I feel it, said Lom. Yes.
Kamilova, bright-eyed and alive, raised the Heron’s brown sail, and the little wooden boat took them up the river and into the trees.
As they travelled, Kamilova kept up a stream of quiet talk, more talk than Lom had ever known from her before. She talked about the people who went to live among the trees.
‘The forest changes you,’ she said. ‘It brings out who you are. The breath of the trees. Giants grow larger in the woods.’ She talked about hollowers, hedge dwellers who dug shelters in the earth. ‘They don’t hibernate, not exactly, but their body temperature falls and they’re dormant for days on end. They sleep out the worst of winter underground like bears do.’
She told him the names of clans. Lyutizhians meant people like wolves, and Kassubians were the shaggy coats.
‘I saw things once that someone said were bear-made. They were rough things, strange and wild and inhuman, for paws and muzzles and teeth to use, not dextrous fingers. But it was just a rumour. Humanish forest peoples keep to the outwoods, but there’s always further in and further back.
‘The forest is a bright and perfumed place,’ she said, ‘with dark and tangled corners. It is not defined. It includes everything and it is not safe. The forest talks to you, but you have to do the work; you have to bring yourself to the task. Communication is indirect and you must pay attention. You have to dig. Dig!’
Lom hardly listened to her. The river was passing through a gap between steep slopes, almost cliffs, under a low grey sky, and there was the possibility of cold rain in the air. The troubling ache in his head that had been with him all morning, the agitated throbbing of the old wound in his forehead, was fading. His sense of time passing had lurched, dizzying and uncomfortable, but it was settled now. Time present touched the endless eternal forest like sunlight grazing the outer leaves of a huge tangled tree or the surface of a very deep and very dark lake. The forest was all Kamilova’s stories and more, but it was also a breathing lung made of real trees and rock and earth and water. He felt the aliveness of it and the way it went on for ever.
Doors in the air were opening. The skin of the water glimmered and thrilled. Promising reflections, it almost delivered. The breath of the forest crackled. It bristled. There were black trees. There were grey and yellow trees. He was watching a single ash tree at the river margin and it was watching him back, being alive.
Lom was opening up and growing stronger. He was entering a place where new kinds of thing were possible, different stories with different outcomes. He was coming home. He reached up into the low roof of cloud and opened a gap to let a spill of warmth through that made the river glitter. A moment of distraction, lost in sunlight: there were many small things among the trees–animals and birds–and they were all alive and he could feel that.
Then he became aware that Kamilova had stopped talking and was watching him. Intently. Curiously. A little bit afraid.
From the slopes of the hills and among the trees they are watched. The small boat edging upriver against the stream; the woman whose arms are painted with fading magic; the man spilling bright beautiful scented trails from the hole in his skull, tainted with dark shades of angeclass="underline" all this is seen and known by watchers with brown whiteless eyes, and by things with no eyes that also see. Word passes through roots and leaves and air. Word reaches Fraiethe and the Seer Witch of Bones. Word reaches Maroussia Shaumian Pollandore.
He is coming. He is here.
Chapter Twelve
Nothing that lives and dies ever has a beginning, nor does it ever end in death and annihilation. There is only a mixing, followed by the separating-out of what was mixed: and these mixings and unmixings are what people call beginnings and ends.
1
Kantor-in-mudjhik runs through the endless forest, tireless, exultant and strong. The continental Vlast is behind him. He has run it, ocean to trees, without a pause.
Under the trees he has heard the voice of Archangel talking and they have sealed the deal.
I will give you body after body, says Archangel, a chain of human bodies without end, vessels for my champion son. Worthy and valid strength of my strength, bring me out of the forest and for you I will break down the doors and shatter the doorposts. For you I will raise up the dead to consume the living. I will give you armies without end, and you will carry me, speaking my voice, across the stars.
Josef Kantor in his mudjhik body likes the sound of that.
I am nobody’s son, he says, but I will be a brother.
It’s not enough, but it will do for now.
2
Into the forest old beyond guessing, the first place, primordial, primeval, primal, the unremembered home, fair winds carried them day after day, deeper and deeper, up the river against the stream. Trees stood silently, lining the banks, fading away in every direction into twilight and indistinction.
‘How will we find her?’ said Kamilova. ‘I mean Maroussia?’
‘We keep going in,’ said Lom, ‘and she will come to us.’
Things that find their way into the forest grow and change. They grow taller, shorter, thinner, fatter; they change colour. Each thing grows out into its true shape and becomes more itself. A dog may become more wolf-like. It unfolds like a fern.
In the forest you can’t see far or travel fast; detachment and analysis fail; you can’t see the wood for the trees. Aurochsen and wisent, woolly rhinoceros, great elk and giant sloth browse among the leaves, and the corpses of those killed in great and terrible massacres are buried under shallow earth. The labyrinth of trees is filled with travelling shadows and all the monsters of the mind. In the forest, things long thought dead may be alive and the hunter become the prey. Green pools glimmer in the shade. More is possible here.
It is hard enough to get in, but leaving, that is the labour, that is the task. The forest is receding, back into its own world. Ancient silences are withdrawing like the tide.
Nights they slept out under blankets on the deck boards of the Heron. Kamilova cut thorns to make a brake on the bank against wolves and left a slow fire burning.
‘If a big cat comes, set the thorns alight,’ she said.
‘Lynx is worse than wolf?’ said Lom.
‘Not lynx,’ said Kamilova. ‘Bigger than lynx, much bigger. Heavy as a horse, and teeth to snap your spine.’
Lom lay awake and heard the grumbling of predators in the dark, but nothing troubled them.
‘I don’t think wolves hunt in the night,’ he said.
‘You want to bet your skin on that?’
‘No.’
Kamilova took the pan of stewed rosehips off the fire and set it in the grass. Pulled her knife from her belt and wiped it carefully clean. Unwrapped the axe and did the same, and sharpened the blades of both to a clean fineness with her stone. By the time she’d done, the stewed hips were cool enough. She picked a handful out of the pan and squeezed the juices back in. Lom watched the bright redness dribble between her fingers. She threw the seed-filled pulp away and scooped another handful, working it between her palms to release as much as possible of the blood-warm liquid. By the time she’d picked the last few softened fruits out of the liquid and pressed them between finger and thumb she had the pan half-full of rich rose liquor.