Aleksey's Kingdom (2 page)

“Out loud?”

“No, in his heart. He is miserable and can settle to nothing.”

He picked up a long splinter and began to clean his nails, a deep frown upon his perfect features. “Perhaps he should tell me these things sometimes. When I am here.”

I sunk the axe into the block and went over to him and straddled his thighs, then took up my shirt and wiped the sweat off my face and naked chest. He lifted his eyes from the small task he was employed upon and watched the slow movement over my muscles. I slid my hand around the back of his neck and leaned closer, my mouth mere inches from his. “He is a dumb animal, Aleksey. You need to interpret his mood better—read his body language.”

He cupped me gently, a rueful pout upon his lips. “I am trying to interpret this. It resembles the axe handle. What could it mean?”

I lowered him to the ground, pressing it against him to give him a clue. He smiled wickedly and kissed me, a long, loving meeting of mouths. “You could come with me, Niko.”

“If I came with you, I would not have the pleasure of your absence. The peace and the quiet….” I was too busy kissing and exploring to play the game for much longer. I was close to admitting just how much I had missed him and showing him this very forcibly with my body.

But he was Aleksey. He suddenly pushed me off and darted one hand back up to the woodpile. “I forgot your present!”

“Aleksey!”

“No, wait. It’s a letter from Johan. To you, or I would have opened it—if it had been to me, which I think it should have, as he is my friend, not yours.”

But I had seized the letter from him and tossed it out of reach. Johan would understand. He was a man.

Aleksey’s breeches came down very swiftly, revealing the only present I needed. I took it eagerly in my mouth, as if he had brought me some sweet offering of sugar. He tasted better to my mind, despite a day in the saddle. He groaned and stretched upon the dry earth under the hot sun, then stripped off his shirt before spreading his arms and grabbing small handfuls of dust as his pleasure mounted.

One of the great delights of our enforced exile was that the monarch of this small kingdom could lie in the bright midday sun completely naked and be sucked to completion by another man, and the only stake he faced was one of flesh and blood, which was soon to take him another way.

I turned him onto his belly in the dirt after I had swallowed all he had to offer. He deserved to be mounted thus and reminded of his place in the scheme of things. And besides, although I loved to see his face when I took him, I cherished seeing his hard buttocks just as much, to spread my fingers over them as I thrust in, parting them to their extreme, stretching as I plunged to hear his gasp of delight. I relished the moment when he would inevitably push up, rising from his slim waist, twisting around for a kiss. I kissed him willingly, ignoring the slight smirk I sensed hovering around his lips. No doubt he would see this taking very differently: having returned home he’d successfully manipulated me into forgiving him his absence and rewarding him just the way he wanted. I would have pulled out and punished him by teasing my cock over him, promising reentry but withholding that extreme pleasure, but he had been absent two weeks, and that meant many, many such entries had been lost to me. I was not a man who found it easy to deny myself this indulgence. Actually, I cannot recall one instance when I had voluntarily denied myself Aleksey’s backside. Unless when giving him mine, of course.

We finished most satisfactorily with me coming deep inside him and he frustrated, for he had risen again after the relief my lips had given him but had not now been brought again to fulfillment. I left him in this state, disheveled, naked, hard, sitting alongside me as I retrieved Johan’s letter. I didn’t let him find his own easement either and told him I’d bind his hands behind his back if he tried it. This was something new we were experimenting with—me tying him up occasionally—so he did not take this threat lightly. As a king, this new interest of mine went very much against the grain for him, and it was taking a long time to coax him into playing with me in such a way. He would come around.

I prayed Johan would forgive me opening his letter in such circumstances, but I was fully intending to rise again very soon and finish my annoying king off properly, so holding one of his hands, preventing him touching himself, laughing and fooling, I tried to read poor Johan’s news. I was hoping it was confirmation they would soon be joining us.

I had no objection at all to Aleksey having a little more company from an old warrior he thought of as a father and a young wife who adored her husband. It was only soldiers in the colony I had a problem with Aleksey seeing. But then, as I frequently reminded him, he did not have a very good record with the military. He had seduced a senior officer in his own army on the road to war!

Johan and Anastasia wanted to come and join us. I think my descriptions of the life—the freedom and the complete lack of censure from any form of authority—had seduced a young princess who had dreamt of such a life since she was old enough to realize that etiquette and manners of court were not for her. Although I do not think Johan’s and my experiences of love were similar in most respects, they were perhaps more alike than we had ever suspected they would be. We had both tethered ourselves irrevocably to beautiful whirlwinds and were hanging on for the ride.

So his letter was full of his plans for the journey to the New World, but also full of the work they were both doing as de facto guardians and counselors of a very young king. Stephen, being only twelve, needed them. It was an ideal arrangement. Johan and Anastasia ruled Hesse-Davia and raised Stephen to be a monarch worthy of the ideal. Our early reforming zeal was in very good hands. They had apparently rescinded once more the death penalty for witchcraft and sodomy.

There was even a suggestion of Aleksey and I being able to return one day, which is why, I suspect, the canny old soldier had sent the letter to me and not to Aleksey, or both of us as he usually did. He knew Aleksey’s innate good manners would forbid him opening something so directed. He probably understood my extreme reluctance to even contemplate such a return, despite how much Aleksey might see it now—from this great remove—as a good idea. He was still, technically, King of Hesse-Davia, of course. Only a small handful of people knew of his survival—and mine, come to that. So I read him parts of the letter I wanted him to hear and concealed others. I think he was too distracted by us both being naked and erect to worry much over what the letter said. I dragged out the recital a little to inflame him more.

Finally he could stand it no longer and suddenly displayed one of those annoying traits I alluded to: he demanded I turn for his convenience. I didn’t object to taking Aleksey into my body—indeed, I craved the feel of him inside me—but I didn’t appreciate being ordered by him to do anything and certainly not in the crude way he put it.
Turn over, I want to fuck you
was the sort of thing a soldier might say to an eager young man….

At my very mild enquiry—something along the lines of
is that what the soldiers in the colony say to you?
—he took umbrage with me for some reason, and the consequent manhandling was quite vicious. I always took the time to prepare him—well, a finger or two if he was lucky and I was feeling generous. His entry into me, however, was painful and sudden. If we hadn’t been laughing so much, I might have actually resented it. But we were too amused with ourselves to worry about my discomfort or his intense delight in conquering me so. He rode me with the same urgency he rode his horse, with the spirit with which he did everything, and as he worked himself deep inside me, he regaled me with tales of what he did with the soldiers, when and how, and was inventive in his wicked lies. Quite where the young prince I first met who had no words to describe most of what we did with our bodies had gone, I had no idea. This challenging man had taken his place. It was a good trade, I thought.

Aleksey’s news, therefore, did not get related until later that day as we were swimming in the lake. It was incredibly convenient, given our favorite pastime was inevitably so messy, to have this to look forward to afterward. The water was always cool, even in the high summer months, and sometimes, when the light was just right, was entirely clear to the bottom except in the very deepest parts in the middle. Now in late autumn it was very cold and quite delightful to plunge into—once the initial heart-stopping moment was over.

We were both very brown, as even his pale skin, exposed to so much sun and activity naked outside in the daylight hours, had darkened over the very hot summer we had just enjoyed. I would have been taken for one of my Powponi brothers had it not been for the intense lightening effect of the sun on my hair, which was now the color of gold dust dredged and shiny from a river. We were both very lean, too, living as we did on a diet of mostly fish and meat. And, of course, we had no home comforts other than those we provided for ourselves.

If we wanted shelter, we had to build it. If we hungered, we had to catch and kill something. If we fancied luxuries like saddles or boots we had to trap for furs, which could be traded. The activity all this necessitated had contributed to our leanness. Even during the war, neither of us had felt so well, so vitalized. Maybe it was other things making us so vigorous and alive. Relief from torture and death can do that to a man.

It had taken me many months to recover fully from the torture I had endured in Hesse-Davia. I often found it hard to watch a branding iron being heated on a fire and still could not smell boiling flesh without nausea assailing me. The sound of a bone breaking when we cleaned a carcass produced an odd stab of pain behind my eyes, as though my body were expecting a consequent follow-on of agony. My scars were ferocious upon otherwise tanned, smooth skin. I did not mind them too much. Who does not secretly like to be scarred and fearsome with evidence of a life lived as a man? Aleksey spent many hours tracing my wounds, trailing his tongue and fingers around them, roused, I suspect, by the thought of possessing and taming the violent nature they betrayed.

Other than the scar on his belly, won before I met him, Aleksey was as flawless as the water in the lake when the light struck it just right. His nature more than balanced out this apparent perfection in being so infuriatingly annoying, as evidenced in the lake that evening. Whilst I was taking the opportunity to laze and relax my muscles, as I had been exerting myself from first light with domestic chores, he decided I needed to be punished. He never needed a reason to decree this, as he claimed my whole demeanor to him was an outrage, given he was a king and I was nothing more than a deserter from his army, a fake doctor, and a sodomite. Three death sentences. I would have preferred the scaffold to the dunking and splashing and constant torment he subjected me to in the water. Fortunately, being stronger and quicker and just better than him, I was able to dunk him more than he could me and thus make his life an equal misery.

We were both shivering and exhausted from laughter and swallowing lake water when we finally emerged to check the fish we were grilling over a fire on the lakeshore. It was done to perfection, and both of us being starved, it tasted better than any meal prepared by chefs and servants in Europe. It was as he was picking flesh from around the bones that Aleksey suddenly blurted out, “Oh, guess what has happened.”

I swallowed and replied dryly, “One of the soldiers has got you with child?”

“No, surprisingly, though, for they have all tried.” He flicked me a cheeky look that told me no bad temper on my part was believed now. “They have lost contact with the colony outpost. Isn’t it odd?”

Our land extended to the north a day’s ride from the junction of two big rivers, which dominated this region of the New World. Where they joined, the waters merged and tumbled over a vast fall, then ran as a wild, rough tumult impassable to man for many, many miles. On the junction above the falls, an offshoot of the colony on the coast had been established a little over a year ago, and consequently a contingent of soldiers had been posted there as well—north of the falls was French territory.

This tiny colony facing the papists was a good week’s ride, if not more, from me, so I was unconcerned at its presence. But unfortunately we lay as the shortest route between the larger coastal colony and this outpost, and thus we occasionally saw a troop of soldiers moving between them with supplies or replacement men, and one or two families joining the enlarging falls group. Aleksey, needless to say, found all this fascinating and appeared to know schedules and duties and names and ranks—things he tried to interest me in. Once or twice, he had even mentioned illness or injury within the families, trying to spark my abeyant interest in medicine. It was very dormant, trust me—unless Aleksey had a vague ache needing warmed oils and the application of my hands to relieve…. Soldiers, abscesses, boils, and the pox did not concern me.

The fish was good, though.

“Nearly thirty people! Soldiers and officers, Niko, and the families—men, women, and children. They have all disappeared. Is that not strange?”

“How does anyone know they have? It is ridiculous, Aleksey. If I do not hear from Johan, I do not assume he has
disappeared
. Eat your fish before it gets cold.”

“They know because… well… everyone just
does
know. You should hear what has been said—that the place is entirely deserted with no sign of damage or a struggle, but that there is food still warm in bowls upon the tables; that—”

“Oh, and you join in with this gossip fit only for servants, do you?”

“Why are you in such a sulk? Is this not the most interesting thing that has happened for ages?”

I was not in a bad mood as such, but his words had sparked an unfortunate memory that I was at some pains to conceal. Aleksey was bad enough when he had no fuel for the fires of his imagination….