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 hitsolidwater, 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 becameenraged.
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.
