7
It was late afternoon when Lom and Maroussia walked together back down the trail to the river where the Heron was moored.
Eligiya Kamilova received Maroussia with quiet reserve. She was generous and fine, but Lom could see her withdrawing. She was displaced again: having done her part she was finding herself edged to the margin of other people’s reunions and plans. Lom found himself feeling slightly sorry for her. It was guilt that he felt, he knew that–he’d brought her here, he’d used her as his guide–but it was the path she’d chosen. The solitary traveller. She’d wanted to come. The forest was her travelling place, but she’d come back and found it an emptier, harsher place than before.
Kamilova had caught a fish in her trap. A pike. She shared it with them. The smoke of the cooking fire hung about in the still air of evening, clinging and acrid. It stuck to their skin. The flesh of the pike tasted muddy and was full of fine sharp bones. Not pleasant eating. Maroussia said little and ate less.
The sliver of an ominous new hill had appeared above the trees in the west. It glowed a dull rust-red in the last of the westering sun, and above it dark shapes circled like flocks of flying birds.
‘I’m sorry, Eligiya,’ said Maroussia.
Kamilova frowned.
‘Sorry? Why?’
‘A bad thing is coming and I am bringing it here. I show myself now to draw it out before it gets any stronger. It may already be too strong.’
Maroussia turned to Lom. She was almost a stranger, fierce and strong. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark and wide. She was carrying his child. He hadn’t even begun to absorb the truth of that yet.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘Ready for what?’ said Lom, but he knew.
He’d felt it coming for some time: the pulsing rhythm of blood in his head was the rhythm of a heavy, pounding footfall crashing through the trees, growing louder and coming closer. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he felt the touch of the avid hunter’s tunnel-narrow gaze. He saw that even Kamilova was feeling it now: a faint drumbeat in the ground underfoot.
‘Kantor is coming,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. There is no time to prepare. It has to be now. Kantor is here.’
‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Oh. Yes. I see.’ A sudden sick lurch of fear. ‘OK. Well there’s no time like now.’
The mudjhik stepped out from the grey twilit birches, dull red and massive, balanced and avid and bulky and strangely beautiful and as tall as the trees it stood among. Its eyes–it had eyes–took them in with a gaze of confident relaxation and intelligence. Its expression was almost elegant and almost amused. It had grace as well as size and power. It was a perfectly realised angel-human giant of stone the colour of rust and blood and bruises, a new thing come into the world, and it had the face of a hundred million posters and portraits and photographs. The face on the statue at the top of the Rizhin Tower. The face of Papa Rizhin. The face of Josef Kantor.
And when it spoke it had the voice of Kantor too, warm and expressive, loud and clear among the trees. You heard it in your head and you heard it in your ear. Tall as the trees, it had a tongue to speak.
‘So it is you, my Lom, my investigator, my troublesome provincial mouse, my annoyance still and always,’ said the voice and face of Josef Kantor. He looked from Lom to Maroussia. ‘And here is the trivial bitch-girl not my daughter too, my betrayer’s bastard whelp, the spill of my cuckolding. You stink of the forest like your mother did. Both of you stink of it. Well the mother is dead and I will destroy the daughter also, and the man. You run and you wriggle and you hide, you sting me and skip away, but I have you cornered now.’
Kantor-in-mudjhik took a pace forward and spread its arms wide, arms with a suggestion of muscular flow. Fists opened flexing fingers. It had fingers. Thick stubby fingers. Josef Kantor’s hands.
‘I’m going to make quite a mess. Dog crows will clean it up.’
While the mudjhik Kantor spoke, Lom felt the dark electric pressure of angel senses passing across him, probing and examining. The touch of it, obscene and invasive, brought a surge of anger and hatred, a knot of iron and stone in his belly like a fist.
The mudjhik stopped mid-stride and gave a bark, a sudden laugh of surprised delight. Its blank pebble eyes glittered with warmth and pleasure.
‘And there is a child!’ the voice of Kantor said. ‘How perfect is that? Good. Let me kill it too. Let it all end now, and then I will take the blustering bastard angel down and be on my way out of these trees and get my world back. This triviality has gone on long enough.’
Lom felt surge after surge of anger and desperation and the wired strength of his own angel taint welling up, overbrimming and bursting walls inside him. The taste of iron, a hot suffusion in the blood. He was the violence. The smasher. The fist. He was defender. He was bear.
That was the secret of his birthing. Fathered by a man-bear in the deeps of the forest, he was the blade-toothed muzzle, the gaping tearing snout, the heavy carnivore with heavy paws to break necks. He felt himself unfurling into bear and killing, and let it come. Let it come! Barriers and frontiers dissolving, he was coming into the myth of himself, he was the man-bear with angel in his blood.
Lom felt the power of the angel substance tugging at his mind, a hungry undertow pulling and hauling him out of his body, dizzying and disorientating. The forest sliding sideways. Peripheral vision darkening. Connection with reality slipping away.
It wasn’t Kantor doing that, it was the thing his mudjhik body was made of.
Lom didn’t resist. He threw himself into the pulling of the current and went with it into the mudjhik, leaving his soft body fallen behind, taking the war onto Kantor’s own ground to kill him there.
All power is done at a price, but the price is not paid by those who wield it. It is paid by the victims. Kantor was human and he was not, and there was an end to it.
Lom in the mudjhik found Kantor there and fell on him, tearing and snarling, a blood-blind frontal killing assault of unwithstandable fierceness. To end it quickly before Kantor could react.
Lom hit a wall.
The wall of Kantor’s will. Impregnable will. A hardened vision that could not be changed but only broken, and it would not break. Lom could not break it.
The force of his attack skittered sideways, ineffectual, like cat’s claws against marble slab. It wasn’t a defeat. The fight didn’t even begin.
He felt the gross stubby fingers of Josef Kantor picking over his fallen, winded body. Ripping him open and rummaging among the intimate recesses of memory and desire. Kantor’s voice was a continual whisper in his dissolving mind.
I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen will happen. I am Josef Kantor, and I am the strongest and the hardest thing. I am the incoming tide of history. I am the thing you hate and fear and I am stronger than you. You fear me. I am Josef Kantor and I am inevitable. I am the smooth and uninterruptible voice. I always return. I am total. I am the force of one single purpose, the voice of the one idea that drives out all others. The uncertain dissolve before and forgive me as they die. I am the taker and I have killed you now.
Vissarion Lom wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong at all. He was dying. He could not breathe. He was dead.
And then Maroussia was in the mudjhik with him. Her quiet voice. A mist of evening rain.
The Pollandore was with her, inside her and outside her. Clean light and green air. Spilling all the possibilities of everything that could happen if Josef Kantor did not happen and there were no angels at all. The endless openness and extensibility of life without angels.