Green shoots swell and burst
and your back is shattered, you broken
once-lithe hunting beast,
my lovely miserable century,
but still you go on, gazing backwards with a mindless smile
at the trail you leave.
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)
The man who was Osip Rizhin moves alone through the corridors of the Victory Hall. No praetorian troopers precede him, ten paces ahead, sub-machine guns in hand, sweeping the way. None follows ten paces behind. But he wears his white uniform still and he walks with the confidence of absolute power.
If you see him coming, press yourself against the wall, show the palms of your hands, lower your eyes. Do not meet his gaze. Papa Rizhin can break you open and smash your world. The modest gold braid on the white of his shoulder, the ribbons at the white of his breast: these are the crests of the truth of the power of death.
He looks at you with soft brown burning eyes as he passes.
The news of his fall has not yet escaped the plenum chamber.
Papa Rizhin, President-Commander and Generalissimus of the New Vlast, walks the passageways of the Victory Hall with measured pace and purposeful intent, but he does not exist. He is ghost. He is after-image. He is lingering, fading retinal burn.
The man who hurries towards the exit is Josef Kantor, wearing Papa Rizhin’s clothes.
He pushes his way through heavy bronze doors and finds himself on a high terrace overlooking the River Mir. No one else is there. Above him the sky and before him the city of Mirgorod in the sun of the afternoon. He stands at the parapet and sees the city he saved, the city he rebuilt from the burned ground up: the great sky-rise buildings spearing the belly of cloudless blue, the tower that bears his face but Rizhin’s name, the tower at the top of which Josef Kantor’s immense and far-seeing statue stands.
Josef Kantor looks out across the city that is still his. Below him is the great slow silent river sliding west towards the sea. Barges call to barges, ploughing the green surface burnished in the afternoon sun, and a warm breeze palms his face. Summer air stirs his thick lustrous hair and gently traces the tight puckered scar on his cheek. Gulls wheel above the city lazily, flashing white in the sunlight. Their whiteness answers the whiteness of his tunic.
Josef Kantor does not move. He is calm. He is waiting. It is nearly time.
The revolutionary has no personal interests. No emotions. No attachments. The revolutionary owns nothing and has no name. All laws, moralities, customs and conventions–the revolutionary is their merciless and implacable enemy. There is only the revolution. All other bonds are broken.
He slips his hand into his pocket and folds his fat fingers round the tiny warm piece of angel flesh he always carries there. Always. He is never without it and never was.
He lets the last of Osip Rizhin drift away and dissolve on the air.
There is no past, there is only the future.
There is no defeat, there is only victory.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen, will happen.
There is a movement in the currents of the Mir, a disturbance at the near embankment. A roiling and rising stain of yellow sedimentary mud. An obstruction in the green flow.
The brutal faceless head and shoulders and torso of Archangel-in-mudjhik lifts itself out of the river, a blood- and rust-coloured thing of stone flesh spilling water as it punches holes in the embankment wall and hauls itself higher and higher, climbing towards the terrace of the Victory Hall.
Archangel tears open Josef Kantor’s mind and pours himself in, flood after flood of vast glittering black consciousness, the voice of the shining emptiness between galaxies.
You remembered, my son, while I was gone. You remembered me and did well. You have built me ships for the stars.
Archangel! Archangel! Archangel!
I come for you now so that you can come for me! Carry me out from under the poisonous trees and bring me home!
It begins, oh it begins!
The voice of Archangel singing among the suns!
The foundations of the Victory Hall shook as Archangel-in-mudjhik, twelve-foot-high lump of mobile dull red angel flesh, climbed the embankment up towards the terrace, smashing through the skin of brick and gouging hand- and footholds in the concrete beneath. The waters of the Mir sluiced from him. The parapet crumbled and crunched under his weight as he heaved himself over.
Josef Kantor stood and faced him. He could not speak, his throat was stopped, but he did not fall.
The voice of Archangel filled his mind.
Join with me, faithful, beautiful son. Come inside me now and I will carry you.
Josef Kantor felt the mudjhik mind opening like a flower. It was a deep, scented well and he was on the brink. He was in a high and lonely place and desired only to fall.
Josef Kantor felt his body dying. His heart in his chest burst open, a dark gushing fountain of blood. His lungs collapsed. His ribs flexed and his throat gaped but no air entered. He was drowning in sunlight. His own name separated from him and drifted away.
Archangel-in-mudjhik pulled him in.
Vissarion Lom, running through the corridors of the Victory Hall, felt the irruption of Archangel into the world. A shattering rearrangement of the feel of things. A detonation of total and appalling fear.
He ran, and as he ran he felt the piledriver-pounding and -shaking of the floor. He was near and getting closer.
He ran.
There was no time and it was too far to go.
Lom shoved open the heavy bronze doors and burst onto the terrace. The paving stones were cracked and shattered, pieces of parapet broken and scattered across the ground. A corpse in a crumpled white uniform curled on the floor, leaking dark blood from mouth and nose. Lom looked over the wall down into the river. He could see nothing but he knew what was in there, moving eastwards, pushing strong and fast against the stream.
The River Mir is strong and green and brown. The last mudjhik in the world walks submerged, shoulder against the flow, up the river towards the forest. The archangel fragment, small and lonely and triumphant, is going home.
The river is a strong brown word, endlessly spoken, driving back towards the sea, but the mudjhik is stronger: every mighty footfall stirs puffs of silt. The dark voice of the river is loud: it is a hand against his chest, pressing. It ropes his feet and erodes the ground from under them. Eddies and water vortices stir and turn behind him, sucking him back, tugging him off balance. Thick mud in water whorls. The water ceiling just above his head glimmers and ripples.
Gravity operates differently here: he has no weight. All the forces shove and shear sideways and backwards, lifting and toppling, pushing back against archangel will.
Slip and fall. Tumble and roll. The strong brown river voice is running heavy. It turns everything over and over, slowly. Carries all away through city and marsh towards the ocean.
The river knows mudjhik is there. The river is a watchful, purposeful water ram. The river, the ever-speaking voice of the inland forest, opposes.
But mudjhik resists. Slow-motion walking like a brass-helmed diver in canvas and rubber, leaning forward into the slow conveyor of the water-wind, he hauls his clumsy mud-booted feet up and over lumps of half-buried concrete, brick and stone. Clambers clumsily over the weed-carpeted black and broken spars of a sunken barge, where worms and shell creatures rout and gouge the softening wood and frond gardens stream with the stream.
The engined hulls of riverboats lumber past his shoulder. He strokes their iron and timber with his palm and edges them gently aside. Eels and lampreys slide and flick, feeding in the silt clouds the mudjhik’s feet kick up. Mudjhik pays attention to their slick dark mucus gleam. They flash like muscles of lightning in the paunch of storm clouds. They are bright marks of hungry life. Avid. Their needle teeth are sharp.
Larger fishes watch from shadow and darkness, curious, circumspect, holding themselves effortlessly in position against the force of the stream.
Mudjhik admires fish. Fish brain is cold, intent and unconcerned: the pressure of water currents is the book the fishes read. They trawl the turbid water with cold tongue. With cold and dark-adapted eye. They know what the river is: where it has come from, where it goes; the taste of earth and forest, lake and rain, and the fainter shadow-taste, the dangerous killing taint of oceanic salt. The river is their living god, and they are part of it, and there is nothing else and never was.
Josef Kantor knows that he is underwater in the river, and he knows that he is dead. The will of Archangel, heart and brain and total mudjhik commander, is a hot red fire that burns him. The overwhelming intent of Archangel drives all other thought away. Archangel is inexhaustible and unending dinning shout, all on a single note.
Archangel! Archangel! Archangel!
Archangel is bands of iron and wires of steel. Archangel is thunderous wheels on rails. Archangel is the blinding brilliance of internal suns. Archangel is the only force that drives. Archangel is…
Joseph Kantor is dumb with it.
Mudjhik climbs from the river and stands in the evening sun to dry. The city is far behind him, a murmur in the wind, a skyline stain.
Archangel is well satisfied.
You remembered and did well, my son. You were my voice in the silence and prepared for me the way home. Walk with me now, back to the mountain under the trees. Be my voice a while and I will yet show you the light of the stars.
Josef Kantor is fist. All fist. He rises from the quiet floor (which smells of dead dog and stinks of dead Safran still) and fights.
I am nobody’s son.
All the long day, all the river walk, Kantor has been watching from the shadows, crouching, growing tired of the taste of defeat and death. He has been gently, silently, testing the boundaries of Archangel, weighing strength against strength, will against will. He knows now that this Archangel is fragment only, stretched thin and small and far from home.
He knows the prize to be won, and that the risk of failure is death, but he is dead already, so what does it matter? And he is strong, stronger now than he was, and stronger than Archangel knows.
Josef Kantor hurls himself at the Archangel root shard. Pushes his fist into Archangel mouth.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen, will happen. I am nobody’s prophet and nobody’s labouring hand.
Archangel screams shock and indignation and turns on the sudden enemy within. Crushing. Squeezing. Smashing. He is speed beyond perceiving, strike and strike and strike again: he is the lancing burning blade and the crushing stamping heel. Burst upon burst of hammer-blow force. He is the turner-to-stone and the acid lick of a fire mouth. He is the bitter adversary against whom nothing stands.
Archangel! Archangel!
He is warrior nonpareil; his birthright is all the stars.
Josef Kantor goes down before him like a blade of dried grass under the wheel of a strong wind. Archangel burns him and he flares, weightless and brittle, crumbling to ash and dust. He vanishes into instant vapours of nothing like a scrap of paper in the belly of the white furnace.
The brevity of his destruction cannot be measured in the silence between tick and tick. Josef Kantor is simply instantaneously gone.
But Josef Kantor returns.
Every time Archangel destroys him he returns.
Archangel’s force is fabulously, immeasurably, gloriously greater. He extinguishes Josef Kantor instantaneously every single time–blows him into nothing like a candle flame–but this is not a contest of force, it is a contest of will and nothing else. Archangel-fragment fights for pride and dignity and purpose, because he is Archangel and cannot fail; that cannot be conceived. But Josef Kantor fights because he will not die.
Study what you fear. Learn and destroy, then find a stronger thing to fear. Endlessly, endlessly, until the fear you cause is greater than the fear you feel. This is the dialectic of fear and killing.
Even before birth it began for Josef Kantor, the triumphant twinless twin spilling out onto the childbirth bed, accompanied by his shrivelled and half-absorbed dead little brother. Josef Kantor does not let rivals live. He doesn’t share space in the womb.
All night long the mudjhik stands without moving on the bank of the river, and when morning comes the archangel-conscious fragment is dead.
Josef Kantor explores his new body, and oh but it is an excellent thing! Senses of angel substance show him the world in all its surge and gleam and detail, alive in a thousand ways he knew nothing of before. Mudjhik strength is power beyond dreaming: with a flick of his arm he splinters trees. This is the eternal body Khyrbysk dreamed of! Tireless, impervious, unfailing, free of death.
I have died once. I will not die again.
And yet this mudjhik body is imperfect. It has no face. No voice. No tongue with which to speak. It is a crude and clumsy roughed-out template of massive earthy red. So Josef Kantor does what no mudjhik dweller ever thought to do before, nor ever had the will: he begins to reshape the mudjhik clay from within. He gives it mouth. He gives it tongue (a fubsy lozenge of angel flesh, awkward now but he will learn). He gives it teeth and lips and palate for the enunciation of sibilants and plosives and fricatives, and all other equipment and accoutrements necessary for the purpose of making voice.
He gives its massive boulder head a face.
Josef Kantor’s face.
Josef Kantor made of angel flesh the colour of brick and rust and drying blood and bruises.
Josef Kantor dead and immortal now and twelve feet high.
Josef Kantor in the warmth of the morning walking east towards the forest.
Find the thing you fear and strike it dead.
This is my world and I will not share it.
Thousands of miles to the east, on the edge of the endless forest, Archangel feels himself in the mudjhik die. He knows that Josef Kantor has killed him, this one little piece of him sent out wandering across the world, and he knows what that means.
Archangel opens himself out like an unfolding fern and shouts at the oppressing sky of this poisonous world in absolute and ecstatic joy.
For Josef Kantor is strong!
Stronger than Archangel had ever guessed. The will of Kantor is harder than iron; his purpose is stronger than the heart rock of the world; his heat burns hotter than the sun. The strength of his arm grinds the wheels of time faster and faster.
Archangel knows and has always known that without Josef Kantor he is a dumb mouth shouting, a blowhard bully trundling about for ever in the forest, spilling futile anti-life: a liminal and ineffectual pantoufflard grumbling at the margins of history, claiming primacy but in clear-sighted truth merely scratching an itch.
And Josef Kantor without Archangel, one-time emperor of the Vlast though he may be, is brief-lived and tractionless. A powder flash in the pan.
My champion! My ever-burning sun!
It is Archangel who is the generator of power and endurance, Archangel the ever-spinning dynamo of cruel expansive energy, Archangel the permission and the totaliser. But it is Josef Kantor who is the conduit, the bond, the channel that lets Archangel reach out into the world and seize the bright birthright. Kantor is the face on the poster and the arm that wields the burning sword that turns the skies to ash.
Josef Kantor, freed now of his organic bodily chains, a will and a voice and a mind released into history and driving an angelic body, is coming to the forest with a mind to kill him, but there will be no need for that.
Faster and faster Archangel grinds towards the edge of the forest.
Kantor will come and break down the border.
Kantor will let him loose in the world.
Run my champion Josef Kantor faster and faster, run as I run towards you. Carry to me the banners of victory. The time is short and our enemies are upon us.
Archangel returns to his work with fresh vigour. There is much to do. His champion generalissimo needs a new army.
Aweek after the fall of Osip Rizhin, Vissarion Lom woke hollow and drenched with sweat from a dream of trees and Maroussia, and knew by the feeling in his belly and heart, by the anger and the anxiety and the desperate desolation, by the need to be up and moving, by the impossibility of rest, that it wasn’t any kind of dream, no dream at all.
Maroussia was different–older, wiser, changed–she saw things he didn’t see, she was distant, she was… august. She was something to be wary of. Something of power and something to fear.
Kantor is making for the forest. The angel is calling him there. Nothing is over yet, nothing is done. Come into the forest, darling, and I will find you there.
Helping. Answering the call. That was Lom. That was what he did.
In his dream that was no dream at all he’d seen the living angel in the woods. Seen the trail of poisoned destruction and cold smouldering crusted earth it left in its wake as it dragged itself, an immense hill the colour of blood and rust and bruises, towards the edge of the trees. A cloud of vapours burned off the top of the angel hill, cuprous and shining. Energy nets like pheromone clouds, dream-visible, dream-obvious. The soldiers of the Vlast were crawling about on its lower slopes like ants, digging and dying.
The living angel was recruiting an army of its own, infesting a growing crowd of dark things: bad dark things coming out from under the trees. Men and women like bears and wolves. Giants and trolls from the mountains and moving trees turned to ash and stone and dust. Lom’s dream heart beat strangely when he saw the men like bears. The living angel found them in the forest and took their minds and filled them with its own. He gave them hunting and anger and desire and pleasure in death. He gave them bloodlust and greed and berserking. The smell of blood and musk. There were not many yet but more each day, and the nearer it got to the frontier of trees the more it found.
Lom heard faintly, insistently, the voice of the living angel in his own mind. It pulled at him like gravity, seeped through the skin, and polluted the way he tasted to himself.
I will not be silenced. I will not be imprisoned. I will not be harassed and consumed and annoyed and troubled and stung. I am Archangel, the voice of history and the voice of the dark heart of the world. My birthright is among the stars and I am coming yet.
Lom felt the living angel’s attentive gaze pass over him and come to rest, returning his regard as if it knew it was watched. As if it knew its enemy and disdained him. It came to him then, dream knowledge, that he was Maroussia watching. He was seeing with Maroussia’s eye. Alien Maroussia Pollandore, preparing to kill this thing if she could.
It was still dark when he woke but there was no more sleeping. In the first light of dawn Lom went to see Kistler, and then he went to find Eligiya Kamilova, who was back in her house on the harbour in the shadow of the Ship Bastion. That house was a survivor. Eligiya was there, and so were Elena Cornelius and her girls, Yeva and Galina. Rising for the day. Having breakfast.
I bring your children home to you Elena, Kamilova had said that day in the street. I have looked after them as well as I could. You can stay in my house until you find your feet.
What I owe you, Eligiya, said Elena, it’s too much. It can’t ever be repaid.
When he came for Kamilova in the early morning, Lom found Elena’s girls just as he remembered them from when he and Maroussia stayed at Dom Palffy six years before. They had not grown. Not aged at all. That was uncanny. It disturbed him oddly. Kamilova was dark-eyed, thin and haunted. She had a faraway look, as if she felt uncomfortable and superfluous, marginal in her own home.
‘I want you to come with me into the forest,’ Lom said to her. ‘Bring your boat and be my guide.’
Kamilova was on her feet immediately. Face burning.
‘When?’ she said.
‘Now. Today. Will you come?’
‘Of course. It is all I want.’ She turned to Elena Cornelius. ‘Keep the house,’ she said. ‘It is yours. I give it to Galina and Yeva. There is money in a box in the kitchen. I will not be coming back. Not ever.’
For all of the rest of her life Yeva Cornelius carried an agonising guilt that she hadn’t loved Eligiya Kamilova and didn’t weep and hug her when she left, but felt relieved when Kamilova left her with Galina and her mother. It was a needless burden she made for herself. Kamilova didn’t do things out of love or to get love. She did what was needed.
Lom and Kamilova had the rest of the day to make arrangements. Kistler had arranged a truck to come for Kamilova’s boat. The Heron. It was to be flown by military transport plane, along with Lom and Kamilova and their baggage and supplies, as far east as possible. As near to the edge of the forest as they could get.
Lom spent the time with Kamilova in her boathouse. She knew what she needed for an expedition into the forest and went about putting it all together while he poked about in her collection of things brought back from the woods. He felt excited, like a child, anxious to be on his way. He’d been born in the forest but had no coherent memories of life there. All his life he’d lived with the idea of it, but he’d never been there. And now he was going. And Maroussia was there.
When it was nearly time for the truck to come, Kamilova looked him up and down. His suit. His city shoes.
‘You can’t go like that,’ she said.
She found him heavy trousers of some coarse material, a woollen pullover, a heavy battered leather jacket, but he had to go and buy himself boots, and by the time he got back the truck had come and the boat was in the back and Kamilova was waiting.
Elena and the girls were there to see them off.
‘You’re going to look for Maroussia, aren’t you?’ said Elena.
‘Yes,’ said Lom.
‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘You will find her.’
She looked across the River Purfas towards the western skyline where the sun was going down. The former Rizhin Tower, now renamed the Mirgorod Tower, rose dark against a bank of reddening pink cloud. It was still the tallest building by far, though the statue of Kantor was gone from the top of it. The new collective government with Kistler in the chair had had it removed and dismantled.
‘They should call it Lom Tower for what you’ve done. People should know.’
‘I wouldn’t like that,’ said Lom. ‘I’d hate it. Nothing’s done yet. It’s just the beginning.’
Kistler had found jobs for Konnie and Maksim, working for the new government, and he’d sent out word to look for Vasilisk the bodyguard–Kistler was a man to repay his debts–but so far he could not be found. There was trouble brewing: many people had done well out of Rizhin’s New Vlast, and not everyone was glad to see the statue gone. There were Rizhinists now. Hunder Rond had disappeared.
Kistler had offered to find a job for Elena Cornelius but she had refused.
‘What will you do?’ said Lom.
Elena smiled. ‘I’m going to make cabinets again.’ She hugged Lom and kissed him on the cheek. ‘When you find Maroussia, bring her back here and see how we have done.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lom. ‘That would be good.’
He swung himself up into the cab of the truck next to Kamilova and the driver.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
The plane carrying Lom and Kamilova and the Heron landed at a military airfield at the edge of the forest: three runways, heavy transport planes coming and going every few minutes. Soldiers and engineers and their equipment were everywhere: rows of olive and khaki tents in their thousands; roadways laid out; jetties and pontoons and river barges clogged with traffic; the smell of fuel and the noise of engines. Huge tracked machines churned up the mud and eased themselves onto broad floating platforms. It was an industrial entrepôt, the base camp of a massive engineering project and the beachhead for an invasion, all combined in one chaotic hub and thrown now into reorganisation and dismay. Orders had been changed: the collective government under Lukasz Kistler required the living angel not mined for its substance but destroyed. Eradicated. Killed. The order came as a signal, unambiguous and peremptory.
Destroy it? the commanders of the advance said to one another. Destroy it? How?
A few miles east of the airfield low wooded hills closed the horizon: rising slopes of dark grey tree-mass which stretched away north and south, unbroken into the distance, shrouded in scraps of drifting mist. Westward was clear summer blue, the continental Vlast in sunshine, but a leaden autumn cloud bank had slid across the sky above the forest like a lid closing, a permanent weather front coming to rest at the edge of hills.
In hospital tents men and women on low cots stared darkly at the ceiling. Others slumped in wheelchairs, legs tucked under blankets, or hobbled and swung on crutches, aimless and solitary, muttering quietly. Bandaged feet. Arms, hands and faces marked with chalky fungal growths and patches of smooth blackness.
‘Have you seen this before?’ Lom said to Kamilova.
‘No. This is not the forest doing this.’
‘The angel then,’ said Lom. ‘They’ve found it.’
Out of the trees through a gap in the low hills the broad slow river flowed, turbid and muddy green. An unceasing traffic of barges and motor launches and shallow-draught gunships cruised upstream, heavily laden and low in the water, and came back downstream riding higher, empty, bruised and rusting.
‘There’s another way,’ said Kamilova. ‘The old waterway joins the river downstream of here.’
The Heron and their gear was loaded on a flatbed truck. Early in the morning, before their liaison officer was up and about, Lom and Kamilova drove out of the camp alone. Nobody questioned them at the gate.
A day’s sailing downriver and the sinking sun in their eyes was gilding the river a dull red gold when Kamilova swung the boat in towards the left bank under overhanging vegetation. Lom saw nothing but a scrubby spit of land until they were into the canal and nosing up slow shallow waters clogged with weed. Disgruntled waterfowl made way for them, edging in under muddy banks and exposed tree roots, or rose and flapped away slowly to quieter grounds.
‘This way is navigable?’ said Lom.
‘It’s a few years since I was here,’ said Kamilova.
Ruined stonework lined the water’s edge: low embankments, mossy and root-broken and partly collapsed, the stumps of rotted wooden jetties, rusted mooring rings. Back from the canal edge were low mounds and rooted stumps of standing stone. Broken suggestions of fallen ruins lost. Earth and grass and undergrowth spilled in a slow tide across ancient constructions and slumped into torpid water.
‘It’s an old trader canal,’ said Kamilova. ‘It connects with another river over there beyond the hill. In the time of the Reasonable Empire, when the Lezarye families were hedge wardens and castellans of the forest margin, you’d have seen a town here. Trading posts. Warehouses. Of course the trade was already ancient when the Lezarye came. There was always trade into the forest and out of it.’
‘Timber?’ said Lom. ‘The canal seems too narrow.’
‘Not here, that was always big-river trade. In places like this you’d find charcoal burners and wood turners. Fur traders selling sable, marten, grease beaver, miniver, fox, hart. There were markets for dried mushrooms and lichens and powdered barks. Syrups and liquors. Scented woods. Wax and honey and dried berries. Antler and bone. Anything you could bring out of the forest and sell. And there’d have been shamans and völvas and priests. Giants of course, and the other forest peoples would come out this far too. Keres and wildings. This was debatable land then. Marginal. Liminal. A crossing place.’
They passed under the long evening shadow of a round-towered and gabled building of high sloping walls: red brick and timber, collapsing, overgrown, roofless and empty-windowed.
‘A Lezarye garrison way fort,’ said Kamilova. ‘The trade leagues paid the Lezarye to keep the peace and the Reasonable Empire paid them to watch the border and make sure the darker things of the forest stayed there.’
The pace of the boat slackened as the evening breeze dropped away. There was thinness and a still, breathless silence in the air. Lom felt he was at the bottom of a deep well filled up with ages of time.
Kamilova shook herself and looked wary.
‘Things are slowing here,’ she said. ‘I know the feel of this from when I was with Elena’s girls. We shouldn’t linger.’
She unshipped oars and began to row, nosing the Heron forward through thickening standing water. Lom watched her muscular arms working. The intricate interlaced patterns on her skin were like winding roots and knots of brambles and young tendrils reaching out across the earth. They seemed fresher and more vivid than he’d noticed before. There was much he wanted to ask her. But not yet. The wooded hills of the forest edge rose higher and denser before them, closer now, catching the last light of the setting sun. A rich and glowing green wall.
After an hour or so the waterway widened and the going was easier, but the last light of the day was failing. Kamilova tied up the Heron.
‘We’ll camp for the night,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go in under the trees.’
Yakoushiv the embalmer presented himself at the office of Colonel Hunder Rond, commander of the Parallel Sector. Yakoushiv was clammy with sweat. He felt sick. He could hardly speak for nerves. He thought his end had come.
‘You did a nice job with the corpse of the old Novozhd,’ said Rond. ‘Very pretty. I have more work for you, if you’re interested.’
Yakoushiv’s legs trembled with relief. He almost fell. He felt as if his head had become detached from his neck and was floating a foot above his shoulders. He dabbed at his face with a sweet handkerchief.
‘Of course,’ he said. His voice came out wrong. Pitched too high. ‘The subject? I mean… who is the…?’
‘Come through and I’ll show you.’
Rond led him through to the other room. Yakoushiv’s eyes widened in surprise. Another wave of sick nervousness and fear. The corpse of the disgraced Papa Rizhin was laid out in Rond’s inner office on a makeshift catafalque.
‘You will work here,’ said Rond. ‘You will write me a list of what you need and I will obtain it for you. There is need for great haste. He must be ready tonight. You understand? Is that possible?’
‘Of course.’
‘Make it your best work ever. And get rid of the scar on his face.’
Yakoushiv worked as rapidly and as neatly as he could. It was impossible to avoid making a mess in the room. There was… spillage. But when he had finished the corpse of Osip Rizhin was glossy and shining and fragranced with a cloying sickly sweetness.
When Rond returned he examined Yakoushiv’s work from head to foot.
‘You’ve done well,’ he said. ‘You should be pleased, Yakoushiv. Your last job was your best. I hope you can take some satisfaction from that. I’m only sorry you can’t go home now.’
Yakoushiv turned white. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please. No.’
‘There can be no blabbing, you see. No tales to be told.’
‘I won’t. Of course. I promise. Please—’
‘I’m sorry, Yakoushiv,’ said Rond.
Next morning Lom woke at the outermost, easternmost edge of the world he knew, he and Kamilova alone in an emptied ancient landscape.
The sun had not yet risen above the edge of the forest. Close now, the hills were dark shoulders and hogs’ backs of dense tree canopy draped in mist and cloud. Home of ravens. On the lower slopes he could see the relics of long-abandoned field boundaries under bracken and scrub, and out of the scrub rose great twisted knobs and stumps of rock, shoulders and boulders of raw stone. Stone the colour of rain and slate.
The stone seemed to hum and prickle the air.
The Lezarye used to keep the debatable lands by patrol and force of arms, Kamilova had said, but the forest maintains its own boundary. It’s stronger now than I’ve ever felt it before.
I feel it, said Lom. Yes.
Kamilova, bright-eyed and alive, raised the Heron’s brown sail, and the little wooden boat took them up the river and into the trees.
As they travelled, Kamilova kept up a stream of quiet talk, more talk than Lom had ever known from her before. She talked about the people who went to live among the trees.
‘The forest changes you,’ she said. ‘It brings out who you are. The breath of the trees. Giants grow larger in the woods.’ She talked about hollowers, hedge dwellers who dug shelters in the earth. ‘They don’t hibernate, not exactly, but their body temperature falls and they’re dormant for days on end. They sleep out the worst of winter underground like bears do.’
She told him the names of clans. Lyutizhians meant people like wolves, and Kassubians were the shaggy coats.
‘I saw things once that someone said were bear-made. They were rough things, strange and wild and inhuman, for paws and muzzles and teeth to use, not dextrous fingers. But it was just a rumour. Humanish forest peoples keep to the outwoods, but there’s always further in and further back.
‘The forest is a bright and perfumed place,’ she said, ‘with dark and tangled corners. It is not defined. It includes everything and it is not safe. The forest talks to you, but you have to do the work; you have to bring yourself to the task. Communication is indirect and you must pay attention. You have to dig. Dig!’
Lom hardly listened to her. The river was passing through a gap between steep slopes, almost cliffs, under a low grey sky, and there was the possibility of cold rain in the air. The troubling ache in his head that had been with him all morning, the agitated throbbing of the old wound in his forehead, was fading. His sense of time passing had lurched, dizzying and uncomfortable, but it was settled now. Time present touched the endless eternal forest like sunlight grazing the outer leaves of a huge tangled tree or the surface of a very deep and very dark lake. The forest was all Kamilova’s stories and more, but it was also a breathing lung made of real trees and rock and earth and water. He felt the aliveness of it and the way it went on for ever.
Doors in the air were opening. The skin of the water glimmered and thrilled. Promising reflections, it almost delivered. The breath of the forest crackled. It bristled. There were black trees. There were grey and yellow trees. He was watching a single ash tree at the river margin and it was watching him back, being alive.
Lom was opening up and growing stronger. He was entering a place where new kinds of thing were possible, different stories with different outcomes. He was coming home. He reached up into the low roof of cloud and opened a gap to let a spill of warmth through that made the river glitter. A moment of distraction, lost in sunlight: there were many small things among the trees–animals and birds–and they were all alive and he could feel that.
Then he became aware that Kamilova had stopped talking and was watching him. Intently. Curiously. A little bit afraid.
From the slopes of the hills and among the trees they are watched. The small boat edging upriver against the stream; the woman whose arms are painted with fading magic; the man spilling bright beautiful scented trails from the hole in his skull, tainted with dark shades of angel: all this is seen and known by watchers with brown whiteless eyes, and by things with no eyes that also see. Word passes through roots and leaves and air. Word reaches Fraiethe and the Seer Witch of Bones. Word reaches Maroussia Shaumian Pollandore.
He is coming. He is here.