Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  ‘I will hold you to that, Vissarion Yppolitovich. A bond of honour.’

  Lom found Maroussia in Elena’s kitchen, sitting on a stool against the warmth of the stove. She was wearing different clothes. She must have borrowed them from Elena: a plain grey woollen dress and a thick dark cardigan that was too big for her. She had the cardigan buttoned up to the neck, her fingers peeping from the cuffs. She gave him a quick wry smile when he came in, cold and fresh from outside, brushing the snow from his trousers. When the smile faded, her face was pale and drawn, but her eyes when they met his were bright with energy and fierce determination.

  Elena was clearing breakfast off the table and the girls were laying out a backgammon board. The younger one, Yeva, was staring at Lom curiously.

  ‘What’s wrong with your head?’ she said. ‘There’s a hole in it.’

  Lom touched the wound on his forehead.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What happened? Was it a bullet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a man at Vera’s who was shot in the head by dragoons. He’s not dead, but he doesn’t talk and one of his eyes is gone. He dribbles his tea.’

  ‘Be quiet, Yeva,’ said Elena. ‘Leave Vissarion in peace. And you can’t start on a game now. There’s no time. You need to go to school.’

  ‘What? No!’ said Galina. ‘Not today. The snow. There’s snow—’

  ‘You’re not missing school for a bit of snow. Kolya will take you in the cart. He’ll be waiting already.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Go. School. Now. He’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Nobody goes to school when there’s snow. We’ll be the only ones…’

  ‘You’re not missing school. That’s not what we do. That’s not who we are.’

  Elena hustled the girls out of the kitchen. Lom sat at the table next to Maroussia.

  ‘OK?’ he said. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to go. Are you?’

  ‘Go where?’

  Elena came back into the kitchen and attacked the breakfast things in the sink.

  ‘Elena?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need to find out about the forest. Who is there in the raion that I can talk to about the forest?’

  ‘The forest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? Why the forest?’

  Maroussia brushed the question aside impatiently.

  ‘This is important,’ she said. ‘I want to find someone who knows about the forest and what happens there. Someone who’s actually been there.’

  ‘Is this anything to do with the trouble you’re in?’ said Elena. ‘No. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Is there someone?’ said Maroussia again. ‘Anyone who might be able to tell me something? Anything?’

  Elena hesitated.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. There was Teslom at the House on the Purfas. But he was arrested. And there’s the Count–he used to travel once. But not any more. Not for a long time. And I don’t know if he ever actually went into the forest himself.’

  ‘Not the Count,’ said Lom. ‘I’ve run into him already. He’s not the man, not for this.’

  ‘Isn’t there anyone else?’ said Maroussia.

  Well,’ said Elena after a moment’s thought, ‘there is Kamilova. You could go and see her, I suppose. Eligiya Kamilova. She is a friend of mine, in a way. But… well, she’s not an easy person to talk to.’

  ‘Kamilova?’ said Maroussia. ‘Who is she?’

  Elena shrugged, as if she wasn’t sure how to answer.

  ‘No one knows much about her,’ she said. ‘She comes and goes. She goes into the forest, into the wild places under the trees. She brings back specimens for the Count’s collection sometimes, but she’s not easy—’

  ‘I’ll go and see her,’ said Maroussia.

  ‘I can’t promise she’ll even talk to you.’

  ‘Where does she live? Is she here in the raion?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elena. ‘Down by the harbour.’

  ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘Now?’ said Elena.

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  35

  The Colloquium for the Protection of Citizens and the Vlast met at ten o’clock every morning, not in the Lodka but in a room in the Armoury, as befitted a War Cabinet. Chazia was there first, as she always was. Prepared. Colloquium Chairman Etsim Fohn and his sidekick, Fess Khazar, the Secretary of Finance, arrived together, five minutes late and already deep in conversation. Sharing a joke. Fohn surveyed the room. Saw the empty chair.

  ‘Where is our General Secretary?’ he said. ‘Where is Dukhonin? I haven’t seen him this morning. My office has been trying to raise him, but no one is answering at his house. He didn’t come to… Well, never mind. Where is he? We need him here.’ The three of them–Fohn, Dukhonin, Khazar–always met in Fohn’s office before the formal Cabinet, to prepare their lines. To take the real decisions. Chazia was never invited. They thought she did not know.

  ‘The Minister for Armaments will not be joining us,’ she said. ‘Steopan Vadimovich is dead.’

  Khazar sat down at the end of the table, his face white as chalk. He looked at Fohn, to see what he would do. Fohn was glaring at Chazia.

  ‘What?’ said Fohn. ‘When? Why wasn’t I told? Why do you know this, Lavrentina, and I do not? I am the Chairman. I should have been informed. I should have been told immediately. You should have… I should have been the first…’

  Chazia ignored him.

  ‘There was an attack on his house last night,’ she said. ‘The Lezarye were responsible, there is no doubt of that. Dukhonin and all his household were hacked to death in their beds and the house ransacked.’

  ‘Last night?’ said Fohn. ‘Last night! We should have been informed immediately. A member of the Colloquium assassinated, and the Chair man not even told? Who was in charge of Dukhonin’s security? I want names. I want them punished. Heads on spikes. And an overhaul. A thorough review. Action this day and a report on my desk this afternoon.’

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Khazar. ‘If Steopan Dukhonin can’t sleep safe in his bed then who is safe? It might have been any of us! Internal dissidence is your responsibility, Lavrentina. I cannot understand—’

  Chazia held up her hand for silence.

  ‘As you rightly say, gentlemen, this is my area. I will be making a speech in the parade ground as soon as this meeting is over. I will be announcing new measures. We have tolerated the presence of the Lezarye in this city for too long. We cannot afford an enemy within. An enemy at our backs. The raion will be closed and cleared. The Lezarye will be transported to the east. Conscripted labour is needed there.’

  ‘No,’ said Fohn. ‘This is too hasty. There will be trouble. They will resist.’

  ‘I will deal with that,’ said Chazia. ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘No. We should have been consulted. I am—’

  ‘We need to move on, gentlemen,’ said Chazia. ‘This is a War Cabinet and we have more urgent business. Time is short. When I was at Steopan Vadimovich’s house last night, clearing up the mess, I learned a disturbing thing. The situation is worse than we thought.’ She paused and looked each man in the face, one by one. ‘We have all been kept in the dark.’

  Khazar turned to Fohn.

  ‘What’s going on, Etsim?’ he said. ‘What is she talking about?’

  Fohn said nothing. He was watching Chazia narrowly. He was a bureaucrat, but not entirely stupid. She would have to deal with him soon.

  ‘The war situation is much more desperate than we have been led to believe,’ she said. ‘Dukhonin’s desk was piled high with reports. Complaints. Telegrams. A catalogue of inadequacy and failure. The army has no munitions. The navy has no fuel. The armament manufacturers have no materials. We are hopelessly in debt to the finance houses of the Fransa, and the Treasury is within a week of bankruptcy.
The front at Brazhd is crumbling. An Archipelago fleet has been sighted off the Aanen Islands.’

  ‘The Aanens—!’ Khazar began.

  ‘The enemy,’ said Chazia, ‘will be at the outskirts of Mirgorod within days.’

  Khazar slumped forward, his head in his hands.

  ‘Then we are ruined and it is over,’ he muttered. ‘I knew! I always knew!’

  Fohn ignored him. He was glaring at Chazia.

  ‘Lies,’ he said. ‘These are lies. The Novozhd would never have—’

  ‘The Novozhd knew,’ said Chazia. ‘Of course he knew. Why else did he start negotiations for peace? Dukhonin knew. The admirals and the generals knew. Every foot soldier in the infantry knew. Only we did not know. We have been playing a charade of government since the Novozhd was killed, but now we know. And now we must act.’

  ‘What?’ said Khazar. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘The current military command cannot be trusted and must be purged. The necessary action is already in hand.’

  ‘This is happening now?’ said Fohn.

  ‘It began,’ said Chazia, ‘as soon as you entered this room.’

  ‘On whose orders?’

  ‘On mine. Your personal staffs are also being replaced. You have been misled and betrayed. I will give you more trustworthy people. I will arrange it myself. But our first priority is the defence of Mirgorod. The city must not be allowed to fall to the Archipelago. Dukhonin has made no adequate preparations. None at all. However, I have taken matters in hand now. I have appointed General Rizhin as the new City Defence Commissar. He will begin work immediately—’

  ‘Rizhin?’ said Khazar. ‘Who is this Rizhin? Fohn? I don’t know the name. Do we know this man Rizhin?’

  Fohn was on his feet, red-faced and trembling. His chair tipped backwards and crashed to the floor behind him.

  ‘This is a coup!’ he shouted. ‘A filthy fucking putsch! I’m not going to—’

  Chazia pressed the intercom buzzer. The door opened and Captain Iliodor entered the room, followed by three armed militia officers. They took up positions inside the door.

  ‘Arrest this woman,’ said Fohn. ‘Arrest her now.’

  The militia officers ignored him.

  ‘Sit down, Chairman,’ said Chazia. ‘Please, Etsim Maximich, my friend. Sit.’

  ‘So this is how it is,’ said Fohn. ‘You’re mad. You can’t sustain it. You have no strength. The people will not allow it. The army will stand behind me. I’ll have you dragged through the streets.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Etsim. Please. Of course this is not a coup. You are overwrought. This is shocking news, I know. I understand your feelings. I felt the same way myself last night. You will recover soon, and see things clearly again. You are my colleague, Etsim, my valued friend and my Chairman. We continue as before. Of course we do. I have made a plan. You and Secretary Khazar will leave Mirgorod immediately. It is too dangerous for you to remain here. The enemy is at the gate. You will go east, to Kholvatogorsk, and establish our new capital there. The Vlast continues. A new Vlast. A Vlast reborn. It will not matter then whether Mirgorod falls or not. The Vlast is more than one single city. Go to Kholvatogorsk and build anew. Prepare to strike back at our enemies. I will join you there shortly. I have somewhere else I must go first.’

  36

  Lom and Maroussia stepped out of Count Palffy’s house into snow-bright cold.

  ‘Eligiya Kamilova lives in a wooden house on the fish wharf,’ Elena had said. ‘You need to climb the Ship Bastion and take the covered steps down to the harbour.’

  The Ship Bastion was a massive granite outcrop, the highest point in the raion, the highest in Mirgorod. Street sweepers were out–giants shovelling snow with easy strength–and some people were clearing the paths outside their houses and shops, but it was hard climbing. They had to pick their way across rutted, compacted stretches of ice and wade knee-deep through heaps and drifts of snow.

  There was a small cobbled square at the top of the Bastion rock, with a parapet where you could lean and catch your breath. Below them, the canyons and ravines of the raion fell way in a tumble of steep roofs, stepped gables, leaning pinnacles and slumping chimneys; and beyond lay the expansive, grey, snow-dusted, smoking vista of Mirgorod. The city roared quietly under the wheeling of the gulls. In the distance the thousand-foot-high needle-sharp spire of the Armoury, the One Column On Spilled Blood, speared the belly of the sky. The Lodka was a massive squat black prow, and the steel ribbon of the Mir rolled westwards, crossed by a dozen bridges, towards the skyline smudge of the sea.

  In the far corner of the Bastion Square was a wooden door set in a pointed arch of weathered grey stone.

  ‘That must be the way,’ said Maroussia. ‘Down there.’

  The door in the arch opened onto a steep winding flight of stone steps enclosed by wooden walls and a wooden roof. The stairway was in shadow, lit only by narrow slits cut at intervals in the wood, and the treads were worn smooth and hollow in the centre by centuries of footfall. It smelled cool and damp, like the mouth of a well. The steps wound and switchbacked steeply down. Hundreds of steps. Several times they had to stop and press themselves back against the wall to make room for someone coming up.

  They came out into a huddle of warehouses, wharves and jetties. Boats crowded against the harbour edge, idle under a covering of snow. The River Purfas was a pale green porridge of slush and fragments of ice. Rigging clattered in the brisk river breeze. Nets were draped, black and reeking, from the weather-bleached warehouse walls, and the smell from gibbeted racks of drying fish and smokehouses hung heavy on the air. Yellow-eyed seabirds called from canted masts and rooftops, swooped on scraps and stalked the walkways, poking at the chum-buckets. Chalk-boards at the wharfside fish market promised eel and crab, flounder, zander, garfish, herring, bream and cod. But fishing was done for the winter. Harder times were coming. The market trays were empty, the sawdust swept and the shutters up. Men hung about, smoking, talking quietly in the throaty, fricative languages of the raion.

  Lom and Maroussia picked their way between stacked baskets, salt barrels and coils of rope. They found the tall narrow building where Kamilova lived at the far end of the wharf, squeezed between a chandlery and a smokehouse. A frontage of overlapping timbers of tar-black pine and dark lopsided windows with many panes of thick green glass. Maroussia knocked. Lom pulled his woollen cap lower over his forehead.

  The woman who opened the door must have been sixty years old, but she was tall and straight and wiry-muscular, with a traveller’s sparse, defined, weathered face. Iron-grey hair, tied severely back. Bright pale intelligent eyes. She was wearing a knitted sweater, dark canvas trousers, boots.

  ‘Eligiya Kamilova?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Yes? Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Maroussia Shaumian.’

  ‘Shaumian?’ Kamilova studied her with narrowed eyes. ‘I see. Shaumian.’

  ‘Can we come in? We want to talk to you. We want to ask you about the forest. I think you can help me—’

  ‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I can’t help you.’

  She began to close the door. Lom stepped forward and leaned against it.

  ‘We need to talk to you,’ he said.

  Kamilova looked at him steadily.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘should get off my door.’

  ‘We just want to come in for a while,’ said Lom. ‘To talk. That’s all.’

  ‘I said get away from my door.’

  Kamilova’s eyes widened. There was a strangeness there. Wild distant spaces. Lom felt the air stirring. Responsive. Forest smells. Resin and earth. And suddenly the air around him was no longer stuff to breathe, it was his enemy. Heavy in his lungs, hard and cold about him. A stone fist of air punched him in the back of the head, sickening, dizzying, and he stumbled forward. The weight of solid air on his shoulders and back pressed down on him. All the mile-high heaviness of the air. Forcing him to his knees. A sudden wind whipped the snow from the gro
und. It smacked and scraped at his face, a bitter freezing hail, blinding him. He could hear Maroussia somewhere far away, shouting, but the wind destroyed her words. Panicking, he struggled for breath. He could not fill his lungs. He was drowning in the hostile air.

  But he did not drown. There was a sentience in the air. It was alive and knew what it was doing. And he knew what it was.

  Lom reached out towards it. Opening himself. Taking the barriers down. Not breathing in but breathing out. Remembering.

  He was in the centre of a small hardened whorl of fierceness, but beyond it were oceans of atmosphere. Eddies and tides and deeps, layer over layer, air from the forest, air from the river, air from the sea, freighted with life and scent and the stories of themselves. He climbed higher. The air grew thinner, colder, clearer, more beautiful, bright and electric the higher he climbed. He opened himself to it. He was air himself, air in the air. The squalls that battered him were part of him and he was in them. He let them pass through where he was. He rose and stood and waited patiently for the assault to calm and stop.

  Kamilova was looking at him with surprise and frank curiosity. And something else. Lom could not tell what it was. It might have been recognition.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  Lom tried to answer but found he could not. Not yet. His heart was hammering. He needed all the capacity of his aching lungs to breathe, tearing mouthfuls of breath out of the sparse, thinned air.

  ‘Who is he?’ Kamilova said to Maroussia. Urgently. ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘This is my friend. His name is Vissarion.’

  Kamilova frowned.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not Vissarion. That’s not a forest name. He’s strong, but I didn’t know him. He carries himself like a bear, but something’s not right.’

  ‘Can’t we just…’ Lom breathed painfully. His whole body felt bruised and abused. ‘Can’t we just come in?’

  37

  Look to the south of Mirgorod and see hundreds of miles of frontierless grass. Sandy soil. Marshes and small lakes, slow yellow rivers, thorn thickets and sparse scatterings of birch. Collectivised farms of drab herds, two-strand fences, cabbages and potato fields. Hapless towns, dirt roads and one-platform railway halts. A long indeterminate coastline of gravel and mud. A country without features.