As she dressed and packed her few things, Maroussia went over her plan. Like so many people in Mirgorod, she had lived for years with the thought that one day such a time would come. The militia would come for her, and it would be necessary to run. She had decided long ago that when this day came she would make for Koromants, the Fransa Free Exclave on the Cetic shore, three hundred miles to the south of Mirgorod.
The whole world to the west of the forest was divided between Vlast and Archipelago, locked in their endless war. But wherever there was war, there must be bankers, financiers, traders in weapons — wars were fought on credit — and so the Fransa free cities, which belonged neither to the Archipelago nor to the Vlast, existed. Sealed off from the dominions by guarded perimeters. Everyone was stateless there, everyone was free, money and information the only power. Spies and criminals and refugees of every kind gravitated to such places — if they could get in, through the wire or over the walls. Exiled intellectuals gathered there to plot and feud, and she had heard of other, stranger figures, not human, forced out of the ghettos, margins and northern wildernesses of the Vlast, who found places to live in the older, darker corners of the Fransa exclaves. Ones who might understand about the Pollandore and help her.
The nearest Fransa port to Mirgorod was Koromants. Maroussia had seen a photograph once of the seafront there: a wide boulevard of coffee shops and konditorei looking out over clear dark waters, and behind it, rising against the sky, the sheer jagged mountains of the Koromants Massif. There, she had decided, that was where she would go, when the time came. Though how she would get there she didn’t know.
Maroussia decided not to take her identity card. It would be no help where she was going. She placed it carefully on the table in clear view, for the police to find when they came. It was time. She had delayed too long.
She turned towards the doorway and saw the figure of madness and death standing there, regarding her with shadowed fathomless eyes.
‘Maroussia?’ it said. ‘Maroussia. Are you ready?’
The paluba’s voice was thin and quiet in the room, a breeze among distant trees. The air was filled with the scent of pine resin and damp earth. Flimsy brown garments shifted about the creature, stirring on a gentle wind. There was a mouth-shape in the hooded shadows that moved as it spoke.
The creature stepped forward across the threshold. Only it wasn’t a step. The thing seemed to fall slowly forward and jerk itself backwards and upright at the tipping point. It appeared flimsy, held together by fragile joints. Its limbs were articulated strangely. Behind the creature another one came, its follower, its companion double, more shadowy, more shapeless, more airy, more… nothing. Just a shadow, waiting.
‘What are you?’ said Maroussia, at the ragged edge of panic. And hope.
‘I can smell wounds here,’ the paluba said. ‘You’re bleeding. You’ve been hurt.’
‘Who are you?’ said Maroussia again. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘You don’t have to be frightened,’ the voice said. ‘I am your friend. Your mother’s friend. But your mother wouldn’t listen to me. Did she tell you nothing?’
‘She’s gone now. She’s dead. The police killed her.’
‘Oh.’ There was a moment’s stillness in the shadow where the paluba’s face was suggested. Maroussia thought she could hear grieving in its voice. ‘She took what we left for her. Did she give it to you?’
‘No. She gave me nothing.’
‘It was an invitation. A key. Your father sent it.’
‘I never had a father.’
‘Of course you did. Everyone does.’
‘My father was a lie. I come from nothing.’
‘Did she tell you that? Poor darling, it wasn’t so. Do you want to know?’
‘Know what?
‘Everything.’
‘Yes.’
The paluba reached up and pushed back her thin hood, showing her beautiful, terrible face. Her waiting mouth
‘Kiss me, Maroussia.’
‘What?’
‘Kiss me.’ In the shadow the companion stirred. ‘Kiss me.’
Maroussia stepped forward and rested her hand on the paluba’s slender shoulders. Sweet air was drifting out of its upturned mouth. It tasted of autumn. Maroussia put her own dry mouth against it, slightly open, and drank.
In the paluba’s kiss there were trees, beautiful complex trees, higher and older than any trees grew, and everything was connected.
Maroussia was walking among them. She placed her hand on the silent living bark and felt her skin, her very flesh, become transparent. She became aware of the articulation of her bones, sheathed in their muscle and tendon. Eyes, heart and lungs, liver and brain, nested like birds in a walking tree of bone. A weave of veins and arteries and streaming nerves that flickered with gentle electricity.
She heard the leaves and branches of the trees moving. Whispers filling the air with rich smells. The trees reached their roots down into the earth like arms, and she reached down with them, extending filament fingers, pushing, sliding insistently, down through crevices in the rock itself.
And breaking through.
The buried chamber of the wild sleeping god was furled up tight but immense beyond measuring. The restless sleeping god, burdened with tumultuous dreams, had extended himself outwards and inwards and downwards, carving out an endless warren, an intricate dark hollowing. Its whorls and chambers ramified in all directions, turning and twisting and burrowing, spiral shadow tunnellings of limitless extent, unlit by the absent sun but warmed by the heart of the earth. It was all rootwork: the roots of the rock and the roots of the trees. It was matrix and web. Fibrous roots of air, filaments of energy and space, knitted everything to everything else in the chamber of the sleeping god’s dream.
He was lying on his back and great taproots drove down through his ribs. A tree limb speared up out of his groin. Water trickled over him. Rootlets slipped down, fingering his pinioned body, brushing and touching gently. The roots of the great trees drank from the buried god as their leaves drank the sun.
Up in the light the trees mingled their crowns in one great leafhead and exhaled the good, living air of the world. The air she drank on the paluba’s breath.
And there was a man walking there among the trees. She knew that he was her father and he knew that she was there, and he greeted her, and she understood why her mother had loved him and why she had to leave and how the leaving had been her death.
48
Lom sat bolt upright in his seat on the tram. The file! Chazia would come for it, and she would find Vishnik. Maroussia.
He had to do something. Now.
The tram had stopped. An anonymous place somewhere away from the centre of the city. Across the street was a hotel, a telephone cable running to it from a pole in the centre of the square. Lom ran across. THE GRAND PENSION CHESMA. Wet zinc tables under a dripping wrought iron veranda. Steep marble steps up to a chipped, discoloured portico. A handwritten card propped in a small side window: Closed For Winter. Lom hammered on the door.
‘Open up! Police!’
The paint on the door was peeling, revealing sinewy bleached grey wood. There was an ivory button in a verdigrised surround. BELL, it said. PORTER. He pressed it, more in hope than expectation, and kicked at the door.
‘Police! Open or I break it down.’
There was a noise of bolts being pulled back. The door opened. A porter in sabots and a brown overall eyed him warily.
‘You don’t look like police.’ We wouldn’t take you as a guest.
Lom shoved the door open and shouldered his way past the porter into the dim hall. A suggestion of wing-backed chairs and ottomans draped with grey sheets. A smell of old cooking and older carpets. Dampness, dust and the sea. Lom unbuttoned his cloak.