Aleksey's Kingdom (26 page)

I put my hand to his shoulder.

Suddenly, I cried out and recoiled in horror.

Something had emerged from him.

It stung me.

For one awful moment, I thought he had been… possessed, that the witch had left me with the shell only of the angel and that inside a demon lay.

It was nothing of the sort. It was a sharpened stick that emerged from his flesh and passed right into my hand, and over his pierced shoulder I saw an imp, grinning.

The child.

I had forgotten the boy. He had revived from his stupor by the tree. I tore my hand off the stick and reached for him, but he was gone into the trees.

Aleksey nodded that he was all right. Even now he was pulling the stick out. I closed my eyes for one moment, for strength, and then took off after the small, fleeing figure.

Other than the roar that plagued me, it was eerily quiet in the woods.

I had noted earlier that there was no game. It was more than that. The woods now held some of the bleak awfulness that Etienne had claimed. If I had come across a clearing with the hollow bodies of the Black Crow, I would not have been unduly surprised.

I could not see the child. I had no hope of hearing him, given the dull rush of water in my ears. I crouched down, and in the way I had been taught, I became one with the trees. This creature may have been raised in the tribes as I had, but he was only five.

I underestimated him.

He dropped upon me from a height, the fall knocking me to the ground, and before I could regain my feet he came at me. He had lost his stick, but with his small fingers extended he went for my eyes. I have seen snakes strike with less speed and dexterity than that demon child struck that day. His filthy nails grazed my cheek as I darted my head away. I was still on my back from the fall, and he then brought his foot down upon my naked groin, hard, all his weight behind the attack, and then, once more, he was gone.

You have to be a man, and a naked one at that, to understand the pain such a thing can occasion. I curled up, groaning piteously, the blood dripping from my hand mesmerizing me as I waited for the debilitating pain to lessen. When I could rise, I clambered slowly to my feet, testing my stretch to full height.

He came at me again. This time something wacked hard against the backs of my bare knees, and, once more, disbelievingly, I was down on all fours in the snow.

But I had wits enough now to realize my naked arse made a particularly good target, so I rolled and sprang as best I could into a defensive crouch. He had conveniently dropped the branch with which he’d hit me, and I picked it up, testing its heft against my bleeding palm.

I now saw my error. I had been too long in the civilized world where good Christians saw a difference between a man and a boy, giving childhood its due. I had not been raised so, and neither had this creature. He was all savage, and his size and age were immaterial to him, and must become so to me.

I was immensely strong, but as with most men, I suppose, I felt a natural reluctance to use that strength against a child. I cast that consideration aside, thought about Faelan and my beloved horses and all the ill that had befallen us on this journey, and I turned toward the darker part of the woods and found myself again in that shadowy realm. My true self.

I saw a flicker of movement this time before the attack. Even so, something glanced painfully off my brow, and a warmth coursed down my face. He had thrown a rock. Within a second it had been returned to him, and I heard a shocked, angry cry. Good. I’d hit him.

I had thrown instinctively, but now I knew where he was. If he changed position I would have him. If he stayed put… well, I would have him either way. I began to advance.

He did exactly what I would have done had our positions and relative sizes been reversed: he came for me.

It was like fighting a cat. He was small, feral, scratching and screaming and biting. I do not know if he climbed me or I lifted him, but he wrapped around my face, strong, wiry limbs, and a stink that made me gag, and then, to my horror, as I retched, I felt something in my throat. It was awful. I could not make sense of it, and wondered if I had finally succumbed to the poison of the poppet, before I realized with equal horror that he had thrust his small arm down into my mouth. Was he trying to rip out my tongue? I had seen this done in another time and another life, and as his fist thrust farther, all my gag instinct kicked in, making me panic and heave and retch. I staggered back, trying to pull him off, but he held as tight to me as a barnacle upon the hull of a ship, and then I could not breathe at all.

I bit down as hard as I could upon the arm. I tasted blood, and the foulness of this almost undid me. I did not want that covenant, that communion with this abomination of darkness.

I fell back once more, a few steps.

The roaring in my ears seemed to increase—a natural thing when the body knows it is dying, this rushing and pounding of the blood in warning and fury.

I heard a shout. I would know that voice anywhere. I heard it in my dreams. But why was Aleksey telling me not to step back more?

I glanced sideward. It was all I could do.

My heels were over the edge of the cliff.

I believe to this day that I saw the rocky pit of hell beneath me at that moment. The demon had backed me to it deliberately.

What I did then was fitting.

I found a last remnant of strength and pulled at the limpet upon my face. He came loose with a sucking sound as his filthy fist withdrew from my throat and mouth, and then he was free in my arms. Light and almost buoyant after such attachment. I swept him up in my arms as a father might a son to lunge him joyously into the air, both of them laughing at the sport of such activity. My lunge, however, took him tumbling through the air, and not into the water of the falls where I had sent his mother. I threw him off that cliff and down upon the rocks two hundred feet or more below. I had risen whole from the sacrifice of the falls, and I did not want him to.

I could see him when I peered over. I had no fear of this great height now. I was beyond all that.

He was dead.

There was no doubt about it.

His tiny body lay broken and spread upon the glistening rocks until the mist closed like curtains upon it, and he was lost to view.

O
THER
THAN
his final few moments of torment with the poking stick, my beautiful boy had been relatively unharmed. They had fed him again; they had prayed over him; they had treated him… well, like a precious sacrifice. I was even amused to see he was covered in adornment—only leaves and twisted vines, as it was winter, but pretty, nonetheless.

Unharmed except, of course, that I had said farewell to him, and he had thought that I was dead.

We did not speak much about this until later, until we could speak of it without the complete unmanning it would have occasioned us there on the island, for I could not afford to be less than I needed to be nor have him so. We had to return beneath the falls once more, and I had to face what was waiting for me on the other side: my horses. I could not bear to think of it, and yet it had to be faced.

I was a little short with Aleksey then, I confess, when he refused to step down the tiny chinks of rocks and enter the path beneath the falls. I stood with my hands upon my naked hips (I had divested myself of the scalps and was feeling a little ashamed over them, but excess was ever my way when roused in most things). “Are you going to fly?” This was painfully croaked. It was many days before the physical effects of the boy’s fist in my throat would go. I am not sure the emotional scars have healed yet.

Aleksey winced. “I do not know. But I am not going in there. I will tell you that for free.” This was my expression. He had picked it up from me. I had to laugh; I could not help it. I stood there naked, caked with clay and blood, with smears of sweet and sticky blue upon me, laughing at my beautiful boy with his pretty leaves and vines, which he began to tear from himself with great annoyance at my amusement, but then he could not help himself and began to laugh, too, complaining at the same time about it not being funny, for he was hungry and cold and had been poked most rudely with a little stick, and was he not a king who should not have to suffer such indignity?

He cleverly brought us to the heart of all things, and I could see in his eyes his genuine dismay that he had unwittingly brought this down upon us by his beauty, his royal blood, and his—“Wait a minute. You told them you were a
virgin
?”

“Oh, I did no such—”

“He said it! I heard him! A virgin!”

He came closer and began to descend the steps, arguing and very annoyed with me. “Technically, I
am
a virgin.” He entered the tunnel and even twisted around to face me, walking backward as he argued his case. I confess I did not know whether to be impressed by this or horrified, which upon reflection is another feature of our relationship in all things. “I have not known a woman, so I am a virgin, am I not?”

“I do not think what you do inside my arse can count as virginal!”

“Oh, semen and semantics, Nikolai.” He turned and marched on and then… even now, sitting securely in my chair, I find this hard to write… he stuck his hand into the tumult of water passing by us. The entire span of the oceans and all the lakes and all the rivers of the world pouring cold and green and remorseless past us, and that foolish boy stuck his hand into it and commented upon the flow or the current or the coldness. I know not what. Upon reflection, perhaps this is why I still hear the roar of the water. I thought that it had finally found its sacrifice and that, far from being sent over on his back, strapped as I was to a log, he would just volunteer himself and be sucked by his hand into the maw of the beast.

“Why do you press so hard into the rock face, Niko? That is not going to get us to the other side, and it is awfully loud in here. Do you think the way the rock bends in like this increases the volume of the noise of the falls? That would be interesting if we could prove it, like blowing into a shell or a bottle and making that—why are you looking at me like that? I must say you do look horrible. What is that all over your face, and why do you have blueberries on your—” He chuckled and began to walk once more. “If I do call Boudica’s foal Blueberry, I shall never be able to say his name without thinking of your cock painted blue. It is very unusual.” He continued to babble inanely in this way until we had made it out of the tunnel and up the rocky steps to the grass of the promontory.

I do not know, and he has never told me, whether he talked this way as we crossed beneath the water because he had genuinely not been unmanned by thinking I had gone over the falls and died, or that it was because he had been more than that but that he knew how I must have been affected by this apparent parting of ours and was showing, in this, the great depth of spirit that he had.

I know which I believe. It was his way.

I
CONFESS
I could not enter the stable.

Aleksey had to do it for me.

They were not there.

They were not anywhere.

I gave a great bellow of despair and helplessness, and then I heard him.

He had been gorging himself on blueberries, as far as I could see, and amusing himself with his family, wild in the woods without my supervision.

I think the final kind act of the lieutenant had been to free the horses. When he had seen the horror descending upon him and the boys, and knew that he could not guard the crossing, he had thought of the horses and freed them. The other horses had fled into the forest, perhaps, less trained, less… attached.

Xavier and Boudica, her colt by her side and her foal safely inside, had stayed. We were together again.

W
E
FOUND
no bodies. We assumed they had all been put into the water, even those he had used to try and repair his ravaged features. I did not tell Aleksey what I had found in the backwater at the base of the falls, neither the bodies nor the… gold.

In that still pool, churned perhaps by the vast tumult it had been through for so many miles, the silt had finally given up its treasure. Gold had lain in abundance in the grit, large nuggets as big as my fist, and so many chunks of good size that as I had lain there, facedown, floating in that horrible soup, they had shone even through the murk of the decay.

I think the Jesuit had found the gold and that initially he had wanted the colony and the fort cleared out so he could stake a claim to it and take it. Perhaps he had also wanted tales of such horror to surround the place that it would be haunted and thus none would ever venture near.

But then his madness and sickness had increased as the disease had taken him, and he had confused his greed for this with lust for sacrifice. I don’t know. Perhaps he just wanted to be healthy again to enable him to get the gold and enjoy its power. Perhaps he did not know of the gold, and I am surmising all this in the safety of my cabin on our little lake in the forest. One thing is for certain: I cannot ask him now.

Of our whole party, the colonists and the soldiers in the fort, only Aleksey and I survived to return home. They are all dead. At least… I assume they are…. I saw the devil dead. I saw the demon child dead. The witch? I cast her over the falls. But I managed to survive it, and I believe that in some ways our histories were the same. She was a survivor….

W
E
DID
not leave the area immediately, which may sound strange given how much I hated the place and the associations it now had for both of us. Although, truth be told, the falls retained no fear for me now, other than that they would hold for any sensible man—respect for their power, awe at their remote beauty. But we needed some days to prepare for the return journey and to indulge a very pleasant activity—eating!