Wolfhound Century

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Wolfhound Century Page 26

by Peter Higgins

‘Not a pit. A tunnel. The old lake people built souterrains. Follow the passageway until you find a side opening to the right. That will bring you out in the woods behind the enemy. When you are past them, then you run.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘I don’t fit down there.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘So I will destroy our enemies if I can.’

  ‘You can’t fight a mudjhik,’ said Lom. ‘Not even you.’

  ‘There are ways,’ said the giant.

  ‘You can run too,’ said Maroussia. ‘You don’t have to fight. Not for us.’

  The giant didn’t reply. He lit a lamp from the stove embers and handed it to Lom. His face in the flickering light looked mobile, distorted and strange.

  ‘You must be quiet,’ he said, ‘or you will alert the enemy. And you must go now.’ He knelt and scraped a heap of compacted earth from the isba floor and scooped it into the stove, dousing the flames and burying the embers. In the near-darkness they heard the swish of the entrance covers and knew that he was gone.

  The souterrain passageway was narrow and low. Lom, stooping, the lamp flickering in his hand, went first. The walls and roof of the passage were lined with rough wet blocks of stone. The floor was of damp compacted earth. The feeling of immense weight above their heads, pressing down and pressing in sideways against the passage walls, was oppressive. Unignorable. It seemed impossible that there should be underground constructions at all in such a place of soft and shifting, saturated ground, but the tunnel they were following was evidently old. Perhaps even ancient. It had survived. Lom led the way forward as quickly as he could.

  They felt the rush of scorching air almost before they heard the explosions. The surge extinguished the lamp in Lom’s hand. The concussions themselves, when they came, were muted, abbreviated, like heavy slabs being dropped from a height, and it took them a moment to realise what they had heard.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Lom. ‘Grenades. He’s got grenades.’

  There was a longer, liquid-sounding, sliding slump, another rush of hot air, then silence and profound darkness. The tunnel had collapsed behind them.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Maroussia. ‘I’m right behind you. Don’t stop.’

  Lom edged forward, his right hand on the rough stone wall to feel his way along, his left hand stretched out ahead of him. The darkness was total. More than the simple absence of light, it was a tangible presence. It closed in around them and pushed against them, touching their faces with soft insistent fingers, pressing itself against their eyes, feeling its way into their nostrils, the whorls of their ears, slipping down their throats when they opened their mouths to breathe, thick with the rich and oppressive smell of being underground.

  Lom kept moving. He had to push his way through the insistent jostling darkness, filled with the presence of the long-departed souterrain builders, alert, curious and resentful. He felt the hairs rising along the back of his neck.

  There was nothing to measure their progress by, nor the passage of time, except the sound of their own bodies moving and breathing. Raw root-filled earth and rock were all around them now, just the other side of this thin skin of stone. This flimsy, permeable wall. The wall was nothing. Negligible. With one push he could put his hand through it and make an entrance for the slow ocean of mud. Why not? Mud was only a different air. They could breathe it, if they wanted to, like the earthworms did. They could swim through it, slowly, working their limbs through the viscous, slow-yielding, supportive stuff. They could do that. If they wanted to.

  ‘Vissarion?’ Maroussia’s voice reached him from somewhere far away. ‘Why have we stopped?’

  He had lost the wall. He had taken his hand off it. When? Sometime. He waved his arms to left and right, over his head, and encountered nothing.

  ‘Can you feel the wall?’ he said.

  ‘What wall?’ she hissed.

  ‘Either side. Any wall. Can you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Think. Figure it out.

  They must have come into some larger chamber that the giant hadn’t mentioned. He would have assumed they’d have the lamp.

  He was standing on the very edge of a bottomless pit. A narrow tapering well. One more step… any step…

  No. It was a tunnel not a cave. They were not lost, only disoriented. Taking a deep breath he turned to his right and began to walk steadily forward. Four or five paces, and he barked his knuckles against the cold damp stone. Its roughness was familiar now, and comforting.

  There was another concussion. It made the ground sound hollow, and it seemed to have come from just above their heads. Then the ground shook again. And again. A rhythmical pounding that was obviously not grenades, not this time. Trickles of cold stuff fell across their faces and shoulders in the darkness. It might have been earth or water or a mixture of both. The pounding stopped, and a regular scraping took its place.

  ‘It’s the mudjhik,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s found us. It’s trying to dig us out.’

  Lom felt the mudjhik’s presence. Felt the pleasure it was feeling. The anticipation. It would haul them out of the earth like rabbits. Burst their heads between its thumbs, one by one.

  ‘Keep moving!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Come on! There’s no point waiting here till it gets through.’

  Yes, thought Lom, but which way? He felt sour panic welling up at the back of his throat.

  Which way?

  His eyes were stretched wide, straining to see in the absolute dark that pressed in against them. When he realised what he was doing, he closed them.

  We are too rational, he thought. We overvalue sight.

  ‘Get low!’ he hissed. ‘Lie down and get out of the airflow. And keep still.’

  ‘Lie down?’ said Maroussia.

  ‘Just do it.’

  Lom breathed deeply, concentrating on the air around them, ancient and cold and thickened and still. Almost, but not entirely, still. The hole in his head was open, and he was open with it. He could feel the air circulating slowly in a hollow space, and he let himself ride with it, feeling its moves and turns. There was a current eddying slowly towards a gap in the wall. Another passageway. Sloping gently upwards towards an opening into the world outside. In the darkness he crossed directly to Maroussia and took her hand.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  He was hurrying, almost running through the dark, pulling Maroussia behind him. She swore as she smashed her elbow against an outcrop of stone and almost stumbled, but he kept hold of her and pulled her on. Behind them the sound of the mudjhik’s digging had stopped. It knew they were moving. Lom felt its uncertainty. Frustration. For the moment it was at a loss. But it would find them. And it would keep coming. It always would.

  The walls of the passageway were closing in. The roof was getting lower. But Lom led them on at a desperate shambling run. Then there was light ahead of them. The grey light of dawn. Slabs of stone fallen sideways. A gap half-blocked with brambles and small trees. They pushed and scrabbled their way through, ignoring the scratching of thorns and the gouging of branches. And then they were out. Standing among fallen leaves in pathless undergrowth.

  Lom looked for cover, any cover, any place to hide or make a stand against the mudjhik. Nowhere. Only a tangle of low trees and undergrowth and moss in every direction.

  But what sort of stand could they have made You needed a trench mortar to stop a mudjhik in its tracks. If it came, it came.

  There was an acrid smell in the air. A big fire, burning. The isba!

  Maroussia went crashing off towards the scent of burning. Lom was leaning against a tree, doubled over, gasping and trying desperately to get enough breath in to refill his spasming lungs.

  ‘Shit,’ he gasped. ‘Shit. Wait!’

  Maroussia stopped and turned.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Just keep up.’

  75

  Minutes later they were crouched side by side among the trees
at the edge of the clearing. The isba was in flames. Its skin covering was gone. The whalebone frame still stood, blackened and skeletal in the middle of a wind-tugged roaring fire of wood and furs and wool. White and grey smoke and clouds of sparks poured into the sky, swithering and whipping in the wind. The smoke was blowing away from them but they could smell it.

  The mudjhik was a dark shape slowly circling the fire. From time to time it paused, its massive neckless head tilted to one side, as if it were listening to something. Sniffing the air.

  There was no sign of Aino-Suvantamoinen. There was no sign of their human hunter either. They watched the mudjhik in silence.

  Lom felt something dark touch his mind. It was the same intrusive triumphant contact he had felt in the souterrain. His hands prickled as if the flow of blood were returning to numbed extremities. His mouth was dry. He felt himself sinking into a pit of blank hopelessness. Despair.

  The position is hopeless. We’re going to die.

  No. That’s not my voice.

  The mudjhik’s blank face whipped around towards where they were hiding, driving its eyeless gaze into the tangle of branches.

  ‘Fuck!’ hissed Lom. ‘It’s seen us. Run!’ He caught a glimpse of the mudjhik beginning to move towards them. A kind of lurching fall that was the beginning of its accelerating charge. They turned and fled.

  They ran thoughtlessly, stumbling and crashing through the undergrowth. Lom’s chest was tight, his stomach sickened. Already he was feeling the thud of the stone fist against the back of his head that would be the last thing he ever felt.

  After twenty or thirty yards they broke out of the thorny scrub onto a path, a narrow avenue filled with pale dawn light like water in a canal. It led gently downhill between taller trees towards the mudflats. Picking up speed they ran along it. Lom had no plan, no hope, except the wild thought that if they could reach the soft expanses of mud the mudjhik would be unable to follow them. It would flounder and sink. How they themselves would cross the treacherous flats he didn’t know.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He could hear the mudjhik following. The rhythm of its heavy footfalls shook the earth beneath them. And he could feel the taunting, the almost casual mockery of its leisurely pace. It would not lose them now.

  Then Lom was almost knocked sideways off his feet by a slap of wind against his body. Flying leaves and small pieces of twig and thorn stung his face, half-blinding him. He half-felt and half-saw in the corner of his eye a small and indistinct figure flow out of the woods and back up the path behind them. It was almost like a woman except that she was made of twigs and leaves and twisting wind. Behind him he heard Maroussia cry out and stumble. He stopped and turned to grab her and pull her upright.

  ‘Don’t stop!’ he shouted into the rising noise. ‘Don’t look back!’

  The wind rose, dissonant and maddening: it was almost impossible to walk against it, let alone run. A heavy bough fell at their feet with a dull thud. It didn’t bounce. Big enough to have killed them all.

  ‘Just keep going!’ Lom yelled.

  A series of tremendous crashes came behind them, one after another. Four. Five. Six. Accompanied by the squeal and groan of tearing wood. The wind died.

  ‘Vissarion!’

  It was Maroussia. He stopped and looked back.

  There was an indistinct shape on the path, at once a woman and a vortex of air and tree fragments, standing on the air a foot above the earth. It seemed as if her arms were spread wide to embrace the wood. Beyond her, huge trees had toppled across the track. Half a dozen of the largest beech and oak lay as if hurricane-flattened. Swirls of wind still stirred among their fallen, near-leafless crowns. The mudjhik had almost managed to evade them, but the last of them had come down with the immense weight of its trunk across its great stone back. The mudjhik was trapped under it, its face pressed deep into the scrubby grass and dark earth. It was not moving.

  The wind-woman let her arms drop to her sides in a gesture filled with tiredness and relief. Aino-Suvantamoinen stepped out of the woods. He was walking towards the mudjhik where it lay.

  ‘No!’ yelled Lom. ‘Wait! Don’t!’

  The giant didn’t hear him, or else he took no notice. He walked across to look down on the mudjhik’s motionless head. Its face was pressed inches deep into the mud. It could not have seen or heard or breathed. But it did not need to. As soon as the giant came within reach the mudjhik’s free arm whipped forward in a direction no human or giant could have moved. But it was not human or giant: it had no ligaments and skeletal joints to define the limits of its moves. Its fist of rust-red stone smashed into the front of the giant’s knee and broke it with a sickening crack. The giant shrieked in shock and anger and pain as he fell. The wind-woman seemed to cry out also, and shiver like a cat’s-paw across still water. A storm of twig-fragments and whipped-up earth clattered ineffectually about the mudjhik’s half-buried head.

  The mudjhik’s arm struck out again, almost too fast to be seen, punching towards the fallen giant’s body, but he was just out of reach. Groggily, Aino-Suvantamoinen began to crawl away to safety, shaking his great head and dragging his snapped and twisted leg. Lom could hear his laboured breathing, deep and hollow and harsh. He sounded like a huge beast panting, a dray horse or a great elk. The mudjhik was moving purposefully under the weight of the fallen tree. Unable to raise itself with the trunk on it back, it was rocking its body from side to side and scooping at the earth under its belly with its hands. Gouging a deepening groove in the ground. Digging its way out. Soon it would be free.

  He turned to Maroussia, but she wasn’t there. He looked around wildly. Where the hell had she gone?

  Then Lom saw her. Up the path, at the edge of the trees. She was heading for the stricken giant. Aino-Suvantamoinen was waving her away, but she was taking no notice.

  ‘Maroussia!’ Lom yelled. ‘Get down! Get out of sight!’

  There was a sharp ugly rattle of gunfire. An obscene clattering sound, flat and echoless. A sub-machine gun. Lom saw the muzzle flashes among the trees up and to the left, on the side of the path away from Maroussia. Bullet-strikes kicked up the mud, moving in a line towards the crawling, injured bulk of Aino-Suvantamoinen. A row of small explosions punched into the side of the giant’s chest from hip to shoulder, each one bursting open, sudden rose-red blooms in little bursts of crimson mist. The huge body shuddered at the impacts. Then the top of his head came off.

  Lom heard Maroussia’s sigh of despair. Then the gun turned on her. A spray of bullets ripped into the trees around her, splattering the branches like heavy rain. He saw a splash of blood across her cheek, red against pale, as she fell.

  ‘Maroussia!’

  She wasn’t moving.

  No, thought Lom. Not her. No.

  He began to move. He needed to get to her. He needed to draw the fire. Give her time to get into cover. If she could.

  The gunfire turned towards him. He yelled and threw himself sideways into the trees, falling heavily.

  Silence. The firing had stopped.

  Keeping low, expecting the hail of bullets to fall again at any moment, Lom began to slither along the ground, hauling himself along on his elbows, driving forward with his knees. He felt the low mat of brambles and the roots of trees scraping his lower belly raw. He winced as a sharp branch dug into him under his belt: it felt as if it had pierced his skin and gouged a chunk from his flesh. He ignored it. He was trying to work his way up the hill to where she had fallen. Keeping his head low, he could see nothing. Where was the gunman? Waiting for him to show himself. Moving to a new position? Coming up behind him? No point in thinking any of that. Move! The only thing in his mind was reaching Maroussia. He reached the shelter of a moss-covered stump. Pushing aside a thicket of small branches, he risked a look.

  Twenty yards ahead of him, Maroussia, looking dazed and lost, was trying to stand. He saw her stumble into the cover of the trees.

  And then the mudjhik was free of the fal
len tree and on its feet, and coming straight towards him.

  Lom ran, ducking low, ignoring the thorns and brambles that slashed his face and hands until they ran wet with blood, heading for where the trees grew densest, squeezing between close-growing trunks, wading brooks. Anything that would slow the mudjhik. Anything that would give him the advantage.

  The mudjhik was relentless. It would not give up. It would keep on coming. But it could not move as fast as a man through a wood. Lom could hear it behind him, crashing its way through the trees, but he was getting further ahead. Widening the gap.

  Lom ran. There was nothing before this moment, nothing after it; there was only now and the next half-second after now, where he had to get to, by running as fast as he could make his body run and by not falling. The world narrowed down to one single point of clarity, the hole through which he had to pass to reach the moment on the other side of now. Behind him was the hunter. Ahead of him… calling him, wanting him as much as he wanted it… the safe hiding. The dark place. The mothering belly. The hole in the ground.

  Lom hunched in the souterrain. He was sweating and shaking with cold. Thick darkness pressed against his eyes and seeped into his skin. He could smell his own blood, smeared on his hands and face; he could smell the damp earth and stone; and he could smell his own fear. Fear, and despair. Where was Maroussia? For the third time he did not know. For the third time he had left her to face her enemies alone. Vissarion Lom, protector of women. His own death would surely come and find him here. The mudjhik would sniff him out and dig. Drag him out and snap his neck. He had a little time to wait. But no hope. The souterrain was not a refuge but a trap. A dark hand reached inside his skull with stone fingers and squeezed his brain in its palm. Cruel and stupid and certain. I am coming. I will be with you soon. Again Lom felt the prickling clumsy numbness in his fingers and the gut-loosening dread. It will not be long.

  He repelled the touch with all his force and slammed his mind shut against it. He had more strength than he had expected. This was something new. He felt a moment of surprise, his adversary’s mental stumble as he lost his footing, and then… silence. He was free of it.

 

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