Chapters:

1981

The frontiers of the Siberian wilderness that were once populated by the wooly mammoths are what God established as a cruel testing ground for his creation. There are few in the world who will find a way into the desolate landscape no matter how remote or small the entry, and whether deliberate or by accident, there is no way to prepare for it. There are a handful of souls in history who always find a way to survive in such places and they usually earn names like the insane or the incarcerated. The thousands of kilometres of forests stretch out in all directions to form an inescapable and unfathomable labyrinth and it grows and grows, up and down the violent geography of giant valleys carved into the crust of the earth with their razor ridges and ice peaks puncturing through the ever grey clouds. The gargantuan swamps lay in wait and the rushing artic rivers drag the trees into the white water which through no fault of their own grew too close to banks. The unending rows of pines stand like armies of centurions allowing nothing through their ranks, nothing but the feral, the bold, the lost and the exiles. To enter is to either die in the trees or live long enough to fight and lose to the terrain, and no rest, no hope and no rescue would ever come. Those few who went to the Taiga to escape from the world, to seek a sanctuary of solitude never came back. Because when the night came, they turned in the darkness to look behind them to see the way back, only to realise they had come too far. All that found them was starvation, soul-crushing endurance, and God.

The giant isolated ponds and reservoirs stood as still as glass in clearings in the forest on the plateaus when the helicopter passed over them. Zoya sat on her cold strap seat vacantly transfixed through the half sphere window behind her, the map sprawled over her lap, a compilation of grid references ordered in the thick-skinned notebook lay by her side with the fountain pen vibrating in the centre of the page from the rumble of the engine. The beats of the blades rattling everything as the helicopter floated above the desolation. The land passed slowly underneath, the frostbitten tempest whipped up and hissed through the seals of the windows, the tailgate, and over the chatter in the headphones that pressed onto her ears. There were only the pilot and the navigator talking between themselves, whispering briefly every now again, then stopping suddenly and thought was instantly submerged in the roar of the engine. They had been out for so long yet seen nothing and she could hear it in the pilot’s sighs and long, drawn breaths. It made her more and more deserted from them the deeper they went. There was no real mission but to look, to explore, but surrounded by the terrestrial hate for human life she could only stare west at the mountains on the Mongolian border through the cockpit. The mountains sat looking back like a mouth of jagged teeth on a jawline slowly inhaling her deeper and deeper south in its breath.

Most of her exhibitions into the Taiga had been fruitless, hastily planned and usually without authority. Her contract with the crew was running on fumes and the grants for exploration were up for review. Now she was a broke, mercenary explorer. But there had to be something out here, she couldn’t resist the belief in it. Somewhere shallow to get to, and deep enough to warrant an expedition to a place that the competition had not found.

Something in the distance began to develop with the trajectory of the helicopter’s path as if it was planted there for them. Zoya shielded her eyes against the whiteout reflection off the river that snaked below. She pulled up the binoculars to study and then switched to the map, then back to the binoculars. The familiar wash of excitement fluttered in her heart and she looked to the navigator in his seat. It was more interesting than anything they had seen in hours and they were already looking at the patch of deforested land on the downside of the hill that hugged a river that had branched off the major arterial one they had followed for some time. There was a clearing the size of a football pitch like a giant footprint stamped into the endless forest. The closer they got, the more it became apparent that there was a wisp of standing smoke rising into the air like a lonely pole without a flag. The only thing resembling human behavior Zoya had seen in hundreds of miles. She pulled her elbows into her side to steady the binoculars and held her breath to keep her still. She adjusted the focus wheel with her index finger and she saw the small black triangle of a figure looking back at them assemble into focus. There is no way, Zoya thought, there is no way out here.

The helicopter circled the clearing like a wary hawk until the pilot found a plateau next to the stream. The downdraft threw everything without roots into a tornado around the clearing as it eased onto the ground and the black figure hid in the tree line and Zoya didn’t take her eyes from it for a second as if the alien would disappear. The isolation curdled in her thoughts, they were three hundred miles from the nearest human settlement which was a dried up drilling site back north, abandoned and wasting away. She looked before and they were meant to be the first here, no one in the last hundred years had come this far. This was beyond the gulags, beyond Russian politics, and beyond belief. Zoya slid open the door and stepped into the thick elephant grass as the blades whirred overhead to a halt, the ticking engine shrilled and rattled in its power-down. The pilot stayed in his seat looking over his aviators while hanging his headset over the cyclic pitch lever then he checked his watch and tapped the fuel gauge. Any further south and they would be past the point of no return, and it was getting late. The pilot pulled open his window and Zoya stepped to it and looked at the figure stood in the tree line, the glint of something metallic in its hands.

‘Think we’ll get planning permission?’ Zoya said to the pilot, fighting with an unwelcome smile and her voice losing to the whining of the rotor. But the pilot only suspiciously stared at the figure.

‘Probably an exile, the religious folks were driven out to places like this. I want to be out of here before the last of the light so make it quick,’ The pilot said.

‘Exiles,’ Zoya mused into the trees, ‘I won’t be long, let them know we have found a settlement. No one comes this far without a good reason,’ and scooped up her black hair up and tied it back.

‘Oil Zoya, remember that, oil and gas. No more wasting time.’ The pilot advised. Zoya stepped away from the helicopter and for a second, her excitement was stifled by her debt as it loomed over again thanks to the pilot. How much in fuel was this costing her? She didn’t want to look, but she knew there would be nothing left after this trip.

Zoya walked through the grass with one hand in her pocket and her fingers clenched on the bulging notepad and pen in the other. The ground underfoot was a thatch of fallen branches that bounced and cracked under the grass that had grown over as a carpet long ago. The closer she got the more the details were coming into sight. A pile of rags emerged, then the shape of the figure. Then she could see the axe in its hand as she got closer still, then the long filthy jacket and headscarf. What emerged was the face of a woman in turmoil. Zoya studied her and instantly knew by the added notches in her belt tight around her waist that she was not well. Zoya stopped at a distance and waved her hand gently and the wind flanked in with a cold rush of realisation of how far she had come.

‘I’m Zoya,’ She said quietly.

The woman eased out of hiding in the web of pine branches, and into the light in a few steps and stood like something fetched from a tomb. She was breathtakingly primitive in every regard. Birch tree bark wrapped around her ankles as gaiters and tied on with some woven hemp string. All of her clothes were made from hemp and filthy and the only colour came from her eyes; grey diamonds pressed into an almost transparent and sunken mask of emotionless white leather. She was a young woman, Zoya could tell from her posture and the lack of grey in the exposed, mouse brown hair that had fallen from the sweat-soaked headscarf. The woman moved her hand for the first time and unslung a sack of pine cones from her shoulder and lowered them onto the floor. Her hands looked as though she had been handling wet charcoal and her nails were black, thick and ragged. She moved the scarf from around her mouth and let it drop to her chest.

‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on your soul. What is that machine?’ The woman said, her eyelids half closed like a hawk peering through Venetian blinds. Her voice had not an ounce of delight to it. Old Russian, strident and pious. It was straight and emotionless and there were to be only questions and answers. Zoya wanted to turn and look back to buy her some time to think of how to respond, but the axe was telling her otherwise.

‘It’s a machine to fly in the air. We are from the geological prospects institute, we are looking to drill in the area,’ Zoya said, ‘Are you okay?’

‘The machine flies,’ The woman said coldly.

‘Yes, the machine flies,’

‘Treachery, you will be tortured for this. This is not Christian business,’ The woman said. Zoya snorted some laugh, and hastily muted her entire facial complexion.

‘I understand. How long have you been here? Do you need help?’ Zoya said, moving as neatly as possible from any further antagonisation.

‘Father and mother came here in seven thousand four hundred and ten. And they are with the Lord now. I buried them after the six hundred and forty day famine the Lord sent to test us.’

Zoya’s heart swelled by such a prolonged period of famine and struck by the lacerating difference between their experiences of the world. There could be no pressing of worldly conversation that would not drive the woman insane. She had to ride her train to see where it was going.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Zoya said

‘Why?’

‘For your loss,’

‘Why?’

‘Because it must have been hard for you, losing your family. Being alone here,’

‘They are with the Lord, that is all we ever want,’ The woman said, her voice without a single tremble. Zoya paused, she had never met someone of such simplistic piety.

‘Do you know what year it is?’

‘Yes, I have followed my liturgical years strictly since father showed me. It is seven thousand four hundred and forty-six since Adam,’

Zoya shuddered as if someone had walked over her grave. The axe in the woman’s hand never loosened, and Zoya kept her distance.

‘I’m afraid it’s nineteen eighty-one,’ Zoya said and did look back at the helicopter this time, and saw the pilots stood at the door looking at the meeting, cigarettes between fingers relaxing after the long and pointless flight.

‘There will be no such year,’

‘Okay, well would you like some help or would you like us to leave you alone?’ Zoya said, ignoring the madness as politely as she could. The hermit woman paused and shuffled her hand up the axe handle and looked as though she was putting Zoya together piece by piece with her sharp eyes. She had never seen green eyes before, black hair, clean nails, laced boots, a zip, a machined stitch, clean teeth, fitted denim trousers, a watch. She had never even seen her face. It would be a long way down the line before the woman could understand how Zoya gained such smooth golden skin. The idea of Zoya discussing that her father was Cuban and her mother Israeli would involve geographical discussions that were beyond the pale and torturous for both parties, but that line of enquiry didn’t even cross Zoya’s mind, and it would be sinful for the axe-wielding woman to ask. She had never seen human beauty before she saw Zoya, and what was natural to Zoya was unnatural to the woman. She had never heard another name other than her fathers, mothers or two brothers. To the woman, Zoya was an extraterrestrial confrontation that she would have to beg forgiveness for and would probably never recover from.

‘Are you true Christians? Or do you come at the will of that stinking swine Nikon?’

Zoya paused for too long before she answered. It clicked into place as she knew what the woman was, one of the exiles driven to the edge of the earth by the reformations of Christianity under patriarch Nikon three centuries ago. His orders - Exile, reform, or summery destruction of whoever did not follow the liturgical reforms. As for faith, Zoya had given up on that Idea after her correspondence of the Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan led to her arrest. Too ‘morally’ entangled with the mission was her warning, and she was revoked of her license as a journalist. She sucked in the Siberian air sharp with frost and it cooled her heart as she held her breath, then released it with the lie that would change her for as long as she lived.

‘Yes, we are Christians,’

It was either lie and get somewhere or tell the truth and get nowhere at all. Zoya followed the wild eyes of the woman as they lifted slowly to the sky as she almost relaxed, her shoulders drooped and the axe lowered. Her thousand yard stare trailed down to the helicopter as if her eyes could pull on a string that fell from heaven, to ring a bell of sorrow. She gazed at the bewildering machine that came from the sky with its very own wind, carrying with it the revelation of the truth of the world.

‘Oh, my wise father,’ the woman sighed then lifted the axe again, ‘I will show you it.’ and she gestured to the clearing behind her with the axe. Her means of existence could be seen through the trees exposing the garden in pillars of light. Zoya turned to the pilots who were as they were last time she looked and raised a thumbs up then spread out five fingers. The navigator nodded and tapped his watch. But Zoya didn’t care, it would take as long as it needed and that was that.

She followed the woman through the trees, watching her mechanical stride and the axe swinging in her hand like a pendulum. Her leaping steps in the fallen pine needles crunched and squelched in the wet soil and Zoya had to walk briskly to keep up.

‘May I ask how old you are?’

‘Thirty three winters,’

‘We’re the same age!’ Zoya’s smiled in her voice but the woman didn’t turn, ‘How long have you been on your own here?’

‘I buried father at the beginning of the seventh winter,’

Rain from a few hours ago still dripped and pattered in the forest, and tied into the odour of wet wood and foliage Zoya found a faint aroma of rot swimming within it the closer they got to the garden. She backed off from the woman in anticipation as she learnt the origins of such a smell in Afghanistan. They came through into the open area that was a sizeable deforested area of tree stumps with a tilled garden climbing up the hill. At the bottom of the garden stood a tiny dilapidated log cabin of the crudest design. No windows, a small door, a flat moss cladded roof sunken on one side and the shelter watched them like an old frowning eye. A hoe, a spade, a fishing rod made from a whittled down branch and various other filthy tools handcrafted from wood and stone stood propped against the north facing wall. A fire smouldered outside the cabin in a small pit beneath a teepee of branches. A pen of some kind next to the cabin sat empty with bails of old crispy grass hanging from its little roof. There had been no animals in it for a while and it was beginning to be lost to the weeds growing up and over it.

Zoya marvelled as though she had found herself wandering through a perfectly preserved museum of poverty. She followed this being of extreme simplicity through her garden, snagging her jacket on twisted bushes of black and brown bramble as though nature was pulling her back from what lay ahead. Zoya studied the garden for sprouting vegetables and roots but nothing was growing here of any nourishment, and the emaciation of the woman was explained in a cold flush as Zoya could see that her toil in the garden gave her nothing in return.

‘Is it far? I don’t like surprises,’ Zoya said, looking back over her shoulder to the tree line she came through, now beginning to hope the pilots had the urge to follow suit and she saw a torchlight bobbing through the way they came.

‘It is no surprise, no.’ The woman said as she turned to follow the only trodden path towards the top of the garden where Zoya saw the two crucifix’s at the end of the northern perimeter. She swallowed hard to shift the knot of nerves from her throat, there had been death here and no one was around to know. Poorly crafted beams five foot tall hammed together with makeshift nails made from wood, but they were straight and true where they had been hammered into heads of the graves. The woman was heading towards them, and Zoya tasted in each breath that smell of the rot grow stronger. She put the notebook in her pocket took one quick look at the way back in case she needed to run as she was expecting the smell to come from some elaborate and gruesome ritual for a burial. But the scent felt resident, and it was too overpowering for it to just come from one or two bodies.

They stopped at the foot of an empty grave with another crucifix planted at the head, an excavation six feet deep with a puddle at one end. A depressing and empty hole that filled Zoya with pity that the woman had dug her own grave. At the base of the tomb was another small black hole the size of a fist. Zoya looked at the woman and was on the verge of forcing her to come back with them, energised by some sisterly sense of responsibility to nurture her into a better way of life. But there was another agenda brewing in the woman’s cold grimace back at her. A face battered by black winters and a life of crushing worship.

‘You are not Christians. You have turned the lords’ word to dust, and there is no one left for heaven,’ She raised the axe to the fist size hole and nodded once to it with authority.

‘Heathen…you liar!’ The woman hissed through her white cracked lips, ‘What have you done…you Luciferin…my vegetables have stopped growing, and the soil is dead. What you hear down there is what is coming. The fire and the eternal. There is another opening out there in the forest that you would be butchered before your eyes could suffer the sight,’

‘Wait… we can help you. Come back with us. We’ll show you a different world…please,’ Zoya raised a hand to guard herself and stepped back from the woman. In all of her life, she had never seen such unusual hatred and grief give birth to such pure fury.

‘The new kingdom of damnation will come through where the last breath of true faith dies, the last breath of the last true Christian,’

The wind blew around the garden and whistled through the trees. Zoya stared at the woman, void of response to such a claim. How could she possibly know they were not Christians, she thought. She lowered her arm as the woman leaned back and lifted her head and closed her eyes. It was the smell coming from the grave that jolted some validity to it, and the wheels of questioning the woman and recording the encounter started to turn, even if the woman was completely insane. Like exploration, it was irresistible to Zoya. She just could not walk away from the surprise of discovery. She sat down keeping her eyes on the axe in the woman’s hand then slid into the hole and dropped onto her feet into the puddle and sunk into the black clay. She knelt and looked into the hole, and the smell was complete and traumatising. It was pure death and decay, and her body was refusing to find the oxygen within it without her stomach violently contracting as she bucked away from it. She leaned away, her heart squashed and swelled with anticipation and a morbid excitement. She held her breath then put her hands either side of the hole and looked down into the void. Slowly, she leaned in and drew her ear to the hole, straining her eyes to look up at the woman at the same time at the lip of the grave. She pressed the side of her head into the sticky wet clay, and with her free hand, she covered her other ear. The wind shifted, and an echo in the black and bottomless hole caught her eardrum. She focused everything like all the riches of the world were at the tips of her fingers, reaching and straining for just one touch. An iota of something grew until what sounded like an enormous stadium far away filled to capacity quietly cheering. She focused harder, twisting the side of her head into the clay, then it came with some kind of wind up the hole and what she heard snatched the exotic colour from her skin, and yanked her soul to the surface to feel the unimaginable cold for the first time. The loudest whisper of total doom found her, the stadium was not cheering but screaming, a cacophony of absolute terror was trickling up from some dimension of horror. The soul of the earth screamed in agony at the end of every kind of pain through a pinhole. Zoya yelped like she had been electrocuted and fell back from the hole and against the side of the grave wall in a rabid scramble. She locked with paralysis, and her heart gave way to a tsunami of regret, like learning she had a week to live. The woman inclined into the hole, lips curled, the remains of her teeth had been ground down to stumps from eating pine cone nuts for the last four years.

‘My dear lord have mercy on your soul…for that is hell,’ the wind blew more of the screaming out of the hole and there was no need to look for it now you heard it once.

Zoya looked up at her with petrified eyes. Her heels dug into the clay pushing her back against the wall as if she would fall into the hole. It can’t be real, Zoya crushed the thought instantly but it came back, it cannot be real. But there was no mistake in what she heard and a profound sense of uselessness sucked in all response. What is true and what isn’t had been obliterated when she heard it and she could say whatever she wanted, but her mind was already unchained. She could hear it still as she sat up against the mud, now that she knew what the hermit woman knew, she felt close to her. Who to tell without some enormous price. She knew she would be sectioned before she could get the information past the pilots. Even if she could tell the committee, she didn’t know what could be done. No, the revolt came up for one last gasp of air out of the bubbling tar; It’s seismic movement beneath them, tectonic plates rubbing against each other. Is that what tectonic plate movement smells like? She nearly screamed at herself.

‘You’re wrong,’ Zoya said, her eyes wide with terror her hands clasped into fists on top of her knees.

The woman reached into her pine cone sack and drew out a book that looked almost timeless with age. Filthy, thick and screaming of ancient wisdom.

‘No, Zoya…you have all been misled,’


Next Chapter: 2017