and he was in them. He let them pass through where he was. He rose and stood and waited patiently for the assault to calm and stop.
Kamilova was looking at him with surprise and frank curiosity. And something else. Lom could not tell what it was. It might have been recognition.
‘Who are you?’ she said.
Lom tried to answer but found he could not. Not yet. His heart was hammering. He needed all the capacity of his aching lungs to breathe, tearing mouthfuls of breath out of the sparse, thinned air.
‘Who is he?’ Kamilova said to Maroussia. Urgently. ‘Who is this man?’
‘This is my friend. His name is Vissarion.’
Kamilova frowned.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not Vissarion. That’s not a forest name. He’s strong, but I didn’t know him. He carries himself like a bear, but something’s not right.’
‘Can’t we just…’ Lom breathed painfully. His whole body felt bruised and abused. ‘Can’t we just come in?’