The Ocean of Time (38 page)

Further off, in a huddle near the huts, the rest of the
muzhik
– the peasants – are gathered, looking on, or at least, those that have managed to get out of their beds after last night’s carousing.

Katerina leans close. ‘I’ll tell you who each is as they come to the table.’

I’m glad she’s there, for this would have been an ordeal without her. There’s scarce six faces that I know among them, yet they all know me.

I glance at her. ‘We do this how often?’

‘Twice a year. We would have done it a week or so back, only you were still away.’

I nod, then, seeing that Pavlenko’s ready, gesture for the first of them to come forward.

‘This is Semevskii,’ Katerina says very quietly, so I alone can hear. ‘He has two unmarried sons and a young daughter. He’s a field worker, from the north village.’

As Semevskii – a tall, gangly man, with twisted brown teeth – comes to the table, I put out my hand and grasp his firmly. ‘Semevskii,’ I say, smiling at him warmly. ‘How’s your little princess?’

And so it begins. As Pavlenko hands me one of the cloth packets, I have a brief word or two, then hand it to the man, who quite literally tugs at his forelock and bows then walks away, grinning like a fool.

Or is that unfair? Because Semevskii and all the others queuing here have every reason to grin. For here, on this estate, the workers are not merely free men, they are common shareholders in our venture, and this ritual is no less than the giving to them of their half-yearly share – an equal share – of the profits made. There are a set of books, open for any one of them to inspect, of what’s been produced, what used, and what sold on to the merchants of Novgorod. And a good little trade it has proved to be. Looking through the books this morning, I was impressed not only by Pavlenko’s neatness and efficiency at keeping records, but by the industriousness of the peasants and craftsmen of Cherdiechnost.

‘This is what
you
made,’ Katerina said earlier, when I’d asked. ‘It was hard at first, making them understand how it worked, and there were a few rotten apples to be got rid of, I can tell you, but eventually they began to see how by pooling their resources they could not only produce much more, but begin to diversify. They built the workshops and the mill, the smithy and the pottery, and, when things were really bad, we got through because you’d had the foresight to make them store some of the grain and keep it against hard times.’

Hard times … it’s hard to think that these happy, well-fed peasants have ever had hard times, but so it is. And as they come to the table, one by one, each to take their share, so I begin to feel very good about what I’ve done here.

‘Puskarev,’ Katerina says, yet as Puskarev comes forward I laugh in amazement.

‘
Puskarev
?’

He grins, his teeth like pearls in his dark, African face. ‘Meister?’

‘It was his owner’s name,’ Katerina says in a whisper. ‘You bought him at the slave market in Novgorod and brought him back here,
remember
?’

And she gives me a little nudge as she says the last word.

‘Puskarev,’ I say, and because she’s given me nothing more on the man, I ask, ‘Are things well with you?’

‘Fine,
danke
,’ he says, and gives me a beam of a smile, as if to let me know just how highly he regards me.

As he turns away, I look to Katerina. ‘I didn’t see
him
at the feast last night.’

‘That’s because he wasn’t there. He was in town, with four of the other men, delivering the
tamga
.’

‘We pay that?’

‘Everyone pays. Or risks the anger of Prince Alexander.’

I give the smallest nod. This is a little kingdom, and you don’t need to have that much imagination to see how difficult it must have been maintaining this, because, for all my innovations, this land is still a wilderness, and to defend what one has built takes a strong arm and a will of iron. And endless vigilance.

I turn to her again. ‘Was there ever a time when it might have failed?’

‘Plenty of times. But we always came through. You taught us that. How to endure. How to protect what we had. How to plan against the future.’

‘I did?’

And there are suddenly a hundred questions I want to ask her, but already there’s another of the men before me, and as I shake his hand and hand him his packet, the truth of the situation suddenly hits me.

‘This is it!’ I say to her excitedly, laughing with surprise. ‘
This
is the moment when I decided to do it!’

She stares at me, puzzled.

‘Don’t you see? It’s a paradox. I set all of this up – worked hard at it for year after year – all because I saw, just now, what could be achieved.’

‘But that’s—’

‘Time,’ I say. ‘Non-sequential time.’

Let me tell you what I think. The fact that Jamil’s twin is a time agent is of profound significance. As is the fact that she has vanished from the timestream, now that she’s drawn my attention. But is that the
only
reason for what the Russians attempted at Poltava? To taunt me? To let me know that they know about this place, this little haven of mine?

If so, it would be a first. To target a single time agent – which is all I am, after all – and create whole new timestreams, just to let me know I’m being watched.

And not to kill me.

It doesn’t make much sense, only there is no other explanation.

You see, if Jamil’s twin – the whore of Baturin – is a time agent, and it’s fairly clear she is, then the fact that Jamil is here, in such a sensitive position, minding my children, cannot be mere coincidence. Because they don’t work like that. They would not take her and train her and introduce her to me, unless …

But there I stall. Unless what? Do they plan to ‘switch’ her? Is that it? At some future date will Jamil be replaced and my girls find themselves at the tender mercies of a trained killer?

It’s possible. More than possible, in fact. Only they must know I’d think of that.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe they want to undermine me, to make me feel insecure, here where I should feel most safe.

Warfare by other means
.
Psychological
warfare
.

Let us assume, then, that that is what they aim to do. To make me paranoid. To make me fear those closest to me. Well, there’s an easy answer to that: send Jamil away. Remove the doubt by replacing the tutor.

Which is what they’d expect me to do?

Katerina finds me as dawn breaks over Cherdiechnost, sitting up on ‘the hump’, a grassy hillock raised some hundred metres or so above the surrounding countryside, the estate laid out like a map below me, the lake to my left, the main settlement – part-hidden by the trees – to my right, the blue cupola of the church shining brightly in the sunlight.

‘Otto?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I say. ‘About Jamil and her twin.’

She sits beside me. ‘The girls won’t be happy.’

‘I’m sorry …?’

‘You’ll have to send her away. If she stays …’

I nod. She’s understood. Has thought this through the same way I’ve thought it through.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘If there was any other way.’

We’re both silent for a time, looking out over the fields. In the early morning light the shadows are long, the lake in darkness, the forest lining the length of its northern shore, the north village just beyond, over a stout plank bridge.

‘How long are you staying this time?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Last time …’ She stops, looks down, then plucks a blade of grass and puts it to her mouth.

‘Go on …’

‘Last time it was a whole year. I began to think …’ She sighs. ‘I began to think that might be it. That you’d
always
be here. But I should have known, after what you’d told me.’

I ought to be annoyed with her, but I’m not. It must be hard not telling me. ‘A whole year?’ And I can’t help but smile, thinking that that’s to come. That it’s fated. Because I know now that I’m in a loop, and not just any short-term loop, but a big one. One that covers whole years of my life, something intricate and complex.

Only why? What’s happened to ‘the Game’?

‘So how many times …?’

‘Have you stayed here?’ She considers, then says, ‘Fourteen times.’

‘And this?’

‘The fifteenth.’

That makes me think. I have five children and the child mortality rate is high in this Age. For all five of mine to have survived is rare, bordering on exceptional, which makes me think that maybe I’ve ‘cheated’ – brought things back from Four-Oh, perhaps, to help against disease and childhood maladies. Only I can’t ask. Nor can I ask her if Hecht knows I’m here. But he must do, simply for me to be here, mustn’t he?

Katerina is looking at me, her dark eyes concerned. ‘It must be hard, living as you do. Sideways, backwards, any way but straightforward.’

I reach out and touch her neck. ‘Maybe. But it has its compensations. Without it, I would never have met you.’

She doesn’t smile. This time she’s sad. ‘Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why it’s all so hard.’

Only it doesn’t seem so. Sometimes it feels so easy I forget, losing myself, becoming an entirely different man, and maybe you’ll argue that that’s my job, only how am I serving the
volk
by being here? If I think about it at all, it feels like I’m stealing time from them. Shirking my duties. Indulging myself at their expense.

But mostly I don’t think about it. I shut it out. Thus three months pass like a dream. A golden, summer dream. And then, on the day before the harvest, I seem to ‘wake’ again, and finding myself so, wonder what’s so different about the day. It’s not anything that’s happened, just an instinct – a sense, if you like, of hyper-alertness that I’ve come to trust over the years – the time traveller’s equivalent of an adrenalin rush. Yet there’s no time to dwell on it.

The work party is waiting for me in the new field – thirty strong young men, stripped to the waist in the dawn’s early light, ready to begin. Pavlenko is there, too, to help supervise, only today I decide I’ll work with the team, and I send Igor away, knowing that, with the harvest looming, he has more than enough to occupy him.

The new field is an encroachment on the forest to the north of the estate. We cleared the space four weeks back, cutting down the trees and burning them. Their ashen stumps litter the clearing. Our task now is to uproot what remains of them, and clear the field of rocks and stones, ready to plough the earth and seed it with a winter crop.

I smile to myself as we set to, working in a line, the metal-cast wheelbarrows – made to my specifications – behind us. There’s a real enthusiasm for the task, because these young men know that the more fields we have, the more crops we raise, and therefore the richer every last one of them will be. It’s not an attitude you’d find anywhere else in the northern lands where bare subsistence farming is the norm, but we thrive on it, knowing that the markets in Novgorod will take whatever we can produce.

The soil itself isn’t good – it’s a poor, grey soil, nothing like the rich dark soil of the steppes – but a mixture of potash and manure helps raise its fertility, as does the practice of letting each field lie fallow every third growing season.

This is no Eden. It’s a hard land. But these are hardened men, well up to the challenge. I work at one of the charred stumps, digging around it, then, using the spade as a lever, bring it up out of the ground, clods of earth thrown up as it comes free. Throwing the spade down, I crouch and, lifting the heavy stump, carry it across and drop it into the barrow with a ringing sound.

Three of the younger men – hardly more than boys – are on duty, wheeling the full barrows over to the cart, where two more load them on, ready to take them over to where we’re laying down the foundations for a new stretch of wall. Nothing is wasted here.

And as we work, we talk, or sing, moving slowly, patiently across the field as the sun climbs the sky towards midday, when we stop and, satisfied that we’ve cleared a good half of it, make our way back to the north village where the women have prepared us lunch.

Tomorrow is a special day in our calendar, and much of the talk in the field has been about it. Tonight, as the sun begins to set, Anna Efimenko, an old widow from the south village, renowned for having lived a peaceful and virtuous life, will light a candle in front of the icons in her house and bow before them, then, avoiding being seen, she will sneak out to the fields and harvest the first three sheaves, there in the darkness, where the ‘evil eye’ cannot see her. She will bind them together and, after praying to the old gods, return to her house and extinguish the candle.

That done, all will be well. The harvest can proceed with the blessing of the gods.

Leaving the young men to wash and change, I return to the
dacha,
where Katerina is packing a basket for the picnic I promised the girls.

As I stand at the sink, naked to the waist, sluicing myself down, so I study myself in the glass. I am, I know, a changed man. Changed by my children, certainly, but also by the people of this place, this ‘Kingdom out of Time’, as I like to think of it. About my neck, on a simple leather cord, hang ten tiny silver hammers of Thor – a gift from Katerina. My arms look bigger than before, heavily muscled, my hands callused from manual labour, my flesh burned dark by the sun, my face covered – for the first time in my life – with a thick dark beard.

I put my hand up to my face to feel the growth, and find Katerina watching me in the glass, with that look on her face that’s becoming slowly familiar to me and which I’m sure is mirrored in my own – a hunger to see and to remember, to store up for the days to come when we’ll be apart.

‘What happens?’ I asked her, weeks past, late in the evening, when we were alone, the girls asleep in their beds.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I leave … back to Four-Oh. How do I …?’

‘You just go. One moment you’re there, the next …’

‘You mean I just vanish, wherever I am?’

‘No. It’s at night, mainly, but once … Once I was standing with you, among the trees, hand in hand. And then you were gone, you just weren’t there any more. That was the worst time.’