Holding the boat in one hand, carefully, raising it high, she makes her way out into the beck to a dark wet flat of rock. Downstream of the rock the stream has dug a pool, dark brown, slower turning. She crouches and leans out to set the leaf boat on the water and let it go. It turns a while, uncertain, listing, testing the way, then settles and rights itself. The water carries it clear of the matted litter on the bank. It wobbles and turns, tiny under the trees, until it goes beyond where she can see.
It is not a message, not even a messenger, but an explorer: a voyager sent ahead where she can’t yet go.
All morning the ground climbs under her feet and the trees grow sparser, lower, more widely spaced, until in the middle of the day she crests a rise and finds herself on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. The grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spreads out at her feet. Solitary hunting birds circle below her on loose-stretched flaggy wings. A range of low hills on the further side rises into distance and mist. Without trees above her she can see the sky.
Smirrs of mist hang over thorn and bramble scrub, pale and cold, motionless and patient, like breath-clouds: the trees’ breathing. The finger-touch of damp air chill is on her face. Her hands are bunched in her pockets for warmth. She is walking on a thick mat of fallen leaves and wind-broken tips and twigs, bleached of colour. It crunches underfoot. There is winter coming in this part of the forest. Every edge and rib of leaf has a fine sawtooth edge of frost.
The body of the lynx lies on its side in a shallow pool as if it has drowned. Maroussia crouches beside it to look. The pool is dark and skinned with ice: forest litter is caught in it, and tiny bubble trails. The lynx is big like a large dog: sharp ears, a flattened cat-snout, ice-matted fur. She puts out her hand to touch its side. It feels cold and hard. She closes her eyes and reaches out with her mind, groping her way, and touches a faint distant hint of warmth. A last failing ember. A trace. Life, determined, hanging on.
She isn’t dead. She isn’t gone. Not yet.
Maroussia feels her way cautiously into the cold-damaged body. The sour smell of death is there: an obstacle, an uneasy darkness she has to push through. She feels the death seeping into her and pushes it back, trembling with revulsion.
‘Get out,’ she whispers aloud. Get away from me.
She is feeling her way inside the lynx, looking for the core of life, reaching out to it. Here, she is saying. I am here. Where are you?
The lynx barely flickers in response, so faintly that Maroussia doubts at first that it is there at all. But it stirs. She catches a weak sense of lynx life.
Who are you? she says to the lynx life. Who are you?
Leave me. I am death.
No. Not yet. Not quite.
I am tired and death. I am the stinker. The rotting one.
Not yet. Take something from me. I want to share.
It is too much and I am death.
I have life. Share some.
I am lynx and do not share.
The lynx is faint and far away. Drifting. Maroussia pushes some of her self into it, shoving, forcing like she did with the objects she made, but stronger. Harsher. Until it hurts to do it.
Who are you? she says again to the lynx.
Leave me alone.
Who are you? Remember who you are.
Maroussia pushes more of herself into the lynx, feeling the weakening of herself, the draining of certainty, the forest around her grow fainter. The sound of death is like a river, near. She will have to be careful. But the lynx is stronger now. Maroussia can see her, as if the lynx is at the back of a low dark cave. There is something behind her that she cannot quite see. A shadow moving fast across the floor.
Who are you? says Maroussia again.
Plastered fur and soaking hair.
More than that, says Maroussia.
Weakness and all-cold all-hungry and wet and full of dying cub. All strength gone.
More than that!
I am shadow-muzzle, dark-tooth, wind-dark and rough. Faintness and lick and dapple, and pushing, and bloody hair. I am mewler and swallower and want, the shrivelled one, the suckler. I do not need to share.
Take it then. Because you can. Maroussia pushes again. Who are you?
Meat-scent on the air at dusk. Salt on the tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood. I am the eater of meat. I do not share. I do not need to share.
No, you don’t.
I am shit in the wet grass. Milk on the cub’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the bitch’s lust for the dog I do not need. I am the abdomen swollen full as an egg, the pink bud suckler in the dark of the earth den.
Yes.
I am the runner hot among the trees. Noiseless climber. Sour breath in the tunnel’s darkness and teeth in the badger’s neck. The crunch of carrion and the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet blood-or-is-it-milk. Shrew flesh is distasteful, and so is the flesh of bears. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I do not share!
No. But you can take.
I am the lynx in the rain with the weight of cubs in my belly. Cub-warm sleep under the snow, ice-bearded. I am life and I am called death. I am the answer to my own question, and if you look for me, I am the finding. Leave me alone now. I am not dying but I want to sleep.
Eat something first. Then I will carry you and you can sleep.
My teeth are sharp. My claws are sharp.
Don’t bite me.
I do not share.
OK.
Maroussia sits on the ground and lifts the animal into her lap. Holds a piece of pigeon to its mouth. Lynx glares at her but takes it and chews at it warily. Resentfully. Maroussia sees the needle-sharp whiteness of teeth.
The Pollandore inside her gives an alien grin. The growing human child in her belly stirs and kicks. She is alone and very far from home.
8
The place Elena Cornelius took Lom to was a wide field of broken concrete and brick heaps and hummocks of dark weed-growth. It rolled to a distant skyline of ragged scorched facades.
Such landscapes were everywhere in Mirgorod. Lom had seen other war-broken towns and cities that were all burned-out building shells and ruined streets–grids of empty windows showing gaps of sky behind–but during the siege of Mirgorod the defenders had pulled the ruins down and levelled the wreckage, creating mile after mile of impassable rubble mazy with pits and craters, foxholes and rat runs and sniper cover, all sown with landmines, tripwire grenades, vicious nooses, shrapnel-bomb snares and caltrops. Trucks and half-tracks were useless. Battle tanks beached themselves. The enemy had to clamber across every square yard on foot, clearing cellar by cellar with flame-throwers and gas. Artillery and airborne bombardment could not destroy what was already blasted flat.