She is walking again. Walking.
When it rains the rain clags the mud and makes the forest hiss and whisper. Mud clumps and drags and weighs on her boots. Every time it rains the rain gets colder and there are fewer leaves on the trees. Winter seems coming too soon, but she has boots and blankets and she will be OK.
Towards the end of the day she finds a dry rise of ground and a heavy oak tree, half fallen, its root mass torn from the earth. With her axe she hacks off some branches, props them against the fallen tree’s side and weaves thinner stem-lengths through to make strong, shallow, sloping walls. When the walls are solid she heaps leaves on top, pile on pile, until it swells, a natural earthy rising of the ground, skinned with leaves an arm’s length deep, at one end a low dark mouth. She rests another layer of branches across the outside, for the weight of them, to hold the leaves in place, and crawls inside, dragging more leaves after her, the driest she has found. Spreads them deep across the ground and packs the far end until she has a narrow earth-smelling tunnel scarcely wide enough to lie in. With more leaf-heavy branches she makes a door to pull in place behind her.
She works quickly but the light is failing.
The forest is too dark to see beyond the fire circle but she feels its presence. Trees rolling without end or limit, their roots under the earth all touching and knotting together, root whispering to root as branch brushes against branch. Connected, watchful, they merge and make one thing, the largest animal in the world. Night-waking. Watchful. It knows she is there.
There are stars in the gaps between branches, and a deeper purple-green shining blackness.
Maroussia crawls into the enclosing darkness of her leaf-and-branch cocoon. Her hiding, her little burial, her dream time, her forgetting. Deep beneath her in the earth the fine tangled roots sift and slide and touch each other. They whisper.
The shelter has its own quiet whispering too, a barely audible shifting and settling, the outer layer flickering and feathering in the night breeze. She hears the rustle and tick of small things–woodlice, spiders, mice–burrowing in the canopy. The shelter absorbs her, mothering, nurturing. Hiding her away.
The blanket is wrapped tight around her, rough against her face. Knees pulled up tight against her belly, feet pressed against the solid weight of her pack, head pillowed on her arms, she breathes with her mouth, shallow, slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of her own breath. The smell of leaves and earth and moss. Woodsmoke in the blanket and in her clothes and hair.
This isn’t right. This isn’t what I meant at all.
She is a rim of troubled consciousness encircling immensities without and immensities within. Sustaining it hurts. Her fragility and capacity for fracture terrify her.
A hand of fear in the darkness covers her face so it is hard to breathe. Fear grasps her heart inside her chest and squeezes out breath. Everything inside her is tight. Tight like wires. The trees she cannot see in the night prickle with the same fear. She wants to dig herself into the ground and be buried.
One break and I could lose myself for ever.
The Pollandore speaks its presence softly all the time, a voice inside her that sounds like it is outside, whispering dangerous promises. It swells and grows. The spaces inside her are as measureless as the forest and less human. Maroussia-Pollandore holds the green wall shut: the forest is withdrawn from its borders and does not leak. It holds no traffic with the human world, not any more. She feels the human world grow hard and quick and dying, and she is the engine of that. She is the separation and the holding back. She is the border patrol.
I wanted the opposite of this. I chose to open the world not close it. This is not me. My name is Maroussia Shaumian. When the angel in the forest is gone, then I can go home.
All she has to do is keep on walking. Keep it clear and simple, that is all she has to do. Be hard and strong and clever, and somehow she will keep the darkness from her. Somehow she will do that.
Trees in the forest walk, but slowly, year by year. Inching.
She will outrun them yet.
9
Lom had never heard birdsong in Mirgorod before. Never smelled new-cut lawn.
The lindens on the street where Pavel Ilich Antimos lived must have been planted fully grown. The fragrant asphalt, the raked gravel, the clipped laurels, they were all fresh out of the box, but those late-afternoon-sun-kindled shade-breathing linden trees would have taken fifty years to reach the height they were. They cast a kind of quiet privacy over Voronetsin Heights that made you feel like an intruder, just being in the road.
Atom House, the residence of Pavel Ilich Antimos, was a low-rise apartment building in walled grounds. A pleasant low-key fortress. The gate in the wall was wrought iron, painted to a gleam like broken coal. Lom watched the block for fifteen minutes. He saw domestic staff and deliveries checking in and out; wives coming back from shopping; children being driven home from school. The gate opened for them and closed behind them, and no way was the woman in the kiosk going to open that gate, not unless she knew you or you had an appointment and you were in her book.
Thus lived the List–the managers, the lawyers, the officials, the financiers and architects and engineers of Rizhin Land–spending different currency in different stores.
Lom went round the corner out of sight of the kiosk, jumped to hook his fingers on the coping ridge, hauled himself up till he could scrabble over the wall and dropped on the other side. The soft earth of a rose bed. A quiet formal garden in the slanting sun.
Pavel’s apartment was at the end of a short corridor, top floor back. It felt like an afterthought in the building. Single occupancy, one of the less expensive units, not a family home. Lom hoped so. He didn’t want to find Pavel’s wife at home. Or children. That would complicate things. The only other door in the passage was a cleaner’s storeroom. Lom checked it. Empty. Smelling of bleach and musty mops.
He knocked on Pavel’s door, brisk and businesslike. The door felt solid. His knocking sounded dull and didn’t carry. There was no bell push.
He knocked again.
‘Hi!’ he called. ‘Residence Antimos! Is someone at home? Open please!’
Nobody came. No matter how long he stared at it, the door stayed shut. It had a solid Levitan deadbolt lock, heavier than was normal for domestic use and fitted upside down to make it more awkward to pick.
Lom had spent his time productively since leaving the ProVlastKult library that morning. From a dusty shop by the Wieland Station (broken clocks and watches on velvet pads in the window) he’d bought a basic lock-picking kit: a C-rake, a tension wrench and short hook, all wrapped in a convenient canvas roll. He’d also acquired a neat small black rubber cosh in a silk sheath, with a plaited cord lanyard. The cosh was expensive but the proprietor sewed an extra pocket for him in his jacket sleeve. No extra cost. You had to know how to ask.
He popped the Levitan deadbolt without too much trouble. The door was solid hardwood a couple of inches thick. It took weight to open it.
‘Hi,’ he called again quietly. ‘Pavel, old friend? Are you there?’
The place was cool and dim and still and obviously empty. Lom stepped inside, pulled the door shut behind him and relocked it. On the inside it was fitted with two heavy bolts and a chain. Lom looked around. It was a single man’s apartment: kitchen, bathroom, sitting room with one armchair and a desk, a bedroom with a single bed. Pavel didn’t get many visitors obviously. Didn’t seem to spend much time at home at all.