Aleksey's Kingdom (17 page)

It had begun to snow again. I don’t know about Aleksey, but I was beginning to feel as if I were a straw man—both physical and emotional hollowness. As I looked around our small camp, even the colors seemed washed out by the grayness of the day and falling snow: the officers’ blue facings more gray than navy, their gold buttons like old pennies handled too much. Aleksey nudged me, and I righted myself. We had to decide what to do. I was about to suggest something when I frowned. “Where are the trappers?”

Everyone looked puzzled. In the utter confusion of the morning, they had been overlooked. “Did they return at dawn?”

They had not apparently been seen since we had visited their camp the night before.

We immediately had something to do, therefore.

For the first time, the three officers chose to join Aleksey and me as we rode, leaving the Wright family to their own devices for a while. I did not want to see either the woman or more especially the child, so I was glad to have this excuse to leave them. The five of us rode through the snow to the place where we had last seen the missing men. I half expected to see blood upon the ground and torn, broken bodies. A bear attack is a fearful thing to come across. But there was nothing. It had snowed too recently to see any new tracks. We were at a loss. They had vanished. I had just upped my quota of loss to almost half our number. Six out of thirteen men now gone.

W
E
BURIED
the three bodies with equal ceremony. One unnamed driven insane by what he had witnessed, and two who had died from lies, and perhaps from the weakness of their own characters. Who was I to judge weakness of character or condemn another for sin I willingly shared? I had spent the night with my cock buried deep inside another man. I was in no position to judge anyone.

Something was nagging at me, disturbing me more than even all these terrible events. I did not want to mention it to Aleksey, but something about the tangle of lies and half-truths that had led us to where we were, to where those poor soldiers now were, made me determined to tell him, even if it upset him more. No one knew the extent of his grief that morning at the short burial, but I understood that in his heart he was saying good-bye to Faelan and perhaps to any hopes he might have once had of returning to Hesse-Davia and being king once more. For surely, when we give up one essential part of our view of ourselves—as he was having to do with Faelan, who had been his constant companion (I might almost say familiar, if fear of accusations of witchcraft did not prevent me)—then we see other things in a new light also. He had always seen himself as king, with Faelan at his side. Now, having to let the wolf go, he was possibly letting go many other things as well. However, I did not want to have more lies twisting around us, so I took my first opportunity when we were on the move again to ride up alongside him and state, “I am returning to our campsite last night.”

“Why?” His face crumpled a little as he remembered what would be there, but then calmed. He had such great depths of inner strength, this man who could be so flighty and theatrical and emotional upon the surface.

“I….” This was not easy. “I do not think the madman fired his musket, Aleksey. It was still primed when it hit me. I am sure of it.”

“Wh—the trappers!” He was intelligent too.

I nodded.

“Oh my God, why?”

“I do not know, but it would be a very lucky—or unlucky—shot to take a wolf out so in the dark. I wonder if they meant only to shoot at us—perhaps to make me aware of the poor, raving man, who I might not have seen had they….”

He gritted his teeth at the obvious words I did not say. “But why?”

“Again, I do not know. But I want to check his musket.”

Although in this I told the truth, I lied by omission at the same time. I could not help but remember the look the raving man had given to the woods when he cried, “Did you not see them?” It had occurred to me that this might have been less raving and more a genuine enquiry. If he had been referring to the trappers, then I might find some alternative evidence in the tree line of their presence at those tragic events, even if the musket was discharged.

He rode out with me, as I knew he would. I did not want him to see Faelan again. We had said our good-byes, and nothing good comes of dwelling upon such grief.

But we had an intense shock when we arrived in the small clearing. Faelan’s body was gone. In its place was a scattering of dried blueberries. They were a muted, frozen blue upon the pristine snow. No tracks, no Faelan, just the berries with their little star-shaped points. I shivered as if a great wind had blown right through my body. Aleksey was bewildered, frightened, I think. He started to question what he was seeing. I did not know what to tell him, so I offered him what seemed most likely, although I did not believe it myself. “Etienne must have taken him, Aleksey. He must have come across the site and saw that we could not do him justice and has taken him to send him on his way.”

I believed Faelan had indeed been taken—but not by human hands.

And thus my transition from a man of science to one of faith was complete. I felt the tangible presence of the Great Spirit in that place and saw with my own eyes the evidence that he had come for one of his warriors.

For the first time ever, I saw how limited and narrow my view of the world had been. I saw a very real possibility that I would see Faelan again one day but that he would be restored and in the forests of a distant place that I could not yet comprehend. And if this applied to Faelan, did it not also apply to Aleksey? I turned and looked at him as he puzzled through my weak explanation for this great mystery. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Great Spirit would also come for him one day. I needed to be ready so we would be taken together.

I shivered again, and he turned and asked if I was cold—a familiar question, as I was very often cold. It turned the moment back to one of the real and present, and I answered in the affirmative, as he expected, and went to find the weapon. As I suspected, it had not been fired. I found no additional footprints in the snowy tree line, but the gun told its own tale. We were no further forward in understanding the events in which we seemed to be participating, helplessly, but we both felt glad in some way that we had untangled this small lie.

I glanced once more at the place that marked the great mystery I had witnessed. It was snowing again, settling upon the blueberries and covering them. It was fitting.

T
HERE
APPEARED
to be family discord when we rejoined our increasingly depleted companions.

The three older Wright sons had allied themselves finally to our side. I make this sound like a war, and perhaps in a small way it was, but they were now riding with us—Aleksey, myself, and the officers—for the first time, leaving the reverend alone with his wife and child on the cart. I wished him luck with that.

The young men seemed distant and silent by nature, and so although they joined us that day, I cannot say we were made merrier from their company. The three officers were naturally very grim, given what they had done that morning. Aleksey was utterly silent, which was different from his annoyed-with-me silences, which were in fact very loud. He had just withdrawn and gone elsewhere for a while, leaving only a body upon a horse riding alongside me. Faelan’s absence was so loud that to be honest I could hear little else anyway.

All told, it was a miserable day.

We camped that night, and the only glimmer of good news I could find to relay was that it would be our last night before encountering the falls. We were now on the border of our land and in the morning would cross into true wilderness—unclaimed land—until we reached the colony.

We set up tents much as we had ridden—eight men in four tents to one side of the campsite, and the reverend and his depleted flock on the other. We also set sentries—something I wished we had done earlier but had genuinely not thought we would need. I had been on my own land, after all, and did not see the enemy within until too late. We also set sentries because the child had divested itself of the bindings I had immobilized him with. I guessed he had worked out for himself that he was not actually injured much at all and that after trying to walk on his leg, he had discovered he could. So he was free again. He had taken a new habit too of studying me and… fiddling with his clothing as he watched. Aleksey told me I was imagining this last and that he was merely playing with a cloth doll his mother had made for him, but I was unconvinced. I noticed Aleksey did not deny that the child was watching me.

It made for an uneasy night. Personally I did not trust Jacob, Samuel, or Martin enough yet to leave them as my only protection, so we paired them up with one of the officers and worked out a rough sort of rota and then turned in. Aleksey and I had taken the after-midnight duty, so we had a few hours before being roused once again.

Our tent was too close to the others to do anything other than sleep, and I think we were both grateful for this, as it prevented us having to admit that we didn’t actually feel much like pleasuring our bodies. Grief can do that to you.

But although we could not join physically, I think we did emotionally, and when I thought back to our argument of the day before, I realized something
had
been missing from our relationship since we arrived in the New World. We had been so busy, so self-contained and glad to be here and to be free, that we had indulged the physical at the expense of the pleasures of the heart, perhaps. Perhaps, like any muscle, the heart needs to be tested and worked to grow strong, and ours had been lazy. We had not been tested at all since we’d left Hesse-Davia. We were together—what else did we need? And, of course, being men, how could we know of this? Was it not a woman who taught her husband these things? Perhaps it was just Aleksey and me—neither of us raised by women—who had never thought much beyond the physical.

I curled around Aleksey, pulling his back tight against me. His hair got in my mouth, and I put a hand up to brush it away and felt his face wet with silent tears. He pushed my hand away, as he did not want me to know that he was crying. My heart almost broke for his grief. For all the years I had known him, he had played with the belief that he could hear Faelan’s thoughts. Perhaps he could. I believed Faelan had understood his. And now there was a great silence in his head. Perhaps it would have been better that the wolf live on, despite getting sick and aged and unlike himself—it would have given Aleksey time to come to terms with his inevitable passing. As it was, it had been so sudden, so out of place, given what we had been doing and enjoying all night. Love turned to horror so quickly. I murmured something of this—saying I was wrong about his quick death and that I was sorry for ever saying such a stupid thing, but Aleksey turned in my arms so we were face-to-face on the folded jacket that served as our only pillow. I could feel his breath upon my face. He put a finger on my lips. “He was glad to go. He did not want to leave me, though.”

“What?”

“Shush, they will hear you.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were fighting with the madman, I sat with him as he died. He told me he did not want to leave me sad.”

I could not think of one thing to say to this. I kissed his face, brushing the dampness away with my lips. After a while, I ventured, “I think the same as he did, Aleksey. If I… went… you must find another. Will you promise me that you will?”

“No.”

“Aleksey, I am serious. If… even if you just stop wanting to be with me and find another, I would not actually kill you or him—if he made you happy. If I die, you
must
find someone else.”

“I will go out and find someone else now if you do not shut up.”

“I mean this! Promise me!”

“I will promise you, if that is what you want to shut you up, but I would not mean it, and I will break my promise as soon as you are in the ground.”

“How will you immediately break your promise, as you are promising to go and find another man? How can you immediately
not
do that?”

“I don’t know! I will immediately take myself off to a nunnery, disguised as a woman—how is that for a plan?”

“It is dreadful. Although you would probably be the prettiest nun there.”

“Maybe I will take up with a nun, recant my sinful life of sodomy.”

“If you took up with a nun, you would be committing just as many sins, and as they would think you a woman, you would still be committing unnatural acts, just as we do.”

“What are you talking about, Niko? I have never ever heard anyone talk as much rubbish as you do, and my father once had a genuine fool in his employ because he heard somewhere that all kings benefit from their wisdom. Women cannot… you know… with other women, can they?”

I chuckled. “You have led too sheltered a life, little one.”

“No, you have led too dissolute a one.”

“Aleksey, use your head. Women join with women as often as men do with men. Only, I grant you, it is less noticeable. Do you remember the sisters aboard our ship? The ones who helped you nurse me?”

“What!”

“Hush! Yes, they were not sisters.”

“What!”

“Aleksey! Shush.”

“But… but….” I waited for it, knowing it was coming. “But how?”

I chuckled. “Think about it.”

He did and made a low grunt of amazement.

“I thought for a while that Anastasia was….”

“What!”

“Be quieter!”

“Anastasia! No! Poor Johan!”

“Oh God, I did not say she
was
, only that I thought she might be.”

“So there are women who look at a man and do not admire him?”

“Oh, I think they do not have to prefer unnatural acts to think that about most men, do you?”

“But could a woman look at you and not want you? I find that very hard to believe.”