The Ocean of Time by David Wingrove Read Free Book Online Page A

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