Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘Have you seen one of these before?’ she said.

Maroussia took it and turned it over in her hand. Held it up to her face and breathed the scent.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My mother had them all over the house. She said the forest brought them to her. But she… she was weak and frightened all the time. She was terrified of trees in the street. She said they waited for her and watched and followed her. She wasn’t… well.’

‘This is what the volvas, the wise women, call a solm, or a khlahv, or a bo. Sometimes they call them keys. It’s a vessel for air. It can hold and carry a breath, and the breath is the message. The voice. That one in your hand is empty now. Old and dead.’

Maroussia handed the object back.

‘What my mother had, they were messages ?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’

‘About it. Or for it.’

‘But they’re all gone now,’ said Maroussia. ‘They’re all lost. Or destroyed.’ She paused. ‘No, wait. Mother used to hide them sometimes in the apartment. Vissarion, we have to go back there. We have to go back and look.’

‘No,’ said Lom. He brought out from his pocket the bloodstained hessian bag he’d taken from her mother’s body in the street by Vanko’s. The survivor. It felt alive in his hand. Quiet and watchful. Breathing. ‘I’ve still got this.’

Maroussia snatched it from him and opened it. Brought out the knot of twigs and forest stuff. Held it up to her face. Her hands were trembling slightly. But nothing happened. Nothing came.

‘Is it still good?’ she said to Kamilova. ‘Is it OK?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘But… what do I do with it?’ Maroussia held it out to her. ‘Can you tell me?’

Kamilova shook her head.

‘Not if it’s meant for you.’

‘But I don’t know how… There’s nothing. Nothing’s happening.’

‘You have to learn that for yourself. You have to listen. Keep it with you. Hold it. Breathe it. Pay attention. Don’t push it. It’s all about openness. Wakefulness. Give it time.’

‘Time?’ said Maroussia. ‘There is no time. Time is what we haven’t got.’

Kamilova kissed Maroussia on the mouth when they left.

Maroussia said nothing when they emerged from Eligiya Kamilova’s boathouse. They walked in silence along the harbour edge and began the ascent back up towards the Ship Bastion.

Lom kept pace alongside Maroussia. Leaving her space. Letting her think. He wasn’t sure, himself, what they had learned from Kamilova. In Kamilova’s presence he’d felt the forest, its realness and closeness, its watchfulness, its urgency. But… perhaps there wasn’t anything else to know. Perhaps it wasn’t about learning, but doing. The Pollandore was in the Lodka, right in the cruel stone centre of the Vlast. Bring Maroussia to the Pollandore and… it would happen. Something would happen. Trying to learn, trying to explore, trying to figure out what she had to do when the moment came and what it might mean: that was nothing, only passing time. An avoidance strategy. A rationalisation of fear. The task was simpler than that.

Maroussia stopped and turned to face him.

‘What Kamilova said…’ she began. ‘About the people who sent the paluba having a purpose of their own, that I couldn’t know…’ She paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? None of that matters. The angel in the forest is real. The Pollandore is real. The rest of it doesn’t matter. There are only two sides, and everyone has to choose. I’m not trusting the paluba, I’m trusting myself . It’s about feeling and instinct and knowing what to do, when the time comes.’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘I guess that’s right.’

‘We have to get into the Lodka and find the Pollandore. What happens after that… that’s something else. We just have to get there.’

You can’t just walk into the Lodka, thought Lom, but he said nothing. That was his problem, not hers. Getting her inside, that was his job. What happened afterwards would be up to her.

Consider the question in its widest aspect.

The Lodka: it was where the Pollandore was, and it was where Chazia was. And Josef Kantor. The Lodka was the last place Lom had seen Kantor. Kantor was more than a terrorist. Much more. Lom didn’t fully understand Kantor’s connections with Chazia and the Lodka, but he knew that Kantor was deeply and intricately meshed in it all. That made Kantor a way in. So. Find Kantor . It was back to that.

They climbed back up the winding covered steps to the Ship Bastion and emerged into winter light. The sky was pale powder-blue, airy and vertiginous, wisped with sparse cloud-feather, achingly elsewhere, achingly high. They leaned on the parapet and looked out across the city. Mirgorod, spreading out towards the horizon under an immensity of height and air, seemed almost small. A humane settlement. Contain able. A place where people lived. The winter sun, already westering, burned with a blinding whiteness that gave no heat. There was something wrong. A buzzing in the air, an edgy vibration, like unseen engines racing. Too quiet and distant to be a sound, you heard it with your skin, your teeth, the bones of your skull.

‘Look,’ said Maroussia ‘Look.’

She was squinting towards the sun.

Lom looked but saw nothing. The sun was cold and dazzling. When he shut his eyes against it, colour-shifting after-images and shadow-filaments floated across the blood-warmth inside. When he looked again, some of the specks were still there. Strings of dots across the sun in wavering horizontal lines. Faint punctuation.

Others had stopped to watch them. Nobody spoke.

More and more rows of specks resolved out of the sun. Coming into focus. Dozens. Scores. Hundreds. Coming in pulses. Waves. Formations.

The noise escalated to a thundering, rattling roar, not from the west where Lom was looking but from behind. He jerked his head round. The aircraft was low and descending and coming straight for them. It was immense. Three fat-bellied fuselages hung from wide, thick wings. Each wing carried eight–no, ten –propellers. The fuselages were as large as ships. The bomber was so big it seemed to be suspended in the sky, an impossible motionless thing. It was descending slowly straight down onto them, onto the rock hill on which they stood. It was going to crash.

At the last moment the plane lifted its nose fractionally and roared slowly overhead. They saw its swollen triple bellies of unpainted metal. Lettering on the underside of its wings. The insignia of the Archipelago. It was low enough to see faces looking down from its windows as it trundled over them and sailed out across the city, its engine noise climbing to a roar beyond hearing, its array of speed-blurred propellers chopping and grinding the air.

A trail of insignificant silver shapes spilled from its triple belly mouths.

A pause. A suspended moment. Maroussia’s hand was gripping Lom’s arm so tight it hurt.

The bombs splashed into the upturned face of the city and flowered into small blossoms of flame and smoke puffs.

And then came the sound.

The world lurched sickeningly and Lom’s stomach with it. A new door had opened and everything was utterly changed.

Wave after wave of huge triple-fuselaged bombers unloaded their cargoes. The engines roared relentlessly and the detonation-thuds burst in short fast shattering series. Fat columns of black oily smoke rose everywhere and drifted in low, thickening banks. The smell of it reached them: an industrial smell, like engine sheds and factories. Hot metal and soot.

Higher in the sky, smaller wasp-like aircraft circled, buzzed and droned, drawing tracks and spirals of vapour trail.