The Crimson Outlaw Read online

  “Does who do what?”

  Ionescu held out the cake and the wine for Vali to take. As much as Vali didn’t want to receive anything from the cause of all his woe, as much as his victim mocked him now with this kindness, he had not managed to choke down breakfast and by now he was very hungry. Accept a gesture of peace, or—for he had no doubt he would get nothing else today—go to bed ravenous?

  The older man waited out his thought process patiently and smiled when he took the food. “Does your father often hit you?”

  What business was it of his? Vali found himself overcome by a kind of furious embarrassment. “I don’t often let him catch me. But don’t they say ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’? If he disciplines us, it is for our own good.”

  Ionescu’s expression grew threatening, his eye like a storm cloud. Vali stepped as far away as he could without choking himself, convinced the wildest stories were true—that Ionescu had lost his arm and half his face by reaching down a dragon’s throat while it flamed him to strangle it from the inside.

  “Us? He has done this to your sister too?”

  “Sometimes.” Vali drained the cup and let it drop. When he had swallowed the cake too, he curled both hands around the collar and took some of his weight on his arms instead. It made shrugging tricky. “But discipline is—”

  “Judging from that fiasco, I don’t think anyone in your family knows what discipline is.” Ionescu sneered—it was not a pretty sight on that scarred face. “I came here to drink with the man who sacrificed his own well-being for my bride’s happiness. I know that to you young things I must not seem like much of a catch. But now I find you tried to keep her in a place where she is ill-treated? Because if she goes, you will be alone? I thought you were a man, but I see you are just a boy after all.”

  Vali turned his face to the wall. He wasn’t upset, and he wasn’t on the verge of tears. He didn’t care about Ionescu’s opinion. He was just closing his eyes because it calmed the throb behind them, and it shut off the nauseating sight of all those gorgeously dressed idiots, filling up the flower-bedecked main hall beyond him, braying with laughter, tossing back drink and staggering. Also it meant he couldn’t see his father. He could allow himself to forget, for a while, that this wasn’t over yet.

  “Oh, Vali.” Stela’s voice. Her sky-blue dress made her cheeks look sallow. Her eyes were still red, but they were dry now, and there was a new calmness about her, as if she were glad to leave choice behind and settle down with endurance. “I was never going to run. Thank you for trying to save me, but I wish you had not tried. The last thing I wanted for my wedding present was to see you in pain.”

  So apparently it wasn’t enough to simply fail to get her away; he’d actively made it worse for her. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said and smiled the day’s first smile. “You were there for me as I’ve always known you would be. And this is not good-bye for us. I’m not going for a quite a while, and even when I do, I won’t be far away. You’ll visit and so will I.” Her fingers curled over his, under the thick iron that pressed on his collarbones. “I’ll always be there for you, too.”

  But even before the night was over, this proved to be a lie. Stela and her new husband had barely retired to the room prepared for them before Wadim was pushing all the other guests out.

  He shut the doors to the Great Hall, and there, amidst the detritus of feasting—the spilled carcass of a roast pig, arrangements of fruit now lopsided from the grazing of indiscriminate eaters, sticky pools of strongly hopped beer, bitter to the nose, discarded hairpins and pipes and a sugar diorama of siege warfare with gold leaf flags—he snapped his belt between his fists, and set the buckle flying at Vali’s ribs.

  Vali tried to catch it, got the heavy metal buckle on the back of his hand. The tongue of it punched a hole in the web between his fingers. When the buckle flew a second time, he flinched away, and it landed on his ribs with a kick like a horse. This was something different for his father. A half-dozen punches, a few kicks, this was normal. Public humiliation was normal. Being confined to his room without food for a week was normal—all of it accompanied by incessant lecturing. But this—this silent violence, his father’s face set and not even angry, this was . . .

  He had twisted, trying to get out of the way. All that meant was the buckle hit him on the buttocks, three times. But that wasn’t so bad. He got his shocked flutter of breathing under control, blinked away the tears that were clouding his eyes, and tried to provoke a tirade of words, a sign of reason. “Father, I was doing it for Stela. He’s not worthy of her. You must know that; she’s your daughter, she’s worth more—argh!”

  He had swung back, still clinging on with both hands to the collar. Every time a blow landed, every time he recoiled, its hard iron was driven into his throat. The flesh was growing tender, bruised, gathering hot red grazes on top and aching bones beneath, going from painful to unbearable.

  As he hung on, trying to protect his neck, the buckle slapped into his belly, drove up under his sternum, hammered the breath out of his lungs and squeezed every particle of space out of his body. Instinctively, he bowed forwards over it, choking himself on the collar. It felt like he was trying to saw his own head off. Breathing was impossible, his throat closed, his lungs glued together. He opened his mouth wide, looked up at his father, imploring, shocked, appealing silently for help from one whom he still trusted, deep down, not to betray him, not to be too harsh, not to push beyond what he could bear.

  Father!

  But his father was as silent and unwavering as an automaton. The next strike was to his throat, bursting against the bruises. Pain whited out the world and any awareness of who he was for long, long seconds. When he next knew joined-up time, his knees had buckled and he was clawing at the collar, still unable to breathe, still jangling and shattering with panic and disbelief.

  His father was going to kill him. Impossible. Unthinkable. But he still couldn’t breathe, his lungs burning, his heart labouring, and his legs still refusing to stand up.

  Father, please!

  The far door partially opened. A woman he didn’t know looked inside. Her hat was laced with pearls twelve rows deep and they each looked like a little moon. A woman with the moon on her hat was looking at him, and he tried to free his voice, get breath to call, “Help me please!” But it had been too long. His body had forgotten what to do with air. Maybe . . . maybe he had died before, and this was him back from the dead, trying to clamber back into his living family.

  That would explain it all. His father could do this to a dead son who wouldn’t lie down, someone who had peeked out from his grave and thought life was sweeter and tried to take it back. If he was trespassing out of his tomb, it was only his father’s duty to put him back in it.

  That must be it indeed. The pain had blurred into a volcanic cloud, a settle of hot ash all over him and he had time to think it was quite right to bury the revenant and stake it down with spindles to make sure it never came back. He was dying, but it was all right—the second time hardly counted, after all.

  He was almost content by the time the blackness came down.

  Vali woke reluctantly. His bed was hard, his neck agonising. His head hurt so badly he thought he would puke, and yet there was none of the lingering taste of alcohol on his breath that would have told him he had simply had a very good night.

  The smell was of the deep earth, acrid, never-endingly wet, laced with a thread of shit scent that would never have been tolerated in his bedroom. “Gn!” he croaked, and his voice drew a plane along the inner muscles of his throat, shaved off long strips. Not even that prevented him from feeling the hunger. He could have drunk the moat and eaten all the buffalo that grazed along the riverbank below the castle. How long had his stomach been growling like an angry dog?

  But the thought of dogs brought his situation home to him at last. All the bruises throbbed and stung as though greeting his memories with enthusiasm. They were . . . he took a menta
l inventory . . . they were not so bad, really. The beating had not been as bad as it had seemed. If he had only kept his head, kept his weight off his neck, he could have endured it like a man.

  Very briefly, he was ashamed of his lack of fortitude, but that shame was shouldered out by shock when he opened his eyes. He lay on a stone floor. A few handfuls of rotten straw barely lifted him out of the puddles, and more water was cascading through the grate overhead. Just beyond his arm’s reach, a hole in the ceiling, barred with iron, opened into one of the courtyards. Sky above him, still grey and drizzling rain, provided a dim light by which he could see the bars on every side.

  He was in the dungeon. In the corridor of cells where prisoners awaited judgement before being released to their trial, and to an instant punishment—a fine, or branding, or the loss of a hand, or hanging. He was, thank God, not in one of the oubliettes. There, deep underground, would have been no light, nor water, nor a view through the bars.

  Since his father had held petty court only the day before the wedding, the cells beyond his to the left were empty. The corridor that led to freedom was featureless—a long retreat of finely fitted stone. But in the cell to his right, in the dimmest spot, something moved on the floor. Something undulated like a caterpillar and breathed in two uneven panting voices.

  Vali sat up, the world swinging dizzily around him. A bucket by the door! He lurched over and reached it before he was sick. The flow of acid up his abused throat was a pain unlike anything he had ever felt before, and he sat huddled into himself for many moments after it was done, weeping, wiping his streaming nose, begrudging the loss of liquid.

  A jug, wedged by the bars, contained dirty water. He drank it anyway in gulps, and felt a little better afterwards. Only hungry, terribly hungry.

  From here he could see better into the other cell. The thing on the floor had been covered by a rough blanket, which had now slipped aside, showing him a man’s back and buttocks, trousers round his ankles, shirt around his armpits, vigorously fucking into some person all but hidden by his bulk. A thin bare leg was bent around his hip, an arm and hand lay as if severed, motionless in the inch-deep water of the cell floor.

  Vali was in pain, and afraid, but he was also young, full of curiosity and inexperience and longing. His higher thoughts told him he should be repulsed at this dirty little jailbird copulation, but when the person below—he thought it was a woman—cried out in something that could have been pleasure, his stomach twisted and his mouth fell open. The man’s back fascinated him, pale and strong and working, with that delicious dip just before the swell of the arse. And how smooth, how yielding, those buttocks. The hair on the man’s thighs ended in a straight line just below the groin, so it was as if he were wearing a tiny tight pair of skin-coloured shorts that looked softer than the skin elsewhere.

  A bundle beyond the beast with two backs straightened up, the movement catching Vali’s eye, startling him out of carnal thoughts. Such a small thing. Was it a dog? A dwarf? It caught his gaze with a too wide gleam of eyes, came closer, out into the light, and embarrassment and shock wilted his desire as he saw it was a child, three, perhaps four years of age.

  A little boy, who came and grasped the bars and pushed his face between them—and surely children should be plumper cheeked than that; this child was all sticks and eyes—to look at Vali with innocent curiosity.

  The woman must be his mother, Vali realised, and his nascent arousal twisted swiftly into shame. The child had been sitting quiet, watching his mother copulate, because there was nowhere he could go without at least hearing it.

  The man finished. He got up, fixed his clothes, stood looking down for a moment at the still-sprawled form of his bedmate, and if the child was thin, she was a memento mori, all the knobs of her bones showing through her hips and her knees, the light and dark shadows of her ribs. Pulling her shift down wearily, she held out a hand, and after the man had unlocked the cell door and gone through, locking it again behind him, he passed her a heel of bread, a little smaller than his fist.

  The jailer. Vali saw the whole sordid transaction in a flash as the man walked whistling down the corridor and out of sight. Not a bad-looking man, clean-shaven, clean-washed, his yellow hair cut short, and an air of Saxon industriousness about him.

  “I’m not a whore.” The woman had righted her clothes while he was looking away, had wound the blanket around her waist—it was her skirt—and shrugged on a brown woollen waistcoat with green trim. And indeed she didn’t look like one—she looked like a peasant from Lueta village, some honest ploughman’s daughter. “But how else am I to feed the child?”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “My name is Doina, and I am not ashamed. You may look at me with horror, but I am a mother, and I will do anything within my power to protect Cristian. To protect my son.”

  She enfolded the boy in her arms and laid her cheek on the top of his head, while he held his bread in both hands and ate it bite by bite with hard-earned patience.

  “I don’t look at you with horror,” Vali insisted, for they made an almost holy picture there—emaciated mother and child, oddly serene in this moment of plenty, like what could have happened to Mary and Jesus, had Joseph chosen to turn them out.

  It made him ashamed. Because the truth was he was hungry himself, and he had had dreams just like this. Daydreams, lounging on his bed when training and studying were over and he was free to let his mind wander: He would go to war, and after fighting like a hero, he would be overwhelmed and captured, thrown into prison.

  In his mind it had been a Turkish jail, warmer and dryer than this, and he had held out through beating, starvation, and torture until he had astonished his captors with his endurance. But one night when he could scarcely move, when he was at death’s door, the jailor had come to him. A big man, his arms gnarled with muscle, his thighs like trees. His skin brown as oak, his eyes black under black brows. And he had pinned Vali’s still-defiant fists above his head in one great hand, stripped him with the other—slowly, looking and touching every inch, ignoring Vali’s fervent protests all the way.

  Then he would turn onto his stomach and think of being spread and speared, his struggles turning into surrender and then wanton enjoyment as he stroked himself, pretending it was a bigger, rougher hand that clasped him, that there were teeth biting down on the meat of his shoulder, and that he was helpless, helpless to stop any of it.

  Afterwards he would be rescued. There would be food and drink and comfort, and they would tell him how brave he’d been to hold out for so long, to come back so unbroken. He would fall asleep content that he had got away with it one more time.

  He didn’t know if he’d ever dare have that dream again now. Reality quite took the allure away.

  “It’s a sacrifice and a sacred duty. I understand that. But you don’t have family to bring you food?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, dry-eyed only because her tears had run out. “The lord Wadim heard our village was harbouring outlaws. He rode there with his men and set a fire in the houses. My husband tried to fight back and was ridden down. Then Cristian, seeing his tata hurt, threw an apple. It hit Wadim in the ankle and hurt him, I think, because he snatched Cristian up and brought him here. I ran after him at once and was allowed to join him in his cell.”

  She rocked them back and forth, her eyes sliding shut in the lethargy of starvation. “Surely if my father had lived he would have come asking for me. Surely my mother would have brought me food, if she knew. I thought there would be a trial and a judgement and then we would be released, but it seems we’re just forgotten here. Here is where he’ll grow up, seeing the sun through a rusty grill, never with a playmate or a school or land or a lover of his own.”

  “My father did this to you for a child’s tantrum?” Vali was appalled. Yes, his father had a streak of cruelty—he’d known that all his life. Wadim was not the best of fathers, but Vali had always believed he was a good lord, a boyar of renown and glory.

>   “He’s your father?” She hunched close around Cristian, shuffled them both away from the bars, where Vali could no longer reach out and touch them. “I’m sorry, my lord. I shouldn’t have spoken.”

  “No. No, Doina, wait. Don’t be afraid.” He held out a hand, trying to reassure. “Look at me—you can see my father and I don’t get along. I’m in here too, after all. We’re in the same boat, you and I.”

  But he had barely had time to hear his own words, to think what they might mean, before she was laughing. “Your father will not forget you. You in your mink and your sable with sapphires around your cuffs. I could eat for a year for the price of one of those, and surely your father will return in a week so that you can beg his forgiveness and be taken back, properly humbled and thankful.”

  He had no doubt she was right. A vivid recollection came over him of falling down the secret stairs behind the library when he was five. Lying huddled in the dust, screaming because his leg was bent in half at the shin and the pain was a kingdom of spears. Wadim had come running then, faster than all his men, and picked him up with capable hands, strong and soothing. Though he had said something along the lines of “None of that shrieking, my son, you are braver than that,” the tone of voice had made it into a caress. He had not let go of Vali’s hand until the leg was set and splinted, the memory now a laudanum haze punctuated by his father’s dark, reassuring solidity.

  They had become estranged since those days, age and independent thought driving a wedge of suspicion and silence between them. Vali was not quite sure why, and sometimes he thought his father didn’t know either. Perhaps the beatings and the baffled fury were as much Wadim’s anger at the loss of their closeness as they were anger at any specific thing Vali had done wrong.

  He had no memories of his mother, who had died of influenza when Vali was two, but he had often wished for someone calm, who loved them both, who could quietly explain each of them to the other in a way they could both understand. In the absence of such a person, Vali was sure that underneath it all his father loved him. And still, beneath Vali’s anger and resentment, he knew he loved Wadim in return.