‘One every fifteen minutes or so. But back in the Past. Our Past, that is.’
And suddenly it hits me. ‘They’ve got access!’
‘Access?’
‘To the Haven. How else would they be able to track down dead agents? When they died, the link to the timeline they were in would have “died” with them. And the only record of their presence in those timelines would have been with Hecht’s brother, in his archives at the Haven.’
Ernst shakes his head. ‘We’ve looked there already. There’s no sign of infiltration.’
‘Oh …’
Then how was this being done, and – more crucially – why? After all, what could be achieved? Unravel that twisted skein and what would follow? Not time travel, that’s for certain.
‘What did they say, these notes in ge’not? Can I see one?’
‘Only two have survived.’
‘So?’
‘I’ll have them prepared for you. With translations.’
I nod. ‘Incidentally … what was all that about just now, in Baturin? The stuff with the Gypsy woman?’
‘She was an agent.’
‘I thought she was. Only you were supposed to be with me. To jump in with me, and …’
Ernst looks away. ‘I got delayed.’
‘Delayed? No one gets delayed in Time. You can pick the precise spot. So what was going on? Why did you leave me alone with her? And why did I feel like I’d been hit over the head?’
‘Our best guess is that it was the result of being catapulted back in Time. Those last ten jumps took things just a little too far. Your connection was stretched thin. We had a hard time tracing where you were. But then we located you. In Baturin.’
‘But why leave me there alone?’
‘To see if she’s the one.’
‘The one?’
‘The one who’s still connected to Kolya. When we realised it was her, we did a bit of digging. She’s worked for all sides. For Reichenau and the Russians … why, she even worked for us, in the past.’
‘You mentioned Reichenau before. Have I met him?’
Ernst stares at me, surprised. ‘Reichenau? You don’t remember Reichenau?’
I shake my head.
‘Urd help us, Otto! Two brains sewn into one head? That Reichenau?!’
‘It’s a total blank.’
‘Urd’s sake! Did you leave your memory out there in the Wilds?’
‘The Wilds?’
‘Distant Time. That’s what we call it. The Wilds. Don’t you even remember that?’
And now I’m worried. What else have I forgotten? Who else?
The woman in the High Priestess card for a start.
‘As for the Gypsy woman … in some timelines she’s a complete innocent. In others … she’s got a twin, who works at Cherdiechnost.’
‘Cherdie-what?’
Ernst stares at me, horrified now. ‘Otto. Stay precisely where you are. Don’t move and don’t under any circumstances jump. Don’t even think of jumping. We need to look at you. You’ve come back out of Time with half your memories missing!’
465
And possibly more than half. But first an aside.
In ge’not there are twenty-seven different terms for developmental control genes, and not a single one of them deals with the phenomenon of Time. We’ll, not directly, anyway.
Developmental control genes?
DCGs are genes that have, as their primary function, control over development decisions. They regulate the fate of cells during their development, producing thereby the wide variety of life we witness on this planet. You see, genetics is entirely about sequence – about trigger events at the cellular level. The shape of a simple leaf is an example. The way it splits and branches. It is as it is because of certain natural decisions, decisions which are controlled by the DCGs.
And time travel?
Time travel bucks the rules of genetics. It is a kind of ‘mutant’. That is, it ought not to exist in this unidirectional universe. And yet it does, the irony being that it depends on the transmission of DNA to function.
Oh yes, and there are forces that bond us to Time, and should we place too great a strain upon those forces …
Ernst, more than anyone, should know that.
I lie there, in the medical centre in Moscow Central, waiting for the results of the tests. Waiting to hear whether or not I’ve suffered a crucial loss of memory, and why, and what can be done about it, when I remember something.
I remember how it began.
When Ernst returns I tell him all I can recall of it, and he sits there, staring into the air a while, taking it all in.
‘Are you sure?’ he asks.
And I tell him I am. That what we thought was the culmination was in fact the start. That it began with my rebirth, raised from the cart – just as in the tarot reading – and carried from there to safety. From which point – and here it gets complicated – everything connected back. Back to the ending which we have been wrongly perceiving as the start.
Wrongly because that is the only way our brains have been genetically programmed to view it and interpret it. Whereas, in fact …
‘That can’t be so, Otto,’ Ernst says, interrupting my chain of thought. ‘That would be like …’ And he shrugs, unable to come up with a likeness. No. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced. Time has two faces. It runs two ways, like the two circles in the lazy-eight symbol Kolya uses. And we can only travel within it because that is so. If it wasn’t …
Only right there I start to shed my certainty. Because back at Krasnogorsk – and I remember its name now – reality itself was fragmenting. Put under too much pressure – too many tugs in too many directions – it began to fall apart.
As in that other card – The Tower.
Was that why she was there? To give me, in some palatable form, a series of clues, to help me understand just what has really been going on.
And Kolya?
We have been wondering all this time just how he could anticipate each and every move of ours, how he knew each time just where we’d be and when. It explains why we could never touch him. Never come close. It seemed like some kind of mind-reading trick on his part, only it wasn’t. He was simply looking back over what had already happened – yes, and forward to what must be. Like Odin in the first and last days of the World.
Yes, it explains it all. The Past as Future and the Future as Past. Grasp that – attune your self to Time’s twinned directions – and the rest was easy.
Only why, then, did he not kill me? What stopped him?
For that I have no answer. Not yet, anyway.
But it must make sense. It has to. How would any of this have happened otherwise?
466
I dream of moths, their wings painted in the colours of the woman, a dark red trimmed with blue and green and yellow. They flutter about the candle’s flame and the light dances with them, casting shadows on the walls.
Of her – the Gypsy woman, Mariya – there’s no sign.
The room is empty, silent but for the flapping of the moths.
And then I wake, to find myself in my own rooms once more, alone, the Tree of Worlds pulsing, shining in the darkness, the silence perfect.
And beside me?
No one. My bed, like the room, is empty. Katerina, Ernst called her, as if that should trigger some recollection. Only it doesn’t. Not even at the deepest depths of me. I do not know her. She, who meant all the world to me. Why, she’s not even an absence in my head.
Heavy-hearted, I shower and dress, then go out, searching for Ernst. And find him, poring over a map.
I go across and stand beside him. ‘What’s this?’
He looks to me and smiles, as if he’s been expecting me. ‘It’s an estate in Russia, just north of Novgorod. A place called Cherdiechnost.’
‘The place I didn’t recognise?’
‘The same.’
‘And this woman? She lives there, yes?’
>
‘We don’t know. We presume so, only …’
‘Only what?’
‘Only this timeline is somehow flawed. Your failure to recognise it … that’s troubling. Which is why we want you to study this and prepare yourself, ready to go back in. We need you to report back. To describe the place and how it functions and, well, to give us a portrait of the place to compare with what we know.’
‘Cherdiechnost?’
‘Yes,’ he says, and there’s a sadness in his eyes. ‘Cherdiechnost.’
Four
Cherdiechnost B
467
Things have changed. That’s the only thing I’m sure of. Reality itself seems now as changeable as the clouds, constantly forming and reforming. The question is, did we cause this? Is this the net result of all our meddling?
It is a warm, late summer day in AD 1237 and as I follow the broad and dusty path that leads down through the trees, I ask myself why I don’t remember this. What’s happened to me that could possibly have erased it? Because I’ve read the files and seen how powerful the time-change was. How she and I were central to it all. But now?
Now I cannot even remember her face.
The estate is up ahead, across the plank bridge and on another mile or so. It’s harvest time and the serfs will be out in the fields, stripped to the waist beneath the blazing sun, gathering in the crops. While I …
I am an outsider, a youngish-looking man in my early forties, walking that broad path, wearing furs and carrying a heavy backpack, strangely over-dressed for this time of the year, sweat trickling down my brow and inside my loose-fitting clothes.
Ahead of me, beneath a cloudless blue sky, there where the ground begins to dip, is Cherdiechnost, a huge, sprawling estate, worked by over four hundred serfs and their families. It’s a dour, unhappy place by all accounts, but not the Cherdiechnost that exists in our records back in the Haven. So let’s distinguish. Let’s call this Cherdiechnost B. The greyest of grey shadows of the place I once knew.
Not that I can remember much.
I am stopped at the gate by two big, brutish men, who keep me there while a boy runs across to the village to fetch the steward.
The steward turns out to be an elderly man in his sixties, his hair trimmed like a priest’s, his whole nature slow, methodical, enough to make me wonder how he got the job. While he stands there, examining my papers, I look about me. I’ve seen all this before, of course, in the simulator; yet seeing it for real I get a much better sense of things.
The main dacha, the master’s house, is to the left, no distance from the gate, surrounded by a scattering of smaller buildings, while the main village – a sprawl of cheaply built dwellings that edge the fields – is directly ahead of me. And there’s a pond and a mill and a forge and a carpentry shop; enough to make the estate self-sufficient.
Finally, the steward looks up. ‘Just what do you want?’
‘I hope to get work.’
‘Work?’ He shakes his head. ‘We have all the hands we need. Try the town.’
‘I’ve tried the town. Someone said I might find employment here.’
He’s about to tell me to move on before I get a beating, but just then a young boy runs up to say there’s been an accident. Old Gregor has sliced off two of his toes with the scythe. It’s his own fault, the boy is saying. He shouldn’t have drunk so much last night.
Which leaves a vacancy.
‘I can swing a scythe,’ I say.
His eyes rest on me a moment, and then he shrugs. ‘What’s in the sack?’
I slip it off my shoulder and hand it to him.
He opens the neck of it and looks inside, then looks up at me again, surprised. ‘Did you steal these?’
‘They were my father’s. He was a smith.’
‘But you can use these, yes?’
‘At a pinch.’
I nod. Smiths, in this age, are fairly high up the pecking order. It’s an in-demand skill, and it makes the steward reappraise things. ‘You worked with your father … in the past?’
I nod again.
‘Come then,’ he says quietly. ‘Field workers I don’t need, Gregor’s toes notwithstanding. But smith’s assistant …’
He dismisses the two guards, then gestures for me to follow him down through the knee-length grass and into the village, where, amid the dilapidated and decaying buildings, there’s a forge. Not an impressive one at first glance, but that too is very much of this age.
The smith himself looks up from the horseshoe he’s been making, his eyes suspicious. ‘Who’s this?’ he asks, as he hammers out the red-hot iron.
I smile inwardly, for I can see at once that he’s not the most skilful of smiths. There’s a kind of awkwardness to him.
‘This is Petr. He used to help his father out, in the smithy. I thought you might appreciate having a boy to act as a runner to you. To gather wood and feed the fire and pump the bellows.’
I see how the smith likes the steward’s use of that word, ‘boy’. It makes me less of a threat to him.
‘Where’s he going to sleep?’ the smith asks, glaring at me, as if to put me in my place from the start.
‘He can sleep here, in the back room. No need to impose on you, eh, Simon?’
Simon, eh? Not a traditionally Russian name.
‘That be good with you?’ the steward asks, turning to me.
I bow my head. ‘Thank you, master, I …’
‘Steward,’ he corrects me. ‘The master alone is the master.’
And he’s not here right now. I know that from my briefing. But when he comes back he’ll want to see me; to make sure I’m no troublemaker. Because troublemakers aren’t welcome here in Cherdiechnost B.
‘What about my pack?’
‘You can leave that in the house for now. Until you leave us.’
‘I thought, maybe—’
‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘Unless you’d rather walk on.’
I bow my head. ‘As you wish, Steward …?’
‘Shepnikov,’ he says and puts out his hand, taking the heavy pack from me, weighing it a moment before turning away, leaving me alone with the smith.
He’s scowling still, appraising me, weighing up whether I’m a good thing or bad.
‘Where you from?’ he asks.
‘South,’ I say. ‘But now I’m here.’
I see a flash of anger in his eyes. I’m rather too mouthy for his liking.
‘Sorry,’ I say, playing the conciliatory card. ‘It’s just … home was trouble. That’s why I left, when I was seventeen. I came north. Tried my hand at trapping and hunting. Farming, too. I arrived here by chance. But now I need … well, I need to put down roots.’
‘And you think this is the place?’
But I can see his attitude has softened. He gestures towards the wood stack. ‘Build the fire up, Petr. I’ve eight more of these to fashion.’
468
As it turns out, the smith is not so bad, and for five days we get along just fine. He even lets me fashion a few things by myself, watching me with what I guess is admiration. But then the master returns from one of his trading expeditions, and things change.
On the second day back, the master summons me, sending his two brutes to fetch me.
Entering the room wherein he’s sat, I fall to my knees, my head lowered.
The master is a big man. Six foot six and built like an ox, with a shock of long blond hair that gives him the look of a Viking chief, which is maybe what his ancestors once were. And then there’s his son, stood just behind him, slimmer than he, but with the same shock of blond hair. A young man born to get his way. Indulged, the smith called it, when I asked. You can see it in his eyes, it seems, in the very way he holds himself.
The Sons of Odin.
‘Master …’
My humility clearly pleases him. Behind him, his son smiles.
‘Get up, man,’ the master says. ‘I’m told your name is Petr and you’re a smith’s son. Is that so?�
��
‘Yes, master,’ I answer, but make no move to get up. Like almost all the masters in this age, he likes the sense of his seniority. Enjoys it. And I want no trouble with him.
‘And you want to stay here, yes? In Cherdiechnost?’
‘That is so, master.’
‘Smith Simon speaks well of you. My steward, too. But tell me … what trouble was it that set you travelling at so young an age?’
I look down. ‘Do I have to say?’
‘Only if you wish to stay.’
And so I tell him the tale I’ve learned by heart and, as I end my account, I see him nodding to himself.
‘Families … there are ravenous wolves that behave better.’
The master eases back a little in his chair, then nods. ‘You can stay, Petr, just so long as you behave and do what you’re told. You’re a free man, I understand that. You’ve bought your freedom, but if you want to stay you will work hard and do as you’re told, when you’re told. Do you understand?’
‘I understand, master.’
‘Good. Then go now.’
I hesitate. ‘And my pack, master?’
He looks away. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of it, Petr. After all, what safer place than with me, no?’ And he laughs, as if it’s all a joke and he hasn’t already gone through the contents with a fine-tooth comb.
Back at the forge, the smith is curious as to what went on – what was said and what decided – but I’m not feeling like telling him. My task here is to find out why Cherdiechnost changed. Why my small utopian dream – my north Russian paradise – turned into a nightmare. Because perhaps there’s a clue in that as to what has been happening lately. Particularly my loss of memory.
Not to speak of Kolya and whether he had a hand in this.
That night, the master throws a party, partly to celebrate, but also because – and word of it does the rounds within the hour – his son has his eye on a new conquest. A young maid who, with her family, arrived here from the town not two weeks past.
Oh yes. The boy means to get her father drunk, her mother distracted, and the maiden …
Well, let’s not be coy about it. He means to fuck the maiden, virgin as she is.
The Master of Time: Roads to Moscow: Book Three Page 36
