Wolfhound Century

62


‘Now we must try again,’ Chazia was saying, somewhere far away. Nothing had changed. It must have been only minutes. Seconds, even. ‘Quickly, before we lose him.’

Still blinded, he felt the glove of angel substance on his face again, and this time there was nothing he could do to defend himself. She came right inside him, roughly. Invading. Violating. He was naked and broken.

He gave Chazia everything.

She was in there, inside his mind, and she knew. Nothing could be hidden from her. She went everywhere, and he gave it all up. Everything that had happened. Everything he had heard. Everything he knew. Krogh. Vishnik. The Archive. The massacre. The whisperers in the square. The Crimson Marmot. Petrov. Safran. The mudjhik. Maroussia. Everything.

‘He desires her, Josef!’ Chazia crowed with genuine wonderment and pleasure. ‘The poor idiot desires her.’

And then – how much later was it? how much time gone? nothing seemed to take very long –

‘He knows nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing. He’s of no use at all. Kill him.’


They left him alone in the interrogation room, still tied to the chair. After an unmeasurable amount of time it seemed that other men came and released him. He might have been sick. One of the men might have been Safran. He might have imagined that.

They were leading him along corridors. He could see from one eye: linoleum, worn carpet, flagstones, his own feet. It didn’t matter.

A shock of cold and space and early morning light. The smell of water. A bridge. They were crossing a bridge.

He jerked himself out of the grip of the men, who were holding him loosely by the arms, and lurched away from them towards the bridge’s low parapet.

For a moment, a half-second, no more, he looked down at the dark, swollen current. He wanted the water to wash the blood and mess and memory away. A clean, cold, private death. He tipped himself over the edge.

The water reached up to take him as he fell.


The moment between tipping over the parapet and hitting the water seemed to go on for ever. Lom hung head downwards in air. The surface of the river rose slowly to meet him, freighted with the debris of the flooded city. The water had a particular smell: dark, cold, earthy, cleansing.

He crashed into green darkness and the noise churned in his ears. The shock of the cold seized his lungs in ice fists and squeezed. Bands of freezing iron tightened around his head and his chest.

He tried to scrabble his way to the surface of the river, not knowing the direction where the surface was. His clothes, water-heavy, wrapped round his body. The weight of his boots pulled at his legs, slowing their struggle to a nightmare of running. His mouth fell open in a silent O.

And yet he was happy.

After the first rush of panic, he felt his pulse-rate slowing. The icy river reached inside his ribs with cool gentle fingers and cupped his heart kindly. Calmness returned. This was now, and he was alive, and the river was his friend.

He let the dark and freezing absolution of the Mir wash away the stink and shame and failure of the interrogation room. The river let him understand.

There is no blame. There is no judge but you. Forgive yourself.

He had been… violated… by alien, brutal intruding fingers. The fat, poking stubs of Kantor, Chazia’s in her foul dead-angel glove. He had given up nothing. It had been ripped out and taken, that was all. And that was not the same.

The waters cleansed the hole in the centre of his forehead where the piece of angel stone had been ripped away and the river now entered. He felt the cool currents of its touch directly against the naked cortex of his brain, bursting long-dead synapses into light and life. Unplugged at last, for the first time since childhood, Vissarion Lom perceived the world as it was, fresh and new and timeless, flooded with truth. He smelled the light and tasted the space between things.

The Mir was filled with watchful awareness and intelligence. Lom opened wide his arms and felt himself rising. He broke the surface into early morning air. His cloak unfolded and spread itself around him like a huge black lily pad, rotating slowly in the current. His face, upturned in the cloak’s dark centre, was the lily’s pale flower, opening to the grey light. Breathing.

The river was in full spate. As he turned slowly, tilted upwards, he saw the wharves and quays and rooftops of Mirgorod passing against the cloud-grey sky. Nearer to his face, pieces of wood and broken things came with him. He was the flagship of a debris flotilla, being carried towards the edge of the city and beyond it the sea, on the surge of the withdrawing flood.

Waves splashed against his face and trickled into the open hole in his forehead.

The sentient water had a voice that was speaking to him. It told him that the city was an alien tumorous growth, formed around the plug with which the Founder had tried to stop the river’s mouth. Yet there had been a time before the city, and there could be such a time again: when it was gone, when trees grew up between the buildings, and moss and black soil breathed the air again.

The kindly waters of the Mir brushed against his skull and reached inside to calm his heart and whisper reassurance. The voice was telling him who he was. He was a man of muscle and lung and love and understanding. He was a vessel and a flowering on the seaward flow. There were people it was right to love and there were people it was right to loathe and bring to destruction.

Yes, if I have time. I need more time.

Only there was no more time.

As he rotated slowly on the current, the ice-cold waters of the river were draining all the feeling from his body. Lom no longer knew where his arms and legs were, or what they were doing. The muscles of his face were numbed into immobility, his mouth frozen in its permanent open O.

Helplessly, from a great distance, he observed the rippling water work at the bulges and pockets of air that had been trapped in the folds of his cloak. The movement of the river was easing them slowly to the edges of the heavy fabric. One by one they bubbled out and surrendered themselves to the sky.

There was nothing he could do.

What his lily-pad cloak was losing in buoyancy it gained in weight, and slowly it was sinking, and taking him down with it. The river was already lapping at his chin and spilling over into the waiting uncloseable O.

The river brimmed against his nostrils and covered them over. At last he inhaled the cold waters deeply and sank for the second and last time. It felt like sleep. As he closed his eyes he saw against the shadows the face of Maroussia, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him hugely out of the sky, like the moon made whole.


Close by (so close!) – but also not – neither in this world, nor very far away at all – the other O – the pocketful of second chances, the waiting second mouth, the tongue of different lives – is listening to the river, listening to the rain.





63


Maroussia Shaumian found Lom’s body floating face down, lodged against a squat stone pillar of the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge among planks and branches, lost shoes and broken packing cases. She tried to pull it into the boat but she could not. Several times she almost tipped herself into the river before she gave up and knotted a line to his leg and towed him, an inert, lifeless weight, to a place where there were stone steps in the embankment. All the time she worked, she expected the shouts, the bullets, to start.


She had found the boat – an open, clinker-built, tapered skiff, her oars neatly stowed on board – bumping against the wall at the end of Pelican Quay. Ignoring the oars, she’d crouched in the bottom and edged it slowly, hand over hand, along the house-fronts until she came in sight of Vishnik’s building, and she’d watched from the shadows as Lom was taken into the militia vessel. When the police boat left, its searchlight stabbing the night, raking darkened street frontages and swirling water, she followed it all the way to the Lodka, and moored against a telegraph pole.

Cold and wet and shivering, she waited. She could have left, but she did not. Lom had saved her twice. She thought of Vishnik, his ruined body and his terrible lonely death. She thought of her mother, shot in the back in the street. She would not let the Vlast take another. Not if she could prevent it.

When dawn began to seep across the city and other boats began to appear, she felt it would be less conspicuous to be moving, and so she started a slow patrol, circling the Lodka through flooded squares and across re-emerging canals. It was sheer luck that she saw, from the cover of a stranded fire-barge, the uniforms come out of a side door, and Lom stumbling along in the middle of them as if he was drunk. She saw his lurch for the parapet and heard the warders’ shouts and the splash when his body hit the water. But she couldn’t go to look for him straight away. She had to wait, watching the killing party linger near the bridge, shouting to each other and shining torch beams on the dark water. It was fifteen minutes before they gave up and another fifteen before she spotted the sodden hump of his back floating low in the water among the rubbish.


She dragged the body up the steps and laid it on its back. Water seeped out and puddled on the stone. The eyes were open and glassy, the pupils darkly dilated. In the dim grey dawn the face and hands were tinged an ominous blue. She made a desperate, rushed examination. There was no pulse at the wrist or neck, and no breath from the stiffened, cyanotic mouth.

‘He’s not gone,’ she said to herself. ‘He’s not gone.’ She was surprised how much it mattered.

With a desperate energy Maroussia pumped the lifeless chest with the heel of her hand and forced her own breath into the waterlogged lungs. Every time she paused to rest, she saw the ragged-edged hole in Lom’s forehead. It oozed a dark rivery fluid.

She worked and worked, pounding the inert chest, forcing breath into the cold mouth. At last she collapsed across him, her chest heaving.

It was no good.

But at that moment Lom gave a powerful jerk and twisted out from under her weight. He rolled over onto his side, retching and vomiting black river water.

Emptied of the river, Lom sank back into unconsciousness, but he was breathing now, and the blue of his face began to flush faintly in the rising light of morning.

Somehow she managed to heave him back into the boat. There was nothing else to do. She could not carry him, and she would not leave him.

She unshipped the oars and pushed the boat free of the landing place and out into the current. Pulling out into midstream she felt the force of the current seize her. The subsiding flood waters were pouring out of the city, down towards the marshes and the sea. The boat took its place among the detritus, the floating wreckage and the crewless vessels drifting, bumping and turning on the dark foam-flecked current. There was no need to row. It would be better – less conspicuous – if she did not. But Lom’s body was icy to the touch. He needed warmth, and quickly, or he would die.

Maroussia pulled Lom’s cloak over his head, stuffed it away at the stern, and got his shirt, boots and trousers off. His body, naked but for his underclothes, was white as chalk. She took off her own coat and dress and lay down next to him, pulling the clothes over them both and taking him in her arms like a lover. His body was cold, clammy, inert, like something dead, and the cold seeped from him into her. She shivered uncontrollably, but she pushed herself closer against him and closed her eyes.

The Mir surged forward in the cold of the morning, taking their small vessel in its grasp, carrying them onward, downstream on turbid waters under a dark pewter sky, past the waterfronts of the waking city.


Archangel probes a sudden strangeness, and realisation almost shatters him.

He is appalled.

He is brittle.

A new fact bursts open, flowering into his awareness, staining it with a rigid poison.

Blinded by the profusion of the millions – he has not noticed – not until this moment – the faint, brushing touches – the trails – the spraints – of those he cannot see. There are time streams, and people in them – story threads, small voices – that are not part of his future.

He begins to sense them now. He detects – faintly, peripherally – the tremor of their passing and knows what it means for him. Suddenly, disaster is near. At the very moment of his triumph, failure is becoming possible.

In the forest he heaves and struggles, desperate to release the embedded hill of himself from his rock prison. He pulls and shudders, straining at the crust of the earth. Stronger now, he feels the give of it, just a little, a fraction, and the snow roars and slides off his shoulders. For a moment he believes he might succeed. But it is not enough. He cannot move, he cannot rise, he cannot fly.

He sends his mind instead, the whole of it, the entire focused armoury of his attention forced down one narrow beam, ignoring everything except the hint of one small boat and its impossible cargo of change.

He cannot see them, he cannot find them, not himself: they are somehow hidden. But they are there, and there are – he reasons – others who will be able to see them with their jelly-and-electromagnetism oculars.

He bursts his way into first one human mind, then another, and another, a roaring angel voice.

WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY?

A sailor falls, bleeding from the eyes. Archangel jumps to another.

WHERE ARE THEY?

A typist collapses to the floor, fitting, speaking in tongues. Archangel jumps to another.

WHERE ARE THEY?

An engineer splatters vomit across the floor and tears at his ears until they hang in tatters and bleed. Archangel jumps to another.

Archangel leaps from mind to mind, faster and faster, finding nothing. Yet they must be found. Now. Before it is too late.





Part Two





64


The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen lay on his back on the soft estuarial river-mud of the White Marshes. It was almost like floating. It was more like being a water-spider, resting on the meniscus of a pool, feeling the tremor of breezes brushing across the surface. He kept his eyes closed and his hands spread flat and palm-downward on the drum-tight, quivering skin of the mud. He was listening with his hands to the mood of the waters, feeling the way they were flowing and what they meant. He drew in long slow lungfuls of river air, tasting it with his tongue and nose and the back of his throat. There was ice and fog and rain on the air, and the exhalations of trees. He knew the savour of every tree – he could tell birch from alder, blackthorn from willow, aspen from spruce – and he could taste the distinctive breath of each of the great rivers as they mingled in the delta’s throat: the Smaller Chel, the Mecklen, the Vod, and above all the rich complexity of the Mir, with traces of the city caught like burrs in her hair. Everything that he could taste and hear and feel spoke to him. It was the voice of the world.

He was floating on the cusp – the infinitesimal point of balance – between past and future. The past was one, but futures were many, an endlessly bifurcating flowering abundance of possibilities all trying to become, all struggling to grow out of the precarious restless racing-forwards of now.

Aino-Suvantamoinen sat up in the near-darkness – his heart pounding, his head spinning – and scooped up handfuls of cold mud. Cupping his palms together, he buried his face in the slather for coolness and rest. There was something on the Mir that morning such as he had never known before. The river was excited, it was strung out and buzzing with promise. In three centuries of listening, no other morning like this one. A boat was coming, the river told him: a boat freighted with significance, freighted with change. New futures were adrift on the Mir, and also – astonishingly – he’d never felt, never even conceived of anything like this – a new past.

The giant picked himself up from the mud. He had to hurry. He had to reach the great locks and set his shoulder to the enormous ancient beams. He had to open the sluices and close the weir gates before the rushing of the flood carried everything past. Before it was too late.





65


Maroussia lay in the bottom of the skiff, wet and cold, holding the unconscious Lom in her arms. The boat rocked and turned in the current, colliding from time to time with other objects drifting on the flood: the bodies of drowned dogs and the planks of Big Side shanties. Maroussia kept her face turned towards the wooden inside freeboard, staying low and out of sight, risking only occasional glances over the gunwale. If anyone saw the skiff, it would look like one more empty boat adrift from its moorings. Lom was breathing loudly, raggedly, the terrible wound in the front of his head circled with a fine crust of dried blood and weeping some cloudy liquid.

The river had breached its banks in many places. The current was taking them west, towards the seaward dwindling of the city. They passed through flooded squares. Lamp posts and statues sticking up from the mud-heavy, surging water. Pale faces looking from upper windows. Later, at the city’s edge, they drifted above submerged fields, half-sunken trees, drowned pigs. The swollen waters carried them onwards, out of Mirgorod, into strange territories. As the morning wore on, the waters widened and slowed, taking them among low, wooded islands and spits of grass and mud. By now they should have been following one of the channels of the Mir delta, but the channels were all lost under the slack waters of the flood. Maroussia couldn’t tell where the river ended and the silvery mud and the wide white skies began.

Maroussia had been as far as the edge of the White Marshes once or twice, years ago. She remembered walking there, just at the edge of it, lost, exhilarated, alone. That’s where the water would take them. There was no other choice.

It was a strange, extraordinary place. Inside the long bar of Cold Amber Strand, the huge expanse of Mirgorod Bay had silted up with the sediment and detritus of millennia, deposited there by slow rivers. The commingling waters of the four rivers and many lesser streams, stirred by the ebb and flow of the brackish water entering through the Halsesond, had created behind the protecting arm of the Strand a complex and shifting mixture of every kind of wetland, a misty tract of salt marsh, bog and fen. It was a place of eel grass and cotton grass, withies, reed beds and carr. Pools of peat-brown water and small shallow lakes. Winding creeks shining like tin. Silent flocks of wading birds swept against the sky, glinting like herring shoals on the turn.

The sun was hidden behind cloud and mist. Maroussia had no way of measuring the passing of time, except by growing hunger and thirst. Lom was breathing more easily, but she had no food or water. She needed to find a landing place soon. Eventually – it might have been early in the afternoon – she unshipped the oars and began to row. The little skiff was the only vessel to be seen, conspicuously alone in the emptiness. Cat’s-paw ripples and veils of fine mist trailed across the flatness, ringed by the wide horizon only. Waterfowl flew overhead or bobbed in small rafts. A mist was gathering and thickening around them, and Maroussia was glad of it. Mirgorod was a fading stain on the horizon behind them. It began to seem to her that they were nowhere at all.

She rowed clumsily, learning as she went. At least the work warmed her and loosened her stiffened muscles. Lom lay at her feet in the bottom of the boat, heavy and still. Shorelines loomed at them out of the mist. The skiff seemed to be passing between islands, or perhaps they were following channels between mudflats. It was impossible to say. After a time – it might have been only an hour, it might have been much more – she began to feel that the shores were closing in around them. They were approaching slopes of mud and stands of tangled tree growth coming down to the water’s edge. An otter slipped off a mudslope and slid away through the slow waters. A heron, motionless, regarded them with its unblinking yellow eye. At last she saw that, without realising it, she had been following the narrowing throat of a backwater, and now they had reached the end of the passage. They came up to a broken-down jetty of weathered, greyish wood. She managed to bring the skiff up against it with a gentle jolt, clambered up onto the planks with the bow line in her hand, and stood there, looking down at the inert shape of Lom, wondering how she was going to get him out of the boat. At a loss, she glanced back the way they had come.

A giant was wading towards them, waist deep in the dark waters.

In the city, in their labouring clothes, the giants were diminished and made familiar by the human context. This one was different. It was as if the river itself and the mud and silt of the estuary had gathered into human-like form – but twice as large – and risen up and started walking towards them.

The slope of the giant’s belly broached the waters like a ship as he came. His chest was as deep and broad as a barrel, but far larger. Unlike the city giants, who wore their hair tied back in queues, his hair was long and thick and spread across his shoulders in dark, damp curls. The giant waded right up to them and gripped the gunwale of the skiff with both hands, steadying it. The hands were enormous. Fingers thick as stubs of rope, joined with pale webs of skin up to the first knuckle. Wrists strong and round as tree branches. His huge face was weathered dark and his eyes were large and purple like plums, with something of the same rounded protuberance.

‘Your boat is named Sib,’ he said. ‘She’s a good boat.’

His voice was deep and slow, with the cool softness of estuarial mud, but ropes of strength wound through it. His clothes were the silvered colour of mud, with a faint shimmer of grainy slickness. Brown or grey, it was difficult to tell the difference. He was neither wholly of the land nor wholly of the water, but in between, estuarial, intertidal, partaking of both.

‘She’s not our boat,’ said Maroussia. ‘I stole her. She was floating loose, so I took her. We needed her. Badly. My friend is hurt.’

‘You make fast here,’ said the giant. ‘You climb out, and I will bring him.’

The giant scooped Lom up in his arms, settled him into a comfortable position against his chest and waded across to a place where he could climb out. The water sluiced off him. His legs up to his the knee were sleek with mud. Maroussia hesitated. The giant walked a few paces, then stopped and turned. Maroussia hadn’t moved.

‘Well?’ said the giant.

‘What?’ said Maroussia.

‘Follow me.’

‘Where?’

But the giant had already gone ahead.





66


Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom – that part of him which is not made of tissues and plasma, proteins and mineral salts – is floating out in the sea, buoyant, awash in the waves. And Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom – this is not his true name, he knows that now, but he has no other – is puzzled by his situation.

He is alive.

Apparently.

Evidently.

Yet he has no recollection of how he got here, how he came to be in this…

Predicament?

Situation.

And he is… changed.

This is not his body.

His body is elsewhere.

He is aware of it, distant, separate, yet not entirely detached.

And this sea that he is in, it is the real sea, but also…

… not.

The sky is too clear. Too close above his head. There appears to be no sun in the sky. Everywhere he looks, it is…

… just the sky.


Time is nothing here.


The sea shines like wet slate. Numbing slabs of sea-swell hammock and baulk him. He rides among the bruising hollows and feels the touch of salt water pouring over his face, and when he runs his fingers through it, it is like stroking cool hair. Fulmars scout the wave valleys and terns squall overhead. He sees the faint distant smudge of a cliff shoulder to the north, and the low beach-line curving away southwards into mist and indeterminacy. He sees the shore of Cold Amber Strand. He can see it, but he can’t reach it. He lacks the strength to swim so far. It doesn’t matter.


Time is nothing here.


His head is wide open – there is a hole in it – the sea is pouring in – and the fluid from inside him is seeping out, pluming away into the wider water. Part of him is part of the sea. Part of the sea is taking its place. And then…


Time is nothing here.


The sea is slow and always. Days graze its surface and the sea’s skin rises and falls with the barely perceptible pulse of the tide. He can feel the unseen pull of the moons: a gentle lunar gravity tugging at his hair and palpating with infinite slowness the ventricular walls of his heart. But days and nights touch only the thinnest surface of the sea, and all the while, below the surface, beneath the intricate, flashy caul, there is darkness: coiling and shouldering layers inhabited by immense, deathless, barrelling movers.


Time is nothing here.


He imagines he is already sinking. The abyssal deeps open below him like a throat. He dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him.

As he descends the light fails. Layer by layer the spectrum is sucked dry of colour: first the reds fade and the world turns green, then the yellows give up the ghost and the world turns blue, and then… nothing, only the fuliginous darker than dark, the total absence of sight.

The waters are deep. It takes only seconds to leave the light behind, but the descent will be many hours. Every ten yards of depth adds the weight of another atmosphere to the column of water pressing on his body. He imagines going down. Fifty atmospheres. A hundred. A thousand. More. More. The parts of his strange new body which contain air begin to rupture under the weight. Long before he reaches the bottom, his face, his chest, his abdomen, implode. Fat compresses and hardens. The finer bones collapse. Broken rib ends burst out through the skin.

He imagines he hears himself speaking to the hard cold darkness.

‘You are the reply to my desire.’





67


Maroussia slept late the next morning, and woke in the giant’s isba. It smelled of woodsmoke, lamp-oil and the smoked fish that hung in rows from the rafters. Rafters which, now that she looked at them up there in the shadow, weren’t the branches of trees as she had thought, but salt-bleached and smoke-browned whale bones.

The isba was twice as tall as a human would make it, but it felt warm and intimate, lit with fish-oil lamps and firelight from the open stove. Although it was morning outside, inside was all shadow and quiet. The whale-skeleton frame was covered with skins and bark, the gaps caulked with moss and pitch. Iron boiling-pots and wooden chests stood along the sides. From the middle of the floor rose a thick pillar of ancient-looking wood, its base buried in the compacted earth. Every inch of it was carved with the eyes and claws and heads of animals – elk, horses, wolves, seals – their teeth bared in anger or defiance – and inscribed with what looked like words in a strange angular alphabet. The pillar seemed meant to ward off some threat, some doom that was waiting its chance. What kind of thing was it, out here in the marsh, that a giant would be afraid of?

The stove was made of iron, large and elaborate, with panels of white and blue tiles. It was the kind that had a place for a bed on the top of it. Lom lay on it now, breathing quietly. Inert.

Maroussia remembered the night before only in snatches and fragments. She had been too cold. Too tired. Too hungry. The giant had given her food, a broth from his simmering-pot. Fish, samphire, berries. Food that tasted of the river and the sea and wide open spaces. And then he’d left her and gone out into the night and she had slept. When she woke, the morning was half gone, and she was alone with Lom.

She stood up stiffly and crossed the floor to look at him. The stove was taller than her but his face, roughened with a growth of reddish stubble, was near the edge and turned towards her. He wasn’t sleeping, he was… gone. But his body breathed and seemed to be repairing itself. The giant had tended to the wound in the front of his head and left it bound in a cloth soaked with an infusion of bark and dried leaves. Now that she was close to him, the clean, bitter scent cut through the fish-and-smoky fug in the hut.

She had lain alongside him in the cold of the boat, the warmth of their bodies nurturing each other, keeping each other alive. That meant something. That changed something. She knew the smell of his body close up, the smell of his hair and skin, the feel of his warmth. She touched his face. Despite the stove and the furs he felt cool and damp, like a pebble picked up from a stream.

Wake up. Please wake up. We can’t stay here.

She needed to go. She had something to do. It was a weight. A momentum. A push. What she needed to find was somewhere in the city. Vishnik had found the Pollandore. She was certain now, that’s what he’d meant to tell her. He had died and hadn’t told her where. Yet surely it would be in Mirgorod, if he had found it. She needed to get back there.

The giant came in, pushing his way between the skins across the entrance gap. His bulk filled the space naturally and made her feel that humans were small.

‘Has the sleeper woken?’ he said.

‘No. No, he hasn’t.’

The giant walked with a surprisingly soft and quiet tread across to where Lom lay, and looked down on him in silence. He placed a huge hand on the small head and put his huge face near Lom’s small mouth, as if he were inhaling his breath, which – she realised – he was.

‘He has been like this all morning?’

‘Yes. He hasn’t changed.’

The giant went to a wooden chest and took out something wrapped in dark cloth, which, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the stove, he unwrapped and began to eat. It looked like a piece of meat, except that it was dark grey, soft and satiny, with a strange oily sheen. He tore off a large chunk with his teeth and chewed it, his head on one side, his massive jaws working like a dog’s, up and down.

‘Does anyone else live out here?’ Maroussia asked. ‘In the marshes, I mean. I didn’t see any sign… when we were coming here. It all seemed so empty. Are there villages?’

‘Why?’

‘I was wondering where the clothes came from.’ He had found dry clothes for her, not city clothes but leggings and a woven shirt. Soft leather boots.

‘There are no humans here now. There used to be a village on the smaller lake.’ He waved his arm vaguely in no particular direction.

‘You’ve been kind to us,’ she said.

‘The rivers brought you. Why would I not be kind?’

‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘My name is Aino-Suvantamoinen, and yours is Maroussia Shaumian, and you are important.’

‘What do you mean? How do you know my name.’

‘You are someone who makes things happen. Different futures are trying to become. You have something to do, and what you choose will matter.’

She stared at him. ‘You know?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’

The giant made a movement of his hand. ‘I know,’ he said,‘some things.’

‘You know where it is?’

‘It was taken. Long ago.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘That I do not know.’

‘I have to find it,’ said Maroussia. ‘I can’t stay here. Time is running out.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to do when I find it. I don’t understand.’

‘Understanding is not the most important thing. Understanding never is. Doing is what matters.’

The giant turned away and sat down in a corner to concentrate on his meat, as if he had said all he would say. It was like talking to a thinking tree, or a hill, or the grass, or the rain.

‘What exactly is that stuff you’re eating?’ said Maroussia.

‘Old meat,’ the giant said. ‘The marsh preserves. Trees come up whole after a thousand years. This meat… I put it in, I leave it, I find it again. It tastes good.’

‘What kind of meat?’

He held the chunk at arm’s length, turned it round, inspected it.

‘No idea.’ He took another bite. Then he laid it aside and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let us walk.’

Maroussia looked at Lom, sleeping on the stove.

‘What about him?’ she said. ‘Will he be all right on his own?’

‘No harm will come today.’


Maroussia walked in silence beside the giant. The floods had receded during the night, revealing a wide alluvial land, a cross-hatch of creeks and channels punctuated by rocky outcrops, islands and narrow spits of ground. Reed beds. Salt marsh. Sea lavender and samphire. Withy, carr and fen. There were stretches of water, bright and dark as rippled steel. Long strips of pale brown sand, crested with lurid, too-green, moss-coloured grass. Reaches of soft, satiny mud. Wildfowl were picking and probing their way out on the mud. Maroussia knew their names: she had watched them rummaging on the muddy riverbanks near her home. Curlew, plover, godwit, redshank, phalarope. The quiet progress of geese at the eelgrass. A kestrel sidled across the sky: a slide, a pause, a flicker of wings; slide, pause, flicker of wings.

This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood-ash and fallen leaves.

‘This is a beautiful place,’ Maroussia said. ‘It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we’re so near to the city. I didn’t know. I never came this far.’

‘It will be winter soon,’ the giant said. ‘Winters are cold here. The birds are preparing to leave. In winter the snow will lie here as deep as you are tall. The water freezes. Only the creatures that know how to freeze along with it and the ones who make tunnels beneath the snow can live here then.’

‘But it’s not so cold in Mirgorod,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s only a few versts away.’

‘No. It is colder here.’

‘What do you do when the winter comes?’ said Maroussia.

‘When the ditches freeze and the marshes go under the snow I will sleep. It will be soon.’

‘You sleep through the winter like a bear? The giants in Mirgorod don’t do that.’

‘Their employers do not permit it. They are required to work through the year, though it shortens their lives.’

The giant fell silent and walked on. Maroussia began to notice signs of labour. The management of the land and water. Heaps of rotting vegetation piled alongside recently cleared dikes. Saltings, drained ground, coppiced trees. Much of it looked ancient, abandoned and crumbling: blackened stumps of rotting post and plank, relics of broken staithes and groynes, abandoned fish traps. The giant paused from time to time to study the water levels and look about him, his great head cocked to one side, sniffing the salt air. Sometimes he would adjust the setting of some heavy mechanism of wood and iron, a winch or a lock or a sluice gate.

They stopped on the brink of a deep, fast-flowing ditch. The giant stared into the brown frothing surge that forced its way across a weir.

‘The flood is going down,’ the giant said. ‘Every time the floods come now, the city builds its stone banks higher. But that is not the way. The water has to go somewhere. If you set yourself against it, the water will find a way, every time.’ He stooped for a moment to work a windlass that Maroussia hadn’t noticed among the tall grass. ‘I tried to tell them,’ the giant continued when he had done his work. ‘When they were building the city, I tried to tell them they were using too much stone. They made everything too hard and too tight. You have to leave places for the water to go. But I couldn’t make them listen. Even their heads were made of stone.’

‘You remember Mirgorod being built?’

‘I was younger then. I thought I could explain to them, and if I did, then they would listen. They tried to drive me out, and every so often even now they try again.’ He grinned, showing big square teeth. Incisors like slabs of pebble. Sharp bearish canines. ‘I let them lose themselves.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The marshes are bigger than you think, and different every day. Every tide brings shift and change. All possible marshes are here.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You do.’

Maroussia hesitated. ‘If you remember the city when it was being built—’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘—then you would remember the time before? You remember the Pollandore?’

‘You don’t need to remember what is still here.’

Maroussia hesitated.

‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to leave Vissarion. He helped me.’

‘You should not leave him,’ said the giant. ‘He is important too.’

‘What do you mean?’

The giant stopped and looked down at her.

‘I don’t know, and neither does he. But it is on the river, and the rain likes him. That’s enough.’

‘But what if he never wakes up?’ said Maroussia. ‘Or he wakes up but he isn’t… right. He almost drowned, and there’s that hole, that terrible hole, in his head.’

‘He is not hurt,’ said the giant. ‘At least, his body is not. But he doesn’t know how to come back.’

‘I don’t understand that either.’

‘I can fetch him back, if you want me to. Tonight. After dark. When the day is over. Your choice.’

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it.’





68


Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom lies face down, floating on the glass roof of the sea. He presses his face against the water as if it were a pane of glass. Looking down into clarity. A landscape unrolls beneath him.


Time is nothing here.


This is the drowned, memorious land. Mammoths’ teeth, the bones of bear and aurochs and the antlers of great elk litter the sea’s bed. The salt-dark leaf mould of drowned forests. It is a woodland place. Lom sees the sparrowhawk on the oak’s shoulder and he sees the bivalves browsing the soft stump’s pickled meat. Sea beasts move across the floor of it. Their unhurried footfalls detonate quiet puffballs of silt as they go, slow without heaviness, shoving aside fallen branches, truffling for egg-purse, flatworm and urchin, their eyes blackened like sea beans and gleaming in the half-light.


Time is nothing here.


Except… something touches him. The merest graze of an eye in passing. An alien gaze, cold and empty, vaster far than the sea, star-speckled. It passes away from him.

And pauses.

And flicks back.

And takes him in its grip.


Lom closes himself up like a fist, like a stone in the sea, like an anemone clenching close its crop of arms, like a hermit crab hunching into its shell. He wants to be small. Negligible. He wants to pull himself tight inside and withdraw or sink out of sight. But it is hopeless. He knows the touch of the angel’s eye for what it is.


Archangel begins to prise him open for a closer look.


No! Lom dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him. He is strong. Very strong. Stronger than he had ever known. Lom slips with a writhing kick out of the angel’s grasp. He hears, very faint and far away, the yell of its anger. And feels its fear.


In his room on the Ring Wharf, Josef Kantor felt Archangel rip a hole in his mind and step inside. Archangel’s voice filled his head. The cold immensity separating stars. He fell.

THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY LIVE!

KILL THE TRAVELLERS! DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!

As soon as he was able to stand and wipe the spittle from his face and stem the blood that was spilling from his nose, Kantor went to find a telephone. He needed to speak to Chazia.





69


Night came, a thick and starless black. Inside the isba the smoke from the burning bog-oak in the stove and the fumes from the boiling-pot made Maroussia’s head swim. Afraid she would be sick, she tried to retreat into the shadows at the edge of the room and would have squatted there, watching, but the noises from outside drove her back. There were voices outside in the dark, voices that barked and growled and called like birds and argued in unintelligible words. The skin covering of the isba shook as if something was pounding on it and tugging at the door covering. She crawled back towards the centre of the room and crouched as near to the iron stove as she could get. Blue fire was burning hot and hard as a steam-engine’s firebox, roaring heat into the air.

‘Do not be alarmed by anything you see or hear,’ Aino-Suvantamoinen had said. ‘But do not touch me. And do not go outside.’

Yet now he lay on the floor, immense, like a felled bull. His arms and legs trembled as if he was having a fit: their shaking rattled and clattered the antlers, vertebrae, pieces of amber and holed stones tied to his coat. The hood of the coat hid his face, but she could still see his eyes. They were open, but showing white only, as sightless and chalky as seashells. He’d put a piece of leather between his teeth, and now his mouth dripped spittle as he chewed and ground on it with an unconscious concentration that seemed like blank rage.

Lom lay on his back in the centre of the floor.

‘No matter how bad it gets,’ the giant had said, ‘you can do nothing. Understand? Nothing. Whatever happens, do nothing. and do not touch me.’ Yet he had been like this – collapsed, growling, fitting – for… how long now? Half an hour? An hour?

The wall of the isba bulged inward, as if some heavy creature outside had thrown itself against it. There was a screech of anger. Surely whatever was outside would break in soon. The carvings on the central pillar flickered in the fierce firelight as if they were alive and moving.

Five minutes. Five more minutes, and if nothing has changed…


Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom is lying on his back in the sea, looking up into the night sky. He feels the gentle pull of the moons in his belly. All around him the sea glows with a gentle phosphorescence. A fringe of luminousness borders his body. Light trickles down his arms when he holds them in front of his face.


The hole in the front of his head is open to the starlight. A little cup of phosphorescence has gathered there. So much has flowed in, and so much flowed out, washing across the folds of his cerebral cortex. He is merging with the sea. His pulse is the endless passing of waves. His inward darkness is the darkness of the deep ocean.


Time is nothing here.


He hears the sound of splashing. Rhythmical. Sweep, sweep, through the waves. It is a sound he remembers, but he cannot place it now. The drift of water through the kelp forests below him is more interesting.


Idly, with the last remains of merely human curiosity, he turns to look. Something very large and human-shaped, an outline darker than the sky, a starless mass against the stars, is wading towards him. That is what the sound is. Legs. Wading through water. Did he not once do such a thing himself?


The wading person is growing larger and larger as he comes closer. He is watching. He has a purpose. His purpose is to bring Lom back.


But Lom doesn’t want to go back.


He gathers the weight of the sea and throws it against the giant in immense curling waves that crash against him. Lom fills the waves with the teeth and jaws of eels and the stings of rays. He tangles the giant’s feet in ropes of weed. The giant stumbles and the undertow of the waves pulls at him, dragging him towards the edge of the deep trench that opens and swallows him.


The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen feels the viciousness of the sea’s antagonism. Ropes of water form within the water and wrap themselves around his arms and legs, tugging him down towards the pit that is opening beneath him. Bands of iron water squeeze his ribcage, forcing the breath from his lungs. Ice-cold water-fingers grip his face, hooking claws into his nostrils, stabbing into his ears with water-needles, gouging his eyes, tearing at the lids. This isn’t how it is meant to be. The man he is trying to bring home is fighting him. He’s too strong. All the futures in which he will rescue this man and return home safe are fading and dying one by one. Something is putting them out like lamps.

I will drown here, and with me the marsh will fail.

With one last push of effort he begins to swim for the surface.

Pulling the water-fingers from his face he peers up and sees the dim light above him, the greenish star in the shape of a man, glowing dimly. It is not far. The giant kicks and hauls himself towards it. The seawater clamps itself about him, heavy and chill as liquid iron, squeezing like a fist. He fights it, dragging himself upwards out of the ocean pit. But it is too far. He is tiring. He cannot reach it. The thread of river-water that links him to his body in the isba is failing, and when it breaks he will be lost.

Desperately he lets go of a part of himself and sends it back up the river-thread, squirming and writhing for home like a salmon against the stream. The silver thought-salmon flickers its tail and disappears into the dimming green.


Maroussia was kneeling over the still body of the giant, her ear against his mouth. He was trying to say something.

‘Wake him… wake the man… call him back… do it… now’

The hoarse whisper faded. The giant’s face collapsed.

Maroussia lurched across to where Lom was lying and took his face in her hands, turning it towards her.

‘Vissarion!’ She was shouting to be heard. The voices outside in the night were screeching and yammering, hurling themselves against the walls of the isba. ‘Vissarion! It’s Maroussia! Listen to me! You have to wake up now! Oh, you have to. Please.’


Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom hears a voice calling, faint above the noise of the sea and very far away. He opens his eyes and sees against the shadows of the sky a face he knows, a familiar face, a face with a name he half-remembers, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him, like the moon made whole. He lifts his arm towards it, and as he does so he feels a tremendous blow against his back, lifting him up out of the water, and a huge fist seizes him by the neck and begins to pull him back towards the shore.





70


Lom woke in the giant Aino-Suvantamoinen’s isba, aware of the warmth and the fire and the quiet shadows and the giant sitting near him, waiting, patient, large and solid. Lom knew where he was. Completely. He felt the moving water nearby, and grass, and trees, and the sifting satiny mud. The sea, some distance off, was still the sea, and the river that surged towards it was a great speaking mouth. The air around him was a tangible flowing thing, freighted with a thousand scents and drifting pheromone clouds, just as the space between the stars was filled with light and forces passing though. Everything was spilling myth, everything was soaked in truth-dream.

‘You are awake,’ said Aino-Suvantamoinen gently. His voice was slow and strong and estuarial.

‘This will fade,’ said Lom. ‘Won’t it? This will not last. Will it? Will it?’

He tried to raised his head from the leather pillow.

‘No,’ said the giant, ‘this feeling that you have now will not last. But it will not altogether fade. There is no going back to the way you were before.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You need to rest.’

‘I hurt you, didn’t I? I didn’t want to come back, and I hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I almost killed you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault. You were stronger than I thought. You did not know.’

‘No.’

‘I bear you no grudge. ‘

‘But you are hurt.’

‘Only tired now. I will recover. But I need to sleep. it will be winter soon.’

Lom tried to push the covers back and sit up.

‘You can’t sleep yet,’ he said. ‘You know that. There is something wrong. There’s something coming. It’s very close.’

‘Ah. You felt that?’


When the giant left him, Lom went outside to sit by himself some distance from the isba, on a stump of wood. The stiffness of his bruises was scarcely noticeable. He touched his forehead tentatively. In the centre of it, just above the eyebrows, he found a small and roughly round hole in the bone of his skull, like a third eye socket. It had a fine, smooth covering of new skin, slightly puckered at the edge. With his fingertip he felt the fluttering of a pulse.

The world he had seen in all its oceanic myth-ridden fullness was already diminishing, but still he smelled the dampness in the air, the woodsmoke, and heard the flow of water in the creek, and he knew what they meant. It was all traces and memories now, a faint trembling of presences: possibilities almost out of reach. But still real. Still there. The plug in his head was gone, and he was alive.

The world and everything in it, everything that is and was and will be, was the unfolding story of itself, and every separate thing in the world – every particle of rock and air and light, every life, every thought and every event – was also a story, its own story, the story of everything becoming more like itself and less like anything else. The might-be becoming the is. The winter moths on their pheromone trails, intent on love and flight, were heroes. Himself, Maroussia, Vishnik, Aino-Suvantamoinen, they were all like that, or could be: living out the bright significant stories of their own lives, mythic, important.

But Vishnik was dead. Vishnik, what was left of him, mutilated and killed, his ruined body laid out naked on the couch; Chazia had done that.

Lom remembered Chazia and Kantor bending over him in the interrogation room – Chazia’s knife, Kantor’s indifferent finger poking at his opened brain. It was all coming back, riding a hot rushing tide of anger. He could not stay here, in this timeless watery place. He had to do something. He had to go back.

And then – only then – the question occurred to him. The last thing he remembered, vaguely, a blur, was throwing himself from the bridge into the flooding Mir. What had happened to him after he fell? How had he come to be here? He didn’t know.





71


Elsewhere – far away, but not so far – in an empty side room in the Lodka, Lakoba Petrov was preparing himself for his one great moment. He had obtained all he needed – all the materials for his new, wonderful art – from Josef Kantor, impresario of destruction. And now the time was almost come for the performance.

From a canvas holdall Petrov extracted three belts of dynamite and nails, enwrapped his person with them, buckled the straps. Also from the canvas holdall he drew forth a capacious overcoat of dark wool, threaded the detonator cords through the sleeves so he could grip their terminations in his palms, and put on the coat to drape and obscure his death-belted torso.

Petrov did what he did with care. Fully. With absolute clarity and certainty of purpose. Every movement a sacrament. Every breath numbered. Rendered aesthetic. Invested with ritual luminance.

When he tugged the detonators, nails would fly outwards from him explosively. Omnidirectional. Flying in the expulsive, expanding, centrifugal cloud of his own torn and vaporised flesh. He would be the heart of the iron sunburst. Going nova.

And so I am become the unimaginable zero of form. The artist becomes the art. Total creation. Without compromise. Without hesitation. Without meaning, being only and completely what it is. The gap between artist and work obliterated.

His own unneeded coat he closed up in precise folds and set in the middle of the empty floor. Adjacent to this he placed the now-empty canvas holdall.

They would be found so. The only extant work of the Petrovist Destructive School: members, one.

A thought struck him. Awkwardly, on account of the bulk of the explosive girdles, he bent to withdraw items from his former coat. A tube of paint. A piece of polished reflective tin to use as a mirror. One final time, with the facility that came with practice, he inscribed his forehead. And then, with an unexpected flourish, one last tweak of originality, he unbuttoned his shirt and wrote on his bare, white, fleshless, hairless (because shaven) upper chest, the same two splendid words.

I, Petrov.

He was calm. He was prepared. All was ready.


At the other end of the same long corridor as the room in which Petrov prepared himself, in a much larger chamber, there was a large gathering of persons of importance. The Annual Council of the Vlast Committee on Peoples. Josef Kantor was there, thanks to the arrangements of Lavrentina Chazia. He stood anonymously at the back of the room, one more nondescript functionary among many, watching. Waiting for what would come. For what he knew would happen. His toothache, which had not troubled him for weeks, was back, and he welcomed it, prodding at the hurt again with his tongue as he examined the scene.

The large room was dominated by one long narrow heavy table of inlaid wood. A line of electric chandeliers hung low above it like frosted glittering clusters on a vine, and creamy fluted columns made an arcade along one side, where secretaries sat at individual desks with typewriters. For all its spaciousness the room was warm, and filled with muted purposeful talk. The places at the table were occupied by men in suits and full-dress uniforms, absorbed in their work, assured of their importance and the significance of what they did.

On the far wall from where Kantor stood hung a huge painting of the Novozhd, life size and standing alone in an extensive rolling late-summer landscape. Sunlight splashed across his face, picking out his plush moustache and the smile-lines creasing his cheeks, while behind him the country of the dominions unrolled: harvest-ready fields crossed by the sleek length of express trains, tall factory chimneys blooming rosy streamers of smoke against the horizon, the distant glittering sea – the happy land at its purposeful labours.

And beneath the portrait, halfway down one side of the table, sat the Novozhd himself, in his familiar collarless white tunic, drinking coffee from a small cup.

There was a shout from across the room.

‘Hey! You! Who are you?’

Kantor looked across to see what was going on. It was Petrov. He was pushing past flustered functionaries, his shaven head moving among them like a white stone. He was wearing an oddly bulky greatcoat and there were fresh scarlet markings on his face. He was right on time. Kantor stepped back towards the wall. He needed to be as far away from the Novozhd as possible.

Petrov paused and surveyed the room for a moment.

The militia who lined the walls, watchful, were not approaching him. Those nearest him were retreating. Giving him room. They were Chazia’s Iron Guard, every one: they would not interfere.

A diplomat near Kantor took a step forward. ‘What is that man doing—?’ he began.

‘Stay where you are!’ hissed Kantor. The diplomat looked at him, surprised, and seemed about to say something else. Kantor ignored him.

Petrov had seen the Novozhd, who had risen from his seat, cup in hand.

High functionaries were murmuring in growing alarm. A stenographer was shouting. There was rising panic in her voice. ‘Someone stop him!’

Petrov moved towards the Novozhd, blank-faced and purposeful.

The ambassador from the Archipelago was on her feet, trying to push through a group of Vlast diplomatists who did not know what was happening and would not make way. She was shouting at the guards: ‘Why won’t you do something!’ But the guards were moving away, as Kantor knew they would.

Petrov made inexorable progress through the crowd. When he got near the Novozhd, his arms stretched out as if to embrace him.

And the explosion came. A muted, ordinary detonation. A flash. A matter-of-fact thump of destruction. A stench. The crash of a chandelier on the table. Silence. More silence. Ringing in Kantor’s ears.

Then the voices began: not screams – not shouts of anger – just a low inarticulate collective moan, a sighing of dismay. Only later did the keening begin, as the injured began to realise the awful permanent ruination of their ruptured bodies.


Pushing through the crowd, stepping over the dead and dying, Kantor found himself looking down at the raw, meaty remnants of the Novozhd, and Lakoba Petrov fallen across him like a protective friend. Petrov’s head and arms were gone, and some great reptilian predator had taken a large bite of flesh from his side. The Novozhd, dead, was staring open-mouthed at the ceiling that was spattered with his own blood and chunks of his own flesh. His moustache, Kantor noticed, was gone.

Someone touched his arm, and Kantor spun round. He knew the guards would not bother him, but there was always the possibility. But it was only Chazia.

She leaned forward intimately, speaking quietly under the din and panic of the room. Her blotched fox-face too close to his.

‘Good, Josef,’ she said. ‘Very good.’

Kantor took a step back from her in distaste. There was too much of angels about her. It was like a stink. She was rank with it.

‘I do my part, Lavrentina. You do yours. What about the girl, and Krogh’s man? Lom?’

‘That’s in hand,’ said Chazia. ‘It is in hand. Though I don’t understand why you set so much store—’

Kantor glared at her.

‘I mean,’ Chazia continued, ‘after today—’

‘The angel needs them dead, Lavrentina,’ Kantor heard himself say, and struggled to keep the self-disgust out of his voice. It uses me like a puppet. A doll. A servant. He was getting tired of the angel. More than tired. He feared and hated it. The situation was becoming intolerable.

I am bigger than this angel. I will make it fear me and I will kill it. I will find a way. I have killed the Novozhd and I will kill the angel. Kill Chazia too.

But now was not the time. He needed to prepare. He needed to focus on the future. Only the future mattered.

‘Just get rid of them,’ he said. ‘Lom and the girl. Don’t foul it up again.’

‘I told you,’ said Chazia. ‘It’s already in hand.’