The woodland was a dim, perspectiveless, muted labyrinth of widely spaced birch and pine. Resinous. Twilit. Snow-carpeted. Directionless. Florian seemed to know where he was going: he set off quickly, moving in as straight a line as was possible, away from the sea.
Lom followed.
‘We must get clear of the landing place,’ said Florian. The moss and the snow and the trees drained all echo, making his voice sound drab and flat. ‘We cannot light a fire until it is dark.’ He fished a twist of paper out of his pocket. It was filled with solid dark pieces of sugar. ‘Here,’ he said, holding one out. ‘Eat this. We go west until we strike the railway. Then we follow it north wherever it goes. OK?’
‘How far?’ said Lom.
‘To the railway? Ten or twenty miles. Not more. After that, who knows? We follow the track to its end, wherever that is. The south island is a hundred and twenty miles long and fifty wide at the waist, but I doubt we will have to go so far.’
‘What we’re looking for is on the south island? Why not the north?’
‘I think not the north. This island sits across a current of warmer water that flows from the west; the north island does not. It is under permanent ice, glaciers come down from the mountains.’
Florian, in his sombre suit, dark overcoat and astrakhan hat, the knapsack on his back, moved with fast and sure-footed noiseless grace. Lom jogged and stumbled behind him. The Blok 15 was a solid weight in his pocket. He carried nothing else. Shallow streams crossed their path, ice-fringed water running fast over mud and gravel, turning aside and deepening into moss- and root-edged pools. They drank and washed the stinking smears of the shoreline from their clothes. Lom plunged his face into the freezing water and sluiced his matted hair, then sat on a fallen trunk to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. When he looked up he saw the wolves. They were moving under the tree-shadow, silent and indistinct as moths. One turned its face towards him. Wolf eyes. Unhurried, considering.
‘Wolf,’ he called to Florian in a low voice.
He would fight, if he had to. Wolf mouth on his face, his arm in a wolf mouth, fingers in a wolf throat, digging. Dragging his revolver from his pocket, firing it into wolf belly. Firing again. Blood and blood. Without hope, he would turn and fight.
‘I see them,’ said Florian. ‘There are others behind us. They are following.’
Lom jerked round but there was nothing to see.
‘Why didn’t you say before?’
‘They will not trouble us while I am here,’ said Florian. ‘They are not hunting, they are curious, that’s all. But do not go far alone. Not without me.’
All afternoon and into the evening they pushed on through the trees, Florian moving fast and confidently, Lom struggling to keep up. From time to time he looked for wolves but did not see them again.
They broke out onto the edge of the railway track suddenly, without warning. It stretched away to right and left, twin parallel rails. The massive sleepers and ten-foot gauge of a major freight line. On either side of the track the trees had been cut down and cleared five yards back from the line. It was freshly done work, the toppled trees stacked neatly, the ground scattered with raw yellow axe chippings, the scent of fresh-cut timber in the air. An inch-deep covering of snow. It made the going easier. They turned right and began to jog along beside the rails.
They had been going steadily for about an hour when Florian stopped suddenly.
‘Train,’ he said. ‘Do you hear? A train is coming.’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Lom. He was breathing hard. Heart pounding in his chest.
‘Get out of sight,’ said Florian urgently.
Lom followed him into the dimness under the trees and they hunched down low to wait. Eventually he heard the rumbling in the rails, rising in pitch to a squeal as the train got closer. It was approaching from behind them. He could hear it now, a locomotive under full steam. The train roared into view and thundered past, close enough to see the moustache glistening on the engineer’s face in the firebox glow and catch the smell of hot iron and burning coal. Iron wheels high as a man is tall. Truck after truck followed the engine, ten, twenty, thirty of them, wooden-sided, windowless, each as long as a barn. Lom recognised them. The long trains. He had seen such trains, hundreds of them, waiting in rows in the Wieland marshalling yards. They looked like cattle trucks but they weren’t for carrying cattle.
They walked on, following the railway track. There were no landmarks. No horizon except the vanishing point of the track. Walking brought them no nearer to anything and no further away. Motion without movement. The birch trees receded in all directions, endlessly repeating mirrors of trees, misting into brown and grey, dimness and snow. Numberless, featureless and utterly bleak.
‘We’ll camp here,’ said Florian when the light began to fail. They had reached nowhere in particular.
They left the railway and pushed three or four hundred yards in under the trees, to a place where a heavy spruce had fallen, tearing its root mass from the earth, making a small clearing where scrub and thorn had taken root. Florian fished a small bag from his pocket and gave it to Lom. It held a fire steel and a clump of dry tinder: moss and leaves and small twigs, all dry and sweet.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Keep the fire small. We should be far enough from the track, but we should take no risks.’
Lom gathered a bundle of branches and set them by. He scraped a patch of earth clear with his foot and checked the ground for shallow-buried roots that could catch and smoulder underground. There were no stones to make a hearth. He took a handful of tinder from the pouch and laid it ready: a tight clump in the middle, outside pieces pulled looser to let the air in. When the tinder was set he held the fire steel close above it and struck a shower of sparks. He got it first time, sweet, like he always did, and bent low to breathe on the faint smoulder. Gentle. Gentle. Encouraging the little flicks of flame to come alive. Breathing in the faint smell of woodsmoke.
The wood he had gathered was all damp. He chose a few of the smallest, driest pieces and set them round the smouldering tinder one by one, carefully, to shelter the frail young flame, to barely touch it and take it into themselves. He fed it with a little extra tinder when it started to fail and felt the first brush of heat against his face. A little cup of life in the gathering dark. When he was sure of the small fire, he picked out some of the larger branches from the pile and set them in a careful pyramid around the tiny fire, closing it in like a tent frame. The heat and smoke would dry them out.
Lom sat back for a moment and watched. A bitter breeze had risen as the light faded. The legs of his trousers were still soaked, and now he had stopped moving the cold of it chilled him. But the fire had steadied. It was breathing. He watched the lick of small quick colours, the sparks in the smoke, the heart of it growing stronger.
While Lom made the fire, Florian took a small hand axe from his knapsack and hacked an armful of larger branches from the fallen spruce. He propped them against the side of the tree and wove thinner stem-lengths through them to bind a strong, shallow-sloping wall, on which he piled deep armfuls of brush and damp earth, until he had made a low, dark tunnel closed at one end, with a mouth at the other. He took some branches still heavy with needles and cut them to size, to make a door for the entrance which could be pulled shut once you were inside.
When he had finished, he came across to the fire. Considered it with approval.
‘It’s good,’ he said.
He pulled a little pan from his knapsack and set it on the fire. Used the axe to cut a fist-sized chunk of pork into slices and dropped them in. ‘I raided the kitchen at Terrimarkh,’ he said. ‘The shelter is for you. You should spread more leaves inside on the floor.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have no need. I will not sleep.’
When they had eaten, Florian set some water to boil in the pan and scattered it with coffee grounds. Dropped in a small pebble of sugar. He set the pan aside to cool and then they drank from it in silence, alternating sips. The drink was dark and bitter and sweet and good. Night thickened between the darkness and the trees.
Lom sat quietly and stared out into the darkness, taut as wire.