‘That I do not know.’
‘I have to find it,’ said Maroussia. ‘I can’t stay here. Time is running out.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to do when I find it. I don’t understand.’
‘Understanding is not the most important thing. Understanding never is. Doing is what matters.’
The giant turned away and sat down in a corner to concentrate on his meat, as if he had said all he would say. It was like talking to a thinking tree, or a hill, or the grass, or the rain.
‘What exactly is that stuff you’re eating?’ said Maroussia.
‘Old meat,’ the giant said. ‘The marsh preserves. Trees come up whole after a thousand years. This meat… I put it in, I leave it, I find it again. It tastes good.’
‘What kind of meat?’
He held the chunk at arm’s length, turned it round, inspected it.
‘No idea.’ He took another bite. Then he laid it aside and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let us walk.’
Maroussia looked at Lom, sleeping on the stove.
‘What about him?’ she said. ‘Will he be all right on his own?’
‘No harm will come today.’
Maroussia walked in silence beside the giant. The floods had receded during the night, revealing a wide alluvial land, a cross-hatch of creeks and channels punctuated by rocky outcrops, islands and narrow spits of ground. Reed beds. Salt marsh. Sea lavender and samphire. Withy, carr and fen. There were stretches of water, bright and dark as rippled steel. Long strips of pale brown sand, crested with lurid, too-green, moss-coloured grass. Reaches of soft, satiny mud. Wildfowl were picking and probing their way out on the mud. Maroussia knew their names: she had watched them rummaging on the muddy riverbanks near her home. Curlew, plover, godwit, redshank, phalarope. The quiet progress of geese at the eelgrass. A kestrel sidled across the sky: a slide, a pause, a flicker of wings; slide, pause, flicker of wings.
This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood-ash and fallen leaves.
‘This is a beautiful place,’ Maroussia said. ‘It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we’re so near to the city. I didn’t know. I never came this far.’
‘It will be winter soon,’ the giant said. ‘Winters are cold here. The birds are preparing to leave. In winter the snow will lie here as deep as you are tall. The water freezes. Only the creatures that know how to freeze along with it and the ones who make tunnels beneath the snow can live here then.’
‘But it’s not so cold in Mirgorod,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s only a few versts away.’
‘No. It is colder here.’
‘What do you do when the winter comes?’ said Maroussia.
‘When the ditches freeze and the marshes go under the snow I will sleep. It will be soon.’
‘You sleep through the winter like a bear? The giants in Mirgorod don’t do that.’
‘Their employers do not permit it. They are required to work through the year, though it shortens their lives.’
The giant fell silent and walked on. Maroussia began to notice signs of labour. The management of the land and water. Heaps of rotting vegetation piled alongside recently cleared dikes. Saltings, drained ground, coppiced trees. Much of it looked ancient, abandoned and crumbling: blackened stumps of rotting post and plank, relics of broken staithes and groynes, abandoned fish traps. The giant paused from time to time to study the water levels and look about him, his great head cocked to one side, sniffing the salt air. Sometimes he would adjust the setting of some heavy mechanism of wood and iron, a winch or a lock or a sluice gate.
They stopped on the brink of a deep, fast-flowing ditch. The giant stared into the brown frothing surge that forced its way across a weir.
‘The flood is going down,’ the giant said. ‘Every time the floods come now, the city builds its stone banks higher. But that is not the way. The water has to go somewhere. If you set yourself against it, the water will find a way, every time.’ He stooped for a moment to work a windlass that Maroussia hadn’t noticed among the tall grass. ‘I tried to tell them,’ the giant continued when he had done his work. ‘When they were building the city, I tried to tell them they were using too much stone. They made everything too hard and too tight. You have to leave places for the water to go. But I couldn’t make them listen. Even their heads were made of stone.’
‘You remember Mirgorod being built?’
‘I was younger then. I thought I could explain to them, and if I did, then they would listen. They tried to drive me out, and every so often even now they try again.’ He grinned, showing big square teeth. Incisors like slabs of pebble. Sharp bearish canines. ‘I let them lose themselves.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The marshes are bigger than you think, and different every day. Every tide brings shift and change. All possible marshes are here.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You do.’
Maroussia hesitated. ‘If you remember the city when it was being built—’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘—then you would remember the time before? You remember the Pollandore?’
‘You don’t need to remember what is still here.’
Maroussia hesitated.
‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to leave Vissarion. He helped me.’
‘You should not leave him,’ said the giant. ‘He is important too.’
‘What do you mean?’
The giant stopped and looked down at her.
‘I don’t know, and neither does he. But it is on the river, and the rain likes him. That’s enough.’
‘But what if he never wakes up?’ said Maroussia. ‘Or he wakes up but he isn’t… right. He almost drowned, and there’s that hole, that terrible hole, in his head.’
‘He is not hurt,’ said the giant. ‘At least, his body is not. But he doesn’t know how to come back.’
‘I don’t understand that either.’
‘I can fetch him back, if you want me to. Tonight. After dark. When the day is over. Your choice.’
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it.’
68
Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom lies face down, floating on the glass roof of the sea. He presses his face against the water as if it were a pane of glass. Looking down into clarity. A landscape unrolls beneath him.
Time is nothing here.
This is the drowned, memorious land. Mammoths’ teeth, the bones of bear and aurochs and the antlers of great elk litter the sea’s bed. The salt-dark leaf mould of drowned forests. It is a woodland place. Lom sees the sparrowhawk on the oak’s shoulder and he sees the bivalves browsing the soft stump’s pickled meat. Sea beasts move across the floor of it. Their unhurried footfalls detonate quiet puffballs of silt as they go, slow without heaviness, shoving aside fallen branches, truffling for egg-purse, flatworm and urchin, their eyes blackened like sea beans and gleaming in the half-light.
Time is nothing here.
Except… something touches him. The merest graze of an eye in passing. An alien gaze, cold and empty, vaster far than the sea, star-speckled. It passes away from him.
And pauses.
And flicks back.
And takes him in its grip.
Lom closes himself up like a fist, like a stone in the sea, like an anemone clenching close its crop of arms, like a hermit crab hunching into its shell. He wants to be small. Negligible. He wants to pull himself tight inside and withdraw or sink out of sight. But it is hopeless. He knows the touch of the angel’s eye for what it is.