Aleksey's Kingdom (22 page)

I could not help but think of a man I had once seen pressed to death. He had refused to plead either guilty or not guilty to the crime he had been accused of, and so to make him plead, for he could not be tried until he did, they laid him on his back in the town square and placed a board upon him and then piled heavy stones upon the board. For three days he suffered under those stones until his tongue came from his mouth and his eyes were as globes almost out of his head, but still he would not plead. In the end he could not breathe and died.

I would die if I could not move and relieve the pressure upon my chest. I put out my hand and found purchase in the rock and pulled myself sideward. I fell into a gap between the rocks, held now only by the rope around my waist, but I could breathe again. I did not want to think about the men holding the other end of this tiny lifeline. They had tied it to a tree as well, but trees could be uprooted.

I put my arm out again, found another crevice, wedged my fingers in and pulled myself sideward once more like a huge, sodden crab moving along inch by inch. Once more I could not breathe. As I could not hear or see either, for the sound of the water and the cold and the rush of the torrent past me, it seemed fitting to have no breath. Once more the movement sideward. Not enough: I was still against this large rock. More movement, a scrabble. Still not enough. I was losing my senses now, a swimming in my head of lightness and a sense of moving beyond all things, when with a tiny movement more the water saved me, for it pushed me past the rock, and so I was dangling again, held by the waist by rope. I took a huge breath of air, pulled myself to the next rock, and realized my feet were on solid ground. I could make no physical use of this, as the current was too strong, but it shored me up mentally to know I had nearly reached my goal. A few pulls more, and I was out to my waist, and then with a fling to the side I was lying on the gritty beach of Morning Island.

I lay for so long that I felt anxious tugs upon the rope.

I turned my head and saw Aleksey on the other end.

We regarded each other across the torrent.

Perhaps he had watched it all.

Perhaps he realized now that he could not have done it. I hoped he did.

But I
had
done it.

I sat up suddenly and realized what I had achieved.

I had crossed this fucking river with nothing more than a rope around me, a few feet from a thousand-foot drop or more (you be that close to such a fall and see if you do not exaggerate its height in your mind). For the first time since we had arrived at that place, I felt myself once more. I rose to my feet, and it was only then I realized I had lost my boots in the crossing. They had been stripped off me by the current, and I had not even noticed. I stared down at my bare feet in wonder. My boots were now…. Could I look? I did. I braved it and looked toward the fall. Fortunately, I could not see it for the ever-present cloud that it exhaled. I wondered where my boots would end up.

I limped over to the tree line, trying to untie the rope. Obviously, it had been very securely fastened, and with my fingers now utterly frozen, I had some real job to undo it. That my eyes kept raking the tree line and the darkness beyond and not the knot I hardly need to relate. The devil was on this island, and I had no intention of meeting him by myself.

Finally I had the rope off me and on the tree. I only had to secure it—they would tighten it at their end. It looked good. It stretched across the crossing rocks at man height. Easy then to cross back!

In the end, I did not touch the rocks at all, or the water. I tried to stand and use the line to aid my way, but it was impossible. The current just whipped my legs from under me, and I was left time and time again dangling from the rope. So I just lifted my legs and crabbed along—very easy for a man with my strength and lean body, but impossible, I reckoned, for a woman or child, who would not have the necessary muscle in their arms or shoulders (or poor Major Parkinson, come to that, who had a slight disadvantage in all physical endeavors. Well, not slight, I suppose). I would have argued more for the witch and her offspring staying by the fort had it not been for the horses.

Once I returned, it was relatively easy for the second rope to be got across and secured. Captain Rochester copied my method and shinnied over with the second rope around his waist, and then he tested the route back. Now with two supports, one under each arm, he was able to walk on the submerged rocks and hop across the gaps. Just.

Aleksey and I watched his progress one way and then watched him come back the other way. I was shivering very badly, and Aleksey handed me my coat, which I had left with his unconscious body. I wished I’d left him my boots, upon reflection.

We did not speak at first. There wasn’t much to say. I had only hit him twice in our relationship. I would argue that both times were for his benefit, but I could understand that he might not see it this way. Sometimes I tried to get inside Aleksey’s head, to see the world, and me, through his eyes. I think he saw himself as something far above most other people and most other things, which makes him sound a vain and arrogant man, but he was not—far from it. Perhaps this seeing was more as the wolf would view a spaniel, a warhorse behold a donkey. The superiority was so evident that it did not make the superior one arrogant to acknowledge it. He knew he was beautiful beyond the ordinary. He knew he was intelligent. He was educated. As he had so recently pointed out, he and I were the only people we knew, all these in our group included probably, who could read. Not only was he all this, but he
was
a king. His bloodline went back to Canute and beyond into history that was told now only as legend. He actually had a sword in our cabin that he claimed King Canute had used (I doubted this myself, but he insisted it was true). He had led an army to war, captured a whole nation, and reformed his own country for a while. He was all this, and yet I had hit him and knocked him unconscious. I twitched my nose, wondering what he would say.

He kept staring out over the water, and when he eventually spoke, he could not have picked any words that would have surprised me more. “You do have a very unfortunate way of showing that you love me, Niko. But, upon reflection, I prefer it to your attempt to woo me, which was rather pathetic.” He smiled, not looking at me.

As I have said, Aleksey was not arrogant or vain in thinking himself so superior to ordinary men. He
was
far above them all. I felt humbled. For a moment. I soon recovered.

He punched my arm. “You were not gobbled by the nasty water monster, then?”

“I never said there was a nasty water monster.”

“Oh yes, you did.” He chuckled. “And I am not going to let you forget it. Now we just have the devil to defeat.”

W
E
ALL
crossed.

Eventually the captain took the child on his back (I was the more suitable to do this, but he wouldn’t have made it across if I’d taken him… a little slip… a tip….) and Mary Wright made it by the clever addition of a sling added to the two ropes in which she could sit and be pulled from the other side. It looked very insecure, and I wouldn’t have been surprised or too upset if she went into the river too. Unfortunately, the whole group made it safely to the other side.

Neither Aleksey nor I had mentioned what we had seen pulling the naked woman into the trees. Neither had we had an opportunity to discuss it ourselves. Again, it was a hard decision whether to tell what we knew or not, for does it not sound incredible, fanciful, to say you saw the devil and that he was dressed in the skin of a man but for all that was still the devil beneath? I wasn’t going to say it, and I guessed Aleksey didn’t want to either. I don’t think now, reflecting upon this decision, that it would have made any difference to the eventual outcome of this venture if we had enlightened our companions. We found the devil soon enough—he found us.

We had told the depleted group left on the mainland that we would stay on the island only until light began to fade—whether or not we had completed our mission.

Aleksey was standing on the shore staring back thoughtfully at the lieutenant and the brothers. I stood alongside him, my feet so cold I felt every stone like a knife in them. “I am thinking about the ropes.”

“They worked. It was a good plan.”

“Not our ropes. Theirs.” He turned to face me. “Why were their ropes cut? And why were they cut on
that
side?”

I thought about this for a while. The ropes
had
been cut. It had not struck me at the time, nor had I put any significance to the short lengths left in the trees. Someone on the other side, clearly, must have cut them. Aleksey shrugged. “I am glad we left guards on that side, although I wish we had not lost our soldiers, for they would have been better…. What?”

I could hardly articulate the thought that then occurred to me. We had lost our soldiers. How strange a coincidence this was, now I reflected upon it. The four men dead were the four soldiers. It was not just that our party had evil intent within it, but that the intent had a purpose. Our guards had been deliberately removed.

Aleksey had got there himself without me saying anything. We stared at each other.

“This is another peninsula.”

I licked my lips. “You think this has all been a…?”

“A ruse, yes. I believe we have been in an entirely different war than the one we thought we were in. But I have not seen the enemy’s plans this time, so I have no idea what war we
are
in.” He peered back into the tree line. “But I think now that they killed Faelan deliberately.”

“What?” But I suddenly saw the logic in this. Four soldiers and a ferocious wolf…. Who better to remove if you… if you… if you what? Why would they eliminate four soldiers of a rescue party? Were they not the best placed to—“They did not want rescue.”

His face paled, and he put a hand on my arm. “You. They tried to get rid of you as well.”

I opened my mouth to question this, but then I remembered the very first night upon the riverbank. Aleksey’s prejudice in favor of my countenance had led him to think Mary Wright had been tempted beyond sense by my beauty—that that was why she had picked me to accuse.

Four soldiers, one wolf, me.

If she had been believed, if it had been the lieutenant or the major to come upon us and not Aleksey, would I too have been strung from a tree for my crime?

And then I remembered her venomous glare at me at our first meeting. She had not been seeing me as a potential ravisher but as a threat of an entirely different nature. Expecting a shriveled, old, rheumatic doctor, she had got… me.

I shook myself. “I think we are making castles out of clouds. If any of this is true, then they would have tried to kill you as well. The soldiers before you? I do not think so. After me, you are… I mean,
as
with
me,
you are clearly a warrior.” Fortunately for me he let my slip go.

“Yes, maybe. But be wary of them, Niko. Things are not as they have seemed to us. Do not trust anyone.”

“Oh, believe me—”

“What?”

I shook my head. “
Anyone
. I thought that there was nothing that would get me onto this island—to cross the river.”

“Oh God, and then we saw the naked woman. But she cannot be part of this—whatever this is. She was genuinely terrified.”

“She was. But of us crossing or…
not
crossing?”

The others were making noises that they wanted us to join them. Those lucky enough to have boots had emptied them of water, dry clothes had been redonned, and they wanted to be off. The days were very short now. I suddenly had an idea. Should we not walk around the entire shoreline to ensure that there were no other crossing points? It seemed important to me for some reason to know that what we sought was ahead of us and not behind us—that we could not be taken unawares. Our crossing point was guarded. Let us be sure it was the only one. I put my idea to the major and he agreed. It was the task of no more than an hour, for the island was very small. If the shoreline had not been occasionally steep and difficult to negotiate we would have done the circumnavigation more quickly. In truth we did not walk around the whole island for, of course, one long side of the small piece of land formed a share of the vast cliff over which the two sets of falls plummeted.

We started where we crossed and walked away from the falls on our side around the back of the island where the water of the great river split and then along the other side almost as far as the second falls. The northern half of the great river divide was far wider than the one on our side and was impossible to cross. I could hardly see the northern far shore at all. I had a good sense of the lay of the land now. The island was about a mile long and two miles wide with a thick covering of trees. Clearly Etienne had been too long in the sun, for there were birds in the very top branches of the trees (although to be fair I had seen no game as yet), and I could not see how any tribe could use this place for rites, sacred or not, given the difficulty of the crossing.

There was nothing on the shore, so whatever was happening, was happening in the heart of the island.

I went in the lead with Aleksey, the captain brought up the rear, and the major stayed in the middle with the remainder of the Wright family. I did not like the look of the major. He had struggled on the crossing and had had to be helped in the same contraption we had rigged for Mary Wright, and his face was now an unhealthy red, like he was being squeezed too tight. He should not have come on this mission. None of us should have come on this ghastly journey. I think secretly he’d just wanted to see the falls. Have a picnic. Return with some stories.

I hoped he would return with tales to tell. I hoped we’d be there to share them with him.

I was moving steadily through the trees—it was not hard to tell which direction we faced, for I could not only see the plume of mist above the falls at all times, I could feel its wetting upon my face and, of course, hear the dreadful sound of its maker. The vibration was appalling in all directions, so that was no help at all. At one point I chose a route and had gone a little way when I realized the others had stopped. I turned around to see the child standing on another possible pathway, but one that led through a small bit of boggy ground that I had therefore rejected. He had started upon this route himself and seemed surprised that no one else followed him. I had the immediate and very sure conviction that this child knew exactly where he was and that he had made a mistake here, falling out of character, so to speak, by showing us this knowledge. His mother ignored him, not looking at him, and continued to follow me, and after a moment he ran to her. He took her skirts in one hand and looked down at his other.