Night Watch 05 - The New Watch (22 page)

‘Glad to see you,’ Arina said with a smile. ‘You’ve . . . matured, Anton.’

One thing I had always liked about her was her precise way of expressing herself. Not ‘you’ve aged’ – what question could there be of age? Not ‘you’ve grown up’ – from the extreme vantage point of her long years I was a veritable infant, but for Arina to say that would have been to admit her own age. Not ‘you’ve changed’ – experienced Others know that very few individuals are capable of genuinely changing.

Although Arina had done it.

‘Are you aware of the fact that the Inquisition is looking for you?’ I asked. ‘And that all members of the Night Watch and the Day Watch in every country of the world, regardless of their level of Power and specialisation, are obliged to summon the Inquisition when you show up and take measures to detain you?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Arina confirmed. She thought for a second and decided not to provoke me. ‘I hope we can manage without that?’

‘We can,’ I agreed.

For a minute or so we drank our beer and looked at each other. She was a strange Other. Once she was a Dark One who often committed good deeds. Then she contrived to change her colour and become a Light One – but in the process she caused worse grief and disaster than some werewolves or vampires. I even had a sneaking suspicion that fundamentally it was all the same to Arina what she was called and how she was regarded – at any moment she was capable of abominable meanness or noble generosity. And it was entirely possible that in working evil she would appear to be a hundred-per-cent Light One, and in doing good would look every inch a Dark One, from her head to her feet.

I even suspected that, contrary to the general opinion, Arina was capable of changing her colour over and over again.

It wasn’t exactly that for her there was no difference – she could see the difference all right. It was just that she regarded the path from the Darkness to the Light as a well-beaten track, not a narrow little path that crumbled away behind you.

‘Strangely enough, I’m glad that you got away that time,’ I said. ‘Despite all the mischief you got up to.’

‘I had to help the departed to find rest,’ Arina said, with a shrug. ‘And I think the outcome justified that. And Saushkin the elder ended his . . . activities. And Edgar found rest too. The world became a better place. Your nerves suffered a bit, I admit that, but it all turned out well in the end . . . Peace?’

‘Peace,’ I said after a brief pause. ‘That’s all in the past now. I’ll mention in my report that I met you, but I won’t do anything rash.’

‘Thank you,’ said Arina. ‘That’s precisely the right decision! And anyway . . . I came looking for you for a reason.’

I said nothing. I didn’t ask how she had found me and what she wanted me for. She wouldn’t tell me how, in any case: a witch has her own cunning methods. And she was going to tell me what for without being asked.

‘Have you already met Erasmus?’ Arina asked.

I smiled and didn’t answer. Arina’s sources are pretty good, but not omniscient.

‘I assume you have,’ Arina went on. ‘Are you going to share the news?’

‘What for?’ I asked.

Arina sighed. ‘Now that’s the right question. Anton, how do you intend to deal with the Tiger?’

‘I don’t. He’s gone.’

‘And when he comes back for you?’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘You’ve always tried to avoid actions with irrevocable consequences, Anton. I don’t believe the boy’s prophecy was simply lost in the void.’

I shrugged.

‘Arina, if I had heard the prophecy, the Tiger would have come after me, right? That’s the first thing. The second is that I was physically nowhere near him. The boy was egged on by Nadya. And then she left him too. Surely you don’t think I would have left my daughter unsupervised if I had even the slightest suspicion that she had heard the prophecy . . . and was therefore in danger?’

A shadow of doubt flickered across Arina’s face.

‘Yes, that’s true . . . that’s right. I understand that. But something doesn’t fit! You must have tried to save the information and keep it for yourself. You wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t!’

I laughed.

‘Well, Arina, that’s all fine and dandy, but how could I have done it?’

‘A tape recorder?’ Arina suggested.

‘A tape recorder is an ancient device for recording and reproducing music . . .’ I said pensively. ‘Yes, yes, I remember . . . when I was a kid I had one: you put these cassettes into it, they had this tape coated in iron oxide . . .’

‘Anton, don’t play with words. Tape recorder, cassette deck, dictaphone – it doesn’t matter what it was! The older generation may underestimate technology, but at least I have enough wits to understand that. You’re young, you used to work with technology. You could have thought of something. Any telephone can record sounds nowadays. Tell me honestly: has the information been preserved?’

‘I think you should be the first to show a bit of frankness,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I hold all the trump cards.’

Arina nodded. She looked at a young waitress running past, carrying food to some table. The girl nodded, offloaded her plates and went dashing to the bar counter.

‘Agreed,’ said Arina. ‘All right, listen.’

‘Are you sure this is the right place for a private conversation?’ I asked. ‘There are plenty of Russian tourists in here.’

‘The waitress is from Riga, and she has excellent Russian too,’ Arina answered. ‘Don’t worry, no one will hear us.’

I hadn’t noticed anything like a Sphere of Negation or any other privacy spell, but I believed Arina. Witches, even ex-witches, have their own magic.

‘Then tell me,’ I said.

‘Anton, the main prophecies must be fulfilled. They absolutely must. The Twilight demands it . . . life itself demands it.’

‘Is that so?’ I asked in surprise. ‘And I thought the Twilight tried to obstruct the Prophets.’

‘That’s a mistake,’ said Arina, shaking her head. ‘Does it not surprise you that, for all his omnipotence, the Tiger moves so slowly?’

‘Well . . .’

‘The Tiger is the spur, the lash urging the Prophet on. The Tiger hurries him along, trying to make him pronounce his main prophecy as quickly as possible.’

‘A bold conclusion,’ I said.

The waitress brought us two more beers. She looked slightly bewildered – first, in pubs you’re supposed to buy beer at the bar yourself, and second, Arina hadn’t bothered to pay. I handed the girl a tenner without saying anything.

‘I think we’d better start from the basics. Who is a Prophet?’ Arina asked me. Then she answered her own question: ‘He’s not just an Other who is capable of forecasting the lines of probability, so that he can “look into the future”. At that level all of us can “foresee the future”, to a greater or lesser degree. In the right set of circumstances, even ordinary human beings are capable of similar prescience.’

‘A Prophet is qualitatively different,’ I said. ‘Another kind of Other, pardon the pun.’

‘Ah, but he isn’t,’ Arina laughed. ‘The difference is quantitative. A Prophet reads the lines of probability for the whole world, not only his own or the lines of people close to him. A Prophet informs us which direction humankind will move in, only not in the form of a learned treatise but with just one single fact that at first glance seems insignificant. Take the year 1956, for instance. At the age of sixty-two, the French Prophet André Lafleur utters his first prophecy, his main one – it happened that way because he was initiated late in life . . . The prophecy is absolutely crazy: “Soon shall the girl Mary shorten skirts and the world shall be adorned with naked legs.”’

I snorted.

‘There, exactly,’ said Arina. ‘Those who heard the prophecy quite reasonably suspected that André had gone senile and lapsed into lascivious fantasies in his old age. And note – only a year later the first Sputnik was launched into space! But here was a Frenchman muttering something about Mary, who would clip skirts shorter . . . But then in 1963 Mary Quant – a Londoner, by the way – showed her collection of miniskirts. They shook the world. And the result? The sexual revolution, emancipation, a significant increase in the birth rate in the Old World. So what was more important, the Sputnik or the miniskirt?’

‘The Sputnik,’ I said resentfully, although I myself had defended the importance of miniskirts to Gesar.

Arina laughed.

‘It was all important. The Sputnik was prophesied too, but space flight was a generally anticipated important development. No one foresaw those twenty centimetres of cloth being snipped off, and they could only appreciate how important they were many years later. That’s the way a Prophet works – he foresees great upheavals and forewarns us of them through small events.’

‘Then perhaps you know what was so remarkable about an Australian who died as an infant . . .’

‘Alistair Maxwell? Yes, I know. The boy’s death broke up his parents’ marriage. In the late 1970s his mother had another child, by another man. That boy lives a perfectly ordinary life . . . but at the age of fifteen he pulled a little girl who was drowning out of the water. The situation didn’t seem like an emergency, he didn’t even realise that he had actually saved someone’s life. But now that little girl is one of the most powerful enchantresses in the Australian Day Watch. They forecast a great career for her. But if that infant hadn’t died . . .’

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘It’s just like in the joke.’

‘What joke?’ asked Arina.

‘Well, this guy has died and he asks God: “What was the meaning of my life?” And God answers: “Remember, in 1972 you were travelling in a train and you passed the salt to someone in the restaurant car? Well then . . .”’

Arina laughed.

‘Yes, right. Sometimes it can be just like that. But if you really go into them thoroughly, all those strange prophecies can be explained.’

‘And you’ve gone into them.’

‘Yes. It’s important.’

‘All right, prophecies are important,’ I said, nodding. ‘No one’s arguing with that. But does a Prophet really create the future? Does whether he is heard or not really determine the way the world will be? I’ve heard various different theories.’

‘To be honest, I don’t know,’ Arina admitted reluctantly. ‘Maybe the prophecy shouted into the hollow of an old elm tree was fulfilled anyway. And maybe not.’

‘Oak,’ I said. ‘Erasmus entrusted his prophecy to an oak tree. He doesn’t really like elms.’

‘Ah, what a finicky druid . . .’ Arina laughed. ‘So oak trees are dearer to his heart, are they? I don’t know if a prophecy works without listeners or not, Anton. That’s like the question about whether a tree falling in a remote forest makes any sound or not. Probably not – that’s what most researchers agree. But one thing that’s quite definite is that a prophecy can be changed.’

‘Well now, that’s a real turn-up,’ I said wryly. ‘Everyone’s convinced that prophecies are the ultimate instance of truth, that they’re unchangeable, unlike mere predictions. And only you know the truth.’

‘Yes, only I know it,’ Arina replied perfectly calmly. ‘Because I have already changed prophecies.’

‘Right, from this point on, let me have more detail,’ I told her. I thought for a second and got up. ‘And, you know what . . . let’s go somewhere else.’

‘Are you going to invite me to a hotel?’ Arina laughed.

‘I don’t think I ought to do that. Let’s sit in the park.’

‘They’re just about to close it for the night,’ replied Arina. ‘But then, what difference does that make to us?’

Drinking beer in a children’s playground is an old Soviet tradition. Where else could young people go when they wanted to drink . . . let’s say, beer? They had no money for restaurants in the USSR, there weren’t any pubs and bars, the tiny apartments were all packed with mum, dad, granny, brothers, sisters and relatives from the country who had come to town to buy salami . . . no way you could get it on there. So the over-aged children, who not so long ago were scrabbling about in the sandpits, sat on the children’s benches and swings in their own courtyards to drink their beer . . .

The USSR passed on, RIP, but the apartments didn’t get any bigger and young people didn’t get any more prosperous. Where the children’s playgrounds survived, they still served two shifts – infants during the day and senior-school pupils and students in the evening. The more stupid evening gatherings were rowdy, they dropped litter, played loud music and were aggressive with people walking by – for which they were dispersed by old grannies, who knew no greater joy than to ring the militia. The more cultured gatherings sat there quietly, concealed their alcohol, greeted passers-by politely and cleared up their own litter. I used to sit in one of those gatherings too.

Well, at least it seems to me that our gathering was cultured and polite, and it didn’t get on anyone’s nerves. But, of course, it’s quite possible that the inhabitants of the houses round about might have had a completely different opinion.

Anyway, one thing I could never have imagined, neither as a young dosser, nor even after I became a Light Other, was that late one evening I would find myself sitting in Princess Diana’s playground in Kensington Gardens, London, drinking beer with an ancient witch!

‘Luckily for me the prophecy was pretty clear,’ said Arina. ‘Masha was a diligent girl and she prophesied like that too – neatly. Only she tried to rhyme everything. She had it fixed in her head that a prophecy had to be in verse. So there I am, sitting in front of this nitwit and wondering what I should do. If I hadn’t understood who it was all about, I wouldn’t have taken any notice. What’s the point of complaining about what can’t be changed . . . right? But I did understand. It was 1915 – everything was quite transparent: “With the loss of his heir, the tsar is deranged, Bolsheviks are hanged in the cells. War lasts nine years, Moscow is consumed by flames and the country partitioned as well. Little Russia is German land, Siberia comes under the Japanese hand, a third of the people die of starvation, the world absorbs the rest of the nation.”’

‘A genuine apocalypse,’ I said sarcastically.

‘I think that’s what it would have been,’ said Arina. ‘The death of the Tsarevich Alexei could have affected Nicholas in an unexpected manner. He could have crushed the revolution . . . and then lost the First World War. And Russia would effectively have ceased to exist. The Japanese in the Far East, the Germans in the West.’