Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  65

  Elena Cornelius, crouching knee-deep in an anti-tank ditch, hacked at the solid black earth with a gardening trowel. The wooden handle had split and fallen away, but she gripped the tang in her blistered palm. She was lucky: many women of the conscript artel scrabbled at the ground with their fingers, numbed and bleeding, tearing their fingernails and the skin off their hands. Fresh snow had fallen in the night and the churned mud bottom of the tank trap was frozen iron-hard, sharp-ridged and treacherous, but her cotton gabardine kept out the worst of the wind and the digging was warm work.

  Black earth rolled away from her in all directions, level to the distant horizon, skimmed with a thin scraping of snow. In front of her the rim of grey sky was broken only by sparse hedges and clumps of hazel, a line of telegraph poles, the chimneys of the brickworks where they slept. Between her and the sky rolled a wide slow river, crossed by a bridge: steel girders laid across pillars of brick, a surface of gravel and tar. The bridge was why they were there. The retreating defenders would cross it and then it would be blown. But for a while the bridge would have to be held.

  At her back the sound of distant explosions rumbled. Every so often she straightened and turned to watch the flickering detonations and the thick columns of oily smoke rolling into the air. The bombers were over Mirgorod again.

  The ground they were working was potato fields, harvested months before, but from time to time the diggers turned up an overlooked potato. Most were soft and black with rot, but some were good. Elena stuffed what she found into her pockets and underclothes for later, for Yeva and Galina and Aunt Lyudmila. She ate handfuls of snow against the thirst. It was OK. Survivable.

  ‘Here they come again!’ Valeriya shouted.

  Elena looked up. Three aircraft rose out of the horizon in a line and swept towards her, engine-clatter echoing. They were fat-nosed, like flying brown thumbs suspended between short, stubby wings.

  Bullets spattered the earth and snow in front of her, and three yards to her left the top of a woman’s head came off. Elena had known her slightly. She had been a teacher of music at the Marinsky Girls Academy.

  While the planes circled low to make another pass, Elena and the others ran for the river. Breaking the thin ice at the water’s edge they waded waist-high into the current, feet slipping and sinking in the silt, and waited, bent forward under the low bridge, for the planes to drift away elsewhere. Oilskin-wrapped packages of explosives clustered under the bridge, strung together on twisted cables that wrapped and hung like bindweed.

  Elena saw something in the water out near the middle of the river: a sudden smooth coil of movement against the direction of the current. It came again, and again, slicker and more sure than the wavelets chopping and jostling. She glimpsed a solid steely-grey oil-sleeked gun barrel of flesh. Blackish flukes broke the surface without a splash. A face rose out of the water and looked at her A human face. Almost human. A soft chalky white, the white of flesh too long in the water, with hollow eye sockets and deep dark eyes. The nose was set higher and sharper than a human nose, the mouth a straight lipless gash. The creature raised its torso higher and higher out of the water. An underbelly the same subaqueous white as the face. Heavy white breasts, nipples large and bruise-coloured, bluish black. Below the torso, a dark tube of fluke-tailed muscle was working away.

  While she rested upright on her tail, the rusalka was using her arms to scoop water up onto her body. She rubbed herself down constantly, smoothing her sides and front and breasts as if she were washing them, except it was more like lubrication. She smoothed her hair also, though it wasn’t hair but flat wet ribbons of green-black stuff hanging from the top of her head across her back and shoulders. While she washed herself, the creature’s face watched Elena continuously. There was no expression on her face at all. None whatsoever. Elena gripped the arm of the woman next to her.

  ‘Valeriya!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Do you see it? Out there! A rusalka!’ But when she looked again there was nothing but a swirl on the surface of the water.

  After the planes had gone the women waded out from under the bridge and slipped and scrabbled up the bank. A thin bitter wind was coming up from the south. They stood shivering and shedding greenish river water from their skirts. There was a flash on the horizon, the dull thump of an explosion, and one of the brickworks chimneys collapsed in a cloud of dust. Two more explosions followed and the whole building crumpled.

  Seven heavy tanks were rolling towards them across the potato fields.

  ‘Our boys,’ said Valeriya. ‘Running home to mother.’

  More muzzle flashes, rapid fire. The chatter of machine guns sounded dry and quiet, like twigs crunching. In the distance behind the tanks long lines of men were coming towards them, making slow progress across the levels of frozen mud.

  ‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Those aren’t us. The enemy is here. We have to run.’

  When she got back to Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment it wasn’t there. The building wasn’t there. The whole of the street was gone. Sticking out from the rubble among the smouldering beams and spars was a leg, pointing its heel at the sky. Small enough to be a child’s. A girl’s. It was black like burned meat. A charred flap of shoe hung from the foot.

  66

  The rain in the Gulf of Burmahnsk was definitely beginning to ease. Slowly the area of visible sea around the aircraft widened until it was possible to see a mile or more in every direction. Lyuba Gretskaya stirred and opened her eyes. Lom wasn’t sure she had ever really been asleep. She slid back the canopy, letting in a blast of freezing spray and the smell of the ocean, stood up precariously in her seat and reached up to jolt the engine into life.

  She took off and climbed steeply to a thousand feet, swung round and headed east. After about fifteen minutes they crossed the coastline: a wide shallow lagoon behind a long sandspit. Drab dunes and brown scrub grass dusted with snow. The Kotik swung north to follow the shore. Bays and lagoons. Small scattered settlements tucked a mile or so back from the sea. The fuel gauge lapsing closer and closer to empty.

  They came up on Slensk from the south where it hid from the weather in the lee of a low headland. As Gretskaya swung a loop to port, Lom found himself looking down on a tumble of bleached grey rooftops divided by a broad river. Wharfs and piers edged the river, fronting an extensive patchwork of timber yards. Beyond the docks the river frayed, splitting into a threadwork of rivers and streams across a widening triangle of tawny brown mud streaked with veins of livid orange. The Northern Kholomora reaching the sea.

  The Kotik swung out over the delta, descending gently, and turned back to touch down neatly in the middle of the river. Gretskaya taxied across to the nearest jetty and found a berth between a rusting hulk and two big pitch-caulked barges roped together side by side. She eased the plane nose first against a solid wall of pine trunks blackened and streaked with lichenous green, and cut the engine.

  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 o
f 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.

  67

  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.’

  ‘But you are not remaining here. You come from Mirgorod, and only the weather detains you. Correct? So your destination is where?’

  ‘We are going north along the coast,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Garshal. We leave tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. There is no hurry. Not until the storm blows through.’

  The gendarme held out his hand.

  ‘Papers,’ he said.

  ‘The logs and registration documents are in the plane. If you want to—’ Gretskaya began, but the gendarme cut her off impatiently.

  ‘My concern is with persons only. Personal identification. Documents of travel.’

  Gretskaya handed over her passport. Florian and Lom followed suit. The gendarme looked through them slowly and carefully, page by page. Then he put all three in the back pocket of his trousers.

  ‘Hey!’ said Gretskaya.

  ‘I have certain enquiries to make concerning these documents,’ said the gendarme. ‘Confirmations I intend to seek. You may collect them from the gendarmerie tomorrow, in the afternoon, and until then you will remain in Slensk. This will be convenient for you, no doubt,’ he said to Lom. ‘You will have more time to pursue your commercial interests.’

  ‘That decides it,’ said Florian. ‘We have to leave now, straight away, and not for Garshal but east.’

  ‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It’s not a flight to try at night, even
without bad weather. Not without a navigator. The only sure way is to follow the river. If we lost the river–it’s a wilderness: no features, no landmarks–we’d circle till the fuel ran out, and if we had to go down, no one would come to look for us. No one would know where we went. It would take us weeks to walk out of there.’

  ‘If it’s a matter of additional payment…’

  ‘No,’ said Gretskaya. ‘Not that. Anyway, why the hurry? We’ve got till tomorrow afternoon.’

  Florian shook his head. ‘He could send a wire tonight,’ he said. ‘He could be on the telephone now.’

  ‘Who’s he going to call to check out a passport?’ said Lom. ‘The Lodka’s not open for business, not any more. Anyway, he’s not waiting for ID confirmation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Gretskaya.

  ‘How many gendarmes are there in a place like Slensk? Two or three at the most. My guess is he’s on his own. And he’s worried about us. He didn’t buy our story and he didn’t like the odds, so he’s calling for help. Reinforcements. Only he knows nobody can get here before tomorrow. Fuck, he’s almost begging us to run.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ said Gretskaya.

  Florian looked at Lom. ‘Let him decide,’ he said.

  Lom emptied his balzam glass. The liquid seared his throat and left his mouth dry and rough. He didn’t need to think. Somewhere Chazia’s train was rolling north towards Novaya Zima with Maroussia and the Pollandore. It was a race, and nothing else mattered, and the train was moving, and they were not. At the thought of Chazia, Lom felt a tight surge of anger and purposeful violence. The iron aftertaste of angel stuff mixed with the balzam. There would be a reckoning there.

  ‘We leave,’ said Lom. ‘We leave now.’

  Gretskaya poured another tumbler of Ligas Balzam, drank it down, and tucked the bottle inside her sheepskin jacket.