* * *
Besides a desk and a cabinet, the tiny office accommodated a safe and a refrigerator with hardly any room left.
“How come you’re so crowded in here?” Oxana blurted out.
“Just the way it is,” Artem replied philosophically, squeezing through to the desk.
“Do they provide enough funding, at least?”
“We get paid on time, and thank goodness for that.”
“I just don’t understand it!” Oxana said earnestly. “How can you work in these conditions? It’s scary even to think that the very outcome of the Battle of the Kalka depends upon you guys! I don’t get it! And all this weird silence of the media—” She was going to add more when he pulled a drawer and took out something resembling her Dictaphone scaled about three times up.
“Is this the thing?” the girl asked, peering.
“Yep… it is,” Artem replied meditatively. Frowning, he began to press tiny buttons on the unit. “The very thing. Minichron, Model One. Here…” he drawled with satisfaction, placing the gadget inside a shoulder bag sitting on the chair. “I guess we’re ready to go.”
“What! Just the two of us?” Oxana asked anxiously.
“Why, what else did you expect?”
“I thought you had a SWAT team—”
“Too much credit,” he muttered, stuffing a checkered blanket into a different compartment of the bag.
“But he has a machine-gun!”
“I was kidding,” Artem said, zipping up the bag. “He doesn’t. He just wants to warn Prince Mstislav the Bold against ever splitting the Rus forces.”
“Wait!” Oxana recalled the clanging warrior. “Are we going like this? What about the gear, outfits?”
Artem looked at her contemplatively. Then he turned towards the refrigerator and not the safe as one would expect.
“Right on!” he encouraged her and opened the door. “What do you prefer to drink?”
For the life of her, Oxana couldn’t grasp what was going on.
“Well… in a picnic setting, I mean,” Artem explained, answering her bewildered gaze. “I got beer, but I’d rather recommend dry red wine with cheese and greens. Or would you like something stronger?”
* * *
“Is this the Kievan Rus, then?” Oxana asked, gawking around.
An ordinary country landscape surrounded them. A river snaked between low hills. There were neither shingled roofs nor latticed power-line towers in sight. On the other hand, gingerbread mansions and wooden palisades of the Old Rus were nowhere to be seen, either.
“O Rus! Back of the knoll art thou,” Artem replied with a quote, also looking around for something. “I see a perfect spot! That’s where we’ll sit. A great overlook, but the main thing we’ll be in plain view as well.” He adjusted the stuffed bag and sauntered toward a hillock. Oxana followed.
“But… what if the Mongol horsemen show up?” she asked anxiously.
“You think if the Rus horsemen show up it would be any better?”
“But still—!”
Artem looked back.
“Whoever shows up, just clap your hands,” he suggested. “As loud as you can. Or scream.”
“And that would scare them away?”
“No. This Minichron is tuned to sound. It would switch off, and we’d bounce right back to our starting point. That is, my office.”
They reached the top of the hill. Artem unzipped the bag, took out and spread the checkered blanket, then began to unload the cheese, greens, flatbreads, and the two bottles of wine.
“Hey, look!” Oxana cried. Luckily, she did it softly enough.
Artem straightened up and looked in the direction she pointed. At the edge of the woods they caught a glimpse of a human figure – once, then again. The stranger was dressed in blue shorts and a white T-shirt.
“Is that him?”
“No,” Artem said after a pause. “That’s me. Never mind, I come here often enough.”
Oxana stared but the distance was too great and she couldn’t make out the face.
“Can I come closer?”
“There’s only one Minichron for the two of us,” Artem said. “You move about fifteen paces away, and find yourself—”
“—back in your office?”
“Exactly.” Artem smiled, no longer looking so bashful. He appeared a lot more relaxed in the first half of the thirteenth century than in the present.
They sat on the blanket. Artem produced a corkscrew and opened the first bottle. The wine was good, the kind that should be sipped, but the girl knocked the first glass back in a single gulp. She needed it to get her bearings.
“So!” she said, shaking her head resolutely. “Let’s cut to the chase. How are you going to intercept him?”
With a thoughtful air, Artem was wrapping cheese and greens into a piece of flatbread.
“May I recommend…” he said, “…breakfast of the Georgian peasant… Intercept him? God bless you, what for? Where would he go? All he can do is walk around for a while… and come back all by himself.”
“What do you mean, walk around? He’d have enough time to—” Oxana halted and surveyed the deserted surroundings again. “What?” she said in a grave whisper. “But where are—” Goggle-eyed, she suddenly burst into laughter. “Oh well! Here I am, waiting for the battle to start! So it is there after all and not here? May of 1223, isn’t it?”
Artem looked at her closely. For some reason he found it necessary to refill the glasses.
“In May of 1223 we have exactly the same situation,” he informed her somberly.
The laughter stopped.
“I don’t understand—”
“That’s easy. Both chroniclers were wrong.”
“So it’s just as deserted there as it is here?”
“Not exactly,” Artem said. “Rather crowded. You saw that guy with the spade. Well… he’s sorting it out there with his own chronomuddler. Has been at it for a couple of years with no end in sight.”
“But there was a Battle of the Kalka River after all, wasn’t there?!” Oxana exhaled timidly.
“Probably there was one.”
“Where? And when?”
“We’re still looking for it,” Artem reassured, handing her the glass.