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