Wolfhound Century

by Peter Higgins

  ‘Their employers do not permit it. They are required to work through the year, though it shortens their lives.’

  The giant fell silent and walked on. Maroussia began to notice signs of labour. The management of the land and water. Heaps of rotting vegetation piled alongside recently cleared dikes. Saltings, drained ground, coppiced trees. Much of it looked ancient, abandoned and crumbling: blackened stumps of rotting post and plank, relics of broken staithes and groynes, abandoned fish traps. The giant paused from time to time to study the water levels and look about him, his great head cocked to one side, sniffing the salt air. Sometimes he would adjust the setting of some heavy mechanism of wood and iron, a winch or a lock or a sluice gate.

  They stopped on the brink of a deep, fast-flowing ditch. The giant stared into the brown frothing surge that forced its way across a weir.

  ‘The flood is going down,’ the giant said. ‘Every time the floods come now, the city builds its stone banks higher. But that is not the way. The water has to go somewhere. If you set yourself against it, the water will find a way, every time.’ He stooped for a moment to work a windlass that Maroussia hadn’t noticed among the tall grass. ‘I tried to tell them,’ the giant continued when he had done his work. ‘When they were building the city, I tried to tell them they were using too much stone. They made everything too hard and too tight. You have to leave places for the water to go. But I couldn’t make them listen. Even their heads were made of stone.’

  ‘You remember Mirgorod being built?’

  ‘I was younger then. I thought I could explain to them, and if I did, then they would listen. They tried to drive me out, and every so often even now they try again.’ He grinned, showing big square teeth. Incisors like slabs of pebble. Sharp bearish canines. ‘I let them lose themselves.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The marshes are bigger than you think, and different every day. Every tide brings shift and change. All possible marshes are here.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You do.’

  Maroussia hesitated. ‘If you remember the city when it was being built—’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘—then you would remember the time before? You remember the Pollandore?’

  ‘You don’t need to remember what is still here.’

  Maroussia hesitated.

  ‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to leave Vissarion. He helped me.’

  ‘You should not leave him,’ said the giant. ‘He is important too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The giant stopped and looked down at her.

  ‘I don’t know, and neither does he. But it is on the river, and the rain likes him. That’s enough.’

  ‘But what if he never wakes up?’ said Maroussia. ‘Or he wakes up but he isn’t… right. He almost drowned, and there’s that hole, that terrible hole, in his head.’

  ‘He is not hurt,’ said the giant. ‘At least, his body is not. But he doesn’t know how to come back.’

  ‘I don’t understand that either.’

  ‘I can fetch him back, if you want me to. Tonight. After dark. When the day is over. Your choice.’

  ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

  68

  Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom lies face down, floating on the glass roof of the sea. He presses his face against the water as if it were a pane of glass. Looking down into clarity. A landscape unrolls beneath him.

  Time is nothing here.

  This is the drowned, memorious land. Mammoths’ teeth, the bones of bear and aurochs and the antlers of great elk litter the sea’s bed. The salt-dark leaf mould of drowned forests. It is a woodland place. Lom sees the sparrowhawk on the oak’s shoulder and he sees the bivalves browsing the soft stump’s pickled meat. Sea beasts move across the floor of it. Their unhurried footfalls detonate quiet puffballs of silt as they go, slow without heaviness, shoving aside fallen branches, truffling for egg-purse, flatworm and urchin, their eyes blackened like sea beans and gleaming in the half-light.

  Time is nothing here.

  Except… something touches him. The merest graze of an eye in passing. An alien gaze, cold and empty, vaster far than the sea, star-speckled. It passes away from him.

  And pauses.

  And flicks back.

  And takes him in its grip.

  Lom closes himself up like a fist, like a stone in the sea, like an anemone clenching close its crop of arms, like a hermit crab hunching into its shell. He wants to be small. Negligible. He wants to pull himself tight inside and withdraw or sink out of sight. But it is hopeless. He knows the touch of the angel’s eye for what it is.

  Archangel begins to prise him open for a closer look.

  No! Lom dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him. He is strong. Very strong. Stronger than he had ever known. Lom slips with a writhing kick out of the angel’s grasp. He hears, very faint and far away, the yell of its anger. And feels its fear.

  In his room on the Ring Wharf, Josef Kantor felt Archangel rip a hole in his mind and step inside. Archangel’s voice filled his head. The cold immensity separating stars. He fell.

  THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY ARE IN THE MARSH! THEY LIVE!

  KILL THE TRAVELLERS! DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!

  As soon as he was able to stand and wipe the spittle from his face and stem the blood that was spilling from his nose, Kantor went to find a telephone. He needed to speak to Chazia.

  69

  Night came, a thick and starless black. Inside the isba the smoke from the burning bog-oak in the stove and the fumes from the boiling-pot made Maroussia’s head swim. Afraid she would be sick, she tried to retreat into the shadows at the edge of the room and would have squatted there, watching, but the noises from outside drove her back. There were voices outside in the dark, voices that barked and growled and called like birds and argued in unintelligible words. The skin covering of the isba shook as if something was pounding on it and tugging at the door covering. She crawled back towards the centre of the room and crouched as near to the iron stove as she could get. Blue fire was burning hot and hard as a steam-engine’s firebox, roaring heat into the air.

  ‘Do not be alarmed by anything you see or hear,’ Aino-Suvantamoinen had said. ‘But do not touch me. And do not go outside.’

  Yet now he lay on the floor, immense, like a felled bull. His arms and legs trembled as if he was having a fit: their shaking rattled and clattered the antlers, vertebrae, pieces of amber and holed stones tied to his coat. The hood of the coat hid his face, but she could still see his eyes. They were open, but showing white only, as sightless and chalky as seashells. He’d put a piece of leather between his teeth, and now his mouth dripped spittle as he chewed and ground on it with an unconscious concentration that seemed like blank rage.

  Lom lay on his back in the centre of the floor.

  ‘No matter how bad it gets,’ the giant had said, ‘you can do nothing. Understand? Nothing. Whatever happens, do nothing. and do not touch me.’ Yet he had been like this — collapsed, growling, fitting — for… how long now? Half an hour? An hour?

  The wall of the isba bulged inward, as if some heavy creature outside had thrown itself against it. There was a screech of anger. Surely whatever was outside would break in soon. The carvings on the central pillar flickered in the fierce firelight as if they were alive and moving.

  Five minutes. Five more minutes, and if nothing has changed…

  Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom is lying on his back in the sea, looking up into the night sky. He feels the gentle pull of the moons in his belly. All around him the sea glows with a gentle phosphorescence. A fringe of luminousness borders his body. Light trickles down his arms when he holds them in front of his face.

  The hole in the front of his head is open to the starlight. A little cup of phosphorescence has gathered
there. So much has flowed in, and so much flowed out, washing across the folds of his cerebral cortex. He is merging with the sea. His pulse is the endless passing of waves. His inward darkness is the darkness of the deep ocean.

  Time is nothing here.

  He hears the sound of splashing. Rhythmical. Sweep, sweep, through the waves. It is a sound he remembers, but he cannot place it now. The drift of water through the kelp forests below him is more interesting.

  Idly, with the last remains of merely human curiosity, he turns to look. Something very large and human-shaped, an outline darker than the sky, a starless mass against the stars, is wading towards him. That is what the sound is. Legs. Wading through water. Did he not once do such a thing himself?

  The wading person is growing larger and larger as he comes closer. He is watching. He has a purpose. His purpose is to bring Lom back.

  But Lom doesn’t want to go back.

  He gathers the weight of the sea and throws it against the giant in immense curling waves that crash against him. Lom fills the waves with the teeth and jaws of eels and the stings of rays. He tangles the giant’s feet in ropes of weed. The giant stumbles and the undertow of the waves pulls at him, dragging him towards the edge of the deep trench that opens and swallows him.

  The giant Aino-Suvantamoinen feels the viciousness of the sea’s antagonism. Ropes of water form within the water and wrap themselves around his arms and legs, tugging him down towards the pit that is opening beneath him. Bands of iron water squeeze his ribcage, forcing the breath from his lungs. Ice-cold water-fingers grip his face, hooking claws into his nostrils, stabbing into his ears with water-needles, gouging his eyes, tearing at the lids. This isn’t how it is meant to be. The man he is trying to bring home is fighting him. He’s too strong. All the futures in which he will rescue this man and return home safe are fading and dying one by one. Something is putting them out like lamps.

  I will drown here, and with me the marsh will fail.

  With one last push of effort he begins to swim for the surface.

  Pulling the water-fingers from his face he peers up and sees the dim light above him, the greenish star in the shape of a man, glowing dimly. It is not far. The giant kicks and hauls himself towards it. The seawater clamps itself about him, heavy and chill as liquid iron, squeezing like a fist. He fights it, dragging himself upwards out of the ocean pit. But it is too far. He is tiring. He cannot reach it. The thread of river-water that links him to his body in the isba is failing, and when it breaks he will be lost.

  Desperately he lets go of a part of himself and sends it back up the river-thread, squirming and writhing for home like a salmon against the stream. The silver thought-salmon flickers its tail and disappears into the dimming green.

  Maroussia was kneeling over the still body of the giant, her ear against his mouth. He was trying to say something.

  ‘Wake him… wake the man… call him back… do it… now’

  The hoarse whisper faded. The giant’s face collapsed.

  Maroussia lurched across to where Lom was lying and took his face in her hands, turning it towards her.

  ‘Vissarion!’ She was shouting to be heard. The voices outside in the night were screeching and yammering, hurling themselves against the walls of the isba. ‘Vissarion! It’s Maroussia! Listen to me! You have to wake up now! Oh, you have to. Please.’

  Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom hears a voice calling, faint above the noise of the sea and very far away. He opens his eyes and sees against the shadows of the sky a face he knows, a familiar face, a face with a name he half-remembers, pale and calm and serious, looking down on him, like the moon made whole. He lifts his arm towards it, and as he does so he feels a tremendous blow against his back, lifting him up out of the water, and a huge fist seizes him by the neck and begins to pull him back towards the shore.

  70

  Lom woke in the giant Aino-Suvantamoinen’s isba, aware of the warmth and the fire and the quiet shadows and the giant sitting near him, waiting, patient, large and solid. Lom knew where he was. Completely. He felt the moving water nearby, and grass, and trees, and the sifting satiny mud. The sea, some distance off, was still the sea, and the river that surged towards it was a great speaking mouth. The air around him was a tangible flowing thing, freighted with a thousand scents and drifting pheromone clouds, just as the space between the stars was filled with light and forces passing though. Everything was spilling myth, everything was soaked in truth-dream.

  ‘You are awake,’ said Aino-Suvantamoinen gently. His voice was slow and strong and estuarial.

  ‘This will fade,’ said Lom. ‘Won’t it? This will not last. Will it? Will it?’

  He tried to raised his head from the leather pillow.

  ‘No,’ said the giant, ‘this feeling that you have now will not last. But it will not altogether fade. There is no going back to the way you were before.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You need to rest.’

  ‘I hurt you, didn’t I? I didn’t want to come back, and I hurt you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I almost killed you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault. You were stronger than I thought. You did not know.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I bear you no grudge. ‘

  ‘But you are hurt.’

  ‘Only tired now. I will recover. But I need to sleep. it will be winter soon.’

  Lom tried to push the covers back and sit up.

  ‘You can’t sleep yet,’ he said. ‘You know that. There is something wrong. There’s something coming. It’s very close.’

  ‘Ah. You felt that?’

  When the giant left him, Lom went outside to sit by himself some distance from the isba, on a stump of wood. The stiffness of his bruises was scarcely noticeable. He touched his forehead tentatively. In the centre of it, just above the eyebrows, he found a small and roughly round hole in the bone of his skull, like a third eye socket. It had a fine, smooth covering of new skin, slightly puckered at the edge. With his fingertip he felt the fluttering of a pulse.

  The world he had seen in all its oceanic myth-ridden fullness was already diminishing, but still he smelled the dampness in the air, the woodsmoke, and heard the flow of water in the creek, and he knew what they meant. It was all traces and memories now, a faint trembling of presences: possibilities almost out of reach. But still real. Still there. The plug in his head was gone, and he was alive.

  The world and everything in it, everything that is and was and will be, was the unfolding story of itself, and every separate thing in the world — every particle of rock and air and light, every life, every thought and every event — was also a story, its own story, the story of everything becoming more like itself and less like anything else. The might-be becoming the is. The winter moths on their pheromone trails, intent on love and flight, were heroes. Himself, Maroussia, Vishnik, Aino-Suvantamoinen, they were all like that, or could be: living out the bright significant stories of their own lives, mythic, important.

  But Vishnik was dead. Vishnik, what was left of him, mutilated and killed, his ruined body laid out naked on the couch; Chazia had done that.

  Lom remembered Chazia and Kantor bending over him in the interrogation room — Chazia’s knife, Kantor’s indifferent finger poking at his opened brain. It was all coming back, riding a hot rushing tide of anger. He could not stay here, in this timeless watery place. He had to do something. He had to go back.

  And then — only then — the question occurred to him. The last thing he remembered, vaguely, a blur, was throwing himself from the bridge into the flooding Mir. What had happened to him after he fell? How had he come to be here? He didn’t know.

  71

  Elsewhere — far away, but not so far — in an empty side room in the Lodka, Lakoba Petrov was preparing himself for his one great moment. He had obtained all he needed — all the materials for his new, wonderful art — from Jos
ef Kantor, impresario of destruction. And now the time was almost come for the performance.

  From a canvas holdall Petrov extracted three belts of dynamite and nails, enwrapped his person with them, buckled the straps. Also from the canvas holdall he drew forth a capacious overcoat of dark wool, threaded the detonator cords through the sleeves so he could grip their terminations in his palms, and put on the coat to drape and obscure his death-belted torso.

  Petrov did what he did with care. Fully. With absolute clarity and certainty of purpose. Every movement a sacrament. Every breath numbered. Rendered aesthetic. Invested with ritual luminance.

  When he tugged the detonators, nails would fly outwards from him explosively. Omnidirectional. Flying in the expulsive, expanding, centrifugal cloud of his own torn and vaporised flesh. He would be the heart of the iron sunburst. Going nova.

  And so I am become the unimaginable zero of form. The artist becomes the art. Total creation. Without compromise. Without hesitation. Without meaning, being only and completely what it is. The gap between artist and work obliterated.

  His own unneeded coat he closed up in precise folds and set in the middle of the empty floor. Adjacent to this he placed the now-empty canvas holdall.

  They would be found so. The only extant work of the Petrovist Destructive School: members, one.

  A thought struck him. Awkwardly, on account of the bulk of the explosive girdles, he bent to withdraw items from his former coat. A tube of paint. A piece of polished reflective tin to use as a mirror. One final time, with the facility that came with practice, he inscribed his forehead. And then, with an unexpected flourish, one last tweak of originality, he unbuttoned his shirt and wrote on his bare, white, fleshless, hairless (because shaven) upper chest, the same two splendid words.