‘Don’t move,’ Kamilova hissed in his ear. ‘There’s one behind us.’
Lom lay on his back, face turned up, looking into the close tangle of the leafless bush. Outriders scouting the trail. Fear made his heart struggle. He wanted to breathe clear air. He forced himself to lie still and wait. Let them pass.
Long after the last sound of their passing had gone, the two of them lay without speaking under the thorns. The touch of the riders’ eyeless gaze stayed with them, a taint breath, a foulness in the mind. They listened for any sign of more following or the scout returning, and when that purpose faded they still didn’t move.
‘What were they?’ said Kamilova. She didn’t look at him but stayed lying on her back, watching a spider moving slowly among the branches.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you feel…?’
‘Yes.’
‘That wasn’t… normal. That wasn’t right.’
‘No.’
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
‘We should go,’ she said at last. ‘We should move on.’
‘Yes.’
Stiff and cold, they picked up their packs and began to walk.
‘Perhaps we should stay off the track,’ she said. ‘There might be more coming.’
‘We have to get back to the boat,’ said Lom. ‘We have to keep going.’
It began to rain. Sheets of wind-driven icy water soaking their clothes. The noise of it was like an ocean in the trees. The track led them between shallow green pools, rain-churned and murky.
Lom didn’t hear the splashing charge of the bear-man over the noise of the rain. Didn’t smell it through the rain and the mud and the drench of the leaves. But he felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision that drove the air from his lungs, crunched the ribs in his chest and hurled him off the path into the water, crashing his spine against the trunk of a beech tree.
He could not raise his arms. He could not move his legs. The water came up to his waist. Propped against the slope of the tree root, he watched the grey-hooded figure turn and come back, wading towards him through the mud-swirled green pool. Its cowl was pulled back off its head.
Lom smelled the bear-man’s hot sour breath on his face, on his wide staring eyes. He saw deep into the dark red mouth as its jaws widened to clamp on his face. The mouth reeked of angel. He observed with detached and distant surprise that half its head was made of stone.
Lom punched the side of the half-stone head with closed-up forest air, boulder heavy and boulder-hard. A swinging fist of rain and air. The bear-weighted bear-muzzled skull jerked sideways, crushed and broken and dead in a sudden mess of blood and bone.
5
The bear-man, the angel rider of horse, opens his mouth to scream out the shock and outrageous surprise of his death, his death out of nowhere. He is instantaneously silenced. Cerebral cortex sprayed on the air like a smashed fruit.
But the screaming instant is heard.
Archangel, O Archangel all-surveying, connected by iron filaments of Archangel mind to all the doers of his will–all the absorbed living syllables through which he gives voice, all the soldiers in the army he is building for his brother in arms Josef Kantor–Archangel hears and feels the killing of the bear and knows it for what it is. It is familiar. Anomaly and threat.
And there is something else.
He has seen it now. Resolved out of endlessness and trees it has locality. The eye of his surveillance has pinned it, and this time it is close and he can reach it.
She shows herself and he has found her.
Everything comes together in the forest, and out in the forest hunting now is his racing engine, his destroyer, his fraternal champion and his pride.
Kill them all. Kill them quickly. Do it now.
Archangel calls and his champion runs them down.
6
‘They were riding for the angel,’ said Lom. ‘I think we’re coming closer to where it is.’
There was strain in Kamilova’s eyes. She was watching him warily again. There was always a separateness about her: a wordless watchfulness, a lonely, withheld and self-postponing patience, doing what she must and waiting for the dark times to go.
‘It was going to kill you,’ she said. ‘Then it was like its brain exploded.’
They were back at the Heron, and the rain had passed leaving watery afternoon sunshine. Lom had wiped the dark bear blood off his face and neck but still he felt unclean. The angel-residue in his own blood was strung out taut like wires in his veins again. He didn’t like Kamilova’s scrutiny and wanted to be alone.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said.
He followed a game trail up to the crest of a low slope and looked down on dark green water. The trail took him down to the edge of it, a stillness fringed on the far side with dense bramble. A fallen tree dipped a leafless crown and branches like arms into the mystery of the pool. Goosander gave muted echoless mews. Lom took off his rain-damp clothes and waded out. The water, cold against his shins, was moss-coloured, icy, opaque. He felt the thick cool of silt sliding between his toes and up over his feet. It felt like darkness.
After a few steps the lake bottom fell away steeply and he slipped, half-falling and half-choosing, into a sudden clumsy dive. The water closed over his head. How deep it might be he had no idea and didn’t care. Bands of iron cold tightened round his skull and bruised ribs, squeezing out breath. He opened his eyes on nothing but pale thickened green light.
Floundering to the surface he swam with cramped clumsy strokes, arms and legs working through the cold. Broken twigs and fallen leaves littered the surface: he nosed his way through.
Once the first shock of the chill subsided, he immersed himself in the wild forgetful freedom of swimming in the forest, washing the sourness of killing and angel from his skin and hair. He took breath and dived for the bottom, reaching his arms down for it, but couldn’t touch it, and surfaced, gasping. Floating on his back he watching the canopy of trees turning slowly overhead against the heavy sky.
He swam until the icy bitter cold of the water returned to the attack, then hauled himself up onto the bole of the fallen tree and lay there for a long time, face down, the bark’s hard roughness against his skin, the air of the forest resting against his naked back. Lazy and reluctant to move he watched the pool opaque and green below him.
When he was dry he crawled back along the tree and swung himself down onto the bank, and she was there, her eyes brushing across him, bright and dark and happy.
Maroussia.
She put her hand against his chest, tracing the rise and hollow of his ribs. His hands and face were weather-brown, his body pale. The warmth of her fingers was on him. He smelled the sweetness of her breath.
‘Is it you?’ he said. ‘Not a shadow but you?’
‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Your skin is rough and hard and cool like stone.’
She looked into his face and opened her mouth a little, and he kissed her, his arms around her shoulders awkwardly, uncertain. She tasted like hedge berries, and she leaned in and pressed herself against him. The scent of woodsmoke and forest in her hair. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly gently.
‘Do you feel our child moving?’
For him it had been six years and more, but for her hardly any time at all.