I don’t often get to go back home in the middle of the day. If you’ve been out on Watch duty, then you come home early in the morning. If you have an ordinary working day to get through, you won’t get back before seven. Even with the ability to foresee traffic jams on the roads – what good is that if the jams are everywhere?
And naturally, even without the help of magic, any wife knows that a husband doesn’t come back early from work without good reason.
‘Daddy,’ Nadya announced. Naturally, she was standing by the door. She can tell I’m coming just as soon as I approach the entrance to the building – that’s if she happens to be busy with some important childish business of her own. If she’s feeling bored, she knows from the moment I leave the office.
I tried to pick my daughter up. But she was clearly far more interested in the cartoons on TV: I could hear a squeaky ‘La-la-la, la-la, la-la-la’ coming from the sitting room. She had done her duty as a daughter: Daddy had been met when he came back from work and nothing interesting had been discovered in his hands or his pockets.
So little Nadya deftly slipped out of my arms and made a dash for the TV.
I took off my shoes, tossed the Autopilot magazine that I had bought on the way home onto the shoe stand and walked through into the sitting room, patting my daughter on the head along the way. Nadya waved her arms about – I was blocking her view of the screen, on which a blue moose with only one antler was hurtling downhill on skis.
Svetlana glanced out of the kitchen and looked at me intently. She said, ‘Hmm!’ and disappeared again.
Abandoning any attempts to fulfil my paternal functions until better times, I walked into the kitchen. Svetlana was making soup. I’ve never been able to understand why women spend so much time at the cooker. What does it take so long to do there? Toss the meat or the chicken into the water, switch on the hotplate, and it boils itself. An hour later drop in the macaroni or potatoes, and a few vegetables – and your food’s ready. Well, you mustn’t forget to salt it – that’s the most difficult part.
‘Will you pack your own suitcase?’ Svetlana asked, without turning round.
‘Did Gesar call?’
‘No.’
‘Did you look into the future?’
‘I promised you I wouldn’t do that without permission …’ Svetlana paused for a moment, because I had gone up to her from behind and kissed her on the neck. ‘Or unless it’s absolutely necessary …’
‘Then why did you ask about the suitcase?’
‘Anton, if you come home from work during the day, then I go to bed alone in the evening. They’re either sending you out on watch or away somewhere on an assignment. But you were on watch two days ago, and the city’s calm at the moment …’
In the sitting room Nadya laughed. I glanced in through the door – the moose on skis was hurtling wide-eyed straight towards a line of small and obviously young animals, who were walking along the edge of a precipice. Oh, this was going to be a real disaster …
‘Sveta, are you sure Nadya should be watching cartoons like that?’
‘She watches the news,’ Svetlana replied calmly. ‘Don’t avoid the issue. What’s happened?’
‘I’m going to Samarkand.’
‘Your assignments do take you to some interesting places,’ Svetlana said. She scooped up a spoonful of soup, blew on it and tasted it. ‘Not enough salt … What’s happened out there?’
‘Nothing. Nothing yet.’
‘The poor Uzbeks. Once you get there, something’s bound to happen.’
‘Gesar held a meeting today. With the Higher Ones and the first level …’
I told Svetlana briefly about everything we had discussed. To my surprise, there was no reaction to the idea that from now on Nadya would be guarded in secret by two Light and two Dark magicians. Or rather, the reaction was exactly what Olga had forecast it would be.
‘Well, good for Gesar! I was thinking about ringing him myself … to ask for protection.’
‘You’re serious? You’ll allow it?’
Svetlana looked at me and nodded. Then she added:
‘While I’m with her, Nadya’s in no danger. Believe me, I’ll make mincemeat of any three Higher Ones. But it’s best to take precautions. When’s your flight?’
‘In five hours. From Sheremetievo.’
‘Semyon will get you there in an hour. So you still have two hours left. You can have something to eat, then we’ll pack your things. How long are you going to be there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then how much underwear and how many pairs of socks shall I put in?’ Svetlana asked reasonably. ‘I can’t imagine you washing anything while you’re away.’
‘I’ll buy new ones and throw the old ones away. Gesar promised to give me heaps of money.’
‘I wonder how much “heaps” is for him,’ Svetlana replied doubtfully. ‘I’ll pack five sets of underwear. Sit down at the table – I’m serving the soup.’
‘Daddy!’ Nadya called from the sitting room.
‘What, my little daughter?’ I answered.
‘Daddy, will Uncle Afandi give me the beads for a present?’
Svetlana and I looked at each other, then walked quickly into the sitting room. Our daughter was still watching the cartoons. The screen showed a group of different-coloured animals gathered round a campfire.
‘What uncle’s that, Nadya?’
‘Uncle Afandi,’ said our daughter, without looking away from the screen.
‘What Afandi?’ Svetlana asked patiently. ‘What beads?’ I asked.
‘The man Daddy’s going to see,’ Nadya told us, with that ‘How stupid you grown-ups are!’ intonation. ‘And the beads are blue. They’re beautiful.’
‘How do you know who Daddy’s going to see?’ asked Svetlana, continuing the interrogation.
‘You were just talking about it,’ Nadya replied calmly.
‘No, we weren’t,’ I objected. ‘We were talking about me going on an assignment to Uzbekistan. That’s a beautiful country in the East – Gesar used to live there once. Do you remember Uncle Gesar? But we didn’t say anything about Afandi.’
‘I must have misheard, then,’ Nadya replied. ‘There isn’t any uncle.’
Svetlana shook her head and looked at me reproachfully. I shrugged – okay, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have butted in. Mummy would have got a lot more out of her …
‘But the beads are real anyway,’ Nadya suddenly added inconsistently. ‘You bring them, all right?’
There was no point in asking any more about Uncle Afandi. Nadya had had ‘fits’ of clairvoyance ever since she was three, if not two. But she was absolutely unaware that she was prophesying, and as soon as you started asking ‘How do you know that?’ she clammed up.
‘My fault,’ I confessed. ‘Sorry, Sveta.’
We went back to the kitchen. Svetlana poured me some soup without saying a word, sliced the bread and handed me a spoon. It sometimes seems to me that she plays the role of a perfectly ordinary housewife with emphatic irony. But after all, it was her choice. Gesar would be absolutely delighted if Svetlana came back to the Watch.
‘Rustam has had a lot of names … is that what Gesar said?’ Svetlana asked thoughtfully.
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, slurping my soup.
‘We can assume that now he’s called Afandi.’
‘Anything’s possible.’ I wasn’t exactly counting on it, but in my situation I couldn’t afford to ignore even the slimmest lead. ‘I’ll ask around.’
‘It’s good that Alisher will be with you,’ Svetlana observed. ‘You let him do the asking as often as possible. The East is a subtle business.’
‘Now there’s an original thought …’ I said sourly. ‘Sorry, I’ve been hearing wise thoughts about the East all day long today. The rivers of eloquence have already flooded the lake of my awareness, oh Turkish delight of my heart!’
‘Daddy, bring back some Turks and some delight!’ my daughter responded i
mmediately.
I didn’t meet Alisher often at work. He preferred working ‘in the field’ – he was always out on patrol and usually only appeared in the office in the morning, with his eyes red from lack of sleep. I once heard that he was having an affair with some girl from the accounts department, and I knew he was a seventh-level Other, but apart from that I knew very little about him. He was naturally reserved, and I don’t like to force my friendship on anyone.
However, Semyon seemed to be on friendlier terms with him. When I went down and got into the car, Semyon was just finishing telling a joke. As I sat beside him, he was leaning back over his seat and saying:
‘All right, Daddy, let’s go the long way round. Bring me a little scarlet flower, please!’
Alisher laughed first and then held his hand out to me.
‘Hi, Anton.’
‘Hi, Alisher.’ I shook his hand and passed my bag back to him. ‘Dump it on the back seat, I don’t want to bother with the trunk.’ ‘How’s Sveta? Did she scold you?’ Semyon asked as he drove off.
‘No, of course not. She wished me luck, fed me a delicious dinner and gave me heaps of useful advice.’
‘A good wife even keeps her husband happy,’ Semyon declared cheerfully.
‘You’re in a good mood today,’ I remarked. ‘Is Gesar sending you to Samarkand too?’
‘As if he would,’ Semyon said, with a histrionic sigh. ‘Listen, lads, why are you going to Samarkand? The capital’s Binkent, I remember that for certain!’
‘Tashkent,’ I corrected him.
‘Nah, Binkent,’ said Semyon. ‘Or isn’t it? Ah, I remember! The town’s called Shash!’
‘Semyon, you’re not old enough to remember Binkent,’ Alisher scoffed. ‘Binkent and Shash were ages ago – only Gesar remembers that. But we’re flying to Samarkand because that’s where the oldest Light Other who works in a Watch lives. The Watch in Tashkent is bigger, they have all the swank of a capital city, but most of them are young. Even their boss is younger than you are.’
‘Would you ever …’ said Semyon, shaking his head. ‘Incredible. The East – and everyone in the Watches is young?’
‘In the East the old men don’t like to fight. The old men like to watch beautiful girls, eat pilaf and play backgammon,’ Alisher replied seriously.
‘Do you often go home?’ Semyon asked. ‘To see your family and friends?’
‘I haven’t been there even once in eight years.’
‘Why’s that?’ Semyon asked in surprise. ‘Don’t you miss your home at all?’
‘I haven’t got a home, Semyon. Or any family. And a devona’s son doesn’t have any friends.’
There was an awkward silence. Semyon drove without speaking. Eventually I just had to ask:
‘Alisher, if this isn’t too personal a question … Your father, was he a man? Or an Other?’
‘A devona is a servant whom a powerful magician creates for himself.’ Alisher’s voice was as steady as if he were giving a lecture. ‘The magician finds some halfwit who has no family and fills him with Power from the Twilight. He pumps him full of pure energy … and the result is a stupid but very healthy man who possesses magical abilities … No, he’s not quite a man any more. But he’s not an Other, all of his power is borrowed, inserted into him by the magician at some time. A devona serves his master faithfully, he can work miracles … but his head still doesn’t work any better than it did before. Usually the magician chooses people who are mentally retarded, or have Down’s syndrome – they’re not aggressive and they’re very devoted. The power inserted into them gives them good health and a long life.’
We didn’t say anything. We hadn’t expected such a frank answer from Alisher.
‘The common people think a devona is possessed by spirits. And that’s almost true … it’s like taking an empty, cracked vessel and giving it new content. Only instead of intelligence it is usually filled with devotion. But Gesar’s not like all the others. Not even like other Light Ones. He cured my father. Not completely – even he can’t do absolutely anything. At one time my father was a total idiot. I think he suffered from imbecility – obviously owing to some kind of organic damage to the brain. Gesar healed my father’s body, and in time he acquired normal human reason. He remembered that he had once been a complete imbecile. He knew that if Gesar didn’t fill him with fresh Power in time, his body would reject his reason again. But he didn’t serve Gesar out of fear. He said he would give his life for Gesar because he had helped him to become aware. To become a man. And also, of course, because a mindless fool like him now had a family and a son. He was very afraid that I would grow up an idiot. But it was all right. Only … only the people remember everything. That my father was a devona, that he had lived too long in this world, that once he was an imbecile who couldn’t even wipe his own nose – they remembered all that. My mother’s family rejected her when she left to join my father. And they didn’t acknowledge me, either. They forbade their children to play with me. I am the son of a devona. The son of a man who should have lived the life of an animal. I have nowhere to go back to. My home is here now. My job is to do what Gesar tells me to do.’
‘Well, well …’ Semyon said quietly. ‘That’s a tough deal – really tough. I remember how we drove back those counter-revolutionary bandits, the basmaches. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Well, maybe now they’re not bandits any longer, but national heroes … ‘
‘When Gesar was a commissar in Turkestan my father fought in his detachment,’ Alisher said with pride.
‘He fought there?’ Semyon asked excitedly. ‘What year was that in?’
‘The early 1920s.’
‘No, I was there later … In Garm, in 1929, when the basmaches broke through from abroad.’
They launched into a lively discussion of events from days of long ago. From what I understood, it seemed that Alisher’s father and Semyon had almost crossed paths – they had both fought alongside Gesar when he’d been on active military service in the Red Army. To be quite honest, I didn’t really understand how Gesar could have taken part in the events of the Civil War. The Great Light One couldn’t possibly have bombarded the White Guards and the basmaches with fireballs! Apparently not all Others had been indifferent to that revolution. Some of them had taken one side or other in the struggle. And the great Gesar and his comrades had gone dashing about the steppes of Asia to fight the other side.
And I also thought that now I could probably guess why Gesar and Rustam had quarrelled.
CHAPTER 2
EARLY IN THE morning is the right time to arrive in a new city. By train, on a plane – it makes no difference. The day seems to start with a brand new leaf.
In the plane Alisher became taciturn and thoughtful again. I half-dozed almost all the way through the flight, but he looked out of the window as if he could see something interesting on the distant ground, enveloped in night. Then just before we landed, when we flew out into the morning and the plane started its descent, he asked:
‘Anton, would you mind if we separated for a while?’
I gave the young magician a curious look. Gesar’s instructions hadn’t involved anything of the kind. And Alisher had already told me everything about his family and friends, or rather, about the fact that he didn’t have any.
But then, it wasn’t hard to guess what a young guy who had left his homeland at the age of just over twenty might be thinking about.
‘What’s her name?’ I asked
‘Adolat,’ he replied without trying to deny anything. ‘I’d like to see her. To know what happened to her.’
I nodded and asked:
‘Does that name mean something?’
‘All names mean something. Didn’t you ask Gesar to give you knowledge of the Uzbek language?’ Alisher asked in surprise.
‘He didn’t suggest it,’ I mumbled. But really, why hadn’t I thought of it? And how could Gesar
have goofed so badly? We Others learn the major languages of the world as a matter of course – naturally, with the help of magic. Less common languages can be lodged in your mind by a more powerful or experienced magician. Gesar could have done it. Alisher couldn’t …
‘That means he didn’t think you needed it,’ Alisher said thoughtfully. ‘Interesting …’
It looked as if Alisher couldn’t imagine Gesar making a mistake.
‘Will I really need the Uzbek language?’ I asked.
‘It’s unlikely. Almost everyone knows Russian … And anyway, nobody would take you for an Uzbek,’ Alisher said, with a smile. ‘Adolat means justice. A beautiful name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘She’s an ordinary human being,’ Alisher murmured. ‘But she has a good name. A Light name. We went to school together …’
The plane shuddered as the undercarriage was lowered.
‘Of course, go and see her,’ I said. ‘I think I can find the way to the Watch office on my own.’
‘Don’t think it’s only because of the girl,’ Alisher said, and smiled again. ‘I think it would be best for you to talk to the members of the local Watch yourself. You can show them Gesar’s letter and ask for their advice … And I’ll get there an hour or an hour and a half later.’
‘Weren’t you on very friendly terms with your colleagues, then?’ I asked quietly.
Alisher didn’t answer – and that answered my question.
* * *
I walked out of the airport terminal building, which had clearly been reconstructed recently and looked absolutely new. The only things I was carrying were my hand baggage and a small plastic bag from the duty-free shop. I stopped and looked around. The sky was a blinding blue and the heat was already building up, although it was still early in the morning … There weren’t many passengers – our flight was the first since the previous evening, and the next one wasn’t expected for about an hour. I was immediately surrounded by private taxi drivers, all offering their services in their own particular way:
‘Come on, let’s go, dear man!’
‘I’ll show you the whole city, you’ll see the sights for nothing!’
The Last Watch: Page 17
