‘And for me?’ said Rizhin. ‘What would there be for me? I mean me personally, of course.’
‘An honourable retirement, General. A small estate somewhere. Froualt, perhaps? And a reasonable pension. We might say two thousand roubles a year, something in that region. There would be limits on your future travel and communication, naturally, but for all practical purposes you would be free to live out a quiet and prosperous end to an illustrious career.’
‘These are reasonable terms,’ said Rizhin. ‘Very attractive.’
‘I expect you’ll want time to consider,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to discuss your answer with your colleagues, I understand that, and we would of course need to be assured that yours was a collective answer. A reliable agreement. But…’ She paused. ‘I would advise you against consulting with your masters who have fled. It’s easy to spend other people’s lives from a distance. I urge Mirgorod to make its own mind up. I can give you twenty-four hours. No more.’
‘There is no need for time,’ said Rizhin. ‘I speak for Mirgorod. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Good. Excellent. So, what do you say, General?’
‘I say you’re full of shit.’
‘I assure you—’ Carnelian began, but Rizhin held up his hand for silence.
‘You and I,’ he said, ‘what we’re fighting for here is a city. A capital city. If Mirgorod is not the capital of the Vlast it is nothing, it is meaningless, it no longer exists. You won’t burn it. What use to you is a million stinking corpses? What use to you is five hundred square miles of ash and rubble in a marsh on the edge of a northern ocean? This threat of burning is nothing. It’s shit. I could burn it myself, more easily than you could. Fuck, I would burn it myself, to stop you having it. But to destroy it is to lose it. You burn Mirgorod and you obliterate the idea of it, and it’s the idea of Mirgorod we’re fighting over here, not some piss and vinegar diplomatic compromise.’
Rizhin stood up to go.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You want my city, you come and get it. You fight for every inch, or you fuck off somewhere else and let the Archipelago find themselves a general who can.’
‘You can’t save the people of Mirgorod, General.’
‘You haven’t been listening,’ said Rizhin. ‘You should pay attention. I don’t want to save the people of Mirgorod, they are of no interest to me. What I want is a victory. And I’m going to have one. You’re going to give me one.’
69
For three hours out of Slensk, Lyuba Gretskaya followed the Northern Kholomora upstream, flying low through steady drizzle. The river slid beneath them, wide and slow and dark. Carpets of leafless birch and moss gave way to plains of tawny scrub grass and miles-long streaks of bare yellow earth. Twilight was thickening into night when the storm clouds rose from the north, clotting the horizon. Rags of wind buffeted the Kotik, sending it scrabbling and skittering across the surface of the air.
‘We’ll have to lie up overnight,’ said Gretskaya. ‘I’m going down while there’s still light to land by.’
‘Go a few miles north,’ said Lom. ‘Out of sight of the river. Just in case.’
Gretskaya nodded and swung the Kotik to port. After a couple of minutes she eased off the throttle and began to descend in a wide flat spiral. She pulled a handle and Lom felt the thunk as the landing wheels dropped into position. Almost imperceptibly the nose came up as the aircraft flattened out, engine silenced, gliding. The wind whistling through the struts, the creak of the airframe, the rain against the windscreen, the tick and sweep of the wipers. Even in the dusk and rain the grass was visible underneath them now, not flat and smooth as it had appeared from height, but rough and tussocky and dotted with low clumps of shrub and thorn. Gretskaya flew on, thirty feet above the ground.
And then a wall of scree rose out of the ground in front of them.
Gretskaya hauled back on the stick, dragging the nose up steeply, and raced the throttle till it screamed. They must have cleared the top by a matter of feet. Inches. They were flying over a stretch of gravel and small stones. Patches of illumination from the wing-tip lamps raced alongside them. The ground was so close, Lom felt he could have reached over the side and brushed it with his hand.
The tail dropped, the wheels touched and bounced and touched again, and they were down and trundling, wheels crunching and jolting across the stony surface. The whole aircraft strained as Gretskaya applied the brakes. It skidded and slewed to the right. Suddenly they ran out of gravel and bounced into long grass. A shadowy clump of thorns loomed out of the darkness and smacked into the wing almost at Lom’s shoulder. With a screech of protesting metal they lurched to a sudden halt.
Gretskaya cut the engine instantly.
‘Shit,’ she said quietly. ‘That didn’t sound good.’
Gretskaya opened the cockpit and climbed down to have a look at the damage. Lom followed. A thin bitter wind tugged at his trousers. Rain flattened his hair and streamed down his face. The right under-carriage wheel was tangled in a mess of thorny branches. The struts, to Lom’s inexpert eye, looked bent and twisted awry. Despite the wind and the rain, he could smell an acrid industrial taint on the air. Something was leaking. Gretskaya bent down and dabbed at the mechanism, then sniffed her fingers.
‘Brake fluid,’ she said. ‘Nothing too bad, if that’s the only damage. I can fix it up in the morning.’
Florian appeared beside them. His eyes were shining happily.
‘I’m going to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up.’
Lom looked at him in surprise but Gretskaya only grunted indifferently.
‘Come,’ she said and clapped Lom on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get inside and finish this balzam and get some sleep.’
Antoninu Florian slid down the scree and found a place where he could tuck away his clothes. He pulled them off hastily, shivering happily as the rain drenched the bare skin of his body. He wrapped them in his jacket and stashed the bundle under a thorn tree. He marked the place with his scent so he could find it again.
All around him for hundreds of miles there was spaciousness and weather and, apart from the two left behind inside their stale metal box, no humans. None at all. And no cramped enclosing constructions of stone and brick. No stench of coal and iron. No thundering of engines and petrol fumes. No noise at all but the wind in the grass and the rain. How long? How long since such a moment, a true wolfnight? Too long. Too many years. But now. Now. The joy of it made him want to howl and shout.
Florian ran, and as he ran he stretched out his body, re-articulating bone and cartilage inside their hot tendon sheaths, feeling his muscles bunch and reach and work themselves warm and free, pushing out his ribcage and filling his unfolding lungs deeply, deeply, with the night-freighted air: the smell of crushed herbs, broken twigs and wet earth. At full pelt he tipped himself sideways into the brush and rolled over and over, growling, yelping, laughing. He came to a stop and thrust his face into the ground, just to breath it, just to rub his muzzle against the fragrant wet grass.
Then he picked himself up and stood for a moment, still, the fur on his back raised thickly, mouth open, panting hot breath that steamed on the air, simply listening to the hot blood of his own veins.