He turned to me, astonishment on his face. “He has already told you that I am not! He has told you, yes? He told me that he had told you!”
I thought this confusing rush of words over for a moment. “Judas’s bollocks.”
He chuckled. “I like it when you curse like that.”
“Then you are a very bad boy, for it is a sign of a dissolute life spent amongst bad men.”
“Tell me, please, Niko. When you… lashed out like that, you put me in mind of a dog I found once at the castle gate. I went to pet it and it bit me. The guard said he had been kicked one time too many, and that no act of kindness now to him was tolerated.”
I turned once more so we were face to face. I stared into those beguiling eyes. I bit my lip, thinking. “I have never told anyone. It is hard to speak of.”
“I am not anyone. I’m me. Tell me.”
I smiled, and something happened between us with that smile: warmth, a connection. He took my hand, idly playing with my fingers, watching them rather than me, and it gave me the space I needed to speak. “I lived with the Powponi for fourteen years, although I had no way to gauge this at the time. I worked it out later from records of my birth, which I found in my old parish in England. I was twenty and—”
“Three years younger than I.”
“Yes. Three years younger than you. Very young and immature, therefore. There were many colonies establishing on the seaboard. Some we had managed to dissuade from settling—”
“Dissuade?”
I sighed. “We massacred them. Satisfied?”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“But then they were too many. Like a swarm, we could not fight it. We adapted and began to trade with them. I met a man.” I stopped and saw him once more in my mind: James Harcourt. This was not going to be easy. I decided to shorten the tale. “He liked me, saw what I was—”
“A white captive?”
“No, Aleksey, not that. Use your head. He wanted me to return to England with him when he sailed. I forgot to say that he was the first mate on a whaler. They had enjoyed a very successful voyage and were returning to Plymouth. I wanted”—him—“to see the world. I accompanied him. He was not—”
“Niko.”
“What?”
“Just tell me. Close your eyes and just say it.”
“You want to know? All right, I will tell you. As soon as we left sight of land, he took me, and when he had done with me many days later, he sold me to his crewmates at excellent rates whenever he could make a sale. It was a very long voyage back to England. So there you are. That is why I do not travel by ship, and that is why I—” I flung myself onto my back, angry, suffering again the pain of not only the physical horror I’d endured, but memory of the emotional pain as well. Until that voyage, I had never allowed another man inside my body. My sense of always being an outsider with the Powponi, always having to prove myself the strongest, the fastest, the most savage, had also led me to see being taken as womanly, proof I was not the warrior I wanted to be. James Harcourt and his crew not only hurt my body, they destroyed my hard-won sense of myself.
I had fallen in love and thought that love would be my whole world.
Aleksey didn’t say anything for a long time. When he did, he put a hand gently to my face and turned it so I was forced to look at him. “I was only a boy when I found that dog. I believed the guard and was angry about my arm—where it bit me. I avoided him from then on. Now that I am a man, I would return to him day after day until he did trust me.” He leaned over and clumsily kissed me, just missing my mouth. He shifted position, and then his kiss was perfect. He must have tasted the salt upon my cheeks, because he kissed my eyes.
I wanted his mouth on mine once more and showed him so by turning and seizing him, forcing him back. He opened his mouth first, his tongue seeking mine. The touch was charged when it came, that spark once more igniting the fire that lay below. I shifted over onto his bunk, lying heavy upon him, our kisses becoming almost painful in their intensity. I could feel the urgent arousal of a very young man against me. It felt as if I were rubbing up against the hilt of his sword, so solid and hard had our kisses made him. I was close to disgrace. I needed to stop or go to places that were far beyond his understanding as yet. This was his first real kiss with a man. I knew it would be overwhelming for him. I began to soften the intensity. Open mouth with tongues engaged turned to soft kisses around his lips, but he was having none of it. He pulled me closer, wriggling beneath me, all mouth and tongue again. I smiled into the kisses but murmured, “Aleksey… enough. Be calm or… you will undo me.”
“I want you to spill upon me.”
I gave him a stern look. “That is hardly fit for a prince or a general to think or say.”
“I am neither. I am your servant, Niko, or have you forgot?” He slid his hand between us and began unfastening my breeches. “Let me see you.”
I kissed him some more, mainly to distract him so I could think. I had wanted this for so many months; why was I hesitating now? I had no doubt that I could take him. He was urgent, young, unthinking in his passion. As I had once been. But this time and place was not what I wanted or needed. This thing between us was a distraction now. He had no idea of the impact of what he was asking. He grew impatient and pushed me off onto my own cot so he could use both hands on my laces, and very soon he had his reward. His eyes opened wide at the sight of me, exposed, swollen, leaking. My eyes closed. I was lost to the sensation of his hands upon me—to the thought that his fingers touched me there. He didn’t need any skill or experience for what he achieved then. I would have released from his mere presence alone. I cried out as I shot high and long. I heard his soft moan of pleasure at the sight, but when I went to release him, I discovered it had been more than just pleasure from my stream.
He buried his face, embarrassed, into my chest. “I’m sorry. I was too eager.”
I chuckled. These things happened. I made to reassure him so, but he was already asleep.
I planned to stay awake to not waste this first night of having such incredible delight. He lay with his head upon my chest, my fingers in his hair, and I felt a lightness of heart that had eluded me since childhood. Perhaps wise men are right: a problem shared is one halved. I had never told anyone of that fateful voyage to England. I had not yet told Aleksey the full horror and possibly never would, but on that bed, with my fingers in his hair, I could almost recall the creaking of wood without an instant surge of sickness and dizziness, as if a deck rolled beneath me as I lay humiliated and in pain. I fell asleep, still deep in the bowels of the ship in my mind, and woke once to the familiar nightmare, but this time I did not call out or wake my sleeping companion, which was good. I enjoyed this novelty of waking with another in the middle of the night and pitied anyone who took such things for granted: the comfort of the warmth, the sense of security and peace. It was a great novelty to me and all the more precious for that. I was tempted to wake my sleeping general and see what commands I could coax from him, but we were in a place of considerable danger should we be discovered, not only enemy spies, but fornicators of the worst kind. You can only be put to death once, of course, but I had no intention of that happening now to either Aleksey or me.
I woke again to the familiar sounds of an encampment of men stirring. Aleksey was waking too. We were both in that half moment between sleep and full consciousness when thoughts gather and memories return. Ours returned to us at the same time. My caution of the night was now overcome by my familiar morning urgency. With a groan of pleasure, our mouths came together, hands sought and fumbled. I was determined this morning to see him, for I had not yet and very much desired to. When released from his breeches, his cock was indeed a thing of wonder. All men take a great interest and pride in their cocks. You can see proof of this in the very youngest of our gender, strutting around and hoping to be admired before we are even aware of purpose. I have never met a woman, whore or otherwise, who gives a man as much admiration of
his cock as he thinks it merits. This was the first time Aleksey had ever genuinely had his cock admired as it truly deserved. It was, as I have said, a thing of incredible beauty: long, pale until the tip, where it mushroomed out to a dark flushed pink, betraying his excitement. He had released me too. A man cannot fake interest or excitement or arousal. My intense pleasure at our activity was as evident as his. In one shift of my hips, I had us together in my hand. He did not speak but watched, then arched, and it was over. It had such great novelty attached to the act that we were in awe of what we did, as if we were the first men to wake together on a bed and to do such a thing.
We returned to kissing, but we had no time. It was incredibly frustrating to hear the increasing sounds of decampment. I had a momentary image of our tent being left isolated on an empty, ravaged field and us left kissing within. It would not do. Aleksey was the one to ease us apart, his hand coming sticky off our cocks, his lips off mine to whisper, “We must stop.”
I was glad he was still himself: general and prince. Anything else would have been false, and I had been played false before. I nodded, and we were all business: summoning hot water and attempting to wash away the sin of the night. This was not easy, as Aleksey’s breeches were still damp from his spills and my shirt was soaked, but I knew we would not be the only men so, only that our ruin had a uniquely shared provenance. I do not claim that we were entirely professional or behaved merely as friends as we had on the long march sharing a tent in his army. We enjoyed a great deal of horseplay with the water.
It began innocently enough as I lathered my hands, took my cock, and began to soap it. It was in that place somewhere between hard and entirely soft, just standing proud of my thighs but not ready for action.
Aleksey stood close and, keeping my gaze with his piercing green eyes, murmured coyly, “That is my job, Master.”
There was more to wash after that.
He grasped my stiff prick and continued the soaping, but slower now, and with different intent than I. He could not keep my gaze but let his greedy eyes travel down to watch the slick pinkness appearing and disappearing in his tight fist. He gave a little gasp. I thought he would stop and could not have tolerated the cessation of pleasure, for my whole body was bowed and taut and urgent now for relief. But he’d only paused to apply a finger to the very tip of my cock, to enter my foreskin and swirl around there as he must do to his own, and I came upon his finger and his hand, and my release mingled with the soap and water and required us to start again.
He actually began to wash me properly, but I caught at his wrist playfully. “You are a naughty servant. You should be of good, upstanding character….”
He caught the tenor of my words. He stepped back a little, smirking, and let me see that he was indeed upstanding. My knees weakened with an almost instinctive desire to fall to that stiff member. I did not have the chance. As I groaned with appreciation, staring at his cock, it spurted, a young man’s eager seed released on admiration alone, as he laughed at his own foolishness and at the expression upon my face as his thick cream splattered upon my shirt.
OUR COATS covered us enough to emerge from the tent. Our wry, private smiles went unnoticed in the general organized chaos that always accompanied an army. We found our horses and mounted. I remembered thinking how bright the land looked, how pretty this Saxefalia was, and how intense the winter colors were.
If I had not known that I was in love with Aleksey before this moment, I would have known it then. Once more I experienced that strange intensifying of light around him, as if the sun paused in its orbit to shine on him alone. When he turned his head to me and told me gleefully that he wanted to ride and ride and never stop until he was as one with the wind, to me it appeared as if he moved slower than the rest of the world, as if his smile took an age to fade.
We rode in a sense of heightened awareness of all things that set nerves afire and hearts racing. How someone did not realize what was now between us, I do not know. I could not look at him without smiling and finding some excuse to touch him: a binding requiring fixing, perhaps his coat adjusting. He, likewise, did not ride behind me as a servant might, but by my side, and he ensured our horses were crowded on the path, his thighs constantly brushing mine. And his eyes—so much for casting them down meekly that day. They were alive with delight. They were the greenest things under the whole of God’s sky, for the frost whitened his rival that day. I wanted to tell him to be more circumspect but could not. The starving man was happily swallowing every morsel offered him and had no intention of fasting ever again.
CHAPTER 19
ALEKSEY ALMOST gave us away that day. I finally remonstrated with him that he should not be giving me such looks, but he only laughed and continued glancing at me, considering me, thinking about me. I looked around, dismayed. “These things must remain discreet between men, Aleksey, as you are very well aware. Stop it, or they will suspect.”
“They will only think that, as my master, you have maybe given me a… raise.” He laughed at his own wit. “Which you have.”
“That is enough. Keep the skill of your tongue for things more intimate. Remember, I have lain with the most skilled of men: warriors. I would that you display the same skill later.”
That shut him up, as I had intended. He sulked for a while, then said disingenuously, “I think you will have to be my master for real in this, Niko. You will have to teach me, for I am entirely unknowing of such things.”
What man could hear such a declaration from a beautiful young man alongside him and stay unmoved? I certainly could not. I was completely undone by the picture it awoke in my mind: us lying together, me teaching him the things I wished him to know and do…. I coughed, swung my horse around, and told him I was going to scout the line for ideas for a diversion. He was still laughing at his own cleverness as I rode away. I determined never to underestimate Aleksey again in our personal affairs.
I found what I was to use as my diversion very easily by dint of smelling it and sliding sick from my horse and vomiting onto the frosty earth. I startled some of the wagoners, I think, but I could not explain to them why the smell of whale oil made me so. There were barrels of it, used for lighting the lamps, and it was exactly what I needed.
I RECONNECTED again with Aleksey after some considerable searching. As we’d agreed earlier, he had befriended the small contingent of guards assigned to the command tent and the tents of the senior officers. It had occurred to us that if they became familiar with him, then his presence around the tent, should it be discovered, might be explained away as an aberration, rather than a deliberate ploy. He had taken them some bread and beer and was sitting up on their wagon, sharing this small feast, his horse tied to the rear. It must have driven him wild to be so close to the very maps and plans he wanted to read, but they were securely packed in boxes in the bed of the wagon, and he would have to wait until the night.
I chastised him as a master would a servant for being so lazy and greedy and demanded that he accompany me on my rounds of the lines to check for sickness or injury. He scrambled down, returning the ribald comments of the guards, and slid up onto his horse. Any observant officer might have noted that this doctor’s servant rode a superb warhorse, but I had already determined to explain, if questioned, that we had manage to liberate her from the bandits who had stolen our supplies.
We rode off a little way together to talk privately. I told him of my discovery of the barrels of oil, and he thought my plan to set them alight a good one. He watched my face closely and eventually asked, “What is wrong, Niko? You do not look good.”
I dismissed his concerns, saying merely that the smell was very strong and that anyone would find it so. He nodded sadly and laid a hand on my leg. “I would find those men, Nikolai, and they would suffer more punishment in this life than they will surely find in the next.”
I patted his hand. “Aleksey, they already have. They are all dead. Now we must continue our fiction of doctor and servant until dark. C
ome, I believe there is a man with anal fissures awaiting my attention.” I repressed my smirk. Poor boy. He was very, very enjoyable to toy with.
I stayed out of the officers’ tent that night at dinnertime. I did not feel that our deception would hold out much longer, and I did not want to be questioned too closely on my journey to Saxefalia. Our plan was relatively simple: I would set a fire with the oil; Aleksey would run to the tent and tell the guards that the whole camp was threatened, employing usefully, for once, his theatrical abilities. When they left, he would slip into the tent, find the information he needed, and join me waiting with the horses.
What could go wrong?
First, I could not get the oil to light. I had thought that creating a spark against the open top of a barrel would cause it all to flare up. I was expecting a huge flame and was blinking, holding back, wincing, but… nothing. It would not light. I only had a few moments before someone would come along. I thought wick and cursed myself for being so stupid. I stuffed a strip of my shirt into the barrel, soaked it, and that lit easily. I trailed it over the rim of the barrel and ran for it.
I expected a whoosh and a flare of flame. I did not reckon on the oil being stored near to the tent in which the gunpowder was boxed.
The first I knew of my success was discovering the ground was hard as I hit it face-first.
A huge fist of air had thumped me into the mud, silent until an almighty whump made me cry out and, too late, cover my ears. My whole head ringing, I turned fearfully to see a white-hot flame and sparks rising high into the air. I could see worse too. I had known what was about to happen and had been running for shelter. I had not paid the enemy the same courtesy.
Burning men rolled on the ground.
No one had the sense to grab canvas and wrap them tightly, which would have saved many lives. It wasn’t my job to help them.
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