Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.
‘Our mother thinks I’m sixteen,’ says Yeva. ‘Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn’t find us. She never came.’
‘I didn’t know,’ says Kamilova. ‘There wasn’t a way to know.’
‘She couldn’t have come,’ says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. ‘But tomorrow we’ll go home,’
‘Home?’ says Kamilova. ‘What do you mean “home”?’
‘You don’t have to come with us, Eligiya. You’ve done enough; you’ve done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. ’
Galina’s words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.
‘I…’ she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. ‘Everything will have changed,’ she says. ‘You have to think about that. She… Your mother might not even—’
‘You don’t have to come, Eligiya.’
‘I will come,’ says Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Of course I will come.’
Chapter Three
If you’re afraid of wolves, stay out of the forest.
1
The rain came in long pulses, hard, warm and grey, and the noise of it in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain-horses. Rain-bison. Rain-elk. Maroussia Shaumian followed the trail through rain and trees, splashing through mud-thick rain-churned puddles, the bindings on her legs sodden and clagged to the knee, pushing herself, back straight and face held high, into the future. Her clothes smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of her own body. Rain numbed her face and trickled down her chin and neck. It tasted of earth and nettles. Rain slicked and beaded on the ferns: tall fern canopies trembling under the rain, unfurling ferns, red fern spore. A boar snuffled and crashed in the fern thickets. His hot breath. The smell of it in the rain. There were side paths leading in under the thorns; mud ways trodden clear that passed under low branches. The larger beasts were further off and elsewhere, under taller trees. Cave bear and wisent and the dagger-mouth smilodon.
The land rose and then fell away: not hills but a drifting swell that wasn’t flatness. Coming down, the trail took her among broad shallow pools. Maroussia cut a staff and kept her head down and walked against the rain, churning knee-high through water, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Most of the ground here was water. Roots and stumps and carcasses of fallen trees reached up through the rain-disturbed surface, paused in arrested motion, waiting, balanced between worlds, and everything distant was lost in the rain.
Maroussia crouched to dip her hands in the water, letting the rain beat on her back. Rolling up her sleeves she reached right down to the bottom and ran her fingers through the grass there. It looked like hair and moved to her touch, dark green and beautiful. It was just grass. Her arms in the water looked pale and strange, not hers but arms in the shadow world as real as the one she was in. She cupped her hands and brought some water up into her world to drink, feeling the spill of it through her fingers and down her arms. The water tasted of cold earth and leaves and moss. She tasted the roots of all the trees that stood in it and the bark and wood of the fallen ones. She swallowed it, cool and sweet in her throat, and took more, still drinking long after she wasn’t thirsty any more.
The forest is larger than the world, though those who live outside it think the opposite.
She was Maroussia Shaumian still. Nothing of that time was forgotten, nothing was lost, though she was more now, more and less and different and changed and far from home. Like the water in the rain she was fresh and new, and as old as the planet, both at once.
You don’t know where home is until you’re not there any more.
She waded out deeper into a wide pool loud under the rain to where a beech tree lay on its side, its rain-darkened bark smooth and wet to the touch. The beech had fallen but it wasn’t dead; it was earth-rooted still, and its leaves under the water were green. She let her hands rest on it and felt the tree’s life. She wished she could speak to it but she didn’t have the words, and what would she say? Help me, perhaps. Help me to get home. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t what you should ask, and no help would come.
Wolves plashed under tree-shadow, distant and silent and indistinct as moths. One turned his face towards her, wolf eyes in the rain, unhurried, considering. She returned his gaze and he looked away.
Some while later she came on the wolf kill. It was an aurochs, huge and bull-like, lying on his side in a shallow pool of bloodied water, his rough fox-coloured hair matted with mud and rain-sodden. From a distance he looked drowned, but when she got close half of him was gone, a rain-washed hole of raw meat. Rain-glistening flies sipped at his eyes and crawled on the grey flopped rain-wet slab of his tongue. The noise of the rain beat in her ears like the rhythm of her own blood, too close and too ceaseless to attend to.
Sudden and uncalled, the killing moment closed its grip on her and she was in it. It was still there, still happening, and she was the happening of it, not outside and watching, not remembering, but being there. She was aurochs not hearing the splashing charge of wolf above the rain, not seeing wolf behind him, not smelling wolf through rain and water and the rich scent of rain on leaf. She felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision and the clamp of the tearing mouth at her throat. Heard with the aurochs’ own strange clarity the small snap deep inside her neck. Felt the wordless sad dismay of ruminant beast, the surge of fear and panicked stumble, the attempted burly sweep of a neck that didn’t respond–delivered nothing, moved nothing, connected with nothing. The loneliness of that.
She saw with hopeless aurochs eye the wolf that made the first charge turn and come splashing back through mud-swirled blood-swirled water. Then other wolves were on her back and she fell. Pain and the acceptance of pain. Aurochs could not rise and could not stand. Her leg wouldn’t go where she wanted it to go, her beautiful leg was lost. Aurochs grieved for it. Maroussia lived the last long moments when wolves ripped aurochs belly open and pulled the stuff there out and tore and swallowed bits from her beautiful twitching leg and slowly and softly minute after minute aurochs grew tired and far away and died.
And that wasn’t all.
She was the death of aurochs but she was also the hunting of the wolves. She was salt on the wolf’s tongue and the dark hot taste of blood. She was the sour breath of the aurochs’ dying and the glad teeth in the neck of it. She was the crunch of the killing bite and the thirsty suck and tearing swallow of warm sweet flesh.