There was a sharp ugly rattle of gunfire. An obscene clattering sound, flat and echoless. A sub-machine gun. Lom saw the muzzle flashes among the trees up and to the left, on the side of the path away from Maroussia. Bullet-strikes kicked up the mud, moving in a line towards the crawling, injured bulk of Aino-Suvantamoinen. A row of small explosions punched into the side of the giant’s chest from hip to shoulder, each one bursting open, sudden rose-red blooms in little bursts of crimson mist. The huge body shuddered at the impacts. Then the top of his head came off.
Lom heard Maroussia’s sigh of despair. Then the gun turned on her. A spray of bullets ripped into the trees around her, splattering the branches like heavy rain. He saw a splash of blood across her cheek, red against pale, as she fell.
‘Maroussia!’
She wasn’t moving.
No, thought Lom. Not her. No.
He began to move. He needed to get to her. He needed to draw the fire. Give her time to get into cover. If she could.
The gunfire turned towards him. He yelled and threw himself sideways into the trees, falling heavily.
Silence. The firing had stopped.
Keeping low, expecting the hail of bullets to fall again at any moment, Lom began to slither along the ground, hauling himself along on his elbows, driving forward with his knees. He felt the low mat of brambles and the roots of trees scraping his lower belly raw. He winced as a sharp branch dug into him under his belt: it felt as if it had pierced his skin and gouged a chunk from his flesh. He ignored it. He was trying to work his way up the hill to where she had fallen. Keeping his head low, he could see nothing. Where was the gunman? Waiting for him to show himself. Moving to a new position? Coming up behind him? No point in thinking any of that. Move! The only thing in his mind was reaching Maroussia. He reached the shelter of a moss-covered stump. Pushing aside a thicket of small branches, he risked a look.
Twenty yards ahead of him, Maroussia, looking dazed and lost, was trying to stand. He saw her stumble into the cover of the trees.
And then the mudjhik was free of the fallen tree and on its feet, and coming straight towards him.
Lom ran, ducking low, ignoring the thorns and brambles that slashed his face and hands until they ran wet with blood, heading for where the trees grew densest, squeezing between close-growing trunks, wading brooks. Anything that would slow the mudjhik. Anything that would give him the advantage.
The mudjhik was relentless. It would not give up. It would keep on coming. But it could not move as fast as a man through a wood. Lom could hear it behind him, crashing its way through the trees, but he was getting further ahead. Widening the gap.
Lom ran. There was nothing before this moment, nothing after it; there was only now and the next half-second after now, where he had to get to, by running as fast as he could make his body run and by not falling. The world narrowed down to one single point of clarity, the hole through which he had to pass to reach the moment on the other side of now. Behind him was the hunter. Ahead of him… calling him, wanting him as much as he wanted it… the safe hiding. The dark place. The mothering belly. The hole in the ground.
Lom hunched in the souterrain. He was sweating and shaking with cold. Thick darkness pressed against his eyes and seeped into his skin. He could smell his own blood, smeared on his hands and face; he could smell the damp earth and stone; and he could smell his own fear. Fear, and despair. Where was Maroussia? For the third time he did not know. For the third time he had left her to face her enemies alone. Vissarion Lom, protector of women. His own death would surely come and find him here. The mudjhik would sniff him out and dig. Drag him out and snap his neck. He had a little time to wait. But no hope. The souterrain was not a refuge but a trap. A dark hand reached inside his skull with stone fingers and squeezed his brain in its palm. Cruel and stupid and certain. I am coming. I will be with you soon. Again Lom felt the prickling clumsy numbness in his fingers and the gut-loosening dread. It will not be long.
He repelled the touch with all his force and slammed his mind shut against it. He had more strength than he had expected. This was something new. He felt a moment of surprise, his adversary’s mental stumble as he lost his footing, and then… silence. He was free of it.
Only when it was gone did Lom realise how long it had been there: the fear, the lack of confidence, the constant unsettling feeling of alarm and threat moving at the barest edge of his awareness. It had been with him ever since he’d woken in the giant’s isba, but it was gone at last. He’d driven it out. He was stronger than he thought. Stronger than his enemies knew.
Lom waited a moment, collecting his strength. He took stock. The hunters knew where he was, and he couldn’t keep the mind-wall in place for ever. But it was a chance. And Maroussia might be alive. She was alive. He was sure of it, though he couldn’t have said how he knew. Somehow he could feel her presence out there somewhere in the woods.
It was time to fight back.
When he was ready, Lom called back all the feelings of defencelessness and despair. He let himself be defeated, hopeless, hurt. Bleeding and weeping and broken in the dark.
It is finished. Over.
He let the one thought fill his mind.
I am finished. No more fighting. No more running. Everything hurts.
And deliberately he lowered his defences and let the mudjhik in. He felt its touch flow into his mind, and let it feel his defeat.
And then — when he had it, when he felt its triumph — Lom began to edge away within his mind.
Carefully, slowly, reluctantly, so it would feel to the mudjhik like energy and will draining away, he slipped beneath the surface of his own consciousness, retreating behind a second, inner, hidden wall he had built there. Barely thinking at all, moving by instinct only, he began to crawl away down the souterrain passage, further and deeper into the earth.
76
Maroussia watched the militia man step past Aino-Suvantamoinen’s body with relaxed, fastidious indifference. He was another uniform, another gun. After the mudjhik had lumbered off under the trees in pursuit of Lom, he had stepped out of cover. Coming for her.
He was casually confident now, the squat ugly weapon slung from his shoulder and held across his body, pointing to the ground. He stopped for a moment to look at the dead giant. A defeated humiliated hill of flesh. The carcase of an immense slaughtered cow. She could tell by the way the man held himself that he was pleased. Gratified by the demonstration of his own power. He was walking across to where she lay. Not hurrying. She was no threat to him. Simply a matter of tidiness. A job to finish neatly. An injured woman to kill, while the mudjhik hunted down the fleeing man. He was a man who had succeeded.
She saw him close up. He was bare-headed. She could see his pale, insipid face. Fine fair hair, close-cropped, boyish. A piece of angel stone in the centre of his head. Then it came to her. Like a blow to the head. Anger knotted its fingers in her stomach and pulled, tight, making her retch. It was the same man. The one who had shot down her mother was the same one who was sauntering across to her now to finish the job.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No.’
She began to crawl away towards the trees. She was not badly hurt. Splinters of wood, smashed from the trees by the machine-gun fire, had sprayed her face, leaving her stung and bleeding from small cuts, and something heavy had struck her on the back of the head, leaving her momentarily dizzy, but that was gone now. She could have stood up and tried to run, but the militia man would simply have cut her down. She wanted to draw him closer. Get him into the woods, where she could spring at him from behind a tree. Knock the gun aside. Claw at his eyes with her fingernails. She needed him close for that. Careful to make no sudden movement that might cause him to raise his gun and rake her down from where he was, she crawled with desperate slowness towards the thickets.