Peter Higgins - Radiant State

Doors in the air were opening. The skin of the water glimmered and thrilled. Promising reflections, it almost delivered. The breath of the forest crackled. It bristled. There were black trees. There were grey and yellow trees. He was watching a single ash tree at the river margin and it was watching him back, being alive.

Lom was opening up and growing stronger. He was entering a place where new kinds of thing were possible, different stories with different outcomes. He was coming home. He reached up into the low roof of cloud and opened a gap to let a spill of warmth through that made the river glitter. A moment of distraction, lost in sunlight: there were many small things among the trees–animals and birds–and they were all alive and he could feel that.

Then he became aware that Kamilova had stopped talking and was watching him. Intently. Curiously. A little bit afraid.

From the slopes of the hills and among the trees they are watched. The small boat edging upriver against the stream; the woman whose arms are painted with fading magic; the man spilling bright beautiful scented trails from the hole in his skull, tainted with dark shades of angel: all this is seen and known by watchers with brown whiteless eyes, and by things with no eyes that also see. Word passes through roots and leaves and air. Word reaches Fraiethe and the Seer Witch of Bones. Word reaches Maroussia Shaumian Pollandore.

He is coming. He is here.

Kantor-in-mudjhik runs through the endless forest, tireless, exultant and strong. The continental Vlast is behind him. He has run it, ocean to trees, without a pause.

Under the trees he has heard the voice of Archangel talking and they have sealed the deal.

I will give you body after body , says Archangel, a chain of human bodies without end, vessels for my champion son. Worthy and valid strength of my strength, bring me out of the forest and for you I will break down the doors and shatter the doorposts. For you I will raise up the dead to consume the living. I will give you armies without end, and you will carry me, speaking my voice, across the stars.

Josef Kantor in his mudjhik body likes the sound of that.

I am nobody’s son , he says, but I will be a brother .

It’s not enough, but it will do for now.

Into the forest old beyond guessing, the first place, primordial, primeval, primal, the unremembered home, fair winds carried them day after day, deeper and deeper, up the river against the stream. Trees stood silently, lining the banks, fading away in every direction into twilight and indistinction.

‘How will we find her?’ said Kamilova. ‘I mean Maroussia?’

‘We keep going in,’ said Lom, ‘and she will come to us.’

Things that find their way into the forest grow and change. They grow taller, shorter, thinner, fatter; they change colour. Each thing grows out into its true shape and becomes more itself. A dog may become more wolf-like. It unfolds like a fern.

In the forest you can’t see far or travel fast; detachment and analysis fail; you can’t see the wood for the trees. Aurochsen and wisent, woolly rhinoceros, great elk and giant sloth browse among the leaves, and the corpses of those killed in great and terrible massacres are buried under shallow earth. The labyrinth of trees is filled with travelling shadows and all the monsters of the mind. In the forest, things long thought dead may be alive and the hunter become the prey. Green pools glimmer in the shade. More is possible here.

It is hard enough to get in, but leaving, that is the labour, that is the task. The forest is receding, back into its own world. Ancient silences are withdrawing like the tide.

Nights they slept out under blankets on the deck boards of the Heron . Kamilova cut thorns to make a brake on the bank against wolves and left a slow fire burning.

‘If a big cat comes, set the thorns alight,’ she said.

‘Lynx is worse than wolf?’ said Lom.

‘Not lynx,’ said Kamilova. ‘Bigger than lynx, much bigger. Heavy as a horse, and teeth to snap your spine.’

Lom lay awake and heard the grumbling of predators in the dark, but nothing troubled them.

‘I don’t think wolves hunt in the night,’ he said.

‘You want to bet your skin on that?’

‘No.’

Kamilova took the pan of stewed rosehips off the fire and set it in the grass. Pulled her knife from her belt and wiped it carefully clean. Unwrapped the axe and did the same, and sharpened the blades of both to a clean fineness with her stone. By the time she’d done, the stewed hips were cool enough. She picked a handful out of the pan and squeezed the juices back in. Lom watched the bright redness dribble between her fingers. She threw the seed-filled pulp away and scooped another handful, working it between her palms to release as much as possible of the blood-warm liquid. By the time she’d picked the last few softened fruits out of the liquid and pressed them between finger and thumb she had the pan half-full of rich rose liquor.

‘Here,’ she said and passed the pan to Lom.

He took a sip. Without honey it was bitter enough to roughen the roof of his mouth, but it was good.

‘I know this place,’ she said, ‘but there were people here then, and fewer wolves. Everyone’s gone, but there’s somewhere nearby I’d like to see again. I’ll take you there’

‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘Tomorrow.’

Morning came quiet and cold, suppressed under low featureless skies. A drab unsettling breeze stirred brittle leaves. The forest felt shabby and grey. Snares and fish traps laid the evening before held nothing. Lom ate some berries and drank a little of the sour red rose-drink. It left him no less hungry.

The absence of Maroussia nagged at him. Her failure to come. Since they’d passed through the gap in the hills he’d felt nothing of her. Morning succeeded morning, timeless and inconsequential: a perpetual repetition of movement without progress against the narrowing river that always tried to push them back and out. The resinous taste of the air, the hungry excitement of opening up into the possibilities of the forest, was fading. Immensity and endlessness were always and everywhere the same, and he felt small and ordinary and lost. He was growing accustomed to the inexhaustible sameness of trees, and knew that he was somehow failing.

He crouched among fallen leaves, blotched and parchment-yellow and fragile, like dry pages scattered from an ageing and spine-cracked book, disordered out of all meaning. He picked up crumbling handfuls and sifted them, dealing them out like faceless cards in a game he couldn’t play, returning leaves to the infinite mat of fallen leaves, every one different and all of them the same, abundant beyond all counting, further in and further on forever, abundant to the point of absurdity. Autumn was coming in the interminable forest and there would be no numbering of the trees.

He pushed his hands down, digging through the covering of dry leaves into darkening dampness and rot and the raw deep earth beneath. The cool fungal smell. Mycelium. Earthworm. Shining blackened twig fragment and softening pieces of bark. Truffle-scented leaf rot. Fine tangled clumps of hair-like root.

Lom closed his eyes and breathed.

Trunks of trees rise separately out of the earth and each stands apart from its neighbours. We overvalue sight. In the rich dark earth the roots of all the trees of the forest are intertwined. Knotted filaments and root fibres grow around and through each other, twist each other about, intertangled and nodal, meshed and joined with furtive fungal threads, digging down deeper than the trees grow tall. Slow exchange and interchange of mineral currency. Burrowing capacitors and conductors of gentle dark electric flux and spark. You can’t say one tree ends and the next begins; it’s all one sentient wakeful centreless tree and it lives underground.