Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  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.

  Empedocles (c. 490–430 BCE)

  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, su
ppressed 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.’<
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  ‘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.