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 a
nd 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 wh
ich 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.
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