Across this country war is coming.
Onward the enemy’s armies churn, at the pace of markers being moved across a map in an operations room, at the speed of terse conversations on field telephones, converging on Mirgorod, capital of the Vlast. The armies of the enemy find the opposition melting away.
It is a matter of machine logistics now. Statistics and arithmetics of steel. A calculation of armoured divisions. The sound is the sound of diesel engines droning and the clatter of iron tracks, the rattle of ammunition belts, the thunder-crash of heavy guns. The smell is the smell of hot oil and hot metal, the burning of rubber, the hot piss the gunners use to cool their overworked weapons. The light is the light of arcing sprays of burning gasoline, the flicker of rocket batteries firing, the daytime darkness of shadows under smoke-filled air. Not in one place, but in a hundred places: five separate fronts, all rolling forward, thirty or forty miles a day, converging on Mirgorod.
In rain-sodden fields and bypassed towns, people stand mute and look on as the logarithms of steel, too intent on the future to notice them, surge by. Seventy-ton tanks chew up the ground. The pale faces of motorised infantry stare back at the watchers without expression from the back of armoured half-tracks. Under the watchers’ feet the earth trembles. The deep geologies of history are upheaving. The maps by which they have always lived are being torn up and trodden into the mud. The old certainties are dissolving like bones in an acid bath.
The ones who look on are not even frightened yet.
And over their heads the featureless sky is marked out with the high patchwork geometries of aircraft formations sliding north towards Mirgorod.
38
Lom followed Maroussia and Eligiya Kamilova up the staircase to Kamilova’s room. It was a wide, airy, almost empty space at the top of the house: the scent of woodsmoke and damp earth mixed with the harbour reek. Thick leaded panes filtered the morning light, and harbour sounds drifted in through an open casement. The room was austere, like the woman herself. Stripped back. Only what was essential. Bare floorboards darkened with age. A large rug spread in the centre, leather cushions and bolsters ranged around the edge. A pair of low, carved stools.
A small fire was burning in the corner, logs stacked neatly nearby: the logs looked like they’d spent time in the sea. A bleached animal skull rested on the floor near the hearth. It was big like an elk but broad-browed and feline, with front-facing eye sockets and a pair of long curved incisors. A hunting beast. It was enormous. Colossal.
Kamilova brought them tea in china cups. It was made from forest leaves, muddy and bitter. She folded herself neatly onto a cushion. Maroussia sat near her and Lom squatted awkwardly on one of the stools, facing her across the rug.
‘So?’ said Kamilova. ‘Why come to me?’
‘My friend Elena Cornelius told me you’ve made journeys in the forest. I hoped… maybe you might talk to us. You might know something that could help us. Help me.’
‘Elena Cornelius?’ said Kamilova. ‘You should have said. But… help you with what?’
Lom watched Maroussia hesitate. Take a deep breath. Make a decision.
‘There was a paluba,’ she said. ‘It was looking for me and it found me. It showed me things. The forest. A terrible living angel, and the damage it was doing. The paluba wanted me to find something. The Pollandore. Do you—?’
‘Air-daughter made a new world,’ said Kamilova, ‘to displace the old one from within. World in the forest, forest in the world. What makes you look, and what you find. The wound, and what made the wound.’
‘That’s it!’ said Maroussia. ‘That’s what my mother used to say. I haven’t heard that for years. Yes. And the Pollandore is—’
‘A story. A riddle game. A children’s tale. I have heard others.’
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s real.’ She reached inside her coat and brought out the bundle of Vishnik’s photographs. Handed them across to Kamilova. ‘Here it is. Here is the proof.’
Kamilova looked at the pictures one by one, carefully. Moments in the city, times and places opened up like sunlight in a rain-dark sky, like berries bursting.
‘And this,’ she said at last, ‘you think this is the Pollandore?’
‘No, it’s what the Pollandore is doing,’ said Maroussia. ‘Here in Mirgorod. It’s active. It’s leaking or something. I don’t know. I’ve felt it myself. I’ve seen these things. It’s waking up. The Pollandore itself is a thing. It’s an object in a place. The paluba… she told me to find it. She wants me to open it.’
‘Open it like a box, or open it like a door?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘To let something out, or for you to go in?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘But you’re going to do it?’
‘Yes. If I can.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the angel. The paluba showed me—’
‘The paluba,’ said Kamilova, ‘showed you nothing. The paluba was a vehicle, nothing more. The speaker but not the voice.’ She paused, watching Maroussia closely. Studying her. ‘So,’ she said at last. ‘You want me to tell you about the forest?’
‘Yes,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. Just… just talk to us.’
Kamilova pulled back her sleeves and held out her arms. They were thin, muscular and berry-brown. Intricate knotted patterns wound across her skin, reaching down towards her wrists, drawn in faded purple and green. Like roots. Like veins. Filaments. Growth.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been into the forest. I’ve taken my boat up the rivers. I’ve travelled with fur traders and shamans and women with spirit skins. I’ve lived with giants and lake people. I’ve slept with them and hunted with them and some of them showed me… they showed me things. They taught me, and I listened. I learned. I’m talking about the deep forest now. Deep in under the trees.’ She looked at Lom. ‘He knows what I mean.’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t.’
Kamilova made a crude derisive gesture and spat into the fire. Lom had seen traders on the Yannis do the same thing when offered an insulting price. She turned away from him, back to Maroussia.
‘What you need to understand about the forest,’ Kamilova continued, ‘is this: there is no end to it, and no certain paths. It is not a forest, it is all forests. It contains all forests. Woods within woods, forests within forests, further in and further back, deeper and deeper for ever. Anything that could be in the forest is there. Anything you have ever heard about the forest–any forest–it is all there, somewhere. The Vlast is nothing, the world is nothing, compared to the forest.’ She paused. ‘And the point is, most of what lives in the forest has no interest in the human world at all. The forest has its own purposes. Not everything that comes out of the forest can be trusted.’
‘You think the paluba lied to me?’ said Maroussia.
‘I think that, whoever was using it, they have purposes of their own, of which you are a part. Palubas speak to you like dreams. They draw things out of your mind, use images and ideas they find there, change them, put thoughts to you in ways that you can understand and believe.’
‘But that’s the point. I don’t understand’
‘You’re doing what it needs you to do.’
‘But the Pollandore is real,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s here. It’s near. I’ve seen what it can do. It can make a difference. It can make things… change. And I know where it is, only it will be hard to get to. And I am going to reach it.’
‘Why?’ said Kamilova. ‘I ask you this again. Why?’
‘Because…’ said Maroussia. She frowned. Hesitated. ‘Because there’s a terrible hole in the centre of everything. It’s like a mouth, a gaping mouth that swallows up life and spews out shadow and cruelty and sadness. Not just for me, for everyone. There’s this gap, this awful gap that you feel all the time, between how things are and how they could be. There’s something really close to me, almost in the same place as I am, and it’s my life, my real life as it’
s meant to be, only I’m not living it because I’m here instead. ‘
Maroussia was leaning forward, back straight, dark eyes fixed on the fire in Kamilova’s grate. She was fierce and hurting and determined. Lom watched her intently.
‘Do you understand?’ she said urgently to Kamilova. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Kamilova. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘I will reach the Pollandore,’ said Maroussia. ‘I know where it is. But I don’t know what to do when I get there. The paluba said there was a key. Not a key, but something like it. It thought I already had it. It thought I knew more… but I don’t.’
Kamilova stood up.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I will show you something.’
The boathouse was a few yards down from Kamilova’s building. She let Lom and Maroussia in through a small wicket in a larger door.
‘This is my boat,’ she said. ‘Heron.’ It was under a tarpaulin, a varnished clinker hull. The rest of the space in the boathouse was filled with a clutter of bundles and stacked boxes. A canoe hung suspended from the ceiling, skins on a wooden frame. ‘This is where I keep my collection. Things I’ve brought back from the forest.’
It was impossible to make out much in the shadows. There were carvings on the wall. Crude wooden masks. Bottles and boxes on shelves. Lom felt something stirring. Hunting animals with rain-wet fur. Leaf mould and shadow under trees. Watchfulness. Life. He was in an open space among the trees. Fern and briar and clumps of thorn. Earth and rain. A small stream, barely trickling its way over silted accidental dams of mud and stone and banked-up branches and leaves. A beech fallen in a pool of green water. Rain-mist erasing the further slopes and hillsides. He was young, and something was watching him, a bad dark thing, and he was frightened.
Kamilova disappeared into the back of the boathouse and came back holding something small cupped in her hand. A loosely knotted ball of twigs and dried leaves stuck with gobbets of wax-like stuff, dried brown and brittle. Dull, desiccated berries. The bones and fur-scraps of small animals. She held it out to Maroussia.
‘Have you seen one of these before?’ she said.
Maroussia took it and turned it over in her hand. Held it up to her face and breathed the scent.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My mother had them all over the house. She said the forest brought them to her. But she… she was weak and frightened all the time. She was terrified of trees in the street. She said they waited for her and watched and followed her. She wasn’t… well.’
‘This is what the volvas, the wise women, call a solm, or a khlahv, or a bo. Sometimes they call them keys. It’s a vessel for air. It can hold and carry a breath, and the breath is the message. The voice. That one in your hand is empty now. Old and dead.’
Maroussia handed the object back.
‘What my mother had, they were messages?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’
‘About it. Or for it.’
‘But they’re all gone now,’ said Maroussia. ‘They’re all lost. Or destroyed.’ She paused. ‘No, wait. Mother used to hide them sometimes in the apartment. Vissarion, we have to go back there. We have to go back and look.’
‘No,’ said Lom. He brought out from his pocket the bloodstained hessian bag he’d taken from her mother’s body in the street by Vanko’s. The survivor. It felt alive in his hand. Quiet and watchful. Breathing. ‘I’ve still got this.’
Maroussia snatched it from him and opened it. Brought out the knot of twigs and forest stuff. Held it up to her face. Her hands were trembling slightly. But nothing happened. Nothing came.
‘Is it still good?’ she said to Kamilova. ‘Is it OK?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘But… what do I do with it?’ Maroussia held it out to her. ‘Can you tell me?’
Kamilova shook her head.
‘Not if it’s meant for you.’
‘But I don’t know how… There’s nothing. Nothing’s happening.’
‘You have to learn that for yourself. You have to listen. Keep it with you. Hold it. Breathe it. Pay attention. Don’t push it. It’s all about openness. Wakefulness. Give it time.’
‘Time?’ said Maroussia. ‘There is no time. Time is what we haven’t got.’
Kamilova kissed Maroussia on the mouth when they left.
39
Maroussia said nothing when they emerged from Eligiya Kamilova’s boathouse. They walked in silence along the harbour edge and began the ascent back up towards the Ship Bastion.
Lom kept pace alongside Maroussia. Leaving her space. Letting her think. He wasn’t sure, himself, what they had learned from Kamilova. In Kamilova’s presence he’d felt the forest, its realness and closeness, its watchfulness, its urgency. But… perhaps there wasn’t anything else to know. Perhaps it wasn’t about learning, but doing. The Pollandore was in the Lodka, right in the cruel stone centre of the Vlast. Bring Maroussia to the Pollandore and… it would happen. Something would happen. Trying to learn, trying to explore, trying to figure out what she had to do when the moment came and what it might mean: that was nothing, only passing time. An avoidance strategy. A rationalisation of fear. The task was simpler than that.
Maroussia stopped and turned to face him.
‘What Kamilova said…’ she began. ‘About the people who sent the paluba having a purpose of their own, that I couldn’t know…’ She paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? None of that matters. The angel in the forest is real. The Pollandore is real. The rest of it doesn’t matter. There are only two sides, and everyone has to choose. I’m not trusting the paluba, I’m trusting myself. It’s about feeling and instinct and knowing what to do, when the time comes.’
‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I guess that’s right.’
‘We have to get into the Lodka and find the Pollandore. What happens after that… that’s something else. We just have to get there.’
You can’t just walk into the Lodka, thought Lom, but he said nothing. That was his problem, not hers. Getting her inside, that was his job. What happened afterwards would be up to her.
Consider the question in its widest aspect.
The Lodka: it was where the Pollandore was, and it was where Chazia was. And Josef Kantor. The Lodka was the last place Lom had seen Kantor. Kantor was more than a terrorist. Much more. Lom didn’t fully understand Kantor’s connections with Chazia and the Lodka, but he knew that Kantor was deeply and intricately meshed in it all. That made Kantor a way in. So. Find Kantor. It was back to that.
They climbed back up the winding covered steps to the Ship Bastion and emerged into winter light. The sky was pale powder-blue, airy and vertiginous, wisped with sparse cloud-feather, achingly elsewhere, achingly high. They leaned on the parapet and looked out across the city. Mirgorod, spreading out towards the horizon under an immensity of height and air, seemed almost small. A humane settlement. Contain able. A place where people lived. The winter sun, already westering, burned with a blinding whiteness that gave no heat. There was something wrong. A buzzing in the air, an edgy vibration, like unseen engines racing. Too quiet and distant to be a sound, you heard it with your skin, your teeth, the bones of your skull.
‘Look,’ said Maroussia ‘Look.’
She was squinting towards the sun.
Lom looked but saw nothing. The sun was cold and dazzling. When he shut his eyes against it, colour-shifting after-images and shadow-filaments floated across the blood-warmth inside. When he looked again, some of the specks were still there. Strings of dots across the sun in wavering horizontal lines. Faint punctuation.
Others had stopped to watch them. Nobody spoke.
More and more rows of specks resolved out of the sun. Coming into focus. Dozens. Scores. Hundreds. Coming in pulses. Waves. Formations.
The noise escalated to a thundering, rattling roar, not from the west where Lom was looking but from behind. He jerked his head round. The aircraft was low and descending and coming straight for them. It was immense. Three fat-bellied f
uselages hung from wide, thick wings. Each wing carried eight–no, ten–propellers. The fuselages were as large as ships. The bomber was so big it seemed to be suspended in the sky, an impossible motionless thing. It was descending slowly straight down onto them, onto the rock hill on which they stood. It was going to crash.
At the last moment the plane lifted its nose fractionally and roared slowly overhead. They saw its swollen triple bellies of unpainted metal. Lettering on the underside of its wings. The insignia of the Archipelago. It was low enough to see faces looking down from its windows as it trundled over them and sailed out across the city, its engine noise climbing to a roar beyond hearing, its array of speed-blurred propellers chopping and grinding the air.
A trail of insignificant silver shapes spilled from its triple belly mouths.
A pause. A suspended moment. Maroussia’s hand was gripping Lom’s arm so tight it hurt.
The bombs splashed into the upturned face of the city and flowered into small blossoms of flame and smoke puffs.
And then came the sound.
The world lurched sickeningly and Lom’s stomach with it. A new door had opened and everything was utterly changed.
Wave after wave of huge triple-fuselaged bombers unloaded their cargoes. The engines roared relentlessly and the detonation-thuds burst in short fast shattering series. Fat columns of black oily smoke rose everywhere and drifted in low, thickening banks. The smell of it reached them: an industrial smell, like engine sheds and factories. Hot metal and soot.
Higher in the sky, smaller wasp-like aircraft circled, buzzed and droned, drawing tracks and spirals of vapour trail.
‘Which ones are ours?’ said Maroussia. ‘Can you tell?’
‘None,’ said Lom. ‘None at all.’
Twenty thousand pounds of high explosive per minute, minute after minute after minute, spilled out of the sky in sticks and skeins of bombs. Whistling formations of aerodynamic tubular steel casing. A spattering rain of incendiary parcels. When their bays were empty, the heavy bomber squadrons swept round again for a fresh approach. They lumbered in low. Autocannons in fishbowl noses and underbelly gun-pods punched out 50mm phosphorus shells at thirty rounds per minute. The disciplined, practised attacks concentrated on the wharfs and harbour yards to the west of Mirgorod and the steelworks and factories to the south, but the seeds of destruction and burn were scattered widely.
Truth and Fear Page 15