She followed him into death.
Come back with me. Come back.
8
Lom was in a beautiful simple place among northern trees. Pine and birch and spruce. The air was clear and fresh as ice and rain. Resinous dark green needles carpeting the earth. Time fell there in sudden windfall showers, pulses of night and day, evening and morning, always rising, always young, always new. There were broadleaf trees, and laughter was hidden in the leaves, out of sight, being the leaves.
Everything alive with wildness.
He could see trees growing: unfurling their leaves and spreading overhead, reaching towards each other with their branches until they met, a green ceiling of leaves, and all the light was a liquid fall, green as fire, that spilled through the leaves, enriching the widening silence.
Josef Kantor slammed together the walls of his will to crush Maroussia between them and extinguish her utterly, and it made no difference to her at all.
Lom saw Maroussia walking towards him, and a figure was walking beside her through the trees. It seemed at first to be walking on four legs like a deer, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because the dappled figure appeared to rise on its hind legs as it came and he saw that it was like a woman. A perfume of musk and warmth was in the air. Her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them. She was naked except that a nap of short smooth reddish-brown fur covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts and spread down across her brown rounded belly.
‘Who are you?’ said Lom. Engage in dialogue with your visions.
She smiled, and a long warm pink tongue flickered between thin white pointed teeth.
‘You mean, what am I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what I am.’
‘Tell me.’
She opened her mouth and spilled a flow of words, green foliage tumbling, heaped up, all at once. A chord of words.
I am the vixen in the rain and the hungry sow-badger suckling in the dark earth. I am salt on your tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood.
I am scent on the air at dusk, sweet as colostrum. I am the belly-warm womb of the she-otter in the river. I am the cub-warm sleep of the she-bear under the snow. I am the noctule, stooping upon moths with the weight of cubs in my belly.
I am the she-elk, ice-bearded, nudging my calf against the wind, and I am the mouse in the barn, suckling the blind pink buds of life. I am the sour breath of the stoat in the tunnel’s darkness and I am the vixen’s teeth in the neck of the hen.
I am the crunch of carrion and I am the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet milk. I am tired and cold and wet and full of cub. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I am plastered fur and soaking hair.
I am the abdomen swollen taut as a drum and full as an egg. I am the ceaseless desperate hunger of the starveling shrew. I am the sow’s lust for the boar, the hart’s delight in the pride of the hind.
I am the fucker’s laughing and the smell of droppings in the wet grass. I am the sweetness of milk on the baby’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the hot gates opening into light.
I am all of us and I am you. I am the mirror of your coming here to meet yourself.
‘I don’t understand.’
You understand, said Fraiethe. Though understanding doesn’t matter. You are green forest and dark angel and human world, compendious and strong. Forget what you cannot do and do what you can do.
Fraiethe opened her mouth to kiss him, as she had kissed Maroussia once, though that he did not yet know.
She bit him, she swallowed him up and he was not killed.
9
Things can change. Borders are not fixed. Permeability. Mutability. Trees can speak. A man may become an animal. A woman may become time like a god. Everything is alive and humans are not separate from that.
There is power which is the exercise of will and there is power which is openness and letting go. It has to do with air and breath and consciousness. A freeing not a binding. A removal of bonds.
Josef Kantor–Papa Rizhin–fraternal angel champion–mudjhik–came lumbering at them out of the trees to silence and kill. Maroussia Shaumian and Vissarion Lom, side by side, the child inside a possibility between them, watched him come.
They saw right round him and through him and he wasn’t there.
The mudjhik was an empty column of stuff like stone.
10
The prototype Universal Vessel Vlast of Stars stood on the concrete apron at Vitigorsk, a swollen citadel of steel, a snub and gross atomic bullet thirty storeys high. Hunder Rond had personally overseen the stowage on board of the embalmed corpse, the earthly remains of Papa Rizhin. A chosen crew had taken their places, eager and proud, the brightest and the best, prepared to live or die, but in their hearts they knew that they would live. They would reach their destination. There were other, better suns awaiting them.
Rond stood now on the asphalt, uniformed in crisp new black. The hot wind that disturbed his hair was heavy with the industrial chemical stench of Vitigorsk
‘There have been no tests,’ said Yakov Khyrbysk. ‘It is the prototype. You know what that means.’
‘You can come or you can stay,’ said Rond. ‘Your choice.’
Khyrbysk shook his head.
‘I’m staying here,’ he said.
Rond looked around.
‘The backwash will destroy all this,’ he said.
‘We have evacuated. We will be far away. We will rebuild better somewhere else.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Rond. ‘Perhaps. But we will get there first. You will not find us.’
Khyrbysk shrugged. ‘I have to go now.’
Half an hour later and twenty miles away in Tula-Vitisk Launch Control, Yakov Khyrbysk gave the word. He was curious. It was a prototype. Whatever happened he would learn from it and move on.
The horizon disappeared in a flash of blinding light.
When the light cleared, a column of expanding mushroom clouds was climbing into the pale blue sky, puffs of distant smoke and wind illuminated by inward burn. Higher and higher they climbed, a rising stairway of evanescent stellar ignitions, a trajectory curving towards the west and the sinking of the sun.
At the sweet spot of the rising curve, several hundred miles high, the entire magazine of the Vlast of Stars exploded at once. The brightness of the detonation spread across the whole of the western sky. It overwhelmed the sun. The vaporised residue drifted for months through the upper atmosphere, borne on high fierce winds. Intermixed with the shattered molecular dust of the earthly remains of the corpse of Papa Rizhin it slowly slowly fell to earth, becoming rain.
The dust of Engineer-Technician 1st Class Mikkala Avril was in it too. Yakov Khyrbysk was as good as his word.
11
The great hill of the living angel, blinded, muted and unchampioned, abraded by wind and rain, crawled slowly on, lost among limitless trees. No fliers crowded the air above its sad peak. Already, scrubby vegetation was beginning to claim the crumbling lower slopes. The rain washed from it in slurries of tilth and rolling scree.