Lom nodded. ‘Off and on,’ he said. ‘A little.’
‘What’s it like there?’ said the captain of engineers.
Lom gave a slight shrug. ‘Trees,’ he said. ‘Trees and rivers and lakes. Valleys and hills. Miles and miles of nothing much.’ He gestured towards the fleet of machinery, the barges and the armed boats. ‘You going in there? With that?’
‘That’s right. No secret about that.’
‘It’s been done before. Always got nowhere.’
Once a generation the Vlast mounted incursions against the forest. It was one of the futile repeating rhythmic spasms of the Vlast’s history. Patrols wandered, ineffectual and lost, doing a bit of damage till they got bogged down in mud and thorn and disease. Lom’s own parents had lived in the forest edge. Soldiers came and killed them and razed their village to the ground. The soldiers had carried him out, an orphaned infant, and left him at the Institute in Podchornok. Lom remembered nothing of that forest time and nothing of his parents: presumably they were buried in there somewhere. Bones under the leaf mulch.
So it was to happen again.
‘It’ll be different this time,’ the captain said. ‘This time we’re going to do it right. We’re going in in numbers, whole divisions on a broad front, with heavy machinery and air support. Three salients along the three big rivers. What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re going to cut and burn all the way through to the other side. We’re going to break the myth of the forest once and for all.’
‘Guess you people need something to do,’ said Lom, ‘now the war’s over.’
‘I was hoping you might give me some advice. The benefit of experience? On-the-ground knowledge? Let me buy you dinner and pick your brains.’
‘Not a chance,’ said Lom. ‘Not a chance in a million fucking years.’
4
Lom went back to the mailboat moored at the jetty but Shenkov wasn’t there; he’d gone into Loess for supplies. Lom settled himself on the bench in the stern to wait. There was twilight and silence on the air, and a faint smell of woodsmoke. The lapping of the river’s edge against the side of the boat. Tiny white moths coming to the newly lit lamp. Not many, not yet, just a few: there was still some life in the western sky. Time was quiet and hardly moving: like the broad deserted river in gathering darkness, all islands and further shores hidden, it seemed to rest and breathe. Huge. Secretive. Watchful.
Maroussia came to him then in the cool of the evening.
Lom knew she was there before she spoke. Before he turned to see her, he felt her as a presence emerging. Resolving out of the periphery of things. She was watching him from out of the silence and the twilight and the shoals of time.
He turned his head to look at her full on, thinking as he did so that she might not be there if he did that. But she was still there, except it was impossible to say exactly where she was. She was on the jetty and on the deck of the boat and on the river shore and on the water. She was very precisely somewhere, but the frame of reference that located her was not the same as his. She was solid and real but she was made from air and shadow, woven out of the river twilight. Not flimsy, but he could not have reached out and touched her; the space between them wasn’t crossable. He didn’t try. For a long time he looked at her. Studying. She was different: older, wiser, changed and strange. She saw things now that he didn’t see.
Lom found he was waiting for her to speak first, but she didn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was possible to speak, anyway, if sounds and words could cross the space that separated them. If language itself could survive that crossing.
‘I went into the forest,’ he said at last. ‘I was looking for you.’
There was a moment when he thought she hadn’t heard. He wasn’t even sure he’d actually said anything aloud. And then she spoke. It was her voice, the shock of her real voice speaking. He thought he’d kept the memory of it but he had not. The appalling uselessness of memory, how drab and inadequate it was. The sudden raw and open pain of six lost silent years
‘I know,’ she said.
Lom felt an overwhelming sudden surge of anger and despair. It ambushed him from within. He thought he’d moved beyond all that, he thought he’d acclimatised to loss and living on, but it was all there, unchanged since the day he’d lost her. Since she’d gone where he couldn’t follow.
‘You knew?’ he said. ‘But you didn’t…’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He pushed the anger aside. That hurting was old business, to be dealt with another time, not now.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘you’re here. You came back.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay here. I can’t come back. It isn’t possible. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.’
‘But—’
‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘I need you to listen. I need you to understand. What I’m doing now, somewhere else, not here, is I’m holding the forest closed. The angel is shut in and the intermixing of the worlds is separating out. Time runs at different speeds. My time will become, in your world, small fragments of stillness, areas where there is no time at all. I can’t come back; I can’t come home.’ She stared at him, dark eyes wide and urgent in the twilight. They were made of the twilight and the air of the river breathing. ‘Can you understand that? Can you?’
‘How long?’ he said. ‘How long have we got?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s no measure. How can I say—’
‘I mean today. Now. How much time have we got now?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Today? I don’t know. I shouldn’t have come here at all. Even being here makes a hollowing, a gap for the angel to come through. If that starts to happen, I must go.’
‘I could come to where you are,’ said Lom. ‘You could show me how.’
‘No.’
‘I would come gladly. I would want that. There’s nothing here for me now.’
She looked away sadly in the gathering river darkness.
‘It’s not possible. The barrier mustn’t be broken.’ She paused. ‘I don’t have a choice. I didn’t choose this. But if I had a choice, I would choose it. You have to understand that. If I could choose this, I would.’
‘Then why come at all?’ he said. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You did something for me once, and I’ve come to ask you again. I’m sorry. You should be left in peace, but I’m not doing that.’
‘What do you need?’ said Lom. ‘I will do it if I can. Of course I will.’
‘This world is going too fast and too hard. The future here is… I see it, I see glimpses sometimes, and it’s too… The fracture is deeper and wider and harder… It was unexpected… It could bring everything down—’
Sealed inside endless forest, Archangel grinds slowly on. Look away from him now; he is nothing. He feels the desolation of despair and self-disgust. Cut off from history, his futures slow and fade. Time is failing him. He cannot breathe. He is weak. He is dying. Once he was Archangel, strongest of the strong, quickest of the quick, most powerful of soldiers, quintessence of generalissimos, Archangel nonpareil, but those memories burn and torture him. So does the encroaching of the slow grass.
Archangel probes the boundaries of his enclosure, but they are blank to him, utterly without information and closing in. Archangel hurls himself against the borders ceaselessly, searching for a chink, a crevice, the faintest possible thinning in the imperceptible wall, but all the time the roots of forest trees dig deeper, the grass grows back, and every tiny root-hair is a burning agony to him. He is succumbing to frost and the erosion of rain and wind. They will wear him away to insensate dust.