Part 30 (1/2)

'Make it your best work ever. And get rid of the scar on his face.'

Yakous.h.i.+v worked as rapidly and as neatly as he could. It was impossible to avoid making a mess in the room. There was... spillage. But when he had finished the corpse of Osip Rizhin was glossy and s.h.i.+ning and fragranced with a cloying sickly sweetness.

When Rond returned he examined Yakous.h.i.+v's work from head to foot.

'You've done well,' he said. 'You should be pleased, Yakous.h.i.+v. Your last job was your best. I hope you can take some satisfaction from that. I'm only sorry you can't go home now.'

Yakous.h.i.+v turned white. 'No,' he said. 'Please. No.'

'There can be no blabbing, you see. No tales to be told.'

'I won't. Of course. I promise. Please-'

'I'm sorry, Yakous.h.i.+v,' said Rond.

8.

Next morning Lom woke at the outermost, easternmost edge of the world he knew, he and Kamilova alone in an emptied ancient landscape.

The sun had not yet risen above the edge of the forest. Close now, the hills were dark shoulders and hogs' backs of dense tree canopy draped in mist and cloud. Home of ravens. On the lower slopes he could see the relics of long-abandoned field boundaries under bracken and scrub, and out of the scrub rose great twisted k.n.o.bs and stumps of rock, shoulders and boulders of raw stone. Stone the colour of rain and slate.

The stone seemed to hum and p.r.i.c.kle the air.

The Lezarye used to keep the debatable lands by patrol and force of arms, Kamilova had said, but the forest maintains its own boundary. It's stronger now than I've ever felt it before.

I feel it, said Lom. Yes.

Kamilova, bright-eyed and alive, raised the Heron's brown sail, and the little wooden boat took them up the river and into the trees.

As they travelled, Kamilova kept up a stream of quiet talk, more talk than Lom had ever known from her before. She talked about the people who went to live among the trees.

'The forest changes you,' she said. 'It brings out who you are. The breath of the trees. Giants grow larger in the woods.' She talked about hollowers, hedge dwellers who dug shelters in the earth. 'They don't hibernate, not exactly, but their body temperature falls and they're dormant for days on end. They sleep out the worst of winter underground like bears do.'

She told him the names of clans. Lyutizhians meant people like wolves, and Ka.s.subians were the s.h.a.ggy coats.

'I saw things once that someone said were bear-made. They were rough things, strange and wild and inhuman, for paws and muzzles and teeth to use, not dextrous fingers. But it was just a rumour. Humanish forest peoples keep to the outwoods, but there's always further in and further back.

'The forest is a bright and perfumed place,' she said, 'with dark and tangled corners. It is not defined. It includes everything and it is not safe. The forest talks to you, but you have to do the work; you have to bring yourself to the task. Communication is indirect and you must pay attention. You have to dig. Dig!'

Lom hardly listened to her. The river was pa.s.sing through a gap between steep slopes, almost cliffs, under a low grey sky, and there was the possibility of cold rain in the air. The troubling ache in his head that had been with him all morning, the agitated throbbing of the old wound in his forehead, was fading. His sense of time pa.s.sing had lurched, dizzying and uncomfortable, but it was settled now. Time present touched the endless eternal forest like sunlight grazing the outer leaves of a huge tangled tree or the surface of a very deep and very dark lake. The forest was all Kamilova's stories and more, but it was also a breathing lung made of real trees and rock and earth and water. He felt the aliveness of it and the way it went on for ever.

Doors in the air were opening. The skin of the water glimmered and thrilled. Promising reflections, it almost delivered. The breath of the forest crackled. It bristled. There were black trees. There were grey and yellow trees. He was watching a single ash tree at the river margin and it was watching him back, being alive.

Lom was opening up and growing stronger. He was entering a place where new kinds of thing were possible, different stories with different outcomes. He was coming home. He reached up into the low roof of cloud and opened a gap to let a spill of warmth through that made the river glitter. A moment of distraction, lost in sunlight: there were many small things among the treesanimals and birdsand they were all alive and he could feel that.

Then he became aware that Kamilova had stopped talking and was watching him. Intently. Curiously. A little bit afraid.

From the slopes of the hills and among the trees they are watched. The small boat edging upriver against the stream; the woman whose arms are painted with fading magic; the man spilling bright beautiful scented trails from the hole in his skull, tainted with dark shades of angel: all this is seen and known by watchers with brown whiteless eyes, and by things with no eyes that also see. Word pa.s.ses through roots and leaves and air. Word reaches Fraiethe and the Seer Witch of Bones. Word reaches Maroussia Shaumian Pollandore.

He is coming. He is here.

Chapter Twelve.

Nothing that lives and dies ever has a beginning, nor does it ever end in death and annihilation. There is only a mixing, followed by the separating-out of what was mixed: and these mixings and unmixings are what people call beginnings and ends.

Empedocles (c. 490430 BCE)

1.

Kantor-in-mudjhik runs through the endless forest, tireless, exultant and strong. The continental Vlast is behind him. He has run it, ocean to trees, without a pause.

Under the trees he has heard the voice of Archangel talking and they have sealed the deal.

I will give you body after body, says Archangel, a chain of human bodies without end, vessels for my champion son. Worthy and valid strength of my strength, bring me out of the forest and for you I will break down the doors and shatter the doorposts. For you I will raise up the dead to consume the living. I will give you armies without end, and you will carry me, speaking my voice, across the stars.

Josef Kantor in his mudjhik body likes the sound of that.

I am n.o.body's son, he says, but I will be a brother.

It's not enough, but it will do for now.

2.

Into the forest old beyond guessing, the first place, primordial, primeval, primal, the unremembered home, fair winds carried them day after day, deeper and deeper, up the river against the stream. Trees stood silently, lining the banks, fading away in every direction into twilight and indistinction.