The Ocean of Time (61 page)

‘Roland Francke,’ Schultz says, looking down at the bowed head of the first boy, even as he pulls the heavy gun from its holster. ‘You have been sentenced by the court to die. Have you anything to say?’

But young Francke is too petrified to speak, and as Schultz presses the muzzle of the gun against his temple, he pisses himself.

The gunshot makes us all jump, it is so loud. There’s a spray of blood and bone and the body slumps and topples to one side.

Schultz steps across, his cloak billowing out momentarily, his booted feet the last thing young Baeck will ever see.

‘Leo Baeck. You too have been sentenced by the court to die. Have you anything to say?’

‘No, Meister.’

His calmness surprises me and I take a step towards him, yet even as I do, the gun goes off again.

Schultz slips the gun back into the holster, then steps past the two bodies. Blood pools beneath his feet. He takes a deep breath and addresses the audience again.

‘Good. We are almost done now. But we have one final piece of business to attend to. One last matter that must be resolved.’

He turns and looks to me, then turns back. ‘Paul Woolf … come up here.’

I open my mouth, then shut it again. He
can’t
, surely. The investigation’s incomplete, and besides, nothing’s been proved. Nothing
can
be proved. Yet I have a sudden gut certainty that Schultz means to settle it right here and now, whatever the state of the evidence. I know that he hasn’t read the file, he hasn’t had time, only time enough to memorise Woolf’s name.

Woolf comes slowly, reluctantly up the steps and on to the stage, and whatever I felt about him, facing him earlier, I feel pity for him now, for Schultz is relentless. He might as well be the figure of death itself, standing there in his black cloak and shining black boots, his face stern like the face of an ancient statue.

Woolf approaches to within a couple of paces and then stops, bowing his head low. ‘Meister Schultz.’

Schultz studies the boy, almost as if he can
see
guilt, and then he speaks in that booming, commanding voice of his. ‘You have two choices, Herr Woolf. You can confess and save your family, or you can die anyway, and your family will die with you.’

‘But—’

It is not Woolf, but I who says that ‘but’. Schultz turns and glares at me, then turns back to young Woolf.

‘
Well
?’

Woolf is trembling. He cannot speak, let alone make a decision. Schultz draws the gun.

‘Stop it!’ I yell. ‘For Urd’s sake!’

The gunshot startles me. I can’t believe he’s done it. I feel sick, because – foul as young Woolf was to me – he wasn’t guilty. He hadn’t done anything. Not anything to die for, anyway.

Everyone’s looking at me now, staring at me, like
I’ve
done something wrong.

‘Herr Scholl,’ Schultz says, turning to me, the gun still in his hand. ‘Have you something to say?’

But I’ve nothing to say, except, perhaps, how foul this age is, how perverse its values, and, turning away, I hurry from the stage.

I have packed my case and am ready to depart when the young servant comes to me again, the same who met me on the walkway the previous night.

‘Come with me,’ he says.

I’m not sure I want to, but I follow anyway, down the main stairwell and left, along a narrow corridor I’ve not been down before. At the end there’s a short flight of steps, leading down to a small, metallic door set into a bare brick wall.

We go through, into a narrow, dimly lit corridor.

‘What is this place?’

But he doesn’t answer, just sets off down the passageway, as if it’s my choice whether to follow him or not.

I follow.

We go left and then sharp right and come to a narrow wooden door, set into the hacked stone of the wall. Facing it, I find my heart is racing.

The young man stands aside. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Go in. He’s waiting for you.’

That’s what I fear. My hand moves toward my chest. I look down at it, then lower it again. My palms are damp.

There’s no handle, so I push it open, The room is poorly lit – a cell of a room – not that I can see anything at first. There’s a kind of narrow hallway before it opens out, to my right. And there, sitting on a chair beside a bed, is one of them – one of Kolya’s ‘brothers’, a big man in his mid-thirties, long-haired and with that prominent, balding brow they all seem to possess. He’s like Kolya, only he lacks the intensity, lacks his
eyes
.

I stand before him, noticing only then that the boy is also there, curled up on the bed behind him, facing the wall.

I try to seem confident, but my nerves are on edge.

‘What do you want?’ I ask.

‘To tell you—’

‘Tell
me
?’

‘That you can’t touch us. Do you understand that, Otto? We’re way ahead of you. We know everything you do. We know
when
you do it, and
why
. As for tracking us down …’ He laughs. ‘Kolya
let
you meet us. Me and the boy. He
wanted
you to. So that you’d understand.’

‘Understand?’

‘That he’s not afraid of you. Despite what your people did to him.’ He smiles. ‘Oh, he knows that you know that now. The book … he knows about that. But that too will be reversed.
Everything
will be reversed, in the end.’

‘Then why is he so angry?’

‘Angry?’

‘At Krasnogorsk.’

The man shrugs. He clearly knows nothing about Krasnogorsk.

‘Tell him …’ I begin. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in the loop.’

And with that I jump. Back to Four-Oh. Back to chaos.

There’s the smell of cordite in that big, circular room, and over to the side, a group of the women have left their posts to huddle around another of them, who is down, clutching her arm. As I go across to them, Zarah looks up from among them, shock in her face.

‘Otto! He was here! Kolya was here!’

If I hadn’t come straight from where I’d come from, I might have laughed in disbelief, only right now I think he’s capable of anything – even of jumping right in here, on to
our
platform, with
his
DNA.

By rights he should be dead, scattered into a billion little pieces, like the fake Burckel I brought back that time. Only he isn’t.

‘What happened?’ I ask, crouching over the injured girl. It’s Leni, I see. ‘Why did he shoot her?’

Leni swallows, then. ‘I tried to grab him. I leapt up on to the platform and—’

‘There’s a note,’ Zarah said, and shakes her head in wonder. ‘He jumped in just to leave you a note!’

She hands it to me.

It’s just a single sheet of folded paper. I unfold it and read.

Otto.

Time isn’t safe for you any more. What’s more, I have that which is most precious to you. Your family. You will not see them again; not unless I choose to show them to you. To make you burn inside, the way you made me burn. Ah, but I forget. You don’t remember that, do you? It isn’t in the book. But ask Hecht’s brother, sometime.

I’m sure he has it somewhere among his papers.

Yours in hatred,

Kolya.

To say that I am chilled by what I read is to understate it. My blood goes cold with fear. I look to Zarah and her eyes show that she has read it and knows what I am feeling at that moment. Or thinks she knows. Because this is awful; this feels like death itself. Forget the bigger questions that his note throw up – how Kolya knows and does these things – it is his blunt statement that he has them that destroys me.

‘I have to go,’ I say to Zarah quietly. ‘I have to try to see them.’

And what’s to stop me? If I jump in
before
I left … Only even as I make to ask Zarah to do just that, the platform activates behind us and I turn to see Ernst materialise in the air, his face as shocked as ours, his eyes bleak. He looks close to breaking down, and his voice, when he speaks, shakes, heavy with grief.

‘Oh, my dear, dear friend. Oh, Otto, Urd save us, you’ve got to come and see. The things they’ve done. The
things
they’ve done …’

We jump in, into the trees behind the ‘Hump’, Cherdiechnost spread out below us. And what a scene of desolation it makes. Fires are burning everywhere. A great pall of thick black smoke drifts slowly in the wind. And the dead …

‘What’s happened?’ I ask Ernst, the words the merest breath. ‘How …?’

But Ernst doesn’t answer. He seems as shocked as I am. And that’s understandable, because only a day has passed here since I left, since I was taken back to Four-Oh.

And this …

‘Kolya,’ I say, but Ernst shakes his head.

‘No, Otto. This was Nevsky. Come. You’ll see.’

Only I don’t want to see. My heart is breaking. Because, even from where we stand, I can see the bodies, strewn here and there, lifeless, across the burning fields, and running through my head is the thought that my girls – even Katerina – could be among them. That I could stumble on them …

The thought of it robs my legs of strength.

‘I can’t … I …’

But I know I must. This is no time to give in to weakness. If anything can be done …

Only I can see with my own eyes how complete the devastation is. Barely a single house is untouched, not a structure unmarked.

Slowly, side by side, guns drawn, we walk down the slope towards it. I feel sick. I feel, well, suffice to say that nothing in my long and oft-bloody career has prepared me for this. Because these are my friends, people I loved. And as we go, we pass first one and then another of those loving, happy people, and every last one of them is dead, bloodily disfigured, men, women and children: what did it matter to Nevsky who they were? All that mattered was our defiance. And from seeing it, an anger begins to burn in me. An anger the like of which I have never felt before. An anger that threatens to consume me, just as the flames consume Cherdiechnost.

But the worst is to come. We cut across to the right, making for Razumovsky’s half-completed house. I make to go inside, but Ernst pulls me back.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to see.’

But I do. In those few moments since we descended from the Hump I have swung the other way. Now I
have
to see. For my revenge, I swear, will be terrible, and so I
must
. Even so, what I do see makes me groan; makes my heart break again, for there is my father-in-law, that big, larger-than-life man with his great black beard and his fierce ways, dead in his own bed, his young wife beside him, their throats cut, the sheets stained black with their blood.

Outside, I fall to my knees. I
must
see. Only I’m not sure I am strong enough to bear what I
might
see. Fear grips me now, and as I raise my eyes and look across to the big house and see the flames that still climb into the air from it, I wonder how I shall bear it, seeing the unseeable. How can I possibly go on living if life itself has been taken from me?

Crossing those few hundred yards is the most difficult thing I have ever done, because my head is filled with dark imaginings, with pictures beyond enduring, and so to find the house abandoned, empty, is a numbing surprise.

I turn to Ernst. ‘Do you think …’ I swallow. ‘Do you think he’s taken them?’

‘Nevsky?’

Ernst thinks a moment and then shrugs. His eyes meet mine. ‘What shall we do, Otto? How shall we …?’

But he doesn’t finish. A shout has gone up, from over near the mill. We run down towards it and see, emerging from one of the grain stores, three villagers. Our people.

The miller, Terekhov, and his wife and daughter.

Seeing us, all three of them fall to their knees.

‘Meister …’

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Was it Nevsky?’

‘They came in the night, Meister,’ Terekhov says. ‘Hundreds of them, on horseback. They started putting houses to the torch and killing anyone who ventured outside.’

‘And Katerina and my girls?’

Terekhov drops his head. ‘I … I didn’t see, Meister. They were killing everyone.
Everyone
.’

So I’ve seen. But Nevsky. How did Nevsky get here so quickly? Unless …

Unless he was here, in Novgorod, already. Unless that small troupe of his men who ventured out here were part of a much larger force.

And I know, as soon as I’ve thought it, that it’s the truth. There can be no other explanation.

I turn to Ernst, meaning to speak, to tell him what, in that instant, I have decided, only I hear the hoof beats of horses, behind us and to our left and, turning, see a troupe of horsemen – five in all – heading towards us.

I look around and see, close by, a sword, lying there on the grass. I pick it up and, almost without thought, walk towards the approaching horsemen.

They slow and stop, laughing among themselves to see me, alone, walking towards them. They huddle together, then, some decision made, one of them straightens and, kicking his horse forward, begins to ride at me.

I meet him, taking him waist-high, almost disembowelling him. And walk on, towards them. Four of them now.

They don’t mess about this time. All four of them kick forward. But that’s the trouble with being on a horse. Manoeuvring. Only two of them at most can get close to me at a time, and I make that hard. As they flash past me, one more of them is lying on the ground, dead, his head severed.

They turn, focused on me now. Three of them. And as they do, so Ernst gives a bellow and throws himself at their back, taking one of them out with his bare hands – leaping on the fellow and bringing him down, his hands at his neck.

I yell, giving a blood-curdling cry, startling their horses who start to rear, plunging my sword pommel-deep into the chest of one of them. No pity in me. Dead to pity. Wanting these bastards dead for what they’ve done here.

Yet even as he falls from the horse’s back, he takes my sword with him, leaving me facing the last of them, unarmed, defenceless.

Only he’s lost his courage. He’s seen me kill three of his fellows single-handed, and he doesn’t want to die, and, turning his horse, he kicks its flanks, making ground between us. And I watch him go, my chest heaving, aching to kill him, but knowing he’s beyond me. Yet not. For I still have the gun. Realising it, I draw it and, taking aim, fire at his back, burning him, making him shriek and topple from his mount.