The Crimson Outlaw Page 6

  He was sawing through it with a knife. Loop upon loop of it fell out of the darkness on their heads, hitting and hitting and hitting them again. Vali flailed to tread water, to hold them both up, while he bent over the now silent form of Maria, taking the blows on his back. When it was done, the coils of rope sank around them. The weight almost pulled the child out of his arms before he managed to untie her, let it slip away. They’d be left to swim in the freezing water until the women came with their buckets at dawn. Or—if they could not swim that long—to drown.

  Vali kicked himself to the side of the well, where he could lean their weight partially against the wall. Shifting the child to sit astride his hip, he held her with one arm and with the other began to feel along the circumference of the well for loose bricks. If he could pry out one or two to make spaces for handholds . . .

  But it was a carefully made thing. He found no place to cling and only exhausted himself with the search. Maria’s breath scorched the side of his bruised throat, the only heat still in him, the only sign she still lived. He couldn’t even see her face, to guess at how badly she’d been injured by the fire, but while he could still hold the small body entrusted to him to save, he would not give in to ice or numbness or mere fatigue. Mihai had . . . not died . . . had taken a grievous blow in defence of these harmless people. That was how a boyar ought to behave. Vali could do no less for his little charge.

  The shaft of the well magnified noises from the world above. He could hear the horsemen mustering together, his father saying, “Then we go on to the next village, and make sure they return him when he stops to water there.”

  The rumble of hooves made the water shake around him. His legs felt like they were made of icicles, articulated with rusty wire. If the wire pulled, the bones would shatter. Cold pressed around his chest like a noose, making it hard to draw deep breaths. He thought it was good that he had stopped shivering, though it seemed odd he would be less cold now than when he had gone in the water. Perhaps his scaldingly hot tears were keeping him warm. They certainly seemed to be making him sleepy. It was all he could do to think drowsily, They’re gone then. The bad men are gone. So we’re safe at last, Mihai, Maria, and I. Time for bed.

  Voices again, far too loud, were keeping him awake. “Shut up!” he shouted. “We’re trying to sleep down here in the underworld. The devils are all behind the masks anyway!”

  Another pinhead at the top of the world, and Vali wondered why he was holding on to this dead child. Perhaps all three of them were dead together and might be buried in one grave. In which case he should probably stop moving.

  “Is there someone down there?”

  Was it too hard to answer? It was probably impolite not to. And besides, there was something important he had to remember. Oh, that was it! He drew the deepest breath he could fetch and coughed out, “Help!”

  Confused noises. They were talking again out there, softer but more urgent. Feet ran away and ran back, and Vali wanted to tell them to be quiet again but couldn’t get the shushing noises out of his mouth.

  And then there was a rumble and squeak directly overhead that seemed to go on forever. When it stopped, something burning landed on his face, making him lurch and miss his kick. He sank and the water closed over his head, but the hot thing—a hand—caught him by the collar and lifted him out.

  A brief, vivid glimpse of a ring of local lads. The walnut tree in the square bristled with propped up scythes as if it had grown steel branches. He had lost his jacket in the well; now they stripped him of everything else and swaddled him in their own clothes.

  The taste of tuica like snorting a nose full of paprika, and his throat and belly remembered what warmth was, while his heart remembered other things. “Mihai, is he . . .? And Maria . . .?”

  He struggled to his feet, and the shivers came back in the form of great spasms that clicked his teeth together and made him bite his own tongue. The lads pushed him onto a farm cart, still full of hay, and trundled him up to the church, and he couldn’t get a further word out for a long time, no matter the frustration or dread.

  But at the church he was carried into a fortress kitchen, where the wide hearth was a good four inches deep with red-gold embers, above which there hung on ancient chains a dozen copper kettles steaming, and a cauldron from which arose the savoury scent of tripe and garlic soup.

  They set Vali as close to the fire as seemed comfortable and packed him around with warmed stones beneath his borrowed furs. With much patience and a certain amount of laughter, the lads got some of the soup into him despite his shudders, followed it with another shot of tuica in a long glass of hot water. Gradually his mind cleared and the desperate tiredness ebbed a little. Warmth penetrated into his lungs from outside and in, and eased them into breathing deeper, loosening his jaw enough so he could ask again. “But are they alive? What happened to . . .?”

  Father Petru had sat proprietorially at the rough-sanded kitchen table throughout Vali’s treatment, eating his own bowl of soup with a plate of mamaliga to accompany it. Now he rose and said, “Can you walk, my son?”

  Vali’s legs no longer resembled an ice sculpture. When he tried to get up, though they trembled, they held him. Oddly, he now felt more cold than ever, so it was while clutching three coats closed around him with one hand and cuddling a hot rock with the other that he shambled after the old man into a room carpeted with straw pallets, where a dozen casualties lay motionless on makeshift beds.

  He barely had time to take this in when a woman’s voice shrieked something shrill, and a short head-scarfed form was hugging him tight around the waist, her arms unable to close around his many layers of coats. “You saved her! You saved her! Oh, thank God and his angels, thank you, sir. Thank you!”

  The woman untangled herself and tugged on his hand. He followed her over to the small form on the furthest bed, his own eyes welling with tears that still felt cold enough to fall as snowflakes. An iron, pot-bellied gypsy stove filled this end of the room with contented, catlike heat. Maria had warm stones at her belly and the small of her back, and was curled asleep between them.

  Vali reached out, shocked, disbelieving. A little blonde Saxon girl, and yes, there were ugly burns on the backs of her hands, her hair from ear to ear seared off and the skin beneath it puckered and scarlet, but most of her was no worse than the glowing colour of a bad sunburn, and her little eyes were intact, the smooth curve of her sleeping cheek whole and unharmed.

  “We think she must have wrapped herself in one of the rugs,” said Father Petru, looking on her sleeping form and Vali’s relief with the same tenderness. “There were fringes left in her hands from where she must have held it closed.”

  He smiled, reassuringly, as Vali’s tears spilled over, and the mother gave him a squeeze he could barely feel on his over-padded shoulder, struggling to get words past her sobs. “You got to her before it burned through. You saved her.”

  It was too much. Vali doubled over as though the words were punches, covered his wobbly chin and streaming eyes with both hands, utterly ashamed. “If I hadn’t been here, she wouldn’t have needed saving. It’s because of me that—”

  A weary voice interrupted him from the next bed. “Not everything’s about you.”

  “Mihai?” Joy lifted him—uncomplicated, unmixed joy. He came scrabbling to his feet, limping and shivering to where Nicolae the horse doctor had just finished stitching the exit wound in Mihai’s chest and was moving around to close the matching hole through his back. “I thought you were dead!”

  Many beatings in Vali’s past could have been averted if he had been the kind of self-reflective person to know the mysteries of his own heart, to be able to lay out reasons for his actions in clear and rational speech. His inability to know what he thought and why had often driven his father past clenched-toothed patience and straight into punches. So it didn’t occur to him now to wonder why the thought of a dead Mihai had hurt so much, or why he was so elated to find the man alive. This was wha
t he felt, so he went with it.

  “Straight through the muscle,” Nicolae grunted, concentrating on tying off his stitching. “Missed everything important. Poor aim. Any lower and he’d have got the heart.”

  “Eugen doesn’t have poor aim,” Vali exclaimed, automatically defensive, before his old loyalties tripped over his new and brought the guilt back stronger than the relief. “I’m sorry. The man who did this to you was my friend. All of them were, not friends exactly, but my people. My household. And my father, of course. I shouldn’t have tried to get away. Now I’ve brought all this upon you, and I would not have . . . If I’d known.”

  Mihai’s face was white as linen, so transparent the darkness of the hollows of his eyes showed beneath the skin. He lay on his uninjured side, accepting the stitches with the resignation of one who has done this many times before. And indeed that lovely bared chest was tracked with silver scars like the prints of birds’ feet on snow. He reached out and took Vali’s hand before the doctor could prick him harder for moving.

  “They say you can only get a snake out of a snake’s egg,” Mihai murmured, his voice tired but his sideways glance wry. “So, when I guessed who you were, I thought you would be a younger version of your father.” The whisper of a laugh. “I was wrong.”

  The big hand squeezed, and Vali’s cold fingers felt that bit closer to being warm. This was an apology, wasn’t it? This was, I’m sorry I attacked you in the forest. I wouldn’t do it now. It was very welcome.

  “And I wanted a hostage against him because, you should know, your father does things like this for sport. Your fault? No. You may have been the excuse this time, but if you had not come, it would have been something else. Late payment of taxes, or ‘Why have you not paid the new tithe?’ or ‘Your cattle have been grazing on my land,’ or ‘When will you stop harbouring bandits?’ It’s as much my fault as yours, Vali.”

  Well-meant words, but they were impossible to believe. These people had had to turn to a bandit for protection, and what had Vali done about that? Not cared enough even to know about it. You can only get a snake out of a snake’s egg.

  Mihai watched him with a gaze that seemed too fond for his new conscience. “What were you running from anyway?”

  Crina passed Vali another hot stone, waiting to take away the one that had cooled. By the stove in the corner, one of the gypsy musicians had finished retuning his fiddle and struck up a bouncing, cheerful air that brought resolute smiles to the listening invalids. Vali felt unworthy of them all.

  “My father married off my sister, Stela, to a man his own age, whom she’d never even seen before, and he was hideous. I tried to disrupt the wedding so she could get away, but she refused.” And this, something like this, must have been why. Because she could see that her actions had consequences not only for herself. Because she wouldn’t subject her people to this—she wasn’t as deeply, reprehensibly selfish as Vali was. “I see now why.”

  “What was his name, this man?”

  “Danylo Ionescu.”

  “Ah.” Mihai smiled as though he recognised an old companion, and Vali wondered for the first time what he had done before he was an outlaw, whether the lordly air was perhaps something left over from an earlier life. “He’s a good man. They do say that all men are handsome in the dark. She may find herself glad of it in time. And your father punished you until you would take no more?”

  “Yes.” Vali thought of Doina, down in the dungeon, of how calmly the villagers had taken the attack, how prepared they were, how little they seemed to blame him. “I’ve always known he was a bad father, but I took comfort from the fact that he was at least a good lord. I can’t— I don’t want to believe—”

  The music whispered into silence as the fiddler remarked—as though he were remarking on the weather, “He sent all the Ghurara people on his land to work in the salt mines. Three-quarters were dead within the year.” And the tune picked up again as if nothing of any moment had been said.

  “It’s true,” Maria’s mother spoke up from where she had lain down to cocoon her cold child in her embrace. “I had a cousin who lived in Santimbru. Your father accused the Vlach people there of plotting with the Wallachians. He had the town well poisoned. Thirty people died, and most of them children. But you’ve seen yourself—” She choked off as she looked down on her daughter, so narrowly saved.

  Vali hugged his warm stone tighter, lowering his head to allow his long black hair to veil his face—ashamed to be seen. Some of these things he had known. “I am putting down an insurrection in Santimbru,” he remembered, his father smiling as he leaned down from his horse to ruffle Vali’s hair. “These Vlachs think that because we share their blood they may openly question our rule and our alliances. They should know better—it is hard enough for us to hold land in this country without our own people bringing us shame.”

  “You’re going to talk to them? Let me come.”

  Wadim was always approachable, good-humoured, before these trips, a glad memory of the father Vali knew in his childhood, in those halcyon days before he stopped being able to do anything right. He had always hoped that if he were allowed to join his father on his small, peacekeeping expeditions, they could somehow get back to that state of happy trust when Wadim had been his hero and his idol. Before Vali had begun questioning and disobeying and asking why.

  “It’s only a little thing, son. It doesn’t deserve the honour of having both of us attend. Stay and train. I would rather not take you anywhere while you are still so weak in hand-to-hand combat. You are young still, and I do not wish to expose you to unnecessary risk.”

  Now it was clear that such a reconciliation would never have happened. If Vali had been allowed to go, it would only have led to him questioning his father more, accusing him more, losing him more as any kind of beloved mentor. That must have been why Wadim did not take him—because he cared for Vali’s opinion enough to avoid his criticism. Just not enough to face it and change.

  “I’ve walked about the villages all my life.” Vali felt resentful and stupid at the thought of how little anyone had ever trusted him, how blindly he had not noticed. “And no one spoke of any of this to me. No one ever complained. No one even hesitated to smile at me as though all was well.”

  “What good would it have done?” Mihai’s hand brushed his shoulder, almost as though he would have liked to shake Vali, were he not so weak. “Either you would have told your father, and those who complained would be punished, or you would have kept silent but had no power to make any change. Not a risk worth taking.”

  It was left to Father Petru to conclude, significantly, “You do not think we would consort with bandits, if we had a lord to truly protect us? We prefer the wolf to the dog only because we have been left shepherdless for so long.”

  Once Mihai’s chest had been bandaged firmly in boiled linen, and he had taken a few sips of soup and ale, Vali pleaded coldness as an excuse to lie down beside him. The night was far advanced now, and all the wounds treated, so the village women looking after the sick pinched out the candles and left them to sleep. The musician moved into the nave of the church, and Vali could hear the violin sing for a long time, made eerie and solemn-sweet by the high arched roof, as if man and God conversed in music.

  Vali spread his many sheepskins over the bed. Clad only in his shirt, he settled back against Mihai’s chest. The touch of him made Mihai shiver all over, then reach up his good hand to card his fingers through Vali’s hair in a gesture, like the kiss, whose unexpected tenderness seemed to change everything between them. Vali still wanted to be held down and half throttled and split apart by Mihai’s big prick. But it was a want for the future. Right now he was lapped in contentment, simply from being in the same bed with Mihai, one strong arm around him and the sigh of breath on his shoulder.

  As he waited to warm up to a temperature at which he could sleep, he felt peace, bliss, like solid things, spread out from all the places where his skin touched Mihai’s. He had dreamed a l
ot of sex, but never of this strange intimacy, innocent and cradling as the womb.

  “Nothing like what I expected,” Mihai repeated softly against the top of his head and slid that caressing hand down Vali’s chest until Vali could catch it again in his own. He would have laughed to scorn had anyone ever told him he might consider falling asleep while holding a man’s hand one of the happiest things life could offer, but he would have been wrong.

  Sunlight was pouring through the inner courtyard windows of the room when he awoke, sweltering, sweating all over from too much heat, his cheeks burning and his mouth dry. From the kitchen came the sound of the whole village gathered to cook and eat together—familiar jokes told in voices to which the resilience was returning. Easy-sounding laughter and quarrelling, and a rattle and clash of plates.

  Vali shoved the many sheepskins off the bed and lay luxuriating in the cool for a few moments before he realised that the biggest source of heat in the bed was Mihai. All the points of contact that had been a comfort the night before were now almost burning hot. The man had a high temperature when healthy, but this was like being pressed against a stove. Sitting up swiftly, Vali threw back the rest of the sheets and saw that Mihai’s whey-pale skin was now crimson as blood. He looked more burned than Maria, and his eyes were half-slitted—a stripe of pearly white showing between the lids as he muttered half-formed words to himself in a breathless wheeze.

  When Vali burst into the kitchen in panic, he received little sympathy.

  “It’s the wound fever.” Nicolae did not look up from his breakfast of soft eggs and coffee. He had the air of a man who felt he’d done enough and was now owed a rest. “It’s fine. Put the covers back on him and let it burn itself out. God willing, he will come through it well enough.”

  “And if God isn’t willing?”

  “Then there’s nothing you or I can do.”

  Maria was up, looking like some newly hatched demon spawn, slathered all over as she was with green salve. At her mother’s urging she came over to hug Vali, then ran back behind her mother’s legs and shyly observed him from there, holding on to her mother’s skirts with a bandaged hand. He wiggled his fingers at her in greeting, and smiled when she smiled, but was glad to be able to turn back to the matter of Mihai at once.