Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(59)

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.