Eventually he stopped. Looking at his boots, he said, “It was very quick. He fell ill, took a fit, after your ex—after you—that evening. The doctors were summoned, but it was too late. He—”
“No!” I could tell from his sudden glance at my face that he’d been told about my ranting and raving and was fearful that I would make a scene. I concentrated on a tiny glint in the sand at our feet so that my voice would stay calm, and elaborated, “He wasmurdered.”
Johan snapped back angrily, “This does not help, Colonel. You were not the only one who—you weren’t there!”
“I saw him from the scaffold! He wasdrugged.”
“I was there too, and you, sir, were in no fit state to see anything at all.”
“Do you seriously think Aleksey would send me to my death on a spike?”
At that he swung away from me and began to pace toward the surf, but turned back just as suddenly and poked me painfully in the chest. “You know the answer to that better than I.”
And I saw it then. He had at last answered his own question.Can he be trusted? He had weighed me in the balance and found me wanting.
I was too grieved to talk more and began to walk away from him, back to the inn. He caught me up and said with less acrimony, as if he knew he’d gone too far and was making apology, “He is lying in state, Nikolai, and you are to come with me and see him.”
I began to shake my head violently. Perhaps he feared another scene, for he put his hand upon my arm and murmured, “You must see for yourself or you will never believe it. Come, be a man, for his sake.”
For his sake. I would have willing given my life for his sake. Paying tribute to his death was the least I could do.
Aleksey’s body was to be shown for half a day; everything was being done very quickly because of the summer heat. Many hundreds of Hesse-Davians would file past, and I was to be one of them. Johan had brought me a cloak with a deep hood, which would keep me concealed. I was to leave with him early the following morning and be one of the first in line. Then, he said, I must leave Hesse-Davia, for I was putting everyone in danger by being there.
THELINEhad formed before dawn. Everyone wanted to see the dead young king. Some of them were there because they had genuinely loved him. Others wanted the spectacle. Others, perhaps, were just morbidly curious that even the very favored of God can die. Sometimes it must have seemed to those peasants that only their lives held such an end, so blessed were the rich in all other things. I pulled the hood down low over my face and entered the shadowed hall.
The bier dominated the room. There were twenty-four guards around it, one for every year of King Christian’s life, so Johan informed me. They were dressed in pure black with only their epaulettes and gold braid breaking up the somber attire. It was exactly how I had pictured Aleksey riding in front of his father’s funeral cortege. Irony is very painful when it concerns the things you once loved.
In the middle was the body. It was Aleksey. I could not deny the evidence of my eyes, although I tried for some time, staring at the still form. It struck me then for the first time that all my ravings had been nothing more than the vaunting cries of a thwarted child.
I had not believed him murdered for I had not believed him dead.
I had expected, at any moment, Gregory or Pia to fly to my side to tell me that it had all been a mistake, that Aleksey was alive. I had thought Johan had come to the inn to secrete me away to Aleksey’s location, where he would be waiting for me, laughing with unfettered merriment at the cleverness of his scheme.
I saw now that they had all been aware of my denial, and that was why Johan had been summoned to bring me to him, to see thebodyfor myself.
IFIhad ever thought Aleksey beautiful in life, he was even more so in death. Whereas in life his face had often held such mischief and wicked amusement—usually to spite me—in death he was as perfect as a mold of man made by God to show us what all men could be. The Christians say we are made in his image. That day I believed it to be the other way around. Aleksey lay there as if he’d just fallen asleep, almost a blush still upon those high cheekbones, just as it had been in life when roused. I wished I could rouse him then. I wanted to cry out that I repented, that I would never sin again, even with him, if only he would come back to me, but I could not. Everyone was crying, so my tears went unnoticed in that great place of lamentation. I filed past, not daring to step across the rope. He was as effectively separated from me in this life as I thought he would be in the next, for I did not believe in his God’s promises—not yet, anyway. The line was moving on, and I had to move on with it. What else was there for me to do? I was one man. Aleksey was dead. Did it matter how he had died? I cared not if the whole edifice came tumbling down and killed them all. Aleksey was dead.
I told Johan I wanted to return to the palace. I think he thought I wanted to collect some of my things. I let him think so. In truth, I wanted to climb into our bed and not leave it again, but I kept this thought to myself. The place was not even guarded, but all the same, I took the back way across the beach and up through the gardens and over the balcony rail. I had often come to Aleksey’s bed this way, and it seemed fitting now. I turned briefly and looked out over the expanse of sea, the view very familiar to me now. I could see Johan holding the horses, waiting. I should have spared him some sympathy, I suppose. He had been as a father to Aleksey and was grieving terribly. But I had none to give. It seemed as if I were in a tiny tunnel, as tiny as the pinpricks of Aleksey’s pupils, and that I was squeezed and short of breath. I was not myself at all.
I entered the bedroom and stopped abruptly. Faelan was on the end of the bed. He was dead. I felt such a surge of pain at the sight that I wondered my body could take any more of this continued assault. I went up to him and knelt. We had endured a rocky relationship, this huge wolf and I. I had taken his place, not in Aleksey’s heart—for that vast organ was well able to encompass both his savage loves—but in his master’s daily routines and, of course, in his bed. I utterly refused to even kiss Aleksey if Faelan was watching, so close were they in thought that it sometimes felt as if I kissed the wolf as well. But here he was. I wondered if he had died of a broken heart. I was so far from being a man of science now that I thought this quite possible. I wished it were true of men too. Faelan was doing exactly what I had planned on doing: lie where I had lain with Aleksey and let my own misery take me.
I stretched out my hand, and only then did I feel the rumble of menace. I jerked away and looked more closely. He was dead. He was stretched out, tongue protruding, eyes glassy and staring. I was angry now, for I had suffered enough shock and confusion. I put my hand to him again, and this time I saw the eyes move; they flicked to regard me. I jerked back once more, and he was as dead once more. I stood up and shouted at him. It must have been a very odd sight, a badly beaten, scarred man shouting at a dead wolf.
I moved toward the head of the bed, and his eyes followed me.
At that sight, my whole world tipped, just as the scaffold had beneath my feet—and I was falling.
I ran for the balcony and vaulted to the ground—a broken, defeated man no longer. My brain was telling me that Faelan had merely been drugged, that the same opiate had been used upon him as they’d used to subdue Aleksey at my execution. I had come upon him as he revived from insensibility. It was entirely logical and scientific, and my head accepted this explanation as I ran with Faelan at my side toward Xavier. But I ran through my pain, driven by the urgings of myheart. My heart refused to listen to this rationalization of Faelan’s appearance of death.It sang. It told me that Faelan was mimicking his master, his friend. It told me the wolf and Aleksey were in communionstill.
I was no longer a man of science who believed only what his senses told him was true, a man who needed the laws of nature to align and be in their allotted places, dictating his world. I had become entirely a man of faith, who had his prayers answered that day in the House of Lust.
I screamed at Johan, “He is still alive!” I grabbed the reins and expected him to mount as rapidly as I. I repeated my shout in case, being so grieved and defeated, he had not heard me and added yet one more time, “He’s alive, Johan! The blush upon his cheeks was not of death! I do not know why I did not see it then! I have seen much death, and he wasnot dead. Faelan told me!”
This last did not help my cause. At the time I thought it the perfect addition to my argument. Johan was holding my bridle, so I could not swing Xavier away.
“Calmdown, Nikolai.”
“Calm down! He’s still alive. Am I speaking German? Do you understand me? He isalive. They drugged him, and he’sstilldrugged. Itoldyou they had drugged him.He’s not dead!”
