Peter Higgins - Radiant State

And there is something else.

He has seen it now. Resolved out of endlessness and trees it has locality. The eye of his surveillance has pinned it, and this time it is close and he can reach it.

She shows herself and he has found her.

Everything comes together in the forest, and out in the forest hunting now is his racing engine, his destroyer, his fraternal champion and his pride.

Kill them all. Kill them quickly. Do it now.

Archangel calls and his champion runs them down.

‘They were riding for the angel,’ said Lom. ‘I think we’re coming closer to where it is.’

There was strain in Kamilova’s eyes. She was watching him warily again. There was always a separateness about her: a wordless watchfulness, a lonely, withheld and self-postponing patience, doing what she must and waiting for the dark times to go.

‘It was going to kill you,’ she said. ‘Then it was like its brain exploded.’

They were back at the Heron , and the rain had passed leaving watery afternoon sunshine. Lom had wiped the dark bear blood off his face and neck but still he felt unclean. The angel-residue in his own blood was strung out taut like wires in his veins again. He didn’t like Kamilova’s scrutiny and wanted to be alone.

‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said.

He followed a game trail up to the crest of a low slope and looked down on dark green water. The trail took him down to the edge of it, a stillness fringed on the far side with dense bramble. A fallen tree dipped a leafless crown and branches like arms into the mystery of the pool. Goosander gave muted echoless mews. Lom took off his rain-damp clothes and waded out. The water, cold against his shins, was moss-coloured, icy, opaque. He felt the thick cool of silt sliding between his toes and up over his feet. It felt like darkness.

After a few steps the lake bottom fell away steeply and he slipped, half-falling and half-choosing, into a sudden clumsy dive. The water closed over his head. How deep it might be he had no idea and didn’t care. Bands of iron cold tightened round his skull and bruised ribs, squeezing out breath. He opened his eyes on nothing but pale thickened green light.

Floundering to the surface he swam with cramped clumsy strokes, arms and legs working through the cold. Broken twigs and fallen leaves littered the surface: he nosed his way through.

Once the first shock of the chill subsided, he immersed himself in the wild forgetful freedom of swimming in the forest, washing the sourness of killing and angel from his skin and hair. He took breath and dived for the bottom, reaching his arms down for it, but couldn’t touch it, and surfaced, gasping. Floating on his back he watching the canopy of trees turning slowly overhead against the heavy sky.

He swam until the icy bitter cold of the water returned to the attack, then hauled himself up onto the bole of the fallen tree and lay there for a long time, face down, the bark’s hard roughness against his skin, the air of the forest resting against his naked back. Lazy and reluctant to move he watched the pool opaque and green below him.

When he was dry he crawled back along the tree and swung himself down onto the bank, and she was there, her eyes brushing across him, bright and dark and happy.

Maroussia.

She put her hand against his chest, tracing the rise and hollow of his ribs. His hands and face were weather-brown, his body pale. The warmth of her fingers was on him. He smelled the sweetness of her breath.

‘Is it you?’ he said. ‘Not a shadow but you?’

‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘Your skin is rough and hard and cool like stone.’

She looked into his face and opened her mouth a little, and he kissed her, his arms around her shoulders awkwardly, uncertain. She tasted like hedge berries, and she leaned in and pressed herself against him. The scent of woodsmoke and forest in her hair. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly gently.

‘Do you feel our child moving?’

For him it had been six years and more, but for her hardly any time at all.

It was late afternoon when Lom and Maroussia walked together back down the trail to the river where the Heron was moored.

Eligiya Kamilova received Maroussia with quiet reserve. She was generous and fine, but Lom could see her withdrawing. She was displaced again: having done her part she was finding herself edged to the margin of other people’s reunions and plans. Lom found himself feeling slightly sorry for her. It was guilt that he felt, he knew that–he’d brought her here, he’d used her as his guide–but it was the path she’d chosen. The solitary traveller. She’d wanted to come. The forest was her travelling place, but she’d come back and found it an emptier, harsher place than before.

Kamilova had caught a fish in her trap. A pike. She shared it with them. The smoke of the cooking fire hung about in the still air of evening, clinging and acrid. It stuck to their skin. The flesh of the pike tasted muddy and was full of fine sharp bones. Not pleasant eating. Maroussia said little and ate less.

The sliver of an ominous new hill had appeared above the trees in the west. It glowed a dull rust-red in the last of the westering sun, and above it dark shapes circled like flocks of flying birds.

‘I’m sorry, Eligiya,’ said Maroussia.

Kamilova frowned.

‘Sorry? Why?’

‘A bad thing is coming and I am bringing it here. I show myself now to draw it out before it gets any stronger. It may already be too strong.’

Maroussia turned to Lom. She was almost a stranger, fierce and strong. Her hair was black, her eyes were dark and wide. She was carrying his child. He hadn’t even begun to absorb the truth of that yet.

‘Are you ready?’ she said.

‘Ready for what?’ said Lom, but he knew.

He’d felt it coming for some time: the pulsing rhythm of blood in his head was the rhythm of a heavy, pounding footfall crashing through the trees, growing louder and coming closer. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as he felt the touch of the avid hunter’s tunnel-narrow gaze. He saw that even Kamilova was feeling it now: a faint drumbeat in the ground underfoot.

‘Kantor is coming,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m sorry. There is no time to prepare. It has to be now. Kantor is here.’

‘Oh,’ said Lom. ‘Oh. Yes. I see.’ A sudden sick lurch of fear. ‘OK. Well there’s no time like now.’

The mudjhik stepped out from the grey twilit birches, dull red and massive, balanced and avid and bulky and strangely beautiful and as tall as the trees it stood among. Its eyes–it had eyes–took them in with a gaze of confident relaxation and intelligence. Its expression was almost elegant and almost amused. It had grace as well as size and power. It was a perfectly realised angel-human giant of stone the colour of rust and blood and bruises, a new thing come into the world, and it had the face of a hundred million posters and portraits and photographs. The face on the statue at the top of the Rizhin Tower. The face of Papa Rizhin. The face of Josef Kantor.

And when it spoke it had the voice of Kantor too, warm and expressive, loud and clear among the trees. You heard it in your head and you heard it in your ear. Tall as the trees, it had a tongue to speak.

‘So it is you, my Lom, my investigator, my troublesome provincial mouse, my annoyance still and always,’ said the voice and face of Josef Kantor. He looked from Lom to Maroussia. ‘And here is the trivial bitch-girl not my daughter too, my betrayer’s bastard whelp, the spill of my cuckolding. You stink of the forest like your mother did. Both of you stink of it. Well the mother is dead and I will destroy the daughter also, and the man. You run and you wriggle and you hide, you sting me and skip away, but I have you cornered now.’