‘Where’s this train going?’ said Maroussia.
‘Novaya Zima,’ said Chazia. ‘I told you.’
‘I don’t know where that is.’
Chazia gestured vaguely. ‘North.’
‘We’re not going north.’
‘Not yet. We’ll turn north when we can.’
‘There was shooting yesterday,’ said Maroussia. ‘Was that the Archipelago? Are you losing the war?’
‘Losing it?’ said Chazia. ‘Of course we can’t lose it. The war is good. It is history in action. The old Vlast was stale and tired. Silted up with careerists. They had no energy. No purpose. No imagination. The Archipelago will clear all that away for us. They want Mirgorod? So? Let them have it. Mirgorod is not the Vlast. Mirgorod is one city, yesterday’s city. Let them have it. The Archipelago will consume our corruption like maggots in a wound, and for now we let them do their work, and when they have finished we’ll brush them away.’
‘What if their armies follow you east?’ said Maroussia.
‘At the time of my choosing I will destroy them,’ said Chazia. ‘All their armies will count for nothing. They will burn, they will all burn, and the winds of their burning will blow the ashes of the Archipelago from the face of the planet.’
As she talked she was turning the solm over and over in her hands, looking at it from every direction. Cupping it protectively. Holding it up to her face.
‘It doesn’t do anything,’ said Chazia. ‘Nothing at all.’
Maroussia felt something moving inside her head. A surreptitious, intrusive touch, like careful fingers probing gently, cool and sly. A secretive violation. It made her feel dizzy and sick.
‘What are you doing to me?’ she said.
Chazia looked up from the solm.
‘You were going to use this,’ said Chazia, ‘against the Vlast. Against the angel. Against me. You thought you were going to change the world. You thought you could free the planet of angels by the deed of your own hand. You thought you’d got some kind of hero’s task.’
‘No—’
‘It is an interesting form of individualistic delusion. One person does not change the world. History is huge, colossal, unturnable. Look at me. I am building a new, better, cleaner Vlast. By my own efforts I will do this. But I don’t think I’m a hero. I know I am not. I reject the concept. I am a conduit, a facilitator. I ride the wave of history but the wave has its own momentum and I go this way because it is inevitable. If I turn aside and try to find my own independent path I will certainly be destroyed. The world is as it is and will be as it will be.’
‘Everyone makes their own world,’ said Maroussia. ‘I will do what I have chosen to do. Because I have chosen. Even if what I do makes no difference to anyone but myself, I’ll still have done something that matters.’
Again Maroussia felt faint sickening touches inside her mind. Needle probes and clumsy fingers grubbing around. She tried to focus on what was happening but could not.
‘But that is such rubbish, sweetness. Can’t you hear yourself? Absolute shit. Did you choose the Pollandore, or did it choose you? You don’t know anything about what you’re dealing with, except what the people in the forest have told you. You’re a move in a game, that’s all. Someone else’s game.’
‘No!’
‘So what is the Pollandore? What does it do? What is it for? Can you tell me?’
‘Take this chain off my leg,’ said Maroussia.
Chazia laughed.
‘You’re stubborn,’ she said. ‘Determined. I understand what Lom sees in you.’
‘You opened his head with a knife.’
‘It was a chisel. A fine chisel.’
‘You hurt him. You tried to kill him, but it didn’t work: it made him better and stronger.’
‘He desires you, did you know that?’ Maroussia looked away. ‘Ah,’ said Chazia. ‘I see you do. And you desire him? You are lovers perhaps? Are you lovers? Tell me, darling, are you?’
‘I want to get off this train,’ said Maroussia.
Chazia ignored her.
‘There will be time for personal life,’ she said. ‘One day. We might even live to see it. But not yet, not now, and perhaps for you and me not ever. It cannot be indulged. Now there is work to do, and what is required is clear-sightedness, hardness and resolve in the doing of what is necessary. That will be our gift to the future. Our sacrifice.’ Chazia leaned forward and took Maroussia’s hand in hers. Stroked it. ‘Help me here, darling. Work with me. Help me to use the Pollandore. I don’t want to hurt you. I like you.’
‘I’m never going to help you. You know that.’
‘You will know me better, Maroussia darling, by and by.’
Later that same afternoon the train halted on the shore of an immense and nameless lake. Maroussia watched damson-coloured, damson-heavy cloud heads rise out of the distance and roll towards them, bruising more and more of the sky and darkening the surface of the water, erasing all reflection. Slowly the storm advanced, bringing the closing horizon with it as it came, until the train was enfolded in ominous dim purple-green light. Maroussia stood up in excitement and gripped the window bars. At last fat raindrops splatted on her window, singly at first, but faster and faster, harder and harder. Machine-gun bullets of rain. Water sluiced down the glass in a continuous rippling flood. There might have been arcs of lightning and shattering thunder crashes, or it might have been the glitter and roar of the rain.
Maroussia’s shouts of joy were lost in the noise.
And then a crack opened in the world, the rain and the storm split down the middle, and a different sun was shining through the carriage window: splashes of warmth and spaciousness and the quietness of an afternoon in early summer. The sourness in her mouth was gone, and her heart was big and calm with the possibility of happiness.
The Pollandore reached out and touched her face, and for the first time Maroussia felt how close it was, how near in time as well as distance. There had been bad things–bad things that happened and bad things she had done–but she and the Pollandore were travelling together now, and their paths were slowly converging, and the moment would come: the moment of meeting, when good things would be possible again. She could not have said exactly what the good things coming were, but that didn’t matter. It made no difference at all.
72
The Pollandore’s massive detonation of possibility and different sunlight sweeps outwards across the continent from its epicentre on Chazia’s train. It roars like an exploding shock wave through the certainty of things, gathering momentum as it goes, and the world of history unfolding stumbles, brought up suddenly smack against the truth of human dream and desire. In the trenches of the war and the bitterness of drab town streets the air is suddenly, briefly, rich with the smell of rain on broken earth; another voice is heard, not in the ears but in the blood, and for the brief unsustainable duration of the moment of the Pollandore’s passing, nothing, nothing anywhere dies at all.
The surge of change and otherness rolls across the continent and into the endless forest, where it passes from root to root and from leaf-head to leaf-head. It is leafburst. It is earth-rooted rain-sifting burning green thunder. It crashes against the steep high flanks of Archangel like an ocean storm against the cliffs of the shore.