Peter Higgins - Wolfhound Century

He even remembered the book he had been reading. The Life of our Founder: A Version for Children. The chapter on the founding of Mirgorod. There was an illustration of the Founder on horseback, accompanied by his retinue on lesser horses. They had drawn to a halt on a low hummock surrounded by flat empty marshland, and the Founder had thrust his great sword upright into the bog.

‘Here!’ he said. ‘Here shall our city stand.’

It was a famously preposterous location for a city. The ground was soft and marshy, scattered with low outcrops of rock like islands among the rough grass and reedy pools and soft, silken mud. No human settlement within two hundred versts. No road. No safe harbour. Nothing. Yet here the Founder had said, because he could see what all his counsellors and diplomats and soldiers could not. He could see the great River Mir reaching the ocean. He could see that the river was linked by deep inland lakes and other rivers and easy portages to the whole continent to the east. He could see that to the west lay great oceans. Only the Founder could see that this lonely place was not the back end of nowhere but a window on the world.

‘We can’t build a city in this awful place!’ the Founder’s retinue cried, splashing knee-deep in the mud, their horses struggling and stumbling.

‘Yes,’ the Founder had said. ‘We can. We will.’

‘Hey, you!’

Lom was passing a small shop of some kind, still open. A man came lurching out.

‘Hey, come on. Drink with us.’

Lom ignored him.

‘Wait. That’s my cloak. Give it me, you bastard. You stole my cloak.’

Lom fingered his cosh. The length of hard rubber, sheathed with silk, rested in a specially tailored pocket in the sleeve of his shirt, near the wrist. He undid the small button that let it slip into his hand and turned.

‘You’d better go back inside,’ he said.

The man saw the weapon in his hand. Stared at him, swaying slightly.

‘Ah, fuck you,’ he said, and turned away.

Lom walked on, deeper into the city. Kantor’s city. But his city too: he would make it so. He was the hunter, the good policeman, the unafraid. He passed a bar, but it was closed and dark. Its name written on the window in flaking gold paint. The Ouspensky Angel. When, in the last years of the Founder’s reign, the first dying angel had fallen from the sky and crashed into the Ouspenskaya Marsh, it had been taken as a sign of acknowledgement and consecration. Over the centuries the stone of the angel’s limbs had been used to furnish protection for the Lodka and other great buildings, and to make mudjhiks to garrison the city, but its torso had been left to lie where it still was, visible to all newcomers as they arrived in the city. The Life of our Founder had a picture of the falling angel and a simple sketch map of ‘Mirgorod Today’ showing the cobweb of streets and canals, the city like a dark spreading net. Lom remembered how he had stared at that map, and the picture of the falling angel, that time in the library. The strange, nameless longing the pictures had stirred in him. The sense of possibilities. Purposes. The adventures that life could hold.

And then Lom remembered…

… now, for the first time…

He had forgotten… for a quarter of a century…

… when he was reading that book, looking at that picture, imagination stirring

… he remembered…

… the hand ripping aside the curtain from the library window and the hate-filled face stuck into his, the sour breath, the cruel hand snatching the book from his hand, the voice screeching at him.

‘Here you are, you vicious little bastard! Now you’re caught, you evil piece of shit!’

The claw-hand grabbed him by the neck, fingernails gouging his skin, and hauled him out of the window seat. He fell hard, down onto the library floor.

Lom stopped in the middle of the street, pausing for breath, letting the rain run down his face. The memory of that moment had shocked him. He had put it away so deep. Forgotten it. A hurt from a different world, it meant nothing to the policeman he had become. Put it aside again, he told himself, think about it later. Maybe. Now, immediately, he needed to get out of this rain and night. He wondered if he was lost. There were no signs. No sense of direction in the empty streets. He had been stupid not to take a ride.

Rain skittered down alleyways, riding curls of wind. Rain slid across roof-slates and tumbled down sluices and drainpipes and slipped through grills into storm drains. Rain assembled itself in ropes in gutters and drains, and collected itself in watchful, waiting puddles and cisterns. Rain saturated old wood and porous stone and bare earth. Rain-mirrors on the ground looked up into the face of the falling rain. The wind-twisted air was crowded with flocks of rain: rain-sparrows and rain-pigeons, crows of rain. Rain-rats ran across the pavement and rain-dogs lurked in the shadows. Every column and droplet, every pool and puddle and sluice and splash, every slick, every windblown spillage of water and air, was alive. The rain was watching him.

Ever since the builders first came, the rain had been trickling through the cracks and gaps in the carapace of the chitinous city, sliding under the tiles and lead of the roofs, slipping through the cracks between paving slabs and cobbles, pooling on the floors of cellars, insinuating itself into the foundations, soaking through to the earth beneath the streets. Every rainfall dissolved away an infinitesimal layer of Mirgorod stone, leached a trace of mineral salts from the mortar, wore the sharp edges imperceptibly smoother, rounded off the hard corners a little bit more, abraded fine grooves down the walls and buttresses. Fine jemmies and levers of rain slid between ashlar and coping. Little by little, century by century, the rain was washing the city away.

The rain trickled down Lom’s face, tasting him. The rain traced the folds of his skin and huddled in the whorls of his ears. The rain splashed against the angel-stone tablet in his skull. The rain tasted angel, the rain smelled policeman, the rain trickled over the hard certainties of the Vlast and the law, stoppered up with angel meat. While Lom walked on, oblivious, absorbed in memories, the rain was nudging him ever further away from the peopled streets, towards the older, softer, rainier places.

Memory hit him like a fist in the belly.

How was it he’d forgotten her? Buried her so deep? Never thought of her? Never. Never. Not till now.

She had dragged him down corridors and up stairways to the Provost’s room.

‘Here you are!’ she shrieked at the Provost. ‘I told you! He is corrupted. He is foul. He should never have been admitted. I said so.’

There was a fire of logs burning in the room. She had taken something of his, something important, and gone across to the fire and put it carefully in.

‘ No! ’ he’d cried. ‘ No! ’

He’d thrown himself across the room and scrabbled at the burning logs. He remembered her, screeching like an animal, punching him across the back of the head, and… Something had happened. What? He couldn’t remember There was a door he couldn’t open, and something terrible was behind it. What had he done? He felt the shame and guilt, the permanent stain it had left, but he didn’t… he couldn’t… he had no recollection of what it was.

But he did know that the next day they had cut into the front of his head and placed the sliver of angel stone there, and that had made him good.

Lom rested his valise and wiped the rain from his face. He was passing through narrow defiles between once-grand buildings that were tenements now, propped up with flimsy accretions and lean-tos. Gulfs of night and rain opened between the few street lamps. Mirgorod had withdrawn indoors for the night, and his sodden clothes had tightened around him, becoming a warm mould, wrapping him in his own body heat. The sound of the rain seemed to seal him in. Dark alley-mouths gaped. Broken wooden fences barricaded gaps of waste ground. Small doorways cut into high brick walls.