Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  Teslom had come in quietly while he was reading. When Vishnik noticed him, the Curator made the formal gestures of acknowledgement and permission.

  ‘Welcome, Prince Vishnik. The princes of Vyra and Turm were always friends of Lezarye in the former days of the long homelands. There is a place for you in our hearts and at our tables. How can I help you?’

  Teslom was a small man, neat, spare, kempt, with dark-shadowed eyes behind rimless circular glasses and glossy brown hair flopped across his forehead. He wore a double-breasted suit of dark blue; a soft white shirt with a soft turned-down collar and faint pattern of squares; a dark tie held in place with a pin.

  ‘I want you to tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom my friend. Every fucking thing you can.’

  ‘The Pollandore? Why?’

  ‘I found a story about this thing. It was in a book. An old and rare book. I asked myself, is it real? Is it true?’

  ‘What story is this? Where did you find it? What book?’

  Vishnik opened his satchel and handed it to him. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago. Teslom took it carefully and opened it, his dark eyes shining.

  ‘I had heard of it, but even we don’t have a copy.’ He held it close to his face, examining the stitch binding and inhaling its paper smell.

  ‘Tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom, and I will give it to you. My gift to the People.’

  Teslom handed the book back to him.

  ‘A good gift. But why the Pollandore? There are other stories here.’

  ‘Because of these.’

  Vishnik opened his satchel again, took out a sheaf of photographs and spread them across the table. Teslom lit a lamp and studied them for a long time in silence.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ he said at last.

  ‘They are mine. I took them. These things happen. I’ve seen them. This is the proof. And now I ask myself, what does Teslom know about this?’

  ‘But what makes you connect these pictures with the story of the Pollandore?’

  ‘Why? Always fucking why? Because it is a possibility, Teslom my friend. Because I have a feeling. A hypothesis. Because it would fit the case. So. What do you tell me? What do you say?’

  Teslom hesitated.

  ‘I would say,’ he said at last, ‘that you are not the first to come to this house and speak about the Pollandore. A paluba came here yesterday.’

  ‘A paluba.’

  ‘Indeed. From the woods. It talked of the Pollandore and now you come with these questions about the same thing.’

  ‘The Pollandore is real then. It was actually made.’

  ‘I don’t know that. There is a record that Lezarye once held such a thing in care, that one of the elder families was appointed warden, but it was seized by the Vlast soon after the Founder came north. Attempts were made to destroy it in the time of the Gruodists, but they failed. That is what is said.’

  ‘And this paluba spoke of it? That implies it exists.’

  ‘It implies only that our friends in the woods believe so. Some of the Committee also think it is real. Others do not.’

  ‘What else did it say, this paluba?’

  ‘It asked to address the Inner Committee. It spoke of an angel, a living angel that had fallen in the forest and was doing great damage. The woods fear it will poison the world. The paluba wanted us to open the Pollandore. That is the way the legend goes, is it not? The Pollandore, to be opened in the last extremity, when hope is lost.’

  ‘Exactly. Yes. Fuck yes. Do you see what this means, Teslom? Do you see?’

  ‘The paluba also said the Pollandore itself was broken, or leaking, or failing, or something. The point was unclear, I think. I was not there myself.’

  ‘What did the Committee do?’

  ‘Nothing. They refused to countenance the paluba’s message at all. They wanted nothing to do with it. They sent it away.’

  ‘So…’

  ‘I was appalled when I heard what they had done. But they’re too frightened to act. The pogroms have begun again, worse than ever. Did you know that? The Vlast is clearing the ghettos. People are being lined up and shot. Lezarye is being rounded up and put on trains to who knows where. Whole neighbourhoods are being emptied.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I’ve seen the rhetoric in the papers, but I didn’t… What are you — I mean the Committee…?’

  ‘The Committee is too frightened to move. There is talk of arming ourselves and fighting back. Getting money and mounting a coup. Young men on the rooftops throwing down bombs on the militia. Others, of course, hope that if we keep quiet the troubles will fade away again, like they have done before. But already people are dying. ‘

  ‘And you? The Collection?’

  ‘My duty is to protect it. It has survived such times in the past. I’ve begun to pack it away, but… it is so much work for one man. The Committee offers no help. They will not consider departure.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps the woods, if I can find a way to transport the collection there. Or one of the exclaves. Koromants. Or maybe I will get it on a ship and go across the sea to the Archipelago. But with the winter coming…’

  Vishnik held out the Child’s Book of Wonders.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it.’

  ‘But you know I can’t… it may not be safe…’

  ‘Take it, Teslom. Find a way. And if you think I can help you, my friend, ask me. Ask me.’

  50

  Maroussia must have fallen. She was lying hunched on the floor of her room. Aching, exhausted, she pulled herself carefully, with steady deliberation, up onto the chair. The feel of the trees, the buried sleeping god, swam in her head. The paluba was watching her.

  ‘That’s real,’ she said. ‘It’s there. Isn’t it? I didn’t know.’

  The paluba said nothing.

  Maroussia saw it and the companion now for what they really were: a weaving of light and will and contained, living air. The moulded breath of forest trees. Trees rooted in the body of the buried god.

  But her mother was still dead. The militia would come. They were already coming. That was real too.

  ‘How long was I…? I mean, when did you come? How long have I been lying here?’

  The paluba shrugged jerkily. The question meant little to her.

  ‘I’ve done what I can for your wounds. They will heal quickly now.’

  Maroussia pulled up her skirt and looked at her leg. The raw gash had crusted over. The pain was dulled.

  ‘Who was he?’ she asked. ‘The man I saw?’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes. My father. He must have a name.’

  ‘Oh, he’s Hasha.’

  ‘Hasha?’

  ‘Hasha. He can’t come to you here. He can’t leave the forest.’

  ‘Will I… Could I go there, to him?’

  ‘Eventually. Perhaps. It is possible. But… I’m sorry, there’s something more.’

  Maroussia stared into the paluba’s wild, fathomless eyes.

  ‘Show me.’

  51

  Rain was tumbling out of the sky. A heavy black downpour. Lakoba Petrov the painter had walked a long way, out to the northern edge of the city, no longer Mirgorod proper but the Moyka Strel, in the wider Lezarye Quarter, out beyond the Raion Lezaryet itself, an ageing halfway place where the houses were made of wood. Although they had been there for centuries, they were skewed, temporary-looking buildings of weathered planking, with shuttered windows and shingled roofs. Their eaves and porches and windows were mounted with strips of intricately carved wood, pierced with repeating patterns and interlaced knotwork. It was like embroidered edging. Like pastry. Like repeating texts printed in a strange alphabet. The woodwork was salt-bleached, and broken in places, but even so the houses looked more like musical cabinets or confectionery than dwellings. They were made from trees that had grown on the delta islands long before the Founder came.

  Petrov had been b
orn in this place, but he hardly knew that now. New thoughts filled him so full of wild energy that he could not keep body or mind still, he couldn’t even walk straight. Uncontainable and superabundant, he tacked back and forth across the road, advancing only slowly and zig by zag in stuttering steps, muttering as he went, hissing random syllables under his breath in a new language of his own.

  Lost in his fizzing new world, he walked smack into the line of soldiers that blocked his path.

  In the face of one a mouth was moving, but Petrov heard no words, only the soft swaying of the sea and the hissing of the rain, until the soldier struck him in the shoulder with the butt of his rifle, hard, and he fell.

  ‘Go down there. Get in line with the others.’

  Petrov struggled to his feet, his shoulder hurting. The soldier who had hit him was young, not more than a boy, his face white as paper. He seemed to have no eyes.

  ‘Get in line.’

  ‘No,’ said Petrov. ‘No. I can’t.’

  The soldier jabbed the muzzle of the rifle hard into his stomach.

  ‘Do it. Or we shoot you now.’

  Some of the soldiers had circled round behind him. A hand shoved Petrov sharply in the back, so that he stumbled forward, almost falling again. The soldiers in front of him moved aside to let him through.

  ‘Down there. Walk.’

  Petrov realised then that he knew this place. It was a piece of waste ground, cut across by a shallow gully. Boys used to play there when he was one of them. They had called it Red Cliff, having never seen cliffs. There was a small crowd of people there now, lined up on the lip of the slope, in silence, in the rain. Soldiers to one side, waiting. Three army trucks drawn up in a line. Soldiers unloading stuff from the tarpaulined backs. An officer, fair-haired, neat and pale, was giving orders. Petrov knew he smelled of soap.

  Some of the people were naked, and others were in their underclothes. Some were undressing under the soldiers’ gaze. Women crossed their arms over their breasts and shivered. The rain soaked them. There was a pile of rain-sodden clothes. Alone, at some distance, an earth-coloured mudjhik stood, sightlessly swaying, attendant. The soldiers were arranging their mitrailleuses in a row on a raised mound.

  Petrov realised that one of the soldiers from the street had followed behind him, and was standing at his shoulder.

  ‘Go over there and join the others, citizen,’ the soldier said in his ear. His young voice was drab with shock. ‘Leave your clothes on the pile. If we can, we will be quick.’

  The people smelled wet and sour. They were as silent as trees. Petrov was aware of bare feet, his own among them, cold and muddy in the rain-soaked, puddled red earth.

  Time widened.

  Somewhere — distant — it seemed that someone, a woman, was berating the soldiers with loud, precise indignation. Three echoless shots repaired the silence and the rain.

  Then the mitrailleuses began to fire.

  52

  Maroussia was in a terrible place. The paluba’s kiss had taken her there. A dreadful nightmare place in the shadow of a steep hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, it was alive. It was an angel, fallen.

  There were trees here too, but here the trees were stone, bearing needles of stone. Maroussia was walking on snow among outcrops of raw rock. In parts the earth itself, bare of snow, smouldered with cool, lapping fire under a crust of dry brittleness. Dust and cinders, dry scraping lava over cold firepools. Walking over it, Maroussia’s feet broke through the crust into the soft flame beneath. Flame that was cold and didn’t burn.

  Stone grew and spread like vegetation. There were strange shimmering pools of stuff that wasn’t water.

  Everything was alive and watched her. No, not alive, but the opposite of life. Anti-life. Hard, functional, noticing continuation without existence, like an echo, a shadow, a reflection of what once was. But everything was aware of her. Everything.

  The hill that was an angel had spilled its awareness. It was bleeding consciousness into the surrounding rock for miles. Like blood.

  She wasn’t alone. Sad creatures wandered aimlessly among the trees. Creatures of stone. Creatures that had become stone. They were broken, cracked, abraded, but they couldn’t die. From the shelter of stunted stone birches, a great stone elk with snapped antlers and no hind legs watched her pass. There was no respite for it. It could only wait for the slow weathering of ice and wind and time that would, eventually, wear it away and blow its residuum of dust across the earth. But it would be watching, noticing dust. Cursed with the endlessness of continuation.

  Stone giants were digging their way up out of the earth and walking across the top of it, breaking waist-high through stone trees. If they fell they cracked and split. Headless giants walking. Fingerless club-stump hands. Giants fallen and floundering in pools of slowed time.

  The corruption was spreading, seeping outwards through the edgeless forest in all directions like an insidious stain, like lichen across rock, like blood in snow. It would never stop. It would creep outwards for ever. The forest was dying.

  The angel had been shot into the forest’s belly like a bullet, bursting it open, engendering a slow, inevitable, glacial, cancerous, stone killing.

  The angel was watching her. The whole of the lenticular stone waste was an eye, focused on her. She felt the gross intrusion of its attention like a fat finger, tracing the thread from her to the paluba to the great trees of the forest.

  It knew. And without effort it burst the paluba open.

  The explosion of the paluba drove sticks and rags and meat across the apartment, smashing furniture and shattering glass. The air companion was sucked apart like a breeze in the hurricane’s mouth.

  Maroussia felt a scream in her head as the paluba tried to tuck her away in a pocket of safety. There were fragments of voice in the scream — the paluba’s voice — desperately stuffing words into the small space of her head.

  The Pollandore! Open it! Open it, Maroussia! You have the key! The key is in your pocket!

  And in the moment of ripping and destruction she also sensed the angel’s fear. Fear of what was in Mirgorod waiting, and fear of what she, Maroussia, could do.

  Maroussia walked out of her apartment and down the stairs. Out into the street and the rain. In her pocket was a frail ball of twigs and berries, bones and wax. She wasn’t going to Koromants. Not yet.

  53

  Lakoba Petrov lay among the bodies of the dead. A dead face pressed against his cheek. The smell and the weight and the feel of killed people were piled up on his chest — he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe — the trench was filling up with the bodies of the dead — one by one in rows they jerked as the bullets struck them and they died — they fell — they died. Water, percolating through the stack of the dead, brimmed in his open mouth. He coughed and puked. His mouth tasted bitter and full of salt.

  The soldiers clambered among the bodies, finishing off the ones who were not yet dead, the ones who moaned, or hiccupped, or moved, or wept. Petrov, who had fallen when the firing began, untouched by any bullet, lay as still as the dead under the rain and the dead.

  The soldiers began to cover the bodies over with wet earth. Petrov felt the weight of it and smelled its dampness. It was as heavy as all the world. He could not draw breath. He waited.

  When the time came he pulled himself out from among the bodies and the red earth and turned back towards the city. But there was no escape: the dead climbed out after him in countless number; sightless, speechless, lumbering. Dripping putrefaction and broken as they died, they climbed out from the pit and followed him, walking slowly.

  What he needed now could be got only from Josef Kantor.

  54

  By the time Raku Vishnik got home from the House on the Purfas he was soaked, but he hardly noticed the rain. He was certain that he had found the Pollandore. What Teslom had said confirmed it. It was real, it existed, he knew where it was. He wanted to tell someone — he would tell Vissarion — he w
ould tell Maroussia Shaumian –they would share his triumph. They would understand. And together they would make a plan. His head was turning over scenes and plots and plans as he opened the door to his apartment and walked into nightmare.

  The room was destroyed. Ransacked. His furniture broken. Drawers pulled out and overturned. Papers and photographs spilled across the floor. A man in the pale brick colour uniform of the VKBD looked up from the mess they were sifting when he arrived. Two other men were sitting side by side on the sofa. Rubber overalls and galoshes over civilian clothes. Neat coils of rope put ready beside them. Two large clean knives.

  ‘My room,’ he said. ‘My room.’

  It was the room he thought of first, though he knew, some part of him knew, that this was madness. When he’d arrived in Mirgorod twenty years before, to begin his career, he’d been able to obtain this small apartment, just for himself. The first time he closed the door behind him he had almost wept for simple joy. One afternoon soon afterwards he’d found on a stall in the Apraksin a single length of hand-blocked wallpaper — pale flowers on a dark russet ground — and put it up in the corner behind the stove. It was there now. And he’d accumulated other treasures over the years: the plain gilded mirror, only a little tarnished; the red lacquer caddy; the tinted lithograph of dancers. He looked at it now, all spilled across the floor.