the clothes came from.’ He had found dry clothes for her, not city clothes but leggings and a woven shirt. Soft leather boots.
‘There are no humans here now. There used to be a village on the smaller lake.’ He waved his arm vaguely in no particular direction.
‘You’ve been kind to us,’ she said.
‘The rivers brought you. Why would I not be kind?’
‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘My name is Aino-Suvantamoinen, and yours is Maroussia Shaumian, and you are important.’
‘What do you mean? How do you know my name.’
‘You are someone who makes things happen. Different futures are trying to become. You have something to do, and what you choose will matter.’
She stared at him. ‘You know?’ she said. ‘About the Pollandore?’
The giant made a movement of his hand. ‘I know,’ he said,‘some things.’
‘You know where it is?’
‘It was taken. Long ago.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘That I do not know.’
‘I have to find it,’ said Maroussia. ‘I can’t stay here. Time is running out.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to do when I find it. I don’t understand.’
‘Understanding is not the most important thing. Understanding never is. Doing is what matters.’
The giant turned away and sat down in a corner to concentrate on his meat, as if he had said all he would say. It was like talking to a thinking tree, or a hill, or the grass, or the rain.
‘What exactly is that stuff you’re eating?’ said Maroussia.
‘Old meat,’ the giant said. ‘The marsh preserves. Trees come up whole after a thousand years. This meat… I put it in, I leave it, I find it again. It tastes good.’
‘What kind of meat?’
He held the chunk at arm’s length, turned it round, inspected it.
‘No idea.’ He took another bite. Then he laid it aside and stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Let us walk.’
Maroussia looked at Lom, sleeping on the stove.
‘What about him?’ she said. ‘Will he be all right on his own?’
‘No harm will come today.’
Maroussia walked in silence beside the giant. The floods had receded during the night, revealing a wide alluvial land, a cross-hatch of creeks and channels punctuated by rocky outcrops, islands and narrow spits of ground. Reed beds. Salt marsh. Sea lavender and samphire. Withy, carr and fen. There were stretches of water, bright and dark as rippled steel. Long strips of pale brown sand, crested with lurid, too-green, moss-coloured grass. Reaches of soft, satiny mud. Wildfowl were picking and probing their way out on the mud. Maroussia knew their names: she had watched them rummaging on the muddy riverbanks near her home. Curlew, plover, godwit, redshank, phalarope. The quiet progress of geese at the eelgrass. A kestrel sidled across the sky: a slide, a pause, a flicker of wings; slide, pause, flicker of wings.
This was a threshold country, neither solid ground nor water but something liminal and in between. The air was filled with a beautiful misty brightness under a lid of low cloud. There was no sun: it was as if the wet land and the shallow stretches of water were themselves luminous. The air smelled of damp earth and sea, salt and wood-ash and fallen leaves.
‘This is a beautiful place,’ Maroussia said. ‘It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we’re so near to the city. I didn’t know. I never came this far.’
‘It will be winter soon,’ the giant said. ‘Winters are cold here. The birds are preparing to leave. In winter the snow will lie here as deep as you are tall. The water freezes. Only the creatures that know how to freeze along with it and the ones who make tunnels beneath the snow can live here then.’
‘But it’s not so cold in Mirgorod,’ said Maroussia. ‘It’s only a few versts away.’
‘No. It is colder here.’
‘What do you do when the winter comes?’ said Maroussia.
‘When the ditches freeze and the marshes go under the snow I will sleep. It will be soon.’
‘You sleep through the winter like a bear? The giants in Mirgorod don’t do that.’
‘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.