Aleksey's Kingdom (18 page)

I felt a surge of warmth from his disingenuous thought that made me smile privately, but I replied, “Do you not look at the most beautiful women… and I take Anastasia as my example yet again… and want them not?”

He was silent for a very long time and then said hesitantly, “I think I have a theory. Do you want to hear it?”

“Is it as good as my theories?”

“Much better, for it comes out of an educated and intelligent brain.”

“All right, then. I am agog to hear it.”

“Your mimicry of my accent is awful.”

“Hurry up, or I will be soon asleep.”

“Well, what if some women get born with a man’s brain—I mean, we know some bodies are male and some female, but what if brains were male and female too, and the woman who does not desire you has in fact a man’s brain.”

“But what if she had a man’s brain, but was then a man like us? She would be a woman with a man’s brain who wanted other men. That would be interesting. And then, my little thinking one, would not some men be born with women’s brains, and someone who did not know you might say, oh, that very pretty man with the green eyes is actually a woman called Posy.” He hit me very hard, which was not easy given how close we were lying, but he had a lot of practice and so had perfected this over the years. I laughed quietly. “But I do like your theory a great deal.”

“No, you do not. You are only humoring me.”

“No, seriously, I do like it. Think back to the sisters Peel aboard the ship. Did not something strike you about them that might prove your theory?”

He thought about this for a while, then said in a wondering voice, “Miss Jane Peel was very… mannish… wasn’t she? She strode around giving orders just as you would have done had you not been… I do not like thinking about that.”

Neither did I. More diversion for his thoughts was needed. “Of course, that would mean that in every pairing of men, one might be said to be the female of the pair—the one with, as you call it, a female brain.”

He actually had to think about this before he hit me again. I pulled him even closer. “So that would mean that a man like me does really want a woman, and he seeks for her in another man. You have made me a very happy man, Aleksey. I am quite as other men.”

“Shut up, or I will prove to you just how much of a man I am. Remember, Niko, that one day you will be very old and I will not. At the moment you are stronger than I—fractionally—but one day you will be dribbling and incontinent, and I will be much stronger than you. Then you will regret all the mean things you say to me.”

“Then I will be confused with an addled brain and will not remember anything I have ever said to you—or you, possibly.”

“Good God, is this conversation supposed to be cheering me up and taking my mind off Faelan or making me want to jump from the falls tomorrow?”

I shuddered for some reason and pulled him tighter, kissing into his hair. “If I forget you, I can fall in love with you all over again, can I not?”

He eased away slightly and put a hand to my face. “It is like falling, isn’t it? I feel the air sucked out of me when I look at you sometimes—although I know I do not tell you this very often, for you are vain enough—and then there is the jolt like hitting the ground when I realize that you are mine—that you actually came to Hesse-Davia and I met you. I do not think there would have been anyone else for me—you are the one man in all the world I was meant to be with.”

I sincerely doubted this given Aleksey’s extreme beauty and his incredibly attractive personality, but I obviously did not say this to him. I was actually hot from the rare praise, basking in it as a sleepy cat in front of a roaring fire.

“You drew me to Hesse-Davia, Aleksey. I heard your name on the ship as I crossed the English Channel, and then I fell too—the first moment I saw you emerge from the forest, all grubby and arrogant as you were.”

“I was filthy, I grant you that, although I think I was very polite and shared my breakfast with this horrible, angry warrior who looked at us as if he wanted to kill us. Faelan said….”

Dammit. All my hard work and we were back to Faelan.

I wondered, though, and said hesitantly, “Do you remember the time he pissed in your uncle the Cardinal’s house, and so you broke the vase of flowers in the spot to try and cover it up?”

He laughed. “He never did like my uncles. He shared your opinion, I think. But he disliked my brother more.”

“Well, your brother tried to kill him.”

“True. Do you remember how he always snarled at you and I told you he liked you well enough? Well, I was actually lying a little. I think he saw a rival from the first moment he saw you.”

“That might be misconstrued, Aleksey.” Once more he hit me. I would be black-and-blue in the morning, but we always enjoyed examining my bruises and remembering how I got them. I think that although we were now talking about Faelan and I was not trying to distract him from the very thought of his wolf, it was good. Perhaps it was like the relief of an abscess. If we stored up thoughts of Faelan, they would go bad and poison us: better to talk about him and remember him with pleasure. I rolled onto my back, and he came with me, sprawled across me, his head upon my chest.

“I think Boudica is in foal again.”

I raised my head. “Really? That is good news.”

“I do not want you to trade this foal, Niko. He stays with us, as does Freedom. I am going to call him Blueberry.”

Oh God. Imagine calling that out to your horse in the company of other men. “Yes, that is a very good name.” Let us pray the foal was a girl.

“It will suit equally well if it is female.”

I squeezed him tighter. “Go to sleep now. Our sentry duty will come very soon.”

He was quiet for a long time, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but just as I was sinking down into that quiet darkness, he whispered, “Thank you. For tonight.”

I grunted.

We understood each other very well.

A
LEKSEY
AND
I had never been to the falls nor crossed the border of our land at this farthest point north. We knew what lay beyond only from tales—me from listening to Etienne, and Aleksey from stories he heard at the colony on the coast. Thus I knew that there was a great confluence of rivers at this point and that the combined power of their joining ran for a mile or so as one mighty river before pouring over a vast cliff. Opinion on the height of the falls varied depending upon the teller of the tale. Etienne said they were taller than the tallest pine and that he had not seen their like anywhere in Europe.

The river did not fall in one great plummet either. Its path was interrupted at the very edge of this great cliff by a piece of land, an island. The Indians called the island Matinicus, but this had been corrupted to Matins Island by the French and thus Morning Island by those Europeans on this side of the river. Even Etienne had never ventured onto the island, and he said it was an accursed place, which I had taken to mean there was not much worth him seeing there, as he had seen so many wonders in his life. He told me once he had stood at the summit of a mountain that spat fire—that it was like liquid inside the mountain. He was a great storyteller, and I did not believe everything he told me. I wish I had listened better to his tales about the island, however: that it was entirely barren of life and that no animals or birds would or could live there; that many, many generations ago, it had been used by a savage tribe that lay on the northern borders as a sacred place for strange rites but that their gods had turned on them, and they had disappeared from the earth. Perhaps, upon reflection, this was the reason I had not introduced Aleksey to Etienne. Aleksey’s overactive imagination was bad enough without Etienne’s encouragement.

You might think it strange, therefore, given the great wonder that lay only a few hours beyond the point we had marked as ours, that we had never visited and confirmed some of these tales for ourselves, and I cannot rightly explain it to you. I suppose Aleksey would have gone out of curiosity, had I been willing to accompany him. I was not at all willing, and so we did not go. After all, it was not as if we lived a life of ease and luxury as we had in some ways in Hesse-Davia, with our every need taken care of, allowing time for leisure pursuits. Here, in this savage country, life hung on a very thin thread at most times. We were constantly busy (or I was) keeping us alive: fed, housed, warm. I did not have time for amusing travels to waterfalls.

That I would not have gone, even if I had been granted the time, I will add now, for I am attempting to be truthful in this account. My dislike of the idea, I suppose, was what initially caused me to refuse to venture on this journey, but no man likes to have a secret little cause of fear, cowardice even, worming away inside himself, and I knew I had built my fear of the falls to an unreasonable level and that the fear needed to be conquered. I had gone on a ship. I could do this. So I thought.

My fear began to creep upon me as soon as we crossed the boundary to our land—and I am not even sure where that border is, to be honest. We did not have waymarkers, after all. Upon our arrival in the New World, we had just ridden around a vast acreage of forest, marking trees and calling it all ours. It had almost been more of a joke than real, for how can men own the earth? Aleksey did not see this as I did, of course, as he came from the very essence of the tradition of owning land, but I did not.

I came from a people who more saw the land owning them, and so they had a duty to care for it and it was a privilege to be allowed to live upon it.

So, as I say, an unpleasant tightness began to form in my stomach as we rode beyond the borders of Aleksey’s kingdom, a worm of despair that even my new accord with Aleksey could not dispel.

Aleksey and I were pretty much always in harmony, despite appearances and the fact we derived so much enjoyment out of arguing, but this morning was different. We had found some new bond, I think, in Faelan’s death and our shared grief over this that we had possibly not thought to ever find, both being men. Perhaps it was a bond only those who lose children can know, and we had not thought that to be our lot in life. And although Faelan clearly was not a child to us, he fulfilled some of that role, and so this shared agony at his passing bound us in a way we had not experienced before.

I
GENUINELY
believed at the time, and I still believe this now, that I could feel the power of the falls long before we came to them. I remember looking around at my fellow travelers and wondering that they had not commented yet upon this. I could feel it like a drumming up through Xavier and into me, and I knew he felt it. If Faelan had been there, I would have consulted him, and that he was not put yet another stab into my heart. Aleksey moved Boudica close and enquired in a low voice, “What is wrong? You are pale.”

I glanced over. “Do you not feel it?”

“What?” Clearly he did not.

I had heard tales of men who had experienced the ground shaking beneath their feet so badly that things fell around them. It was hard to believe such a report, frightening to do so, I suppose. But now I did believe. I had also heard from these same men that dogs howled before the shaking and that they had seen strange portents in the skies. I felt like one of those dogs; I wanted to howl.

It was awful, and it got worse as the afternoon progressed. Before nightfall, Aleksey insisted we stop early and thus reach our destination fresh the following morning. He told Major Parkinson that we would go hunting and that if he got a fire ready, we would return with some fresh food. I stood apart from the group, my head ringing as if I had taken a blow and my body so tense and off-kilter that I was actually sick soon after we left the camp. Aleksey watched me with concern. “You must have eaten something that was not good.”

I shook my head. “Can you not feel it?”

“What? You keep asking me this. I can feel nothing!”

“Well, then, I cannot explain it to you.”

“You are tired. You did not sleep after our turn on sentry and not before, either, if I recall.”

“If you remember that, then you must have been awake too.”

“But I am not sick. Do you want to stay here? I will hunt on my own.”

I was tempted to say yes, but he was truly alone without Faelan. Yet another stab. I had never really considered just how safe Faelan made Aleksey. Without the guardianship of his ferocious wolf, he seemed far too beautiful to be left alone in this world. He snorted. I think he caught something of my thoughts. “Come on, then, for I am hungry, even if you are not.”

We caught a moose very easily, a yearling that had probably recently been chased away by its mother. We hoisted it onto Freedom, which unsettled him, and took it back to butcher closer to the camp.

I wished I had dressed it there where we caught it when I saw that I had an audience for this activity. The child, now freed of its restraints, had left the campsite and come to the area a little way away where I had hung the young animal to drain. He stood at the edge of the clearing, fiddling with his little cloth doll, squeezing it in his hand, squeezing, releasing, squeezing, his eyes wide with delight as intestines spilt upon the ground. None of this helped my nausea, as you can imagine, but I was interested to see that once or twice he lay down and put his ear to the ground as if he too could hear what I was. I would have asked him about this, but naturally I was not about to speak to it under any circumstances. I kept my knife in my hand, and I knew exactly where Aleksey and my three horses were. I was taking no chances with this creature again.

We had a very good meal that night, although I ate nothing of it, for the very sight of the food made me sick, and then turned in for a final night’s sleep. We repeated our sentry duty as the night before, although we were this night given an easier shift just before daylight, so we actually did have the whole night to sleep. I think Aleksey engineered this with Major Parkinson, and I did not challenge it. I do not actually remember falling asleep.