Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 4

Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.

'What?' she says. 'What about it? What?'

'The date.'

Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.

'It's a couple of months old.' She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier's drying mess. 'It's greasy. It smells bad.'

Galina's eyes aren't focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.

'Not the month,' says Kamilova. 'The year.' She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.

'It's a mistake,' she says. 'A printing error.'

'No,' said Kamilova. 'I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn't a mistake.'

'What?' said Yeva. 'What are you talking about.'

Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.

'What is it?' she said.

'I'm sorry,' said Eligiya Kamilova. 'I'm so sorry.'

'What?'

'We've been walking in the trees,' said Kamilova, 'and we've been living here in the village by the lake, and it's been seven months, nearly eighta long time but not quite eight monthsthat's all.' She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina's lap. 'Look at the date.'

Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.

'But that's wrong.'

'No.'

'But it is wrong. It's five years wrong.'

'Five and a half. Five and half years gone.'

Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.

The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the gra.s.s far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don't quite manage it even then.

Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.

'Our mother thinks I'm sixteen,' says Yeva. 'Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn't find us. She never came.'

'I didn't know,' says Kamilova. 'There wasn't a way to know.'

'She couldn't have come,' says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. 'But tomorrow we'll go home,'

'Home?' says Kamilova. 'What do you mean "home"?'

'You don't have to come with us, Eligiya. You've done enough; you've done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. '

Galina's words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.

'I...' she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. 'Everything will have changed,' she says. 'You have to think about that. She... Your mother might not even-'

'You don't have to come, Eligiya.'

'I will come,' says Eligiya Kamilova. 'Of course I will come.'

Chapter Three.

If you're afraid of wolves, stay out of the forest.

Josef Stalin (18781953)

1.

The rain came in long pulses, hard, warm and grey, and the noise of it in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain-horses. Rain-bison. Rain-elk. Maroussia Shaumian followed the trail through rain and trees, splas.h.i.+ng through mud-thick rain-churned puddles, the bindings on her legs sodden and clagged to the knee, pus.h.i.+ng herself, back straight and face held high, into the future. Her clothes smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of her own body. Rain numbed her face and trickled down her chin and neck. It tasted of earth and nettles. Rain slicked and beaded on the ferns: tall fern canopies trembling under the rain, unfurling ferns, red fern spore. A boar snuffled and crashed in the fern thickets. His hot breath. The smell of it in the rain. There were side paths leading in under the thorns; mud ways trodden clear that pa.s.sed under low branches. The larger beasts were further off and elsewhere, under taller trees. Cave bear and wisent and the dagger-mouth smilodon.

The land rose and then fell away: not hills but a drifting swell that wasn't flatness. Coming down, the trail took her among broad shallow pools. Maroussia cut a staff and kept her head down and walked against the rain, churning knee-high through water, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Most of the ground here was water. Roots and stumps and carca.s.ses of fallen trees reached up through the rain-disturbed surface, paused in arrested motion, waiting, balanced between worlds, and everything distant was lost in the rain.

Maroussia crouched to dip her hands in the water, letting the rain beat on her back. Rolling up her sleeves she reached right down to the bottom and ran her fingers through the gra.s.s there. It looked like hair and moved to her touch, dark green and beautiful. It was just gra.s.s. Her arms in the water looked pale and strange, not hers but arms in the shadow world as real as the one she was in. She cupped her hands and brought some water up into her world to drink, feeling the spill of it through her fingers and down her arms. The water tasted of cold earth and leaves and moss. She tasted the roots of all the trees that stood in it and the bark and wood of the fallen ones. She swallowed it, cool and sweet in her throat, and took more, still drinking long after she wasn't thirsty any more.

The forest is larger than the world, though those who live outside it think the opposite.

She was Maroussia Shaumian still. Nothing of that time was forgotten, nothing was lost, though she was more now, more and less and different and changed and far from home. Like the water in the rain she was fresh and new, and as old as the planet, both at once.

You don't know where home is until you're not there any more.

She waded out deeper into a wide pool loud under the rain to where a beech tree lay on its side, its rain-darkened bark smooth and wet to the touch. The beech had fallen but it wasn't dead; it was earth-rooted still, and its leaves under the water were green. She let her hands rest on it and felt the tree's life. She wished she could speak to it but she didn't have the words, and what would she say? Help me, perhaps. Help me to get home. But that wasn't right. It wasn't what you should ask, and no help would come.

Wolves plashed under tree-shadow, distant and silent and indistinct as moths. One turned his face towards her, wolf eyes in the rain, unhurried, considering. She returned his gaze and he looked away.

Some while later she came on the wolf kill. It was an aurochs, huge and bull-like, lying on his side in a shallow pool of bloodied water, his rough fox-coloured hair matted with mud and rain-sodden. From a distance he looked drowned, but when she got close half of him was gone, a rain-washed hole of raw meat. Rain-glistening flies sipped at his eyes and crawled on the grey flopped rain-wet slab of his tongue. The noise of the rain beat in her ears like the rhythm of her own blood, too close and too ceaseless to attend to.

Sudden and uncalled, the killing moment closed its grip on her and she was in it. It was still there, still happening, and she was the happening of it, not outside and watching, not remembering, but being there. She was aurochs not hearing the splas.h.i.+ng charge of wolf above the rain, not seeing wolf behind him, not smelling wolf through rain and water and the rich scent of rain on leaf. She felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision and the clamp of the tearing mouth at her throat. Heard with the aurochs' own strange clarity the small snap deep inside her neck. Felt the wordless sad dismay of ruminant beast, the surge of fear and panicked stumble, the attempted burly sweep of a neck that didn't responddelivered nothing, moved nothing, connected with nothing. The loneliness of that.

She saw with hopeless aurochs eye the wolf that made the first charge turn and come splas.h.i.+ng back through mud-swirled blood-swirled water. Then other wolves were on her back and she fell. Pain and the acceptance of pain. Aurochs could not rise and could not stand. Her leg wouldn't go where she wanted it to go, her beautiful leg was lost. Aurochs grieved for it. Maroussia lived the last long moments when wolves ripped aurochs belly open and pulled the stuff there out and tore and swallowed bits from her beautiful twitching leg and slowly and softly minute after minute aurochs grew tired and far away and died.

And that wasn't all.

She was the death of aurochs but she was also the hunting of the wolves. She was salt on the wolf's tongue and the dark hot taste of blood. She was the sour breath of the aurochs' dying and the glad teeth in the neck of it. She was the crunch of the killing bite and the thirsty suck and tearing swallow of warm sweet flesh.

And that wasn't all.

She was the life and growth and connected watchfulness of every tree and every leaf and every small creature and every water drop in the pool and the rain, its history and the possibilities of what was to come.

And that wasn't all.

Nothing was all, because there was no end to the fullness of what she could perceive. Because this was what she had become, this overwhelming surprise of plenitude.

She was Maroussia Shaumian stillMaroussia Shaumian, who had made her choice in Mirgorod and followed her path to its end in Novaya Zimabut she had been inside the Pollandore when the temporary star ignited around it. The Pollandore had imploded and exploded and changed and brought her here, and now it was gone. It was inside her now, if it was anywhere: inside her, new and strong, volatile and unaccommodated. The Pollandore and what she could be ran ahead of her and overwhelmed her until she hardly knew what was her and what was not, because sometimes she was everything.

Time wasn't a river; time was the sea, layered and fluid and malleable, what was past and what was possibly to come all intricately infolded and vividly present inside the rippling horizons of now. Nothing of Maroussia was lost, but she was more. She was changed and become this. All this.

The seeing faded. (She called it seeing though it wasn't that, but there was no word.) Seeing always came uncalled and surprised her. She suspected she could learn to call it up at will, but she was afraid of learning that. Once she went through that door, there would be no coming back, and she hadn't chosen that and did not want it. She hadn't chosen anything of this, not this, but here it was.

She was as lonely in the rain as the dying aurochs and as far from home.

Time to move on.

The meeting place was not far, and they would be waiting.

2.

There were three of them at the place on the White Slope, Fraiethe and the father and the Seer Witch of Bones, and Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth.

The father spoke, as he always did, the phrases of beginning.

'And so we are met again under wind and rain and trees and the rise and set of sun. We are the forest; the forest is everywhere and everything, and the forest is us.'

'No,' said Maroussia. 'We are something but not everything.'

The father made a barely perceptible movement of his head, acknowledging the justice of that, but frowned and said nothing. An antagonist then, Maroussia thought. Well, there it is then. So it is.

The father was not actually present at the meeting on the White Slope. After the first time he had not come in bones and blood and flesh but as a fetch, a spirit skin, while he kept himself apart and somewhere else. The fetch had come as a man with woodcutter's hands and forearms, hair falling glossy-thick across his brow and shoulders. A rank aroma, and burning green eyes that watched her openly. Maroussia thought the fetch crude and suspected a deliberate slight aimed at her. This is the form, it said, that seduced your mother and made her sweat and cry in a timberman's hut in the woods. This the form that fathered you. Like some too?

But Maroussia didn't believe it. Whatever artifice seduced her mother at Vig would have been more subtle than that, more complex and thoughtful and elegant and patient and kind, to console her for the wasteland of her marriage to Josef Kantor and draw her out of it into the shadow under the trees. It was imagination that seduced her mother, not this unwashed goat. The goat was provocation only.

Then she realised that the father knew this, and knew that she knew it, and in fact the burly woodcutter was not a provocation but a complicitous tease. A wink. A fatherdaughter joke to be shared.

She didn't resent the father for fathering her. Not any more. When she was growing up in Mirgorod she'd lived with the pain of the consequences of that, but now and here she understood. For the father there was a pattern to be woven, things to be done, opportunities to be taken and prices paid. What he had done to her mother and her wasn't personal. It wasn't even human.

She turned away from him to the other two.

Fraiethe had come in the body. She was really there. Though Fraiethe had guided the paluba that reached Maroussia in Mirgorod, that spoke to her and half-lied and half-bewitched and set her on the course that brought her here; though Fraiethe was part of the deceptionif deception was what it had been (which it was not, not a deception but an opening-up)Fraiethe did not like spirit skins. She stood now under the trees, shadow-dappled like a deer, rain-wet and naked except for the reddish-brown fur, water-sleek and water-beaded, that covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Fur traced the muscular valley of her spine, and a perfume of musk and warmth was in the air around her. Her skin was flushed because of the rain and cold, and her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them.

The third, the Seer Witch of Bones, was neither body nor fetch, but something else, a shadow presence, a sour darkness, the eater of death, the mouth that opened with a smile of dark leaves and thorns, rooted in neither animal nor tree but of the crossing places, muddy and terrible.

And Maroussia Shaumian, who had sewn uniforms at Vanko's factory and pulled Vissarion Lom out of the River Mir and lain beside him in the bottom of a boat to bring him back with the warmth of her body; Maroussia Shaumian, who had sliced a man's head off with a flensing blade and crossed the snow of Novaya Zima to the Pollandore; Maroussia Shaumian, who forgot none of that but remembered everything: Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth at the White Slope, and she claimed an equal place.

The three of them had drawn her to the Pollandore in the moment of its destruction. Because of them she had been there at that moment and absorbed itbeen absorbed into itand become what she was. Because of them the Pollandore was gone from the world beyond the forest and she was here. It was their stratagem against the living angel in the forest. The forest borders were sealed and she, Maroussia, by her presence here, was what held them so. But the three had no sense of the consequences of what they'd done, none at all; only Maroussia had that, and even to her it came only in broken glimpses, fragments that were dark and bleak and hopeless.

She didn't know if there was a better thing they could have done than what they did, but if there was, they hadn't done it.

The fetch of the father spoke again, the man with green eyes: 'The forest is safe. The living angel is contained and we will deal with him. Already he is growing weak and slow. He subsides and grows mute. His ways out of the forest are closed and he no longer draws strength from the places beyond us. The trees are growing back. He has no influence beyond the forest, and here we are stronger than he is.'

The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, answered him, and the voice she spoke with was her voice but not only hers but the Pollandore's also, and sounded strange to her ears.

'Yet the angel lives!' she said. 'Whatever you say, it is not yet destroyed, and it is not clear that we alone have the strength to do it. And we must look to the world beyond the forest. The years there are moving hard and fast, the Vlast is resurgent, the last slow places are closing, the giants and rusalkas are driven out.'

'What happens beyond the edge of the trees doesn't concern us,' the fetch of the father said. 'It is outside. That's what outside means.'

'The world beyond the forest is growing steel fists,' said Maroussia. 'There's no balance there, no breathing of other air. They will not rest content with what they have; they want it all. They will come here, they'll cut and burn. There are winds the forest cannot stand against. I've seen-'

'They've come here before,' said the fetch of the father, the green-eyed man of muscle, the rich deep voice. 'And always we have always driven them out. It's not even hard.'

'But nothing is the same now, because of what you did. The Pollandore is gone from that world. There is no balance there, and the Vlast will come in numbers, they will drive and burn and burn and drive. There is a man that leads them. Josef Kantor, called Rizhin now. I know something of him and so do you. You know how far he's gone already and how fast he moves.' The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, paused and looked at all of them, not just the father. 'And we all know what he is throwing into the sky. We have all heard the hot dry thundercrash and smelled the burning stink of dead angel flesh cutting open the sky. We know the force and speed of what is pa.s.sing overhead and looking down on us. It makes the forest small. And that's just the beginning of his ambition. How can you say this doesn't concern us?'

The fetch of the father moved to speak, but Maroussia dark-eyed paradigm s.h.i.+fter, the unexpected outcome and maker of change, held up her hand to stop him.

'You must listen to me,' she said, 'or why did you do this? Why make me as I am and bring me herewhich I did not ask for, which I did not choosewhy do this and not listen now to what I say?'

The fetch fell into silence. Maroussia realised that the father, wherever he was, had finished his testing of her.

The Seer Witch of Bones said nothing. It didn't matter to her. Whatever came there would be a fullness of death at the house of bleached skulls.

But Maroussia felt the pressure of Fraiethe's attentive examination. Fraiethe knew everything: the heaviness and smell of her wet muddy clothes, the hot sweat of her palms and the beating of her heart, her anger at the trickiness of the father, that she was lonely and didn't like the forest and wanted to go home. It was Maroussia not Fraiethe who was naked on the White Slope.

'What would you have us do?' said Fraiethe.