And then they were ready. But for what? He found he could sense the hunters outside in the darkness. They were out there watching. Waiting for dawn, presumably, a better killing light, and that would come soon. Lom considered their options for defending the isba, or getting to their boat, or escaping into the woods; but without weapons there were none. They were caught. Helpless.
Aino-Suvantamoinen stepped across to the great iron stove, pressed his belly against it and, stooping slightly, embraced it. The isba filled with the smell of damp wool singeing as the giant grunted, lifted the entire stove off the ground, spilling red embers against his legs, and carried it, staggering, a few paces sideways. The stove had been standing on a threadbare rug with an intricate geometrical pattern, much worn away and scarred by spills of ash and charcoal. The giant kicked the rug aside to reveal an area of rough planks. He knelt and fumbled at it, trying to get a grip with his huge fingers, then leaned back and pulled. The area of floor came up in his hands, releasing a chill draught of air that smelled of damp earth and stone. A patch of darkness opened like the cool mouth of a well.
‘Go down,’ he said. ‘Quickly!’
‘You want us to hide down a pit?’ said Lom.
‘Not a pit. A tunnel. The old lake people built souterrains. Follow the passageway until you find a side opening to the right. That will bring you out in the woods behind the enemy. When you are past them, then you run.’
‘What about you?’ said Maroussia.
‘I don’t fit down there.’
‘So…?’
‘So I will destroy our enemies if I can.’
‘You can’t fight a mudjhik,’ said Lom. ‘Not even you.’
‘There are ways,’ said the giant.
‘You can run too,’ said Maroussia. ‘You don’t have to fight. Not for us.’
The giant didn’t reply. He lit a lamp from the stove embers and handed it to Lom. His face in the flickering light looked mobile, distorted and strange.
‘You must be quiet,’ he said, ‘or you will alert the enemy. And you must go now.’ He knelt and scraped a heap of compacted earth from the isba floor and scooped it into the stove, dousing the flames and burying the embers. In the near-darkness they heard the swish of the entrance covers and knew that he was gone.
The souterrain passageway was narrow and low. Lom, stooping, the lamp flickering in his hand, went first. The walls and roof of the passage were lined with rough wet blocks of stone. The floor was of damp compacted earth. The feeling of immense weight above their heads, pressing down and pressing in sideways against the passage walls, was oppressive. Unignorable. It seemed impossible that there should be underground constructions at all in such a place of soft and shifting, saturated ground, but the tunnel they were following was evidently old. Perhaps even ancient. It had survived. Lom led the way forward as quickly as he could.
They felt the rush of scorching air almost before they heard the explosions. The surge extinguished the lamp in Lom’s hand. The concussions themselves, when they came, were muted, abbreviated, like heavy slabs being dropped from a height, and it took them a moment to realise what they had heard.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Lom. ‘Grenades. He’s got grenades.’
There was a longer, liquid-sounding, sliding slump, another rush of hot air, then silence and profound darkness. The tunnel had collapsed behind them.
‘Keep going,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m right behind you. Don’t stop.’
Lom edged forward, his right hand on the rough stone wall to feel his way along, his left hand stretched out ahead of him. The darkness was total. More than the simple absence of light, it was a tangible presence. It closed in around them and pushed against them, touching their faces with soft insistent fingers, pressing itself against their eyes, feeling its way into their nostrils, the whorls of their ears, slipping down their throats when they opened their mouths to breathe, thick with the rich and oppressive smell of being underground.
Lom kept moving. He had to push his way through the insistent jostling darkness, filled with the presence of the long-departed souterrain builders, alert, curious and resentful. He felt the hairs rising along the back of his neck.
There was nothing to measure their progress by, nor the passage of time, except the sound of their own bodies moving and breathing. Raw root-filled earth and rock were all around them now, just the other side of this thin skin of stone. This flimsy, permeable wall. The wall was nothing. Negligible. With one push he could put his hand through it and make an entrance for the slow ocean of mud. Why not? Mud was only a different air. They could breathe it, if they wanted to, like the earthworms did. They could swim through it, slowly, working their limbs through the viscous, slow-yielding, supportive stuff. They could do that. If they wanted to.
‘Vissarion?’ Maroussia’s voice reached him from somewhere far away. ‘Why have we stopped?’
He had lost the wall. He had taken his hand off it. When? Sometime. He waved his arms to left and right, over his head, and encountered nothing.
‘Can you feel the wall?’ he said.
‘What wall?’ she hissed.
‘Either side. Any wall. Can you?’
‘No.’
‘Shit.’
Think. Figure it out.
They must have come into some larger chamber that the giant hadn’t mentioned. He would have assumed they’d have the lamp.
He was standing on the very edge of a bottomless pit. A narrow tapering well. One more step… any step…
No. It was a tunnel not a cave. They were not lost, only disoriented. Taking a deep breath he turned to his right and began to walk steadily forward. Four or five paces, and he barked his knuckles against the cold damp stone. Its roughness was familiar now, and comforting.
There was another concussion. It made the ground sound hollow, and it seemed to have come from just above their heads. Then the ground shook again. And again. A rhythmical pounding that was obviously not grenades, not this time. Trickles of cold stuff fell across their faces and shoulders in the darkness. It might have been earth or water or a mixture of both. The pounding stopped, and a regular scraping took its place.
‘It’s the mudjhik,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s found us. It’s trying to dig us out.’
Lom felt the mudjhik’s presence. Felt the pleasure it was feeling. The anticipation. It would haul them out of the earth like rabbits. Burst their heads between its thumbs, one by one.
‘Keep moving!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Come on! There’s no point waiting here till it gets through.’
Yes, thought Lom, but which way? He felt sour panic welling up at the back of his throat.
Which way?
His eyes were stretched wide, straining to see in the absolute dark that pressed in against them. When he realised what he was doing, he closed them.
We are too rational, he thought. We overvalue sight.
‘Get low!’ he hissed. ‘Lie down and get out of the airflow. And keep still.’
‘Lie down?’ said Maroussia.
‘Just do it.’
Lom breathed deeply, concentrating on the air around them, ancient and cold and thickened and still. Almost, but not entirely, still. The hole in his head was open, and he was open with it. He could feel the air circulating slowly in a hollow space, and he let himself ride with it, feeling its moves and turns. There was a current eddying slowly towards a gap in the wall. Another passageway. Sloping gently upwards towards an opening into the world outside. In the darkness he crossed directly to Maroussia and took her hand.