Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  She was as lonely in the rain as the dying aurochs and as far from home.

  Time to move on.

  The meeting place was not far, and they would be waiting.

  2

  There were three of them at the place on the White Slope, Fraiethe and the father and the Seer Witch of Bones, and Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth.

  The father spoke, as he always did, the phrases of beginning.

  ‘And so we are met again under wind and rain and trees and the rise and set of sun. We are the forest; the forest is everywhere and everything, and the forest is us.’

  ‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘We are something but not everything.’

  The father made a barely perceptible movement of his head, acknowledging the justice of that, but frowned and said nothing. An antagonist then, Maroussia thought. Well, there it is then. So it is.

  The father was not actually present at the meeting on the White Slope. After the first time he had not come in bones and blood and flesh but as a fetch, a spirit skin, while he kept himself apart and somewhere else. The fetch had come as a man with woodcutter’s hands and forearms, hair falling glossy-thick across his brow and shoulders. A rank aroma, and burning green eyes that watched her openly. Maroussia thought the fetch crude and suspected a deliberate slight aimed at her. This is the form, it said, that seduced your mother and made her sweat and cry in a timberman’s hut in the woods. This the form that fathered you. Like some too?

  But Maroussia didn’t believe it. Whatever artifice seduced her mother at Vig would have been more subtle than that, more complex and thoughtful and elegant and patient and kind, to console her for the wasteland of her marriage to Josef Kantor and draw her out of it into the shadow under the trees. It was imagination that seduced her mother, not this unwashed goat. The goat was provocation only.

  Then she realised that the father knew this, and knew that she knew it, and in fact the burly woodcutter was not a provocation but a complicitous tease. A wink. A father–daughter joke to be shared.

  She didn’t resent the father for fathering her. Not any more. When she was growing up in Mirgorod she’d lived with the pain of the consequences of that, but now and here she understood. For the father there was a pattern to be woven, things to be done, opportunities to be taken and prices paid. What he had done to her mother and her wasn’t personal. It wasn’t even human.

  She turned away from him to the other two.

  Fraiethe had come in the body. She was really there. Though Fraiethe had guided the paluba that reached Maroussia in Mirgorod, that spoke to her and half-lied and half-bewitched and set her on the course that brought her here; though Fraiethe was part of the deception–if deception was what it had been (which it was not, not a deception but an opening-up)–Fraiethe did not like spirit skins. She stood now under the trees, shadow-dappled like a deer, rain-wet and naked except for the reddish-brown fur, water-sleek and water-beaded, that covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts. Fur traced the muscular valley of her spine, and a perfume of musk and warmth was in the air around her. Her skin was flushed because of the rain and cold, and her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them.

  The third, the Seer Witch of Bones, was neither body nor fetch, but something else, a shadow presence, a sour darkness, the eater of death, the mouth that opened with a smile of dark leaves and thorns, rooted in neither animal nor tree but of the crossing places, muddy and terrible.

  And Maroussia Shaumian, who had sewn uniforms at Vanko’s factory and pulled Vissarion Lom out of the River Mir and lain beside him in the bottom of a boat to bring him back with the warmth of her body; Maroussia Shaumian, who had sliced a man’s head off with a flensing blade and crossed the snow of Novaya Zima to the Pollandore; Maroussia Shaumian, who forgot none of that but remembered everything: Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth at the White Slope, and she claimed an equal place.

  The three of them had drawn her to the Pollandore in the moment of its destruction. Because of them she had been there at that moment and absorbed it–been absorbed into it–and become what she was. Because of them the Pollandore was gone from the world beyond the forest and she was here. It was their stratagem against the living angel in the forest. The forest borders were sealed and she, Maroussia, by her presence here, was what held them so. But the three had no sense of the consequences of what they’d done, none at all; only Maroussia had that, and even to her it came only in broken glimpses, fragments that were dark and bleak and hopeless.

  She didn’t know if there was a better thing they could have done than what they did, but if there was, they hadn’t done it.

  The fetch of the father spoke again, the man with green eyes: ‘The forest is safe. The living angel is contained and we will deal with him. Already he is growing weak and slow. He subsides and grows mute. His ways out of the forest are closed and he no longer draws strength from the places beyond us. The trees are growing back. He has no influence beyond the forest, and here we are stronger than he is.’

  The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, answered him, and the voice she spoke with was her voice but not only hers but the Pollandore’s also, and sounded strange to her ears.

  ‘Yet the angel lives!’ she said. ‘Whatever you say, it is not yet destroyed, and it is not clear that we alone have the strength to do it. And we must look to the world beyond the forest. The years there are moving hard and fast, the Vlast is resurgent, the last slow places are closing, the giants and rusalkas are driven out.’

  ‘What happens beyond the edge of the trees doesn’t concern us,’ the fetch of the father said. ‘It is outside. That’s what outside means.’

  ‘The world beyond the forest is growing steel fists,’ said Maroussia. ‘There’s no balance there, no breathing of other air. They will not rest content with what they have; they want it all. They will come here, they’ll cut and burn. There are winds the forest cannot stand against. I’ve seen—’

  ‘They’ve come here before,’ said the fetch of the father, the green-eyed man of muscle, the rich deep voice. ‘And always we have always driven them out. It’s not even hard.’

  ‘But nothing is the same now, because of what you did. The Pollandore is gone from that world. There is no balance there, and the Vlast will come in numbers, they will drive and burn and burn and drive. There is a man that leads them. Josef Kantor, called Rizhin now. I know something of him and so do you. You know how far he’s gone already and how fast he moves.’ The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, paused and looked at all of them, not just the father. ‘And we all know what he is throwing into the sky. We have all heard the hot dry thundercrash and smelled the burning stink of dead angel flesh cutting open the sky. We know the force and speed of what is passing overhead and looking down on us. It makes the forest small. And that’s just the beginning of his ambition. How can you say this doesn’t concern us?’

  The fetch of the father moved to speak, but Maroussia dark-eyed paradigm shifter, the unexpected outcome and maker of change, held up her hand to stop him.

  ‘You must listen to me,’ she said, ‘or why did you do this? Why make me as I am and bring me here–which I did not ask for, which I did not choose–why do this and not listen now to what I say?’

  The fetch fell into silence. Maroussia realised that the father, wherever he was, had finished his testing of her.

  The Seer Witch of Bones said nothing. It didn’t matter to her. Whatever came there would be a fullness of death at the house of bleached skulls.

  But Maroussia felt the pressure of Fraiethe’s attentive examination. Fraiethe knew everything: the heaviness and smell of her wet muddy clothes, the hot sweat of her palms and the beating of her heart, her anger at the trickiness of the father, that she was lonely and didn’t like the forest and wanted to go home. It was Maroussia not Fraiethe who was naked on the White Slope.

  ‘What would you have us do?’ said Fraiethe.

  The human woman dark-eyed Maroussia Sh
aumian opened her mouth to answer Fraiethe. She felt again the dark earth roots and the watchful sentience of rain. A wind stirred the leaves and moved across her face.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I would have you do nothing. There is another way. ‘

  3

  Mailboat Number 437 chugged down the mighty mile-broad River Yannis. Vissarion Lom sat in the stern and watched the low wooded hills roll by. The river was slow and quiet here, taking a wide turn to the south, its green waters a highway for tugs, ferries, excursion boats and barges riding low under the weight of ore and grain and oil. Mailboat Number 437 was a dogged striver. The vibration of her engine defined Lom’s world: the gentle rhythmic shocks, the slap of small waves against her iron skin. It was a world that smelled of diesel engine and pine planking and rust. Wet rope and mailbags.

  Sora Shenkov, master and sole crew of Mailboat Number 437, was a big man with hard brown hands and eyes the colour of ice and sky. He wasn’t a talker. Every day Lom sat in the stern and watched him work, unless it rained: then he would go below and watch the river through the specks and smears of his little cabin window. And every day Shenkov’s boat made slow headway: her engine churned the screw, and her forward speed through the water exceeded the south-west slide of the Yannis by a certain number of miles, and the marginal gain accumulated. Not that Lom was keeping count. He’d earned some money and taken passage with Shenkov. He’d paid his way. This boat-world time belonged to him. Lom had never owned a time before, but he owned this one and did not wish for it to hurry to an end.

  The last six years had changed him. He had travelled far, keeping himself to himself, taking rough work where he could find it, never staying in one place long. His wanderings had taken him into the forest margins, and he had found the endless forest simply that: an endlessness of trees. There were sounds in the night and pathways that went nowhere. Above all, he had not found Maroussia. Of her no trace at all. When he came out of the forest again, months had passed by, seasons come and gone, and he had imagined much but found nothing. He was heavily bearded now, muscular, wiry and weather-darkened, with shaggy wheat-coloured hair. The hole in the front of his skull was nothing but a faint thumbprint visible in certain slanting lights, sun-browned and almost healed. And slowly, slowly, day by day, he was being carried down the river in Shenkov’s boat. He enjoyed these days, which required no decisions, required nothing from him at all. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. His adventure was over and time had moved on. Once giants rode the timber rafts west on the Yannis, but now it was women without husbands or sons, and it seemed on the wide quiet river that it had always been so.

  Swinging round a headland, the boat came up on two huge timber rafts sliding side by side downstream on the current. Rather than waste time and fuel going out into the middle passage, Shenkov, in the little wheelhouse, gunned the engine and nosed skilfully though the channel between them. Lom reached instinctively for the boathook, not that it would help if the rafts chose to drift together and crush the boat between them. Each raft was as big as an island and carried a cluster of plank huts with smoking chimneys and fenced paddocks for goats and chickens. The logs were red pine, and though they were boughs and branches only, never the trunks, they were thicker and heavier by far than whole trunks of beech or oak. As the boat eased through the gap, a woman was milking a cow and speaking in a soft easy voice to her neighbour on the next raft, who was hanging out clothes to dry. Shenkov gave the women a courteous nod. The air was thick with the resinous red pine scent.

  It was early evening when Mailboat Number 437 came to the timber station at Loess. Shenkov grunted in surprise. The wharves were crowded with military vessels: cruisers in brown river camouflage, crane-mounted barges loaded with stacked pontoons, a requisitioned paddle-wheel ferry painted stem to stern and smokestack in dull sky grey.

  Shenkov managed to find a berth in front of the excise house, tucked in under the looming steel hull of a cruiser, and began to unload mailbags onto the steps. Lom left him to his work and wandered off to have a look at what the troops were doing. Sitting on a bollard at the railhead, he watched a captain of engineers supervising the unloading of vehicles from an armoured train. The engine noise was deafening. The stink of diesel fumes. Heavy grinding tracks churned the mud, splintered the boardwalks and cracked the paving. There were half-tracks and troop carriers, but also tractors and cherry pickers and things Lom hadn’t seen before that looked like immense hooks and chainsaws mounted on caterpillar tracks. The sapper platoon was marshalling them off the train and onto waiting barges whose decks were already stacked high with oil drums. The sappers struggled with three Dankov D-9 battle tanks, each towing what looked like a hefty spare fuel tank. Instead of a gun, the tank turrets were equipped with a short and vicious-looking nozzle. Lom knew what they were. He’d seen flame-thrower tanks in newsreels. Seen spouts of burning kerosene ignite buildings and flush trenches. Seen the enemy run. Screaming. Burning.

  The captain of engineers saw him watching and came across. Took in Lom’s weathered face and thick untidy crop of beard, his mud-coloured clothes and boots.

  ‘You came down the river with the mailboat,’ he said. ‘Were you ever in the forest?’ He was a decent-looking man, efficient and practical, more engineer than soldier. It was a question not a challenge.

  Lom nodded. ‘Off and on,’ he said. ‘A little.’

  ‘What’s it like there?’ said the captain of engineers.

  Lom gave a slight shrug. ‘Trees,’ he said. ‘Trees and rivers and lakes. Valleys and hills. Miles and miles of nothing much.’ He gestured towards the fleet of machinery, the barges and the armed boats. ‘You going in there? With that?’

  ‘That’s right. No secret about that.’

  ‘It’s been done before. Always got nowhere.’

  Once a generation the Vlast mounted incursions against the forest. It was one of the futile repeating rhythmic spasms of the Vlast’s history. Patrols wandered, ineffectual and lost, doing a bit of damage till they got bogged down in mud and thorn and disease. Lom’s own parents had lived in the forest edge. Soldiers came and killed them and razed their village to the ground. The soldiers had carried him out, an orphaned infant, and left him at the Institute in Podchornok. Lom remembered nothing of that forest time and nothing of his parents: presumably they were buried in there somewhere. Bones under the leaf mulch.

  So it was to happen again.

  ‘It’ll be different this time,’ the captain said. ‘This time we’re going to do it right. We’re going in in numbers, whole divisions on a broad front, with heavy machinery and air support. Three salients along the three big rivers. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re going to cut and burn all the way through to the other side. We’re going to break the myth of the forest once and for all.’

  ‘Guess you people need something to do,’ said Lom, ‘now the war’s over.’

  ‘I was hoping you might give me some advice. The benefit of experience? On-the-ground knowledge? Let me buy you dinner and pick your brains.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Lom. ‘Not a chance in a million fucking years.’

  4

  Lom went back to the mailboat moored at the jetty but Shenkov wasn’t there; he’d gone into Loess for supplies. Lom settled himself on the bench in the stern to wait. There was twilight and silence on the air, and a faint smell of woodsmoke. The lapping of the river’s edge against the side of the boat. Tiny white moths coming to the newly lit lamp. Not many, not yet, just a few: there was still some life in the western sky. Time was quiet and hardly moving: like the broad deserted river in gathering darkness, all islands and further shores hidden, it seemed to rest and breathe. Huge. Secretive. Watchful.

  Maroussia came to him then in the cool of the evening.

  Lom knew she was there before she spoke. Before he turned to see her, he felt her as a presence emerging. Resolving out of the periphery of things. She was watching him from out of the silence and the twilight and the
shoals of time.

  He turned his head to look at her full on, thinking as he did so that she might not be there if he did that. But she was still there, except it was impossible to say exactly where she was. She was on the jetty and on the deck of the boat and on the river shore and on the water. She was very precisely somewhere, but the frame of reference that located her was not the same as his. She was solid and real but she was made from air and shadow, woven out of the river twilight. Not flimsy, but he could not have reached out and touched her; the space between them wasn’t crossable. He didn’t try. For a long time he looked at her. Studying. She was different: older, wiser, changed and strange. She saw things now that he didn’t see.

  Lom found he was waiting for her to speak first, but she didn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to speak, anyway, if sounds and words could cross the space that separated them. If language itself could survive that crossing.

  ‘I went into the forest,’ he said at last. ‘I was looking for you.’

  There was a moment when he thought she hadn’t heard. He wasn’t even sure he’d actually said anything aloud. And then she spoke. It was her voice, the shock of her real voice speaking. He thought he’d kept the memory of it but he had not. The appalling uselessness of memory, how drab and inadequate it was. The sudden raw and open pain of six lost silent years

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  Lom felt an overwhelming sudden surge of anger and despair. It ambushed him from within. He thought he’d moved beyond all that, he thought he’d acclimatised to loss and living on, but it was all there, unchanged since the day he’d lost her. Since she’d gone where he couldn’t follow.