David Wingrove - The Empire of Time

‘As if I’ve been in a fight?’ I smile, but the tiredness is beginning to gnaw at me. I need to bathe, to sleep. I need …

‘Look,’ Ernst says, putting a hand out to touch my shoulder. ‘I know this isn’t the moment, but will you speak to the boys? Tell them about your experience? They’ve been learning about the situation back there, but … well, it would be nice to have a firsthand account.’

I smile. ‘Sure. Later. Hecht said you had something to tell me.’

Ernst glances back at the watching students. ‘It can wait.’

‘All right. Then I’ll see you-’

‘Tonight,’ Ernst finishes for me. ‘We’ve a session at eight.’ He laughs, seeing how blank I look. ‘It’s just after eleven, Otto, in the morning.’

‘Ah.’ And I laugh. But it’s hard sometimes, making these jumps through time. Harder than you could ever imagine.

Nothing stays the same for ever. Not even the Past.

Hecht’s room is long and wide, the ceiling low, except in the central space where he seems to live, connected to his terminal. There, where the floor sinks down two feet, the ceiling also climbs to form a dome above his work space, the twelve black glass panels reflecting the faint fluorescence of the tree that hovers in the air above his desk.

Hecht’s room is always dark. As you enter, you can see Hecht’s face in the glow of his screen, austere, carved, the only bright thing in that shadowed environment. All else is glimpsed vaguely in the surrounding darkness: his pallet bed, his shelves of books, his clothes — in boxes, as if he’s never quite moved in — and other things.

As I enter he looks up and across at me, his fingers still moving over the pad.

‘Otto.’

He smiles faintly as he says it. Like the women, he is pleased to see me home, safe and in one piece.

I walk across, then sit cross-legged on the floor, facing him, the terminal to my right, the Tree above us both, its faint, yet ever-pulsing lights like the flow of life itself.

‘So?’ Hecht asks, not looking up from what he’s doing. ‘What went wrong?’

I have been thinking about this from the moment I recognised their dialect as Curonian, not Prussian: asking myself why they should be there at just that moment in time, and having argued the pros and cons in my head, I’m certain now.

‘There must have been a Russian agent at Marienburg.’

Marienburg on the Baltic coast is one of the Order’s fortresses, twenty miles west of Christburg. It was from there that Meister Balk set out to ordain me into the Order. As for the Curonians, we know they’ve been working with the Russians for some while.

Hecht glances up. ‘It could just be coincidence.’

‘It could, only with Meister Balk dead, and especially after the slaughter of the Sword Brothers at Saule earlier in the year, well, I can’t think of two things more likely to destabilise the Order.’

Hecht smiles. ‘Do you want to know what happened?’

I shrug, as if not bothered, and yet I do, for Balk’s death, three years before his due time, was certain to have caused ripples, if not the collapse of the Order’s Northern Crusade altogether, and without that …

Without that, there would be no Prussia, no Frederick, and, ultimately, no Greater Germany. The implications were enormous. And yet it can’t have happened that way, for if it had, things here would have changed.

Hecht glances at the screen one last time, then removes his hand from the pad, concentrating his attention on me.

Hecht has grey eyes. Some say they’re cold — cold with the strange, dispassionate fervour of the intellectual — yet I’ve never seen that. I understand the icy fire that burns in him, for it burns in me too. And when he smiles, those same grey eyes are warm. Warm with a father’s love for his children. Or perhaps that’s just for me, his favourite, his Einzelkind as he calls me, as if any of us here could be an ‘only child’. Yet I know what he means, for I am the wolf that hunts alone. Yet they are wrong. It is just that I do not properly fit into this regimented world of ours, although I try. Urd knows I try.

Hecht watches me a moment longer, and then he smiles. ‘What happens is this. The Crusade does indeed falter. Support for it from the Papacy dries up. Moreover, the Swedes, dismayed by the failures of the campaign, do not invade the northern lands in 1240. They stay at home, and so Nevsky never becomes Nevsky, for there are no battles on the Neva or Lake Chud. Von Gruningen becomes Grand Master both of the Prussian and Livonian Orders, and under his leadership things go from strength to strength. In 1246 the Crusade is renewed with massive support from the Western princes. As a result, the heathen Prussians are suppressed, the Curonians defeated at Krucken.’

‘Then …’

‘Time heals itself, Otto. As is its way. From 1250 onward you would scarcely know the difference.’

‘And Nevsky?’

‘He has his moment. But not as Nevsky. As ever, a few names change, the odd detail here and there, but Time … Time flows on.’

I smile. ‘Who did you send back to find out?’

‘Kramer, and Seydlitz.’

‘ Seydlitz? ’

My surprise amuses him. ‘I thought he needed to get out in Time. He’s been too wrapped up in his project.’

‘Barbarossa?’

Hecht nods. ‘Yes, but I wanted him away from here, while the Elders met.’

‘They’ve met ?’

Hecht sits back slightly. He is a tall, gaunt-looking man, yet the black one-piece that he’s wearing makes him seem part of the shadows. Only his face is distinct; that and his hands, which rest on the edge of the desk as he studies my face.

‘Let’s say I consulted them.’

‘And?’

Hecht smiles, then changes the subject. ‘You understand now how weak they are back there?’

For a moment I don’t understand. Does he mean the Teuton Knights? Or is he talking about the Russians? The thing is, we’re both spread thin. I mean, three thousand years, and only a couple of hundred agents to police them. No wonder we miss things. But then, so do they. It’s a game of chess — the most complex game imaginable — only the moves can be anything, and the board …

The board is everywhere and any time.

I look up at the Tree.

It is not a tree like other trees. This is a Tree of Worlds, a tree of shining light, its trunk representing our reality, a thick thread of pearled whiteness, its various, multi-coloured branches the time-lines in which our agents operate.

Eight hundred and seventy souls inhabit the Nichtraum — the ‘no-space’ — of Four-Oh, at the last count. Of those, one hundred and seventeen are out there right now, in the Past, fighting the Russians, each one linked through Time and Space to Four-Oh. Their presence out there shapes the Tree, their living pulse forming its pulse. If any one of them should cease, then one shimmering, delicate branch ceases also, leaving only an after-image.

One whole alternate history snuffed out.

I look to Hecht. ‘And you want me to find out just how weak?’

‘In time. First you need to get some rest. I hear you’re talking to Ernst’s students later on.’

Is there anything Hecht doesn’t know?

‘He wants me to give them a first-hand account.’

Hecht laughs. ‘Well, you can certainly give them that. Do you realise how strongly you smell, Otto?’

I grin. ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed.’

‘No, but the women did. Oh, and Otto …’

‘Yes, Meister?’

‘Try to be kinder to the women, now you’re back. They’re only doing what they’re supposed to do.’