The Empire of Time (19 page)

History is like that. Beside the great trunk of the Tree of Time lie countless other ghostly branches – the remnants of endless experiments to change and shape it. Sometimes one of those experiments works, and the ghost becomes reality – a switch is made. The sap flows elsewhere. But that doesn’t happen often. You can even travel to those other worlds and see the effects of your what-ifs, but you need to be careful always to come back to the point at which you entered that otherness. Step even a foot to the side and you can be lost.

For ever.

While I’m celebrating, Urte comes up to me and, gently stroking the back of my hand, asks me if I’ve remembered our appointment. Although it was only this morning, her time, for me it’s been a long time since I spoke to her – almost three days subjective – and I’m tired. Even so, I know my duty.

‘Half an hour,’ I say, and she slips away, grinning, as if I’d promised her the world. But now my mood is darker, and I wonder just how much use to her I’ll be.

I stay another fifteen minutes, then get a detoxifier from Zarah. She asks me what I’m doing later, and I tell her I’ve an appointment with Urte, and she nods, as if it’s okay, but I know Zarah is sweet on me, and I’m sad I can’t reciprocate. Oh, I’ll sleep with her when it’s my turn to see her, but for her that’s not the same, and I think I understand just what she’s feeling.

Urte is waiting for me in her room. As the door hisses open and I step through, I see that she’s made a real effort for tonight. There are sweet-scented candles and, in the far corner of the long, shadowy room, she’s filled a bath.

I smile at her, though I feel little like smiling. Though it’s my duty, I don’t have to be unpleasant to her. It’s just that I can’t do this like I used to. It used to be … what? Recreation, I guess you’d call it, and I used to enjoy the physical side of it, but now – since I’ve known Katerina – I find it very hard. Each time is a betrayal.

Urte is naked. She has a nice body, and as the door hisses shut, she slips from her bed and comes across to me, taking both my hands in hers.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she says, looking up into my face, and I find myself at once feeling guilty. Guilty because she clearly wants me and, try as I might, I know I don’t want her. I just can’t give her back all the love she seems to want to give me.

Not that this is about love. This is duty. How we maintain our bloodstock.

Urte is one of the most intelligent of our women, She’s our astrophysics specialist, though what she doesn’t know of higher maths and electrical engineering isn’t worth knowing. In any other time or place she would be considered a Meister. A mere
Frau
she is not. But like all of us she has no choice in this. We serve the
Volk
.

She leads me across and, as I undress, she sings softly to herself, watching me all the while. Naked, I wait for her next move and, as I thought, she takes my hands again and climbs into the bath. We sit there, facing each other.

‘You’re a real hero, Otto. You know that?’

‘Yes?’

But I don’t feel like it. I feel like a man who has just killed an old friend.

She leans closer and plants a soft kiss on my chest, just beneath the hollow of my neck, then places her hands gently on my shoulders. It’s pleasant, yet I have to fight the urge to pull away; to climb from the bath and run from there.

I close my eyes. ‘I’m glad it’s over.’

‘Mmm …’ And her lips move down, her tongue now playing at my nipples. Yet if she senses my reluctance, she doesn’t show it. Or maybe she thinks she can simply win me over. I am a man, after all. And in a sense she’s right. I’ve never failed yet. I’ve done my duty by the
Volk
. Once a week since my eighteenth birthday I’ve done this, each week with a different woman. It’s how, in this small community of ours, we attempt to diversify the gene pool. Just how many children I have from this is hard to tell. Hecht knows, I’m sure, but we are not allowed to. All of the children are
our
children; all of the women
our
women.

I try to think that way right now, but it’s hard to. I liked Gruber, and the thought of him having died in that explosion haunts me. I keep seeing the misery in his face, and I’m conscious that I don’t know why – that I didn’t even attempt to find out why.

Even so, my cock grows stiff, my body responds to her gentle ministrations.

It’s late when I wake, and for a time I wonder where I am. I roll over and find that Urte’s next to me, her eyes closed, her tiny, compact body on its back, her small breasts barely prominent. For a moment I am somewhere else, and the sense of loss makes me almost want to cry, only what’s the point? It’s no use trying to change things.

‘Otto?’

Her eyes are open now. She studies me a while, unconcerned that I do not answer her.

‘Otto … why can’t we women go back in Time?’

I laugh. ‘You want to, then?’

She nods, her eyes never leaving mine, and I realise that this matters to her.

‘Because it’s dangerous.’

‘The Russians send
their
women back.’

‘The Russians are barbarians.’

She’s silent a while, then. ‘You know, sometimes I feel … degraded.’

‘What?’

‘
This!
’ She laughs at the reaction in my face. ‘Oh, I like you well enough, Otto, and in other circumstances …’ A shivering sigh passes through her. ‘It’s just so unfair, being a brood-cow.’

‘But …’

Only I don’t know why she’s raised this right now. It’s how it is. How it’s always been with us. The men go out and back, the women stay at home. That’s the German way of things. As for the Russians … well, the Russians
are
barbarians. They kill each other for fun, then resurrect themselves.

I make to say something, but she interrupts. ‘You want to fuck me again, Otto? You know, I’d rather like a child of yours.’

Back in my own room I try to sleep, but it’s no good, there’s all eternity to sleep. So I go to Zarah and she gives me something to keep me awake for a couple of days, and then I visit Hecht. And so it is that, two hours after leaving Urte’s bed, I am standing on the platform once again, a knapsack on my shoulder, waiting to jump.

I am going to see Frederick, to give him the snuff-box. I have to, otherwise none of it means a thing. Frederick dying would mean a
big
change, a major re-routing of the Tree, and I can’t allow that.

As I step into his tent, Frederick looks up from his map table and smiles at me.

‘Ah, Otto, where have you been?’ Frederick has the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. They dominate his lined and careworn face and are – so I’ve come to learn – the absolute barometer of his mood. He is forty-seven years old, yet he looks a good ten to fifteen years older, an impression that his unkempt uniform does much to enhance. Yellow snuff stains cover his unwashed indigo blue coat – what, in his youth, he called his ‘
Sterbekittel’
, his ‘shroud’. Nowadays he never changes from it. Even at court he wears this patched and shabby uniform. Only on his mother’s birthday does he take it off and wear ‘mufti’.

Still smiling, he beckons me across, then stabs a finger at the hand-drawn map.

‘Saltykov’s in Frankfurt, and Daun is marching north to meet him. I mean to cut them, Otto, and bring each one to battle separately.’

Frederick is much smaller than me – five two to my six foot – yet he dominates the space surrounding him. Like Urte, I think, and wonder briefly what she’d make of this, for Frederick is our hero. As much as Frederick Barbarossa, he is Germany, though if you were to say that to him he would laugh, and curse the Saxons for pigs and dogs, and tell you what a barbarous language it was. No, Frederick speaks only French, as now.

And so I answer him. ‘You think they will attempt to link their forces, then?’

His eyes seek mine. ‘Assuredly. Saltykov is still licking his wounds from last year’s battle at Zorndorf. If what my spies say is true, the Empress Elizabeth would prefer him not to sustain a second bloody nose.’

I nod, but we both know that it is only half the story, and that Frederick’s words, as ever, contain an element of bravado. Zorndorf was a terrible confrontation – as fierce as any in this bloodthirsty century – and both the Russians and the Prussians came away from it with a new respect for the ferocity of their opponents. Neither side, I know, wish to repeat the experience. Yet Frederick seems determined to force the issue.

His flute stands in one corner, propped up against a music stand. Nearby is a small shelf of books: Tacitus, Horace, Sallust and Cornelius Nepos in French translations, Rousseau, Racine, Corneille, Crebillon and Voltaire in the original. Nothing German.

This is a complex man, an icon of the Enlightenment, and a friend of that impish monkey Voltaire; a man whose private art collection includes works by Rubens and Watteau, Titian, Corregio and van Dyke. Yet he is also a king steeped in the blood of his own people, a man who has lost one hundred and twenty generals in battle, and who has been in the thick of ten of the most terrible battles of the century.

An honourable and untrustworthy man, full of contradictions.

‘So how have you been?’ he asks, turning from the map.

‘Not too well,’ I say, sticking to the tale I have invented for myself here in this time and place. ‘My chest …’

He nods sympathetically, for if Frederick understands one thing it is physical suffering. He is troubled by his teeth and has gout in both his feet. Moreover, the cold, damp weather bothers him and causes him arthritic pain in his hands and knees.

‘We are plagued, you and I, Otto.’

‘So we are. But there are spiritual compensations.’

I remove the knapsack from my shoulder and open it up, then hand Frederick the first of my two gifts.

He studies the leather-bound volume a moment, squinting at the binding, and then his eyes open wide with delight.

‘Fénelon! His
Telemaque
! My God, Otto, where did you get hold of this? When my father destroyed my library …’ He stops, lost for words, then reaches out and holds my arm affectionately. ‘Thank you, dear friend. This is indeed a valued gift.’

‘And this …’ I say, and hand him the tiny gold snuff-box.

Frederick laughs. For that moment his smile and his eyes are as clear as a summer sky. ‘You know me too well, old friend. Why, this is beautiful. Is it Dutch?’

‘Russian,’ I say, and he laughs with delight.

‘Russian, eh? Then they can do more than just drink and fuck and fight?’

‘Oh, sometimes …’

And we both roar with laughter and he claps his right arm about my shoulders, even as two uniformed men step through the flap into the tent. Frederick turns to them, still grinning.

‘Friedrich … Hans … come in …this is my old friend, Otto. Otto Behr.’

Friedrich and Hans … I almost want to laugh, for these are none other than Seydlitz and Zieten who, since the deaths of Keith and Winterfeldt, have become Frederick’s chief advisors.

Seydlitz, yes, but not
that
Seydlitz. This is his historical predecessor, the man who, almost single-handedly, won the day at Rossbach and was subsequently promoted to the highest rank by Frederick for his valour. Seydlitz is an elegant, attractive man. Zieten, by comparison, is an amiable thug, a man who would fight you for a wager, or even for the sheer hell of it. Both stare at me now, suspicion in their eyes. They have heard of me, for sure, but this is the first time we have met.

‘Is there news?’ Frederick asks, releasing me, a sudden sobriety changing his whole face, giving it that cynical, trouble-plagued expression that was so often noted by observers.

And so they talk, discussing the latest news. Most of it is rumour and hearsay, dangerously inaccurate. Many of Frederick’s spies, I know for a fact, are double-agents, paid by the Austrians to provide him with false information. And as they lean over the map, I realise I could surprise all three by telling them exactly where Daun and his Austrians are right now, and what instructions he carries from his Empress. But that might lead them to think
me
a spy, and so I hold my tongue, knowing that this part of it is unimportant in the greater scheme.

You might think me cold. By not saying what I know, Frederick will lose Kunersdorf and thousands of men will die who might otherwise have lived. Indeed, Kunersdorf would not happen at all – Frederick would intercept Saltykov’s Russians at Gorlitz, to the north and, despite the odds, beat him. But he would die there, taken by a party of Cossacks, who would cut his throat and strip him naked before leaving him on the battlefield.

I know because I have seen it. I have stood on that terrible battlefield, the screams and shouts echoing in my ears, and watched as fate snatched away all hope, even in the hour of victory. We have tried to make that change, and each and every time it ends the same: the Prussians win, but Frederick dies. Each death the kind of death we can’t undo. Only by losing at Kunersdorf, by suffering the very extreme of adversity, can Frederick, and thus Prussia, survive.

History is like that, sometimes. Things seem fated. There appears to be but a single path. Which is why the snuff-box that now rests in Frederick’s pocket is so important. Yet if it
is
fated, then you might ask why I go to such lengths to get it to him. If History wants it so, then surely History will provide.

Not so. This is what we call the ‘fallacy of inaction theory’. I know that Frederick will live, that the musket-ball will strike the strengthened snuff-box. That is what happened, after all. But I also know that it happened
only
because I interceded, and I know that because our experts analysed the snuff-box and saw what it was made of.

DNA.
My
DNA.

Circles, I know, but one I must complete. Inaction is not an option.

I am about to leave, to make my excuses and go, when Frederick turns and looks to me.

‘Otto, you know the Russians. What do you think is in Saltykov’s mind? Do you think he’ll try and march on Berlin?’

This is awkward, for I know precisely what is on Saltykov’s mind. Not only that, but I have seen with my own eyes his mistress Elizabeth’s detailed instructions to him. She doesn’t trust the Austrians – not completely – and is worried in case Daun decides not to link up with her army, but stay where he is in Gorlitz, near the Elbe. Their alliance is one of mutual suspicion, and only a joint hatred of Prussia holds it together. What’s more, she is afraid – and rightly so – of extending her supply lines further than she has to. Last year’s retreat from Zorndorf proved more costly than the battle, and she is loathe to repeat the experience, hence Saltykov has been warned to be cautious.