Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  Lom gripped Palffy’s arm. Hard.

  ‘You can’t tell anyone she’s here,’ he said urgently. ‘You see that, don’t you?’

  ‘These are men I would trust with my life. Men of purpose and experience—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Lom. ‘You can’t tell anyone she’s here. No one at all.’

  41

  Captain of Police Vorush Iliodor, assistant to Commander Chazia, was busy in his office. Outside his night-dark uncurtained window, snow was falling, and bombs. More bombs. From time to time a close impact shook his desk. He forced himself to ignore it. He had much work to complete and he was a man who stuck at his duty. He was preparing detailed orders to put into effect the evacuation from Mirgorod of the Government of the Vlast. He had almost finished.

  Iliodor prided himself on unquestioning efficiency. His job was to take the broad instructions of his superiors and translate them into the detailed, precise and unambiguous practical orders that made for effective implementation. It required a certain kind of pragmatic imagination, at which he excelled. It required him to understand not just what was required, but why. He liked to call this, in his own mind, his strategic comprehension. But it emphatically did not require him to have personal opinions: these he rarely formulated, even in his own mind, and never expressed. It was precisely this quality of non-judgemental receptiveness which, as he well knew, had caused Chazia to appoint him to his post and made her comfortable in his presence, and even occasionally talkative.

  The instruction to evacuate, which she had given even as the first bombs fell, came as no surprise. He knew, as Chazia had known, that in the last weeks of his life the Novozhd had accepted that if the tentative peace talks failed and the Archipelago pressed home their advance, Mirgorod was indefensible. He knew, as Chazia had known but Dukhonin, Khazar and Fohn did not, that the Novozhd had secretly approved the withdrawal of the Third, Seventh and Eighth armies from the provinces to the east and south of the city, leaving only a skeleton force to slow but not stop the enemy’s advance. He also knew that Chazia saw the loss of Mirgorod as an advantage not a disaster.

  ‘We will build a new Vlast, Iliodor!’ she had said more than once. ‘A renewed Vlast, young and strong and pure, safe in the east behind thousands of miles of empty steppe and plain. We will strip the factories and carry the plant eastward on trains. We will empty the Lodka and move the government out. Take what files we need and burn the rest. Mine and booby-trap the Lodka itself.

  ‘Let the Archipelago bring Mirgorod down around their ears. We will have new cities, with marvellous modern buildings, taller and finer and fitter for the modern world. New towns, new factories, connected by the best roads and railways. With airfields in the centre! Around the towns we will build handsome, spacious farms for citizen peasants to work on, and delightful, hygienic villages. We will clear out all the rubbish, and grow a new, pure, wholesome and modern Vlast. Let the Archipelago wear themselves out in the west and overstretch themselves, and when we’re ready we’ll roll them back into the Cetic Ocean and rebuild Mirgorod as a vacation resort.’

  So Iliodor had anticipated that one day the evacuation orders would be required. He had made his preparations. Outline plans and diagrams, kept in a sealed folder in the safe. When the moment came, he simply had to fetch out his folder and begin the process of filling out the necessary memoranda of instruction and orders of movement. The work was already nearly done. Chazia had suggested he should co-opt some assistance, but he had not done so. There was no need. Quicker to do it himself than to explain, and more certain to be done accurately and correctly.

  Nevertheless it was arduous, absorbing work. The air raid on the city was an annoying distraction and the effort of ignoring it was wearing. Still, he had done well. And he had not forgotten his other, smaller duties. The file on the woman Shaumian was waiting, out of the way on the corner of his desk, ready for the creature Bez Nichevoi to collect that night. Including the note on where to find her, based on information recently received. No loose ends there.

  Iliodor did not at first look up when he heard someone quietly enter the room. A figure pausing before the desk, waiting for attention. Iliodor held up his hand for silence and continued to copy a list of departmental branches from his notes onto a printed Consolidate-and-Remove proforma in a neat, precise script. Only when he had finished did he glance up to see who had come, and found himself staring into his own face. His own face watching him from under an astrakhan hat.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ said Iliodor. It struck him, even as he spoke, that this wasn’t the most urgent, nor the most rational, of all the questions he might have asked.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said the intruder with Iliodor’s face, ‘what with the bombs and all, security was rather cursory in the matter of credentials. A familiar appearance…’

  He spoke with a cultured, almost diffident voice that resembled Iliodor’s own but was not, Iliodor thought, the same. There was a deepness, a throaty undertone, that struck him as odd. His neck was thicker than Iliodor’s own, and roped with muscle under the skin. There were flecks of tawny amber in the green of his eyes.

  ‘And of course,’ the mirror-Iliodor continued, ‘by the same token, given the destruction wrought across the city, one more unidentifiable body found in the street will be unlikely to cause much excitement.’

  Only then did Iliodor notice the large kitbag in the intruder’s hand, which was obviously empty.

  ‘Oh…’ said Iliodor. ‘No.’ There was an emptiness in his stomach. An unhealable sadness. ‘No. You don’t have to…’

  The face watching him was raw. Gold-flecked eyes looked into his, dark almost to tears, reflecting Iliodor’s own hopeless sadness back at him, distilled and magnified.

  ‘But I am a soldier,’ said the man who was not Iliodor. ‘And this is a war.’

  42

  After Fohn’s broadcast, Lom and Maroussia went back down with Elena Cornelius and her girls to their apartment. The air-raid sirens were wailing again in the distance. They could hear the muffled crump of falling bombs.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with us,’ said Maroussia. ‘For tonight.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elena. ‘No. I’m glad.’

  The two of them, Elena and Maroussia, made a soup. Cabbage. An onion. Kvass. While they worked, Lom picked up the newspaper that Elena had brought with her from the Count’s room. He skimmed idly through the account of the attack on General Secretary Dukhonin’s house: the brave defence mounted by his guards and a passing militia patrol; the fall of Dukhonin himself in the struggle; the death of the firebrand convict Josef Kantor and all of his murderous gangster squad.

  Lom read and reread the sentence. It didn’t change. Kantor was dead. He had led the attack on Dukhonin and died in the ensuing gun battle.

  Kantor was dead.

  He read the story to the end. Chazia had made a speech about a renewed determination to rid Mirgorod and the Vlast of the disease of anarchic nationalist terrorism and those who harboured it. There was nothing more about Kantor. In the rest of the paper there was almost no mention of the war and the enemy coming towards the city. It might have been news from a year ago. A decade. Except that Kantor was dead.

  Lom sat and nursed the news of Kantor’s death like a wound. This was new disaster. Lom’s thread into the Lodka; his plan–if it was ever a plan, not just a half-baked impossibility–was shredded. He would have to start working at it all over again. And war was come. The city burning.

  ‘Maroussia?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You should see this.’ He held the newspaper towards her, folded open at the page. Watched her read it twice.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘OK. So that’s that.’ She put the paper down and started laying the table.

  When they had finished eating and Lom had helped the girls clear away, Elena Cornelius brought out a box and put it on the table. It was made of a reddish fibrous wood, heavy and roughl
y made, the size of a large book, with a tight-fitting lid. The lid was covered with carvings of leaves and intertwined curling thorny stems.

  ‘I’ve been saving these,’ she said. ‘I brought them with me when I came to the city. I want to have them now.’

  She took off the lid. Inside was a heap of dark shining fruit. Berries of purple and red. Wild strawberries, blackcurrants, raspberries. Elderberries, night-blue, luminous, as fat and fresh and full as the day they were picked. Other berries Lom didn’t recognise.

  ‘Here,’ said Elena, offering the box to the girls. ‘These are from the forest. I’ve kept them twenty years. There used to be more. The box was full when I came to Mirgorod. Your father and I had some, when each of you were born.’

  Galina hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ said Elena. ‘They’re good to eat. I promise.’

  ‘But… they’re for celebrations.’

  ‘I want us to have them now.’

  When the girls had taken a couple she pushed the box over to Maroussia and Lom.

  ‘You too. Please.’

  Lom took a single elderberry and put it in his mouth. Burst it against his tongue. The fruit was fresh and sharp and sweet, with a slight taint of resin that was not unpleasant but made the juice taste dark and wild and strange.

  ‘It’s a property of the tree,’ said Elena. ‘It’s a kind of red pine: the breath of the wood keeps things fresh, not for ever, but longer. There was a giant called Akki-Paavo-Perelainen who used to come every autumn to our timber yard. He would always come just before the river froze, riding a great raft of red pine down the river. He gave me this box, and I carved the lid.

  ‘That was the year my father was accused of crimes of privacy, and they made us leave the yard and the house. We weren’t allowed to take anything with us. Not a thing. Not even our name. They said our family was dissolved. Relations annulled. My father was to be called Feliks Ioannes, my mother was Teodosia Braun, and I was Elena Schmitt. I remember my mother shouting at the official, “She is my daughter. It is a fact of nature. Nothing you say can change it.” And the man was saying to us over and over again, “Your thoughts and your strength belong to the Vlast, just like the rest of us.”

  ‘They let us carry on living together for a while, in a room above a shop in the town. When we got there it was filthy. Disgusting. Every surface was covered in some kind of sticky grease, and the blankets smelled of illness. The day we moved in my mother set about cleaning it, and my father sat in a chair by the window, smoking, not saying a word. I sneaked away and went back to our old house. I broke in through a window and I just walked from room to room. Just touching things. While I was there some men came, and I had to hide in my bedroom. I heard them in the corridor. One of them pissed on the wallpaper. I heard it splashing on the rug. When I got away from the house I brought this box away with me, the only thing I had left from the old life, and when I came to work in Mirgorod I brought it here. These are the same berries Akki-Paavo-Perelainen gave me. You can’t hang on to things for ever. Let’s finish them now.’

  43

  Bez Nichevoi returned to his body at nightrise. He came back into it gradually, curled in its nest of earth and leaves and moss and chewed-over bones high among the roof beams of an empty warehouse in the city. As the planet turned its continent-face slowly away from the sun, the netted nerve-threads of his body snagged the touch of darklight and twitched and quietly sang. The settled sump of its blood unthickened, the secretions of its glands began to seep, interstitial lymph condensed like honeydew and capillaries, deconstricted, stirred. Ligatures of skeletal articulation re-clenched. In the slack pale slubs of jelly in the chambers of its skull, synaptic pathways undissolved. Bez Nichevoi warmed slowly through. And took breath. The body jack-knifed, spasming, choking, retching, vomiting acidic slews of gluey, gobbetty brown stink across its mushroom-pale and bone-thin chest. The waste products of a day of death.

  Awakened, he lay back and opened his eyes, drinking in the beautiful darkness like water. The air around him was freezing. His first breaths hung in pale ghosts above his face, slowly dispersing. He surrendered himself to the pleasures of his nest, sweet and warm and crumbly-rotting, matted with perfumed fungal threads. The familiar musty smell of crusted salt and hawthorn blossom, rotting fruit and strong meat. A smell to awaken desire and dark, hidden feelings. Parts of his body were covered with skin-like papery stuff. He picked and peeled it carefully away with his fingernails and ate it.

  When he was fully warmed through he rolled lazily out of his nest, swung himself up to the ceiling and skittered across it to the skylight, slipped through and climbed onto the lead of the roof. Naked, he squatted under the sky, bathing in starlight. There was something new on the air. The night was wired with it. The residue of burned city and upturned earth, the traces of two thousand deaths. The touch of war.

  Bez Nichevoi, light of heart, unstrung the bundle of clothes he’d left hidden in the lea of a chimney stack, dressed, and set off across the rooftops to the Lodka, to read the file of papers Iliodor had left for him on Maroussia Shaumian.

  44

  Josef Kantor, king terrorist, buttoned the tunic of his Colonel-General’s uniform with fat, stiff fingers. Josef Kantor, agitator, pamphleteer, bomb-maker, assassin and robber of banks, his fingers swollen and hardened by decades of labour with shovel and pick, bare-handed scrabbling at rock, freezing cells, interrogation rooms, did up his uniform buttons one by one. Josef Kantor, author of the Birzel Declaration, survivor of Vig, leader of the Fighting Organisation of Lezarye, forced awkward buttons of gleaming brass through virgin buttonholes with ruined fingernails.

  The uniform was green, thick serge and factory-new. More brass at shoulder and collar. Hammers and stars. Boots shone like coal.

  New times require new forms of thought.

  The telephone on the desk rang. He picked it up.

  ‘General Rizhin? They are ready for you. The Operations Room—’

  ‘Let them wait.’

  He opened the drawer and took out his revolver. A Ghovt-Alenka DK9. An unremarkable service firearm. It felt comfortable in his hand, a familiar, useful thing, like a spade to a peasant.

  I’ll dig with it.

  He checked the cylinder and slipped it into his holster. Left the flap unbuttoned. A handful of loose shells in his pocket. It was time.

  There is no past. There is only the future.

  He walked out of the room into the corridor where Rizhin’s future began.

  It cost him nothing to let Josef Kantor die.

  They were waiting for General Rizhin in a ground-floor conference room on the far side of the Armoury parade ground. Operation Ouspensky Bulwark. Maps and charts and telephones. The six officers at the table stood when he entered. The fat one stepped forward and saluted. The flesh of his neck bulged over his collar. Small, worried eyes squinted at Rizhin with wary hostility. The distrust of the career officer for the man he’d never heard of till that very morning. The political man. Chazia’s man. Chazia’s ears.

  ‘I am Strughkov,’ he said. ‘Major-General Strughkov, Commander, City Defence. Welcome, General. We have prepared a presentation. The current situation, and our plans. We have proposals to make for—’

  ‘The situation, Strughkov, is shit. Your plans are also shit.’

  Strughkov flushed.

  ‘General Rizhin—’

  ‘Where are the divisions?’ said Rizhin. ‘Where are the guns? The Bukharsk Line is broken. When the enemy comes, will you blow up their armies with presentations and sink their ships with plans?’

  ‘Our orders,’ said Strughkov, ‘are to hold the city for forty-eight hours. A week at most. We are to delay the enemy for long enough to allow the orderly evacuation of government. The Vlast is moving east. Plant and stocks from the factories are to be relocated. We have made our dispositions. Khalturin’s Corps of Horse stands ready in the Ouspensky Marsh. Five infantry regiments at Satlivosk. We have the 23rd Engineers. We have stockpiled
arms for the militia. Raised twenty thousand volunteers—’

  ‘Untrained conscripts,’ said Rizhin. ‘Old men and boys. Policemen with antiquated rifles.’

  ‘We make the best of what we have.’

  ‘Where are the fortifications? The outer lines of defence? Artillery? Aircraft? More mudjhiks guard the Novozhd’s bones than guard the city. Where are the gunships in the Reaches? Why do the bridges at Nordslavl still stand?’

  ‘We will hold the line between Kropotlovsk and Yatlavograd for forty-eight hours. That will be enough. Then we will withdraw eastward, fighting as we go. We are to destroy everything we cannot take with us. Not a sack of grain, not a horse and cart, not a gallon of engine oil is to be left. We are to join the Third Army at Strom.’

  ‘Mirgorod,’ said Rizhin, ‘is the capital city of the Vlast. The Founder’s city, built at the site of the first angel fall. The heart of the Dominions for four hundred years. And you, General Strughkov, are proposing to abandon it without a fight.’

  Rizhin watched with curiosity the working of Strughkov’s fat, tired face. The reddening anger and, in his eyes like tears held back, the strange beginning of grief. The war been stalemated for so long, the fronts locked in entrenched positions far from Mirgorod to the south and south-east, that even to the men who led the armies of the Vlast it had come to seem permanent. Stable. Familiar. Inevitable. Like the authority of generals. Like the Vlast itself. A few miles lost and gained here and there, year by year, decade by decade, paid for with statistical quantities of death, changing nothing. And yet, behind it all, the whisper unheard. The myth dispersing. The possibility of failure and total collapse.

  In the room a fundamental psychological turn had been taken. Rizhin felt it. The men withdrawing. Strughkov standing alone.