It is 1867 and winter in Ryazan, a city on the banks of the Oka River in Central Russia. Konstantin is ten years old. His days are full of dreams of flight - to Moscow, even to the silent stars. But then, one day, he catches cold in the freezing woods near his home and his own world becomes silent. Left deaf by scarlet fever, his outlook is desperate. Only his fascination with a newly mechanised age and his astonishing visions of humanity's future seem to offer him any sort of hope.

Konstantin, Tom Bullough's brilliant, inspirational novel, tells the extraordinary story, based on a real-life character, of the first man to reveal how travel into space might be possible. It is a story of man, nature, and the limitless power of the imagination.

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December 1867

Kostya hurried down the bank towards the frozen Oka, fine and light in his heavy sheepskin coat as a sparrow in its winter plumage. On the river, the tracks of the woodsmen cut north through the even snow, steering a line towards the pine logs strewn along the shore beneath the forest. Kostya ran and slid on the exposed ice. From the darkness of the birch trees he emerged in the December sunlight, one arm extended for balance, the soup can blazing between his shirt and his coat, and nowhere beneath the ice- blue sky could he see any movement beside his own long, wavering shadow.

The snow on the north bank had formed a crust since it was last trampled by horses and men in bast shoes, and the boy moved quickly and easily up the slope. He climbed among white-capped logs in their hundreds, which would, in the spring, be carried east with the broken ice, seething and roaring the 350 versts to the sawmills at Nizhny Novgorod, but for now were as frozen as the forest behind them. Their tracks in the deep snow were broad, hard and sparkling, cutting between the bare, scrubby lilacs and the gangling ash trees – converging on a door in the wall of the pines.

That winter, as everyone in Ryazan knew, felling had been prohibited within five versts of the river. Even for a grown-up it was an hour’s walk to the woodcutters’ clearing, and Kostya arrived in the forest almost at a trot, following the plumes of his breath. In the gloom of the great, snow-laden trees, the cold was sharper than ever against his pink, rounded cheeks, his determined, down-turning mouth, the black Tatar eyes that had come to him from his mother. He held the soup can firmly to his skinny stomach, and he looked up only once, when the Sun cut a line through the tangled branches and turned their snow into a torrent of light.

It was perhaps a verst, perhaps two, before Kostya came to a bright red streak in the track in front of him. He stopped, touched it with his old felt boot and found that it was sticky. The streak was startling against the uniform whiteness. It stretched and wove away from him, complicated by clods of fur, arching in the prints of the horses, and as Kostya lifted his head he found himself facing a tall, scruffy dog – its thick coat glinting with icicles, its colour such that it need only to have retreated a few paces to have vanished among the white-grey trunks.

On the narrow track beneath the shadow-hung trees, Kostya heard the tremor of his heart, the gasp of his breathing, the hush as a cascade of snow slipped from the treetops, but beneath these fragile noises he heard nothing: the great, indifferent silence of the forest. Distantly, he wondered why this dog had strayed so far from Korostovo, the village where it surely lived. Through the smell of cabbage soup, he smelt its hard, animal stink. He saw the half-eaten hare beneath its wide, webbed claws. He saw its pyramid ears, its muscular shoulders, the knife-like teeth between its thin black lips.

He saw the silence in its fire-coloured eyes.

The swathe cut by the men from Korostovo lay parallel with the Oka: a great, gaping space of broken trees and open sky where women in headscarves and children in well-patched rags were gathering branches beneath the few deformed or unwanted pines, the limes and rowans that stood exposed in the winter sunlight. The smoke rose straight from the woodsmen’s fires, like the ghosts of the trees they had felled. In the mouth of the track, Kostya stood small and shivering, the peak of his blue woollen cap low above his eyes. To the south, the men were working steadily, the cold air loud with their axes. He watched them cut a notch above the root of each tree, and a higher notch on the opposite side. He watched them hammer in the wedge as the treetop started to waver, and as the branches met the ground in a screaming, splintering crash he saw them fall upon the trunk – working with brisk, practised movements, slicing the bark along its length, skinning it like an animal.

Several minutes passed and several women paused in their work to point and call to Kostya before the foreman came striding from the shallow shadow to the south. Eduard Ignatyevich was a broad, dark figure with a black-grey beard, a long black coat and a black felt cap that covered his cropped black hair. Even with a bracking hammer swinging from his big, gloved hand he looked as much like a priest as a forester.

‘Konstantin?’ He took his spectacles from his pocket and hooked the arms over his ears. ‘What are you doing here?’

Kostya produced the soup can from his coat. He held it up to him with trembling hands, the steam coiling faintly from the lid.

‘Konstantin,’ his father repeated. His eyelids flickered, but his voice remained low, methodically Polish. ‘Let me explain to you something very important, which I have explained to you in the past but you have clearly failed to understand. In the town, a man is a mind. That is to say, in the town he is an intellectual being. With a house, a fire and a reliable source of food, he is able to rise above his surroundings, to forget his physical self and devote himself to mental pursuits. Without the town, we would have no books, no telegraph, no railway. Because in the forest, a man is simply an animal with neither fur nor claws. Alone in the forest in the winter, he may consider himself to be in terrible danger. Do I make myself clear?’

Eduard Ignatyevich opened his tin cigarette case, lit a match and released a cloud of smoke, which shone in the light of the low Sun prowling through the southerly treetops. Kostya blinked to stop himself crying. He gave a little nod and his father put a hand to his back and propelled him towards a nearby bonfire where a pine tree stood like a visiting mourner – a rotten lip near the top of its trunk where it had once been struck by lightning.

‘As you know,’ he continued, ‘the zemstvo has decided that there will be no more felling in Ryazan after the end of this week. As a result, I have a great deal of work to do. So, I would like you please to make a bed of embers and warm up your soup can, and then when it is hot I would like you to drink it.’

‘But –’ said Kostya.

‘No buts.’

‘But, Father, I brought it for you!’

‘Konstantin,’ said Eduard Ignatyevich, and his voice acquired the faintest edge. ‘Do you take me for an idiot? Do you think that I come to the forest every day with inadequate food?’

‘But . . . But, Mama said she was worried that you would have to work until after dark again. She said it’s the most coldest winter she can remember, and she said you would get hungry!’

His father turned at a shout from one of the woodsmen.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever your mother might have told you, I am quite sure that she had no intention that you should come all the way out here. Indeed, if she knows about it, I imagine she is losing her mind with worry. The situation is quite simple. You are shivering, which indicates that you are trying to remain warm. It is important that you do not catch a chill, therefore you are to drink the soup, stay by the fire and wait for me to return.’

Even with the heat from the bonfire, a skin of ice had already covered the small oval lenses of his spectacles.