Peter Higgins - Radiant State

Lom listened to the circuitry of the earth. He felt the living angel getting stronger. The first weakening of hope. A cruel thing coming closer and the rumourous growth of fear. There was a hurt in the forest and a wound in the world. He missed Maroussia and wished she would come.

Josef Kantor embodied in mudjhik reaches the lower slopes of the Archangel hill. The ground he stands on is burning with cool fire, thrilling to the touch, and the immense body of the living angel rises in front of him, higher, far higher, than he had imagined. Hundreds of feet into the sky. Even hurt and weakened, grounded as it is, it is a thing of glowering power. It crackles with life. The mudjhik body loosens and grows light. It feeds. Archangel feeds Kantor and Kantor feeds Archangel, strength mixes with strength, distinctions blur.

Archangel separates several hundred chunks of himself and sends them into the sky to circle his top on flaggy wings. The coming of his prince deserves such glorious celebration.

Kamilova took Lom to see the place she knew. She was happy in the forest. This was where she could be who she was.

They approached through old earthworks and turf-covered stone dykes. Redoubts. Salients. Massive boulders that had been tumbled into place and now settled deep into the earth. Rooks chattered and flocked among thorn trees.

The full extent of the stronghold was invisible, immersed in trees, and it felt smaller than it was because the chambers were small. Intimate human scale. Inside was gloomy, rich with earth and stone and leaf and wood, and the river ran through it, in under the hill. The place was burrow, sett and warren. Tunnels extended into darkness, every direction and down.

Kamilova took and lit a tar-soaked torch. The flame burned slow and smoked.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This way.’

Distinctions between inside and outside, overground and underground, meant little. There were low halls with intricately carved ceilings and curving wooden walls, like the hulls of underground ships, polished and dark with age and hearth smoke, into which real living trees, their limbs and roots and branches, were interwoven and included. Chambers and passageways were floored with stone flags or compacted earth, leaf-carpeted. Older places were rotting and returning to the earth, moss and mushroom damp.

‘I’d thought there might be someone still here,’ said Kamilova. ‘Stupid, but I hoped it.’

Lom’s feeling of unease was growing.

‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ he said. ‘There’s something not right.’

On the path back to where they had left the Heron they heard riders approaching. The footfall of horses. The clanking of bridles and gear. The scuffing of many feet through mud and forest litter. No voices. There was a quiet wind moving among the trees, but Lom could hear them coming.

‘Get out of sight,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

They crouched behind low thorn and briar. There was movement visible now through the trees.

Kamilova put her face next to his ear. ‘Did they see us?’

‘I don’t know.’

He pulled off his pack and crawled forward on his belly, turning on his side to squeeze between thorn-bush stems. A root in the ground dug into him. He felt the spike of it gouging into his flesh, dragging at him. It hurt. He eased himself slowly forward across it, his face pressed close to the earth. Thorns snagged in his hair and grazed the skin of his scalp. A strand of briar hooked itself across his back. He reached back to pull it away and inched himself forward until he could see the track. He scooped a lump of earth and moss and rubbed himself with it, smearing it on his forehead and round his eyes, working it into the stubble on his face. The scent of it was strong and sour in his nose. He was sweating despite the cold.

Kamilova squeezed up next to him. The sound of her ragged breathing. He didn’t look round.

There were three riders at the front, and men walking behind, strung out and silent. Lots of men, dirty and ill dressed. More riders followed, the horses dragging long heavy bundles wrapped in cloth. The bundles were heavy, deadweight, trailing furrow-paths through the leaves on the path. The horses pulled slowly against the weight.

The riders were bulky and hooded, soiled woollen cowls shrouding their faces, their heads heavy and too large. They rode alert, scanning the trees. Lom felt the pressure of their attention pass across him. It made him feel uneasy. Exposed. He inched his way cautiously backwards under the thorn.

‘Don’t move,’ Kamilova hissed in his ear. ‘There’s one behind us.’

Lom lay on his back, face turned up, looking into the close tangle of the leafless bush. Outriders scouting the trail. Fear made his heart struggle. He wanted to breathe clear air. He forced himself to lie still and wait. Let them pass.

Long after the last sound of their passing had gone, the two of them lay without speaking under the thorns. The touch of the riders’ eyeless gaze stayed with them, a taint breath, a foulness in the mind. They listened for any sign of more following or the scout returning, and when that purpose faded they still didn’t move.

‘What were they?’ said Kamilova. She didn’t look at him but stayed lying on her back, watching a spider moving slowly among the branches.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you feel…?’

‘Yes.’

‘That wasn’t… normal. That wasn’t right.’

‘No.’

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

‘We should go,’ she said at last. ‘We should move on.’

‘Yes.’

Stiff and cold, they picked up their packs and began to walk.

‘Perhaps we should stay off the track,’ she said. ‘There might be more coming.’

‘We have to get back to the boat,’ said Lom. ‘We have to keep going.’

It began to rain. Sheets of wind-driven icy water soaking their clothes. The noise of it was like an ocean in the trees. The track led them between shallow green pools, rain-churned and murky.

Lom didn’t hear the splashing charge of the bear-man over the noise of the rain. Didn’t smell it through the rain and the mud and the drench of the leaves. But he felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision that drove the air from his lungs, crunched the ribs in his chest and hurled him off the path into the water, crashing his spine against the trunk of a beech tree.

He could not raise his arms. He could not move his legs. The water came up to his waist. Propped against the slope of the tree root, he watched the grey-hooded figure turn and come back, wading towards him through the mud-swirled green pool. Its cowl was pulled back off its head.

Lom smelled the bear-man’s hot sour breath on his face, on his wide staring eyes. He saw deep into the dark red mouth as its jaws widened to clamp on his face. The mouth reeked of angel. He observed with detached and distant surprise that half its head was made of stone.

Lom punched the side of the half-stone head with closed-up forest air, boulder heavy and boulder-hard. A swinging fist of rain and air. The bear-weighted bear-muzzled skull jerked sideways, crushed and broken and dead in a sudden mess of blood and bone.

The bear-man, the angel rider of horse, opens his mouth to scream out the shock and outrageous surprise of his death, his death out of nowhere. He is instantaneously silenced. Cerebral cortex sprayed on the air like a smashed fruit.

But the screaming instant is heard.

Archangel, O Archangel all-surveying, connected by iron filaments of Archangel mind to all the doers of his will–all the absorbed living syllables through which he gives voice, all the soldiers in the army he is building for his brother in arms Josef Kantor–Archangel hears and feels the killing of the bear and knows it for what it is. It is familiar. Anomaly and threat.