And Archangel is appalled, because in his delight at his own movement he realises that he has made a terrible mistake.
He has forgotten to be afraid.
For a moment his painful grinding progress across the floor of the forest pauses, and for miles around him there is nothing but silence and a second of waiting.
He gathers. He centres. He focuses.
He remembers this thing.
How is it that he had forgotten? That never happens, but it has happened. This thing has been hiding from him! It has woven a forgetting around itself, but now it has made itself known.
This is a powerful and dangerous threat.
Archangel traces the path of the passing of the Pollandore moment back to its source. Examines. Analyzes. Knows what he must do.
73
Mirgorod, war city.
Elena Cornelius survived alone. Elena’s Mirgorod was zero city, thrown back a thousand years, order and meaning and all the small daily habits of use and illusion scorched and blasted away, the concepts themselves eradicated. Money wasn’t money any more when it had no value and there was nothing to buy. Food was what you found or stole. Clothing against the cold and the night lay around free for the taking on the unburied corpses of the dead. Homes weren’t security, shelter and belonging: they were broken buildings, burned and burst open to the elements, the intimate objects of interior domestic life scattered on the streets. Apartments were boxes to shut yourself in and wait for the bomb blasts, the fires, the starvation.
She kept moving, ate scraps scavenged from bombed buildings, drank water from rooftop pools and melted snow. She risked being shot for a looter, which she was, and she hid from the conscripters. She existed day by day in the timeless zero city, alien, unrooted, a sentience apart, belonging to nothing. Herself alone. She felt ancient. Places to hide and sleep were plentiful among the cellars and empty streets. When she slept, she dreamed of the rusalka in the potato-field river. She dreamed of her girls. Yeva and Galina. Mornings she woke early into fresh disorientation, the appalling daily shock: always she felt like she had survived a train crash in the night, a bridge that had crumbled beneath her, a house that had fallen down. Life had broken open, and everything was raw and clear. Every day she looked for her girls. Perhaps they had survived. Perhaps they were existing also somewhere, looking for her.
What follows after taking tea?
The resurrection of the dead.
There were no longer newspapers, but the MIRINFORM bulletin was posted on walls and telephone poles daily. ‘No sooner had Volyana fallen under our fire than the Archipelago soldiers jumped out of the windows with their underwear down and took to their heels. With cries of hurrah the battalion fell upon the slavers. Grenades, bayonets, rifle butts and flaming bottles came into play. The effect was tremendous.’ Increases in rations were reported. The city held stockpiles of grain and dried fish in reserve, ready to be distributed if the need arose. Courage, citizens. One more push, and victory will be ours. Nobody believed, but everybody gathered to read when a new edition was posted. It did not say that the cemeteries were full and there was no fuel for the mortuary trucks.
Elena walked out to the edge of the city until the way was barred by fighting. Three times she probed the outskirts in different directions, but always it was the same. Cleared firing zones. Shell holes filled with corpses and refuse. Charred skeletal buildings. The clatter of tank tracks and the rattle of gunfire. On her third attempt a sniper’s bullet skittered through the broken bricks at her feet like a steel lizard.
Elena knew she was tiring. The effort of keeping moving all day was almost beyond her. She should choose a place to be her permanent home, but she had to keep moving, walking twenty or thirty miles in a day. Looking for her girls.
On the third night the snow came again, a silent softness of feathers thickening the air. She had collected nothing. Her food bag was empty. She broke open the door of an empty house on the edge of the firing zone, drank the last of her water bottle, lit a fire in the grate, laid herself out on the floor and slept.
She was woken by someone kicking her leg. The dazzle of a flashlight in her eyes.
‘Stand up! I said stand up!’
Two young men were looking down at her. Well fed bare-headed boys. Waist-length pea coats. Black trousers and heavy black boots. Elena knew what they were. They were the Boots, and they were the worst. She had always known that one day she would be too tired, too hungry, not careful enough, and it would be finished. But she stood up to face them.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What?’
Rizhin had co-opted the semi-organised, semi-militarised thugs of the Mirgorod Youth and Student Brigade to support the militia in the war against defeatists, hoarders, looters, racketeers, saboteurs and spies. They were kept fed and left to do as they would. Autonomy without discipline. And what they did was rob and torture and rape and kill. People said that even the VKBD found the Boots excessive. Repellent. Elena had heard the Boots roamed the places near the fighting, but she had been too tired to remember.
The Boots were holding rifles. Bayonets fixed to the muzzles. The one with the flashlight turned it off and put it on the floor. The light from the fire was enough.
‘Take off your scarf,’ he said. ‘Let’s see your face.’ His friend was grinning.
Elena let the scarf drop to the floor.
‘Now the coat.’
She unbuttoned the heavy greatcoat and let it fall.
‘And the sweater.’
The two boys were both staring at her now. Not grinning any more. Focused. Eager. Elena saw one of them swallow hard.
‘Take off the shirt,’ he said.
‘And the trousers. Turn around.’
‘Go on. Don’t stop. Show us. Let’s see what you’ve got. Let’s see it all.’
The Boots had laid down their rifles and were opening their own clothing. Fumbling with their belts and flies.
‘No,’ said Elena. She stopped, her right hand behind her back. She was trembling. Her hands were shaking. ‘No.’
‘Bitch.’
One of the Boots lunged forward to push her down, his trousers open and falling round his thighs. Elena pulled out the kitchen knife she kept tucked in the back of her trousers and shoved it into his belly. The boy gasped and stopped in surprise, looking down at his stomach. Disbelieving. Elena took a step back, pulled out the knife, swept it upwards and sliced the blade laterally under his chin. Blood spilled out and splashed to the floor. The boy stared at her. He made a small gurgle in his opened throat.
The other one was scrabbling for his rifle.
‘Drop it. Now.’
The Boot swung round. A VKBD officer was standing in the doorway, a pistol in his hand.
‘Piss off, Brosz,’ said the Boot and raised the rifle muzzle, pointing the bayonet towards him. The officer shot him in the knee and he fell, screaming.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said the officer. ‘You’re such a fucking pair of pigs.’
He walked over to the screaming boy and shot him again. In the face.
The other boy, the one Elena had cut, was still standing in the middle of the room. He was cupping his throat with one hand, trying to catch the blood. The other hand was pressed against the wound in his belly. He was weeping.