The giant paused from time to time to study the water levels and look about him, his great head cocked to one side, sniffing the salt air. Sometimes he would adjust the setting of some heavy mechanism of wood and iron, a winch or a lock or a sluice gate.
They stopped on the brink of a deep, fast-flowing ditch. The giant stared into the brown frothing surge that forced its way across a weir.
‘The flood is going down,’ the giant said. ‘Every time the floods come now, the city builds its stone banks higher. But that is not the way. The water has to go somewhere. If you set yourself against it, the water will find a way, every time.’ He stooped for a moment to work a windlass that Maroussia hadn’t noticed among the tall grass. ‘I tried to tell them,’ the giant continued when he had done his work. ‘When they were building the city, I tried to tell them they were using too much stone. They made everything too hard and too tight. You have to leave places for the water to go. But I couldn’t make them listen. Even their heads were made of stone.’
‘You remember Mirgorod being built?’
‘I was younger then. I thought I could explain to them, and if I did, then they would listen. They tried to drive me out, and every so often even now they try again.’ He grinned, showing big square teeth. Incisors like slabs of pebble. Sharp bearish canines. ‘I let them lose themselves.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The marshes are bigger than you think, and different every day. Every tide brings shift and change. All possible marshes are here.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes,’ said the giant. ‘You do.’
Maroussia hesitated. ‘If you remember the city when it was being built—’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘—then you would remember the time before? You remember the Pollandore?’
‘You don’t need to remember what is still here.’
Maroussia hesitated.
‘I need to go back,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to leave Vissarion. He helped me.’
‘You should not leave him,’ said the giant. ‘He is important too.’
‘What do you mean?’
The giant stopped and looked down at her.
‘I don’t know, and neither does he. But it is on the river, and the rain likes him. That’s enough.’
‘But what if he never wakes up?’ said Maroussia. ‘Or he wakes up but he isn’t… right. He almost drowned, and there’s that hole, that terrible hole, in his head.’
‘He is not hurt,’ said the giant. ‘At least, his body is not. But he doesn’t know how to come back.’
‘I don’t understand that either.’
‘I can fetch him back, if you want me to. Tonight. After dark. When the day is over. Your choice.’
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Do it.’
68
Vissarion Yppolitovich Lom lies face down, floating on the glass roof of the sea. He presses his face against the water as if it were a pane of glass. Looking down into clarity. A landscape unrolls beneath him.
Time is nothing here.
This is the drowned, memorious land. Mammoths’ teeth, the bones of bear and aurochs and the antlers of great elk litter the sea’s bed. The salt-dark leaf mould of drowned forests. It is a woodland place. Lom sees the sparrowhawk on the oak’s shoulder and he sees the bivalves browsing the soft stump’s pickled meat. Sea beasts move across the floor of it. Their unhurried footfalls detonate quiet puffballs of silt as they go, slow without heaviness, shoving aside fallen branches, truffling for egg-purse, flatworm and urchin, their eyes blackened like sea beans and gleaming in the half-light.
Time is nothing here.
Except… something touches him. The merest graze of an eye in passing. An alien gaze, cold and empty, vaster far than the sea, star-speckled. It passes away from him.
And pauses.
And flicks back.
And takes him in its grip.
Lom closes himself up like a fist, like a stone in the sea, like an anemone clenching close its crop of arms, like a hermit crab hunching into its shell. He wants to be small. Negligible. He wants to pull himself tight inside and withdraw or sink out of sight. But it is hopeless. He knows the touch of the angel’s eye for what it is.
Archangel begins to prise him open for a closer look.
No! Lom dives, pulling the surface shut behind him, nosing downwards, parting the layered muscles of the dimming waters’ body. Sounding. Depth absorbs him. He is strong. Very strong. Stronger than he had ever known. Lom slips with a writhing kick out of the angel’s grasp. He hears, very faint