‘I don’t see Elena,’ said Maroussia, looking round. ‘Shit. Where is she?’
A voice called across to them.
‘Maroussia? It is you!’
A woman came across from the tea counter, wiping her hands. She was about thirty. Dark blue work clothes. A tangle of thick fair hair roughly cut. Her eyes were full of life and intelligence but she looked tired. Harassed.
She gave Maroussia a hug.
I’m so glad you came,’ she said. ‘I was worried. Your mother… I heard. I’m so sorry. I went to your apartment, but you weren’t there and nobody knew where you’d gone. Are you all right? You look pale…’ She glanced curiously at Lom.
‘Elena,’ said Maroussia. ‘This is my friend Vissarion.’
The woman held out her hand.
‘Elena Cornelius. Pleased to meet you.’
Then she saw the blood on his coat. And on Maroussia’s.
‘Maroussia?’ she said. ‘What’s going on? Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘But—’
‘You’re in trouble. What’s happened?’
‘Elena, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have, but we… There wasn’t anywhere else to go, and I thought…’
‘What do you need?’ said Elena.
‘Transport,’ said Lom. ‘A cart or something like that.’
‘There’s someone else,’ said Maroussia. ‘We left him downstairs. He’s hurt. He’s been shot. It was just outside here, in the alleyway.’
‘Shot?’ said Elena. She looked hard at Lom. ‘Shot by who?’
‘The militia,’ said Maroussia. ‘They shot my mother and they’re trying to kill me. They’ll come here looking for us.’ She stopped. ‘Elena, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come. I’ve brought you trouble. I wasn’t thinking straight. We’ll go. They won’t ever know we were here.’
She turned to go.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Elena. ‘We can use my cart. I can take you somewhere. I can take you home.’
Maroussia shook her head.
‘I can’t go home. Not ever.’
‘Then come to my place,’ said Elena.
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘No, I couldn’t. I can’t ask you that. I’m sorry I came.’
‘Just for now. Until you have a plan.’
Maroussia shook her head.
‘Why not?’ said Elena. ‘Have you got anywhere else to go?’
‘No.’
‘Then come with me.’ Elena Cornelius paused a beat, then she added, ‘Both of you. For now. We’ll work something out.’
Lom studied Elena Cornelius. He liked her. She was sensible. Purposeful. Tough.
‘Where do you live?’ he said.
‘The Raion Lezaryet.’
Lom let it happen. The next two minutes. The raion was as good a place as any. Better than most. Gendarmes didn’t patrol the raion.
He nodded.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Elena ignored him.
‘Where’s the one who’s hurt?’ she said.
Maroussia told her.
‘This way,’ said Elena. ‘There’s a service elevator.’
She took Maroussia by the hand. It was an instinctive, almost motherly gesture.
When they reached the porters’ room the chair was on its side, the table and the floor smeared with blood. Florian was gone.
‘Somebody must have found him,’ said Maroussia quietly.
‘Or he got up and walked away,’ said Lom. ‘Either way, we need to get out of here. Now.’
Elena Cornelius kept her cart in a place that was part warehouse, part garage, part stables: a cavernous shadowy space with a flagstone floor scattered with wisps of straw.
‘You ride up front,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk with the pony.’ She found a grey woollen blanket and insisted that Maroussia wrapped herself in it against the cold. It smelled of fresh-cut wood. ‘Sorry about the sawdust.’
She pushed open the heavy sliding doors onto the street. Grey snow was shawling thickly out of a darkening sky. She took the pony’s halter and said a word in her ear. The cart lurched forward and they were out and moving. There was hardly any traffic. It was freezing cold. A bitter wind whipped snow into their faces.
27
Thousands of miles east of Mirgorod, beyond the continental plain, the endless forest begins. The forest that has no centre and no farther edge. The absolutely elsewhere, under an endless sky.
There are pools in the forest: pools and lakes of still brown water; streams and slow rivers, surrounded on all sides by brown and grey columns that disappear upwards into shadow and leaf. Ivy and moss. Fern. Liverwort. Lichen. Mycelium. Thread. There are no landmarks, only the rising and falling of the ground, and trees becoming dark in the distance. Low cloud and morning mist: breaths of cool air moving, chill and earthy and damp. There is rustling and sudden small movement. There are broad hollow ways, paths and side paths, ways trodden clear. Large things walk there: boar and aurochs, wisent and wolf. Lynx and wolverine. Elk and sloth and woolly rhinoceros. War otter and cave bear. Dark leopard and fox.
Somewhere in the forest it is winter. The long night settles; predators bury carrion in the snow; bear sows sleep with their cubs and the old fighting males wander in the dark. And somewhere in the forest it is spring, with the deep roaring of rutting deer, the air filled with the musk of females in season, and trees, trembling and flaring with blossom, pouring out scent and colour, ignited with life.
The forest is larger than the world, though the world thinks the opposite. Going in is easy: it’s coming out that’s hard. Time stops in the forest. People walk into the forest and never come out. They feel lost. They drift. They walk round in circles. They stop wanting.
The forest is the first place, original, primeval, primordial, primal. It is the inexhaustible beginning, direct, instinctual, unmediated, real. The land before the people came. This land. Old and bright and dark and full of dreams and nightmares. It is not an empty place. People live here, human and not so: free giants and tunnel dwellers; windwalkers, rusalkas, vyrdalaks, shapeshifters, hamrs, fetches, man-wolves; disembodied watchful intelligences, wild and cruel, that might be called witches and trolls. Many things are lost and buried in the forest: old things, perdurable, and new things, potential, unrealised yet, and waiting. All things are possible here, and here is everything. Growth and change. Here everything freely, abundantly begins, and becomes itself: the multiplicity, variousness, potential, myriadness, wanderability, wellspring and wilderness of forest. The trees are sensitive to light and earth. They taste and listen. Their roots go deep, and touch, and interweave. They spill pheromone language on the air. The trees are watchful. The rain, the air, the earth are watchful. The forest is borderless mind. It is aware.
Across the forest Archangel grinds his way, immense and alien and poison.
28
Minister of Armaments and General Secretary of the Colloquium Steopan Dukhonin’s car took him home after the Novozhd’s funeral. From a window in the building opposite, Bez Nichevoi watched the long ZorKi Zavod saloon arrive. It rode low, weighed down by two tons of steel plate. Assassination-proof. Bez could make out Dukhonin’s head in the back, a dim featureless shape behind two inches of hardened glass. An underwater profile, bowed forward as if he were absorbed. Reading. The car pulled up at the wide double gates and the driver spoke into the intercom grille. The gates swung open to let the ZorKi edge through and closed behind it. Bez knew the routine. Dukhonin would not leave again before morning.