Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

A giant was sitting on the edge of the wharf, studying the aircraft with frank curiosity. He caught the line Gretskaya threw up to him and looped it neatly round a stump. Lom, stiff and awkward after nine hours cramped into the tiny cockpit, hauled himself up the rusting iron ladder and stood a little unsteadily, relishing the stability of the heavy weathered planking under his feet. He breathed deeply. The cold prickled the back of his nose. It was much colder here than Mirgorod, and the sky was bigger. The air smelled of grasslands and smoke and river mud and the resinous tang of cut timber. It flushed the staleness and engine fumes from his lungs.

He glanced across at the giant and nodded.

‘Where do you come from in that?’ the giant said. His accent was thick. Consonants roughened and elided. Vowels formed deeper in the back of his throat than a human larynx allowed.

‘Mirgorod,’ said Lom.

The giant considered him for a while. Though he was sitting with his legs over the edge of the jetty, his massive head was level with Lom’s. His thick hair was tied back in a pony tail and the dark glossy skin of his face was covered with an intricate pattern of tattoos. A lacy knotted profusion of thorns and leaves and berries, stained brown and purple like bramble juice, spread up into the roots of his hair and wound down his neck, disappearing inside his shirt. His eyes were large as damsons, bright damson-black, and showed no whites at all.

‘I heard Mirgorod is burning,’ he said.

‘The people are getting out,’ said Lom, ‘those that can. Like us. The government is moving. There is to be a renewal in the east. The Vlast reborn in Kholvatogorsk.’

The giant shrugged and spat into the sea.

‘And where do you go?’ he said. ‘East also?’

‘North,’ said Lom.

The giant stiffened, suddenly alert and wary. His nostrils flared. He was looking past Lom at something behind him. Lom glanced back. Florian had appeared at the top of the ladder, wearing his astrakhan hat.

‘You keep wild company,’ the giant muttered, ‘for a Mirgorod man.’

Lom and Florian left Gretskaya to secure the cockpit and sort out the refuelling of the Kotik.

‘We must restore our spirits,’ said Florian, setting off towards the town. ‘Coffee, I think. Cherry schnapps. Pastries. Honey.’

Lom looked sceptically at the subsiding weather-bleached frontages. Cherry schnapps and pastries?

Slensk was a timber town. Timber was the only trade, and all the buildings were made of wood–old, warped, much repaired and weather proofed with tar. Boardwalks were laid across mud, woodsmoke leaked from tin chimneys. There were as many giants as humans in the streets of Slensk. Giants were the timber trade. They came out of the forest hauling barges with their shoulders or riding herd on thunderous rafts of red pine logs: down the Yannis, across Lake Vitimsk, then the Northern Kholomora to the sea. The logs were boughs and branches only, never entire trunks, though they were thicker, stronger and heavier than whole trees of beech or oak. When the giants had delivered their charges, some stayed in Slensk and laboured in the sawmills, where they hefted timbers five men couldn’t shift, and some travelled onward with the seagoing barges or drifted south and west, itinerant labourers, but most walked back to the forest. Giants tended to observe human life from a height, detached and unconcerned, indifferent to detail. They went their own way and rarely got involved. City people treated them with a mixture of fear and contempt, which bothered the giants, if they noticed it at all, about as much as the scorn of cats. But the giants were noticing Florian. They watched him warily. They bristled.

On a bleak corner a door stood open in a lopsided old house. A tin sign read PUBLIC ROOM. You ducked under a low beam to get in, and stepped down into a room of long benches and sticky tables, wet muddy floorboards, a log stove and a fug of strong tobacco. No coffee, no cherry schnapps. Florian ordered for both of them: big wooden bowls of cabbage soup with blobs of sour cream dissolving in the middle, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of birch liquor and two glasses. The bottle was brown and dusty. LIGAS DARK BALZAM . The thick black liquor burned Lom’s throat. It left a thick oily film down the inside of the tumbler. At the next table a group of seamen were playing cards.

Florian took one of the boiled eggs from the plate and crushed it gently between finger and thumb until the shell cracked. He began to remove the broken pieces one by one.

‘The giants are bothered by you,’ said Lom.

‘Are they?’ said Florian.

He finished peeling the egg, and held it up to examine it in the light. It was shiny white and elliptically perfect.

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘You make them nervous.’

Florian tossed the peeled egg into the air, and with an impossibly fast movement seemed to lean forward and snap it out of the air with his jaws. He swallowed the egg whole. It was over in a fraction of a second, almost too fast to see. It was the most inhuman gesture that Lom had ever seen a human make. Only Florian was not human of course.

Florian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘And what about you, Vissarion?’ he said. ‘Do I bother you?’

‘Yes,’ said Lom. ‘Absolutely.’

‘I see,’ said Florian. ‘Well. OK.’ He took a sip of birch liquor, made a sour face and sat back as if he’d made an incontrovertible point.

Gretskaya turned up at the bar half an hour later, her sheepskin rain-soaked, her thick curly hair heavy with water.

‘You tracked us down,’ said Florian.

‘Where else would you be? There is nowhere else. Give me some of that.’ She picked up Florian’s balzam glass and emptied it, then slid in alongside Lom on the bench. ‘There’s heavy weather coming in from the north. It reached Garshal this morning, bad enough that they telephoned a warning to the pier head here. That’s not normal. We’ll stay here tonight and let it blow through, and start again in the morning.’

‘We could go east,’ said Lom. ‘Follow the river to Terrimarkh, like you said. Keep south of the weather.’

Gretskaya shook her head.

‘I will not risk the Kotik over that country,’ she said. ‘It is a wilderness. Bad weather in daylight over the ocean is one thing. Bad weather at night over 250,000 square miles of moss and rocks and scrub is something else again. But…’ She paused and frowned and looked across the room. A corporal of gendarmes had ducked in under the low doorway. He was standing at the edge of the room, letting his eyes adjust to the light.

When he saw them he came across. He was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, narrow-shouldered and wide-hipped. A velvet moustache, a full moist lower lip, a roll of softness swelling over his belt. The holster on his hip looked big and awkward on him.

‘You are the aviators?’ he said. ‘That is your seaplane at the jetty? The Beriolev Mark II Kotik?’

‘It is,’ said Gretskaya.

‘And you are the pilot?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are required to register a flight plan with the harbour authorities. This is your responsibility, yet no such plan is registered.’

‘I don’t have a plan. Not yet. We were just discussing that. There is a problem with the weather.’

The boy was staring at Lom and Florian.

‘And these are your passengers?’ he said. ‘Two men?’

‘As you see.’

‘Cargo?’

‘None.’

‘This can be checked. The aircraft will be searched.’

‘There is no cargo. It is a passenger flight.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘I am exploring possibilities in the timber business,’ said Lom. ‘Naturally, we came to Slensk.’