8.
In the first days of May that ill-starred year, word had come from the capital that Lefty had attacked Kholos Scylla, very nearly killed him with a roar, put out an eye and disfigured his face. No one could explain what Lefty had done, but everyone suspected Rita Nai-Turs had something to do with it. What happened afterwards, nobody really knew. An enormous bounty was put on Lefty’s head; hunters were prowling everywhere in search of him. Then he suddenly surfaced in the Fieldlands, presumably to empty one of his caches, but ran into the hunters, who drove him into the Wild City. From there, rumour had it, he tried to escape through the Cursed Field, went too deep and vanished. Six months later, no one expected to see him alive and well. Yet here he sat, smiling quietly, giving off dreams and the warmth of a radiant future like a second sun. Now the shareholders sat motionless in the shade of their resurrected hopes, returning in their thoughts to dreams that had come back to life.
Into the utter silence of the six, an ice bucket containing a bottle of moon infusion was brought and set on the table. Var muttered something and shifted in his wheelchair. Skripka, gazing dreamily through solid objects, poured him a glass. Var drank and fell quiet again.
Lefty studied his old friends with curiosity. Through the frost-patterned panes of the tall window, the winter day drenched them in poisonous Field light. They all seemed to have thawed a little, their features softened; every last one had withdrawn into himself. Each was trying on his allotted share of the spoils and flying away in dreams towards the future opening before him.
Only Var looked out from beneath his shaggy eyebrows with a sullen indifference. Once, it seemed, he had wanted something good, but that had passed. Now his hands merely itched a little to crush somebody’s face, to make it crunch like an apple, to feel the sticky juice running between his fingers and into his sleeves. Perhaps he wanted to do it to Lefty for his fragile beauty; perhaps to the Lady for her wearying, oppressive ugliness. Certainly not to Ivanka. Her he would have fondled gently, unwrapped like a sweet, settled on his stumps and let play with his beard and moustache like a kitten. Still, these were manageable desires, and Var had not yet had his head put in a cage or been chained up like poor Noah.
What Mammoth-Noah wanted most was to be cured of the furious mad thing that had taken up residence in his skull, wriggling among the filthy memories and filthy thoughts and shoving them all across his mind. Now everything was fouled, even the once cosy, spotless bedrooms of memory: stinking tracks and greasy, cold splashes everywhere. Properly prepared from his share, a golden thread of treasure-ichor would help catch the vile, hundred-legged creature and pull it out of his unfortunate head, to burn in God’s daylight like a monstrous sulphur head on a clump of fused matches. Then, holding compresses of icy sun-water to his head, he would leave this place and go as far away as possible, to the Overseas Tributaries.
Of course he would take poor Var along: the beaten carrying the unbeaten. The poor devil had gone badly downhill. But his golden thread, too, would draw him out of his damp lair and into the clear sunshine.
Kazimirov would arrive by ship soon and take them to the ancestral refuge(*) beneath Mount Viy, where they would entrust themselves to respectable Ovidan doctors and affectionate nurses. Mammoth-Noah would walk the snowy paths, rest for hours in fluffy snowdrifts, wrapped in furs like the Beast Neved, and, like that beast, search beneath the snow for the nests of spruce ants as red as blood, prise apart their dwellings of russet needles and find, deep inside, their fragrant clutches full of intoxicating ant honey. Afterwards, following a bath heated with iron logs, he would spend the night in a wooden room as snug as a coffin, in a great oak bed with a high feather mattress, starched linen, a cup of sweet juniper tea and the matron of the oratai chambers, plump as a steamed bun. What use would memory be then? Without it, sweet things would cease to taste bitter and salty things sour. He and his brother could live another hundred years that way, a hundred and thirty, far outliving Lefty and Skripka and every last one of them. This day and these faces would have been forgotten long ago, while they would go on wintering and summering, wintering and summering, wintering and summering, drinking quantities of tea and gutting anthills in the snowdrifts.
The Lady had no wish to go anywhere. Quite the opposite: she wanted to sell her share and at last buy herself pantsar immunity, the kind the Scyllas had. So that no one would dare lay a finger on her or her business. She did not want to be rid of her second face, or leave, or forget her memories. She wanted things as they had been before, in the golden age. This Field company might be all but dead, its remnants eager to scatter, but she would remain. New brave boys and beautiful girls would come to her Pool, and a new era would begin, a new life, on this very same accursed spot.
Here everything bore the imprint of her ample body, the tread of her soft shoes, the scent of her melon perfume. Here everyone was used to her little peculiarity, and she seldom encountered faces twisted with disgusted surprise. Not once in the past seven years had the Lady left Vasilkov. She felt almost as though she were the spirit of this place, and beyond the town’s boundaries the wind would simply scatter her. Let Kazimirov take the others to Ovida: she would worry less about them then.
Skripka awaited Kazimirov more eagerly than anyone, though not because he missed him. The most sociable and companionable of them all, he wanted simply to disappear somewhere new, change his name, cover his tracks and forget everyone in peaceful Ovida across the sea. There had been no Solovar there, no Exodus, no civil war; the people were peaceful and placid, like the cows on a milk bottle. The savagery and bitterness that had struck unfortunate Varvarossa were, to these respectable, good-natured souls, no more than frost crackling outside a cosy drawing-room window. Ovidans guarded their peace. Getting into their country was far from easy: money alone, however much of it—and Skripka had put some by—was not enough. One needed first-rate forged papers, useful connections and consent from on high. Only Kazimirov could arrange all that, and he was due any day. Together they would bury Lisovskaya, empty the caches, and away to Ovida. For good.
How surprised Kazimirov would be to find Lefty alive, with seven units of depth in his Sleeve into the bargain. It was all almost too good, but good fortune had never frightened Skripka: he boldly considered himself deserving of every blessing. Besides, what he wanted most now was peace and safety. Only his peace had to be thoroughly respectable and very long-lasting. He had no intention of making either treasure-ichor or golden thread from his share: sell it, that was all; money, lots and lots of money, and no mystical transformations. He did not want to be healthier, handsomer or better. To hell with it. The best was the enemy of the good. Nor did he want to mend anything in his memory. The past sloughed off him easily enough already, like an old snakeskin: it faded at once, dried out, trailed behind him, snagged on the branches of life and stayed there in transparent tatters.
His future, on the other hand, he pictured in vivid colours. He pictured a seaside resort town where he would arrive in a blue Blumichel with a single travelling bag and a passport in the name of Yazir Polabich, a millionaire from Stipika who had made his fortune in photographic film. He pictured a terrace in the morning, an oak with red leaves, white socks to the knee, a dressing gown to the ground, the crisp rustle of a newspaper full of peaceful news and advertisements for almost-new useful things he would have no need of, since he would have the money for things that were brand-new and entirely useless.
He even pictured his future bride—a girl from a good local family—down to the tips of her well-kept pink nails, the tender flesh of her inner thighs, the bones of her ankles. Only her face did he take care not to imagine, lest, God forbid, he grow attached to some bodiless creature he might never meet.
In his plans and dreams, everyone in his future life was well dressed, smelled pleasant but not overpowering, and conducted themselves in a businesslike fashion, without barbarous liberties. Yet all these most agreeable ladies and gentlemen had warm, open palms instead of faces. In time, living faces would appear above those white collars, among those arranged curls; for now there were only wavering patches.
This whole colour film, without plot or drama, played before his eyes. That provisional life, made up of thousands of cosy details, agreeable tastes and first-rate possessions glimpsed in magazines and other people’s drawing rooms, awaited its discerning master. He was tired of the wild life. Give him his share, and he would vanish without a trace before you noticed; you would never know where to send your old friend a postcard.
Separate from the wife, the car, the fireplace, the hand resting on the silky skull of a large, good-natured dog, he pictured a companion, a friend for travelling, for late-night vigils in bars and hot tussles beneath hotel silk sheets. This companion had a face: Ivanka’s.
Ivanka had no share, but she was sure a few crumbs would fall to her from the shareholders’ table, and she felt a joyful excitement. Oh, for the first time in months she had hope. How she wished dear Lefty would take her somewhere far away, a dizzying distance from here. Surely he would not leave her behind? Of course he would not.
Twice she had been his nurse, tending him after his return from the Field. The first time had followed a successful dive: Lefty had suffered scarcely any distortions and was back on his feet in two days. The second time, he was the only one of three Clockmakers to return. Frol and Bukovsky had died, and Lefty had been hauled out on cables in an acid suit torn open from within. He looked less like a man than a hideous, living tuber. Nobody believed the thing would survive until noon, and Var proposed injecting the unfortunate creature with a sufficient dose of Black Manila. But Lisovskaya gave the order, and four maravars in heavy suits lowered the monstrous human clot into the Crematorium baths.
Lisovskaya spent the first three nights and two days there with Lefty. On the third night Mammoth-Noah went down to the baths in a heavy suit and found her asleep beside Lefty’s body. A very distant human resemblance had returned to it. A child with a good imagination, finding a potato that shape, would have cried, ‘Mummy, look—a little man!’
Lisovskaya had no strength left, and they brought her upstairs. They decided to send in the two most experienced nurses, Lera and Lena Malagina. The following day both gave out and had to be brought back; afterwards they slept for a week on shallow-dew drips. Before long Lera gave up acid work and left Vasilkov for good.
Ivanka went next. She had worked hard ever since to forget her first twenty-four hours with Lefty, but even now images of that night sometimes rose in her memory like parts of a corpse swollen in bog water.
Still, she endured that first day and night, half transparent from the expanders, driven mad by the unbearable ringing of the time bursting out of Lefty, working her sorcery with drips, needles and flasks of heavy dew. Then she endured the second, when it seemed she had turned for ever into a scorched old woman. On the third night Lefty began to revive: the swollen rags of flesh started rapidly unravelling and gathering themselves back into a human outline.
On the fifth day Lefty grumbled, in the voice of a wounded whale, that she should take the drips out. He already looked like himself, but disfiguring spasms still shook him. Ivanka ordered him to bear it another day or two, until his nerves grew stronger and his human form set firmly. Lefty obeyed. Three days later, the expanders and dew broke the illness, and both of them were like brand-new porcelain dolls with freshly painted blushes on snow-white faces. Oh, it happens that way when dew prevails: the paradise of perfection lowers its razor curtain and severs what has gone before. Then come the days of peace and healing.
For days on end Lefty and Ivanka lay in one another’s arms on the couches of the baths, in a hot abundance of expanders and each other. Lefty was evidently still under the spell of one of his Field lives. He told Ivanka about the Overseas Tributaries on Ovida’s western edge, about how they would run away there together, to that free country. He would buy a passenger steamer, hire a crew, and for the rest of their days they would carry people from the Zimalayan foothills all the way to the Dunava and back, into the narrow headwaters of the Neved, where the boughs of ancient royal spruces sometimes met above the sluggish black river, forming dark, enchanted vaults filled with the puffing of a steam engine, woodsmoke and the soft, muffled echoes of passengers talking on deck.
Among the books in the baths’ library there was an atlas of Varvarossa, and Lefty spent hours studying it. He turned out to know a great deal about those parts. It was nothing like as wild, he said, as it looked in that old film The Mountain Marksman, starring Nyuk Makavey. Ovida’s overseas lands had seen neither Solovar nor the Civil War. On the western edge, in the mountain forests, old towns lived on around river ports and timber mills, and in the larger towns living trams still ran.
Ivanka peered at the map and felt dizzy, as though looking down from a height. Could such a thing really be possible—to live on a ship, sail mysterious rivers past towns with living trams, hold her hat against the wind and watch from above as passengers strolled about the deck? The imaginary river glittered before her, and its banks were nothing but spruce-covered hills, because in her picture of the north nothing but spruces grew. Lefty kept talking as though painting a picture. Ivanka watched him: in the pinkish neon twilight of the baths, he himself seemed made of neon rather than real. She lost the thread of his story, but believed it all with pleasure and took that foolish dream for her own.
On the fourteenth day a call came from upstairs ordering them out of the baths. Remaining under the influence of expanders any longer was dangerous: at some point a person might simply crumble into the finest pinkish dust.
Meanwhile Lefty sat hunched and lost in thought, distractedly pressing little scrawls into a napkin with the end of a coffee spoon. He could see damn-all ahead. The future split into hundreds of fibres, and every one dissolved in the crumbly fog of this evening. Kazimirov would arrive from Ovida any day now, and that was wonderful. He would be surprised, delighted; and seven units of depth, why… Together they would gather up the caches, bury Yana… And sail away to Ovida? Lefty too? He could not see that ahead at all, and the failure made him heartsick and uneasy. His morning encounter with Lisovskaya hovered before his eyes. Why was she wandering the town like a ghost? What bastards had shot her with crossbows? Nothing could help her now, but they must at least lay that wretched body to rest before scattering after their dreams. Though the last thing he wanted was to meet her again. That was what some of the golden thread should go on: healing the memory of Lisovskaya. Or forgetting her altogether? And Margarita while he was at it. Ha-ha. At that audacious thought, Lefty felt a tear scratch his eye. Damn it. He had to feign tiredness and rub his eyes with cold fingers. Careful: these were dangerous thoughts. Catch so much as a cuff on them and the whole little bird was done for. Lefty tried to distract himself, replaced the napkin he had worried into shreds with a fresh one, and tried to think about the future.
Thoughts of escaping the fateful Fieldlands had visited Lefty before, especially at bedtime. Then he would glimpse the bridges of Varvarossa, or the River Zephyr washing the stone feet of the giant Drobogor, or the mirrored pencil cases of Ovida’s business district. Things he had seen only in films and magazines were snipped apart by the scissors of his drowsy imagination. Stone legs were attached to mirrored towers; they became the piers of the capital’s bridges and strode knee-deep in clouds past a moon like a hole cut in ice, with chipped, frozen edges, tropical fish and light at the bottom. With the thought of a saving flight to distant countries, he fell asleep easily, as beside a beautiful woman he did not love. But Lefty usually dreamed only of the Cursed Field. They were long, inescapable dreams, seeming to last for weeks, like volumes of commentary on enormous novels whose pages had been shuffled.
Once, more than anything in the world, he had wanted to break the Cursed Field, conquer it, or at least tame it. He had believed that, once he defeated the monsters, he would find that oak, tear that chest from its chains, catch that duck, crack that speckled egg and, shaking the splashes of egg white off the accursed needle, snap it with the satisfying crunch of victory. Then the evil spell would fall away, the dome dissolve like a dream, and the sunlit homeland of his childhood greet him with familiar smells and glints of light. Nonsense. Even a year ago, at the zenith of the golden days, he had barely believed in that fairy tale. And when the Cursed Field swallowed Lisovskaya and spat her out, he felt a treacherous sense of release and renounced it for good.
Lefty had just decided to break the dreamy lull and bring his friends back down to earth when the teaspoons began trembling in their cups, the samovar’s feet rattled sharply, and an uneasy ripple spread across his unfinished coffee.