The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

“No. Of course not. I was ten.”

“But I, I would have taken the opportunity. I would have said, ‘Now is my chance to become more educated.’”

Nick took a sip of his brandy and eyed the lanky Russian. His head was thrown back and he was blowing smoke rings again, clearly lost in his own fantasy. “Remind me why we are even discussing this?”

Arkady rolled his head to one side to look dreamily at Nick. “I am trying to describe to you the feeling. You do not know what it is. Like a little boy who does not know what it is to desire a woman. Then suddenly you do know what it is. Forever afterward you know. At first you cannot control this feeling; it is—how do you say it nowadays—the boss of you. It arrives when it arrives. But soon you learn how to control it. You can make the feeling come and you can make it go. You are the boss of it. Do you see?”

“So it feels like desire? Someone near me is shifting time and I think, ‘That’s lovely. I want to have sex.’”

“No. Deliberately you misunderstand me. It feels like . . . like you almost trip and think, ‘Oh! I am falling.’ But then you do not fall. Or you are drinking and you think, ‘Oh! If I drink more the room will spin.’ But you do not drink more and then it does not spin. Do you see?”

Nick drew on his cigar and didn’t answer. Sex, drinking, falling. He was beginning to suspect that this old Russian had led a far more interesting life than he had.

Arkady tried again. “Do you remember the feeling the moment you jumped in time?”

“Yes.” Nick recalled Jem Jemison fighting near him. Catching his glance. The bloody gravel under his fingers as he scrabbled for purchase. He recalled the cold intent in the Frenchman’s eyes, and then the terrifying, blind sensation of being yanked forward, as if by a team of wild horses. “It was like I was being pulled forward uncontrollably, and at great speed.”

“Yes. This is the feeling I describe, only much, much smaller. Softer, this feeling. Someone near you is playing with time. You feel it; it is like a little pull in your belly. A little rushing in your ears. That time you jumped, it was a big pull, a big rush. You were saving your own life. You think it was an accident, a strange trick that takes you from the battlefield to the future. No, it was you. It was your gift, something inside you that was saving you. But you had no control over this thing, this gift. You were unaware. Much like a boy when he dreams of a woman, and when he wakes he finds that—”

Nick held up a hand. “Please, Arkady. Is it possible to continue this conversation without constantly referring to sex?”

“But why? Sex is related to everything. It is the most powerful human drive.”

Nick sighed.

Arkady pointed at Nick with his cigar. “Your years in America have ruined you. You are prudish, like a priest. Remember your old self, Blackdown. Would he have said to me, ‘I will not talk with you about women’? ‘I am embarrassed to talk with you about women’? No. He would have said, ‘Arkady, we are friends. Let us drink brandy and smoke cigars and talk about women.’”

“But we aren’t talking about women. We are talking about freezing time. I am still not entirely sure what dairymaids have got to do with it.”

Arkady unfolded himself from his armchair and stood glaring at Nick from his beanpole height. “Our skill—it is sensuous. It is warm. Making time stop at your will, it is like caressing a beautiful woman. Caressing her and feeling her surrender.”

Nick slumped back in his chair. “Fine,” he said. “I am merely the student here.” He could not believe this man was Alice Gacoki’s husband. But across the few days that he had lived with them, he had learned that in private Alice was a very different woman from the cool and collected Alderwoman he knew. They wouldn’t let Nick out into London—“You must still abide by Guild rules as far as possible”—and so they ate at home together. Alice was an inspired cook, reciting English poetry or singing in Kikuyu as she moved around the kitchen, unless—and Nick couldn’t bear to be in the kitchen at these times—she was listening to The Archers on the old-fashioned radio that sat like a cat, humpbacked and purring, on a sunny windowsill. She was a mean poker player and she liked her drink. She flirted constantly with her randy husband, while he, for his part, worshipped his beautiful, powerful wife. But Nick now also understood why Arkady was so seldom to be seen at official events, and was silent and mysterious when he did attend. The man was incorrigible.

Arkady stood beside Nick’s chair. “Close your eyes this time, Blackdown,” he said. “I am going to stop time. Try again to feel it.”

Nick closed his eyes. The room was silent except for the crackle of the fire. They had been through this again and again already this afternoon. Each time Nick missed it, and between one second and the next Arkady would seem, as if by magic, to have flown across the room, or moved Nick’s cigar, or built up the fire to a roar. Now Nick didn’t even try. He let his mind drift back to that voluptuous dairymaid, and the thing he hadn’t told Arkady. When she bent down, she had seen Nick gawping at her. Instead of screeching, or hiding her breasts, she had simply smiled. “Hello,” she said. Then she straightened again and carefully rearranged her fichu, taking her time. Whether she knew that she was tormenting him with her exquisite beauty, or whether she thought of him as an innocent child, Nick could not tell. But the replacement of the scarf became the fuel for years of