Part IV
Chapter Eleven
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.
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
But together!
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.
5
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.’
6
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.’
7
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.
8
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.
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.
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
But together!
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.
5
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.’
6
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.’
7
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.
8
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.
Chapter Twelve
Nothing that lives and dies ever has a beginning, nor does it ever end in death and annihilation. There is only a mixing, followed by the separating-out of what was mixed: and these mixings and unmixings are what people call beginnings and ends.
1
Kantor-in-mudjhik runs through the endless forest, tireless, exultant and strong. The continental Vlast is behind him. He has run it, ocean to trees, without a pause.
Under the trees he has heard the voice of Archangel talking and they have sealed the deal.
I will give you body after body, says Archangel, a chain of human bodies without end, vessels for my champion son. Worthy and valid strength of my strength, bring me out of the forest and for you I will break down the doors and shatter the doorposts. For you I will raise up the dead to consume the living. I will give you armies without end, and you will carry me, speaking my voice, across the stars.
Josef Kantor in his mudjhik body likes the sound of that.
I am nobody’s son, he says, but I will be a brother.
It’s not enough, but it will do for now.
2
Into the forest old beyond guessing, the first place, primordial, primeval, primal, the unremembered home, fair winds carried them day after day, deeper and deeper, up the river against the stream. Trees stood silently, lining the banks, fading away in every direction into twilight and indistinction.
‘How will we find her?’ said Kamilova. ‘I mean Maroussia?’
‘We keep going in,’ said Lom, ‘and she will come to us.’
Things that find their way into the forest grow and change. They grow taller, shorter, thinner, fatter; they change colour. Each thing grows out into its true shape and becomes more itself. A dog may become more wolf-like. It unfolds like a fern.
In the forest you can’t see far or travel fast; detachment and analysis fail; you can’t see the wood for the trees. Aurochsen and wisent, woolly rhinoceros, great elk and giant sloth browse among the leaves, and the corpses of those killed in great and terrible massacres are buried under shallow earth. The labyrinth of trees is filled with travelling shadows and all the monsters of the mind. In the forest, things long thought dead may be alive and the hunter become the prey. Green pools glimmer in the shade. More is possible here.
It is hard enough to get in, but leaving, that is the labour, that is the task. The forest is receding, back into its own world. Ancient silences are withdrawing like the tide.
Nights they slept out under blankets on the deck boards of the Heron. Kamilova cut thorns to make a brake on the bank against wolves and left a slow fire burning.
‘If a big cat comes, set the thorns alight,’ she said.
‘Lynx is worse than wolf?’ said Lom.
‘Not lynx,’ said Kamilova. ‘Bigger than lynx, much bigger. Heavy as a horse, and teeth to snap your spine.’
Lom lay awake and heard the grumbling of predators in the dark, but nothing troubled them.
‘I don’t think wolves hunt in the night,’ he said.
‘You want to bet your skin on that?’
‘No.’
Kamilova took the pan of stewed rosehips off the fire and set it in the grass. Pulled her knife from her belt and wiped it carefully clean. Unwrapped the axe and did the same, and sharpened the blades of both to a clean fineness with her stone. By the time she’d done, the stewed hips were cool enough. She picked a handful out of the pan and squeezed the juices back in. Lom watched the bright redness dribble between her fingers. She threw the seed-filled pulp away and scooped another handful, working it between her palms to release as much as possible of the blood-warm liquid. By the time she’d picked the last few softened fruits out of the liquid and pressed them between finger and thumb she had the pan half-full of rich rose liquor.
‘Here,’ she said and passed the pan to Lom.
He took a sip. Without honey it was bitter enough to roughen the roof of his mouth, but it was good.
‘I know this place,’ she said, ‘but there were people here then, and fewer wolves. Everyone’s gone, but there’s somewhere nearby I’d like to see again. I’ll take you there’
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Tomorrow.’
Morning came quiet and cold, suppressed under low featureless skies. A drab unsettling breeze stirred brittle leaves. The forest felt shabby and grey. Snares and fish traps laid the evening before held nothing. Lom ate some berries and drank a little of the sour red rose-drink. It left him no less hungry.
The absence of Maroussia nagged at him. Her failure to come. Since they’d passed through the gap in the hills he’d felt nothing of her. Morning succeeded morning, timeless and inconsequential: a perpetual repetition of movement without progress against the narrowing river that always tried to push them back and out. The resinous taste of the air, the hungry excitement of opening up into the possibilities of the forest, was fading. Immensity and endlessness were always and everywhere the same, and he felt small and ordinary and lost. He was growing accustomed to the inexhaustible sameness of trees, and knew that he was somehow failing.
He crouched among fallen leaves, blotched and parchment-yellow and fragile, like dry pages scattered from an ageing and spine-cracked book, disordered out of all meaning. He picked up crumbling handfuls and sifted them, dealing them out like faceless cards in a game he couldn’t play, returning leaves to the infinite mat of fallen leaves, every one different and all of them the same, abundant beyond all counting, further in and further on forever, abundant to the point of absurdity. Autumn was coming in the interminable forest and there would be no numbering of the trees.
He pushed his hands down, digging through the covering of dry leaves into darkening dampness and rot and the raw deep earth beneath. The cool fungal smell. Mycelium. Earthworm. Shining blackened twig fragment and softening pieces of bark. Truffle-scented leaf rot. Fine tangled clumps of hair-like root.
Lom closed his eyes and breathed.
Trunks of trees rise separately out of the earth and each stands apart from its neighbours. We overvalue sight. In the rich dark earth the roots of all the trees of the forest are intertwined. Knotted filaments and root fibres grow around and through each other, twist each other about, intertangled and nodal, meshed and joined with furtive fungal threads, digging down deeper than the trees grow tall. Slow exchange and interchange of mineral currency. Burrowing capacitors and conductors of gentle dark electric flux and spark. You can’t say one tree ends and the next begins; it’s all one sentient wakeful centreless tree and it lives underground.
Lom listened to the circuitry of the earth. He felt the living angel getting stronger. The first weakening of hope. A cruel thing coming closer and the rumourous growth of fear. There was a hurt in the forest and a wound in the world. He missed Maroussia and wished she would come.
3
Josef Kantor embodied in mudjhik reaches the lower slopes of the Archangel hill. The ground he stands on is burning with cool fire, thrilling to the touch, and the immense body of the living angel rises in front of him, higher, far higher, than he had imagined. Hundreds of feet into the sky. Even hurt and weakened, grounded as it is, it is a thing of glowering power. It crackles with life. The mudjhik body loosens and grows light. It feeds. Archangel feeds Kantor and Kantor feeds Archangel, strength mixes with strength, distinctions blur.
Archangel separates several hundred chunks of himself and sends them into the sky to circle his top on flaggy wings. The coming of his prince deserves such glorious celebration.
4
Kamilova took Lom to see the place she knew. She was happy in the forest. This was where she could be who she was.
They approached through old earthworks and turf-covered stone dykes. Redoubts. Salients. Massive boulders that had been tumbled into place and now settled deep into the earth. Rooks chattered and flocked among thorn trees.
The full extent of the stronghold was invisible, immersed in trees, and it felt smaller than it was because the chambers were small. Intimate human scale. Inside was gloomy, rich with earth and stone and leaf and wood, and the river ran through it, in under the hill. The place was burrow, sett and warren. Tunnels extended into darkness, every direction and down.
Kamilova took and lit a tar-soaked torch. The flame burned slow and smoked.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This way.’
Distinctions between inside and outside, overground and underground, meant little. There were low halls with intricately carved ceilings and curving wooden walls, like the hulls of underground ships, polished and dark with age and hearth smoke, into which real living trees, their limbs and roots and branches, were interwoven and included. Chambers and passageways were floored with stone flags or compacted earth, leaf-carpeted. Older places were rotting and returning to the earth, moss and mushroom damp.
‘I’d thought there might be someone still here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Stupid, but I hoped it.’
Lom’s feeling of unease was growing.
‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s something not right.’
On the path back to where they had left the Heron they heard riders approaching. The footfall of horses. The clanking of bridles and gear. The scuffing of many feet through mud and forest litter. No voices. There was a quiet wind moving among the trees, but Lom could hear them coming.
‘Get out of sight,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
They crouched behind low thorn and briar. There was movement visible now through the trees.
Kamilova put her face next to his ear. ‘Did they see us?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pulled off his pack and crawled forward on his belly, turning on his side to squeeze between thorn-bush stems. A root in the ground dug into him. He felt the spike of it gouging into his flesh, dragging at him. It hurt. He eased himself slowly forward across it, his face pressed close to the earth. Thorns snagged in his hair and grazed the skin of his scalp. A strand of briar hooked itself across his back. He reached back to pull it away and inched himself forward until he could see the track. He scooped a lump of earth and moss and rubbed himself with it, smearing it on his forehead and round his eyes, working it into the stubble on his face. The scent of it was strong and sour in his nose. He was sweating despite the cold.
Kamilova squeezed up next to him. The sound of her ragged breathing. He didn’t look round.
There were three riders at the front, and men walking behind, strung out and silent. Lots of men, dirty and ill dressed. More riders followed, the horses dragging long heavy bundles wrapped in cloth. The bundles were heavy, deadweight, trailing furrow-paths through the leaves on the path. The horses pulled slowly against the weight.
The riders were bulky and hooded, soiled woollen cowls shrouding their faces, their heads heavy and too large. They rode alert, scanning the trees. Lom felt the pressure of their attention pass across him. It made him feel uneasy. Exposed. He inched his way cautiously backwards under the thorn.
‘Don’t move,’ Kamilova hissed in his ear. ‘There’s one behind us.’
Lom lay on his back, face turned up, looking into the close tangle of the leafless bush. Outriders scouting the trail. Fear made his heart struggle. He wanted to breathe clear air. He forced himself to lie still and wait. Let them pass.
Long after the last sound of their passing had gone, the two of them lay without speaking under the thorns. The touch of the riders’ eyeless gaze stayed with them, a taint breath, a foulness in the mind. They listened for any sign of more following or the scout returning, and when that purpose faded they still didn’t move.
‘What were they?’ said Kamilova. She didn’t look at him but stayed lying on her back, watching a spider moving slowly among the branches.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you feel…?’
‘Yes.’
‘That wasn’t… normal. That wasn’t right.’
‘No.’
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
‘We should go,’ she said at last. ‘We should move on.’
‘Yes.’
Stiff and cold, they picked up their packs and began to walk.
‘Perhaps we should stay off the track,’ she said. ‘There might be more coming.’
‘We have to get back to the boat,’ said Lom. ‘We have to keep going.’
It began to rain. Sheets of wind-driven icy water soaking their clothes. The noise of it was like an ocean in the trees. The track led them between shallow green pools, rain-churned and murky.
Lom didn’t hear the splashing charge of the bear-man over the noise of the rain. Didn’t smell it through the rain and the mud and the drench of the leaves. But he felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision that drove the air from his lungs, crunched the ribs in his chest and hurled him off the path into the water, crashing his spine against the trunk of a beech tree.
He could not raise his arms. He could not move his legs. The water came up to his waist. Propped against the slope of the tree root, he watched the grey-hooded figure turn and come back, wading towards him through the mud-swirled green pool. Its cowl was pulled back off its head.
Lom smelled the bear-man’s hot sour breath on his face, on his wide staring eyes. He saw deep into the dark red mouth as its jaws widened to clamp on his face. The mouth reeked of angel. He observed with detached and distant surprise that half its head was made of stone.
Lom punched the side of the half-stone head with closed-up forest air, boulder heavy and boulder-hard. A swinging fist of rain and air. The bear-weighted bear-muzzled skull jerked sideways, crushed and broken and dead in a sudden mess of blood and bone.
5
The bear-man, the angel rider of horse, opens his mouth to scream out the shock and outrageous surprise of his death, his death out of nowhere. He is instantaneously silenced. Cerebral cortex sprayed on the air like a smashed fruit.
But the screaming instant is heard.
Archangel, O Archangel all-surveying, connected by iron filaments of Archangel mind to all the doers of his will–all the absorbed living syllables through which he gives voice, all the soldiers in the army he is building for his brother in arms Josef Kantor–Archangel hears and feels the killing of the bear and knows it for what it is. It is familiar. Anomaly and threat.
And there is something else.
He has seen it now. Resolved out of endlessness and trees it has locality. The eye of his surveillance has pinned it, and this time it is close and he can reach it.
She shows herself and he has found her.
Everything comes together in the forest, and out in the forest hunting now is his racing engine, his destroyer, his fraternal champion and his pride.
Kill them all. Kill them quickly. Do it now.
Archangel calls and his champion runs them down.
6
‘They were riding for the angel,’ said Lom. ‘I think we’re coming closer to where it is.’
There was strain in Kamilova’s eyes. She was watching him warily again. There was always a separateness about her: a wordless watchfulness, a lonely, withheld and self-postponing patience, doing what she must and waiting for the dark times to go.
‘It was going to kill you,’ she said. ‘Then it was like its brain exploded.’
They were back at the Heron, and the rain had passed leaving watery afternoon sunshine. Lom had wiped the dark bear blood off his face and neck but still he felt unclean. The angel-residue in his own blood was strung out taut like wires in his veins again. He didn’t like Kamilova’s scrutiny and wanted to be alone.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said.
He followed a game trail up to the crest of a low slope and looked down on dark green water. The trail took him down to the edge of it, a stillness fringed on the far side with dense bramble. A fallen tree dipped a leafless crown and branches like arms into the mystery of the pool. Goosander gave muted echoless mews. Lom took off his rain-damp clothes and waded out. The water, cold against his shins, was moss-coloured, icy, opaque. He felt the thick cool of silt sliding between his toes and up over his feet. It felt like darkness.
After a few steps the lake bottom fell away steeply and he slipped, half-falling and half-choosing, into a sudden clumsy dive. The water closed over his head. How deep it might be he had no idea and didn’t care. Bands of iron cold tightened round his skull and bruised ribs, squeezing out breath. He opened his eyes on nothing but pale thickened green light.
Floundering to the surface he swam with cramped clumsy strokes, arms and legs working through the cold. Broken twigs and fallen leaves littered the surface: he nosed his way through.
Once the first shock of the chill subsided, he immersed himself in the wild forgetful freedom of swimming in the forest, washing the sourness of killing and angel from his skin and hair. He took breath and dived for the bottom, reaching his arms down for it, but couldn’t touch it, and surfaced, gasping. Floating on his back he watching the canopy of trees turning slowly overhead against the heavy sky.
He swam until the icy bitter cold of the water returned to the attack, then hauled himself up onto the bole of the fallen tree and lay there for a long time, face down, the bark’s hard roughness against his skin, the air of the forest resting against his naked back. Lazy and reluctant to move he watched the pool opaque and green below him.
When he was dry he crawled back along the tree and swung himself down onto the bank, and she was there, her eyes brushing across him, bright and dark and happy.
Maroussia.
She put her hand against his chest, tracing the rise and hollow of his ribs. His hands and face were weather-brown, his body pale. The warmth of her fingers was on him. He smelled the sweetness of her breath.
‘Is it you?’ he said. ‘Not a shadow but you?’
‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Your skin is rough and hard and cool like stone.’
She looked into his face and opened her mouth a little, and he kissed her, his arms around her shoulders awkwardly, uncertain. She tasted like hedge berries, and she leaned in and pressed herself against him. The scent of woodsmoke and forest in her hair. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly gently.
‘Do you feel our child moving?’
For him it had been six years and more, but for her hardly any time at all.
7
It was late afternoon when Lom and Maroussia walked together back down the trail to the river where the Heron was moored.
Eligiya Kamilova received Maroussia with quiet reserve. She was generous and fine, but Lom could see her withdrawing. She was displaced again: having done her part she was finding herself edged to the margin of other people’s reunions and plans. Lom found himself feeling slightly sorry for her. It was guilt that he felt, he knew that–he’d brought her here, he’d used her as his guide–but it was the path she’d chosen. The solitary traveller. She’d wanted to come. The forest was her travelling place, but she’d come back and found it an emptier, harsher place than before.
Kamilova had caught a fish in her trap. A pike. She shared it with them. The smoke of the cooking fire hung about in the still air of evening, clinging and acrid. It stuck to their skin. The flesh of the pike tasted muddy and was full of fine sharp bones. Not pleasant eating. Maroussia said little and ate less.
The sliver of an ominous new hill had appeared above the trees in the west. It glowed a dull rust-red in the last of the westering sun, and above it dark shapes circled like flocks of flying birds.
‘I’m sorry, Eligiya,’ said Maroussia.
Kamilova frowned.
‘Sorry? Why?’
‘A bad thing is coming and I am bringing it here. I show myself now to draw it out before it gets any stronger. It may already be too strong.’
Maroussia turned to Lom. She was almost a stranger, fierce and strong. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark and wide. She was carrying his child. He hadn’t even begun to absorb the truth of that yet.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘Ready for what?’ said Lom, but he knew.
He’d felt it coming for some time: the pulsing rhythm of blood in his head was the rhythm of a heavy, pounding footfall crashing through the trees, growing louder and coming closer. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he felt the touch of the avid hunter’s tunnel-narrow gaze. He saw that even Kamilova was feeling it now: a faint drumbeat in the ground underfoot.
‘Kantor is coming,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. There is no time to prepare. It has to be now. Kantor is here.’
‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Oh. Yes. I see.’ A sudden sick lurch of fear. ‘OK. Well there’s no time like now.’
The mudjhik stepped out from the grey twilit birches, dull red and massive, balanced and avid and bulky and strangely beautiful and as tall as the trees it stood among. Its eyes–it had eyes–took them in with a gaze of confident relaxation and intelligence. Its expression was almost elegant and almost amused. It had grace as well as size and power. It was a perfectly realised angel-human giant of stone the colour of rust and blood and bruises, a new thing come into the world, and it had the face of a hundred million posters and portraits and photographs. The face on the statue at the top of the Rizhin Tower. The face of Papa Rizhin. The face of Josef Kantor.
And when it spoke it had the voice of Kantor too, warm and expressive, loud and clear among the trees. You heard it in your head and you heard it in your ear. Tall as the trees, it had a tongue to speak.
‘So it is you, my Lom, my investigator, my troublesome provincial mouse, my annoyance still and always,’ said the voice and face of Josef Kantor. He looked from Lom to Maroussia. ‘And here is the trivial bitch-girl not my daughter too, my betrayer’s bastard whelp, the spill of my cuckolding. You stink of the forest like your mother did. Both of you stink of it. Well the mother is dead and I will destroy the daughter also, and the man. You run and you wriggle and you hide, you sting me and skip away, but I have you cornered now.’
Kantor-in-mudjhik took a pace forward and spread its arms wide, arms with a suggestion of muscular flow. Fists opened flexing fingers. It had fingers. Thick stubby fingers. Josef Kantor’s hands.
‘I’m going to make quite a mess. Dog crows will clean it up.’
While the mudjhik Kantor spoke, Lom felt the dark electric pressure of angel senses passing across him, probing and examining. The touch of it, obscene and invasive, brought a surge of anger and hatred, a knot of iron and stone in his belly like a fist.
The mudjhik stopped mid-stride and gave a bark, a sudden laugh of surprised delight. Its blank pebble eyes glittered with warmth and pleasure.
‘And there is a child!’ the voice of Kantor said. ‘How perfect is that? Good. Let me kill it too. Let it all end now, and then I will take the blustering bastard angel down and be on my way out of these trees and get my world back. This triviality has gone on long enough.’
Lom felt surge after surge of anger and desperation and the wired strength of his own angel taint welling up, overbrimming and bursting walls inside him. The taste of iron, a hot suffusion in the blood. He was the violence. The smasher. The fist. He was defender. He was bear.
That was the secret of his birthing. Fathered by a man-bear in the deeps of the forest, he was the blade-toothed muzzle, the gaping tearing snout, the heavy carnivore with heavy paws to break necks. He felt himself unfurling into bear and killing, and let it come. Let it come! Barriers and frontiers dissolving, he was coming into the myth of himself, he was the man-bear with angel in his blood.
Lom felt the power of the angel substance tugging at his mind, a hungry undertow pulling and hauling him out of his body, dizzying and disorientating. The forest sliding sideways. Peripheral vision darkening. Connection with reality slipping away.
It wasn’t Kantor doing that, it was the thing his mudjhik body was made of.
Lom didn’t resist. He threw himself into the pulling of the current and went with it into the mudjhik, leaving his soft body fallen behind, taking the war onto Kantor’s own ground to kill him there.
All power is done at a price, but the price is not paid by those who wield it. It is paid by the victims. Kantor was human and he was not, and there was an end to it.
Lom in the mudjhik found Kantor there and fell on him, tearing and snarling, a blood-blind frontal killing assault of unwithstandable fierceness. To end it quickly before Kantor could react.
Lom hit a wall.
The wall of Kantor’s will. Impregnable will. A hardened vision that could not be changed but only broken, and it would not break. Lom could not break it.
The force of his attack skittered sideways, ineffectual, like cat’s claws against marble slab. It wasn’t a defeat. The fight didn’t even begin.
He felt the gross stubby fingers of Josef Kantor picking over his fallen, winded body. Ripping him open and rummaging among the intimate recesses of memory and desire. Kantor’s voice was a continual whisper in his dissolving mind.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen will happen. I am Josef Kantor, and I am the strongest and the hardest thing. I am the incoming tide of history. I am the thing you hate and fear and I am stronger than you. You fear me. I am Josef Kantor and I am inevitable. I am the smooth and uninterruptible voice. I always return. I am total. I am the force of one single purpose, the voice of the one idea that drives out all others. The uncertain dissolve before and forgive me as they die. I am the taker and I have killed you now.
Vissarion Lom wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong at all. He was dying. He could not breathe. He was dead.
And then Maroussia was in the mudjhik with him. Her quiet voice. A mist of evening rain.
The Pollandore was with her, inside her and outside her. Clean light and green air. Spilling all the possibilities of everything that could happen if Josef Kantor did not happen and there were no angels at all. The endless openness and extensibility of life without angels.
She followed him into death.
Come back with me. Come back.
8
Lom was in a beautiful simple place among northern trees. Pine and birch and spruce. The air was clear and fresh as ice and rain. Resinous dark green needles carpeting the earth. Time fell there in sudden windfall showers, pulses of night and day, evening and morning, always rising, always young, always new. There were broadleaf trees, and laughter was hidden in the leaves, out of sight, being the leaves.
Everything alive with wildness.
He could see trees growing: unfurling their leaves and spreading overhead, reaching towards each other with their branches until they met, a green ceiling of leaves, and all the light was a liquid fall, green as fire, that spilled through the leaves, enriching the widening silence.
Josef Kantor slammed together the walls of his will to crush Maroussia between them and extinguish her utterly, and it made no difference to her at all.
Lom saw Maroussia walking towards him, and a figure was walking beside her through the trees. It seemed at first to be walking on four legs like a deer, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because the dappled figure appeared to rise on its hind legs as it came and he saw that it was like a woman. A perfume of musk and warmth was in the air. Her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them. She was naked except that a nap of short smooth reddish-brown fur covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts and spread down across her brown rounded belly.
‘Who are you?’ said Lom. Engage in dialogue with your visions.
She smiled, and a long warm pink tongue flickered between thin white pointed teeth.
‘You mean, what am I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what I am.’
‘Tell me.’
She opened her mouth and spilled a flow of words, green foliage tumbling, heaped up, all at once. A chord of words.
I am the vixen in the rain and the hungry sow-badger suckling in the dark earth. I am salt on your tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood.
I am scent on the air at dusk, sweet as colostrum. I am the belly-warm womb of the she-otter in the river. I am the cub-warm sleep of the she-bear under the snow. I am the noctule, stooping upon moths with the weight of cubs in my belly.
I am the she-elk, ice-bearded, nudging my calf against the wind, and I am the mouse in the barn, suckling the blind pink buds of life. I am the sour breath of the stoat in the tunnel’s darkness and I am the vixen’s teeth in the neck of the hen.
I am the crunch of carrion and I am the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet milk. I am tired and cold and wet and full of cub. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I am plastered fur and soaking hair.
I am the abdomen swollen taut as a drum and full as an egg. I am the ceaseless desperate hunger of the starveling shrew. I am the sow’s lust for the boar, the hart’s delight in the pride of the hind.
I am the fucker’s laughing and the smell of droppings in the wet grass. I am the sweetness of milk on the baby’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the hot gates opening into light.
I am all of us and I am you. I am the mirror of your coming here to meet yourself.
‘I don’t understand.’
You understand, said Fraiethe. Though understanding doesn’t matter. You are green forest and dark angel and human world, compendious and strong. Forget what you cannot do and do what you can do.
Fraiethe opened her mouth to kiss him, as she had kissed Maroussia once, though that he did not yet know.
She bit him, she swallowed him up and he was not killed.
9
Things can change. Borders are not fixed. Permeability. Mutability. Trees can speak. A man may become an animal. A woman may become time like a god. Everything is alive and humans are not separate from that.
There is power which is the exercise of will and there is power which is openness and letting go. It has to do with air and breath and consciousness. A freeing not a binding. A removal of bonds.
Josef Kantor–Papa Rizhin–fraternal angel champion–mudjhik–came lumbering at them out of the trees to silence and kill. Maroussia Shaumian and Vissarion Lom, side by side, the child inside a possibility between them, watched him come.
They saw right round him and through him and he wasn’t there.
The mudjhik was an empty column of stuff like stone.
10
The prototype Universal Vessel Vlast of Stars stood on the concrete apron at Vitigorsk, a swollen citadel of steel, a snub and gross atomic bullet thirty storeys high. Hunder Rond had personally overseen the stowage on board of the embalmed corpse, the earthly remains of Papa Rizhin. A chosen crew had taken their places, eager and proud, the brightest and the best, prepared to live or die, but in their hearts they knew that they would live. They would reach their destination. There were other, better suns awaiting them.
Rond stood now on the asphalt, uniformed in crisp new black. The hot wind that disturbed his hair was heavy with the industrial chemical stench of Vitigorsk
‘There have been no tests,’ said Yakov Khyrbysk. ‘It is the prototype. You know what that means.’
‘You can come or you can stay,’ said Rond. ‘Your choice.’
Khyrbysk shook his head.
‘I’m staying here,’ he said.
Rond looked around.
‘The backwash will destroy all this,’ he said.
‘We have evacuated. We will be far away. We will rebuild better somewhere else.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Rond. ‘Perhaps. But we will get there first. You will not find us.’
Khyrbysk shrugged. ‘I have to go now.’
Half an hour later and twenty miles away in Tula-Vitisk Launch Control, Yakov Khyrbysk gave the word. He was curious. It was a prototype. Whatever happened he would learn from it and move on.
The horizon disappeared in a flash of blinding light.
When the light cleared, a column of expanding mushroom clouds was climbing into the pale blue sky, puffs of distant smoke and wind illuminated by inward burn. Higher and higher they climbed, a rising stairway of evanescent stellar ignitions, a trajectory curving towards the west and the sinking of the sun.
At the sweet spot of the rising curve, several hundred miles high, the entire magazine of the Vlast of Stars exploded at once. The brightness of the detonation spread across the whole of the western sky. It overwhelmed the sun. The vaporised residue drifted for months through the upper atmosphere, borne on high fierce winds. Intermixed with the shattered molecular dust of the earthly remains of the corpse of Papa Rizhin it slowly slowly fell to earth, becoming rain.
The dust of Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril was in it too. Yakov Khyrbysk was as good as his word.
11
The great hill of the living angel, blinded, muted and unchampioned, abraded by wind and rain, crawled slowly on, lost among limitless trees. No fliers crowded the air above its sad peak. Already, scrubby vegetation was beginning to claim the crumbling lower slopes. The rain washed from it in slurries of tilth and rolling scree.
Directionless, inch by inch, withdrawing from the borderland, not knowing where it was, the ever-living angel turned inward from the forest margin into inexhaustible trees. There it would crawl on for ever and get nowhere at all. Of the heartwood, the inward forest, there is no end, and so there can be no ending of it.
12
Lom and Maroussia were together on the bank of the river. Fraiethe was there, and the Seer Witch of Bones, and the father also, though his presence was indistinct and Lom felt he had not really come there at all.
Eligiya Kamilova was standing apart. Alone again. A secondary role.
Fraiethe spoke to her.
‘You can remain here, Eligiya Kamilova, in the forest with us. Go further in and deeper. If that’s what you wish? You’ve done your part.’
‘Yes,’ said Kamilova. ‘That would be good. I would like that.’
‘In that case,’ said Lom, ‘perhaps we could borrow your boat?’
‘You’re not staying?’ said Kamilova.
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘No. We’re going home.’
13
The Political Bureau of the interim collective government met in the former Central Committee cabinet room. Lukasz Kistler took the chair. Unrest was continuing. Rizhinites had barricaded themselves in the administrative block of the university and a large crowd had gathered in Victory Square. Already it had been there three days, penned in by a cordon of gendarmes. The crowd was smashing flagstones and levering up cobbles. Bonfires had been lit.
‘It’s a stand-off,’ said Yulia Yashina.
‘Negotiations?’ said Kistler.
‘No,’ said Yashina. ‘At least not yet. They have no leader; they have no clear demands to make. They want to turn back the clock, that’s all.’
‘Give them time,’ said Kistler. ‘We can do that. Are more people joining them?’
‘Not for the moment,’ said Yashina. She paused. ‘We could end it now,’ she said. ‘The militia is standing by in the Armoury. There are tanks within two hundred yards.’
‘The commanders are loyal to us?’ said Kistler. ‘They would fire on their own people?’
‘Of course they would, if you give the word. Government rests on civil order. It’s the prerequisite.’
Kistler looked around the table, each face one by one. They all avoided his eye. The decision was to be left to him, then, and they would follow where he led.
‘We must not do it,’ he said. ‘And we will not. Give the order to withdraw the tanks and the militia to their barracks, and make sure the people of the city see them go.’
Nothing that lives and dies ever has a beginning, nor does it ever end in death and annihilation. There is only a mixing, followed by the separating-out of what was mixed: and these mixings and unmixings are what people call beginnings and ends.
1
Kantor-in-mudjhik runs through the endless forest, tireless, exultant and strong. The continental Vlast is behind him. He has run it, ocean to trees, without a pause.
Under the trees he has heard the voice of Archangel talking and they have sealed the deal.
I will give you body after body, says Archangel, a chain of human bodies without end, vessels for my champion son. Worthy and valid strength of my strength, bring me out of the forest and for you I will break down the doors and shatter the doorposts. For you I will raise up the dead to consume the living. I will give you armies without end, and you will carry me, speaking my voice, across the stars.
Josef Kantor in his mudjhik body likes the sound of that.
I am nobody’s son, he says, but I will be a brother.
It’s not enough, but it will do for now.
2
Into the forest old beyond guessing, the first place, primordial, primeval, primal, the unremembered home, fair winds carried them day after day, deeper and deeper, up the river against the stream. Trees stood silently, lining the banks, fading away in every direction into twilight and indistinction.
‘How will we find her?’ said Kamilova. ‘I mean Maroussia?’
‘We keep going in,’ said Lom, ‘and she will come to us.’
Things that find their way into the forest grow and change. They grow taller, shorter, thinner, fatter; they change colour. Each thing grows out into its true shape and becomes more itself. A dog may become more wolf-like. It unfolds like a fern.
In the forest you can’t see far or travel fast; detachment and analysis fail; you can’t see the wood for the trees. Aurochsen and wisent, woolly rhinoceros, great elk and giant sloth browse among the leaves, and the corpses of those killed in great and terrible massacres are buried under shallow earth. The labyrinth of trees is filled with travelling shadows and all the monsters of the mind. In the forest, things long thought dead may be alive and the hunter become the prey. Green pools glimmer in the shade. More is possible here.
It is hard enough to get in, but leaving, that is the labour, that is the task. The forest is receding, back into its own world. Ancient silences are withdrawing like the tide.
Nights they slept out under blankets on the deck boards of the Heron. Kamilova cut thorns to make a brake on the bank against wolves and left a slow fire burning.
‘If a big cat comes, set the thorns alight,’ she said.
‘Lynx is worse than wolf?’ said Lom.
‘Not lynx,’ said Kamilova. ‘Bigger than lynx, much bigger. Heavy as a horse, and teeth to snap your spine.’
Lom lay awake and heard the grumbling of predators in the dark, but nothing troubled them.
‘I don’t think wolves hunt in the night,’ he said.
‘You want to bet your skin on that?’
‘No.’
Kamilova took the pan of stewed rosehips off the fire and set it in the grass. Pulled her knife from her belt and wiped it carefully clean. Unwrapped the axe and did the same, and sharpened the blades of both to a clean fineness with her stone. By the time she’d done, the stewed hips were cool enough. She picked a handful out of the pan and squeezed the juices back in. Lom watched the bright redness dribble between her fingers. She threw the seed-filled pulp away and scooped another handful, working it between her palms to release as much as possible of the blood-warm liquid. By the time she’d picked the last few softened fruits out of the liquid and pressed them between finger and thumb she had the pan half-full of rich rose liquor.
‘Here,’ she said and passed the pan to Lom.
He took a sip. Without honey it was bitter enough to roughen the roof of his mouth, but it was good.
‘I know this place,’ she said, ‘but there were people here then, and fewer wolves. Everyone’s gone, but there’s somewhere nearby I’d like to see again. I’ll take you there’
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Tomorrow.’
Morning came quiet and cold, suppressed under low featureless skies. A drab unsettling breeze stirred brittle leaves. The forest felt shabby and grey. Snares and fish traps laid the evening before held nothing. Lom ate some berries and drank a little of the sour red rose-drink. It left him no less hungry.
The absence of Maroussia nagged at him. Her failure to come. Since they’d passed through the gap in the hills he’d felt nothing of her. Morning succeeded morning, timeless and inconsequential: a perpetual repetition of movement without progress against the narrowing river that always tried to push them back and out. The resinous taste of the air, the hungry excitement of opening up into the possibilities of the forest, was fading. Immensity and endlessness were always and everywhere the same, and he felt small and ordinary and lost. He was growing accustomed to the inexhaustible sameness of trees, and knew that he was somehow failing.
He crouched among fallen leaves, blotched and parchment-yellow and fragile, like dry pages scattered from an ageing and spine-cracked book, disordered out of all meaning. He picked up crumbling handfuls and sifted them, dealing them out like faceless cards in a game he couldn’t play, returning leaves to the infinite mat of fallen leaves, every one different and all of them the same, abundant beyond all counting, further in and further on forever, abundant to the point of absurdity. Autumn was coming in the interminable forest and there would be no numbering of the trees.
He pushed his hands down, digging through the covering of dry leaves into darkening dampness and rot and the raw deep earth beneath. The cool fungal smell. Mycelium. Earthworm. Shining blackened twig fragment and softening pieces of bark. Truffle-scented leaf rot. Fine tangled clumps of hair-like root.
Lom closed his eyes and breathed.
Trunks of trees rise separately out of the earth and each stands apart from its neighbours. We overvalue sight. In the rich dark earth the roots of all the trees of the forest are intertwined. Knotted filaments and root fibres grow around and through each other, twist each other about, intertangled and nodal, meshed and joined with furtive fungal threads, digging down deeper than the trees grow tall. Slow exchange and interchange of mineral currency. Burrowing capacitors and conductors of gentle dark electric flux and spark. You can’t say one tree ends and the next begins; it’s all one sentient wakeful centreless tree and it lives underground.
Lom listened to the circuitry of the earth. He felt the living angel getting stronger. The first weakening of hope. A cruel thing coming closer and the rumourous growth of fear. There was a hurt in the forest and a wound in the world. He missed Maroussia and wished she would come.
3
Josef Kantor embodied in mudjhik reaches the lower slopes of the Archangel hill. The ground he stands on is burning with cool fire, thrilling to the touch, and the immense body of the living angel rises in front of him, higher, far higher, than he had imagined. Hundreds of feet into the sky. Even hurt and weakened, grounded as it is, it is a thing of glowering power. It crackles with life. The mudjhik body loosens and grows light. It feeds. Archangel feeds Kantor and Kantor feeds Archangel, strength mixes with strength, distinctions blur.
Archangel separates several hundred chunks of himself and sends them into the sky to circle his top on flaggy wings. The coming of his prince deserves such glorious celebration.
4
Kamilova took Lom to see the place she knew. She was happy in the forest. This was where she could be who she was.
They approached through old earthworks and turf-covered stone dykes. Redoubts. Salients. Massive boulders that had been tumbled into place and now settled deep into the earth. Rooks chattered and flocked among thorn trees.
The full extent of the stronghold was invisible, immersed in trees, and it felt smaller than it was because the chambers were small. Intimate human scale. Inside was gloomy, rich with earth and stone and leaf and wood, and the river ran through it, in under the hill. The place was burrow, sett and warren. Tunnels extended into darkness, every direction and down.
Kamilova took and lit a tar-soaked torch. The flame burned slow and smoked.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This way.’
Distinctions between inside and outside, overground and underground, meant little. There were low halls with intricately carved ceilings and curving wooden walls, like the hulls of underground ships, polished and dark with age and hearth smoke, into which real living trees, their limbs and roots and branches, were interwoven and included. Chambers and passageways were floored with stone flags or compacted earth, leaf-carpeted. Older places were rotting and returning to the earth, moss and mushroom damp.
‘I’d thought there might be someone still here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Stupid, but I hoped it.’
Lom’s feeling of unease was growing.
‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s something not right.’
On the path back to where they had left the Heron they heard riders approaching. The footfall of horses. The clanking of bridles and gear. The scuffing of many feet through mud and forest litter. No voices. There was a quiet wind moving among the trees, but Lom could hear them coming.
‘Get out of sight,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
They crouched behind low thorn and briar. There was movement visible now through the trees.
Kamilova put her face next to his ear. ‘Did they see us?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pulled off his pack and crawled forward on his belly, turning on his side to squeeze between thorn-bush stems. A root in the ground dug into him. He felt the spike of it gouging into his flesh, dragging at him. It hurt. He eased himself slowly forward across it, his face pressed close to the earth. Thorns snagged in his hair and grazed the skin of his scalp. A strand of briar hooked itself across his back. He reached back to pull it away and inched himself forward until he could see the track. He scooped a lump of earth and moss and rubbed himself with it, smearing it on his forehead and round his eyes, working it into the stubble on his face. The scent of it was strong and sour in his nose. He was sweating despite the cold.
Kamilova squeezed up next to him. The sound of her ragged breathing. He didn’t look round.
There were three riders at the front, and men walking behind, strung out and silent. Lots of men, dirty and ill dressed. More riders followed, the horses dragging long heavy bundles wrapped in cloth. The bundles were heavy, deadweight, trailing furrow-paths through the leaves on the path. The horses pulled slowly against the weight.
The riders were bulky and hooded, soiled woollen cowls shrouding their faces, their heads heavy and too large. They rode alert, scanning the trees. Lom felt the pressure of their attention pass across him. It made him feel uneasy. Exposed. He inched his way cautiously backwards under the thorn.
‘Don’t move,’ Kamilova hissed in his ear. ‘There’s one behind us.’
Lom lay on his back, face turned up, looking into the close tangle of the leafless bush. Outriders scouting the trail. Fear made his heart struggle. He wanted to breathe clear air. He forced himself to lie still and wait. Let them pass.
Long after the last sound of their passing had gone, the two of them lay without speaking under the thorns. The touch of the riders’ eyeless gaze stayed with them, a taint breath, a foulness in the mind. They listened for any sign of more following or the scout returning, and when that purpose faded they still didn’t move.
‘What were they?’ said Kamilova. She didn’t look at him but stayed lying on her back, watching a spider moving slowly among the branches.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you feel…?’
‘Yes.’
‘That wasn’t… normal. That wasn’t right.’
‘No.’
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
‘We should go,’ she said at last. ‘We should move on.’
‘Yes.’
Stiff and cold, they picked up their packs and began to walk.
‘Perhaps we should stay off the track,’ she said. ‘There might be more coming.’
‘We have to get back to the boat,’ said Lom. ‘We have to keep going.’
It began to rain. Sheets of wind-driven icy water soaking their clothes. The noise of it was like an ocean in the trees. The track led them between shallow green pools, rain-churned and murky.
Lom didn’t hear the splashing charge of the bear-man over the noise of the rain. Didn’t smell it through the rain and the mud and the drench of the leaves. But he felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision that drove the air from his lungs, crunched the ribs in his chest and hurled him off the path into the water, crashing his spine against the trunk of a beech tree.
He could not raise his arms. He could not move his legs. The water came up to his waist. Propped against the slope of the tree root, he watched the grey-hooded figure turn and come back, wading towards him through the mud-swirled green pool. Its cowl was pulled back off its head.
Lom smelled the bear-man’s hot sour breath on his face, on his wide staring eyes. He saw deep into the dark red mouth as its jaws widened to clamp on his face. The mouth reeked of angel. He observed with detached and distant surprise that half its head was made of stone.
Lom punched the side of the half-stone head with closed-up forest air, boulder heavy and boulder-hard. A swinging fist of rain and air. The bear-weighted bear-muzzled skull jerked sideways, crushed and broken and dead in a sudden mess of blood and bone.
5
The bear-man, the angel rider of horse, opens his mouth to scream out the shock and outrageous surprise of his death, his death out of nowhere. He is instantaneously silenced. Cerebral cortex sprayed on the air like a smashed fruit.
But the screaming instant is heard.
Archangel, O Archangel all-surveying, connected by iron filaments of Archangel mind to all the doers of his will–all the absorbed living syllables through which he gives voice, all the soldiers in the army he is building for his brother in arms Josef Kantor–Archangel hears and feels the killing of the bear and knows it for what it is. It is familiar. Anomaly and threat.
And there is something else.
He has seen it now. Resolved out of endlessness and trees it has locality. The eye of his surveillance has pinned it, and this time it is close and he can reach it.
She shows herself and he has found her.
Everything comes together in the forest, and out in the forest hunting now is his racing engine, his destroyer, his fraternal champion and his pride.
Kill them all. Kill them quickly. Do it now.
Archangel calls and his champion runs them down.
6
‘They were riding for the angel,’ said Lom. ‘I think we’re coming closer to where it is.’
There was strain in Kamilova’s eyes. She was watching him warily again. There was always a separateness about her: a wordless watchfulness, a lonely, withheld and self-postponing patience, doing what she must and waiting for the dark times to go.
‘It was going to kill you,’ she said. ‘Then it was like its brain exploded.’
They were back at the Heron, and the rain had passed leaving watery afternoon sunshine. Lom had wiped the dark bear blood off his face and neck but still he felt unclean. The angel-residue in his own blood was strung out taut like wires in his veins again. He didn’t like Kamilova’s scrutiny and wanted to be alone.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said.
He followed a game trail up to the crest of a low slope and looked down on dark green water. The trail took him down to the edge of it, a stillness fringed on the far side with dense bramble. A fallen tree dipped a leafless crown and branches like arms into the mystery of the pool. Goosander gave muted echoless mews. Lom took off his rain-damp clothes and waded out. The water, cold against his shins, was moss-coloured, icy, opaque. He felt the thick cool of silt sliding between his toes and up over his feet. It felt like darkness.
After a few steps the lake bottom fell away steeply and he slipped, half-falling and half-choosing, into a sudden clumsy dive. The water closed over his head. How deep it might be he had no idea and didn’t care. Bands of iron cold tightened round his skull and bruised ribs, squeezing out breath. He opened his eyes on nothing but pale thickened green light.
Floundering to the surface he swam with cramped clumsy strokes, arms and legs working through the cold. Broken twigs and fallen leaves littered the surface: he nosed his way through.
Once the first shock of the chill subsided, he immersed himself in the wild forgetful freedom of swimming in the forest, washing the sourness of killing and angel from his skin and hair. He took breath and dived for the bottom, reaching his arms down for it, but couldn’t touch it, and surfaced, gasping. Floating on his back he watching the canopy of trees turning slowly overhead against the heavy sky.
He swam until the icy bitter cold of the water returned to the attack, then hauled himself up onto the bole of the fallen tree and lay there for a long time, face down, the bark’s hard roughness against his skin, the air of the forest resting against his naked back. Lazy and reluctant to move he watched the pool opaque and green below him.
When he was dry he crawled back along the tree and swung himself down onto the bank, and she was there, her eyes brushing across him, bright and dark and happy.
Maroussia.
She put her hand against his chest, tracing the rise and hollow of his ribs. His hands and face were weather-brown, his body pale. The warmth of her fingers was on him. He smelled the sweetness of her breath.
‘Is it you?’ he said. ‘Not a shadow but you?’
‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Your skin is rough and hard and cool like stone.’
She looked into his face and opened her mouth a little, and he kissed her, his arms around her shoulders awkwardly, uncertain. She tasted like hedge berries, and she leaned in and pressed herself against him. The scent of woodsmoke and forest in her hair. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly gently.
‘Do you feel our child moving?’
For him it had been six years and more, but for her hardly any time at all.
7
It was late afternoon when Lom and Maroussia walked together back down the trail to the river where the Heron was moored.
Eligiya Kamilova received Maroussia with quiet reserve. She was generous and fine, but Lom could see her withdrawing. She was displaced again: having done her part she was finding herself edged to the margin of other people’s reunions and plans. Lom found himself feeling slightly sorry for her. It was guilt that he felt, he knew that–he’d brought her here, he’d used her as his guide–but it was the path she’d chosen. The solitary traveller. She’d wanted to come. The forest was her travelling place, but she’d come back and found it an emptier, harsher place than before.
Kamilova had caught a fish in her trap. A pike. She shared it with them. The smoke of the cooking fire hung about in the still air of evening, clinging and acrid. It stuck to their skin. The flesh of the pike tasted muddy and was full of fine sharp bones. Not pleasant eating. Maroussia said little and ate less.
The sliver of an ominous new hill had appeared above the trees in the west. It glowed a dull rust-red in the last of the westering sun, and above it dark shapes circled like flocks of flying birds.
‘I’m sorry, Eligiya,’ said Maroussia.
Kamilova frowned.
‘Sorry? Why?’
‘A bad thing is coming and I am bringing it here. I show myself now to draw it out before it gets any stronger. It may already be too strong.’
Maroussia turned to Lom. She was almost a stranger, fierce and strong. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark and wide. She was carrying his child. He hadn’t even begun to absorb the truth of that yet.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘Ready for what?’ said Lom, but he knew.
He’d felt it coming for some time: the pulsing rhythm of blood in his head was the rhythm of a heavy, pounding footfall crashing through the trees, growing louder and coming closer. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he felt the touch of the avid hunter’s tunnel-narrow gaze. He saw that even Kamilova was feeling it now: a faint drumbeat in the ground underfoot.
‘Kantor is coming,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. There is no time to prepare. It has to be now. Kantor is here.’
‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Oh. Yes. I see.’ A sudden sick lurch of fear. ‘OK. Well there’s no time like now.’
The mudjhik stepped out from the grey twilit birches, dull red and massive, balanced and avid and bulky and strangely beautiful and as tall as the trees it stood among. Its eyes–it had eyes–took them in with a gaze of confident relaxation and intelligence. Its expression was almost elegant and almost amused. It had grace as well as size and power. It was a perfectly realised angel-human giant of stone the colour of rust and blood and bruises, a new thing come into the world, and it had the face of a hundred million posters and portraits and photographs. The face on the statue at the top of the Rizhin Tower. The face of Papa Rizhin. The face of Josef Kantor.
And when it spoke it had the voice of Kantor too, warm and expressive, loud and clear among the trees. You heard it in your head and you heard it in your ear. Tall as the trees, it had a tongue to speak.
‘So it is you, my Lom, my investigator, my troublesome provincial mouse, my annoyance still and always,’ said the voice and face of Josef Kantor. He looked from Lom to Maroussia. ‘And here is the trivial bitch-girl not my daughter too, my betrayer’s bastard whelp, the spill of my cuckolding. You stink of the forest like your mother did. Both of you stink of it. Well the mother is dead and I will destroy the daughter also, and the man. You run and you wriggle and you hide, you sting me and skip away, but I have you cornered now.’
Kantor-in-mudjhik took a pace forward and spread its arms wide, arms with a suggestion of muscular flow. Fists opened flexing fingers. It had fingers. Thick stubby fingers. Josef Kantor’s hands.
‘I’m going to make quite a mess. Dog crows will clean it up.’
While the mudjhik Kantor spoke, Lom felt the dark electric pressure of angel senses passing across him, probing and examining. The touch of it, obscene and invasive, brought a surge of anger and hatred, a knot of iron and stone in his belly like a fist.
The mudjhik stopped mid-stride and gave a bark, a sudden laugh of surprised delight. Its blank pebble eyes glittered with warmth and pleasure.
‘And there is a child!’ the voice of Kantor said. ‘How perfect is that? Good. Let me kill it too. Let it all end now, and then I will take the blustering bastard angel down and be on my way out of these trees and get my world back. This triviality has gone on long enough.’
Lom felt surge after surge of anger and desperation and the wired strength of his own angel taint welling up, overbrimming and bursting walls inside him. The taste of iron, a hot suffusion in the blood. He was the violence. The smasher. The fist. He was defender. He was bear.
That was the secret of his birthing. Fathered by a man-bear in the deeps of the forest, he was the blade-toothed muzzle, the gaping tearing snout, the heavy carnivore with heavy paws to break necks. He felt himself unfurling into bear and killing, and let it come. Let it come! Barriers and frontiers dissolving, he was coming into the myth of himself, he was the man-bear with angel in his blood.
Lom felt the power of the angel substance tugging at his mind, a hungry undertow pulling and hauling him out of his body, dizzying and disorientating. The forest sliding sideways. Peripheral vision darkening. Connection with reality slipping away.
It wasn’t Kantor doing that, it was the thing his mudjhik body was made of.
Lom didn’t resist. He threw himself into the pulling of the current and went with it into the mudjhik, leaving his soft body fallen behind, taking the war onto Kantor’s own ground to kill him there.
All power is done at a price, but the price is not paid by those who wield it. It is paid by the victims. Kantor was human and he was not, and there was an end to it.
Lom in the mudjhik found Kantor there and fell on him, tearing and snarling, a blood-blind frontal killing assault of unwithstandable fierceness. To end it quickly before Kantor could react.
Lom hit a wall.
The wall of Kantor’s will. Impregnable will. A hardened vision that could not be changed but only broken, and it would not break. Lom could not break it.
The force of his attack skittered sideways, ineffectual, like cat’s claws against marble slab. It wasn’t a defeat. The fight didn’t even begin.
He felt the gross stubby fingers of Josef Kantor picking over his fallen, winded body. Ripping him open and rummaging among the intimate recesses of memory and desire. Kantor’s voice was a continual whisper in his dissolving mind.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen will happen. I am Josef Kantor, and I am the strongest and the hardest thing. I am the incoming tide of history. I am the thing you hate and fear and I am stronger than you. You fear me. I am Josef Kantor and I am inevitable. I am the smooth and uninterruptible voice. I always return. I am total. I am the force of one single purpose, the voice of the one idea that drives out all others. The uncertain dissolve before and forgive me as they die. I am the taker and I have killed you now.
Vissarion Lom wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong at all. He was dying. He could not breathe. He was dead.
And then Maroussia was in the mudjhik with him. Her quiet voice. A mist of evening rain.
The Pollandore was with her, inside her and outside her. Clean light and green air. Spilling all the possibilities of everything that could happen if Josef Kantor did not happen and there were no angels at all. The endless openness and extensibility of life without angels.
She followed him into death.
Come back with me. Come back.
8
Lom was in a beautiful simple place among northern trees. Pine and birch and spruce. The air was clear and fresh as ice and rain. Resinous dark green needles carpeting the earth. Time fell there in sudden windfall showers, pulses of night and day, evening and morning, always rising, always young, always new. There were broadleaf trees, and laughter was hidden in the leaves, out of sight, being the leaves.
Everything alive with wildness.
He could see trees growing: unfurling their leaves and spreading overhead, reaching towards each other with their branches until they met, a green ceiling of leaves, and all the light was a liquid fall, green as fire, that spilled through the leaves, enriching the widening silence.
Josef Kantor slammed together the walls of his will to crush Maroussia between them and extinguish her utterly, and it made no difference to her at all.
Lom saw Maroussia walking towards him, and a figure was walking beside her through the trees. It seemed at first to be walking on four legs like a deer, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because the dappled figure appeared to rise on its hind legs as it came and he saw that it was like a woman. A perfume of musk and warmth was in the air. Her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them. She was naked except that a nap of short smooth reddish-brown fur covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts and spread down across her brown rounded belly.
‘Who are you?’ said Lom. Engage in dialogue with your visions.
She smiled, and a long warm pink tongue flickered between thin white pointed teeth.
‘You mean, what am I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what I am.’
‘Tell me.’
She opened her mouth and spilled a flow of words, green foliage tumbling, heaped up, all at once. A chord of words.
I am the vixen in the rain and the hungry sow-badger suckling in the dark earth. I am salt on your tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood.
I am scent on the air at dusk, sweet as colostrum. I am the belly-warm womb of the she-otter in the river. I am the cub-warm sleep of the she-bear under the snow. I am the noctule, stooping upon moths with the weight of cubs in my belly.
I am the she-elk, ice-bearded, nudging my calf against the wind, and I am the mouse in the barn, suckling the blind pink buds of life. I am the sour breath of the stoat in the tunnel’s darkness and I am the vixen’s teeth in the neck of the hen.
I am the crunch of carrion and I am the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet milk. I am tired and cold and wet and full of cub. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I am plastered fur and soaking hair.
I am the abdomen swollen taut as a drum and full as an egg. I am the ceaseless desperate hunger of the starveling shrew. I am the sow’s lust for the boar, the hart’s delight in the pride of the hind.
I am the fucker’s laughing and the smell of droppings in the wet grass. I am the sweetness of milk on the baby’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the hot gates opening into light.
I am all of us and I am you. I am the mirror of your coming here to meet yourself.
‘I don’t understand.’
You understand, said Fraiethe. Though understanding doesn’t matter. You are green forest and dark angel and human world, compendious and strong. Forget what you cannot do and do what you can do.
Fraiethe opened her mouth to kiss him, as she had kissed Maroussia once, though that he did not yet know.
She bit him, she swallowed him up and he was not killed.
9
Things can change. Borders are not fixed. Permeability. Mutability. Trees can speak. A man may become an animal. A woman may become time like a god. Everything is alive and humans are not separate from that.
There is power which is the exercise of will and there is power which is openness and letting go. It has to do with air and breath and consciousness. A freeing not a binding. A removal of bonds.
Josef Kantor–Papa Rizhin–fraternal angel champion–mudjhik–came lumbering at them out of the trees to silence and kill. Maroussia Shaumian and Vissarion Lom, side by side, the child inside a possibility between them, watched him come.
They saw right round him and through him and he wasn’t there.
The mudjhik was an empty column of stuff like stone.
10
The prototype Universal Vessel Vlast of Stars stood on the concrete apron at Vitigorsk, a swollen citadel of steel, a snub and gross atomic bullet thirty storeys high. Hunder Rond had personally overseen the stowage on board of the embalmed corpse, the earthly remains of Papa Rizhin. A chosen crew had taken their places, eager and proud, the brightest and the best, prepared to live or die, but in their hearts they knew that they would live. They would reach their destination. There were other, better suns awaiting them.
Rond stood now on the asphalt, uniformed in crisp new black. The hot wind that disturbed his hair was heavy with the industrial chemical stench of Vitigorsk
‘There have been no tests,’ said Yakov Khyrbysk. ‘It is the prototype. You know what that means.’
‘You can come or you can stay,’ said Rond. ‘Your choice.’
Khyrbysk shook his head.
‘I’m staying here,’ he said.
Rond looked around.
‘The backwash will destroy all this,’ he said.
‘We have evacuated. We will be far away. We will rebuild better somewhere else.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Rond. ‘Perhaps. But we will get there first. You will not find us.’
Khyrbysk shrugged. ‘I have to go now.’
Half an hour later and twenty miles away in Tula-Vitisk Launch Control, Yakov Khyrbysk gave the word. He was curious. It was a prototype. Whatever happened he would learn from it and move on.
The horizon disappeared in a flash of blinding light.
When the light cleared, a column of expanding mushroom clouds was climbing into the pale blue sky, puffs of distant smoke and wind illuminated by inward burn. Higher and higher they climbed, a rising stairway of evanescent stellar ignitions, a trajectory curving towards the west and the sinking of the sun.
At the sweet spot of the rising curve, several hundred miles high, the entire magazine of the Vlast of Stars exploded at once. The brightness of the detonation spread across the whole of the western sky. It overwhelmed the sun. The vaporised residue drifted for months through the upper atmosphere, borne on high fierce winds. Intermixed with the shattered molecular dust of the earthly remains of the corpse of Papa Rizhin it slowly slowly fell to earth, becoming rain.
The dust of Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril was in it too. Yakov Khyrbysk was as good as his word.
11
The great hill of the living angel, blinded, muted and unchampioned, abraded by wind and rain, crawled slowly on, lost among limitless trees. No fliers crowded the air above its sad peak. Already, scrubby vegetation was beginning to claim the crumbling lower slopes. The rain washed from it in slurries of tilth and rolling scree.
Directionless, inch by inch, withdrawing from the borderland, not knowing where it was, the ever-living angel turned inward from the forest margin into inexhaustible trees. There it would crawl on for ever and get nowhere at all. Of the heartwood, the inward forest, there is no end, and so there can be no ending of it.
12
Lom and Maroussia were together on the bank of the river. Fraiethe was there, and the Seer Witch of Bones, and the father also, though his presence was indistinct and Lom felt he had not really come there at all.
Eligiya Kamilova was standing apart. Alone again. A secondary role.
Fraiethe spoke to her.
‘You can remain here, Eligiya Kamilova, in the forest with us. Go further in and deeper. If that’s what you wish? You’ve done your part.’
‘Yes,’ said Kamilova. ‘That would be good. I would like that.’
‘In that case,’ said Lom, ‘perhaps we could borrow your boat?’
‘You’re not staying?’ said Kamilova.
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘No. We’re going home.’
13
The Political Bureau of the interim collective government met in the former Central Committee cabinet room. Lukasz Kistler took the chair. Unrest was continuing. Rizhinites had barricaded themselves in the administrative block of the university and a large crowd had gathered in Victory Square. Already it had been there three days, penned in by a cordon of gendarmes. The crowd was smashing flagstones and levering up cobbles. Bonfires had been lit.
‘It’s a stand-off,’ said Yulia Yashina.
‘Negotiations?’ said Kistler.
‘No,’ said Yashina. ‘At least not yet. They have no leader; they have no clear demands to make. They want to turn back the clock, that’s all.’
‘Give them time,’ said Kistler. ‘We can do that. Are more people joining them?’
‘Not for the moment,’ said Yashina. She paused. ‘We could end it now,’ she said. ‘The militia is standing by in the Armoury. There are tanks within two hundred yards.’
‘The commanders are loyal to us?’ said Kistler. ‘They would fire on their own people?’
‘Of course they would, if you give the word. Government rests on civil order. It’s the prerequisite.’
Kistler looked around the table, each face one by one. They all avoided his eye. The decision was to be left to him, then, and they would follow where he led.
‘We must not do it,’ he said. ‘And we will not. Give the order to withdraw the tanks and the militia to their barracks, and make sure the people of the city see them go.’
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