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.”
Chapter Twelve
WE 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.
He then spat upon his doll.
The foulness of the child crept once more into my heart. I had somewhat forgotten about him over the difficulties of the crossing and the revelations Aleksey and I had experienced on the shoreline. To be honest, I think I was almost beyond rational thought at this point. The hollowness I had felt days earlier had not been filled either by rest or good food. I was ill and my thoughts confused, but once again the child loomed far larger in my mind than his tiny stature should have allowed. I did not want him behind me and so swapped my position with the captain, letting him take the lead. Aleksey stayed by my side. I think Etienne had at least been right about the game. I saw no animals at all in the place. This absence only added to the sense of wrongness.
But nothing prepared us for the palpable sense of offense when we discovered what we did: as far as we could ascertain with our thorough search, the island was entirely deserted.
We had all seen the woman.
Aleksey and I had seen another.
But the island was now unoccupied.
Can I be blamed for my mind wandering once again to a blasted clearing and a people lying down without a single trace of how they had got there and why they had been so killed? It was as if the woman we had seen here had been plucked into the sky by the same god that had destroyed the Black Crow nation. We were totally at a loss.
We were more so when we returned to the shoreline and discovered our ropes gone.
Chapter Thirteen
I FIND it hard even now at this little distance to describe the sense of horror we felt at discovering we were marooned upon this accursed piece of land with no obvious means of escape. It was as I had foretold—although I had not the heart to point this out: none of us were to return to the world.
We could see the short ends of our ropes dangling from the trees along with those of the poor colonists, who it seemed had been lured also into this trap. For trap we now saw it to be. I could not tell at this distance whether the ends of our ropes were cut, but they must have been untied from our side, for not a trace remained upon the tree where I had tied them.
But the island was deserted.
We could still not yet see where the trap lay. All we could do was move in the direction we were being driven, as if a leaf upon that awful current, with no more ability to control events than that leaf had to change its course. It was an apt analogy, I discovered later.
We could see no sign of Lieutenant McIntyre or the three Wrights we had left to prevent the very thing we were witnessing. I turned to speak to the reverend. He was not there. Aleksey, the captain, the major, and I were alone upon the shore. And for once, I did not feel the child’s eyes upon me.
We searched for them just as we had for the naked woman, but they were gone.
We were utterly broken down in body and spirit by this time.
It was beginning to get dark. When I tell you that I was close to offering to attempt to swim the river just to get away from this place, you will understand how desperate I had become.
Aleksey was the one to find the doll and to then discover that it was not a toy at all.
It would have been a horrifying revelation in any circumstances, but upon that lifeless island, trapped, cold, and hungry, it was one of the most terrifying discoveries he could have made.
The child had made a small representation of me.
He had used the sleeve of my b
loodied and burnt shirt, with which I had fixed his restraint in the cart, to form the body: arms, legs, and a crude head had each been shaped by the deft application and tightening of thread. He had put yellow hair upon it made from a gold tassel cut from one of the officers’ sashes. It had one burnt-off arm. It was soaking wet, but what most turned my stomach was the thorns, which had been dipped in some dark foul-smelling liquid, that pierced its eyes, mouth, and genitals.
Aleksey held it in his hand, his eyes wide as he stood mute, appealing to me to tell him what it was, what to do. I took it from him. It was a poppet. I had inhabited the world of poisoners. I had seen these before. Very carefully, I removed the thorns and placed them upon the ground. Did I believe that the poppet had been making me sick? Why could it not, if looking upon green wallpaper could kill a man? I do not think any entirely rational and scientific man who had been through what we had would doubt the power of the unseen that day.
Whether the poppet was potent or not, I began to feel a great deal better once I had removed the thorns. I do not think the child had intended to drop his delightful toy, but there was no clue as to why he had, here, close to where the island fell away alongside the falls.
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