Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

Dukhonin was coming down the corridor in carpet slippers, a small pistol in his hand. He walked right past the doorway where Bez was. Bez stepped forward and gripped the wrist of the hand that held the gun. Dukhonin jerked round, lashed out, shouted–some harsh meaningless syllable–then saw what had come for him. Bez felt him collapse inside. Smelled that he had pissed himself. The pistol dropped to the floor.

Dukhonin stood in the corridor, arms dropped to his sides, resigned, hopeless.

‘The guards?’ he said in a flat voice. ‘You killed them.’

‘Yes.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Mila?’

‘Housekeeper?’

‘Yes. The housekeeper.’

‘Yes.’

A flicker of something–sadness? grief?–passed across Dukhonin’s face and died.

‘Who sent you?’ he said. ‘Khazar? Chazia? Fohn? Not Fohn? Surely not Fohn?’

‘Chazia.’

Dukhonin nodded.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Well. Go on then. Do it.’

Bez looked at him.

‘Kill me,’ said Dukhonin. ‘Kill me, then. That’s what you’re here for. So. Do it, fuck you. I’m not going to fucking beg.’

Bez turned and started down the corridor.

‘Come,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Your car,’ said Bez Nichevoi. ‘You drive.’

The Raion Lezaryet rose out of the surrounding city of Mirgorod on a steep angular hill of raw black rock. When the Lezarye’s long wandering brought them to the shore of the Cetic Ocean in the time of the Founder’s grandson, the hill of the raion had been an island in the marsh miles distant from Mirgorod. It seemed to surge out of the ground, a solid dark thunderhead glowering against the westering evening sky, the weathered root of a larger mountain. Some of the Lezarye families travelled on, taking ship onwards to the Archipelago and never returning, but the rest stayed and settled the black rock hill. Through the centuries that followed, Mirgorod flowed out across the waterland mud in a tide of suburbs and factories, surrounding the raion, pressing up against it and spilling past across the further islands one by one. On the steep black hill people crowded together, more and more of them squeezing into the narrowing streets. Every new Novozhd brought new restrictions, new laws, new arrests, new pogroms. Why are our years always worse? the poet Yourdania asked, because every decade that came hurt more than the last.

Other peoples came to settle in the raion, building their wooden shacks and shanties along the river and against the walls of the old Lezarye houses. Kyrghs and Mazhars, Esterhaziers, Samoys from the ice grass, shadowy relicts of the proto-peoples who had lived in the Mir estuary before the Founder. Refugees from former countries that had been declared unVlast and erased from the maps. The memory of those sunken countries was written in the faces in the streets: men in long black coats and wide-brimmed hats or furs and boots and braided beards; women in embroidered linen shawls and headscarves made from the colour-stained skins of mice; stark-eyed children with beaded hair and ringlets under caps of felt, carrying little books on straps hung round their necks. No one remembered who had built the wall round the raion, or knew for certain whether it was built to keep Mirgorod out or the Lezarye in. But built it was, with one gate only, which opened through a stone arch onto the Purfas Bridge.

The pony walked slowly, head down and shoulders bunched against the weight of the cart. Maroussia hugged her carpet bag in her lap. Lom shivered and pulled his loden tighter against the cold. An early twilight was closing in and the snow was coming down in a dense steady flow, settling thickly, when they crossed the Purfas by the narrow wooden bridge and entered the raion.

The failing of the day brought the dusk bells ringing, the last circling of rooks, the first evening flicker of bats, lamps and candles in the windows. From narrow passageways came the smell of food: frying fish and spiced meat. Paprika. Onions. Livestock wandered and rooted in the cramped alleyways. There were animals in every tiny courtyard and fenced-in patch of cottage ground. Small stunted orchards, leafless and snow-covered, crouched behind walls. The chill darkening air was rich with woodsmoke and the reek of pigs, chickens and cows.

They climbed the winding streets between ravines of red-tiled roofs and smoking chimneys, jutting windows and arched doorways, weather-blackened wood and stone. Here and there angular outcrops of raw black rock shouldered the crowded buildings aside. Small cottages and wooden shanties jostled in the shadow of tall old houses with peeling louvred shutters at their windows and carved coats of arms on their gable ends: spread-winged eagles, prowling bears, running wolves. The antlers of a great elk were mounted over a courtyard arch. The raion was a place of gaps and crannies, steep angular lanes, small doorways and purposeless openings barred with rusted iron gratings.

Elena Cornelius walked ahead, leading the pony.

‘Elena’s a good woman,’ said Maroussia, breaking a long silence.

‘Yes,’ said Lom.

‘We can’t stay here. We’ll bring her trouble. She doesn’t understand. She has children. I don’t want to get her involved. This is my thing. People have died already.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Lom. ‘It happened.’

‘If anything happens to Elena, it will be my fault. I went to her. I shouldn’t have.’

‘It’ll be OK,’ said Lom. ‘It’ll be fine. It’s just for tonight.’

Wooden signs announced places of business–an estaminet, a pension, a tailor, an apothecary, a notary public–all crowded in among the houses and cottages. The names above the shops were names from lost, remembered countries, long ago obliterated under the hegemony of the Vlast. SYLWEST. NIKODEM. TILL. CZESLAW. ONUFRY. KAZIMIERZ. WHITE. The poetry of distance and difference.

Lom had known of the raion since childhood, though it wasn’t mentioned in the books of the library at the Podchornok Institute of Truth. There were students at the Institute who said that Podchornok, within sight of the endless forest, had been one of the Lezarye way forts once, in the great days of their wardership of the border, under the Reasonable Empire long ago. Some even made whispered claims to family connections with the aristocrat families of the raion, though saying so risked denunciation by the Student Council. Lom, knowing nothing of his own family and remembering nothing before the Institute, toyed with the idea that he too was one of them. But Raku Vishnik, his one true friend, had mocked him. The Lezarye, Vissarion, never gave birth to a great blond clumsy bear like you!

Nevertheless, Lom stared about him now and wondered if it felt like coming home. But it didn’t. Not for him.

Elena Cornelius pulled the cart off the road into a small yard.

‘We’ll go in this way,’ said Elena. ‘Our neighbours watch and talk as much as anyone else’s do.’

She unlocked a door in the brick wall of the yard and led them through into a small private garden. In the gathering darkness Lom caught a vague impression of the side of a tall house: walls of mossy brick and crumbling stucco, precarious vine-tangled wrought-iron balconies, steep roofs and high crowded gables. The ground floor was skirted with a glass-roofed pillared loggia. Yellow light spilled through gaps in the curtains. They rounded the corner of the house and descended a narrow flight of basement steps. Elena rattled at a storm door of pierced zinc and wire netting until it jerked open and they squeezed inside, past buckets and mops and a rack of oilskins. A dog appeared at the end of the passageway, a black and yellow coarse-haired thing, standing stiff-legged and growling at the back of its throat. It was some kind of spitz or laitka, Lom didn’t know what and didn’t care. He preferred dogs at a distance.