Aleksey's Kingdom (24 page)

The officer had become separated from Major Parkinson and did not know where he now was. I made an attempt to find the old man. I wondered if he had perhaps fallen and was lying injured unable to call out; he had not looked well for some time. I could not find him. It was too dark to continue my search. I only again found Aleksey by dint of locating the shore and following it around toward the north.

Their prisoner was bound tight. He looked… wary, but not as frightened as he ought.

We conferred in low voices. I told them that I believed we were alone and that, therefore, it did not matter what we did to this man. Aleksey did not like what he knew I was proposing, but he did not have to do it—I did. We desperately needed to know how he had got upon the island.

I balanced my knife in my hand and considered this trapper—although by now I was fairly sure he was no trapper at all. This seemed like a good place to start. I asked him who he was. I dodged the spit. All men spit upon their torturer at the beginning of this adventure. I had spat upon mine. I did not think the less of this man for it.

I asked again, and this time I encouraged a civil reply by slicing off his ear.

Aleksey stood and went to look at the water. I did not want him to see me like this any more than he wanted to watch, but then, before I knew the outcome of my action, Aleksey returned and squatted down next to me, his hand upon my thigh. I felt the strength of his approbation, and we were as one once more.

I told the man that if he did not tell us what we wanted to know, then the devil’s disfigurements would be as nothing to his.

He told us.

He related how on a Sabbath they had left the colony for the short walk to the falls to admire them: the families and a few of the soldiers. They had gone to the promontory upon which I had fallen clutching the grass for comfort. But they went there often and were familiar with the place.

And then the devil had come to them. He had risen from the falls, exhaled on a breath from hell, and he had told them that he was come amongst them. “He wanted tribute—tribute of the most beautiful and the best—and we gave him—” He put his face into his bound hands and wept. “We gave him the girl who had come amongst us lately. She had been a captive of the Uron and had… she had a child with her that had been born from her terrible treatment at their hands. It was a foul thing… even so young…. We had found it with one of the colony’s cats and her new kittens….” He paused, deep in his memories. “So we gave Mary to him. She was fair of countenance, and we hoped he would not see into her heart before it was too late. He took her. He took them both into the falls with him, and we believed we had appeased the devil. Many of us then wanted to leave this place—abandon the colony. We could not stay here, and so we made preparation. But a foulness had come with the girl that had crept into the hearts of some of my brothers and sisters. They began to….” He paused, his face twisted not just from the pain of his missing ear but apparently from memories that were too awful to bear. “They performed unnatural acts… became wanton. Sin slithered between the cracks of our Church, and we were confounded. They would not leave this place, but we had not the heart to abandon them to their lusts.

“And on the third day, the devil rose again.
She
had also risen and the child with her—he rode upon the devil’s back. They were on the island. And she was pleading with us to save her. She told us we would be absolved of all our sins—as she had forgiven us. We did not know what to do, but those who had followed her ways were restored at the sight of her and fell writhing and ranting upon the ground, speaking such blasphemies as will not bear the retelling here in the darkness.”

I have rarely seen Aleksey’s eyes so wide, his face so concentrated on a tale. I held my counsel.

It is always easy to recall as if merely a witness. I doubted not that this man’s knees were amongst those upon the sands.

“The soldiers, seeing the divisions she was creating in our number, said they would cross to the island for her, and some of us said we would accompany them—to help.” He retreated once more into his dark thoughts. I wondered how he defined the term
help
.

“So we slung ropes across and went.” His breath hitched. “She was gone. The island was deserted, and when we came to return, we could not, for the ropes had been cut. We had left them all on the other side—our wives and children… our babies. He—” The poor man began to rock in his distress, and for my part, I regretted cutting off his ear, even though he had tricked us to this place and shot at us. These things are complex. “He gave them all to the falls. Every morning as the sun crested the trees and hit the shore, he tied another to a log and sent them into the river. Our babies, our wives. And what did we do? We watched and tore at ourselves and could do nothing. Even those hellions in the witch’s thrall who helped and cursed the innocent were eventually sacrificed in their turn. The devil spared not even his acolytes. And then they were no more, and it was many days that we had been on the island, and there was no food. God help us, there was no food, and we became….”

I let him rest for a moment, although our situation was desperate enough and we needed him to talk.

“We fell upon each other, the strong upon the weak, son upon his father, and we took the nourishment we needed.”

I licked my lips, perhaps unconsciously, and glanced at Aleksey. I could see in his face the same horror that was upon the man’s. Joking about such things when you are happy and riding in sunshine on an adventure is one thing—seeing the reality of it is quite another. He did not like his cannibal stories so much now. “After some days, he returned to us. He rose from hell and said he had come to prepare a place for us, and if we chose his path he would save us. We fell at his feet and worshipped him, and he fed us. But he said he needed to ascend, that he needed more sacrifice and wanted always only the fairest and the best….”

Was it at that point that I saw the rest of the mystery unfolding before me? Perhaps it was so awful that I repressed the thought, only watching his lips as he spoke the words, disbelieving them even as I knew them for the truth.

“One of us had been recently in the big colony on the seaboard, and he had seen one there….”

I could see where he was trying not to look, but he could not prevent his eyes flicking for the briefest moment to Aleksey’s face.

“One so fair of face that he was as an angel. But it was more than this. He had heard the angel say that he was a prince—of the most pure of all blood. And even beyond all this, he was virgin, for he lived with an old man who was as a father to him, and that he did not know a woman.”

Aleksey sank back to sit upon the cold sand, wrapping his arms around his head as if he could ward himself from hearing this. It was not the stupidity of his words that had come back to haunt him, but that he saw for the first time the way things had stood, and that it had all happened because of him: all the death and all the misery.

This is not how I saw it, you understand, but how I knew he would be seeing it. We understood each other very well. Sometimes this was a curse.

“The devil said that if we brought this one to him, this angel of the pure blood, then we would be saved and released—that our tribute would not be needed. So he sent us to find this pure one and bring him to this place. We traveled to the colony, and the woman found a family, and we made ourselves known, and we told of some of what had happened here, and we did not need to do more, for the horror of it spread and was enjoyed, as if our babies who had been placed… were sport for tales around the fire.

“We wanted to bring only him and the family so we could travel without suspicion, but he had friends amongst the officers, and soon it was as a small army, and we were perplexed. And then the very worst thing.” I knew what was coming. He flicked his eyes to me but lowered them quickly. “You were not as he had described, and we feared all our plans would fail.” This was rather a feature of our relationship, I decided, but was in no mood to smile about it now. I pulled the man to his feet.

“Show me.” He knew what I meant. He was shivering badly and stumbling, his head pouring blood where my knife had sliced. He staggered as we walked, but he had boots, so I spared him no sympathy. He led us to the center of the island and then farther toward the edge of the cliff. I feared he was planning to throw himself off, so held tight to his ragged shirt. We had almost reached the edge when he stopped and appeared about to speak. But then there was a sound. We turned.

We saw the devil.

He was there, suddenly, the earth spewing him out. He raised his hand and pointed at the poor, bleeding man. The man screamed, and I think my horror at seeing the devil so close, so unnaturally appeared, overwhelmed me, and I let his shirt slip from my fingers.

He took himself over the edge of the cliff, and it felt, as we saw this, as if the devil’s pointing had taken him there.

When we turned back from seeking for the poor man, the devil had gone.

I was not sure by that time whether he had actually been there. How could he have been? Perhaps in our extremes, we had all conjured him in our minds.

W
E
WERE
a very miserable group for the rest of the night.

We did not need to say that dawn was now not something to be welcomed. Dawn meant sacrifice.

I tried not to think of the horror that had overtaken this place and wondered if echoes of it remained and if that was what I had sensed as we approached the falls. Can you hear a remnant of the awfulness that has come upon a place? Had I been hearing not the thunder of the water or feeling the vibrations of its great plunge off the face of the earth, but hearing and sensing echoes of the terror of the poor people who had come here to live freely and worship their God in the way they wanted without fear of repercussion?

They did not come for us that day.

We spent a good proportion of the short daylight hours searching more for Major Parkinson, but our diligence was not rewarded. There was no sign of him at all, and our hearts were burdened by misgivings over his likely fate.

By nightfall we knew what they intended to do to us, but no one spoke of it. There was only one way I liked eating Aleksey, and he felt the same about me, so they could wait as long as they liked if that was what they thought would happen. We would starve together first. Captain Rochester was another matter. But he was one to our two, so we did not fear his hunger.

And this hunger was very great on the following day. We had water—too much water, if truth be told—but nothing whatsoever to eat. Despite my best attempts to lure a bird to the ground and snare it, I could not. The cold bit into our bones and made us all ill with it.

He came before the dawn on the seventh day of our imprisonment upon the island. Seven little nicks into the trunk of a tree. John had died on the fifth day, from the cold more than his hunger, although we had taken him into our curl of body as tightly as if he had been a third lover.

Perhaps they thought Aleksey and I would assuage our hunger upon him, but we did not. We laid him out and would have covered him if we had the strength, and Aleksey said words over him. It seemed to banish some of the horror for a while.

I will admit here and now that my agonies upon the island during those seven days were not helped by thoughts of my poor horses. Boudica in foal. Xavier, my companion for so many years, and Freedom, the tangible representation to me of what Aleksey and I had achieved by leaving our world and coming to this new one. I tried not to think of what the child might be doing to them to spite himself upon me, or just for the pleasure of it, but as the hungry days in the cold wore on my mind, I dwelt upon it, and I was the more miserable for it.

Neither of us could rise when the devil finally came for us.

I could hardly believe what I was seeing, but at last the final part of the mystery revealed itself to me. I knew what he was and where he had come from, but I could do nothing with this knowledge.

I confess I was overwhelmed for a while, and in a very dark place in my mind, for we were reunited again with Major Parkinson: the devil was wearing his skin. I did not think our horror could have been increased after what we had endured in the snow those seven days, but I felt Aleksey’s heart sink and knew he was at the very end of his reserves of courage.

We were bound securely around our waists to trees, unable to resist, but we were fed. At first I could not fathom why he fed us after such a deliberate starving, but he had the woman, Mary Wright, bring us bread and wine, and she knelt and offered it, and I then realized we were now favored of this deformed god, for we were sacrifice. We had been purified, purged, and now we had to be appeased and made ready with offerings.

Aleksey laughed at her and said she prepared a table in the presence of her enemies, and I was relieved. He was not at the end at all, and his courage rallied mine.

We could see she did not even understand his allusion. I ate, and I made Aleksey eat, although he did not want to touch their food. We devoured everything there was, and I felt immediately more myself and able to think.

In some ways I wished he had left me insensible, for knowing what was to come and thinking about it as it was happening to me almost undid me.

We were dragged to the shore, and even though we resisted and were two, even the woman was stronger than either of us now. The child was with them once more, and he had a sharpened stick, which he used to poke us in the face or genitals when we resisted. I knew then that the man’s words about the woman and the child were true, for this is often the way of native children with captives.

The sun was beginning to come up but had not quite reached the shore upon which we lay. I was then strapped to a log, and the devil raised his stolen face to the sky and began to chant. It was a horrible mixture of Latin and French, his own languages, and some of the native tongues I recognized, and somehow then an older language, which I did not and was glad not to know. The sun reached the poor major’s face, began to trace its very unwelcome path down, and then it reached the sand and the water.