WE WERE a very miserable group for the rest of the night.
We did not need to say that dawn was now not something to be welcomed. Dawn meant sacrifice.
I tried not to think of the horror that had overtaken this place and wondered if echoes of it remained and if that was what I had sensed as we approached the falls. Can you hear a remnant of the awfulness that has come upon a place? Had I been hearing not the thunder of the water or feeling the vibrations of its great plunge off the face of the earth, but hearing and sensing echoes of the terror of the poor people who had come here to live freely and worship their God in the way they wanted without fear of repercussion?
They did not come for us that day.
We spent a good proportion of the short daylight hours searching more for Major Parkinson, but our diligence was not rewarded. There was no sign of him at all, and our hearts were burdened by misgivings over his likely fate.
By nightfall we knew what they intended to do to us, but no one spoke of it. There was only one way I liked eating Aleksey, and he felt the same about me, so they could wait as long as they liked if that was what they thought would happen. We would starve together first. Captain Rochester was another matter. But he was one to our two, so we did not fear his hunger.
And this hunger was very great on the following day. We had water—too much water, if truth be told—but nothing whatsoever to eat. Despite my best attempts to lure a bird to the ground and snare it, I could not. The cold bit into our bones and made us all ill with it.
He came before the dawn on the seventh day of our imprisonment upon the island. Seven little nicks into the trunk of a tree. John had died on the fifth day, from the cold more than his hunger, although we had taken him into our curl of body as tightly as if he had been a third lover.
Perhaps they thought Aleksey and I would assuage our hunger upon him, but we did not. We laid him out and would have covered him if we had the strength, and Aleksey said words over him. It seemed to banish some of the horror for a while.
I will admit here and now that my agonies upon the island during those seven days were not helped by thoughts of my poor horses. Boudica in foal. Xavier, my companion for so many years, and Freedom, the tangible representation to me of what Aleksey and I had achieved by leaving our world and coming to this new one. I tried not to think of what the child might be doing to them to spite himself upon me, or just for the pleasure of it, but as the hungry days in the cold wore on my mind, I dwelt upon it, and I was the more miserable for it.
Neither of us could rise when the devil finally came for us.
I could hardly believe what I was seeing, but at last the final part of the mystery revealed itself to me. I knew what he was and where he had come from, but I could do nothing with this knowledge.
I confess I was overwhelmed for a while, and in a very dark place in my mind, for we were reunited again with Major Parkinson: the devil was wearing his skin. I did not think our horror could have been increased after what we had endured in the snow those seven days, but I felt Aleksey’s heart sink and knew he was at the very end of his reserves of courage.
We were bound securely around our waists to trees, unable to resist, but we were fed. At first I could not fathom why he fed us after such a deliberate starving, but he had the woman, Mary Wright, bring us bread and wine, and she knelt and offered it, and I then realized we were now favored of this deformed god, for we were sacrifice. We had been purified, purged, and now we had to be appeased and made ready with offerings.
Aleksey laughed at her and said she prepared a table in the presence of her enemies, and I was relieved. He was not at the end at all, and his courage rallied mine.
We could see she did not even understand his allusion. I ate, and I made Aleksey eat, although he did not want to touch their food. We devoured everything there was, and I felt immediately more myself and able to think.
In some ways I wished he had left me insensible, for knowing what was to come and thinking about it as it was happening to me almost undid me.
We were dragged to the shore, and even though we resisted and were two, even the woman was stronger than either of us now. The child was with them once more, and he had a sharpened stick, which he used to poke us in the face or genitals when we resisted. I knew then that the man’s words about the woman and the child were true, for this is often the way of native children with captives.
The sun was beginning to come up but had not quite reached the shore upon which we lay. I was then strapped to a log, and the devil raised his stolen face to the sky and began to chant. It was a horrible mixture of Latin and French, his own languages, and some of the native tongues I recognized, and somehow then an older language, which I did not and was glad not to know. The sun reached the poor major’s face, began to trace its very unwelcome path down, and then it reached the sand and the water.
I will not recount what Aleksey was doing or saying, or I in reply to his words, come to that.
We had known that separation in this life was inevitable and that one day one of us would be alone without the other, but neither of us had seen it coming so soon nor in a way associated with such horror.
The devil put out his foot and pushed me into the current, and although I tried to tell Aleksey something very important, I had not the time, for the current seized me as voraciously as it seized all things, and I was in the roar and the swirl and the icy-cold horror, heading at a dizzying speed toward an even greater terror.
I was on my back, facing the sky, and that was all I could see, for I was bound to the log, but I was grateful for this. I did not want to see what was coming. I could hear it, though, and feel it in every single fiber of my being.
My greatest terror.
I had not even been able to look in the direction of the falls, but now I was almost there.
My horror was so great that looking back upon this now I wonder if my heart actually stopped before I went over and whether that, ironically, was what saved me. I do not know for, be assured, there was nothing whatsoever left of the man of science on that log as I went over into the great terror. I was not analyzing and thinking at all. So perhaps I was dead and that in being dead I did not breathe. I have no other explanation for my survival, but survive I did.
I went over headfirst, and then all I knew was sound. The noise was so loud that I think my body only accepted this one sensation, for it was too much in itself to allow others. I felt no pain. There was just the noise, and I confess now that it is still in my ears. I still hear the thunder of the falls. Aleksey says I am imagining it. I do not disabuse him.
Why did that fall not kill me when the fall I had taken in Hesse-Davia into a calm bay only forty feet beneath me had rendered me unconscious? I did not hit solid water, which I did hit when I fell from the battlements of the castle. Was the churn at the base of this fall… softer? Is it possible that the very height saved me? For not one tiny bit of that water was solid when I hit.
I have no answers for this; I only know I did survive and washed up some way down the river beneath the falls.
I washed up into a back eddy, and it seemed to me then that this was the very larder of the monster to which I had been fed, for I was not alone. The river, I suppose, had its ways and could not change them. Most of it was all vast wave and whirlpool, but within this a current washed steady and sure into this permanent, stagnant pool. Everything that went over the falls washed in here until, full, it disgorged its occupants like vomit back into the awful current.
They were all here. I recognized some as my companions on the journey, even though they lacked faces, and in the major’s case, his skin. They had left him his hair, which was still tied in his regimental ribbon. Small details concentrated on to overcome horror.
I wallowed in the body parts of all the colonists: men, women, and children. They came up at me from the depths on expelled gasses as my thrashing disturbed their slumber. The horror inflicted upon them was evident in their eyes, or perhaps I was only projecting my
own considerable repugnance upon them.
I had lost the hurdle to which I had been tied. It was following my boots, presumably, to some unknown place. I had also lost my clothes. They had been ripped off me by the fall. I churned and thrashed and tried to swim through the bodies to reach the shore.
At that moment I saw something else in that accursed pool of foulness that let the final part of this entire mystery slide into place. I thought I knew of what we had been a part, and I became enraged.
I had gone into that pool a victim along with all the others, alive, to be sure, when they were not, but for how long I would have stayed alive is debatable. I had just been torn from Aleksey, thrown over the falls, and I was naked and near death in the snow.
I went into that pool as a dead man, but I arose a warrior once more. It is incredible what fury can enable you to survive.
It had been anger, of course, that had permitted me to withstand watching my parents’ torture. The Powponi did not know what they took when they captured me as a child. My ferocity, my rage saved me then and has saved me many times since. James Harcourt and his crewmates would testify to the savage nature that delivered me the day I went over the falls.
I took things from the bodies in the pool. I knew I had their blessing to take whatever I wanted, for they cried out to be avenged. I did not hear one single Christian spirit begging me to be merciful as their religion preached. All I heard was a deep rage and a thirst for vengeance. So I took the little knife, which was still strapped around my thigh despite my nakedness and a fall that had knocked the fear out of me, but not this treasured baby, and I borrowed from the dead.
When I was ready, I rose and regarded what now lay before me.
I was at the base of the great falls, half a mile downstream on the side where the colony had stood. Before me lay the banks of the lower river, which formed from the awful water of the falls. As I have said, it was all huge wave and whirlpool and quite awful to contemplate. But its banks lay easy and smooth until the base of the cliff that formed the side of the fall.
I turned, said my thanks to the dead, and began to run.
Once I had begun on this path, I put all pain, all fear, and all weakness behind me.
The devil still had Aleksey, and dawn would come again.
He still had the beautiful, pure spirit, the one with the face of an angel that he had set this whole hideous debacle up to acquire. Aleksey. My prince, my king. He needed to sacrifice Aleksey to cure himself of the French disease. Could anything be more ironic, more ridiculous, more in character with this great new country that we all floundered about in thinking we mastered it, when all the time its dark heart conquered us?
The people of this land had been coming to these falls for generations, sacrificing the best they had to save themselves from disease and death. Had this fallen priest, this Jesuit, for this is what I now knew him to be, heard these tales? Did he truly believe this would cure him? Restore his features? His nose? His lips? Or was his madness—the madness of the pox—so complete that he was just as one raving and ranting in a squalid alleyway?
I reached the base of the cliff. It was not shear, as I had feared, but only exceptionally steep, and it had growth upon it—saplings clinging here and there, thorny shrubs and plants that could survive even in the constant mist rising from the falls.
Can I describe to you the proximity of that falling water as I climbed beside it? I am not sure I have the words, for it was terrible and beautiful in its own way. Only a few days previous I had beheld these falls for the first time and had been entirely unmanned, clinging to the grass like a child and wanting to be held. How much that was the curse of the poppet and how much just my cowardice, I will never know. But here I was, climbing within touch of the water, and I was not afraid at all. I was beyond fear. I had said my farewells to Aleksey, and he thought that I was dead. He was to be sacrificed at dawn. What room did I have for dread of a trickle of water compared to that? And was it in my mind that this madman, this lunatic priest, might decide another use for Aleksey’s great beauty? Might he have found the uselessness of my sacrifice—waiting there with his arms up to have the divine healing he longed for—so profoundly dismaying that he gave up this quest but then used Aleksey as he had used some of the other men? Major Parkinson?
This I refused to allow myself to contemplate. I found another handhold and continued to climb.
It was an awful ascent. The rocks were slick with water and slime. The roar was driving me insane but fueled my fury at the same time. Was I shouting obscenities? I confess I think I might have been, but as I could not hear myself over the roar, I did not see that this mattered.
Finally I reached the top and dug my fingers into a crevice, my heart pounding and my breath labored. I clung like a starfish, naked and shaking, to the rock, and turned my face to the falls. And I saw what I had expected to see: a path beneath the very curve of the escarpment. The cliff wall behind the water was not flat but concave. Down from the promontory upon which we had all first spied the water were rough steps cut into the rock. I doubted they would even be visible if viewed from above or recognized for what they were if seen. He had not appeared from the falls, and he could not fly. He had traversed the face of the cliff beneath the tumult of water and come upon the colony that way. In some ways this was as fantastic to me as if he had flown. Do not underestimate the courage it took for me to crab sideways to those rough-hewn steps and enter the world beneath the water.
I stood for a moment with my back pressed so tight to the wet rock that Aleksey says I have its imprint upon me still. The shelf upon which I stood was the width of my foot only, and then there was the sheet of water falling. A mere foot from my face. Could the allure of its fall suck me from the security of that rock by the sheer siren power of its might? Not if I had my way. I pressed back harder and shuffled sideward.
I think I was about a third of the way across, shuffle, crab, shuffle, crab, when I thought, fuck it, turned, and ran.
I had said my farewells to Aleksey, and he thought that I was dead.
I emerged before the sunset on the afternoon upon which I had been sacrificed. I can say with all honesty that they did not expect to see me.
Aleksey did not even recognize me, but I have forgiven him for this.
I stood in the rays of the setting sun upon the edge of the cliff, not pretending to have risen from the breath of the water, for they knew from whence I had come. I was naked except for that which I had taken from their victims: the scalps with which I adorned my body. I was painted also with blood and white clay from the riverbank and with crushed blueberries I had torn from the bushes as I had climbed. Red handprints, blue upon my scars to make them prominent and fearful, and my face caked and white as the spirits of my ancestors in the sweat-lodge dreams of my people. And then I began to chant. I knew all the songs of my people in their strange and wonderful tongue: chants for life and health and good harvest, and incantations to summon the spirits and curse our enemies. I knew the obscenities we screamed upon our horses, flying into war. I knew them all, and I howled them as I attacked.
I had completely defeated the woman with the horror of my appearance before I even reached her. She moaned and tried to run, but I caught her easily around the waist. She weighed as nothing, but she spat foul curses at me as I took her to the edge. The child tore at my skin with his nails, trying to stop me, but I kicked at him as I would a rat, and he flew away, hitting a tree and sinking to silence.
I lifted Mary up high above my head and cast her off the cliff into the tumult.
I think at the end, she might even have welcomed it.
The priest, the devil, the Jesuit, had fled, but he could not escape me, for there was nowhere to go. He was now trapped in the same place he had trapped his victims and left them to feed upon themselves to survive.
I threw Aleksey my knife so he could cut his bindings and then began to hunt.
I hunted the devil down.
IN THE en
d, he was just a mad and sick old man, and it was not all that hard.
He was on the shore, one foot despairingly in the water, as if wanting to take the final step that would save him and damn him but unable to. He was a horrible sight. He could not fix the skins and faces that he stole sufficiently to keep them upon himself, and the running and hiding from me had laid him bare. He was in the advanced stages of the disease that had rampaged through his mind and his body. His skin was covered in sores, which were weeping most horribly. These were worse around his groin, and he had lost the appearance of being a man, only bloody holes remaining where his cock and balls should be. It is fearful for another man to see such a thing, and if I felt one tiny sliver of sympathy for this despoiled human being, then it was at the moment I saw that ruin. The pustules massed under his arms, spread over his chest, red, hot, angry, infected, and filthy. But it is his face I will never forget. I had seen this syphilis sickness before, of course. It had its vast rampages in the Old World, breaking out when men clustered together as in war or siege, as though it were the manifestation of the evil they brought with them at such times. It was spread by the act of penetration with a man or woman who carried the disease within their body, and it was here in the New World. He had condemned himself to this through sin, and he had attempted to save himself through evil.
He was blind in one eye, that orb milky and staring unseeing at me. The other was still bright, glaring at me fixedly. But it did not help his face much, this one good eye. He had no nose, and his lips, eaten away by the disease and the putrescence, had regressed, showing his mouth as the mouth of a skull: the elongated teeth that appear in death. He had only a few stumps left, and they were bloodied from mouth ulcers.
He was ruinous, and I felt that I was giving him mercy when I took his life.
He died mumbling his words in Latin. I think my Powponi ones had been more powerful in the end. I was standing. He was not.
I ran back to Aleksey.
I had said farewell to him, and he thought that I was dead.
Aleksey's Kingdom Page 19
