Now, the House on the Purfas was home to the Lezarye Government in Exile Within, but once it had been the Sheremetsny Dom, a low expansive sprawl of wood and brick, skirted with peeling loggias and leaking conservatories. The country estate for which it was built had disappeared long ago under the tenements and courtyards of the expanding city, but for Vishnik the corridors of the House on the Purfas led away into the lost domain of his childhood. If he could go deeper into the house, he felt, he would be back among it all. Back in his own boundless childhood house at Vyra, with its world of passages and stairs. Daylight slanted in through high narrow windows panelled with stained glass, splashing lozenges of colour across dusty floorboards and threadbare rugs. The tall furniture and heavy fabrics of drawing rooms, salons, dining rooms, bedrooms, box rooms and attics. The strange devices and spiced air of kitchens, pantries and sculleries. If he went to a window in the House on the Purfas and looked out, he was sure he would see, not the Moyka Strel, but balustraded pathways, formal parterres, weathered statuary, great heaps and mounds of foliage overgrowing walls of old brick and, in the furthest distance, a slope of wooded hills.
There was a brass hand-bell on a side table. Vishnik picked it up and rang it. A woman in a black dress and a white cape came.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Sir?’
A domestic servant. Another dizzying time-tumble. The whole place was a museum. A case of butterfly specimens, dried out and pinned; their dusty wings spread under glass in a parody of summer flight, but if you opened the glass and picked one up it would crunch and collapse between your fingers.
In the centuries after the coming of the Founder, the people of Lezarye had learned to accept the end of their annual migrations and settle into the static life of the Vlast. The elder families had absorbed the ways of the aristocrats, a choice that was only the latest in the long history of tragic turns and counter-turns that left them with nowhere to go when the Novozhd gripped power and the aristocrats fell.
‘I need to see Teslom,’ said Vishnik to the woman.
‘What name shall I say?’
‘Prince Raku ter-Fallin Mozhno Shirin-Vilichov Vishnik.’
‘Will you wait in the library, please, Excellency.’
Teslom was the Curator of Lezarye. He kept the records of the old families and tended the artefacts, regalia and memories that survived from their proud ancient days of hunting and herding, and the long slow rhythms of their decline: the systole of assimilation, the diastole of segregation and pogrom. Although Vishnik had visited the House on the Purfas to consult Teslom several times before, he had never been admitted to the Curator’s collection. No one who was not born into the long families ever was. The exclusion irked him. Lezarye had few enough friends in Mirgorod.
The room he was put in to wait was not part of the Collection, it was only the Secular Library. It was a dim quiet place of heavy bookcases shut away behind glass doors and curtains. Vishnik opened one of the cases and looked at the spines of the books. The ones here were merely miscellanea, marginal outriders of the true library, but still there were some things here that could be found nowhere else in the Vlast.
Lyrics From The Moth Border
Hunting Cold Beasts
Peace Of Mind Among Cold Beasts
Pigments, Tints
Life On The Water Ways
The Geometry Of Clouds, Steams and Vapours
Jurisprudence In The Archipelago
Vishnik took a book from a shelf, carried it across to a table and opened it. Shaw’s Atlas of the Archipelago. It contained page after page of maps in muted colours and a gazetteer of place names: a world, but not his; other countries, other islands, strung out across the face of the blue, with vertebrae and ribs of snow-capped mountains. The poetry of unfamiliar shorelines. A great bridge had been built across the sea to join them, thousands of miles long, but it was broken in several places. The orthography of the place names was familiar, but the names themselves… He didn’t recognise them — they were strange and wonderful. Morthern. Foerd. Mier. Gealm. The Warth. Horrow. Sarshalls. It was an atlas of elsewhere.
Teslom had come in quietly while he was reading. When Vishnik noticed him, the Curator made the formal gestures of acknowledgement and permission.
‘Welcome, Prince Vishnik. The princes of Vyra and Turm were always friends of Lezarye in the former days of the long homelands. There is a place for you in our hearts and at our tables. How can I help you?’
Teslom was a small man, neat, spare, kempt, with dark-shadowed eyes behind rimless circular glasses and glossy brown hair flopped across his forehead. He wore a double-breasted suit of dark blue; a soft white shirt with a soft turned-down collar and faint pattern of squares; a dark tie held in place with a pin.
‘I want you to tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom my friend. Every fucking thing you can.’
‘The Pollandore? Why?’
‘I found a story about this thing. It was in a book. An old and rare book. I asked myself, is it real? Is it true?’
‘What story is this? Where did you find it? What book?’
Vishnik opened his satchel and handed it to him. A Child’s Book of Wonders, Legends and Tales of Long Ago. Teslom took it carefully and opened it, his dark eyes shining.
‘I had heard of it, but even we don’t have a copy.’ He held it close to his face, examining the stitch binding and inhaling its paper smell.
‘Tell me about the Pollandore, Teslom, and I will give it to you. My gift to the People.’
Teslom handed the book back to him.
‘A good gift. But why the Pollandore? There are other stories here.’
‘Because of these.’
Vishnik opened his satchel again, took out a sheaf of photographs and spread them across the table. Teslom lit a lamp and studied them for a long time in silence.
‘Where did you get these?’ he said at last.
‘They are mine. I took them. These things happen. I’ve seen them. This is the proof. And now I ask myself, what does Teslom know about this?’
‘But what makes you connect these pictures with the story of the Pollandore?’
‘Why? Always fucking why? Because it is a possibility, Teslom my friend. Because I have a feeling. A hypothesis. Because it would fit the case. So. What do you tell me? What do you say?’
Teslom hesitated.
‘I would say,’ he said at last, ‘that you are not the first to come to this house and speak about the Pollandore. A paluba came here yesterday.’
‘A paluba.’
‘Indeed. From the woods. It talked of the Pollandore and now you come with these questions about the same thing.’
‘The Pollandore is real then. It was actually made.’
‘I don’t know that. There is a record that Lezarye once held such a thing in care, that one of the elder families was appointed warden, but it was seized by the Vlast soon after the Founder came north. Attempts were made to destroy it in the time of the Gruodists, but they failed. That is what is said.’
‘And this paluba spoke of it? That implies it exists.’
‘It implies only that our friends in the woods believe so. Some of the Committee also think it is real. Others do not.’
‘What else did it say, this paluba?’
‘It asked to address the Inner Committee. It spoke of an angel, a living angel that had fallen in the forest and was doing great damage. The woods fear it will poison the world. The paluba wanted us to open the Pollandore. That is the way the legend goes, is it not? The Pollandore, to be opened in the last extremity, when hope is lost.’