Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  There were two young girls in school clothes standing together near her, close and side by side, their faces drawn and scared in the harsh shadowy light. They were looking for somewhere to go, somewhere to be out of the way. Kamilova recognised them. It took her a few seconds to recollect their names.

  ‘Hey,’ she called across to them quietly. ‘Galina. Yeva.’

  The girls looked round, trying to find where the voice was coming from.

  ‘Over here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Up here.’ The girls stared at her. They didn’t move. They had learned not to trust the friendly voice. The invitation. ‘You are Elena Cornelius’s girls aren’t you. Do you remember me?’

  ‘No,’ said Yeva.

  ‘Yes,’ said Galina.

  ‘It is Eligiya,’ said Kamilova. ‘I know you. I know your mother. From the raion. I am her friend.’ She swung herself awkwardly down from the high shelf and squeezed her way towards them, stepping over the tightly packed people sitting on the floor.

  ‘Is your mother with you?’

  ‘No,’ said Galina.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. She was left behind.’

  Hours later, Kamilova lay on her shelf listening for the sound of movement outside the train. There was none. For half an hour, as well as she could judge, there had been none. The arc lights still burned. It must have been nearly dawn. She climbed slowly, carefully down and went to find the girls. They were sitting together on the floor, backs against the door. Yeva was asleep. Galina was watching her with wide blank eyes.

  Kamilova knelt down and nudged Yeva gently awake.

  ‘Get ready,’ she whispered. ‘I am going now and you’re coming with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Galina.

  ‘Do you want to stay on the train?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it’s time to get off.’

  Kamilova stood up and pulled the girls to their feet. They looked uncertain and confused but they did it.

  ‘When I say,’ said Kamilova, ‘run. Stay together and stay with me and run as fast as you can. Whatever happens don’t stop. Don’t listen to anything else but me. Don’t look back and don’t stop running unless I say.’

  She turned to face the doors, closed her eyes and took a breath.

  Calm. Calm. Think only of the night and the air.

  The timbers of the massive heavy door screamed. The wood fibres ripped as it bowed and bellied outwards and split and burst and sprang from its rails and crashed to the ground below.

  Kamilova jumped down and turned to catch Yeva and Galina.

  ‘Now!’ she screamed at them. ‘Run! Now! Run with me! Run!’

  78

  Every night at midnight General Rizhin gathered his city defence commanders together to hear their reports, review the day just finished and make plans for the next. In the early days of the siege, when they first understood that Rizhin intended to make a stand, the commanders he appointed had attacked their tasks with a fierce commitment and determination. Few among them thought they could actually succeed in driving back the overwhelming force of the enemy, but there was honour, and for some a fierce joy, in fighting not running. A week of bloody resistance was worth more than a lifetime of capitulation, and every day that Mirgorod did not fall was a day stolen from inevitability by their own determination and will. Rizhin had chosen them because that was how they felt, and he’d chosen well.

  But now, as Rizhin’s gaze moved round the table, examining first one face and then another, he saw tiredness, lack of confidence, reluctance, even despair. One by one they gave their reports, and none of the news was good. Every day the enemy’s forces made some small advance, and the best that Mirgorod ever achieved was not to lose more. Defeat was only a matter of time, and the longer it took, the more grindingly desperate, even humiliating the resistance became. Rizhin knew that his commanders were beginning to feel this, and some were even willing quietly and privately to say so. A shared collective opinion was forming among them, in the way that such opinions do, without any one person leading it, that to continue the battle further was to impose pointless suffering on the people of the city. And so, this midnight, Rizhin called the city commanders together, grey-faced and dusty with the struggles of the day, in a different room, one end of which was separated off by a wide, heavy curtain.

  When they were assembled, Rizhin took his place at the head of the table, relaxed and smiling, and spoke to them in a quiet voice.

  ‘Colleagues,’ he said, ‘friends, I know how tired you all are. You are fighting bravely, you do wonders every day, but I see in your faces that some of you don’t trust the struggle any more. Perhaps some of you think I should have accepted the enemy’s terms of surrender—’

  ‘No!’ shouted Latsis, loyal Major Latsis, and some round the table joined in the murmurs of denial, but others kept silent, and Rizhin noted for later who they were.

  ‘I know that some of you are thinking this,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Where are we going with this bitter, grinding resistance? That is what you ask each other. What is the purpose? What is the strategy?’ He leaned forward and skewered them one by one with his stare. None of them would meet his eye. ‘Do you think I don’t know how you whisper among yourselves?’ he continued. ‘Do you think I don’t hear it all? Do you think it does not reach my ears, this cowardice and doubt? This backsliding? This revisionism?’

  Rizhin let the uncomfortable silence grow and spread round the table.

  ‘I don’t need to hear it,’ he added. ‘I can smell it in the room.’

  ‘General Rizhin—’ began Fritjhov, commander of the Bermskaya Tank Division.

  ‘Let me finish,’ said Rizhin, his voice quiet, reasonable.

  ‘No!’ said Fritjhov. ‘I will have my say! You call us cowards? Cowards! Our soldiers fight for the city, and they will fight to the bitter end, they will fight and die for Mirgorod. But they cannot fight and win. We cannot fight without munitions, and munitions do not come. We cannot advance without air cover, and our air force does not come. The Vlast has abandoned Mirgorod to the enemy! The enemy knows this, and do you think our soldiers don’t?’

  Rizhin poured himself a glass of water. The clink of the jug against the tumbler was the only sound in the room.

  ‘Munitions?’ he said. ‘Air cover? There’s only one weapon that wins wars, Fritjhov, and that is fear. Terror. If the enemy think they are winning, it’s because they smell the stench of your fear.’

  Fritjhov bridled.

  ‘I am a soldier,’ he growled. ‘I am not afraid to die.’

  Rizhin shrugged.

  ‘Then you will die, Fritjhov,’ he said. ‘What I need are commanders who are not afraid to win.’ He fixed the room with his burning, fiery glare. Holding them with all the relentless force of his will and the strength of his imagination. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking to them now. ‘There are new forms in the future, my friends,’ he said, ‘and they need to be filled in with blood. A new type of humankind is needed now: individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that makes motion invisible. We here in this room are the first of mankind, and this city is our point of departure. There is no past, there is only the future, and the future is ours to make. Our imminent victory in Mirgorod will be just the beginning.’

  ‘There isn’t going to be any fucking victory here, man,’ said Fritjhov. ‘As senior commander it is my duty—’

  Rizhin smiled.

  ‘Victory is coming, Fritjhov my friend. Victory is nearly here.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘A train is coming from the north-east, bringing a consignment of artillery shells.’

  ‘One shipment of shells?’ said Fritjhov in derision, looking round the table for support.

  ‘Shells of a new type,’ said Rizhin. ‘You will need to prepare your guns. I will give you instructions.’

  Fritjhov jumped to his feet, sending his chair clattering.

  �
�No more instructions, Rizhin, not from you.’

  Rizhin was a restful centre of patience and forbearance.

  ‘Just sit down a moment, would you, Fritjhov,’ he said, ‘and I will show you what is coming.’

  Rizhin stood and walked across the room. He drew back the heavy curtain to reveal a projector and a cinema screen. He started the projector whirring and turned off the lights.

  WINTER SKIES

  FIELD TEST #5

  NORTH ZIMA EXPANSE

  VAYARMALOND OBLAST

  79

  Lom woke in the quiet before dawn and lay still in the cocoon of branches and leaf mould, knees pulled up tight against his belly, head pillowed on the warm knot of his own folded arms. He didn’t want to move.

  He breathed with his mouth, shallow slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of his own breath, inhaling pine and earth and moss, the smell of damp woodsmoke in his clothes and his hair. He listened for sounds from outside the shelter, but there was nothing: the thickness of the shelter absorbed sound as it absorbed light. Yet the shelter itself had its own faint whispering, a barely audible movement of shifting and settling, the outer layer flicking and feathering in the breeze, and sometimes the rustle and tick of small things–woodlice? spiders? mice?–in the canopy. The shelter was a living thing that had settled over him, absorbing him, nurturing. Deep beneath him in the cold earth the roots of trees, the fine tangled roots, sifted and slid and touched one another. They whispered. They were connected. All the trees together made one tree, night-waking and watchful. It knew he was there.

  Twice in the night Lom had heard the long trains passing.

  He had done a terrible thing and the guilt of it weighed him down. He had lost Maroussia. He had not been there. He could hear the sound of her voice in his head, but not the words.

  Reluctantly he sat up and pushed the entrance branches aside and let in the dim grey dawn and the cold of the day. Harsh frost had come in the night, and now mist reduced the surrounding forest to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. When he crawled out of the shelter the mist brushed cold against his face and filled his nose and lungs, and when he walked his shoes crunched on brittle, snow-dusted iron earth.

  Florian was sitting nearby, almost invisible in shadow until he moved. He had left a hare skinned and ready by the remains of the previous night’s hearth, and next to it was a small heap of mushrooms and a handful of clouded purple berries.

  ‘I think we could risk a fire,’ he said. ‘Before the mist clears.’

  Lom started on the fire. The intense cold made his fingers clumsy: he fumbled the tinder, dropped it. He couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work properly. He found that the water had frozen in the pan. He went for fresh.

  Dawn greyed into morning, sifting darkness out of the mist-dripping branches, condensing detail. Pine needle, twig and thorn. When they had eaten, they went back to the railway track and started to walk north again. Through gaps in the trees they could see the mountain ahead of them, rising pale grey and snow-streaked into the cloud. At one point Florian paused to reach up and pulled a snag from the side of a birch trunk. He studied it, then held it out to Lom.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It is not right.’

  Lom studied the sprig. The leaves were grown too large, and some were misshapen. Sickle-edged. Distorted.

  ‘And here,’ said Florian. ‘I found this also.’ A small branch of pine, the needles long but floppy and fringed with edges of lace. ‘They are not all like this, but some. And more near here than when we landed.’

  After an hour they found the body of the wolf. Or most of it. Its belly was ripped open and empty and one of its hind legs was gone, torn out at the hip. The wolf carcase was impaled on a broken branch at head height, the sharp-splintered stump of wood pushed through the ribcage and coming out, blood-sticky, from the base of the throat. Its head hung to one side, eyes open. Gibbeted. A warning? Or a larder?

  ‘Was that you?’ said Lom.

  ‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I had to ask,’ said Lom.

  At mid-morning the rain came in pulses, wind-driven, hard, grey and cold, washing away the covering of snow and turning the path to a thick clag of mud. The noise of the rain in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain horses.

  Lom’s clothes were soaked. They smelled sourly of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of his body. Rain numbed his face and trickled down his neck and chin. Rain spattered across the brown surface of rain-puddles. He kept his head down and walked against it, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Everything distant was lost in the rain.

  A wisent stepped out of the trees into the clear way ahead of them. When it saw them it stopped, head bowed, nostrils flaring, watching them with its dark eyes. Lom saw the massive rain-slicked wall of its shoulders, the rufous shaggy fall of hair, thick from neck to chest and down its muzzle from the crown of its head, the fine stocky inward-curving crescent horns. Lom and the wisent faced each other, watching. The wisent tested the give of the mud with a fore hoof and flicked the rain with its ears. Then it turned and walked on across the rails and faded between the trees.

  The rain passed, and they came to a place where a stream was running in a ditch alongside the railway track. Lom knelt to drink but Florian put a hand on his shoulder and held him back.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Florian. ‘Look. Over there.’

  Half-buried in the bank of the ditch, where a birch tree had canted over, roots unearthed, was a human head. It was blackened, damp and rotting, and wrapped in a length of mud-brown hair. The face stared blackly sideways without eyes, and brown-stained teeth showed in its lopsided sagging mouth. And near the head a human arm reached out from the mud sleeved in sticky green. At first glance the arm had looked like the root of a tree. Too far from the head to be attached to the same skeleton, it trailed mushroom-white and mushroom-soft fingers in the flowing water.

  Walking between the railway and the stream, Lom and Florian saw more like that. Pieces of human body. When the stream turned aside from the ditch and retreated under the trees it was a relief.

  And then something happened that shook the world.

  A silent snap of blue-white light reflected off the clouds and left after-images of skeleton trees drifting across Lom’s eyes. Many seconds later he felt the sound of it in the ground through his feet, a roll of noise too deep to hear. Ahead of him Florian stumbled, and would have fallen had he not steadied himself against a stump. A tremble of movement disturbed the underside of the cloud bank like wind across a pool. The trees prickled with fear: the nap of the woodland rising, uneasy, anxious. They stood, listening. Nothing more came. Nothing changed. The clouds settled into a new shape.

  ‘What was it?’ said Lom.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It came from the north.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Florian. ‘I think it was everywhere.’

  The railway track began to sink into cuttings and rise to cross embankments and small bridges. Every few hours one of the long trains came through, heading for the mountain or coming away. Away from the cleared trackside, the going was harder. The trees were sparser now, and they had to push through scrub and thorn and accumulations of snow. They were climbing slowly, the mountain to the north growing clearer and more definite against the sky. Rock and scree. Ice and snow.

  They disturbed a parcel of dog-crows gathered on a ragged dark bundle. The birds were a heavy drab and loose-winged black, with unwieldy bone-coloured beaks too heavy for their heads. They carried on picking at the thing on the ground and watched them come. Lom picked up a stick and threw it among them.

  ‘Go on! Get away!’

  The crows glared, but moved off a few feet with slow ungainly two-footed jumps. A couple hauled themselves up on flaggy wings to squat low in the trees and stare.

  The body on the ground was small and had no head. The crows had picked at its neck and shoulders, spilling red pieces of stuff, and parted th
e clothes between trousers and shirt to open the belly.

  ‘It’s a child,’ said Lom. ‘Just a boy.’

  Florian had walked some way off. Lom thought he was looking away, so as not to see. But he had found something else.

  ‘Not a boy,’ said Florian. ‘A girl.’

  The head was hanging from a branch by the tangle of her hair.

  Something was passing near them. Lom felt the woods stir and bristle. The alien watchfulness of what was passing brushed over him, rippling across his mind like rain across a lake. He felt the bigness of it, its steady earth-shaking tread. The top of a distant tree trembled faintly, though there was no wind.

  ‘Mudjhik patrol,’ he hissed. ‘Coming this way.’

  ‘We separate,’ whispered Florian. ‘Hide yourself.’ He crouched and slipped away. Lom caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the trees, loping from bush to bush, bounding low across the ground.

  Lom flattened himself against the ground under a thorn bush and lay quiet, breathing shallow slow breaths. Covered his mind with woodland. Focused his thoughts into a pointy vixen snout, thought vixen thoughts, calm and tired and waiting, warm and cold in the daylight, in a waking sleep. Keeping low. Pass by. Pass by. The mudjhik’s awareness skimmed across him and moved away, but Lom lay on, vixen-still and thoughtless, faintly stomach-sick, dulled and aching and hungry behind her eyes as if she had not slept at all.

  The mudjhik’s awareness jerked back, swung round and pinned him. A blank hunter’s glare.

  I see you. I have sniffed you out. I am coming.

  There was a sudden crashing through the trees. Branches breaking, heavy limbs thumping the ground. The mudjhik was rushing towards him. It was still several hundred yards off, but running was not an option and he could not hide.