IWOKEearly the next morning and murmured to Aleksey that I was going hunting. He grunted, pulled his coat over his head, and went back to sleep.
If he wondered why I was wet when I returned, or why I had caught no game, he did not have opportunity to question it. He had been still asleep and had needed waking up, and I did not do this gently or prepare him in any way.
It was my turn, after all.
We stayed there a week, and I was similarly wet every morning, and he similarly woken when I returned to our tent.
WEWERE,therefore, in some ways lighter, despite good hunting, upon our return, but in other ways heavier. Quite a bit heavier. Freedom seemed to appreciate being a packhorse now, as if he comprehended the import of what he carried.
I did not tell Aleksey that I had taken the weight of a small child in gold from the pool alongside the river. He was a scrupulous man, reared in the highest traditions of honor and observance of correct ownership and title.
I say finders keepers.
The dead had no need of it, and it amused me no end as we rode home through the woods that not only was I sleeping with a king, I was now possibly the wealthiest man in the New World.
Life is strange, is it not?
But levity aside, we are changed. I cannot deny that. I hope the roar in my ears will fade, the tremor of my hand cease. They are both slightly better than when I first got home.
We are different in other ways, as well.
We are not just the two of us now.
Of course, we have not had a physical metamorphism—one of us becoming female, as we once joked about in our tent whilst trying to overcome the grief of Faelan’s passing. As I knew he would, upon our return, Aleksey went straight to the colony to enquire of the puppy the demon child had tortured.
It was well. I did not sayI told you soto Aleksey, as he tended to hit me when I said things like this.
The dog had been heard crying. It had been discovered; the child had attempted to hide it out of earshot of the colony but had not had time to do the job very efficiently. The creature had been taken in by the officers of the colony, and thus it was a very easy job for Aleksey to extract it and bring it home. I think it was about eight weeks old when it came to us—far too young to be away from its mother, and a shaky, pathetic thing it was, if you ask me.
It improved when I told Aleksey that it must sleep at the foot of our bed, for I was not going to get up in the night to check on it tied outside.
By the time it had wormed its way up to lie upside down between us, squeezed between our warmth, I think it resembled a proper dog quite nicely.
Aleksey said she was a wolfhound. I did get hit for my response to that absurd claim. I will grant that it was more leg than dog and had eyes so big and beautifully colored that it appeared to be looking out of orbs of purest amber.
Not that I gave it much consideration, you understand.
Aleksey wanted to know what I thought about names—what I pictured when I looked at her. He did not like my suggestions: Vomit, Flea, and Shitpile.
He said he was going to call her Grace after my mother. After all, he pointed out, had not she given me to him and was thus greatly in his favor? So, Grace it was. Did I overcome some more wiggling little worms of pain when I heard this name now so frequently and in such a pleasant way? Of course I did. I no longer heard my father screaming her name as he died in agony, watching her so degraded. Now I heardGraceand looked to find the ridiculous thing on legs that Aleksey doted upon, for, as he said, did not wolfhounds seek out and find wolves, and would not, therefore, Grace lead us one day to Faelan in the great forest where he was waiting for us?
I said we had both been changed by our experiences.
I agreed with him. Grace would.
I must end now.
I am being called.
Have I set it all down now so it makes sense in my own mind? I am not sure. I said it was inconceivable that the laws of nature could be overcome by the world of the spirit and that by setting down this account I would prove that to myself once more.
But I cannot explain how Faelan’s body departed us or why the blueberries were left in its place.
I think I can explain the appearance of the devil in front of the poor colonists and his subsequent power over them. All men who come to this land seem overly… preoccupied… with God and how they are to live their lives obedient to him. I think they would do better to listen to their hearts, to enjoy their bodies and this land we have care for while we are here on earth. But they snivel and worry and punish themselves and thus leave their hearts vulnerable to the likes of the priest who fornicated and sinned and caught a disfiguring disease. And from that weakness, all horror descended upon us. All his madness manifested itself in that journey we took into his darkness.
Where Mary came from I do not know. How she came to be as she was will also remain a mystery to me. But… ah, this is hard to admit. What would my sister have been had she survived and grown to womanhood with the Powponi? If she had been traded away to another tribe as many captives were? Would she, degraded, defiled, brutalized, have become as Mary did? I will believe that she would not. She was hope and celebration, and I choose to believe that she would have remained so.
And the child. Evil men do not give birth to evil children—I had said this to Aleksey. But from whence, then, does evil come? Again, I do not know, but sometimes when I am lying entangled with Aleksey in the quiet hours of the night, I wonder about a man’s soul and whether if it were made tangible, someone like Aleksey would have it as a gem inside his body: shining so bright that even trapped inside, its rays spread out and illuminate. The child’s would be a small, dark kernel of black. Not even coal—for can coal not be lit?—but something truly dead within him.
