and the hissing of the rain, until the soldier struck him in the shoulder with the butt of his rifle, hard, and he fell.
‘Go down there. Get in line with the others.’
Petrov struggled to his feet, his shoulder hurting. The soldier who had hit him was young, not more than a boy, his face white as paper. He seemed to have no eyes.
‘Get in line.’
‘No,’ said Petrov. ‘No. I can’t.’
The soldier jabbed the muzzle of the rifle hard into his stomach.
‘Do it. Or we shoot you now.’
Some of the soldiers had circled round behind him. A hand shoved Petrov sharply in the back, so that he stumbled forward, almost falling again. The soldiers in front of him moved aside to let him through.
‘Down there. Walk.’
Petrov realised then that he knew this place. It was a piece of waste ground, cut across by a shallow gully. Boys used to play there when he was one of them. They had called it Red Cliff, having never seen cliffs. There was a small crowd of people there now, lined up on the lip of the slope, in silence, in the rain. Soldiers to one side, waiting. Three army trucks drawn up in a line. Soldiers unloading stuff from the tarpaulined backs. An officer, fair-haired, neat and pale, was giving orders. Petrov knew he smelled of soap.
Some of the people were naked, and others were in their underclothes. Some were undressing under the soldiers’ gaze. Women crossed their arms over their breasts and shivered. The rain soaked them. There was a pile of rain-sodden clothes. Alone, at some distance, an earth-coloured mudjhik stood, sightlessly swaying, attendant. The soldiers were arranging their mitrailleuses in a row on a raised mound.
Petrov realised that one of the soldiers from the street had followed behind him, and was standing at his shoulder.
‘Go over there and join the others, citizen,’ the soldier said in his ear. His young voice was drab with shock. ‘Leave your clothes on the pile. If we can, we will be quick.’
The people smelled wet and sour. They were as silent as trees. Petrov was aware of bare feet, his own among them, cold and muddy in the rain-soaked, puddled red earth.
Time widened.
Somewhere – distant – it seemed that someone, a woman, was berating the soldiers with loud, precise indignation. Three echoless shots repaired the silence and the rain.
Then the mitrailleuses began to fire.
52
Maroussia was in a terrible place. The paluba’s kiss had taken her there. A dreadful nightmare place in the shadow of a steep hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, it was alive. It was an angel, fallen.
There were trees here too, but here the trees were stone, bearing needles of stone. Maroussia was walking on snow among outcrops of raw rock. In parts the earth itself, bare of snow, smouldered with cool, lapping fire under a crust of dry brittleness. Dust and cinders, dry scraping lava over cold firepools. Walking over it, Maroussia’s feet broke through the crust into the soft flame beneath. Flame that was cold and didn’t burn.
Stone grew and spread like vegetation. There were strange shimmering pools of stuff that wasn’t water.
Everything was alive and watched her. No, not alive, but the opposite of life. Anti-life. Hard, functional, noticing continuation without existence, like an echo, a shadow, a reflection of what once was. But everything was aware of her. Everything.
The hill that was an angel had spilled its awareness. It was bleeding consciousness into the surrounding rock for miles. Like blood.
She wasn’t alone. Sad creatures wandered aimlessly among the trees. Creatures of stone. Creatures that had become stone. They were broken, cracked, abraded, but they couldn’t die. From the shelter of stunted stone birches, a great stone elk with snapped antlers and no hind legs watched her pass. There was no respite for it. It could only wait for the slow weathering of ice and wind and time that would, eventually, wear it away and blow its residuum of dust across the earth. But it would be watching, noticing dust. Cursed with the endlessness of continuation.
Stone giants were digging their way up out of the earth and walking across the top of it, breaking waist-high through stone trees. If they fell they cracked and split. Headless giants walking. Fingerless club-stump hands. Giants fallen and floundering in pools of slowed time.
The corruption was spreading, seeping outwards through the edgeless forest in all directions like an insidious stain, like lichen across rock, like blood in snow. It would never stop. It