In the light of these additional considerations it was clear to Bezuhov’s superiors that the Avril case required sensitive and flexible treatment. Embarrassment must be avoided. Their own careers were at stake, and surely Rizhin himself would prefer to know nothing of this. A judicial trial followed by a period in a labour camp was out of the question.
‘Special handling, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘In the circumstances? Don’t you think?’
Gholl accepted the Director’s judgement was sound, as ever.
Special handling. Seven grams of lead in the back of the head and the body dumped in the Cleansing Lake to dissolve.
‘But retain a sample of body tissue, Gholl,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Mikkala Avril had promising qualities. Death is temporary and she will be recalled, not once but millions of times, to walk for ever in perfected forms under countless distant suns.’
It was a comforting thought. The Director was not a harsh man. He looked to the radiance of humankind to come, and in dark days he lived by that.
‘You understand, Director, I will have to report back to Colonel Rond?’ said Gholl. ‘I must do that.’
‘Naturally.’
‘You need not be concerned; the colonel is always discreet.’
7
The 28th Division (Engineers), guided by Lieutenant Arkady Rett, arrives at the edge of the living angel’s cold-burning anti-life skirt where the trees are dying. They build walkways across the cold smouldering embers, the flimsy crusts of ground. The red hill advances and they retreat before it. Observations suggest it is picking up speed.
The commanding officer wrestles with many practical problems. Prolonged contact with the hill’s margin is troublesome. The metal of his machines grows weak and brittle, and his people fall sick. Their limbs and faces and bodies acquire strange patches of smooth darkness. Their extremities grow numb, whiten and begin to crumble. An hour a day is the safe limit, all they can stand. But the commanding officer makes progress. Now he has lines of supply, he puts the sappers on rotation. The excavation gear arrives. They reach the lower slopes and begin to dig.
Corporal Fallun, who refused an order and abandoned his comrades, was never seen again. Rett didn’t find him on his way back, and Fallun is assumed to be lost in the woods. The commanding officer classifies him a deserter and thinks of him no more. Fallun’s comrade, Private Soldier Senkov, who returned with Rett but never regained his senses and babbles relentlessly, never sleeping, is sent back out of the forest on a returning barge. He did his duty and the commanding officer recommends a sanatorium cure.
A piece of Archangel rides Senkov’s mind down the river and out of the trees. Quiet and surreptitious, all hugger-mugger, he slips the green wall and squeezes a tenuous blurt of himself through the gap into Rizhin world.
It is the merest thread of Archangel. A wisp of sentience. But he is through. He inhales deeply and shouts defiance at the sky.
This–this!–this is what he needs!
The impossible slow forest behind the green wall was killing him. There was no time there. There was no history.
But he finds Rizhin world different now. Hard. Quick. Lonely. There is no place for living angels here: the whole world stinks of barrenness and death.
Desperately he scrabbles for purchase and purpose.
Archangel! Archangel! I am beautiful and I am here!
And a tiny distant voice answers from the west. A shred of shining darkness from the space between the stars.
Chapter Nine
1
Vasilisk the bodyguard, six foot three and deeply tanned and sleek with sun oil, naked but for sky-blue trunks, runs five springing steps on his toes, takes to the air and executes a long perfect dive. Enters the pool with barely a splash, swims twelve easy lengths, hauls out in a single smooth movement and lies stretched out on a towel–blue towel laid on perfect white poolside tiles–in the warmth of the morning sun.
He lies on his back with eyes half closed, arms spread wide to embrace the sun, the beautiful killer at rest, empty of thought, breathing the scent of almonds. His slicked yellow hair glistens, his firm honey-brown stomach is beaded with water jewels. Through damp eyelashes he watches blue shimmer.
The pool is filled with water and sunlight. The surface glitters.
A warm breeze stirs the fine pale hairs on his chest.
A dragonfly, lapis lazuli, fat as his little finger, flashes out of the rose bushes, disturbed by a quiet footfall in the garden. The chink of glass against glass.
A housemaid with a tray of iced tea.
Vasilisk the bodyguard, blond and beautiful, half asleep, listens without intent to the bees among the mulberries, the shriek and laughter from the tennis court, the pock pock pock of the ball, the sway of trees on the hillside that sounds like the sea.
The sky overhead is a bowl of blue. Brushstroke cloud-wisps. Vasilisk closes his eyes and watches the drift of warm orange light across translucent skin.
Far away down the mountain a car drops a gear, engine racing to attack a steep climb. The sound is tiny with distance.
2
Lukasz Kistler’s sleek ZorKi Zavod limousine took the corniche along the Karima coast, purring effortlessly, a steady sixty-five, glinting under the southern sun. Two and a half tons of engine power, bulging wheel arches, running boards, mirrors and fins.
The road was a dynamited ledge, hairpins and sudden precarious fallings-away. The mountains of the Silion Massif plunged to the edge of the sea: bare cliffs and steep slopes of black cypress; sun-sharpened jagged ridges and crisp high peaks, snow-capped even in summer. And always to the right and hundreds of feet below, the white strip of sand and the sea itself, discovered by glittering light, a tranquil and brilliant horizonless blue.
This was the favoured country: sun-warmed Karima rich in climate and soil, with its own little private ocean. Karima of the islands and the hidden valleys. Karima of the flowering trees, hibiscus, tea plantations, vineyards and orange groves. Karima of the white-columned sanatoriums in the wooded hills and on the curving quiet of the bays. Rest-cure Karima. Union-funded convalescent homes for the paragons of sacrificial labour in olive and lemon and watermelon country: the bed-ridden propped under rugs in their windows to watch the sea, the ambulatory at backgammon and skat under striped awnings. Secluded private hotels with balcony restaurants (LIST ROUBLES ONLY ACCEPTED). Resort Karima. Twenty-mile coastal ribbons of pastel-blue concrete dormitories for the ten-day family vacations of seven-day-week leading workers. War never touched Karima. The Archipelago never got there, neither bombers nor troops nor cruisers nor submarines. Civil war was fought elsewhere. Karima was never hurt at all.
The municipal authorities of Karima made the most of the annual Dacha Summer of the Central Committee. The road to Rizhin’s Krasnaya Polyana, Dacha Number Nine at Zusovo, was remade fresh each year: the velvet shimmer of asphalt, the gleam of undented steel crash barriers.