A Royal Affair (38 page)

I began to shake my head violently. Perhaps he feared another scene, for he put his hand upon my arm and murmured, “You must see for yourself or you will never believe it. Come, be a man, for his sake.”

For his sake. I would have willing given my life for his sake. Paying tribute to his death was the least I could do.

Aleksey’s body was to be shown for half a day; everything was being done very quickly because of the summer heat. Many hundreds of Hesse-Davians would file past, and I was to be one of them. Johan had brought me a cloak with a deep hood, which would keep me concealed. I was to leave with him early the following morning and be one of the first in line. Then, he said, I must leave Hesse-Davia, for I was putting everyone in danger by being there.

T
HE
LINE
had formed before dawn. Everyone wanted to see the dead young king. Some of them were there because they had genuinely loved him. Others wanted the spectacle. Others, perhaps, were just morbidly curious that even the very favored of God can die. Sometimes it must have seemed to those peasants that only their lives held such an end, so blessed were the rich in all other things. I pulled the hood down low over my face and entered the shadowed hall.

The bier dominated the room. There were twenty-four guards around it, one for every year of King Christian’s life, so Johan informed me. They were dressed in pure black with only their epaulettes and gold braid breaking up the somber attire. It was exactly how I had pictured Aleksey riding in front of his father’s funeral cortege. Irony is very painful when it concerns the things you once loved.

In the middle was the body. It was Aleksey. I could not deny the evidence of my eyes, although I tried for some time, staring at the still form. It struck me then for the first time that all my ravings had been nothing more than the vaunting cries of a thwarted child.

I had not believed him murdered for I had not believed him dead
.

I had expected, at any moment, Gregory or Pia to fly to my side to tell me that it had all been a mistake, that Aleksey was alive. I had thought Johan had come to the inn to secrete me away to Aleksey’s location, where he would be waiting for me, laughing with unfettered merriment at the cleverness of his scheme.

I saw now that they had all been aware of my denial, and that was why Johan had been summoned to bring me to him, to see the
body
for myself.

I
F
I
had ever thought Aleksey beautiful in life, he was even more so in death. Whereas in life his face had often held such mischief and wicked amusement—usually to spite me—in death he was as perfect as a mold of man made by God to show us what all men could be. The Christians say we are made in his image. That day I believed it to be the other way around. Aleksey lay there as if he’d just fallen asleep, almost a blush still upon those high cheekbones, just as it had been in life when roused. I wished I could rouse him then. I wanted to cry out that I repented, that I would never sin again, even with him, if only he would come back to me, but I could not. Everyone was crying, so my tears went unnoticed in that great place of lamentation. I filed past, not daring to step across the rope. He was as effectively separated from me in this life as I thought he would be in the next, for I did not believe in his God’s promises—not yet, anyway. The line was moving on, and I had to move on with it. What else was there for me to do? I was one man. Aleksey was dead. Did it matter how he had died? I cared not if the whole edifice came tumbling down and killed them all. Aleksey was dead.

I told Johan I wanted to return to the palace. I think he thought I wanted to collect some of my things. I let him think so. In truth, I wanted to climb into our bed and not leave it again, but I kept this thought to myself. The place was not even guarded, but all the same, I took the back way across the beach and up through the gardens and over the balcony rail. I had often come to Aleksey’s bed this way, and it seemed fitting now. I turned briefly and looked out over the expanse of sea, the view very familiar to me now. I could see Johan holding the horses, waiting. I should have spared him some sympathy, I suppose. He had been as a father to Aleksey and was grieving terribly. But I had none to give. It seemed as if I were in a tiny tunnel, as tiny as the pinpricks of Aleksey’s pupils, and that I was squeezed and short of breath. I was not myself at all.

I entered the bedroom and stopped abruptly. Faelan was on the end of the bed. He was dead. I felt such a surge of pain at the sight that I wondered my body could take any more of this continued assault. I went up to him and knelt. We had endured a rocky relationship, this huge wolf and I. I had taken his place, not in Aleksey’s heart—for that vast organ was well able to encompass both his savage loves—but in his master’s daily routines and, of course, in his bed. I utterly refused to even kiss Aleksey if Faelan was watching, so close were they in thought that it sometimes felt as if I kissed the wolf as well. But here he was. I wondered if he had died of a broken heart. I was so far from being a man of science now that I thought this quite possible. I wished it were true of men too. Faelan was doing exactly what I had planned on doing: lie where I had lain with Aleksey and let my own misery take me.

I stretched out my hand, and only then did I feel the rumble of menace. I jerked away and looked more closely. He was dead. He was stretched out, tongue protruding, eyes glassy and staring. I was angry now, for I had suffered enough shock and confusion. I put my hand to him again, and this time I saw the eyes move; they flicked to regard me. I jerked back once more, and he was as dead once more. I stood up and shouted at him. It must have been a very odd sight, a badly beaten, scarred man shouting at a dead wolf.

I moved toward the head of the bed, and his eyes followed me.

At that sight, my whole world tipped, just as the scaffold had beneath my feet—and I was falling.

I ran for the balcony and vaulted to the ground—a broken, defeated man no longer. My brain was telling me that Faelan had merely been drugged, that the same opiate had been used upon him as they’d used to subdue Aleksey at my execution. I had come upon him as he revived from insensibility. It was entirely logical and scientific, and my head accepted this explanation as I ran with Faelan at my side toward Xavier. But I ran through my pain, driven by the urgings of my
heart
. My heart refused to listen to this rationalization of Faelan’s appearance of death.
It sang
. It told me that Faelan was mimicking his master, his friend. It told me the wolf and Aleksey were in communion
still
.

I was no longer a man of science who believed only what his senses told him was true, a man who needed the laws of nature to align and be in their allotted places, dictating his world. I had become entirely a man of faith, who had his prayers answered that day in the House of Lust.

I screamed at Johan, “
He is still alive
!” I grabbed the reins and expected him to mount as rapidly as I. I repeated my shout in case, being so grieved and defeated, he had not heard me and added yet one more time, “
He’s alive
, Johan! The blush upon his cheeks was not of death! I do not know why I did not see it then! I have seen much death, and he was
not dead
. Faelan told me!”

This last did not help my cause. At the time I thought it the perfect addition to my argument. Johan was holding my bridle, so I could not swing Xavier away.

“Calm
down
, Nikolai.”

“
Calm down
! He’s still alive. Am I speaking German? Do you understand me? He is
alive
. They drugged him, and he’s
still
drugged. I
told
you they had drugged him.
He’s not dead
!”

“Think what you are saying, you fool. Why would they drug him when they could as easily kill him? What sense does this make?”

Despite my heightened sense of excitement, I realized he had not denied the possibility that all was not right with Aleksey’s death. I knew then that Johan had not believed the story of the short illness any more than I.

I fastened onto this little chink and pushed through. “They may not
know
that he is still alive, Johan. There have been
many
cases”—this was an exaggeration, but I was desperate—“where men have been given the opiate and lain like death. They have been
buried
!
Buried alive
!” I saw him wavering. “Think of the old king! What did I do when all thought he was dead?”

“You brought him back with breath. I heard that, yes.” He looked up at me, and I could have wept for the hope I saw in his eyes. “You can bring Aleksey back from death?”

If faith was what he needed, then faith I would give him. I nodded. “Yes, with your help, I can.” He swung up onto his horse but still he held out his arm to stop me riding off.

“We must plan, Niko. We accomplish nothing rushing in with accusations. If he is alive, then this has been a plot which must involve many powerful—”

“It’s his sodding uncles, Harold and John! You know it is. He took Harold’s toys away, and he’s putting him down like a rabid dog.”

He frowned and shook his head. “You are—”

“Yes, you’re damn right I am! I’m going in there, and I’m going to—”

“Tonight, Niko. He will be lying with his father tonight in the great crypt. We will take him then. If he is alive…. If he is dead, then we will take him anyway and bury him somewhere he would like.”

He kicked his horse then to ride in front of me, and I knew his grief had overpowered him once again. I didn’t care. I could feel no grief now, only burning anger and a desperate desire to go to him. I could actually feel him in my arms again. I was all fire and energy and power, and my muscles, which had been so badly torn and abused in prison, were screaming at me to move, run, ride, fight—
kill
. I shouted to Johan that I would catch him up.

I returned to the palace and found my box. I had lost some of my sharp babies but not all of them. I strapped them around me, and they returned to my skin with hisses of evil expectation. Once I put away my rational side, I became entirely savage once again. I heard inanimate objects speaking with me as clear as I had heard the wolf. Knives in place and with plans for every one of them, I left our palace for good.

J
OHAN
HAD
no trouble getting into the royal crypt, for all the guards were familiar to him and he to them. We had all fought in the war together, and they had volunteered to stand this vigil with their commanding officer, to give him fitting escort as he journeyed from his final battlefield. Johan had brought them some beer and meat to cheer their sad duty and said he wanted to pay his respects to the general and lay his medals upon the crypt. He had brought a priest with him. I was the priest in my cloak and deep, shadowing hood. The guards were not bothered one way or the other. This was General Johan, and they obeyed his orders without question.

I had been in the crypt once before, accompanying Aleksey at the interment of the old king. It was not a place I wished to return to, for no man would feel entirely easy in the presence of so much evidence of mortality, especially not one as I was then, a man newly filled by superstition and belief in the unnatural. If wolves and knives spoke to me, why could not these lifelike statues of the old kings? Perhaps Canute would crack his stone jaw and tell me that man could hold back neither tide nor death and that I was wasting my time. I would reply to him that one man had come back from the dead, I now believed, and if he could, then so could Aleksey.

We assumed Aleksey would be next to his father so made our way down the rows of tombs, only one flickering torch lighting our way. We needn’t have worried; Faelan led us with unerring accuracy to the place we wanted. My heart quailed. Could any spark of life exist in this place of stone and death? It was not like a churchyard in England: a sweet place of repose and birdsong and sunlight filtered through yews. This was a place of deep, bone-chilling cold and unforgiving stone. But for all that, I had enough vitality to fill that whole damn mausoleum. I would resurrect all the dead if that was what it took.

We hefted the metal stakes we had smuggled in beneath my cloak. The lid was not even mortared in and lifted easily enough to our combined strength.

My faith wavered. I could not bear to look down upon the body, in case I saw corruption upon his perfect features.

Again, I need not have worried, for we had one with us not awed by stone vaults or the likenesses of dead kings or impressed by two men who quailed in their uncertainty and fear of death. Faelan leaped up into the stone tomb as boldly as a boy had once leaped off stone battlements and into the sea for him. He landed on Aleksey’s belly, all one hundred and some pounds of heavy wolf, and Aleksey rose with a
humph
of shock and opened his eyes.

I
HAD
to break off my narrative.

I had come to the very point I had begun this whole long journey for when I was interrupted. It is some days later now, for I had to put this to one side and be busy with other things, which I will relate.

It has been very cold the last few days, and now I sit cross-legged beside the fire to finish. I had been about to relate my reaction to seeing Aleksey woken from his long, drugged sleep. Trying to recall in my mind what I had been thinking, a hand had suddenly landed hard upon my shoulder.

“What are you doing all this time? You have been here for hours. Are you crying?”

I did not turn but covered slightly the page I’d been working on. “Don’t be ridiculous. My eyes are watering from the cold. I have been writing.”