Look to the south of Mirgorod and see hundreds of miles of frontierless grass. Sandy soil. Marshes and small lakes, slow yellow rivers, thorn thickets and sparse scatterings of birch. Collectivised farms of drab herds, two-strand fences, cabbages and potato fields. Hapless towns, dirt roads and one-platform railway halts. A long indeterminate coastline of gravel and mud. A country without features.
Across this country war is coming.
Onward the enemy’s armies churn, at the pace of markers being moved across a map in an operations room, at the speed of terse conversations on field telephones, converging on Mirgorod, capital of the Vlast. The armies of the enemy find the opposition melting away.
It is a matter of machine logistics now. Statistics and arithmetics of steel. A calculation of armoured divisions. The sound is the sound of diesel engines droning and the clatter of iron tracks, the rattle of ammunition belts, the thunder-crash of heavy guns. The smell is the smell of hot oil and hot metal, the burning of rubber, the hot piss the gunners use to cool their overworked weapons. The light is the light of arcing sprays of burning gasoline, the flicker of rocket batteries firing, the daytime darkness of shadows under smoke-filled air. Not in one place, but in a hundred places: five separate fronts, all rolling forward, thirty or forty miles a day, converging on Mirgorod.
In rain-sodden fields and bypassed towns, people stand mute and look on as the logarithms of steel, too intent on the future to notice them, surge by. Seventy-ton tanks chew up the ground. The pale faces of motorised infantry stare back at the watchers without expression from the back of armoured half-tracks. Under the watchers’ feet the earth trembles. The deep geologies of history are upheaving. The maps by which they have always lived are being torn up and trodden into the mud. The old certainties are dissolving like bones in an acid bath.
The ones who look on are not even frightened yet.
And over their heads the featureless sky is marked out with the high patchwork geometries of aircraft formations sliding north towards Mirgorod.