“Oh goodness, just like the colony! Why did you not say so at first? I wish they could hear this back at the colonel’s house. They laughed at my—anyway. Go on. You do have fun stories. So, where were they? I know, they went swimming, and it was very cold, and they all drowned…?”
“I do not remember, exactly, but there were over a hundred in the Black Crow nation—women, old people, and babies too—so a jolly swimming excursion is not all that likely, is it? And we would have then found their bodies.” I pursed my lips, frowning, staring at the flames. I thought this coincidence of his story of the colony and my memory very odd, but wanted Aleksey to be the one to wonder and speculate about it, as I knew he would.
“So, where were they? What had happened to them? They must have told you where they had been.”
I think he missed the point. “They never were discovered. That is the point. The village was empty, as if they had been plucked from the earth, and no trace of them was ever found again.”
“What?” He was aghast. He had seemed to like speculating about his little mystery at the outpost, but clearly he expected to find a perfectly rational explanation. This did not please him as much. “What did everyone say—the Powponi? When they found this place? Did you release the dogs and take them with you?”
I smiled. “Yes, Aleksey, we saved the dogs and took the horses, although we did not touch the blankets and tools or anything else.” I stared morosely into the fire for a while. I was on tricky ground now and didn’t want to stray into the territory of things I did not want to speak of. “No one talked about it. It was accepted as a part of the world—real—but I think they assigned it more to the unreal world with which we communed only in dreams.” Then I conceded, “But I did not understand this way of thinking at all and wanted to know why the place was deserted, where everyone had gone. I had particularly wanted to meet up with some of the boys I had known the previous—”
“Seriously. You are going to sit there and tell me another story of how you could lie down in plain sight with boys and men and—”
“I was nine, Aleksey, or thereabouts. I wanted to gofishingwith them.”
“Oh. Well, all right, then. I will allow you to have a previous lifefishing. So what did you do?”
“I started to look for them.” I rubbed my nose, remembering more than I wanted to. “Anyway, I was retrieved, beaten, and then we moved on.”
“Oh. That is a bit disappointing.” He stared into the fire, poking it with a stick and then watching its tip flare to life. “But in another way it is excellent, is it not? Now you can do it properly and find the missing—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Niko! You are so dumb sometimes! I’ve told you—the outpost is deserted, so we are raising a party to go there and find everyone. We are mounting a rescue! I told you this!”
I didn’t argue with him; I began to walk back to the cabin.
There was only one thing I was planning to raise, and it wasn’t for anyone else’s relief.
I could feel the waves of his fury washing over me. I suppose, being a king, he just could not tolerate the idea that someone would blithely walk away from him when he was speaking.
The light had fallen now, and it was icy—too bitter for me to sit out in lake-damp clothes and with only a small cooking fire. I still did not like being cold.
I stoked up the fire in our small cabin, although it was already quite warm. I was still hungry, but there was nothing to eat. Aleksey came in. He would either badger me or sulk, neither of which I was looking forward to. He surprised me, therefore, by asking quite rationally, “What do you think happened to the missing tribe? You must have thought about it, even if no one would talk about it.”
I sat down in front of the flames, picking up a stick to poke it idly, just as he had been doing earlier, and he sat close, our knees touching. His shirt was as damp as mine, and I pulled a little piece of the fabric toward me, rubbing it between my fingers. “I wondered at first if they had been raided and taken for slaves—that was very common amongst the people. We had many slaves, but they always died easily and had to be replaced.”
“You also have some truly horrible stories, Niko.”
“Oh, and you did not have slaves, I suppose?”
“No! We most certainly did not!”
“And yet you let your old people starve on the streets if they had no family to care for them when in their dotage? Our elders were treasured and respected, so do not judge me.”
“I’m not…. For God’s sake. So… raided?”
I wrinkled my nose. I knew I’d been unreasonable, but something was telling me the plan to relieve the outpost was not forgotten by any means; he had only gotten stealthier in his ways of winning my compliance. “Yes, but there were no signs of a struggle at all, and I also concluded that looters would have taken the horses at least. And the encampment was full of very valuable items—surely they would have taken them too?”
“Gold! Jewels?”
“Oh yes, Aleksey, of course. Wonderful artworks too, and I believe a piano.”
“Huh. It must have been hard to hang the paintings on the tepees. They would not be… straight.…”
“No, the slaves were employed to stand there all day and night, holding them just so…. I meant knives, axes, and some very fine bows. They had all been left as if the owners had merely stepped into the forest to relieve themselves for a moment.”
“Perhaps they had. A mass tribal shit?”
