The image of her mother dead came vividly into her head. Another slack and ragged body lying in the pool of its own leaking mess. That was three of them. Aino-Suvantamoinen. Vishnik. Mother. Just three among many of course: the Vlast was heaping up the corpses of the dead in great hills all across the dominions, tipping them into pits with steam shovels and bulldozers, and no one was counting. Soon she would be another.
She was not going to make it to cover. Her chance was no chance at all. In less than a minute — in seconds — he would do it. It was his job. His function. He was an efficient man, and even here in the woods the day belonged to efficient men. She was about to get up and run, knowing it would only hasten the end, when she heard him cry out in anger behind her. The noise of his gunfire shattered the silence that had settled on the morning. But no bullets struck her.
She looked back. For a second she thought he had been surrounded by bees. Little black insects were swarming all over him and he was firing wildly, the gun held one-handed while he tried to protect his face with the other and beat the bees away. Only it wasn’t bees. It was leaves and pieces of twig and thorn. He was at the centre of a wildly spinning vortex of wind. The woman-shaped column of air that she had glimpsed earlier was upon him. Embracing him with her arms of wind. The hunter was panicking, blinded, shouting in anger and fear, lurching from side to side, trying to punch the wind away, firing his gun at the air that was assaulting him.
Maroussia could see, as he could not yet, that the wind-woman was losing her strength. Dissipating. The man was keeping his feet. The wind-woman who had brought down huge trees on the mudjhik could not even floor him now. She was exhausted. But she had done enough. She had made time. Maroussia ran.
She pushed her way through the undergrowth, following a path she hoped was taking her back to the isba. It wound between trees and turned aside round boulders. Sometimes it failed altogether, and she had to squeeze between close-growing trees until she found it again. Or found a different path. There was no way of telling. She might have been doing no more than following random trails made by wild animals. She had a vague notion of where the isba lay, but no way of knowing whether she could trust her sense of direction in this world of moss and leafless branches and strange hummocks in the ground.
The wind-woman had given her time. She should use it. She stopped running. Stood. Listened. Heard the sound of her own ragged breathing, the beating of her heart, the air moving through the trees — a sound as ancient and constant as the sea. She rested her hand on the smooth grey skin of a young beech tree. Trying to feel the life in it. She could feel nothing, but she imagined the tree welcomed the effort. She felt that maybe the warm touch of her palm had quickened it somehow. Imagination. But it was a good thought anyway, her first good thought in a long time. Progress. The territory would help her if she let it. Her pursuer would not think like that.
Once more she followed the smell of burnt wood and bone and wool to the remains of the isba. Much of the whalebone framework had fallen, but a few blackened lengths stuck upwards out of the mess. Heaps of rug and fur still smouldered, clotted and blackened and ruinous. The smell of it caught at the back of her throat. The iron stove was canted sideways, heat-seared and filthy with ash and soot. Some of its tiles had fallen away. It looked diminished and pathetic. Everything looked smaller now. There had been so much room inside the isba when she was in it, but the burnt scar it had left on the ground seemed too small to have contained so much space. Maroussia had seen plots like this in Mirgorod, sites where condemned houses had been cleared away and new ones not yet built. The gaps they left always seemed too small. All interior spaces were bigger than their exterior. Living inside them made it so.
The Sib was still tied to the little jetty on the creek at the edge of the clearing where Aino-Suvantamoinen had brought it the day after they arrived, while Lom had lain lost in his fever and she had sat with him. She considered untying the skiff, climbing in and drifting away. But Lom was out there somewhere in the woods. Perhaps not dead. Perhaps the mudjhik had not found him.
What would the hunter do? Come here of course. Check the isba. Check the Sib. Maybe he was watching her now from the trees. Maybe the mudjhik was there. No. Not that. They would not wait. They would attack immediately. They were not here yet. But they would come.
Think.
The territory will help you, if you let it.
The hunter would come here. He would walk where she had walked. Cross the ground that she had crossed. Stand on the jetty where she had stood, to look down into the boat. Sooner or later, he must do that. How much time did she have? Perhaps hours. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps none.
Near the isba was a neat stack of Aino-Suvantamoinen’s fishing gear, untouched by the fire. A hauled-out salmon trap. A mud-sled. Leather buckets for cockles. And, leaning neatly against a stack of firewood, a shaft of wood thicker than her arm and as long as she was tall, with a flat metal blade like a long, narrow spade, lashed firmly to one end. She tested the blade edge. It was sharp on both sides and at the end. She had seen implements like this before, in the whalers’ harbour. Flensing tools, used to slice long ribbons of flesh from porpoises and small whales as they hung from hooks. This was the same, but bigger, of a thickness and weight for the giant to heft. Unwieldy for her. But it was all she had.
The territory will help you, if you let it.
There was a little inlet by the jetty, where a stream flowed into the creek. The ground all around it was flat, grassy, empty but for a few saplings all the way back to the isba and the wood’s edge. But the bank of the inlet was undercut by the stream, creating an overhanging ledge a couple of feet above a small expanse of soft, grey, semi-liquid mud. Maroussia threw a stone out onto the mud and watched it slowly settle for half its depth into the slobs.
She threw the heavy flensing blade after the stone, marking its position by a large bluish tussock of rough grass. Then she took off her clothes. All of them. They would be useless for what she intended; they would only hamper her movements. Slow her down.
She shivered. The touch of the wintry morning raised tiny bumps on her skin. She would be colder soon, much colder, but that was nothing. She could ignore it. Rolling her clothes into a bundle she dropped them into the bottom of the boat and threw a tarpaulin over them. Then she went back to the overhanging bank and slipped carefully down onto the mud within reach of where the blade had sunk almost out of sight. She pressed it down with her foot until the mud closed over it.
Maroussia knelt on the mud. Her knees sank immediately into the chilly ooze. Its touch was soft and slightly gritty against her skin. She began to scoop out a narrow channel the length of her body, plastering the mud over herself. Water began to puddle in the bottom of the shallow trench. But she couldn’t cover herself entirely with the mud. She couldn’t reach her back. There was no time. She lay down in the hollow she had made and rolled, covering every inch of her pale skin with the cold grey mud. Rubbing it into her hair and over her face. She lay flat, trying to wriggle her body down into it as much as she could, until she was firmly bedded in. Lying still, she could feel herself sinking slowly deeper as the mud opened to take her down. Gradually she felt the cold softness rising higher. She had chosen a place where a notch in the bank gave her a view of the jetty ten feet away. It would have to do. She waited. The hunter would come.