Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 13

Elena nodded. In the aftermath of war, when half the world, it seemed, was lost, you didn't ask. People told you or they did not. The stories were always more or less the same.

'I lost my children,' Elena said. 'Galina and Yeva. You remember them?'

'Of course,' said Lom.

'The building they were in is gone, built over now, but I go there every day, and when they come back they'll find me waiting. They're not dead, I know that at least. Of course I'd know if they were killed. A mother would feel that, wouldn't she? In her bones? They were taken away but n.o.body would tell me who took them or where. They all denied knowing anything about itTaken away? n.o.body was taken awaybut some of them were lying, I could see. There's a post office box in my name, so when Galina or Yeva writes me a letter it should go there. The system is very reliable and good, everyone says that.'

'Is that why you want to kill Rizhin?' said Lom quietly. 'Because of what happened to Galina and Yeva?'

'Not his fault,' said Elena. 'Before him, that. That was others. Rizhin came later.'

'What happened to your hands, Elena?' said Lom.

'These?' She shrugged.

'Did they do that in the camps? Did they interrogate you?'

'These are nothing, not compared to what they did to others... not compared to...' She stopped. Looked out of the window.

'They hurt someone you knew?' said Lom.

'What good is this doing? Talking never does any good. None at all.'

'Who was he?'

'He was trying to make a new start,' she said, still looking out across the sunlit concrete square. 'New ideas. A better world after the war. Some of us believed in that. We tried... We wanted to... Why would I tell you this? You wanted to stop me killing Rizhin. You were trying to save him. Weren't you?'

'Yes,' said Lom. 'And now I'm trying to stop you trying again.'

'But... why?'

'Because simply killing Rizhin is no use at all. It's worse than useless: it would be disastrous. It's the idea of him that needs to be destroyed. Killing the man will only make the idea of him stronger. Things will only be worse if you kill him. Much, much worse. '

'No,' said Elena. 'You're wrong. Why do you think that?'

'I don't think it,' he said. 'I know it.'

'What do you want from me? Why are you here?'

'I want your help. I want to bring Rizhin down. Not kill him, but worse than kill him. Destroy him. Ruin him. Ruin his memory. Make it so people will hate all his plans and all he wants to do, and never do any of it simply because it was what he wanted.'

'How? How would you do this?'

'With information. With proof of what he really is.'

'And you have this?'

'Not yet. I should have it tomorrow. But I'll need help to use it properly. That's why I came to see you. I thought you might know people. You could put me in contact-'

'What kind of people?'

'Like you said. People with new ideas. Do you know people like that? People I could talk to?'

'Maybe. Perhaps they would talk to you. You could show them what you have.'

'I'd need to meet them first, before I brought them anything.'

Elena looked hard at Lom. Her thin dark face. Her broken nose. Eyes burning just this side of crazy.

'I don't know,' she said. 'But Maroussia trusted you.'

'And this is Maroussia's work I'm doing. Unfinished business.'

Elena moved her head slightly. That connected with her.

'Is it?' she said.

'Yes, it is.'

She took a deep breath. 'OK. Come with me. I'll take you there now.'

7.

Maroussia Shaumian walks in the forest and as she walks she picks things up. Small things, the litter of forest life that snags her gaze and answers her in some instinctive wordless way. Smooth small greenish stones from the bed of a stream. Twigs of rowan. Pine cones. Galls and cankers. Pellets and feathers of owl. A trail of dark ivy stem, rough with root hairs. A piece of root like a brown mossy face. The body of a shrew, dead at the path-side, a tiny packet of fur and frail bone, the bright black drupelet of an open eye. She stops and gathers them and tucks them in her satchel.

When she rests she tips the satchel out and sorts through them. Holds them one by one, interrogates them, listens, and shapes them. Knots them together with gra.s.s, threads them on bramble lengths, fixes them with dabs of sticky mud and resin smears. She is making strange objects.

Each one as she makes it becomes a tiny part of her, but separated off. Each one is an expression, a distillation, a vessel and an awakening: not the whole of her, but some small and very specific part, some particular and exact feeling, one certain memory that she separates from herself and makes a thing apart. Some don't work. The investing doesn't take, but slips through the gaps and fades. Those, the emptied ones, the ones that die, she buries under earth and moss and leaves. But many do take, and she knows each one and gives it a name. Lumb. Hope. Wythe. Frith. Scough. Ca.r.s.e. Arker. Haugh. Lade. Clun. Mistall. Brack. Lund. In the evenings she hangs them at intervals around her camp. They dangle and twist and open themselves to the night, to watch and listen while she sleeps.

No one showed her how to do this, not Fraiethe or the father or the Seer Witch of Bones. She found her own way to it.

She comes to where a wide shallow beck crosses the path, running fast and cold, spilling across mounded rocks. Trees on either side lean across it, leaf-heads merged, darkening the water. She drinks a little from the stream and sits a while on the bank. Makes a leaf boat, pinned in shape with thorns, weighted with pebble ballast.

When the leaf boat is ready she reaches for one of the figures she's made. Brings it close to her eye and studies the tiny striations on the twig bark, the exact complexity of gra.s.s-stem knots, the russets of moss, the lichen maps like moth wings. She tries to feel her way into it, curious to find what part of herself it is that the object holds. But it is opaque now and keeps its own counsel. She puts it in the boat.

Holding the boat in one hand, carefully, raising it high, she makes her way out into the beck to a dark wet flat of rock. Downstream of the rock the stream has dug a pool, dark brown, slower turning. She crouches and leans out to set the leaf boat on the water and let it go. It turns a while, uncertain, listing, testing the way, then settles and rights itself. The water carries it clear of the matted litter on the bank. It wobbles and turns, tiny under the trees, until it goes beyond where she can see.

It is not a message, not even a messenger, but an explorer: a voyager sent ahead where she can't yet go.

All morning the ground climbs under her feet and the trees grow spa.r.s.er, lower, more widely s.p.a.ced, until in the middle of the day she crests a rise and finds herself on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. The grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spreads out at her feet. Solitary hunting birds circle below her on loose-stretched flaggy wings. A range of low hills on the further side rises into distance and mist. Without trees above her she can see the sky.

Smirrs of mist hang over thorn and bramble scrub, pale and cold, motionless and patient, like breath-clouds: the trees' breathing. The finger-touch of damp air chill is on her face. Her hands are bunched in her pockets for warmth. She is walking on a thick mat of fallen leaves and wind-broken tips and twigs, bleached of colour. It crunches underfoot. There is winter coming in this part of the forest. Every edge and rib of leaf has a fine sawtooth edge of frost.

The body of the lynx lies on its side in a shallow pool as if it has drowned. Maroussia crouches beside it to look. The pool is dark and skinned with ice: forest litter is caught in it, and tiny bubble trails. The lynx is big like a large dog: sharp ears, a flattened cat-snout, ice-matted fur. She puts out her hand to touch its side. It feels cold and hard. She closes her eyes and reaches out with her mind, groping her way, and touches a faint distant hint of warmth. A last failing ember. A trace. Life, determined, hanging on.

She isn't dead. She isn't gone. Not yet.

Maroussia feels her way cautiously into the cold-damaged body. The sour smell of death is there: an obstacle, an uneasy darkness she has to push through. She feels the death seeping into her and pushes it back, trembling with revulsion.

'Get out,' she whispers aloud. Get away from me.

She is feeling her way inside the lynx, looking for the core of life, reaching out to it. Here, she is saying. I am here. Where are you?

The lynx barely flickers in response, so faintly that Maroussia doubts at first that it is there at all. But it stirs. She catches a weak sense of lynx life.

Who are you? she says to the lynx life. Who are you?

Leave me. I am death.

No. Not yet. Not quite.

I am tired and death. I am the stinker. The rotting one.

Not yet. Take something from me. I want to share.

It is too much and I am death.

I have life. Share some.

I am lynx and do not share.

The lynx is faint and far away. Drifting. Maroussia pushes some of her self into it, shoving, forcing like she did with the objects she made, but stronger. Harsher. Until it hurts to do it.

Who are you? she says again to the lynx.

Leave me alone.

Who are you? Remember who you are.

Maroussia pushes more of herself into the lynx, feeling the weakening of herself, the draining of certainty, the forest around her grow fainter. The sound of death is like a river, near. She will have to be careful. But the lynx is stronger now. Maroussia can see her, as if the lynx is at the back of a low dark cave. There is something behind her that she cannot quite see. A shadow moving fast across the floor.

Who are you? says Maroussia again.

Plastered fur and soaking hair.

More than that, says Maroussia.

Weakness and all-cold all-hungry and wet and full of dying cub. All strength gone.

More than that!

I am shadow-muzzle, dark-tooth, wind-dark and rough. Faintness and lick and dapple, and pus.h.i.+ng, and b.l.o.o.d.y hair. I am mewler and swallower and want, the shrivelled one, the suckler. I do not need to share.

Take it then. Because you can. Maroussia pushes again. Who are you?

Meat-scent on the air at dusk. Salt on the tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood. I am the eater of meat. I do not share. I do not need to share.

No, you don't.

I am s.h.i.+t in the wet gra.s.s. Milk on the cub's breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the b.i.t.c.h's l.u.s.t for the dog I do not need. I am the abdomen swollen full as an egg, the pink bud suckler in the dark of the earth den.

Yes.

I am the runner hot among the trees. Noiseless climber. Sour breath in the tunnel's darkness and teeth in the badger's neck. The crunch of carrion and the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet blood-or-is-it-milk. Shrew flesh is distasteful, and so is the flesh of bears. I am s.h.i.+t and blood and milk and salty tears. I do not share!

No. But you can take.

I am the lynx in the rain with the weight of cubs in my belly. Cub-warm sleep under the snow, ice-bearded. I am life and I am called death. I am the answer to my own question, and if you look for me, I am the finding. Leave me alone now. I am not dying but I want to sleep.

Eat something first. Then I will carry you and you can sleep.

My teeth are sharp. My claws are sharp.

Don't bite me.

I do not share.

OK.

Maroussia sits on the ground and lifts the animal into her lap. Holds a piece of pigeon to its mouth. Lynx glares at her but takes it and chews at it warily. Resentfully. Maroussia sees the needle-sharp whiteness of teeth.

The Pollandore inside her gives an alien grin. The growing human child in her belly stirs and kicks. She is alone and very far from home.

8.

The place Elena Cornelius took Lom to was a wide field of broken concrete and brick heaps and hummocks of dark weed-growth. It rolled to a distant skyline of ragged scorched facades.

Such landscapes were everywhere in Mirgorod. Lom had seen other war-broken towns and cities that were all burned-out building sh.e.l.ls and ruined streetsgrids of empty windows showing gaps of sky behindbut during the siege of Mirgorod the defenders had pulled the ruins down and levelled the wreckage, creating mile after mile of impa.s.sable rubble mazy with pits and craters, foxholes and rat runs and sniper cover, all sown with landmines, tripwire grenades, vicious nooses, shrapnel-bomb snares and caltrops. Trucks and half-tracks were useless. Battle tanks beached themselves. The enemy had to clamber across every square yard on foot, clearing cellar by cellar with flame-throwers and gas. Artillery and airborne bombardment could not destroy what was already blasted flat.

Elena led him through pathless acres of brick and plaster and dust. A girl emerged from one of the larger rubble piles and pa.s.sed them with a smile, neat and clean and combing her hair. Two men in business suits came up a gaping stairwell. A woman in a head cloth with a market basket. Patches of ground had been cleared for cabbage and potato. There was woodsmoke and the smell of food cooking. Soapy water. The foulness of latrines.

'People live here?' said Lom.