‘Here,’ she said and passed the pan to Lom.
He took a sip. Without honey it was bitter enough to roughen the roof of his mouth, but it was good.
‘I know this place,’ she said, ‘but there were people here then, and fewer wolves. Everyone’s gone, but there’s somewhere nearby I’d like to see again. I’ll take you there’
‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Tomorrow.’
Morning came quiet and cold, suppressed under low featureless skies. A drab unsettling breeze stirred brittle leaves. The forest felt shabby and grey. Snares and fish traps laid the evening before held nothing. Lom ate some berries and drank a little of the sour red rose-drink. It left him no less hungry.
The absence of Maroussia nagged at him. Her failure to come. Since they’d passed through the gap in the hills he’d felt nothing of her. Morning succeeded morning, timeless and inconsequentiaclass="underline" a perpetual repetition of movement without progress against the narrowing river that always tried to push them back and out. The resinous taste of the air, the hungry excitement of opening up into the possibilities of the forest, was fading. Immensity and endlessness were always and everywhere the same, and he felt small and ordinary and lost. He was growing accustomed to the inexhaustible sameness of trees, and knew that he was somehow failing.
He crouched among fallen leaves, blotched and parchment-yellow and fragile, like dry pages scattered from an ageing and spine-cracked book, disordered out of all meaning. He picked up crumbling handfuls and sifted them, dealing them out like faceless cards in a game he couldn’t play, returning leaves to the infinite mat of fallen leaves, every one different and all of them the same, abundant beyond all counting, further in and further on forever, abundant to the point of absurdity. Autumn was coming in the interminable forest and there would be no numbering of the trees.
He pushed his hands down, digging through the covering of dry leaves into darkening dampness and rot and the raw deep earth beneath. The cool fungal smell. Mycelium. Earthworm. Shining blackened twig fragment and softening pieces of bark. Truffle-scented leaf rot. Fine tangled clumps of hair-like root.
Lom closed his eyes and breathed.
Trunks of trees rise separately out of the earth and each stands apart from its neighbours. We overvalue sight. In the rich dark earth the roots of all the trees of the forest are intertwined. Knotted filaments and root fibres grow around and through each other, twist each other about, intertangled and nodal, meshed and joined with furtive fungal threads, digging down deeper than the trees grow tall. Slow exchange and interchange of mineral currency. Burrowing capacitors and conductors of gentle dark electric flux and spark. You can’t say one tree ends and the next begins; it’s all one sentient wakeful centreless tree and it lives underground.
Lom listened to the circuitry of the earth. He felt the living angel getting stronger. The first weakening of hope. A cruel thing coming closer and the rumourous growth of fear. There was a hurt in the forest and a wound in the world. He missed Maroussia and wished she would come.
3
Josef Kantor embodied in mudjhik reaches the lower slopes of the Archangel hill. The ground he stands on is burning with cool fire, thrilling to the touch, and the immense body of the living angel rises in front of him, higher, far higher, than he had imagined. Hundreds of feet into the sky. Even hurt and weakened, grounded as it is, it is a thing of glowering power. It crackles with life. The mudjhik body loosens and grows light. It feeds. Archangel feeds Kantor and Kantor feeds Archangel, strength mixes with strength, distinctions blur.
Archangel separates several hundred chunks of himself and sends them into the sky to circle his top on flaggy wings. The coming of his prince deserves such glorious celebration.
4
Kamilova took Lom to see the place she knew. She was happy in the forest. This was where she could be who she was.
They approached through old earthworks and turf-covered stone dykes. Redoubts. Salients. Massive boulders that had been tumbled into place and now settled deep into the earth. Rooks chattered and flocked among thorn trees.
The full extent of the stronghold was invisible, immersed in trees, and it felt smaller than it was because the chambers were small. Intimate human scale. Inside was gloomy, rich with earth and stone and leaf and wood, and the river ran through it, in under the hill. The place was burrow, sett and warren. Tunnels extended into darkness, every direction and down.
Kamilova took and lit a tar-soaked torch. The flame burned slow and smoked.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This way.’
Distinctions between inside and outside, overground and underground, meant little. There were low halls with intricately carved ceilings and curving wooden walls, like the hulls of underground ships, polished and dark with age and hearth smoke, into which real living trees, their limbs and roots and branches, were interwoven and included. Chambers and passageways were floored with stone flags or compacted earth, leaf-carpeted. Older places were rotting and returning to the earth, moss and mushroom damp.
‘I’d thought there might be someone still here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Stupid, but I hoped it.’
Lom’s feeling of unease was growing.
‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s something not right.’
On the path back to where they had left the Heron they heard riders approaching. The footfall of horses. The clanking of bridles and gear. The scuffing of many feet through mud and forest litter. No voices. There was a quiet wind moving among the trees, but Lom could hear them coming.
‘Get out of sight,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’
They crouched behind low thorn and briar. There was movement visible now through the trees.
Kamilova put her face next to his ear. ‘Did they see us?’
‘I don’t know.’
He pulled off his pack and crawled forward on his belly, turning on his side to squeeze between thorn-bush stems. A root in the ground dug into him. He felt the spike of it gouging into his flesh, dragging at him. It hurt. He eased himself slowly forward across it, his face pressed close to the earth. Thorns snagged in his hair and grazed the skin of his scalp. A strand of briar hooked itself across his back. He reached back to pull it away and inched himself forward until he could see the track. He scooped a lump of earth and moss and rubbed himself with it, smearing it on his forehead and round his eyes, working it into the stubble on his face. The scent of it was strong and sour in his nose. He was sweating despite the cold.
Kamilova squeezed up next to him. The sound of her ragged breathing. He didn’t look round.
There were three riders at the front, and men walking behind, strung out and silent. Lots of men, dirty and ill dressed. More riders followed, the horses dragging long heavy bundles wrapped in cloth. The bundles were heavy, deadweight, trailing furrow-paths through the leaves on the path. The horses pulled slowly against the weight.
The riders were bulky and hooded, soiled woollen cowls shrouding their faces, their heads heavy and too large. They rode alert, scanning the trees. Lom felt the pressure of their attention pass across him. It made him feel uneasy. Exposed. He inched his way cautiously backwards under the thorn.