Radiant State

by Peter Higgins

  Holding the boat in one hand, carefully, raising it high, she makes her way out into the beck to a dark wet flat of rock. Downstream of the rock the stream has dug a pool, dark brown, slower turning. She crouches and leans out to set the leaf boat on the water and let it go. It turns a while, uncertain, listing, testing the way, then settles and rights itself. The water carries it clear of the matted litter on the bank. It wobbles and turns, tiny under the trees, until it goes beyond where she can see.

  It is not a message, not even a messenger, but an explorer: a voyager sent ahead where she can’t yet go.

  All morning the ground climbs under her feet and the trees grow sparser, lower, more widely spaced, until in the middle of the day she crests a rise and finds herself on a scrubby hilltop among hazel and thorn, looking across a wide shallow valley. The grey-brown canopy of leaf-falling woodland spreads out at her feet. Solitary hunting birds circle below her on loose-stretched flaggy wings. A range of low hills on the further side rises into distance and mist. Without trees above her she can see the sky.

  Smirrs of mist hang over thorn and bramble scrub, pale and cold, motionless and patient, like breath-clouds: the trees’ breathing. The finger-touch of damp air chill is on her face. Her hands are bunched in her pockets for warmth. She is walking on a thick mat of fallen leaves and wind-broken tips and twigs, bleached of colour. It crunches underfoot. There is winter coming in this part of the forest. Every edge and rib of leaf has a fine sawtooth edge of frost.

  The body of the lynx lies on its side in a shallow pool as if it has drowned. Maroussia crouches beside it to look. The pool is dark and skinned with ice: forest litter is caught in it, and tiny bubble trails. The lynx is big like a large dog: sharp ears, a flattened cat-snout, ice-matted fur. She puts out her hand to touch its side. It feels cold and hard. She closes her eyes and reaches out with her mind, groping her way, and touches a faint distant hint of warmth. A last failing ember. A trace. Life, determined, hanging on.

  She isn’t dead. She isn’t gone. Not yet.

  Maroussia feels her way cautiously into the cold-damaged body. The sour smell of death is there: an obstacle, an uneasy darkness she has to push through. She feels the death seeping into her and pushes it back, trembling with revulsion.

  ‘Get out,’ she whispers aloud. Get away from me.

  She is feeling her way inside the lynx, looking for the core of life, reaching out to it. Here, she is saying. I am here. Where are you?

  The lynx barely flickers in response, so faintly that Maroussia doubts at first that it is there at all. But it stirs. She catches a weak sense of lynx life.

  Who are you? she says to the lynx life. Who are you?

  Leave me. I am death.

  No. Not yet. Not quite.

  I am tired and death. I am the stinker. The rotting one.

  Not yet. Take something from me. I want to share.

  It is too much and I am death.

  I have life. Share some.

  I am lynx and do not share.

  The lynx is faint and far away. Drifting. Maroussia pushes some of her self into it, shoving, forcing like she did with the objects she made, but stronger. Harsher. Until it hurts to do it.

  Who are you? she says again to the lynx.

  Leave me alone.

  Who are you? Remember who you are.

  Maroussia pushes more of herself into the lynx, feeling the weakening of herself, the draining of certainty, the forest around her grow fainter. The sound of death is like a river, near. She will have to be careful. But the lynx is stronger now. Maroussia can see her, as if the lynx is at the back of a low dark cave. There is something behind her that she cannot quite see. A shadow moving fast across the floor.

  Who are you? says Maroussia again.

  Plastered fur and soaking hair.

  More than that, says Maroussia.

  Weakness and all-cold all-hungry and wet and full of dying cub. All strength gone.

  More than that!

  I am shadow-muzzle, dark-tooth, wind-dark and rough. Faintness and lick and dapple, and pushing, and bloody hair. I am mewler and swallower and want, the shrivelled one, the suckler. I do not need to share.

  Take it then. Because you can. Maroussia pushes again. Who are you?

  Meat-scent on the air at dusk. Salt on the tongue and the dark sweet taste of blood. I am the eater of meat. I do not share. I do not need to share.

  No, you don’t.

  I am shit in the wet grass. Milk on the cub’s breath and the cold smell of a dead thing. I am the bitch’s lust for the dog I do not need. I am the abdomen swollen full as an egg, the pink bud suckler in the dark of the earth den.

  Yes.

  I am the runner hot among the trees. Noiseless climber. Sour breath in the tunnel’s darkness and teeth in the badger’s neck. The crunch of carrion and the thirsty suck and the flow of warm sweet blood-or-is-it-milk. Shrew flesh is distasteful, and so is the flesh of bears. I am shit and blood and milk and salty tears. I do not share!

  No. But you can take.

  I am the lynx in the rain with the weight of cubs in my belly. Cub-warm sleep under the snow, ice-bearded. I am life and I am called death. I am the answer to my own question, and if you look for me, I am the finding. Leave me alone now. I am not dying but I want to sleep.

  Eat something first. Then I will carry you and you can sleep.

  My teeth are sharp. My claws are sharp.

  Don’t bite me.

  I do not share.

  OK.

  Maroussia sits on the ground and lifts the animal into her lap. Holds a piece of pigeon to its mouth. Lynx glares at her but takes it and chews at it warily. Resentfully. Maroussia sees the needle-sharp whiteness of teeth.

  The Pollandore inside her gives an alien grin. The growing human child in her belly stirs and kicks. She is alone and very far from home.

  8

  The place Elena Cornelius took Lom to was a wide field of broken concrete and brick heaps and hummocks of dark weed-growth. It rolled to a distant skyline of ragged scorched facades.

  Such landscapes were everywhere in Mirgorod. Lom had seen other war-broken towns and cities that were all burned-out building shells and ruined streets–grids of empty windows showing gaps of sky behind–but during the siege of Mirgorod the defenders had pulled the ruins down and levelled the wreckage, creating mile after mile of impassable rubble mazy with pits and craters, foxholes and rat runs and sniper cover, all sown with landmines, tripwire grenades, vicious nooses, shrapnel-bomb snares and caltrops. Trucks and half-tracks were useless. Battle tanks beached themselves. The enemy had to clamber across every square yard on foot, clearing cellar by cellar with flame-throwers and gas. Artillery and airborne bombardment could not destroy what was already blasted flat.

  Elena led him through pathless acres of brick and plaster and dust. A girl emerged from one of the larger rubble piles and passed them with a smile, neat and clean and combing her hair. Two men in business suits came up a gaping stairwell. A woman in a head cloth with a market basket. Patches of ground had been cleared for cabbage and potato. There was woodsmoke and the smell of food cooking. Soapy water. The foulness of latrines.

  ‘People live here?’ said Lom.

  ‘They must live somewhere,’ said Elena. ‘There aren’t enough apartments, not yet, and what there is is far away, and there are so few buses… For many people, this is better.’

  She pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron and went down broken concrete steps. Knocked at a door.

  ‘Konnie? Konnie? It’s Elena.’

  The door opened. A woman in her early twenties, vivid red hair straight and thin to her shoulders, green eyes in a pale freckled face. A clever face. Bookish. Intense. Interesting. She looked like a student. When she saw Elena her eyes widened.

  ‘Elena! Shit!’ She grabbed her by the arm and pulled her forward. ‘Come in quickly. Maksim is here. We can help. Maksim!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘It’s Elena! Elena is here!’ Then she saw Lom
and frowned. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘A friend,’ said Elena. ‘It’s OK, Konnie. He’s a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I trust him,’ said Elena. ‘I want you to help him.’

  Konnie hesitated.

  ‘OK,’ she said ‘Then you’d better come in.’

  Lom followed the women through the entrance into a low basement space. Bare plaster walls lit by a grating in the ceiling with a pane of dirty glass laid across it. The room was divided in two by a tacked-up orange curtain. It smelled of damp brick. The part this side of the curtain had planks on trestles for a table. There were two chairs, a sagging couch, a single-ring gas stove on a bench in the corner.

  ‘You have to get away, Elena,’ Konnie was saying. ‘The militia have your name. They know it was you that shot Rizhin. They’re searching for you. You have to leave the city.’

  ‘No,’ said Elena. ‘I’m not leaving. Never. My girls—’

  ‘Maksim!’ Konnie called again.

  There was a stack of books on the table. Lom glanced at them. Drab covers with ragged pages and blurry print. Wrinkled typescripts pinned with rusting staples. Dangerous thinking, circulated hand to hand. He scanned the titles. The Ice Axe Manifesto. Bulletin of the Present Times. Listen, We Are Breathing. Someone– Konnie presumably, it was a woman’s handwriting–had been making pencil notes in a yellow exercise book. Lom picked it up. ‘ALL GOVERNMENT,’ she had written, ‘rests on possibility of violence against own citizens. Cf Jaspersen!–Principles of Interiority Chap 4. Apeirophobia.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Konnie. ‘Put that down.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Maksim came out, buttoning his shirt, from behind the orange curtain, where presumably there was a bed. His hair was long and tangled. He was tall, taller than Lom. He looked as if he’d just woken up.

  ‘Elena?’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’ He saw Lom and Konnie glaring at him. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s OK, Maksim,’ said Elena. ‘He’s a friend.’

  ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I’m looking for advice,’ said Lom. ‘Maybe some information. Elena said you might—’

  ‘What’s your name?’ said Maksim. He was trying to get the situation under control. An officer, used to command.

  ‘Lom.’

  Konnie frowned.

  ‘I know that name. They’re looking for you too.’

  Lom looked at her sharply. ‘Who is?’

  ‘The militia. They have two names for the shooting of Rizhin: Cornelius and Lom.’

  ‘No!’ said Elena. ‘Not him. He wasn’t there.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Lom said to Konnie.

  Konnie shook her head. ‘We know.’

  ‘I was on my own,’ Elena was saying. ‘He only came later.’

  ‘I let them see me in the hotel. I put my prints on the gun.’

  ‘You did that deliberately?’ said Elena.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make things happen. To get their attention. To get involved.’ Pull a thread. See where it leads. ‘They’ve done well. I thought it would take them longer.’

  ‘That’s insane,’ said Maksim.

  ‘It was quick,’ said Lom. ‘I can’t do what I do from the outside looking in.’

  ‘And what exactly is it you do?’ said Maksim.

  Lom looked him in the eye. ‘I’m here to bring Rizhin down.’

  Maksim pulled the outside door shut.

  ‘You’ve put us in danger coming here,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Elena. ‘I didn’t know. About the militia. The names. I’d never have come here if I’d known.’

  ‘You have to get out of the city quickly,’ said Maksim. ‘Both of you. We have a car. Konnie, you will drive—’

  ‘No,’ said Elena. ‘I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t leave Mirgorod. It’s impossible. I must be here when Galina and Yeva come home.’

  ‘Elena, it’s not safe,’ said Konnie.

  ‘They won’t find me at the Subbotin. I am Ostrakhova there.’

  ‘They’ll come for you. They always find you in the end.’

  ‘The VKBD will hunt you down,’ said Maksim. ‘You cannot imagine. You cannot begin to imagine how they will hunt you now.’

  ‘You have no children, Maksim. I will not abandon my girls.’

  ‘Six years, Elena, it’s been six years. I hope they survived the bombing, but even if they did… They’re not coming back. You must know that.’

  ‘My girls are not dead. They were taken but they will find their way back.’

  ‘You must disappear now,’ said Maksim. ‘If they capture you, if they question you… you will endanger us all, Elena.’

  Konnie put a hand on Maksim’s arm. ‘Please. Enough.’

  ‘You don’t need to leave the city,’ Lom said to Elena. ‘You can come with me. I know a place. They won’t find you there, and you can stay as long as you want. You’ll be safe.’

  ‘With you?’ said Maksim. ‘Who the fuck are you anyway? Where did you come from? We don’t know you.’

  ‘I trust him, Maksim,’ said Elena. ‘I want you to help him. That’s why we’re here.’ She turned to Lom. ‘Maksim is an old friend,’ she said. ‘A comrade. He was in the army, an officer, a good fighter. After the war he was one of the ones who wouldn’t go back to the old ways.’

  ‘You’re right to be cautious,’ Lom said to Maksim. ‘I would do the same. But I just need some advice, that’s all. We’re on the same side.’

  ‘Side?’ said Maksim. ‘What side is that?’

  ‘The side that Rizhin’s not on.’

  Maksim studied him. Weighing him up. ‘Were you in the army?’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘I was with the Political Police.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Maksim,’ said Elena, ‘I’m only asking you to listen to what he’s got to say.’

  ‘But…’ Maksim let out a long slow breath. ‘Oh shit. OK. You’re here now. So what do you want?’

  ‘If you had proof of something that could bring Rizhin down,’ said Lom, ‘if you had documentation which, if it was used properly, would expose him and empty him out and turn the world against him, would you know what to do with it?’

  ‘What kind of proof?’ said Maksim. ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘Later,’ said Lom. ‘Say there was such proof, what would you do with it? How could it be used? Do you have the means? Are you prepared for this?’

  Maksim thought for a moment.

  ‘It’s good, is it?’ he said. ‘This proof? It’s something dangerous? Something big?’

  ‘Yes. It would be explosive. It would make Rizhin’s position impossible. Everyone would turn against him. Everyone. He’d be finished. He would fall.’

  Maksim’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘That would be a great thing indeed,’ he said. Then he frowned. ‘But no. We couldn’t use it. We wouldn’t have a chance. We haven’t the means. We are too few.’

  ‘We know journalists,’ said Konnie. ‘The newspapers—’

  ‘The papers wouldn’t print it,’ said Maksim. ‘Never.’

  ‘The Archipelago then. We have friends at the embassy.’

  ‘If it came from the Archipelago, who would believe it? It would be dismissed as propaganda and lies.’

  ‘Then wouldn’t you need…?’ Konnie began and trailed off.

  ‘Yes?’ said Lom.

  ‘Someone in the government. Someone big, with power and influence, who isn’t afraid of Rizhin. Someone who could step in and push him out.’

  ‘They’re all Rizhin’s creatures,’ said Maksim. ‘They’re all terrified of him, and anyway whoever ousted Rizhin would be just as bad, or worse.’

  ‘All of them?’ said Lom. ‘Is there no one?’

  ‘Well.’ Konnie paused. ‘There’s Kistler. You hear things about him. There are rumours. He has connections… Kistler could
be worth a try. Maksim?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Maksim. ‘Maybe Kistler. Possibly. He’s stronger than the others. He has an independent view–sometimes, apparently.’

  ‘Do you have a link to this Kistler?’ said Lom. ‘Are you in communication with him?’

  ‘No,’ said Konnie. ‘Nothing that firm, but there is talk about him. Like I said, you hear things.’

  ‘How would I reach him?’

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Maksim. ‘I wouldn’t trust Kistler more than any of the others. But… we have the address of his house. We have all of them. We know where they live.’

  ‘Give it to me, please,’ said Lom. ‘I’ll go and see what this Kistler has to say.’

  He was flying blind. Throwing stones at random, hoping to hit something. But he didn’t know another way.

  ‘Like I said, it’s just a rumour,’ said Konnie. ‘A feeling. You shouldn’t place any weight on what I say.’

  ‘It’s the best lead I’ve got,’ said Lom. ‘The only one.’

  ‘Do you have this proof, then?’ said Maksim as Lom and Elena were leaving. ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ said Lom. ‘Not yet. But tomorrow, I hope so. I should have it on Wednesday.’

  Maksim looked puzzled. ‘But today is Wednesday,’ he said.

  ‘Is it?’ said Lom. ‘Is it?’

  The clocks tell you something, but not the time.

  9

  Rizhin had not yet appointed a successor at the Agriculture Ministry for the unfortunate Vladi Broch, killed by the assassin’s bullet meant for another, so Broch’s deputy, an assiduous man named Varagan, was summoned in his place to the weekly meeting of the Central Committee.

  For Varagan this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. His chance to step out from the shadows and demonstrate his quality. Poor Varagan. A man of prodigious administrative capacity and earnest zeal, he had profoundly mistaken his purpose, having got it firmly (and regrettably) fixed in his head that it was his job as Under-Secretary for Food Production to identify and address the causes of growing starvation in the eastern oblasts of the New Vlast.