The River of No Return

Arkady set his brandy balloon down on a table and leaned forward, his sharp elbows propped on his sharp knees. “When I said you would enjoy being the marquess, I also said that it was nothing but a fantasy, yes? You know what comes, what is coming. You are a traveler in time. No more for you the wallowing like a happy pig in the pleasures of the present. It is not for you, or for your sisters, that you are here, dressed like that. It is not for your family or your tenants or your title that you stand there, drinking brandy that was laid down before Marie Antoinette’s pretty head rolled beneath the guillotine’s blade. It is for the Guild. It is for the Guild that we return and put on these costumes.”
    “You said the Guild wanted me to be an aristocrat. It’s why they let me keep my ring. Even as they dispossessed me, they knew. Now I have remembered. This is my home. My family. My land.” Nick twisted the ring on his finger. “I am Blackdown.”
    “Bah!” Arkady clenched his fists, then opened his long-fingered hands very wide. “You are Nick Davenant! Do not forget this! This time we have come back to, it wants you. Like the siren who sings. You are giving in. I said to Alice, perhaps he is too weak. But she said no, that you are strong.”
    “I never wanted this,” Nick said quietly. “I asked to be sent back to Vermont. I told you I wasn’t right for the job.”
    Arkady’s face softened into compassion. “Do you think I don’t feel for you? I, too, lost all when I jumped. Remember, it was I who taught you to feel time, my priest. To feel it slow and stop and speed up again. I taught you to step outside the stream. I taught you that beautiful sensation. Try to feel it again now, how the time is dragging you along. Feel it. Can you? It is moving your limbs, moving your thoughts. Remember you grabbed me by my sleeping clothes today?”
    Nick did remember how the marquess had flared up in him. And with the exception of that brief hour in the morning when he had allowed Jem Jemison to rattle him, Nick had given in and been the marquess all day long. Ogling horsewomen. Walking his lands. Greeting his tenants. Inspecting the home farm. He felt the marquess in him now, angry and affronted. He let him speak: “I grabbed your nightshirt—which in fact is my nightshirt—because you deserved it.”
    Arkady looked at him, his blue eyes very serious. “No.” He shook his head. “Do not give in. Come back to me, Nick Davenant.”
    Nick stared at his friend, his lips pressed tightly together.
    The Russian’s voice was quiet. “You think you are a singular man, an individual, Nick. A great marquess, second only to a duke, yes? You think that you control your own feelings. But time, Nick. Time is all around you. Volga: the Queen of Rivers. Mississippi: the Father of Waters. Amazon: the River Sea. The River of Time is a thousand times greater than these. As wide and deep as the universe itself. If you try now, you will feel how you swim in it. It holds you up. It feels good. But it can pull you down. Wear your dandy clothes and drink your brandy. But do not give in. Do not drown.”
    “Could I drown? What do you mean? Stop speaking in metaphors.”
    The Russian sat back. He pulled his own ring up to the knuckle and pushed it back down, then again. He was searching for words, something Nick had never seen him do before. “Metaphors, they are all we have.”
    “Whatever,” Nick said. “Surely you can speak plainly for once. You want me to be the marquess but not be the marquess. Why?”
    “Alice told you that we travel on feelings. Your feelings, they are your time machine; she said this to you.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you think you understand this. You have jumped, with me to guide you. You have reentered the river in your natural time. You are remembering the feelings of this era. And you think, I am the Marquess of Blackdown! I remember! Bah. Little you, little tiny man. You do not remember. The river—it is the river that remembers you! It flows all around you, through you; it drowns you. Unless you respect its power.”
    “‘Little tiny man’! Now I hope that is a metaphor, Arkady. . . .”
    But the Russian was not to be distracted. His half-lidded eyes gazed somewhere over Nick’s shoulder. “Human emotion. Millions of souls, together they make the mood of a certain time. It doesn’t matter that they disagree, that they hate, that they fight. All together they create it, this thing.