And that wasn’t all.
She was the life and growth and connected watchfulness of every tree and every leaf and every small creature and every water drop in the pool and the rain, its history and the possibilities of what was to come.
And that wasn’t all.
Nothing was all, because there was no end to the fullness of what she could perceive. Because this was what she had become, this overwhelming surprise of plenitude.
She was Maroussia Shaumian still–Maroussia Shaumian, who had made her choice in Mirgorod and followed her path to its end in Novaya Zima–but she had been inside the Pollandore when the temporary star ignited around it. The Pollandore had imploded and exploded and changed and brought her here, and now it was gone. It was inside her now, if it was anywhere: inside her, new and strong, volatile and unaccommodated. The Pollandore and what she could be ran ahead of her and overwhelmed her until she hardly knew what was her and what was not, because sometimes she was everything.
Time wasn’t a river; time was the sea, layered and fluid and malleable, what was past and what was possibly to come all intricately infolded and vividly present inside the rippling horizons of now. Nothing of Maroussia was lost, but she was more. She was changed and become this. All this.
The seeing faded. (She called it seeing though it wasn’t that, but there was no word.) Seeing always came uncalled and surprised her. She suspected she could learn to call it up at will, but she was afraid of learning that. Once she went through that door, there would be no coming back, and she hadn’t chosen that and did not want it. She hadn’t chosen anything of this, not this, but here it was.
She was as lonely in the rain as the dying aurochs and as far from home.
Time to move on.
The meeting place was not far, and they would be waiting.
2
There were three of them at the place on the White Slope, Fraiethe and the father and the Seer Witch of Bones, and Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth.
The father spoke, as he always did, the phrases of beginning.
‘And so we are met again under wind and rain and trees and the rise and set of sun. We are the forest; the forest is everywhere and everything, and the forest is us.’
‘No,’ said Maroussia. ‘We are something but not everything.’
The father made a barely perceptible movement of his head, acknowledging the justice of that, but frowned and said nothing. An antagonist then, Maroussia thought. Well, there it is then. So it is.
The father was not actually present at the meeting on the White Slope. After the first time he had not come in bones and blood and flesh but as a fetch, a spirit skin, while he kept himself apart and somewhere else. The fetch had come as a man with woodcutter’s hands and forearms, hair falling glossy-thick across his brow and shoulders. A rank aroma, and burning green eyes that watched her openly. Maroussia thought the fetch crude and suspected a deliberate slight aimed at her. This is the form, it said, that seduced your mother and made her sweat and cry in a timberman’s hut in the woods. This the form that fathered you. Like some too?
But Maroussia didn’t believe it. Whatever artifice seduced her mother at Vig would have been more subtle than that, more complex and thoughtful and elegant and patient and kind, to console her for the wasteland of her marriage to Josef Kantor and draw her out of it into the shadow under the trees. It was imagination that seduced her mother, not this unwashed goat. The goat was provocation only.
Then she realised that the father knew this, and knew that she knew it, and in fact the burly woodcutter was not a provocation but a complicitous tease. A wink. A father–daughter joke to be shared.
She didn’t resent the father for fathering her. Not any more. When she was growing up in Mirgorod she’d lived with the pain of the consequences of that, but now and here she understood. For the father there was a pattern to be woven, things to be done, opportunities to be taken and prices paid. What he had done to her mother and her wasn’t personal. It wasn’t even human.
She turned away from him to the other two.
Fraiethe had come in the body. She was really there. Though Fraiethe had guided the paluba that reached Maroussia in Mirgorod, that spoke to her and half-lied and half-bewitched and set her on the course that brought her here; though Fraiethe was part of the deception–if deception was what it had been (which it was not, not a deception but an opening-up)–Fraiethe did not like spirit skins. She stood now under the trees, shadow-dappled like a deer, rain-wet and naked except for the reddish-brown fur, water-sleek and water-beaded, that covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts. Fur traced the muscular valley of her spine, and a perfume of musk and warmth was in the air around her. Her skin was flushed because of the rain and cold, and her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them.
The third, the Seer Witch of Bones, was neither body nor fetch, but something else, a shadow presence, a sour darkness, the eater of death, the mouth that opened with a smile of dark leaves and thorns, rooted in neither animal nor tree but of the crossing places, muddy and terrible.
And Maroussia Shaumian, who had sewn uniforms at Vanko’s factory and pulled Vissarion Lom out of the River Mir and lain beside him in the bottom of a boat to bring him back with the warmth of her body; Maroussia Shaumian, who had sliced a man’s head off with a flensing blade and crossed the snow of Novaya Zima to the Pollandore; Maroussia Shaumian, who forgot none of that but remembered everything: Maroussia Shaumian was the fourth at the White Slope, and she claimed an equal place.
The three of them had drawn her to the Pollandore in the moment of its destruction. Because of them she had been there at that moment and absorbed it–been absorbed into it–and become what she was. Because of them the Pollandore was gone from the world beyond the forest and she was here. It was their stratagem against the living angel in the forest. The forest borders were sealed and she, Maroussia, by her presence here, was what held them so. But the three had no sense of the consequences of what they’d done, none at all; only Maroussia had that, and even to her it came only in broken glimpses, fragments that were dark and bleak and hopeless.
She didn’t know if there was a better thing they could have done than what they did, but if there was, they hadn’t done it.
The fetch of the father spoke again, the man with green eyes: ‘The forest is safe. The living angel is contained and we will deal with him. Already he is growing weak and slow. He subsides and grows mute. His ways out of the forest are closed and he no longer draws strength from the places beyond us. The trees are growing back. He has no influence beyond the forest, and here we are stronger than he is.’
The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, answered him, and the voice she spoke with was her voice but not only hers but the Pollandore’s also, and sounded strange to her ears.
‘Yet the angel lives!’ she said. ‘Whatever you say, it is not yet destroyed, and it is not clear that we alone have the strength to do it. And we must look to the world beyond the forest. The years there are moving hard and fast, the Vlast is resurgent, the last slow places are closing, the giants and rusalkas are driven out.’
‘What happens beyond the edge of the trees doesn’t concern us,’ the fetch of the father said. ‘It is outside. That’s what outside means.’
‘The world beyond the forest is growing steel fists,’ said Maroussia. ‘There’s no balance there, no breathing of other air. They will not rest content with what they have; they want it all. They will come here, they’ll cut and burn. There are winds the forest cannot stand against. I’ve seen—’