The Ocean of Time Read Free Page A

my plate and beginning to pick at what’s left.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I bet Master Arkadevich was horrified.’
    I laugh. ‘He was. But his senior apprentice …’
    We meet eyes.
    ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Ernst says. And I know what he means. Alexander Alexandrovich is a very clever young man, quick and flexible of mind. In our own time he would have made a fine technician or engineer; yet here he is in this age of darkness and superstition, wasted, one might say, on making things from wood.
    Some of my younger students make the mistake of thinking themselves more intelligent than the men and women of the past. They think that the context in which they live reflects the degree of their intelligence. It is not so. And how could it be? Could mankind really have evolved so far in so very short a time? No. It’s an impossibility. What might seem like ignorance is merely lack of insight. Or of potential.
    I decide on the spot to go and see our young friend and try to speak to him alone, away from his master. And so, having washed and shaved, I set off for Master Arkadevich’s.
    It is midday when I get there and, picking my way through the jumble of wood and half-finished carts and sleds that clutter the front of the building, I ask where Alexander Alexandrovich might be found.
    ‘He’s asleep, Meister,’ one of the apprentices answers me, grinning broadly.
    ‘He was up all night,’ another adds, ‘working on the new design.’
    ‘Has he been sleeping long?’ I ask, and there is laughter.
    ‘He fell asleep over his bench. He did not
want
to sleep.’
    I grin. Clearly I have found the right man for this job. ‘Then let him sleep. I will come back in an hour or two. I’ll wake him then. Only there are a few things I wish to discuss.’
    ‘But the master—’
    I give the apprentice a handful of small bronze coins and wink. ‘There is no need to trouble the master, eh, my boy?’
    The ‘boy’ – forty if he’s a day – grins toothlessly. ‘No need at all, Meister Behr.’

158
    With time on my hands, I go down to the market to see whether I can spy my Katerina among the stalls. At first there’s no sign of her and I begin to think that she has gone already, but then I see her, her back to me as she examines a bright blue cloak, her servant Natya beside her, discussing the quality of the garment.
    I smile, the day lit up by her presence.
    I walk across and stop on the other side of the stall, watching her until she looks up and notices me there. She looks down, smiling shyly, playing a game we often play, as if she doesn’t know me yet, but quite likes me. As if she is a young maiden again, waiting to be swept away by her future husband. Natya, slower on the uptake, looks from her mistress to me, then back again, then does a comic little double-take, surprised that it’s me who’s standing there, and not some boyar’s son. Dull-natured as she is, Natya cannot understand the powerful chemistry that is between Katerina and I. She thinks her mistress could have done better, and that she is wasted on some ‘old man’ like me, tall as I am, rich as I am.
    But Natya and her like can go to hell. When Katerina looks at me I feel seventeen again, fresh from the Garden, the whole of life laid out before me, like it was all new and promising.
Unsullied
.
    There’s part of me, of course, that knows it isn’t so: that Time is Time and sullied. That life, far from being romantic, is a vale of tears. And that a man’s destiny – whatever it may prove to be – is never what he expects.
    Yet when I look into her eyes and see her smiling back, I can easily believe that nothing in the universe is more powerful than this.
    Not even Time can destroy this bond.
    Katerina walks slowly round the stall, leaving Natya to bring the basket.
    ‘Otto, so you’re up?’
    ‘So it seems.’
    Her right hand lifts from her side, crosses the space between us and gently touches my chest. Like a blessing. I look down at it, then place my