Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  The river had breached its banks in many places. The current was taking them west, towards the seaward dwindling of the city. They passed through flooded squares. Lamp posts and statues sticking up from the mud-heavy, surging water. Pale faces looking from upper windows. Later, at the city’s edge, they drifted above submerged fields, half-sunken trees, drowned pigs. The swollen waters carried them onwards, out of Mirgorod, into strange territories. As the morning wore on, the waters widened and slowed, taking them among low, wooded islands and spits of grass and mud. By now they should have been following one of the channels of the Mir delta, but the channels were all lost under the slack waters of the flood. Maroussia couldn’t tell where the river ended and the silvery mud and the wide white skies began.

  Maroussia had been as far as the edge of the White Marshes once or twice, years ago. She remembered walking there, just at the edge of it, lost, exhilarated, alone. That’s where the water would take them. There was no other choice.

  It was a strange, extraordinary place. Inside the long bar of Cold Amber Strand, the huge expanse of Mirgorod Bay had silted up with the sediment and detritus of millennia, deposited there by slow rivers. The commingling waters of the four rivers and many lesser streams, stirred by the ebb and flow of the brackish water entering through the Halsesond, had created behind the protecting arm of the Strand a complex and shifting mixture of every kind of wetland, a misty tract of salt marsh, bog and fen. It was a place of eel grass and cotton grass, withies, reed beds and carr. Pools of peat-brown water and small shallow lakes. Winding creeks shining like tin. Silent flocks of wading birds swept against the sky, glinting like herring shoals on the turn.

  The sun was hidden behind cloud and mist. Maroussia had no way of measuring the passing of time, except by growing hunger and thirst. Lom was breathing more easily, but she had no food or water. She needed to find a landing place soon. Eventually — it might have been early in the afternoon — she unshipped the oars and began to row. The little skiff was the only vessel to be seen, conspicuously alone in the emptiness. Cat’s-paw ripples and veils of fine mist trailed across the flatness, ringed by the wide horizon only. Waterfowl flew overhead or bobbed in small rafts. A mist was gathering and thickening around them, and Maroussia was glad of it. Mirgorod was a fading stain on the horizon behind them. It began to seem to her that they were nowhere at all.

  She rowed clumsily, learning as she went. At least the work warmed her and loosened her stiffened muscles. Lom lay at her feet in the bottom of the boat, heavy and still. Shorelines loomed at them out of the mist. The skiff seemed to be passing between islands, or perhaps they were following channels between mudflats. It was impossible to say. After a time — it might have been only an hour, it might have been much more — she began to feel that the shores were closing in around them. They were approaching slopes of mud and stands of tangled tree growth coming down to the water’s edge. An otter slipped off a mudslope and slid away through the slow waters. A heron, motionless, regarded them with its unblinking yellow eye. At last she saw that, without realising it, she had been following the narrowing throat of a backwater, and now they had reached the end of the passage. They came up to a broken-down jetty of weathered, greyish wood. She managed to bring the skiff up against it with a gentle jolt, clambered up onto the planks with the bow line in her hand, and stood there, looking down at the inert shape of Lom, wondering how she was going to get him out of the boat. At a loss, she glanced back the way they had come.

  A giant was wading towards them, waist deep in the dark waters.

  In the city, in their labouring clothes, the giants were diminished and made familiar by the human context. This one was different. It was as if the river itself and the mud and silt of the estuary had gathered into human-like form — but twice as large — and risen up and started walking towards them.

  The slope of the giant’s belly broached the waters like a ship as he came. His chest was as deep and broad as a barrel, but far larger. Unlike the city giants, who wore their hair tied back in queues, his hair was long and thick and spread across his shoulders in dark, damp curls. The giant waded right up to them and gripped the gunwale of the skiff with both hands, steadying it. The hands were enormous. Fingers thick as stubs of rope, joined with pale webs of skin up to the first knuckle. Wrists strong and round as tree branches. His huge face was weathered dark and his eyes were large and purple like plums, with something of the same rounded protuberance.

  ‘Your boat is named Sib,’ he said. ‘She’s a good boat.’

  His voice was deep and slow, with the cool softness of estuarial mud, but ropes of strength wound through it. His clothes were the silvered colour of mud, with a faint shimmer of grainy slickness. Brown or grey, it was difficult to tell the difference. He was neither wholly of the land nor wholly of the water, but in between, estuarial, intertidal, partaking of both.

  ‘She’s not our boat,’ said Maroussia. ‘I stole her. She was floating loose, so I took her. We needed her. Badly. My friend is hurt.’

  ‘You make fast here,’ said the giant. ‘You climb out, and I will bring him.’

  The giant scooped Lom up in his arms, settled him into a comfortable position against his chest and waded across to a place where he could climb out. The water sluiced off him. His legs up to his the knee were sleek with mud. Maroussia hesitated. The giant walked a few paces, then stopped and turned. Maroussia hadn’t moved.

  ‘Well?’ said the giant.

  ‘What?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Follow me.’

  ‘Where?’

  But the giant had already gone ahead.

  66

  Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom — that part of him which is not made of tissues and plasma, proteins and mineral salts — is floating out in the sea, buoyant, awash in the waves. And Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom — this is not his true name, he knows that now, but he has no other — is puzzled by his situation.

  He is alive.

  Apparently.

  Evidently.

  Yet he has no recollection of how he got here, how he came to be in this…

  Predicament?

  Situation.

  And he is… changed.

  This is not his body.

  His body is elsewhere.

  He is aware of it, distant, separate, yet not entirely detached.

  And this sea that he is in, it is the real sea, but also…

  …not.

  The sky is too clear. Too close above his head. There appears to be no sun in the sky. Everywhere he looks, it is…

  …just the sky.

  Time is nothing here.

  The sea shines like wet slate. Numbing slabs of sea-swell hammock and baulk him. He rides among the bruising hollows and feels the touch of salt water pouring over his face, and when he runs his fingers through it, it is like stroking cool hair. Fulmars scout the wave valleys and terns squall overhead. He sees the faint distant smudge of a cliff shoulder to the north, and the low beach-line curving away southwards into mist and indeterminacy. He sees the shore of Cold Amber Strand. He can see it, but he can’t reach it. He lacks the strength to swim so far. It doesn’t matter.

  Time is nothing here.

  His head is wide open — there is a hole in it — the sea is pouring in — and the fluid from inside him is seeping out, pluming away into the wider water. Part of him is part of the sea. Part of the sea is taking its place. And then…

  Time is nothing here.

  The sea is slow and always. Days graze its surface and the sea’s skin rises and falls with the barely perceptible pulse of the tide. He can feel the unseen pull of the moons: a gentle lunar gravity tugging at his hair and palpating with infinite slowness the ventricular walls of his heart. But days and nights touch only the thinnest surface of the sea, and all the while, below the surface, beneath the intricate, flashy caul, there is darkness: coiling and shouldering layers inhabited by immense, deathless, barrelling movers.

  Time is nothing here.

>   He imagines he is already sinking. The abyssal deeps open below him like a throat. He dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him.

  As he descends the light fails. Layer by layer the spectrum is sucked dry of colour: first the reds fade and the world turns green, then the yellows give up the ghost and the world turns blue, and then… nothing, only the fuliginous darker than dark, the total absence of sight.

  The waters are deep. It takes only seconds to leave the light behind, but the descent will be many hours. Every ten yards of depth adds the weight of another atmosphere to the column of water pressing on his body. He imagines going down. Fifty atmospheres. A hundred. A thousand. More. More. The parts of his strange new body which contain air begin to rupture under the weight. Long before he reaches the bottom, his face, his chest, his abdomen, implode. Fat compresses and hardens. The finer bones collapse. Broken rib ends burst out through the skin.

  He imagines he hears himself speaking to the hard cold darkness.

  ‘You are the reply to my desire.’

  67

  Maroussia slept late the next morning, and woke in the giant’s isba. It smelled of woodsmoke, lamp-oil and the smoked fish that hung in rows from the rafters. Rafters which, now that she looked at them up there in the shadow, weren’t the branches of trees as she had thought, but salt-bleached and smoke-browned whale bones.

  The isba was twice as tall as a human would make it, but it felt warm and intimate, lit with fish-oil lamps and firelight from the open stove. Although it was morning outside, inside was all shadow and quiet. The whale-skeleton frame was covered with skins and bark, the gaps caulked with moss and pitch. Iron boiling-pots and wooden chests stood along the sides. From the middle of the floor rose a thick pillar of ancient-looking wood, its base buried in the compacted earth. Every inch of it was carved with the eyes and claws and heads of animals — elk, horses, wolves, seals — their teeth bared in anger or defiance — and inscribed with what looked like words in a strange angular alphabet. The pillar seemed meant to ward off some threat, some doom that was waiting its chance. What kind of thing was it, out here in the marsh, that a giant would be afraid of?

  The stove was made of iron, large and elaborate, with panels of white and blue tiles. It was the kind that had a place for a bed on the top of it. Lom lay on it now, breathing quietly. Inert.

  Maroussia remembered the night before only in snatches and fragments. She had been too cold. Too tired. Too hungry. The giant had given her food, a broth from his simmering-pot. Fish, samphire, berries. Food that tasted of the river and the sea and wide open spaces. And then he’d left her and gone out into the night and she had slept. When she woke, the morning was half gone, and she was alone with Lom.

  She stood up stiffly and crossed the floor to look at him. The stove was taller than her but his face, roughened with a growth of reddish stubble, was near the edge and turned towards her. He wasn’t sleeping, he was… gone. But his body breathed and seemed to be repairing itself. The giant had tended to the wound in the front of his head and left it bound in a cloth soaked with an infusion of bark and dried leaves. Now that she was close to him, the clean, bitter scent cut through the fish-and-smoky fug in the hut.

  She had lain alongside him in the cold of the boat, the warmth of their bodies nurturing each other, keeping each other alive. That meant something. That changed something. She knew the smell of his body close up, the smell of his hair and skin, the feel of his warmth. She touched his face. Despite the stove and the furs he felt cool and damp, like a pebble picked up from a stream.

  Wake up. Please wake up. We can’t stay here.

  She needed to go. She had something to do. It was a weight. A momentum. A push. What she needed to find was somewhere in the city. Vishnik had found the Pollandore. She was certain now, that’s what he’d meant to tell her. He had died and hadn’t told her where. Yet surely it would be in Mirgorod, if he had found it. She needed to get back there.

  The giant came in, pushing his way between the skins across the entrance gap. His bulk filled the space naturally and made her feel that humans were small.

  ‘Has the sleeper woken?’ he said.

  ‘No. No, he hasn’t.’

  The giant walked with a surprisingly soft and quiet tread across to where Lom lay, and looked down on him in silence. He placed a huge hand on the small head and put his huge face near Lom’s small mouth, as if he were inhaling his breath, which — she realised — he was.

  ‘He has been like this all morning?’

  ‘Yes. He hasn’t changed.’

  The giant went to a wooden chest and took out something wrapped in dark cloth, which, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the stove, he unwrapped and began to eat. It looked like a piece of meat, except that it was dark grey, soft and satiny, with a strange oily sheen. He tore off a large chunk with his teeth and chewed it, his head on one side, his massive jaws working like a dog’s, up and down.

  ‘Does anyone else live out here?’ Maroussia asked. ‘In the marshes, I mean. I didn’t see any sign… when we were coming here. It all seemed so empty. Are there villages?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was wondering where the clothes came from.’ He had found dry clothes for her, not city clothes but leggings and a woven shirt. Soft leather boots.

  ‘There are no humans here now. There used to be a village on the smaller lake.’ He waved his arm vaguely in no particular direction.

  ‘You’ve been kind to us,’ she said.

  ‘The rivers brought you. Why would I not be kind?’

  ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘My name is Aino-Suvantamoinen, and yours is Maroussia Shaumian, and you are important.’

  ‘What do you mean? How do you know my name.’

  ‘You are someone who makes things happen. Different futures are trying to become. You have something to do, and what you choose will matter.’

  She stared at him. ‘You know?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’

  The giant made a movement of his hand. ‘I know,’ he said,‘some things.’

  ‘You know where it is?’

  ‘It was taken. Long ago.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘That I do not know.’

  ‘I have to find it,’ said Maroussia. ‘I can’t stay here. Time is running out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to do when I find it. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Understanding is not the most important thing. Understanding never is. Doing is what matters.’

  The giant turned away and sat down in a corner to concentrate on his meat, as if he had said all he would say. It was like talking to a thinking tree, or a hill, or the grass, or the rain.

  ‘What exactly is that stuff you’re eating?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Old meat,’ the giant said. ‘The marsh preserves. Trees come up whole after a thousand years. This meat… I put it in, I leave it, I find it again. It tastes good.’

  ‘What kind of meat?’

  He held the chunk at arm’s length, turned it round, inspected it.

  ‘No idea.’ He took another bite. Then he laid it aside and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let us walk.’

  Maroussia looked at Lom, sleeping on the stove.

  ‘What about him?’ she said. ‘Will he be all right on his own?’

  ‘No harm will come today.’

  Maroussia walked in silence beside the giant. The floods had receded during the night, revealing a wide alluvial land, a cross-hatch of creeks and channels punctuated by rocky outcrops, islands and narrow spits of ground. Reed beds. Salt marsh. Sea lavender and samphire. Withy, carr and fen. There were stretches of water, bright and dark as rippled steel. Long strips of pale brown sand, crested with lurid, too-green, moss-coloured grass. Reaches of soft, satiny mud. Wildfowl were picking and probing their way out
on the mud. Maroussia knew their names: she had watched them rummaging on the muddy riverbanks near her home. Curlew, plover, godwit, redshank, phalarope. The quiet progress of geese at the eelgrass. A kestrel sidled across the sky: a slide, a pause, a flicker of wings; slide, pause, flicker of wings.

  This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood-ash and fallen leaves.

  ‘This is a beautiful place,’ Maroussia said. ‘It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we’re so near to the city. I didn’t know. I never came this far.’

  ‘It will be winter soon,’ the giant said. ‘Winters are cold here. The birds are preparing to leave. In winter the snow will lie here as deep as you are tall. The water freezes. Only the creatures that know how to freeze along with it and the ones who make tunnels beneath the snow can live here then.’

  ‘But it’s not so cold in Mirgorod,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s only a few versts away.’

  ‘No. It is colder here.’

  ‘What do you do when the winter comes?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘When the ditches freeze and the marshes go under the snow I will sleep. It will be soon.’

  ‘You sleep through the winter like a bear? The giants in Mirgorod don’t do that.’