‘There was a paluba,’ she said. ‘It was looking for me and it found me. It showed me things. The forest. A terrible living angel, and the damage it was doing. The paluba wanted me to find something. The Pollandore. Do you—?’
‘Air-daughter made a new world,’ said Kamilova, ‘to displace the old one from within. World in the forest, forest in the world. What makes you look, and what you find. The wound, and what made the wound.’
‘That’s it!’ said Maroussia. ‘That’s what my mother used to say. I haven’t heard that for years. Yes. And the Pollandore is—’
‘A story. A riddle game. A children’s tale. I have heard others.’
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s real.’ She reached inside her coat and brought out the bundle of Vishnik’s photographs. Handed them across to Kamilova. ‘Here it is. Here is the proof.’
Kamilova looked at the pictures one by one, carefully. Moments in the city, times and places opened up like sunlight in a rain-dark sky, like berries bursting.
‘And this,’ she said at last, ‘you think this is the Pollandore?’
‘No, it’s what the Pollandore is doing,’ said Maroussia. ‘Here in Mirgorod. It’s active. It’s leaking or something. I don’t know. I’ve felt it myself. I’ve seen these things. It’s waking up. The Pollandore itself is a thing. It’s an object in a place. The paluba… she told me to find it. She wants me to open it.’
‘Open it like a box, or open it like a door?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘To let something out, or for you to go in?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘But you’re going to do it?’
‘Yes. If I can.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the angel. The paluba showed me—’
‘The paluba,’ said Kamilova, ‘showed you nothing. The paluba was a vehicle, nothing more. The speaker but not the voice.’ She paused, watching Maroussia closely. Studying her. ‘So,’ she said at last. ‘You want me to tell you about the forest?’
‘Yes,’ said Maroussia. ‘Please. Just… just talk to us.’
Kamilova pulled back her sleeves and held out her arms. They were thin, muscular and berry-brown. Intricate knotted patterns wound across her skin, reaching down towards her wrists, drawn in faded purple and green. Like roots. Like veins. Filaments. Growth.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been into the forest. I’ve taken my boat up the rivers. I’ve travelled with fur traders and shamans and women with spirit skins. I’ve lived with giants and lake people. I’ve slept with them and hunted with them and some of them showed me… they showed me things. They taught me, and I listened. I learned. I’m talking about the deep forest now. Deep in under the trees.’ She looked at Lom. ‘He knows what I mean.’
‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I don’t.’
Kamilova made a crude derisive gesture and spat into the fire. Lom had seen traders on the Yannis do the same thing when offered an insulting price. She turned away from him, back to Maroussia.
‘What you need to understand about the forest,’ Kamilova continued, ‘is this: there is no end to it, and no certain paths. It is not a forest, it is all forests. It contains all forests. Woods within woods, forests within forests, further in and further back, deeper and deeper for ever. Anything that could be in the forest is there. Anything you have ever heard about the forest–any forest–it is all there, somewhere. The Vlast is nothing, the world is nothing, compared to the forest.’ She paused. ‘And the point is, most of what lives in the forest has no interest in the human world at all. The forest has its own purposes. Not everything that comes out of the forest can be trusted.’
‘You think the paluba lied to me?’ said Maroussia.
‘I think that, whoever was using it, they have purposes of their own, of which you are a part. Palubas speak to you like dreams. They draw things out of your mind, use images and ideas they find there, change them, put thoughts to you in ways that you can understand and believe.’
‘But that’s the point. I don’t understand’
‘You’re doing what it needs you to do.’
‘But the Pollandore is real,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s here. It’s near. I’ve seen what it can do. It can make a difference. It can make things… change. And I know where it is, only it will be hard to get to. And I am going to reach it.’
‘Why?’ said Kamilova. ‘I ask you this again. Why?’
‘Because…’ said Maroussia. She frowned. Hesitated. ‘Because there’s a terrible hole in the centre of everything. It’s like a mouth, a gaping mouth that swallows up life and spews out shadow and cruelty and sadness. Not just for me, for everyone. There’s this gap, this awful gap that you feel all the time, between how things are and how they could be. There’s something really close to me, almost in the same place as I am, and it’s my life, my real life as it’s meant to be, only I’m not living it because I’m here instead.’
Maroussia was leaning forward, back straight, dark eyes fixed on the fire in Kamilova’s grate. She was fierce and hurting and determined. Lom watched her intently.
‘Do you understand?’ she said urgently to Kamilova. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Kamilova. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘I will reach the Pollandore,’ said Maroussia. ‘I know where it is. But I don’t know what to do when I get there. The paluba said there was a key. Not a key, but something like it. It thought I already had it. It thought I knew more… but I don’t.’
Kamilova stood up.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I will show you something.’
The boathouse was a few yards down from Kamilova’s building. She let Lom and Maroussia in through a small wicket in a larger door.
‘This is my boat,’ she said. ‘Heron.’ It was under a tarpaulin, a varnished clinker hull. The rest of the space in the boathouse was filled with a clutter of bundles and stacked boxes. A canoe hung suspended from the ceiling, skins on a wooden frame. ‘This is where I keep my collection. Things I’ve brought back from the forest.’
It was impossible to make out much in the shadows. There were carvings on the wall. Crude wooden masks. Bottles and boxes on shelves. Lom felt something stirring. Hunting animals with rain-wet fur. Leaf mould and shadow under trees. Watchfulness. Life. He was in an open space among the trees. Fern and briar and clumps of thorn. Earth and rain. A small stream, barely trickling its way over silted accidental dams of mud and stone and banked-up branches and leaves. A beech fallen in a pool of green water. Rain-mist erasing the further slopes and hillsides. He was young, and something was watching him, a bad dark thing, and he was frightened.
Kamilova disappeared into the back of the boathouse and came back holding something small cupped in her hand. A loosely knotted ball of twigs and dried leaves stuck with gobbets of wax-like stuff, dried brown and brittle. Dull, desiccated berries. The bones and fur-scraps of small animals. She held it out to Maroussia.
‘Have you seen one of these before?’ she said.
Maroussia took it and turned it over in her hand. Held it up to her face and breathed the scent.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My mother had them all over the house. She said the forest brought them to her. But she… she was weak and frightened all the time. She was terrified of trees in the street. She said they waited for her and watched and followed her. She wasn’t… well.’
‘This is what the volvas, the wise women, call a solm, or a khlahv, or a bo. Sometimes they call them keys. It’s a vessel for air. It can hold and carry a breath, and the breath is the message. The voice. That one in your hand is empty now. Old and dead.’