The Ocean of Time Read online

  Razumovsky greets me off-handedly. Something is bugging him and he’s in a bad mood, even for him. I tell him of my plan to travel east and he asks me why I should want to do that. Isn’t everything I need right here in Novgorod? I tell him no; I’m taking a very special cargo of goods inland with me and this single trip could make my fortune, and that with the proceeds I plan to buy an estate and a thousand serfs. That impresses him, but when I tell him that I’m taking his daughter with me, he objects strongly.

  ‘That’s no place to take a woman, Otto! There are thieves and bandits and ruffians of every kind out there!’

  ‘I know,’ I answer, ‘but there are thieves of a different kind right here in Novgorod and I am as loath to leave Katerina here as she is to let me go alone. Besides, I am her husband!’

  That, irrefutable as it is, settles matters. But Razumovsky still doesn’t like it. He comes up with a dozen reasons why his daughter should stay. And most of them have merit, only …

  I can’t bear to be parted from her. And this journey gives me a valid excuse to be with her every day for the next six months.

  And every night …

  Razumovsky is saved from coming up with further reasons by the arrival of Ernst.

  Ernst, I know, has been back to Four-Oh to get the latest news, but he tells Razumovsky that he’s just come over from the Peterhof, the German Quarter of the town, where he’s struck a deal for fifty furs. Ernst wants to celebrate, and this surprises me somewhat, but I can’t ask why. Not with Razumovsky there. It’s not the ‘deal’ Ernst wants to celebrate, that I know, but there is a definite spring to his step as he calls out to Razumovsky’s servants to bring us wine.

  Razumovsky needs no encouraging. When the servants bring three flasks of wine, he sends them away for a dozen more. So it is that, as evening falls, the three of us sit drunkenly at the bench, laughing and slapping each other’s backs.

  Razumovsky’s ability to consume endless amounts of liquor without needing to excuse himself is legendary. Even so, he eventually needs to use the midden, and when he does, I lean across and ask Ernst what’s going on.

  ‘They’ve killed Shafarevich!’ he says, his eyes gleaming. ‘Freisler shot him between the eyes. Then they snipped off time behind him, neat as a sewn wound!’

  I laugh, astonished. Shafarevich is the Russians’ equivalent of Freisler, in charge of all the dirty jobs, the nasty sort that even us hardened agents want to wash our hands of, and he’s been a thorn in our side for as long as I’ve been an agent – yes, and for long before that. No wonder Ernst wants to celebrate.

  When Razumovsky returns, I call for more wine, then climb on to the table and raise a toast to my father-in-law – a toast that has the sentimental Razumovsky in tears.

  ‘You’re a good son to me, Otto,’ he says, hugging my legs, not letting me get down from the table. ‘A man could not ask for a better son.’

  Only I’m glad I’m not Razumovsky’s son, for if I was, how then could I have married Katerina?

  157

  Ernst wakes before me and he’s making breakfast when I stagger out into the kitchen. There’s no sign of Katerina, and when I ask one of the servants, he says that she’s gone to the market to buy food for our trip. My head is thick and painful, my wits dulled by our prodigious bout of drinking, but just the memory of Ernst’s news makes me grin.

  ‘So the bastard’s dead,’ I say, and laugh.

  ‘Time-dead,’ Ernst says, and that special phrase sobers me, because it’s what we all fear. All of us who travel back and forth in time. Because death’s not final for us. Not until there’s no way anyone can change it. Not until Time itself is snipped off and sealed and made inaccessible to change.

  Time-dead.

  Ernst serves me breakfast: a thick slice of ham with eggs. It’s delicious, but my stomach is feeling none too good after its evening exertions and I push the platter away unfinished.

  ‘Did you put in the designs?’ Ernst asks, taking my plate and beginning to pick at what’s left.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I bet Master Arkadevich was horrified.’

  I laugh. ‘He was. But his senior apprentice …’

  We meet eyes.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Ernst says. And I know what he means. Alexander Alexandrovich is a very clever young man, quick and flexible of mind. In our own time he would have made a fine technician or engineer; yet here he is in this age of darkness and superstition, wasted, one might say, on making things from wood.

  Some of my younger students make the mistake of thinking themselves more intelligent than the men and women of the past. They think that the context in which they live reflects the degree of their intelligence. It is not so. And how could it be? Could mankind really have evolved so far in so very short a time? No. It’s an impossibility. What might seem like ignorance is merely lack of insight. Or of potential.

  I decide on the spot to go and see our young friend and try to speak to him alone, away from his master. And so, having washed and shaved, I set off for Master Arkadevich’s.

  It is midday when I get there and, picking my way through the jumble of wood and half-finished carts and sleds that clutter the front of the building, I ask where Alexander Alexandrovich might be found.

  ‘He’s asleep, Meister,’ one of the apprentices answers me, grinning broadly.

  ‘He was up all night,’ another adds, ‘working on the new design.’

  ‘Has he been sleeping long?’ I ask, and there is laughter.

  ‘He fell asleep over his bench. He did not want to sleep.’

  I grin. Clearly I have found the right man for this job. ‘Then let him sleep. I will come back in an hour or two. I’ll wake him then. Only there are a few things I wish to discuss.’

  ‘But the master—’

  I give the apprentice a handful of small bronze coins and wink. ‘There is no need to trouble the master, eh, my boy?’

  The ‘boy’ – forty if he’s a day – grins toothlessly. ‘No need at all, Meister Behr.’

  158

  With time on my hands, I go down to the market to see whether I can spy my Katerina among the stalls. At first there’s no sign of her and I begin to think that she has gone already, but then I see her, her back to me as she examines a bright blue cloak, her servant Natya beside her, discussing the quality of the garment.

  I smile, the day lit up by her presence.

  I walk across and stop on the other side of the stall, watching her until she looks up and notices me there. She looks down, smiling shyly, playing a game we often play, as if she doesn’t know me yet, but quite likes me. As if she is a young maiden again, waiting to be swept away by her future husband. Natya, slower on the uptake, looks from her mistress to me, then back again, then does a comic little double-take, surprised that it’s me who’s standing there, and not some boyar’s son. Dull-natured as she is, Natya cannot understand the powerful chemistry that is between Katerina and I. She thinks her mistress could have done better, and that she is wasted on some ‘old man’ like me, tall as I am, rich as I am.

  But Natya and her like can go to hell. When Katerina looks at me I feel seventeen again, fresh from the Garden, the whole of life laid out before me, like it was all new and promising. Unsullied.

  There’s part of me, of course, that knows it isn’t so: that Time is Time and sullied. That life, far from being romantic, is a vale of tears. And that a man’s destiny – whatever it may prove to be – is never what he expects.

  Yet when I look into her eyes and see her smiling back, I can easily believe that nothing in the universe is more powerful than this.

  Not even Time can destroy this bond.

  Katerina walks slowly round the stall, leaving Natya to bring the basket.

  ‘Otto, so you’re up?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  Her right hand lifts from her side, crosses the space between us and gently touches my chest. Like a blessing. I look down at it, then place my own over it. He
r eyes are watching me now with such an intensity, such a seriousness, that I wonder how the noise and bustle of the marketplace can continue – how it is that everyone there in that crowded space is not watching us?

  ‘I missed you this morning.’

  ‘Did you?’ she asks. And again, the intensity within those words is almost too much for them to carry. She would die for me, and I for her.

  ‘Your father—’

  ‘Got you drunk last night?’ The smile returns. ‘You need help, then?’

  I smile at her teasing. ‘We were celebrating.’

  ‘Celebrating?’

  ‘Us going away.’

  ‘Ah …’ And she looks more thoughtful. ‘You told him, then?’

  I nod.

  ‘And he agreed?’

  ‘He didn’t like it, but he has given us his blessing. I told him that the journey would make us rich. That I would buy an estate when we returned with a thousand serfs.’

  She frowns at that. ‘You want that, Otto?’

  ‘It would make things easier. Our own place.’

  ‘But we have that.’

  ‘Here in town, yes. I meant a place away from here. In the countryside. With just you and I … and our children.’

  Her eyes widen. For a long moment she says nothing, her eyes searching mine, and then she lifts herself up on to her toes and kisses me softly, gently on the lips.

  ‘Ah, my sweet batiushka,’ she says, and I feel a small tremor pass down my spine at the words, for it is a kind of private code between us. Little father. It is what she always calls me when she wants me to make love to her.

  ‘Natya,’ she says, raising her voice, but never moving, never looking away from me. ‘Take the basket to my father’s house and wait there for instructions.’

  ‘Mistress?’

  ‘Go!’

  And Natya scuttles off, frowning unhappily at having her shopping expedition curtailed. But I don’t spare her a thought. Walking back, my arm about Katerina’s waist, the enticing warmth of her against my side, I am aware of nothing but her.

  We go to bed and stay there until the evening comes. Leaving her there, sleeping on her back, I slip on my robe and go out to use the midden and as I’m there, smiling to myself, remembering the afternoon’s sweet lovemaking, there’s a hammering on the door, and old memories make me frown, recalling how cruelly my happiness has been shattered in the past. But not this time. This time it is Razumovsky, come calling on me, returning Natya and the basket, though that’s not the only reason for his visit. The council of city elders – the veche – wish to see me, and so I wash and dress and, leaving a note for Katerina, venture out into the warm evening darkness, Razumovsky at my side.

  He seems excited, yet he will not tell me why. ‘You’ll find out,’ is all he says, his dark eyes shining, a broad grin splitting his thick beard. It’s a beautiful evening, a full moon laying a coat of silver over the town as we climb the hill toward the assembly building.

  I look back at the river, then beyond it to the forest, recalling what Katerina said as we lay there after our first bout of lovemaking.

  ‘Are you afraid?’ I had asked.

  ‘Of the journey? Yes. But I want to go. Nothing matters, as long as I’m with you, Otto. If I were here … it would be awful. Every moment I’d be wondering where you were, worrying that something might have happened.’

  ‘Nothing will happen.’

  ‘Yet if it did …’

  In my mind I see her there, naked beside me, and see again how she turns her face away briefly, a look of pain in her lovely eyes. When she looks at me again, her voice is the merest whisper. ‘If you died, I would die too. I couldn’t live without you, Otto. The times you are not here …’

  She doesn’t have to finish her sentence. I feel that too. To be apart from her is hell. And when did I ever feel that for anyone?

  Razumovsky nudges me, and it’s only then that I realise I have stopped and am staring back towards the house, as if to see her through the solid layers of wood and stone between her and me.

  ‘Otto? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, and wonder what he’d make of it if I told him the full content of my thoughts, and how each waking, breathing moment of my life is dominated by my love for her.

  He would think such love excessive and unmanly. ‘A man must be the master of his emotions, Otto, not a slave to them.’ Yet how can I feel other than I feel? For Katerina is the other half of me, the part that makes me whole. Without her …

  Jump back in time, Otto Behr, and you will see an unhappy, unfulfilled fellow, not knowing what he lacked, not even guessing.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I say to Razumovsky as we begin to walk again.

  ‘Thinking? About what?’

  ‘That maybe I should ask one of the members of the veche to look into the matter of the estate.’

  Razumovsky glances at me frowningly. ‘But I thought—’

  ‘No disrespect, Father,’ I say hurriedly, ‘but I am thinking in terms of the benefits to our family. Were I to leave the matter in your hands, I am certain you would find me the very best of estates and at a bargain price. But my thinking is as follows. If we ask one of the veche to undertake this matter for us, it will create an obligation.’

  Razumovsky stops dead, then turns to me. ‘An obligation? But surely that’s a bad thing?’

  ‘Not at all. What is trade if not a web of mutual obligations? And what binds men together better than trade? No … if we ask one of the veche to do this for us, it could well be the beginning of greater alliances between our family and the boyars. And in time, well, I do not wish to presume, but to have a grandchild of yours on the veche, that would be something, would it not?’

  It would indeed. Razumovsky, now that his imagination has been stirred, fairly glows at the thought of it. He reaches across and grasps both my shoulders in his massive hands. ‘Otto, you are a genius.’

  ‘And a German,’ I say. ‘And so a stranger here in Novgorod, however long I live here. Yet my sons, and daughters, will be Russians. And it is their future that I must attend to.’

  Razumovsky positively beams. He draws me close and hugs me in a bear-like hug. ‘Why, yes,’ he says. ‘And they will be fine boys, I know it!’

  Another time I might have agreed with confidence, having gone forward to see how the future transpired. But this once …

  This once I am loath to glimpse what yet will be. This once I want to live it. To watch it unfurl, hour by hour, minute by minute, whatever fate has in store.

  Like ordinary people with their ordinary families.

  As Razumovsky releases me, I realise another thing. That I like him. That it pleases me to have this large and colourful man for my father-in-law, and that my toast last night was honesty, not policy. That what I love in Katerina I also glimpse in him.

  We come to the assembly house to find the veche already gathered, the boyars seated about a massive wooden table in a raftered hall that swelters in the evening’s heat. The place is lit by torches, which hang in small braziers on the walls. In their light these bearded figures seem like something from a dream. They are all here, the posadnik at the head of the table, Novgorod’s military commander – the tysiatskii – standing just behind.

  If Razumovsky had not been so excited, I might be fearful, for there is a distinctly sombre feel to this gathering, yet the posadnik greets me cheerfully enough.

  ‘Meister Behr, welcome to our veche. If you would take a seat …’

  I sit in the only vacant chair, Razumovsky standing behind me. Looking about me, I see how every eye is on me. These are rich, powerful men – boyars all. Nor is their power illusory. In the past century they have won the right to nominate their own candidate for prince, expelling – even killing – those they felt were unsuitable to rule. They sit there in their furs in the heat, their full beards specially combed for the occasion.

  Gathered together thus they look very strange, very primitive, and
I feel like smiling, only a smile would be inappropriate, disrespectful.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I say, ‘thank you for inviting me. But tell me … what do you want?’

  At another time and in another place this might seem too forward, too pushy, but these are practical men, used to great suffering and hardships. Novgorod has suffered many famines. In 1128 the town was ravaged by starvation when an early frost destroyed the winter corn and its people were forced to eat birch-bark and wood pulp mixed with husks and straw to survive; only a few years ago, in 1230, more than three thousand died, the people feeding on moss and snails and even eating the dead bodies of the fallen.

  For all its apparent wealth, this land is still a wilderness, and Novgorod is still vulnerable and can be brought low by disease and bad harvests. Thus its boyars like directness. They are blunt to the point of rudeness, and I have learned to be like them.

  The posadnik grins and looks about him before addressing me again. ‘I understand you are about to leave on a journey, Meister Behr. To Moscow. A trip that, it’s rumoured, will make your fortune.’

  Behind me Razumovsky shuffles a little, uncomfortable. If there are rumours flying about, it’s clear who started them.

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Good. Then we have a proposition to make you, Meister Behr. As a body, we would like a share in your mission, and thus – naturally – in the profits to be made.’

  ‘And in return?’

  The tysiatskii answers this time. ‘In return you have the favour of the veche. And whatever internal passes you require.’

  The posadnik turns slightly in his seat and looks back and up at his fellow, and nods, his long beard bobbing in the light from the torches.

  I smile. ‘I have no problem with that. What share does the veche wish?’

  The posadnik hesitates a moment, a hardness in his eyes, then says calmly. ‘A half.’