Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  He even remembered the book he had been reading. The Life of our Founder: A Version for Children. The chapter on the founding of Mirgorod. There was an illustration of the Founder on horseback, accompanied by his retinue on lesser horses. They had drawn to a halt on a low hummock surrounded by flat empty marshland, and the Founder had thrust his great sword upright into the bog.

  ‘Here!’ he said. ‘Here shall our city stand.’

  It was a famously preposterous location for a city. The ground was soft and marshy, scattered with low outcrops of rock like islands among the rough grass and reedy pools and soft, silken mud. No human settlement within two hundred versts. No road. No safe harbour. Nothing. Yet here the Founder had said, because he could see what all his counsellors and diplomats and soldiers could not. He could see the great River Mir reaching the ocean. He could see that the river was linked by deep inland lakes and other rivers and easy portages to the whole continent to the east. He could see that to the west lay great oceans. Only the Founder could see that this lonely place was not the back end of nowhere but a window on the world.

  ‘We can’t build a city in this awful place!’ the Founder’s retinue cried, splashing knee-deep in the mud, their horses struggling and stumbling.

  ‘Yes,’ the Founder had said. ‘We can. We will.’

  ‘Hey, you!’

  Lom was passing a small shop of some kind, still open. A man came lurching out.

  ‘Hey, come on. Drink with us.’

  Lom ignored him.

  ‘Wait. That’s my cloak. Give it me, you bastard. You stole my cloak.’

  Lom fingered his cosh. The length of hard rubber, sheathed with silk, rested in a specially tailored pocket in the sleeve of his shirt, near the wrist. He undid the small button that let it slip into his hand and turned.

  ‘You’d better go back inside,’ he said.

  The man saw the weapon in his hand. Stared at him, swaying slightly.

  ‘Ah, fuck you,’ he said, and turned away.

  Lom walked on, deeper into the city. Kantor’s city. But his city too: he would make it so. He was the hunter, the good policeman, the unafraid. He passed a bar, but it was closed and dark. Its name written on the window in flaking gold paint. The Ouspensky Angel. When, in the last years of the Founder’s reign, the first dying angel had fallen from the sky and crashed into the Ouspenskaya Marsh, it had been taken as a sign of acknowledgement and consecration. Over the centuries the stone of the angel’s limbs had been used to furnish protection for the Lodka and other great buildings, and to make mudjhiks to garrison the city, but its torso had been left to lie where it still was, visible to all newcomers as they arrived in the city. The Life of our Founder had a picture of the falling angel and a simple sketch map of ‘Mirgorod Today’ showing the cobweb of streets and canals, the city like a dark spreading net. Lom remembered how he had stared at that map, and the picture of the falling angel, that time in the library. The strange, nameless longing the pictures had stirred in him. The sense of possibilities. Purposes. The adventures that life could hold.

  And then Lom remembered…

  … now, for the first time…

  He had forgotten… for a quarter of a century…

  … when he was reading that book, looking at that picture, imagination stirring

  … he remembered…

  … the hand ripping aside the curtain from the library window and the hate-filled face stuck into his, the sour breath, the cruel hand snatching the book from his hand, the voice screeching at him.

  ‘Here you are, you vicious little bastard! Now you’re caught, you evil piece of shit!’

  The claw-hand grabbed him by the neck, fingernails gouging his skin, and hauled him out of the window seat. He fell hard, down onto the library floor.

  Lom stopped in the middle of the street, pausing for breath, letting the rain run down his face. The memory of that moment had shocked him. He had put it away so deep. Forgotten it. A hurt from a different world, it meant nothing to the policeman he had become. Put it aside again, he told himself, think about it later. Maybe. Now, immediately, he needed to get out of this rain and night. He wondered if he was lost. There were no signs. No sense of direction in the empty streets. He had been stupid not to take a ride.

  Rain skittered down alleyways, riding curls of wind. Rain slid across roof-slates and tumbled down sluices and drainpipes and slipped through grills into storm drains. Rain assembled itself in ropes in gutters and drains, and collected itself in watchful, waiting puddles and cisterns. Rain saturated old wood and porous stone and bare earth. Rain-mirrors on the ground looked up into the face of the falling rain. The wind-twisted air was crowded with flocks of rain: rain-sparrows and rain-pigeons, crows of rain. Rain-rats ran across the pavement and rain-dogs lurked in the shadows. Every column and droplet, every pool and puddle and sluice and splash, every slick, every windblown spillage of water and air, was alive. The rain was watching him.

  Ever since the builders first came, the rain had been trickling through the cracks and gaps in the carapace of the chitinous city, sliding under the tiles and lead of the roofs, slipping through the cracks between paving slabs and cobbles, pooling on the floors of cellars, insinuating itself into the foundations, soaking through to the earth beneath the streets. Every rainfall dissolved away an infinitesimal layer of Mirgorod stone, leached a trace of mineral salts from the mortar, wore the sharp edges imperceptibly smoother, rounded off the hard corners a little bit more, abraded fine grooves down the walls and buttresses. Fine jemmies and levers of rain slid between ashlar and coping. Little by little, century by century, the rain was washing the city away.

  The rain trickled down Lom’s face, tasting him. The rain traced the folds of his skin and huddled in the whorls of his ears. The rain splashed against the angel-stone tablet in his skull. The rain tasted angel, the rain smelled policeman, the rain trickled over the hard certainties of the Vlast and the law, stoppered up with angel meat. While Lom walked on, oblivious, absorbed in memories, the rain was nudging him ever further away from the peopled streets, towards the older, softer, rainier places.

  Memory hit him like a fist in the belly.

  How was it he’d forgotten her? Buried her so deep? Never thought of her? Never. Never. Not till now.

  She had dragged him down corridors and up stairways to the Provost’s room.

  ‘Here you are!’ she shrieked at the Provost. ‘I told you! He is corrupted. He is foul. He should never have been admitted. I said so.’

  There was a fire of logs burning in the room. She had taken something of his, something important, and gone across to the fire and put it carefully in.

  ‘No!’ he’d cried. ‘No!’

  He’d thrown himself across the room and scrabbled at the burning logs. He remembered her, screeching like an animal, punching him across the back of the head, and… Something had happened. What? He couldn’t remember There was a door he couldn’t open, and something terrible was behind it. What had he done? He felt the shame and guilt, the permanent stain it had left, but he didn’t… he couldn’t… he had no recollection of what it was.

  But he did know that the next day they had cut into the front of his head and placed the sliver of angel stone there, and that had made him good.

  Lom rested his valise and wiped the rain from his face. He was passing through narrow defiles between once-grand buildings that were tenements now, propped up with flimsy accretions and lean-tos. Gulfs of night and rain opened between the few street lamps. Mirgorod had withdrawn indoors for the night, and his sodden clothes had tightened around him, becoming a warm mould, wrapping him in his own body heat. The sound of the rain seemed to seal him in. Dark alley-mouths gaped. Broken wooden fences barricaded gaps of waste ground. Small doorways cut into high brick walls.

  He might have seen something, some shape slipping back out of the lamplight. He felt again for the smooth weight of the cosh in his sleeve.

  He came to the margin of an endless cobbled sq
uare, the far side all but invisible behind the night rain. There was a lamp in the middle of the square, and some kind of kiosk beneath it. Two horses standing against the rain, their heads turned to watch him. And a covered droshki waiting. He walked fast towards it, but he hadn’t crossed half the wide open space when the driver appeared from the kiosk and climbed up into the seat

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Lom. ‘Hey! Wait!’

  Lom started to run, awkwardly, hampered by a horizontal gust of sleet in his face, and his rain-heavy cloak, and his luggage. It was hopeless. The droshki drove away into the dark on the farther side.

  ‘Shit.’

  The rain fell harder and colder. It stung his face and pressed down on him like a heavy weight. Wind-spun rain gathered itself in front of him and resolved itself into a thing of rain, a man of rain — no — a woman of rain — taller than human, a hardened column of rain and air.

  And then the rain attacked him.

  Lom spun around and tried to hide from it, but when he turned it was in front of him still. It lashed out and struck him. A fist of rain. A hard smash of wind off the sea, filled with rain. A stinging punch of rain in his face. He fell to the ground, tasting rain and blood in his mouth. The rain became a great foot and stamped on him, driving him face-down into the stone, driving the breath from him.

  He was going to die.

  He hauled himself to his feet and tried to run, slipping and stumbling across the cobbles. But he was running towards his enemy, not away. The rain surrounded him, and met him wherever he turned, dashing pebbles and nails of rain into his face. He held up his hand to protect his eyes. The droshki kiosk was in front of him. He stumbled towards it and pulled at the door. It wouldn’t open. He tried to barge into it with his shoulder, but the rain kicked his legs out from under him and he fell on his back, cracking his head. When the world came back into focus he was looking up into the face of the rain. His nose and mouth began to fill. He gasped for air and his throat filled with rain and blood. Rain kneeled on his ribs, driving the breath out of him. He was drowning in rain.

  Something broke open inside him then. He felt it burst, as if a chain-link had snapped apart. A lock broken open. Some containment that had been placed inside him long ago had come undone.

  He remembered.

  He remembered what he had done that afternoon in the Provost’s room.

  He remembered how he had gathered up all the air in the room and thrown it at her, and she had screamed and fallen. He remembered the pop that had followed when the air recoiled, refilling the temporary vacuum. He remembered the Provost’s papers flying about the room, the air filled with a cloud of hot embers and ash and smoke from the fire, the chair falling sideways, the picture crashing down from the wall. He remembered what he had done, and he remembered what it had felt like, and he remembered how he hadn’t known, not then and not later, how he had done it.

  He tried to do it again. Now!

  He reached out into the squalling, churning air and gathered up a ball of wind and rain. He tried to compact it as hard as he could. And he flung it at the figure of rain.

  It was a feeble effort. It made no difference. Nothing could. He was going to die.

  The thing of rain was standing over him, suddenly gentler now. Lom felt the attention of its regard, appraising him, wondering. A hand of rain reached down and touched his forehead gently. Fingertips of rain stroked the shard of angel stone cut into his head. He seemed to feel a brush of kindness. Pity.

  Poor boy, it seemed to say. Poor boy.

  The thing of rain dissolved into rain, and he was alone.

  He picked himself up off the ground, bruised, exhausted, soaked. He needed to get inside. Out of the rain. And quickly.

  13

  It was almost midnight when Lom arrived, bruised, soaked and chilled to the core, at Vishnik’s address. Pelican Quay turned out to be a canal-side row of houses, one among many such streets on Big Side, north of the river. The rain had paused. A damp and cave-like smell on the air and the heavy iron bollards and railings on the far side of the road betrayed the invisible night presence of the canal. Number 231 was a tall flat-fronted tenement squeezed between neighbouring buildings, the kind of house once built for grander families but partitioned now into many smaller, boxy apartments for the accommodation of tailors, locksmiths, cooks, civil servants of the lower ranks. Many pairs of eyes were observing him: although it was late, the dvorniks were out, each hunched in a folding chair under his own dim lamp in the lea of his domain. The dvornik of number 231 was drinking from a tin mug. His face gleamed moonily. His cheeks had collapsed to form loose jowls at the level of his chin.

  ‘Raku Vishnik,’ said Lom. ‘Apartment 4.’

  ‘No visitors after nine.’

  ‘He’s expecting me. He keeps late hours.’

  The dvornik looked at Lom’s scruffy valise. His sodden clothes. His dripping hair.

  ‘No overnights.’

  Lom fumbled in his pocket. ‘I appreciate the inconvenience. Twenty kopeks should cover it’

  ‘A hundred.’

  ‘Fifty.’

  The dvornik grunted and held out a hand. He wore thick fingerless woollen gloves: even in the sparse lamplight they looked in need of a wash.

  ‘Second floor. Don’t use the lift and don’t turn on the lights.’

  The stairs were dark and narrow, lit by street light falling through high small windows. Stale cooking smells. A thin carpet in the corridor. The bell of Number 4 sounded faint and toy-like, like it was made of tin.

  Lom waited. Nobody came. He stood there, dripping, in the dark passageway. He realised that he was shaking, and not just with cold and hunger and the fatigue of carrying his case through the empty streets. The taste of the living rain was in his mouth. The smell of it on his face and his clothes. He had heard of such things, the possibilities of them. You didn’t live at the edge of the forest without being sometimes aware of the wakefulness of the wilder things: the life of the wind, the sentience of the watchful trees. The memory of the damp, living earth. But not in Mirgorod. He had not expected to find such things here: Mirgorod was the capital of solidity, the Founder’s Strength, the Vlast of the One Truth.

  He needed Vishnik to open up. He rang the bell again. Nothing happened. Maybe Vishnik was already in bed. He rang twice more and banged on the door. There was a muffled sound of movement within, and it opened slowly. A pale, drawn face appeared. Dark eyes, blank and unfocused, looked into his own.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Raku?’

  The dark eyes looked past him to see if someone else was in the corridor. Vishnik was dressed to go out: an unbuttoned gabardine draped from his shoulders, a small overnight bag in his hand. He was taller than Lom remembered, but the same glossy fringe of black hair flopped across his forehead. The same dark brown eyes behind rimless circular lenses. But the eyes were glassy with fear.

  ‘Raku. It’s me. Vissarion.’

  Vishnik’s hands were balled in tight fists. He was shaking with anger. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck. What the fuck are you doing.’

  ‘Raku? Didn’t you get my telegram?’

  ‘No I didn’t get any fucking telegram. Shit. What are you doing? I don’t see you for half a lifetime and then you’re hammering on my door in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I wired. Five, six days ago. I said I would be coming. I said it would be late.’

  Vishnik held up his bag. Shoved it at Lom. ‘See this? What’s this? Clothes. Bread. So I don’t have to go in my pyjamas when they come. How did you get in here anyway? The dvornik shouldn’t have—’

  ‘I gave him fifty kopeks.’

  ‘Fifty? That’s not enough. He has to report visitors to the police.’

  ‘What’s he going to report? I am the police.’

  ‘Some fucking policeman. Look at you. Dripping on the carpet.’ He looked at Lom’s valise. ‘You got dry things in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Vishn
ik disappeared. Rain seeped out of Lom’s hair and down his face. Rain dripped from the hem of his cloak and spilled from his trouser cuffs.

  Vishnik came back carrying a towel.

  ‘There’s a bathroom at the end of the corridor.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Yeah. Shit. Well, get dry.’

  Lom tucked the towel under his arm, picked up the valise and started down the corridor.

  ‘Oh, and Vissarion.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s good to see you. I thought I never would.’

  Fifteen minutes later Lom was sitting on Vishnik’s couch with a glass of aquavit. There was food on the table. Solyanka with cabbage and lamb. Thick black bread. He leaned back and let the room wrap itself around him. Heavy velvet curtains of a faded brick colour hung across the window. Electric table lamps cast warm shadows. A paraffin heater burned in the corner. Bookshelves everywhere. More books piled on the floor and stacked on the desk. And on a side table, carefully arranged, a strange assemblage of objects: a broken red lacquer tea caddy; a grey and blue mocha mug with no handle; a china dog; a piece of stained wood, stuck through with bent and rusting nails; broken shards of ceramic and glass; a feather; a bowl of damp black earth. Odd things that could have been picked up in the street. Set out like the ritual items of a shaman of the city.

  But it was the collection of art that made the room extraordinary. In plain dark frames, squeezed in between the bookshelves, hung in corners and high up near the ceiling, the paintings were like none Lom had seen before. They were of shapes and colours only. Sharp angular quadrilaterals of red and blue and green, smashed against a background of dark grey that reminded him of city buildings at twilight, but falling. Collapsing. Black lines slashed across jumbled boxes of faded terracotta. Thick, unfinished scrapes of paint — midnight blue — burnt earth — colours of rain and steel. Mad, childish clouds and curlicues and watery rivers of purple and gold and acidic, medicinal green. As Lom looked he began to see that there were objects in them — sometimes — or at least suggestions of objects. Bits and pieces of objects. A bicycle wheel. A bottle-cork. A bridge reflected in a river, exploded by sunset. A horse. The spout of a jug. Sometimes there was writing — typographic fragments, scrawled vowels, tumbled alphabets, but never a whole word.