‘No!’ shouted Latsis, loyal Major Latsis, and some round the table joined in the murmurs of denial, but others kept silent, and Rizhin noted for later who they were.
‘I know that some of you are thinking this,’ Rizhin continued. ‘Where are we going with this bitter, grinding resistance? That is what you ask each other. What is the purpose? What is the strategy?’ He leaned forward and skewered them one by one with his stare. None of them would meet his eye. ‘Do you think I don’t know how you whisper among yourselves?’ he continued. ‘Do you think I don’t hear it all? Do you think it does not reach my ears, this cowardice and doubt? This backsliding? This revisionism?’
Rizhin let the uncomfortable silence grow and spread round the table.
‘I don’t need to hear it,’ he added. ‘I can smell it in the room.’
‘General Rizhin—’ began Fritjhov, commander of the Bermskaya Tank Division.
‘Let me finish,’ said Rizhin, his voice quiet, reasonable.
‘No!’ said Fritjhov. ‘I will have my say! You call us cowards? Cowards! Our soldiers fight for the city, and they will fight to the bitter end, they will fight and die for Mirgorod. But they cannot fight and win. We cannot fight without munitions, and munitions do not come. We cannot advance without air cover, and our air force does not come. The Vlast has abandoned Mirgorod to the enemy! The enemy knows this, and do you think our soldiers don’t?’
Rizhin poured himself a glass of water. The clink of the jug against the tumbler was the only sound in the room.
‘Munitions?’ he said. ‘Air cover? There’s only one weapon that wins wars, Fritjhov, and that is fear. Terror. If the enemy think they are winning, it’s because they smell the stench of your fear.’
Fritjhov bridled.
‘I am a soldier,’ he growled. ‘I am not afraid to die.’
Rizhin shrugged.
‘Then you will die, Fritjhov,’ he said. ‘What I need are commanders who are not afraid to win.’ He fixed the room with his burning, fiery glare. Holding them with all the relentless force of his will and the strength of his imagination. It was Rizhin the poet, Rizhin the artist of history, speaking to them now. ‘There are new forms in the future, my friends,’ he said, ‘and they need to be filled in with blood. A new type of humankind is needed now: individuals whose moral daring makes them vibrate at a speed that makes motion invisible. We here in this room are the first of mankind, and this city is our point of departure. There is no past, there is only the future, and the future is ours to make. Our imminent victory in Mirgorod will be just the beginning.’
‘There isn’t going to be any fucking victory here, man,’ said Fritjhov. ‘As senior commander it is my duty—’
Rizhin smiled.
‘Victory is coming, Fritjhov my friend. Victory is nearly here.’
‘What—’
‘A train is coming from the north-east, bringing a consignment of artillery shells.’
‘One shipment of shells?’ said Fritjhov in derision, looking round the table for support.
‘Shells of a new type,’ said Rizhin. ‘You will need to prepare your guns. I will give you instructions.’
Fritjhov jumped to his feet, sending his chair clattering.
‘No more instructions, Rizhin, not from you.’
Rizhin was a restful centre of patience and forbearance.
‘Just sit down a moment, would you, Fritjhov,’ he said, ‘and I will show you what is coming.’
Rizhin stood and walked across the room. He drew back the heavy curtain to reveal a projector and a cinema screen. He started the projector whirring and turned off the lights.
79
Lom woke in the quiet before dawn and lay still in the cocoon of branches and leaf mould, knees pulled up tight against his belly, head pillowed on the warm knot of his own folded arms. He didn’t want to move.
He breathed with his mouth, shallow slow breaths. Breathing the warmth of his own breath, inhaling pine and earth and moss, the smell of damp woodsmoke in his clothes and his hair. He listened for sounds from outside the shelter, but there was nothing: the thickness of the shelter absorbed sound as it absorbed light. Yet the shelter itself had its own faint whispering, a barely audible movement of shifting and settling, the outer layer flicking and feathering in the breeze, and sometimes the rustle and tick of small things–woodlice? spiders? mice?–in the canopy. The shelter was a living thing that had settled over him, absorbing him, nurturing. Deep beneath him in the cold earth the roots of trees, the fine tangled roots, sifted and slid and touched one another. They whispered. They were connected. All the trees together made one tree, night-waking and watchful. It knew he was there.
Twice in the night Lom had heard the long trains passing.
He had done a terrible thing and the guilt of it weighed him down. He had lost Maroussia. He had not been there. He could hear the sound of her voice in his head, but not the words.
Reluctantly he sat up and pushed the entrance branches aside and let in the dim grey dawn and the cold of the day. Harsh frost had come in the night, and now mist reduced the surrounding forest to a quiet clearing edged by indeterminacy. When he crawled out of the shelter the mist brushed cold against his face and filled his nose and lungs, and when he walked his shoes crunched on brittle, snow-dusted iron earth.
Florian was sitting nearby, almost invisible in shadow until he moved. He had left a hare skinned and ready by the remains of the previous night’s hearth, and next to it was a small heap of mushrooms and a handful of clouded purple berries.
‘I think we could risk a fire,’ he said. ‘Before the mist clears.’
Lom started on the fire. The intense cold made his fingers clumsy: he fumbled the tinder, dropped it. He couldn’t make his stiffened blue-pale hands work properly. He found that the water had frozen in the pan. He went for fresh.
Dawn greyed into morning, sifting darkness out of the mist-dripping branches, condensing detail. Pine needle, twig and thorn. When they had eaten, they went back to the railway track and started to walk north again. Through gaps in the trees they could see the mountain ahead of them, rising pale grey and snow-streaked into the cloud. At one point Florian paused to reach up and pulled a snag from the side of a birch trunk. He studied it, then held it out to Lom.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It is not right.’
Lom studied the sprig. The leaves were grown too large, and some were misshapen. Sickle-edged. Distorted.
‘And here,’ said Florian. ‘I found this also.’ A small branch of pine, the needles long but floppy and fringed with edges of lace. ‘They are not all like this, but some. And more near here than when we landed.’
After an hour they found the body of the wolf. Or most of it. Its belly was ripped open and empty and one of its hind legs was gone, torn out at the hip. The wolf carcase was impaled on a broken branch at head height, the sharp-splintered stump of wood pushed through the ribcage and coming out, blood-sticky, from the base of the throat. Its head hung to one side, eyes open. Gibbeted. A warning? Or a larder?
‘Was that you?’ said Lom.
‘No,’ said Florian. ‘Of course not.’
‘I had to ask,’ said Lom.
At mid-morning the rain came in pulses, wind-driven, hard, grey and cold, washing away the covering of snow and turning the path to a thick clag of mud. The noise of the rain in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain horses.