‘They’ve come here before,’ said the fetch of the father, the green-eyed man of muscle, the rich deep voice. ‘And always we have always driven them out. It’s not even hard.’
‘But nothing is the same now, because of what you did. The Pollandore is gone from that world. There is no balance there, and the Vlast will come in numbers, they will drive and burn and burn and drive. There is a man that leads them. Josef Kantor, called Rizhin now. I know something of him and so do you. You know how far he’s gone already and how fast he moves.’ The human woman, dark-eyed Maroussia, paused and looked at all of them, not just the father. ‘And we all know what he is throwing into the sky. We have all heard the hot dry thundercrash and smelled the burning stink of dead angel flesh cutting open the sky. We know the force and speed of what is passing overhead and looking down on us. It makes the forest small. And that’s just the beginning of his ambition. How can you say this doesn’t concern us?’
The fetch of the father moved to speak, but Maroussia dark-eyed paradigm shifter, the unexpected outcome and maker of change, held up her hand to stop him.
‘You must listen to me,’ she said, ‘or why did you do this? Why make me as I am and bring me here–which I did not ask for, which I did not choose–why do this and not listen now to what I say?’
The fetch fell into silence. Maroussia realised that the father, wherever he was, had finished his testing of her.
The Seer Witch of Bones said nothing. It didn’t matter to her. Whatever came there would be a fullness of death at the house of bleached skulls.
But Maroussia felt the pressure of Fraiethe’s attentive examination. Fraiethe knew everything: the heaviness and smell of her wet muddy clothes, the hot sweat of her palms and the beating of her heart, her anger at the trickiness of the father, that she was lonely and didn’t like the forest and wanted to go home. It was Maroussia not Fraiethe who was naked on the White Slope.
‘What would you have us do?’ said Fraiethe.
The human woman dark-eyed Maroussia Shaumian opened her mouth to answer Fraiethe. She felt again the dark earth roots and the watchful sentience of rain. A wind stirred the leaves and moved across her face.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I would have you do nothing. There is another way. ‘
3
Mailboat Number 437 chugged down the mighty mile-broad River Yannis. Vissarion Lom sat in the stern and watched the low wooded hills roll by. The river was slow and quiet here, taking a wide turn to the south, its green waters a highway for tugs, ferries, excursion boats and barges riding low under the weight of ore and grain and oil. Mailboat Number 437 was a dogged striver. The vibration of her engine defined Lom’s world: the gentle rhythmic shocks, the slap of small waves against her iron skin. It was a world that smelled of diesel engine and pine planking and rust. Wet rope and mailbags.
Sora Shenkov, master and sole crew of Mailboat Number 437, was a big man with hard brown hands and eyes the colour of ice and sky. He wasn’t a talker. Every day Lom sat in the stern and watched him work, unless it rained: then he would go below and watch the river through the specks and smears of his little cabin window. And every day Shenkov’s boat made slow headway: her engine churned the screw, and her forward speed through the water exceeded the south-west slide of the Yannis by a certain number of miles, and the marginal gain accumulated. Not that Lom was keeping count. He’d earned some money and taken passage with Shenkov. He’d paid his way. This boat-world time belonged to him. Lom had never owned a time before, but he owned this one and did not wish for it to hurry to an end.
The last six years had changed him. He had travelled far, keeping himself to himself, taking rough work where he could find it, never staying in one place long. His wanderings had taken him into the forest margins, and he had found the endless forest simply that: an endlessness of trees. There were sounds in the night and pathways that went nowhere. Above all, he had not found Maroussia. Of her no trace at all. When he came out of the forest again, months had passed by, seasons come and gone, and he had imagined much but found nothing. He was heavily bearded now, muscular, wiry and weather-darkened, with shaggy wheat-coloured hair. The hole in the front of his skull was nothing but a faint thumbprint visible in certain slanting lights, sun-browned and almost healed. And slowly, slowly, day by day, he was being carried down the river in Shenkov’s boat. He enjoyed these days, which required no decisions, required nothing from him at all. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. His adventure was over and time had moved on. Once giants rode the timber rafts west on the Yannis, but now it was women without husbands or sons, and it seemed on the wide quiet river that it had always been so.
Swinging round a headland, the boat came up on two huge timber rafts sliding side by side downstream on the current. Rather than waste time and fuel going out into the middle passage, Shenkov, in the little wheelhouse, gunned the engine and nosed skilfully though the channel between them. Lom reached instinctively for the boathook, not that it would help if the rafts chose to drift together and crush the boat between them. Each raft was as big as an island and carried a cluster of plank huts with smoking chimneys and fenced paddocks for goats and chickens. The logs were red pine, and though they were boughs and branches only, never the trunks, they were thicker and heavier by far than whole trunks of beech or oak. As the boat eased through the gap, a woman was milking a cow and speaking in a soft easy voice to her neighbour on the next raft, who was hanging out clothes to dry. Shenkov gave the women a courteous nod. The air was thick with the resinous red pine scent.
It was early evening when Mailboat Number 437 came to the timber station at Loess. Shenkov grunted in surprise. The wharves were crowded with military vessels: cruisers in brown river camouflage, crane-mounted barges loaded with stacked pontoons, a requisitioned paddle-wheel ferry painted stem to stern and smokestack in dull sky grey.
Shenkov managed to find a berth in front of the excise house, tucked in under the looming steel hull of a cruiser, and began to unload mailbags onto the steps. Lom left him to his work and wandered off to have a look at what the troops were doing. Sitting on a bollard at the railhead, he watched a captain of engineers supervising the unloading of vehicles from an armoured train. The engine noise was deafening. The stink of diesel fumes. Heavy grinding tracks churned the mud, splintered the boardwalks and cracked the paving. There were half-tracks and troop carriers, but also tractors and cherry pickers and things Lom hadn’t seen before that looked like immense hooks and chainsaws mounted on caterpillar tracks. The sapper platoon was marshalling them off the train and onto waiting barges whose decks were already stacked high with oil drums. The sappers struggled with three Dankov D-9 battle tanks, each towing what looked like a hefty spare fuel tank. Instead of a gun, the tank turrets were equipped with a short and vicious-looking nozzle. Lom knew what they were. He’d seen flame-thrower tanks in newsreels. Seen spouts of burning kerosene ignite buildings and flush trenches. Seen the enemy run. Screaming. Burning.
The captain of engineers saw him watching and came across. Took in Lom’s weathered face and thick untidy crop of beard, his mud-coloured clothes and boots.
‘You came down the river with the mailboat,’ he said. ‘Were you ever in the forest?’ He was a decent-looking man, efficient and practical, more engineer than soldier. It was a question not a challenge.