They were leading him along corridors. He could see from one eye: linoleum, worn carpet, flagstones, his own feet. It didn’t matter.
A shock of cold and space and early morning light. The smell of water. A bridge. They were crossing a bridge.
He jerked himself out of the grip of the men, who were holding him loosely by the arms, and lurched away from them towards the bridge’s low parapet.
For a moment, a half-second, no more, he looked down at the dark, swollen current. He wanted the water to wash the blood and mess and memory away. A clean, cold, private death. He tipped himself over the edge.
The water reached up to take him as he fell.
The moment between tipping over the parapet and hitting the water seemed to go on for ever. Lom hung head downwards in air. The surface of the river rose slowly to meet him, freighted with the debris of the flooded city. The water had a particular smelclass="underline" dark, cold, earthy, cleansing.
He crashed into green darkness and the noise churned in his ears. The shock of the cold seized his lungs in ice fists and squeezed. Bands of freezing iron tightened around his head and his chest.
He tried to scrabble his way to the surface of the river, not knowing the direction where the surface was. His clothes, water-heavy, wrapped round his body. The weight of his boots pulled at his legs, slowing their struggle to a nightmare of running. His mouth fell open in a silent O.
And yet he was happy.
After the first rush of panic, he felt his pulse-rate slowing. The icy river reached inside his ribs with cool gentle fingers and cupped his heart kindly. Calmness returned. This was now, and he was alive, and the river was his friend.
He let the dark and freezing absolution of the Mir wash away the stink and shame and failure of the interrogation room. The river let him understand.
There is no blame. There is no judge but you. Forgive yourself.
He had been… violated… by alien, brutal intruding fingers. The fat, poking stubs of Kantor, Chazia’s in her foul dead-angel glove. He had given up nothing. It had been ripped out and taken, that was all. And that was not the same.
The waters cleansed the hole in the centre of his forehead where the piece of angel stone had been ripped away and the river now entered. He felt the cool currents of its touch directly against the naked cortex of his brain, bursting long-dead synapses into light and life. Unplugged at last, for the first time since childhood, Vissarion Lom perceived the world as it was, fresh and new and timeless, flooded with truth. He smelled the light and tasted the space between things.
The Mir was filled with watchful awareness and intelligence. Lom opened wide his arms and felt himself rising. He broke the surface into early morning air. His cloak unfolded and spread itself around him like a huge black lily pad, rotating slowly in the current. His face, upturned in the cloak’s dark centre, was the lily’s pale flower, opening to the grey light. Breathing.
The river was in full spate. As he turned slowly, tilted upwards, he saw the wharves and quays and rooftops of Mirgorod passing against the cloud-grey sky. Nearer to his face, pieces of wood and broken things came with him. He was the flagship of a debris flotilla, being carried towards the edge of the city and beyond it the sea, on the surge of the withdrawing flood.
Waves splashed against his face and trickled into the open hole in his forehead.
The sentient water had a voice that was speaking to him. It told him that the city was an alien tumorous growth, formed around the plug with which the Founder had tried to stop the river’s mouth. Yet there had been a time before the city, and there could be such a time again: when it was gone, when trees grew up between the buildings, and moss and black soil breathed the air again.
The kindly waters of the Mir brushed against his skull and reached inside to calm his heart and whisper reassurance. The voice was telling him who he was. He was a man of muscle and lung and love and understanding. He was a vessel and a flowering on the seaward flow. There were people it was right to love and there were people it was right to loathe and bring to destruction.
Yes, if I have time. I need more time.
Only there was no more time.
As he rotated slowly on the current, the ice-cold waters of the river were draining all the feeling from his body. Lom no longer knew where his arms and legs were, or what they were doing. The muscles of his face were numbed into immobility, his mouth frozen in its permanent open O.
Helplessly, from a great distance, he observed the rippling water work at the bulges and pockets of air that had been trapped in the folds of his cloak. The movement of the river was easing them slowly to the edges of the heavy fabric. One by one they bubbled out and surrendered themselves to the sky.
There was nothing he could do.
What his lily-pad cloak was losing in buoyancy it gained in weight, and slowly it was sinking, and taking him down with it. The river was already lapping at his chin and spilling over into the waiting uncloseable O.
The river brimmed against his nostrils and covered them over. At last he inhaled the cold waters deeply and sank for the second and last time. It felt like sleep. As he closed his eyes he saw against the shadows the face of Maroussia, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him hugely out of the sky, like the moon made whole.
Close by (so close!) — but also not — neither in this world, nor very far away at all — the other O — the pocketful of second chances, the waiting second mouth, the tongue of different lives — is listening to the river, listening to the rain.
63
Maroussia Shaumian found Lom’s body floating face down, lodged against a squat stone pillar of the Ter-Uspenskovo Bridge among planks and branches, lost shoes and broken packing cases. She tried to pull it into the boat but she could not. Several times she almost tipped herself into the river before she gave up and knotted a line to his leg and towed him, an inert, lifeless weight, to a place where there were stone steps in the embankment. All the time she worked, she expected the shouts, the bullets, to start.
She had found the boat — an open, clinker-built, tapered skiff, her oars neatly stowed on board — bumping against the wall at the end of Pelican Quay. Ignoring the oars, she’d crouched in the bottom and edged it slowly, hand over hand, along the house-fronts until she came in sight of Vishnik’s building, and she’d watched from the shadows as Lom was taken into the militia vessel. When the police boat left, its searchlight stabbing the night, raking darkened street frontages and swirling water, she followed it all the way to the Lodka, and moored against a telegraph pole.
Cold and wet and shivering, she waited. She could have left, but she did not. Lom had saved her twice. She thought of Vishnik, his ruined body and his terrible lonely death. She thought of her mother, shot in the back in the street. She would not let the Vlast take another. Not if she could prevent it.
When dawn began to seep across the city and other boats began to appear, she felt it would be less conspicuous to be moving, and so she started a slow patrol, circling the Lodka through flooded squares and across re-emerging canals. It was sheer luck that she saw, from the cover of a stranded fire-barge, the uniforms come out of a side door, and Lom stumbling along in the middle of them as if he was drunk. She saw his lurch for the parapet and heard the warders’ shouts and the splash when his body hit the water. But she couldn’t go to look for him straight away. She had to wait, watching the killing party linger near the bridge, shouting to each other and shining torch beams on the dark water. It was fifteen minutes before they gave up and another fifteen before she spotted the sodden hump of his back floating low in the water among the rubbish.