The villagers welcome us joyously, throwing a big feast to celebrate our homecoming, assuming that we have returned from a long physical journey, not thinking for a moment that we could have arrived back in any other way. But so it has to be. It’s a secret my girls have sworn to keep, now that they understand the alternatives.
Only then someone asks after baby Martha, having noticed that she’s not there among us, and – as we’ve rehearsed among us – I tell the villagers that she is gone, died of the fever on our travels and buried at the roadside. Only it’s very hard to do – to utter those half-truths – and I break down, unable to carry on, knowing that this kindly lie is the only thing I can give them.
457
So it is that, the next morning, after a strangely subdued feast, Katerina and I come out to find the front garden of our dacha wreathed in flowers. The villagers have constructed a little shrine for Martha, the sketch of her I did a few months back at the centre of great sprays of camomiles and crocuses, azaleas, orchids and lilies, great swatches of them in reds and white, interspersed with painted wooden crosses and handwritten notes expressing love and loss.
Katerina finds this hard. The not knowing. The pretending that she’s dead, when all she is is missing. Oh, and do not fool yourself – every time I say that ‘all’ I feel a pain of grief and longing so vast it threatens to unhinge me. But for Katerina it’s more personal. She, after all, carried Martha in her womb for nine months and more. Gave birth to her knowing she would lose her. What in Urd’s name could be worse?
But this – this celebration by our friends of Martha’s brief existence – gives Katerina some solace. As she says to me, ‘It’s nice to have one single place we know is hers, where her spirit can lie.’ And so it is. For the first time, that evening, I go to the shrine and, kneeling, alone there, talk to my baby daughter, finally accepting her loss, knowing that I will never see her again. And when I turn, meaning to get up, it is to find Katerina and the girls, there, kneeling alongside me, silent yet potent presences, there beside the shrine.
And before we leave that place, Katerina takes me in her arms and holds me.
‘Is it okay now?’
I lower my head and nod. Only it isn’t. It could never be okay.
458
Back at Moscow Central it is quiet. In the half-light it can be seen that only a third of the desks are manned – by both men and women, Russians and Germans. It is so quiet, in fact, that no one seems to notice the faintest glimmer of the platform, like sunlight glinting at the bottom of a rock pool. There is no power surge, no physical indicator that someone has just jumped through, and yet they have.
There is the faintest glimpse of them as they step down and move slowly towards the exit. It is done so casually, with such a lack of fear, that we might begin to believe that everyone in Moscow Central has been gassed or has had a spell placed over them, like in the ancient tales, yet it is really no more than a moment’s inattentiveness. They have spent so long being vigilant that they have stopped looking. No one even bothers to look up as the tall, heavily built man in the long dark cloak moves past them.
In Yastryeb’s room it is dark, but at a word of command the lamp on the far side of the room lights up. Not that our intruder needs light to see by, yet in its faint illumination we see more clearly who it is, and, as he stands, facing the clear and steady glow, the Tree of Worlds no more than an arm’s length away, so we see how much he has aged since Krasnogorsk – how grey his long hair now is, how lined his ancient face. For this is the Master of Time himself, and he has come to check how things are in his domain.
He leans forward, placing his hand into the flow of energy, closing his eyes as the tingle of power runs over his fingers like water from a fountain. His lips, which never smile, tighten with concentration, and then he nods and lowers his hand and turns away.
Yet, before he goes, he walks across and, taking a book down from the shelf, opens it to the title page and, taking a pen from his coat pocket, writes a few words, then, below his message, signs with his customary mark, the lazy eight, the arrows pointing toward the centre – the same symbol that his ungrateful bastard son stole from him, along with so much else.
He puts the book back, the faintest ghost of a smile suggested but never surfacing on his lips. For a moment longer he looks about him, his fierce eyes seeming to take in everything about him in that room, and then, like a wraith, he vanishes.
The Tree of Worlds shimmers briefly, a single strand of its capillary-like branches pulsing a momentary brilliant carmine and then, like a stick of incense, turns to smoke. And then there’s laughter, doubled, trebled in the room. Demonic laughter.
Epilogue
Six Endings
One – Sideways Twice and Back a Step
Two – Fate and the Gypsy Woman
Three – A Few Short Words in Ge’not
Four – Cherdiechnost B
Five – Of Time and Tides
Six – And the Ruination of Worlds
One
Sideways Twice and Back a Step
459
Kolya is after me.
I woke last night, snatched from the drowning pool of nightmare, to find a warning, written in blood on the wall beside my bed, from an agent of ours who has subsequently vanished from the map. ‘Run,’ it read. ‘For Urd’s sake, Otto, there’s no time! Run!’
Only, even as I flee, going through my mind is the thought that there is always time.
But there is certainly no time to consult them at the platform, and so I adopt the emergency strategy our Great Men devised to deal with such a situation, using the special pendant to over-ride the platform, jumping twice sideways and then back; each time the same, each jump taking me deeper into the maze that is the multiverse.
Twice sideways and once back? you ask. Why that?
The answer’s simple. It’s the knight’s move in chess, and I use it to escape him. But at some stage I must return, or else be lost for ever. Hence the constant, easy-to-remember pattern.
The knight’s move. So it is. Only this particular knight moves not on a board that’s eight by eight, but one that is immeasurably larger, a four-dimensional board that is infinity times itself, then times itself again. The uncountable times the uncountable, and then again. And no. It is impossible to imagine it. The human mind hasn’t the space – or inclination – to do so.
Ironically so, I think, as I make the first of a dozen tiny jumps, side-shifting through time, working my way slowly away from the central core into unexplored territory. My two eights and his two lazy eights. Now where have I encountered those before?
It is incredibly strange, doing this. It has a certain dreamlike quality. Because, from the first jump on, I’ve been effectively ‘off radar’, untraceable from Moscow Central, like a worm burrowing into the depths of the cosmic apple.
Only what kind of apple – cosmic or otherwise – would contain so much that’s un-marked, unaffected, by intelligent life?
No. Don’t answer that. The proper question is, what kind of multiverse is it that has any trace at all of intelligent life in it?
No, and don’t try to answer that one either. Let’s be more practical and ask why Kolya should be after me again? What’s triggered this pursuit?
Maybe it’s something I’ve done, or am about to do, elsewhere and elsewhen.
Or maybe the messenger simply got it wrong. Only I have been dreaming of Kolya these last few nights, since I’ve been away from Katerina. Dreams in which I die horribly.
On the tenth jump back, I stop, to ‘catch my breath’. On all my previous jumps I’ve not stayed long enough to really register what’s surrounding me, only a vague and generalised sense of things growing more wild and less human as I move further and further away from the main trunk of the World Tree.
But this once I take the time to see just where I am. To pause and turn 360.
When this is or where I do not know, but I seem to be in the depths of some great
medieval castle, in a stone-walled corridor, lit by cresset-lamps, at the end of which is a massive, wall-length mirror.
I walk towards it, seeing how the other I – the mirror I – walks toward me. Which seems quite normal, only there’s something wrong about this reflection.
My mouth opens, as I realise what it is. I am the same. Least, my mirror self mirrors me perfectly. But behind me …
Behind me ought to be the lamp-lit darkness of the corridor. Only it isn’t. What is behind me – beyond my mirror self – is a landscape of scorched earth, the terrain, right to the horizon, burned to ash.
For a moment this is all. My mirrored self and the un-mirrored landscape. Only then a second figure enters the frame of the mirror.
Startled, I turn, looking behind me, only the flame-lit corridor is empty. Yet the mirror shows him clearly.
Him. Yes, Kolya. He looks about him, then comes across, standing there, two, maybe three paces behind me. He’s wearing a long, pale blue cloak in this incarnation of himself. And his hair is darker, more lustrous, his face less lined. A younger version.
‘So you’ve come,’ he says, and the words, muted and distorted as they are, are out of synch with the figure that now faces me.
Can he see me? I wonder. Or does he only see my mirror image? Who now is he addressing?
He studies me a moment longer, surprised, perhaps, that I do not turn and face him on his side of the mirror, then comes closer, noting the fixed direction of my gaze. Looking past my mirror self to where I’m looking on. And I know suddenly that he cannot see me. That I am not present in his side of the reflecting glass, just as he is not present on my side.
Which is just plain weird.
Or is this just some property of Time at this distance from the centre? Have I jumped so far from reality that a new set of natural laws have come into play?
Kolya moves past my mirror self and stands there facing me, so close now that my fine hairs bristle with fear. For while he knows that someone’s there behind the surface of the mirror, he cannot see me. Light is travelling in only one direction here.
‘Ah …’ he says quietly, looking from what he cannot see – myself – to my reflection, and then back again, the words distorted as before. ‘I see …’ And then. ‘Or rather … I don’t. You’re there, aren’t you, Otto?’
And as he utters those final words, he touches the mirror’s surface with his left palm.
And there it is, his palm, imprinted on the surface, only lacking all clarity and detail; distorted, just as the sound of his voice is.
Instinct tells me not to say a word, not to move or respond in any kind. Yes, and to keep him uncertain, even if he senses I am there. Only, seeing those eyes, only an arm’s length distant, seeing the imperfect imprint of his palm on the mirror, every hair on my skin stands on end with fear.
Can he get to me from there? Can he somehow slip through and pursue me?
Logic would say no. Only what’s logical about any of this?
If he can get at my reflection – which, it seems, he can – can he not also get at me?
He clearly has the same thought, for suddenly he turns, his pale eyes changing, registering some insight. Taking a step towards my mirror self, he reaches out …
Like Alice, I think, not sure from where that reference comes, even as his fingers penetrate – pass through – the seeming-solid shape of me, a faint electrical charge hissing and crackling as it does.
Kolya turns, facing me, an almost-smile on that pale, haunting face. Eyes so cold they must surely reflect the arctic coldness of his soul.
For the briefest moment nothing, and then he runs at me, hunting knife in hand, throwing himself at the one-way mirror, at the point at which he thinks I stand. The surface stretches and shimmers momentarily, yet holds, throwing him back, ash swirling in the air, his grunt of disappointment the only sound.
Involuntarily I have stepped back, dagger drawn, my heart beating fast, my mirror self, across from me, mimicking my every movement.
Kolya turns and looks and nods.
‘Almost,’ he says, and, putting his hand to the chunky pendant he wears about his neck, he is gone. Down some other cul-de-sac of Time, I hope.
I let out a long, shivering breath.
Too close. Far too close.
Because he’s obviously worked out what I’ve been doing, and has followed – as close as he can – my flight through Time. Two sideways and one back, times ten.
Ten more, I think, only this time different. This time I jump once sideways and twice back. Changing things.
Oh, and he might guess and do the same, yet it’s worth a try.
Farther out. Into the wilderness of Time now. Man’s tiny beacon dimming with distance as we move away from the core.
And when I pause for breath …
460
Things shimmer, then come into sharp focus. There is the buzz of bees, the sweet scent of flowers.
I turn, looking about me, at the dark swathes of woodland that climb the hills on every side, that intense greenness threaded with great fists of rock, and silver flowing streams, and, in the near distance, an ancient fort, its wooden palisade, a wall of wooden staves some eight feet tall, forming a sweeping curve about the great escarpment that’s at the centre of this valley, the great river parting about it and re-forming downstream.
Like a timeline …
How far back? I wonder. Five thousand years? Eight?
I’ve no way of judging. Not as far back as the Haven, I’d guess, but far enough for this to be pre-history. Stone Age, certainly.
I decide to hide out and wait for dark.
And what if he’s here?
Then I’ll deal with that as and when. Besides, if it ever came to a confrontation, one on one, then I’d have a fair to good chance of beating him. It’s some time since anybody killed me.
I find a cave of sorts, a sunken pit of a place, its floor dry, its entrance hidden by vegetation, and wait there, looking out through the thick screen of leaf and branches, watching the sun cross the sky and listening for human presence. Only no one ventures near and I begin to wonder whether the settlement might have been abandoned, its inhabitants the victims of some contagious disease.
Several hundred insect bites later, as daylight begins to fade from the world. I scratch myself, and carefully push the screen aside, emerging from that dank and fetid place, and, in the last of the light, begin to circle the settlement, looking out for guards on the walls, or patrols.
Only there’s nothing, just a bare stretch of land, cleared by human hand, it would seem, extending out some twenty metres or so from the edge of the river that acts as a kind of moat, surrounding the palisade.
I wait a moment, pondering my course of action, then strip off and, forming my clothes into a bundle, fasten them across my shoulders, before quickly crossing the open space.
The water is deep and cold; not freezing, but cold enough to make me take a sharp inward breath. For a stride or two I’m safely in my depth, the water chest-high, but then the riverbed falls away from me and I’m forced to kick out and swim, sputtering against the chill, careful all the while not to soak the bundle.
It’s not far – less than thirty yards – but by the time I climb from the opposite bank, I’m stiff from the cold and shake myself like a dog before putting my clothes on once again.
Encouraged, I approach the palisade and crouch beneath it, listening. There’s the smell of wood smoke and a faint murmur of speech, though not in any language I’ve ever heard. It’s hard to make out, but what I can hear sounds like some less than articulate ur-spracht, a proto-language that seems more grunt than logical statement. A slurred growl that sounds half dog, half drunk.
So the place is inhabited. But how do I get in there without being seen?
It makes sense to wait for darkness, then make my move. Only first I’m going to explore what I can of the land surrounding the settlement.
Not knowing where the main gate
is, I decide to follow the sun, into the west, or clockwise, as we’re to know it in a time very different from this. In less than five minutes I come across a pile of rotting animal bones, the stench of them reaching me long before I stumble across them. What’s worse, there are human skulls, human bones among them.
The darkness is growing more intense by the moment, the moon, which is low in the sky, barely giving any light.
I hurry on, stumbling over rocks, the world seeming more hostile in the dark. And then, suddenly, there’s a light – a torch or lantern of sorts – up ahead in the darkness, the first of several, and in their wavering glow I see it.
The main gate.
There are no towers, no special defences. It’s really just another piece of the palisade, only cut and, in a crude fashion, hinged, to lock into place in the gap. Or so it seems from the distance I am watching.
There are other voices now. Deeper, gruffer, but no less incomprehensible. Guards, I suspect. I press back against the wooden wall, and wait, until they have finished what they’re doing, then shuffle on, making no noise, keeping within the shadow. Only the closer I get, the more likely it is that I’ll be seen.
Maybe so. But I need to see what’s inside. Will there be huts and a lodge house? And if so, how rich and powerful are these people? Do they dominate this land, or are they one of many small tribes? And do they trade? Or do they make war on their neighbours, for this is how it often is back in these early times.
I guess what I’m thinking is that this could be a bolt-hole. A place to come to when things are dangerous. Like the Haven, only closer.
I’m curious, too, as to how they organise themselves, in this innocent yet savage age. Do they have kings? Or was life back here run by groups of men – like the veche?
Most of all, I want to know if he is here. Whether by chance he’s once more followed me. Only surely I’d know that by now. I have been here hours now, and I know how he operates. I would be trussed up like a Christmas turkey, or dead on a cart.
The Master of Time Page 33
