‘Well?’ he says, a slight impatience in his voice. ‘You pay us and we’ll unload the cart. Otherwise …’
Otherwise what? You’ll steal my cart? Take all my goods?
I meet his eyes. ‘Unload it and I’ll pay you.’
He laughs and looks away, then spits into the river to his right. ‘You pay me.
Then
we unload.’
I’m conscious of exactly where each of his sons is standing. In the last few hours I’ve watched them, noting how each one moves, attempting to gauge which of them I’d need to deal with first, for there’s always a best way of handling these situations, and these fellows always look to one of their number for their lead.
Thus I’m acutely conscious of how Krylenko’s eldest straightens and turns slightly to face me. Beneath me the boat gently sways. That’s another factor, and it’s the one that finally decides me.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘here’s the deal. Half now, half when the cart’s onshore.’
Krylenko grins. ‘Done.’
I dig three coins out of my leather purse, and hand them across, then, as the eldest holds the boat still, climb up on to the jetty.
If he wanted, Krylenko could cast off and sail away with my cart and all my goods, only perhaps there are too many witnesses and even he knows he needs a reason – a refusal to pay, maybe – before he could get away with that and not be called a thief. Besides, he’s got what he wanted, an extra six dirhams, and for what?
For being an arsehole and breaking his word
.
I watch them untie the wheels of the cart, then lift it carefully onshore. Krylenko, meanwhile, has not moved. He still sits there, picking at his teeth and watching me.
It’s his eldest now who puts his hand out, asking for the remainder of the money.
I smile and shake my head. ‘Go fuck yourself.’
It’s like he doesn’t hear me properly. Either that or he can’t believe I’ve just said that. ‘What?’ he says. Then, a moment later, ‘
What?
’
‘I said—’
But I don’t have to repeat it. Finally, it’s sunk in, and as it does, he growls and takes a swing at me.
I parry it easily, then watch his face crumple with pain as I knee him in the balls. He goes down on to his knees with a grunt.
The other two are slow to follow up, and the youngest is on his back before he knows what happened, gasping for breath where I’ve punched him in the throat. The last of them yelps and makes to leap on to the boat, only I kick his legs out from under him and he falls between the boat and the jetty with a startled cry and a loud splash.
Krylenko is on his feet now, his eyes wide and frightened. He thinks I’m coming after him, and, taking a step backward, he tumbles awkwardly over the bench seat. But I’m not going to sully my hands. Reaching down, I slip the knife from my belt and cut the mooring ropes, then heave the boat out with my foot.
Slowly it drifts away, Krylenko’s second son, coughing and spluttering from his unexpected dip, trying to clamber on-board.
The eldest son is behind me, wheezing, trying to get up off his knees and take another swing, but I’m not about to let him. Besides, I remember what his father said about Katerina, and how he laughed.
I grab the collar of his smock and jerk him to his feet, then whirl him about and, with the help of the toe of my boot, launch him into the river after the boat.
The youngest doesn’t wait for me to act. Still holding his throat, he throws himself into the water, surfacing a moment later with a spluttering gasp.
It’s over, and barely a minute has passed. As I turn my back on them, I find a crowd of locals gathered at the top of the jetty, staring at me with a mixture of amusement and awe. It makes me realise that Krylenko must have a reputation for his double-dealing, for there’s nothing but admiration for what I’ve done, and when Katerina emerges from the church, she finds me at the centre of a crowd of townsfolk who want nothing so much as to pat my back and shake my hand and offer to buy me drinks at the dockside inn.
‘Otto? What’s going on? Where’s Krylenko?’
‘Gone,’ I say, recalling how he and his sons glared at me and shook their fists even as they rowed away.
‘You paid them?’
‘I paid them.’
‘Good. And the boat?’
I’m about to answer that I haven’t yet hired a boat, when a stranger – a huge, dark-haired man with a long jet-black beard who’s been standing off a little way, watching me – speaks up.
‘If it’s the hire of a boat you want, then a boat you have.’
He steps forward and, leaning down to my level, offers me a hand easily twice the size of my own. A veritable blacksmith’s hand. ‘Bakatin,’ he says. ‘Fyodor Mikhailovich Bakatin, and it’s an honour to meet you, Master …’
‘Behr,’ I say and take his hand. ‘
Meister
Otto Behr.’
Fyodor Bakatin proves to be not just a large man, but a man of large appetites. As we sit at a trestle table in the inn, I marvel at the amount of food he manages to eat, and begin to wonder if there is a boat big enough to carry the provisions it would require to feed such a man for the eight days we’ll be travelling.
The cart is outside, within sight, but to ensure its safety Bakatin has had his sons guard it, in his words, ‘against the thieving fingers of the locals’.
Bakatin has three sons, though I’d not have guessed they were his, had he not told me so. The eldest is long and lanky with a squint and a wispy beard, the middle son short and heavy, bordering on fat, with long, flaxen-blond hair and pale blue eyes. The youngest, however, is the oddest, with his light, athletic build, his bright red hair and green, cat-like eyes. A smooth-faced, handsome boy. Far too handsome to have come from Bakatin’s loins, or so it seems.
While we wait for more wine to be brought, I ask him how it is they don’t resemble each other. Bakatin laughs. ‘That comes, I guess, from them having different mothers.’ He grins. ‘I have three wives.’
Katerina giggles and I nudge her.
‘Oh, it annoys the priest, but what of that? I’m a good husband and a good father, and besides, the church does well out of me. Some around here are mealy-mouthed. They give lip-service to the faith, but I –’ he taps his chest expressively ‘– I, Bakatin, give
money
. I understand the
value
of religion.’
‘And our journey, Fyodor,’ I say, trying to bring him back to what we were discussing earlier. ‘Are you not afraid of the marshes?’
‘
Afraid
?’ Bakatin throws out his great chest proudly. ‘Show me the man of whom Fyodor Mikhailovich Bakatin is afraid and I will show you Satan himself!’
At which he roars with laughter, then finishes his wine and bellows at the serving girl to move her pretty little arse and get some more wine over to our table at once.
Beside me, Katerina giggles, enjoying Bakatin’s company, loving his larger-than-life outrageousness, his
Russianness
. She’s captivated, and when I say he has a deal, and that I’m happy to sail with him, she squeezes my right hand under the table and turns her head to grin at me.
‘You’ll not regret it,’ Bakatin says, nodding to himself. ‘Though I say it myself, there’s no one knows this stretch of river better than Bakatin. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you. As for Krylenko …’ Bakatin leans to one side and spits, showily, as if on Krylenko’s grave. ‘Krylenko,’ he continues, ‘is a liar and a bully and a coward and a sneak-thief and you, Otto, are my friend until the Day of Judgement itself for what you did today. Glorious, it was. Simply glorious!’
At that moment the girl arrives with two fresh jugs of wine, and Bakatin seizes one and pours the rich red liquid into our goblets, the wine splashing everywhere. Then, slamming the jug down and lifting his goblet, he stands and makes a toast.
‘To adventure! And to my dear new friends, Otto and Katerina!’
I would have happily left that night, travelling in the dark, only a sore head prevented it. Katerina alone of our little party was sober when we called it a night, and it is late morning before we finally set off, the cart nestled in the hold of Bakatin’s surprisingly large boat. It’s an
ushkui
, not unlike the one we travelled down from Lake Ilmen on, though smaller. Even so, it’s big enough to make me concerned whether Bakatin and his sons can row such a vessel, loaded as it is not only with us and our cart, but with all manner of goods Bakatin is transporting for other clients.
But Bakatin and his sons prove to be as strong as oxen when it comes to rowing, and whenever the wind blows in our favour – which it does often on that first day – he puts up a great sheet of a sail and, leaving it to the youngest, ships oars and rests, taking the chance to engage Katerina and me in conversation.
It is on one of those occasions that he raises the matter of Krylenko and what I intend to do about him.
‘I intend to do nothing. Why, do you think I should?’
Bakatin nods. ‘At the very least the man should be taught a lesson. But that’s not my point. He’ll be waiting for us, somewhere up ahead. You can be sure of it. He and his sons.’
‘So we take care.’
‘I think we should do more than that. I think we should ambush the rogue.’
‘But if he’s waiting for us, hiding somewhere in the trees, watching us sail past …’
‘You have spare clothes, Otto? You and Katerina?’
I nod.
‘Good. Then listen. I have a plan …’
But the ambush doesn’t happen – not that evening – and while Bakatin and his sons make camp and keep guard, Katerina and I take the opportunity to bathe.
It’s a long journey, and even when lazing about on the boat you can still begin to smell after a day or two. Which is why we try to wash every day and bathe every third day at the least. Katerina, new to such hygiene measures, has taken to the ritual in a big way and is as excited as a child. She likes her washing me, and I …
Well, how can I lie? I love the sight of her pale, beautifully formed limbs glistening wetly, the delight of her wonderfully curved body crouched above the river’s edge. How could I not be aroused by such a sight? And so we make each thing we do a sensual game, and if it usually ends with her in my arms, beneath me, where’s the harm in that? Only this time we are on our guard. Krylenko’s still a threat, and there’s nothing he’d like more, I’m certain, than to come upon us naked, in the act of lovemaking, so this once we simply wash, though, as ever towards the end of the ritual, Katerina squats before me, watching as I shave, endlessly fascinated by it.
‘You should grow a beard,’ she says, and when I laugh, she adds, ‘It would make you look more Russian.’
I smile and, tilting the small circular mirror, study my chin for tufts of hair, the razor-sharp blade in my left hand.
‘I am a
Nemets
. A German. This is how we look. Besides, I thought you liked the smoothness.’
‘I do, only …’
‘Only what?’
But she doesn’t say, merely reaches out and gently touches my face where I’ve missed a bit.
‘
There
…’
I lower the mirror and look directly at her. For a moment I almost – almost – tell her about Peter – Peter the Great, that is – and his amazing gesture on his return from the ‘Great Embassy’, his grand tour of the West. It’s pertinent – a story about beards – but it won’t happen for another four hundred and fifty years.
‘I’ll grow one,’ I say. ‘One of these days.’
I can’t tell her why I don’t. That I couldn’t jump back, sporting a beard. Because that
would
make Hecht suspicious.
‘Otto?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why didn’t you get married, back in Germany?’
It’s quiet in those moments before it begins. Very quiet. The river, which, just north of Surazh, had been narrow and fast-flowing, is broader here and muddied, like a sheet of molten lead. In the heat of the early afternoon the boat moves sluggishly, the big, off-white sheet of the sail hauled down, the four oarsmen – Bakatin and his sons – heaving us at great effort through the water.
There’s the faintest of breezes up on deck, but it’s against us, blowing from the north-east, and where Katerina and I sit in the bottom of the boat, our knees drawn up beneath us, the supporting struts of the body of the cart only inches above our heads, it’s still and stiflingly hot, like an oven.
Bakatin and his sons are quiet, too. Oddly so, for they seem a merry bunch and prone to sing at the drop of a hat, but they’re like silent automata just now. Hung-over, maybe. For a brief moment there is nothing but the rustling of the trees on the banks to either side, the rhythmic pull of the oars through the water, which rushes and gurgles past us. The day is hot and still. And then it happens.
There’s a massive, splintering crash up ahead, followed almost instantly by a series of huge splashes – three or four at least – that send a great wave of water back at us. At once Bakatin’s up and yelling to his sons, getting them to dig in the oars and backstroke, only as slow as we’re moving, we’re still moving too fast, the boat has too much momentum, and it crashes into the tangled barrier of fallen trees that now completely blocks the river.
The shock throws Bakatin off his feet. He gets up, cursing, his face filled with a dark anger.
Telling Katerina to stay where she is, I duck out from under the cart and quickly look about me. There are more than a dozen figures among the trees to our left, and a similar number to the right. Krylenko has got reinforcements.
Things are going badly wrong. This isn’t the kind of ambush Bakatin was expecting, nor have we prepared for it. They’ve boats ready to launch on both banks, and as Krylenko’s boat pushes off from our left, I make a quick decision. Not the Kolbe, but something almost as good under the circumstances. The
staritskii.
I’m breaking rules, I know, but sometimes it’s a question of expedience. Fists and feet won’t do right now, not with the numbers they’re throwing against us.
I crawl back under the cart, slip the catch to the secret compartment, and reach inside. It takes me a moment to undo the strap and open the bundle, but then it tumbles out into my hand, long and smooth with its fine, needle-like nose and its thick handgrip. It doesn’t look very elegant, but it’s highly effective.