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, myking. 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.
INTHEend, 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 thissyphilissickness 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.
