Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  ‘I want to get off this train,’ said Maroussia.

  Chazia ignored her.

  ‘There will be time for personal life,’ she said. ‘One day. We might even live to see it. But not yet, not now, and perhaps for you and me not ever. It cannot be indulged. Now there is work to do, and what is required is clear-sightedness, hardness and resolve in the doing of what is necessary. That will be our gift to the future. Our sacrifice.’ Chazia leaned forward and took Maroussia’s hand in hers. Stroked it. ‘Help me here, darling. Work with me. Help me to use the Pollandore. I don’t want to hurt you. I like you.’

  ‘I’m never going to help you. You know that.’

  ‘You will know me better, Maroussia darling, by and by.’

  Later that same afternoon the train halted on the shore of an immense and nameless lake. Maroussia watched damson-coloured, damson-heavy cloud heads rise out of the distance and roll towards them, bruising more and more of the sky and darkening the surface of the water, erasing all reflection. Slowly the storm advanced, bringing the closing horizon with it as it came, until the train was enfolded in ominous dim purple-green light. Maroussia stood up in excitement and gripped the window bars. At last fat raindrops splatted on her window, singly at first, but faster and faster, harder and harder. Machine-gun bullets of rain. Water sluiced down the glass in a continuous rippling flood. There might have been arcs of lightning and shattering thunder crashes, or it might have been the glitter and roar of the rain.

  Maroussia’s shouts of joy were lost in the noise.

  And then a crack opened in the world, the rain and the storm split down the middle, and a different sun was shining through the carriage window: splashes of warmth and spaciousness and the quietness of an afternoon in early summer. The sourness in her mouth was gone, and her heart was big and calm with the possibility of happiness.

  The Pollandore reached out and touched her face, and for the first time Maroussia felt how close it was, how near in time as well as distance. There had been bad things–bad things that happened and bad things she had done–but she and the Pollandore were travelling together now, and their paths were slowly converging, and the moment would come: the moment of meeting, when good things would be possible again. She could not have said exactly what the good things coming were, but that didn’t matter. It made no difference at all.

  72

  The Pollandore’s massive detonation of possibility and different sunlight sweeps outwards across the continent from its epicentre on Chazia’s train. It roars like an exploding shock wave through the certainty of things, gathering momentum as it goes, and the world of history unfolding stumbles, brought up suddenly smack against the truth of human dream and desire. In the trenches of the war and the bitterness of drab town streets the air is suddenly, briefly, rich with the smell of rain on broken earth; another voice is heard, not in the ears but in the blood, and for the brief unsustainable duration of the moment of the Pollandore’s passing, nothing, nothing anywhere dies at all.

  The surge of change and otherness rolls across the continent and into the endless forest, where it passes from root to root and from leaf-head to leaf-head. It is leafburst. It is earth-rooted rain-sifting burning green thunder. It crashes against the steep high flanks of Archangel like an ocean storm against the cliffs of the shore.

  And Archangel is appalled, because in his delight at his own movement he realises that he has made a terrible mistake.

  He has forgotten to be afraid.

  For a moment his painful grinding progress across the floor of the forest pauses, and for miles around him there is nothing but silence and a second of waiting.

  He gathers. He centres. He focuses.

  He remembers this thing.

  How is it that he had forgotten? That never happens, but it has happened. This thing has been hiding from him! It has woven a forgetting around itself, but now it has made itself known.

  This is a powerful and dangerous threat.

  Archangel traces the path of the passing of the Pollandore moment back to its source. Examines. Analyzes. Knows what he must do.

  73

  Mirgorod, war city.

  Elena Cornelius survived alone. Elena’s Mirgorod was zero city, thrown back a thousand years, order and meaning and all the small daily habits of use and illusion scorched and blasted away, the concepts themselves eradicated. Money wasn’t money any more when it had no value and there was nothing to buy. Food was what you found or stole. Clothing against the cold and the night lay around free for the taking on the unburied corpses of the dead. Homes weren’t security, shelter and belonging: they were broken buildings, burned and burst open to the elements, the intimate objects of interior domestic life scattered on the streets. Apartments were boxes to shut yourself in and wait for the bomb blasts, the fires, the starvation.

  She kept moving, ate scraps scavenged from bombed buildings, drank water from rooftop pools and melted snow. She risked being shot for a looter, which she was, and she hid from the conscripters. She existed day by day in the timeless zero city, alien, unrooted, a sentience apart, belonging to nothing. Herself alone. She felt ancient. Places to hide and sleep were plentiful among the cellars and empty streets. When she slept, she dreamed of the rusalka in the potato-field river. She dreamed of her girls. Yeva and Galina. Mornings she woke early into fresh disorientation, the appalling daily shock: always she felt like she had survived a train crash in the night, a bridge that had crumbled beneath her, a house that had fallen down. Life had broken open, and everything was raw and clear. Every day she looked for her girls. Perhaps they had survived. Perhaps they were existing also somewhere, looking for her.

  What follows after taking tea?

  The resurrection of the dead.

  There were no longer newspapers, but the MIRINFORM bulletin was posted on walls and telephone poles daily. ‘No sooner had Volyana fallen under our fire than the Archipelago soldiers jumped out of the windows with their underwear down and took to their heels. With cries of hurrah the battalion fell upon the slavers. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was tremendous.’ Increases in rations were reported. The city held stockpiles of grain and dried fish in reserve, ready to be distributed if the need arose. Courage, citizens. One more push, and victory will be ours. Nobody believed, but everybody gathered to read when a new edition was posted. It did not say that the cemeteries were full and there was no fuel for the mortuary trucks.

  Elena walked out to the edge of the city until the way was barred by fighting. Three times she probed the outskirts in different directions, but always it was the same. Cleared firing zones. Shell holes filled with corpses and refuse. Charred skeletal buildings. The clatter of tank tracks and the rattle of gunfire. On her third attempt a sniper’s bullet skittered through the broken bricks at her feet like a steel lizard.

  Elena knew she was tiring. The effort of keeping moving all day was almost beyond her. She should choose a place to be her permanent home, but she had to keep moving, walking twenty or thirty miles in a day. Looking for her girls.

  On the third night the snow came again, a silent softness of feathers thickening the air. She had collected nothing. Her food bag was empty. She broke open the door of an empty house on the edge of the firing zone, drank the last of her water bottle, lit a fire in the grate, laid herself out on the floor and slept.

  She was woken by someone kicking her leg. The dazzle of a flashlight in her eyes.

  ‘Stand up! I said stand up!’

  Two young men were looking down at her. Well fed bare-headed boys. Waist-length pea coats. Black trousers and heavy black boots. Elena knew what they were. They were the Boots, and they were the worst. She had always known that one day she would be too tired, too hungry, not careful enough, and it would be finished. But she stood up to face them.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What?’

  Rizhin had co-opted the semi-organised, semi-militarised thugs of the Mirgorod Youth and Student Br
igade to support the militia in the war against defeatists, hoarders, looters, racketeers, saboteurs and spies. They were kept fed and left to do as they would. Autonomy without discipline. And what they did was rob and torture and rape and kill. People said that even the VKBD found the Boots excessive. Repellent. Elena had heard the Boots roamed the places near the fighting, but she had been too tired to remember.

  The Boots were holding rifles. Bayonets fixed to the muzzles. The one with the flashlight turned it off and put it on the floor. The light from the fire was enough.

  ‘Take off your scarf,’ he said. ‘Let’s see your face.’ His friend was grinning.

  Elena let the scarf drop to the floor.

  ‘Now the coat.’

  She unbuttoned the heavy greatcoat and let it fall.

  ‘And the sweater.’

  The two boys were both staring at her now. Not grinning any more. Focused. Eager. Elena saw one of them swallow hard.

  ‘Take off the shirt,’ he said.

  ‘And the trousers. Turn around.’

  ‘Go on. Don’t stop. Show us. Let’s see what you’ve got. Let’s see it all.’

  The Boots had laid down their rifles and were opening their own clothing. Fumbling with their belts and flies.

  ‘No,’ said Elena. She stopped, her right hand behind her back. She was trembling. Her hands were shaking. ‘No.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  One of the Boots lunged forward to push her down, his trousers open and falling round his thighs. Elena pulled out the kitchen knife she kept tucked in the back of her trousers and shoved it into his belly. The boy gasped and stopped in surprise, looking down at his stomach. Disbelieving. Elena took a step back, pulled out the knife, swept it upwards and sliced the blade laterally under his chin. Blood spilled out and splashed to the floor. The boy stared at her. He made a small gurgle in his opened throat.

  The other one was scrabbling for his rifle.

  ‘Drop it. Now.’

  The Boot swung round. A VKBD officer was standing in the doorway, a pistol in his hand.

  ‘Piss off, Brosz,’ said the Boot and raised the rifle muzzle, pointing the bayonet towards him. The officer shot him in the knee and he fell, screaming.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said the officer. ‘You’re such a fucking pair of pigs.’

  He walked over to the screaming boy and shot him again. In the face.

  The other boy, the one Elena had cut, was still standing in the middle of the room. He was cupping his throat with one hand, trying to catch the blood. The other hand was pressed against the wound in his belly. He was weeping.

  The officer raised his pistol at arm’s length and fired. An execution shot.

  ‘This your place?’ he said to Elena. She was standing half-undressed in the firelight, the kitchen knife in her hand, held low at her side.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re looting.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a hanging crime.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The VKBD officer studied her for a moment.

  ‘How long have you been scavenging?’

  ‘Always.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you’re still alive. More than that, you’re still strong. And a good fighter.’

  ‘If you’re not going to shoot me,’ said Elena Cornelius, ‘I’m going to put my coat back on.’

  ‘Ever used a rifle?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come with me. We’ll teach you. You’ll be more use than a roomful of these pigs.’

  ‘I’m better off on my own.’

  ‘It isn’t a choice. It’s that, or I string you up in the morning.’

  Conscripts to the Forward Defence Units got a day’s firearm training and, if they were fortunate, a weapon. Elena Cornelius turned out to have an aptitude for marksmanship. The sergeant took her aside.

  ‘You. You will be a sniper,’ he said. ‘A woman is good for sniping. You are small. You are flexible. You stand the cold better than a man.’

  She was issued with felt overboots, a thick tunic, a fur shapka, the kind with flaps for the ears. A printed booklet with tables that set out how to adjust the aiming point to take account of the ballistic effects of freezing air. And a bolt-action 7.62mm Sergei-Leon rifle with a side-mounted 3.5x Gaussler scope, the one with two turrets, one for elevation and one for windage: effective range 1,000 yards with optics. The modified Sergei-Leon was exclusive to the VKBD; the regular army never had the funds for such precision firearms.

  ‘You learn by doing,’ the sergeant said. ‘We send you out with someone who knows what they’re doing.’

  Elena was paired with a woman called Rosa, a student of history until the Archipelago came.

  ‘I volunteered,’ said Rosa. ‘I was a good shot already. I used to hunt with my father on Lake Lazhka. Wildfowl are harder to hit than soldiers.’ Rosa already had seventeen confirmed kills. ‘We’ll go in the afternoon,’ she said. ‘Firing into the east, you don’t want to shoot in the morning.’

  Rosa led to the way a place near a machine-gun post on the roof of a factory. The enemy were only three hundred yards away.

  ‘Shoot when the machine gun is shooting,’ she said. ‘They won’t even know we’re here, never mind spot us.’

  They were up there for nine hours. When they had finished and returned to the barracks, Elena Cornelius packed her things into a kitbag, slung her rifle over her shoulder and walked away, back into the city to look for her girls.

  74

  Alone in her private carriage in the dark hours after midnight, Lavrentina Chazia lay, fully clothed and sleepless on her bunk, listening to the rumble of the train wheels on the track. She was exhausted, but she knew she would not sleep: she rarely slept any more, the ants under her skin made it impossible, with their creeping and crawling and the sting of their tiny bites. The patches of angel stuff on her arms and face itched and burned.

  After a fruitless day attempting to break through the shell of the Pollandore using various mechanisms of her own devising, she had spent the evening with the Shaumian woman, and even for Chazia, who was hardened to such things, the experience had not been pleasant. Frustrated by the lack of progress, she had concluded it was time to abandon the subtle approach in favour of more direct methods. Maroussia Shaumian was stubborn to the point of stupidity, and after their last talk she had become even more recalcitrant, almost confident. Chazia sensed that something had changed, but she didn’t know what and she didn’t care: it was a matter of breaking the girl’s will, and she knew how to do that. She had decided against using the worm, for fear of doing some damage to the girl’s mind that would prevent her doing whatever needed to be done with the Pollandore, so the work had been noisy and messy.

  The process was still not complete, but Chazia had grown tired and faintly disgusted, so she’d left the girl to the professional interrogators and withdrawn to her compartment. She needed to find rest: her mind lacked edge and speed, and her spirits were low. She was bored, restless and above all frustrated. The power of the Vlast was within reach, but she had not yet quite grasped it: still there was Fohn, and the feeble Khazar. The power of the Pollandore was within reach but she could not get there, she didn’t know how to use it and the Shaumian woman was giving her nothing. Chazia was coming to doubt she had anything to give. And the living angel, the greatest power of all, had never come to her again. All she heard was silence.

  In her sleepless solitude Chazia began to wonder if perhaps, after all her efforts, she was going to fail. Maybe she was simply not good enough to do what she had set out to do. She felt the need for power, any power, in her belly like a hunger. She was incomplete without it. She was made for power, she was capable of it, she deserved it. She had worked so hard for so long. She had made sacrifices. She had given her life to the Vlast unstintingly. She had served. When she held her hands stretched out before her in the darkness, palms open, they felt empty, with an emptiness ready to be filled
. And yet…

  Chazia sat up abruptly and turned on the lamp. She swung her legs off the bunk and stood up. Her self-pity disgusted her. Such moods came upon her when she was alone with nothing to do but think. That was why she must always be working. Never be inactive. Never. Keep moving, keep trying, keep going forward. Always choose the difficult thing. Always choose to dare.

  She went through to the next compartment, where she kept the suit of angel flesh that she had made. The uncanny watchfulness of the thing made her uneasy. She realised for the first time that she was frightened of it, in the way you’re frightened to get back on a horse that’s thrown you several times. But the reluctance, the fear in her stomach, that was the reason to do it. She took the headpiece from its shelf and put it on. She felt it reach out and clamp onto her, plunging invasive tendrils deep into her mind. It was eager, it was ready, and now so was she. Fresh excitement stirred in her belly. Her mind began to turn faster. It was better already. This was what she needed.

  Awakening angel senses trickled information into her mind. She felt with prickling clarity the many lives on the train, the energy of the engine working, the miles and miles of passing trees and snow. The Pollandore. She felt the Pollandore by its absence. Its impossibility. It was a strange blankness. It told her nothing.

  She called out to the living angel in the forest.

  Where are you? Speak to me. I am here.

  Again and again she called into the emptiness, as she had done a hundred times before.

  And this time the angel answered.

  At last it answered!

  When the angel had spoken to Chazia at Vig, it had almost destroyed her. It had come roaring into her mind, a crude appalling destroying storm of sheer inhuman force, as infinite and absolute and cold as the space between the stars, pounding and pouring into her, stronger and more powerful than she could bear, until her head burst open and her lungs heaved for breath but could find none. But this time it was different. Perhaps it was because of the casket of angel flesh enclosing her head, or perhaps it was because she was stronger now, and better prepared, more equal to the encounter. It did not occur to her that the angel had learned subtlety and control.