“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.
Chapter Ten
ALEKSEY 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.
I think Aleksey hoped I would be better in the morning, but as my illness was caused, I believed, by what we were going toward, I could not see how this could be. I think he got it after an hour of riding. He suddenly claimed, “This is in your mind, is it not? Like the ship.”
I pursed my lips. “Possibly, but I think the demon felt it too. I saw him last night, listening to the ground.”
“Do not your people do that? You said you could hear a horse over a mile away and got me to try it one day.”
“Well, yes, but that was because it was funny to see you with your arse stuck in the air and such a grimace of concentration on your face.”
He was about to make a suitable reply when his expression changed, and he held out his hand. “Is it raining suddenly? The sky is not… oh! Look!”
I did. A vast cloud rose ahead of us, as if the earth had suddenly been turned upon its side and we were looking at the sky side on. I hissed with some urgency, “Can you not feel it now? Can you not hear it? Aleksey?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I can hear… but we are still many miles from the falls…. Twenty?”
The others had begun to hear it now and comment upon the drumming and rumbling. It was as if a great beast were ahead of us, turning in its den, and the words of the madman returned to me.
I DO not know what I had expected from the falls. Something like the ones that fed into our lake perhaps? Or the big ones where I had taken Aleksey to see the bears, only slightly bigger still?
I had no idea that the world could be so wrong, so terrifying, so alien to man that I felt as a pond bug must if given a glimpse of an ocean. I could not get my breath as we approached from the tree line. The others were eager, straining to see, to experience this wonder. I did not want to emerge from the security of the forest. But I had no choice. We came out onto a riverbank on a small promontory, and there it was.
Everything was wet. The trees, the ground, our hair, our clothes, the horses—all became soaked within a few moments from the cloud that was not a cloud but the breath of the falls. And the noise. I could not speak nor hear anyone for the thunder. I wanted to put my hands to my ears to block the sound but did not think that would help, for it was not only sound but vibration, and that could not be checked.
The falls spread out from our vantage point on the promontory until the end of the earth, as if all the rivers of the world—even the oceans themselves—came to this point and just dropped off, and there was nothing between us and this great terror. I could not believe it. We were standing on the riverbank and there, there was the water, moving so fast I do not think that even Xavier running at full speed could have matched its fearsome pace, and then it just all ended, and the flow at that final point was so green and deep and curved and clear and tempting, as if it called to me….
My legs went from under me, and I sank to the ground. Thank God, I was not the only one. My companions were variously squatting or sitting, looking at the view as if they were enjoying it and seeing something wondrous.
I thought that if Aleksey went any closer to the water’s edge I would scream, and then he did. He went right up to the river and squatted, putting his hand in it. I knew then that he had been marked. The river had tasted him, and it would have him. I tried to call out. Xavier sensed my extreme distress and began to dance and retreat, and Aleksey turned, surprised, and came up to calm him, glancing at me questioningly. I was too busy clinging to the grass so I would not be sucked over the edge to worry about Xavier. Major Parkinson pottered over as if we were on a picnic and chuckled, “Well, superb, quite superb. Well worth the trip. I shall have to bring mother to see them. Quite something, eh? Shall we find this damn fort, sir? The sooner we sort this bloody mess out, the sooner we can return home, what?”
Aleksey nodded and swung up onto Boudica’s back. I could not rise. If I let go of the grass, I would be in the water and over—I knew this as a certainty. But then I felt eyes upon me and looked over. The creature had his hands planted to the ground too. He was staring at me, the doll squashed beneath his hand upon the turf, sodden and smeared with… mud? Nothing would have led me to have something in common with what he seemed to be, so I rose to my feet. He glared at me as if I defied him. I climbed onto Xavier. The boy lifted himself from the ground and seemed about to approach me, but his mother came back from putting her feet in the water and swept him up under her arm, then carried him to the cart. I closed my eyes and let Xavier lead me back into the trees.
I think I got away with my unmanning this time. I did not run screaming through a cabin, breaking down doors and attacking guards. I did not weep or howl, or if I did, no one could hear me for the noise that stayed with us as we rode slowly along the riverbank and toward the fort. Aleksey possibly knew. But he was very taken with everything he was seeing and with
the possibility of now finding the answer to the mystery of the abandoned fort, so he was not paying me too much attention. I was better away from the falls themselves, but even now I could not take my eyes off the water. I suppose it is not every day that you see something new. I had traveled fairly widely. I had met men in villages in England who had never been beyond their own borders, never even been to the next parish, although this is hard to believe. I had traveled from England to the New World, from there back to England and from there to Hesse-Davia through the low countries of Europe and now back here. I had seen many things, but nothing quite as not of this world as I saw now. This was a place that would truly make a man believe in the spirit world, or a world beyond one where he was supposed to dwell.
Water should not move faster than a horse, nor be sucked so remorselessly into nothingness, for this is how it seemed to me—that the water was being enticed to its doom, cascading over the vast falls and turned into cloud where it rose to the sky—so was this not like the water’s death? The bottom of the falls was beyond sight, so Aleksey said—I had not gone close enough to look. Even the thought that he had made me weaken and groan a little. He maintained that all was mist and spray just like being in a storm upon the ship and that therefore he had not been able to see where the water went.
The fort did not deserve such a term. It was a damp pile of logs upon the riverbank, and behind it we could see some equally sodden cabins, which we supposed was the small colony. This is what the Wrights had come to live in? They were welcome to it.
The place was indeed deserted. We made our way into the palisade and discovered a couple of rough buildings and a stable. One of the structures was a barracks for the soldiers, and one appeared to be a general living area. It was very, very cold. The spray here had frozen in places on the northern sides where the sun did not reach, and eerie shapes like dead witches’ fingers hung from sills and roofs. Nothing seemed to be disturbed in the barracks. I did not care too much at this stage. I sat down upon a wet bench and clasped my hands tight together to stop them shaking. I wanted to suggest that, having found the place now empty, we depart, but I knew that we must at least make a desultory search for the missing occupants.
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