The Ocean of Time (6 page)

There is a path of sorts through the trees, though it would be easy to stray from it, and the old man and his boy take it without the need for thought. In places we have to clear the way to get the cart through, but otherwise our afternoon is uneventful. We walk for three, maybe four hours, then, as the sun begins to sink, the old man looks to me and raises his eyebrows expressively.

‘You want to stop?’ he asks, as if I were the one who was asking.

‘
Here
?’ I ask, looking about me.

‘Here’s as good as anywhere. It’s all much the same.’ And he gives a roar of laughter, as if it’s the funniest thing anyone has ever said.

I shrug, then look to Katerina, who nods.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But let’s clear a space. We can put the cart at the centre and make up pallet beds.’

The crude beds are packed in the sled, atop the tarpaulin, along with our food, axes and furs.

The old man, of course, makes no attempt to help, but watches us with an air of amusement as Katerina and I – and the boy – chop down several of the nearby trees to clear a space a dozen paces in circumference.

At the centre of it, just a little way from the cart, I clear away the leaf mould underfoot and, using an entrencher, dig a small hole and begin to lay a fire. As I do so, the old man comes closer and, leaning over the hole, studies it intently, as if it is the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. After a moment the boy too joins him there, staring down.

‘Strange,’ the old guide says, shaking his head and drawing his fingers repeatedly through his grizzled, unkempt beard. ‘But then, I guess you
are
a
Nemets
.’

Katerina looks to me, to see if I’m offended, but I just shrug. Pulling out my tinderbox I strike the flint and get the fire lit. As I make to put the box away, the old man puts out his hand. I give him the tinderbox and again he studies it, as if he’s never seen the like. Which is so. It is, once more, anachronistic, out of its proper time and place, though not overly so.

‘That too is
Nemets
,’ I say, taking it back.

While Katerina tends the fire, I go off into the surrounding woodland, returning in a while with two small hares. I throw them down, then proceed to skin them. The old man is impressed, then grateful when I share the meat with him. I even go to give the boy some, only our guide doesn’t allow it.

‘You will spoil him,’ he says, wolfing down the boy’s share. ‘And then how will I get him to work?’

But later, while the old man talks to me, I notice Katerina slip the boy a piece of the dark, cooked meat, and see the youngster turn his back as he secretly eats it.

I don’t like the old man – not one bit – but I only have to put up with him for the best part of four days, and so I bite my tongue and let the old rogue say what he wishes.

I ask him about the robbers that we saw and he laughs. ‘There are ten for every one the authorities catch. It’s a wilderness out here. Even the wolves are afraid.’ And he roars with laughter again.

The old man sets the boy to watch the first part of the night, but when I wake to take my turn in the early hours, I find the fire out, the boy asleep and snoring, flat on his back beside his master. But the cart is fine and no harm’s done, and I sit there beside the rekindled embers, awaiting the dawn, listening to the noises of the wild animals in the surrounding forest, remembering other times and other places not so dissimilar from this..

The next few days fall into a routine. We walk, and all the while the old man talks and we listen, for even Katerina has run out of things to remark upon. From time to time we have to change course, to bring the cart around some natural obstacle that has appeared since our guide last took this path – fallen trees, a landslip or the like – but eventually, on the afternoon of the fourth day, we emerge from the trees and find, there across a broad, fast-running river, the trading post of Velizh.

Katerina, especially, is glad to see it, for in the last few days she has been badly bitten by insects. We have only one problem now: how to cross the river.

I mention this to our guide and, in answer, he puts two fingers to his teeth and lets out a piercing whistle. Heads appear from the makeshift houses on the far bank and a moment later there are shouts. Men and women run to and fro on the far bank and then a long, flat-bottomed boat is launched. One man jumps in, then holds the boat still against the bank as a second hurriedly joins him. Swiftly and with great skill they bring the craft across, their short, blunt paddles digging deep into the rushing flow, the boat tacking back and forth against the fast-flowing current.

‘Meister Otto, I take it,’ one of them calls up to me, grinning at me with a mouth full of rotten teeth. ‘We were told to expect you.’

‘Is Krylenko here?’

‘He’s moored about a mile upstream, with his sons. They have an encampment there.’

‘Ah. And the cart?’

He looks past me and gives a little shrug. ‘It’ll be okay there until Krylenko comes. I’ll get one of the youngsters to look after it. But Meister,
please
…’

He puts a hand out, welcoming me on-board. I help Katerina get in, then wait patiently as the old man and the boy clamber aboard before I finally join her in the stern.

‘You’ve had a safe journey, I hope,’ the boatman asks, turning his head to grin at me again, even as he pushes away from the bank and, digging his short paddle steeply into the water, begins to turn the boat’s prow against the current.

‘Yes, thanks to our guide here.’

‘Old Mesyats knows every tree in the forest. Yes, but he loves to talk, eh? He could talk my mother-in-law to death and that’s the truth!’

It is, and I laugh for the first time in days, and old Mesyats, seeing the funny side of it, laughs too, and so we arrive in Velizh in the best of moods, even as the sun finally breaches the cloud cover and lights up the afternoon, blazing on the river’s surface.

Russia … how beautiful it sometimes is
.

Krylenko, when he finally arrives, proves as dour and unhelpful as he could possibly be. He refuses to take me upriver, and will only take me to Surazh, to the south-west, which is in completely the wrong direction. I object strongly, and remind him of the advance Ernst paid him, and of his handshake on the deal, but Krylenko is unmoved. He looks at me from under his heavily hooded eyes and shrugs.

‘My wife is with child,’ he says. ‘If I leave her for so long …’ And he shrugs again, as if I’m to take it or leave it.

I begin to wonder if this is yet another attempt to squeeze more money from me, the foreigner, the
Nemets
. Nor, I know, is it any good me flashing the
tysiatskii
’s pass at him. We are two full weeks from Novgorod and these people are not afraid to snub their noses at the good commander, no, nor kill his tax collectors if they become too persistent. In the end, I bite the bullet and offer to pay the man an extra six dirhams, but even this seems to have no effect.

‘I’ll take you to Surazh,’ he says. ‘You’ll get another boat from there. Someone mad enough to go into the marshes.’

I fall quiet, understanding. Krylenko is afraid. Where the River Mezha turns south towards Zarkovsji, it runs through extensive marshlands, home to river pirates and bandits.

I say nothing more. Surazh it is, then, and a week lost at the very least.

His sons, when they arrive, are carbon copies of their father and every bit as surly, and in transporting the cart and its load across the water, I have to tell them more than once to stop poking at the parcels stacked on-board the sled. For the first time on this journey I feel I am among dishonest men, and come to a decision.

At Surazh I shall have them. All five of them, if needs be. But I don’t tell Katerina what I’m thinking. I tell her calmly that there’s been a change of plan and when she queries it, I tell her it’s for the best. And maybe it is, for to travel into bandit territory with such men might prove disastrous.

Even so, I am angry at the delay. Surazh is a good day and a half’s journey downstream, and Krylenko will not leave until tomorrow. And if I cannot find a boat to hire at Surazh …

I feel like forcing him to stick to his agreement – to
make
him take me – only the practicalities of that are insurmountable; at best it’s an eight-day journey to Belyj on the River Obsca, our final destination, and I can’t imagine how I’d make him take me, short of holding a gun to his head and then keeping awake for eight whole nights.

No. It has to be Surazh. But he’ll not get away with this.

That night I sleep on the cart, Katerina on a pallet underneath. And it’s a good job I do, for in the early hours someone sneaks up and, not noticing me there, tries to take something from the sled. I am awake and on them in an instant, beating them off with my stave. They run away, whimpering, into the trees. In the dark I’m not sure who it was, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll have the bruises to show.

Krylenko is twice as surly when he finally arrives, an hour after noon, and I note that only three of his sons are with him. The fourth is conspicuously absent.

They lift the cart on to their boat – a flat-bottomed
strug
– then, letting us settle in the stern, push off into the current.

There’s little talk. Krylenko is content to mutter instructions now and then to one or another of his sons. Taking his lead, they try their best to pretend we’re not there, and even when Katerina needs to stop to answer nature’s call, Krylenko makes as if he hasn’t heard my request to pull the boat over to the bank. It’s only when I make my way forward and, grabbing his arm, turn him round and speak roughly into his face that he acknowledges me.

He makes some comment under his breath and his sons laugh. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll have the bastard, see if I don’t.

While Katerina is among the trees, I stand there in the boat, looking from one of them to another, defying them to look her way. She’s not long, and when she climbs aboard again, Krylenko makes another of his under-his-breath comments, making his sons roar with laughter.

I hear part of it this time; something about ‘the
Nemets
’ slut’.

This time it’s just too much.

‘Krylenko, why are you such a pig?’

He half turns and looks at me lazily. ‘I merely speak the truth,’ he says. ‘My wife, she’s a bitch, and my daughters and my daughters-in-law cows, all of them!’

His sons laugh and nod their heads.

Krylenko is smiling now, an ugly, sneering smile. ‘Women are good for three things only. Fucking, cooking and beating.’

‘You think I should beat my wife, then, Krylenko?’

He nods slowly. ‘You should beat her while you fuck her.’

His sons are giggling now, tears streaming from their eyes. I look from one to the other and wonder what I’d do if things got out of hand. The Kolbe is in my pack, easy to reach, and I could shoot them dead before they knew what was happening. Only then I’d have to explain to Katerina what the Kolbe was, and why it wasn’t magic.

We’re barely halfway there when Krylenko calls it a day and moors the boat. It’s clearly a spot he knows well and that’s used by the river-men, for the edge of the forest here has been cleared and there’s evidence of many fires. The boat secured, we make camp.

Krylenko tries every means to coax us ashore, and I know then for a certainty that he was hoping that we’d leave the cart unguarded on-board, and that had we camped onshore, he and his sons would have been away just as soon as they heard us snoring.

As it is, I have a restless night, waking several times and starting up. On one occasion I notice Krylenko, seated by the fire, whittling a piece of wood and staring sullenly across at me, as if planning the best way of outwitting me.

With the morning my spirits rise. It’s a bright, warm day and we will we be rid of the odious Krylenko by that afternoon.

There’s a brooding silence as we set off on the last stage of our journey down to Surazh, and I begin to wonder if they haven’t concocted some scheme after all.

I’d not put it past them to try to murder us and dump the bodies, then share out our goods, but as the hours pass and they make no move, so I relax. Besides, if Krylenko wanted to murder us and steal our goods, why not do it on the journey north, where the river traffic is less, rather than on this busier, southern stretch of the Mezha?

Cowardice, that’s why. Simple cowardice.

Surazh heaves into view just after noon, with the sun beating down from directly overhead. It’s the hottest day yet, and it appears that the rain that has swept across the land further north has left Surazh unscathed, for the earth between the ramshackle wooden houses is bare and dry with not a blade of grass to be seen. Even the trees – birch and cedar for the main part – seem to wilt in the excessive heat.

Surazh is a proper town, not just a trading post, and as we drift in towards the main jetty, I note a dozen or more vessels tied up against the shore. Beyond the makeshift harbour, formed by a wide sweep of the river, lies the town itself, a sprawl of two or three hundred houses, set within a wooden palisade, and – that rarity out here in the wilds – a stone-built church, complete with a bright blue cupola. Seeing it, Katerina looks to me. It is two weeks now since her last confession.

‘Okay. But don’t be long. If I can find someone who’ll take us, it would be good to set out at once.’

She understands and, even as we tie up, jumps onshore and, without so much as a glance back, hurries across to the shadowed doorway of the church, a crowd of curious locals watching her go.

Which leaves me with Krylenko and his sons.

Krylenko is sitting there, in the very centre of the boat, on a long worn, wooden bench, staring up at me with a kind of mocking smile.

‘Well,’ he says, lifting his head sneeringly. ‘We’ve brought you here.’

‘So you have.’

There’s a moment’s silence. His sons look to one another, as if not quite sure what’s going to happen next. Krylenko wants paying, of course. The bastard actually wants paying for putting me to such inconvenience – yes, and on top of what Ernst’s already given him – but he’s going to have to ask.