Peter Higgins - Radiant State

Kantor-in-mudjhik took a pace forward and spread its arms wide, arms with a suggestion of muscular flow. Fists opened flexing fingers. It had fingers. Thick stubby fingers. Josef Kantor’s hands.

‘I’m going to make quite a mess. Dog crows will clean it up.’

While the mudjhik Kantor spoke, Lom felt the dark electric pressure of angel senses passing across him, probing and examining. The touch of it, obscene and invasive, brought a surge of anger and hatred, a knot of iron and stone in his belly like a fist.

The mudjhik stopped mid-stride and gave a bark, a sudden laugh of surprised delight. Its blank pebble eyes glittered with warmth and pleasure.

‘And there is a child!’ the voice of Kantor said. ‘How perfect is that? Good. Let me kill it too. Let it all end now, and then I will take the blustering bastard angel down and be on my way out of these trees and get my world back. This triviality has gone on long enough.’

Lom felt surge after surge of anger and desperation and the wired strength of his own angel taint welling up, overbrimming and bursting walls inside him. The taste of iron, a hot suffusion in the blood. He was the violence. The smasher. The fist. He was defender. He was bear.

That was the secret of his birthing. Fathered by a man-bear in the deeps of the forest, he was the blade-toothed muzzle, the gaping tearing snout, the heavy carnivore with heavy paws to break necks. He felt himself unfurling into bear and killing, and let it come. Let it come! Barriers and frontiers dissolving, he was coming into the myth of himself, he was the man-bear with angel in his blood.

Lom felt the power of the angel substance tugging at his mind, a hungry undertow pulling and hauling him out of his body, dizzying and disorientating. The forest sliding sideways. Peripheral vision darkening. Connection with reality slipping away.

It wasn’t Kantor doing that, it was the thing his mudjhik body was made of.

Lom didn’t resist. He threw himself into the pulling of the current and went with it into the mudjhik, leaving his soft body fallen behind, taking the war onto Kantor’s own ground to kill him there.

All power is done at a price, but the price is not paid by those who wield it. It is paid by the victims. Kantor was human and he was not, and there was an end to it.

Lom in the mudjhik found Kantor there and fell on him, tearing and snarling, a blood-blind frontal killing assault of unwithstandable fierceness. To end it quickly before Kantor could react.

Lom hit a wall.

The wall of Kantor’s will. Impregnable will. A hardened vision that could not be changed but only broken, and it would not break. Lom could not break it.

The force of his attack skittered sideways, ineffectual, like cat’s claws against marble slab. It wasn’t a defeat. The fight didn’t even begin.

He felt the gross stubby fingers of Josef Kantor picking over his fallen, winded body. Ripping him open and rummaging among the intimate recesses of memory and desire. Kantor’s voice was a continual whisper in his dissolving mind.

I am Josef Kantor, and what I will to happen will happen. I am Josef Kantor, and I am the strongest and the hardest thing. I am the incoming tide of history. I am the thing you hate and fear and I am stronger than you. You fear me. I am Josef Kantor and I am inevitable. I am the smooth and uninterruptible voice. I always return. I am total. I am the force of one single purpose, the voice of the one idea that drives out all others. The uncertain dissolve before and forgive me as they die. I am the taker and I have killed you now.

Vissarion Lom wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t strong at all. He was dying. He could not breathe. He was dead.

And then Maroussia was in the mudjhik with him. Her quiet voice. A mist of evening rain.

The Pollandore was with her, inside her and outside her. Clean light and green air. Spilling all the possibilities of everything that could happen if Josef Kantor did not happen and there were no angels at all. The endless openness and extensibility of life without angels.

She followed him into death.

Come back with me. Come back.

Lom was in a beautiful simple place among northern trees. Pine and birch and spruce. The air was clear and fresh as ice and rain. Resinous dark green needles carpeting the earth. Time fell there in sudden windfall showers, pulses of night and day, evening and morning, always rising, always young, always new. There were broadleaf trees, and laughter was hidden in the leaves, out of sight, being the leaves.

Everything alive with wildness.

He could see trees growing: unfurling their leaves and spreading overhead, reaching towards each other with their branches until they met, a green ceiling of leaves, and all the light was a liquid fall, green as fire, that spilled through the leaves, enriching the widening silence.

Josef Kantor slammed together the walls of his will to crush Maroussia between them and extinguish her utterly, and it made no difference to her at all.

Lom saw Maroussia walking towards him, and a figure was walking beside her through the trees. It seemed at first to be walking on four legs like a deer, but it must have been a trick of the shadows, because the dappled figure appeared to rise on its hind legs as it came and he saw that it was like a woman. A perfume of musk and warmth was in the air. Her eyes were wide and brown and there were no whites in them. She was naked except that a nap of short smooth reddish-brown fur covered her head and neck and shoulders and the place between her breasts and spread down across her brown rounded belly.

‘Who are you?’ said Lom. Engage in dialogue with your visions.

She smiled, and a long warm pink tongue flickered between thin white pointed teeth.

‘You mean, what am I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what I am.’

‘Tell me.’

She opened her mouth and spilled a flow of words, green foliage tumbling, heaped up, all at once. A chord of words.

I am the vixen in the rain and the hungry sow-badger suckling in the dark earth. I am salt on your tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood.

I am scent on the air at dusk, sweet as colostrum. I am the belly-warm womb of the she-otter in the river. I am the cub-warm sleep of the she-bear under the snow. I am the noctule, stooping upon moths with the weight of cubs in my belly.

I am the she-elk, ice-bearded, nudging my calf against the wind, and I am the mouse in the barn, suckling the blind pink buds of life. I am the sour breath of the stoat in the tunnel’s darkness and I am the vixen’s teeth in the neck of the hen.

I am the crunch of carrion and I am the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet milk. I am tired and cold and wet and full of cub. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I am plastered fur and soaking hair.

I am the abdomen swollen taut as a drum and full as an egg. I am the ceaseless desperate hunger of the starveling shrew. I am the sow’s lust for the boar, the hart’s delight in the pride of the hind.

I am the fucker’s laughing and the smell of droppings in the wet grass. I am the sweetness of milk on the baby’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the hot gates opening into light.

I am all of us and I am you. I am the mirror of your coming here to meet yourself.

‘I don’t understand.’

You understand , said Fraiethe. Though understanding doesn’t matter. You are green forest and dark angel and human world, compendious and strong. Forget what you cannot do and do what you can do.

Fraiethe opened her mouth to kiss him, as she had kissed Maroussia once, though that he did not yet know.