The Crimson Outlaw

by Alex Beecroft

  His fingers skittered over that damnable belt. Four buckles down the front of it and he didn’t have the patience to undo one. He squirmed closer. Obligingly, both of Mihai’s hands curved around his buttocks and lifted him off his feet, sitting him down on that hard bent leg. Vali gave a sharp sound of bliss, recalled himself, tried to be silent, clamping one hand around his own mouth as he rocked forwards and pressed his aching prick into the man’s hipbone, his balls massaged by his own weight as he arched into Mihai’s lap.

  With his free hand, he reached down and tugged the top of Mihai’s trousers out from under the belt so he could get his hand beneath them and slide it over the weeping head of a prick that . . . God, it was huge like the rest of him. It would hurt going in. And at that thought, he pulled one of Mihai’s hands away from his arse, encouraged it to curve around his throat and press.

  “Ah!” The bolt of sensation opened him up from his balls to his mouth. He wanted more, harder, to be filled and consumed by it. He wanted skin and . . .

  As he rocked against Mihai, his thrusts never quite enough, growing faster and more desperate, he leaned up. Mihai was biting his own lip, his eyes closed, his hips driving his prick into Vali’s hand in angry little jerks. He startled back almost in fright when Vali kissed him and their eyes met. In a flash of understanding, Vali watched Mihai’s expression deepen and soften, as though he had expected no intimacy from this and Vali’s trust had taken him aback. The moment hung, undecided, until Vali kissed him again, more carefully, licking along the tender, hot line where Mihai had bitten.

  A beat of hesitation and then Mihai’s mouth opened beneath his and Vali took possession, licking in. Something sweeter settled into the hard, no-nonsense rhythm of their rutting. Mihai groaned into his mouth as if he were in pain, and a moment later he spent all over Vali’s hand. Vali thought his fingers were drunk on it. The reeling, heady bliss, and the knowledge that he had taken this strong man apart with nothing more than the palm of his hand, made him come in a rush that felt like triumph.

  It had been better than his dreams.

  He hung, panting and limp, moulded to Mihai’s side, his face pressed to Mihai’s neck. The scent of the man was terribly familiar for some reason. As if they had known one another before this, had only just found their way back to each other. Long before Vali wanted to move, Mihai was jostling him, offering him a handkerchief from his coat pocket. “Wipe it off before it sets.”

  Vali laughed—“Good point”—and did so, chuckling as Mihai set him down on his feet, the big hands tugging his clothes straight almost tenderly.

  Mihai’s expression was doubtful now, and curious. “You’re not what I was expecting. I—”

  And then the noise Vali had been hearing, on and off for the last little while—the noise he had mistaken for distant cowbells—finally came clear enough to identify. Hooves at a canter. The shrill jangle of horse harnesses.

  A distant rider shouted something. Vali couldn’t catch the words, but he knew the voice. It tore out every last glow in him and replaced Mihai’s warmth with cold, barbed hooks. “Father!”

  Something was wrong with the sky to the north. Above the houses of the village, it had gone brown. It lightened even as he watched, with a boiling of white smoke and a frantic spiralling of glowing red sparks.

  “Father wouldn’t . . .” Vali fought for a way to see this that did not add up to his father riding into a peaceful village and putting it to the torch. But that was when the screams began. Hooves, louder and crisper now. The unmistakable rush of hooves and the wet thud of a lance piercing an unarmoured chest. “He wouldn’t!”

  Vali could see nothing more than that telltale stain on the sky, for the bulk of the building was between him and the village. But he seemed to be the only one still trapped in disbelief. Already the gypsies—with their instruments cradled like babies against their chests—had slipped out of the back door onto the colonnade. Jumping silently over the balcony wall, they made the short sprint across the fields and into the woods. Other villagers were choking the door as they pressed to do the same, their faces grim but not at all surprised.

  “You need not pretend my son isn’t here.” His father’s voice rang out, cold as a steel bell, from the other side of the hall. The tone was as emotionless as his face had been during the beating—an aspect of his father Vali wished he could forget. “We already found his horse in your village. Bring him to me at once, before I grow truly angry.”

  “As you see, he would.” Mihai didn’t sound as if any of this was unexpected. The only one shocked and outraged by his father’s actions seemed to be Vali.

  “Then let me out, and I’ll go to him.” Vali pushed forwards to try to get round Mihai as Mihai moved to block him.

  “You want to?” The words were slow, unsure. Mihai was deliberating something.

  But Vali had no idea what. Why should Mihai expect him to do anything other than give himself up for the sake of a people who had been kind to him? What did the man think he was? “Of course I don’t!” he exclaimed. “But nor do I want to stand here and watch good people suffer because Father doesn’t know how to do anything other than order and take!”

  The truth was that Vali was terrified to go back. Which only meant he had to do it at once, before he lost his courage. He pushed at Mihai’s chest with both hands, trying to manhandle him away so that he could squeeze past and run out to his father’s men before anyone else got hurt. It was as much use as trying to shove aside the hall with his mind. Mihai braced himself and was immovable.

  A woman screamed. Ilie’s wife? The girl he had danced with? “Damn you! Let me out. Let me out! We can at least fight.” Vali half drew his sword. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mihai. Please, stand aside. I can save them by giving him what he wants.”

  Mihai’s train of thought must have come to a very definite conclusion, for he stooped and sprang like a bear. One hand clamped around Vali’s belt, the other around his collar. He lifted Vali horizontally off the floor and threw him in one toss over the balcony, the unexpectedness of the action shocking the wits out of Vali. If he had been fast enough, he could have scrambled up then, run out to the dancing square where his pursuers waited . . . But he wasn’t, and Mihai had jumped down, landing on his feet, and got hold of him again before he could move, dragging him like a deer carcass off towards the woods.

  “I must help! Let me go!” The strength that had seemed so glorious only moments ago felt like a curse now that it wasn’t doing what Vali wanted it to do. Vali hung from Mihai’s hands face down, trying to get purchase enough on the ground to stand up straight, put up a fight. Dragged at speed across saw-like furrows, he could never quite catch up. He batted futilely behind him but couldn’t make any blow count.

  “Yes, we must help,” Mihai conceded, when they had made it across the open land and into the woods, concealed from his father’s men by pitchy darkness. “But not at the cost of giving you up.”

  “Why not? What is it to you?”

  Mihai let him down to his feet, but kept a firm grip on his belt. He seemed to be feeling up the trees all around him. His questing fingers must have found something—a distinctive knot? A woodsman’s mark? “Ah. This way.” And he led them both up an incline of stone. “Go in here.”

  Vali couldn’t see a “here,” so Mihai came behind him and with arms clamped about Vali’s arms guided his hands to the doorway of a small structure. Doorway was overstating it—the structure seemed to be the world’s worst-maintained charcoal burner’s shack. He could feel how the walls had sagged in all around. There wasn’t space inside for him, let alone a giant like Mihai.

  Then he was pushed forwards and the ground fell out from beneath his feet. He slid down shingly soil laced with flint, and his groping hands found a tunnel like that of a giant worm, round and sandy and damp. Mihai came down behind him, stood fiddling with what must have been a trapdoor above. Curious, Vali stood up and touched it before it could be slipped back into place. Yes, a lit
tle platform of woven wattle through which he could feel a mulch of soil and leaves. A searcher, even in the daytime, might look inside the ruined hut for a fugitive, but he would find only an empty space and a floor of forest debris, no trace of the tunnel beneath.

  This was no impromptu hiding spot then.

  “Just carry on down the tunnel.” Mihai nudged him in the back. “We’ll get you a disguise, and a weapon less recognisable than that sword. Then we can return.”

  “There won’t be anyone left alive by then.”

  Vali’s hands, grazing along the tunnel’s sides, suddenly met only emptiness. He stopped where he was, and after a while there came a glow of tinder behind him as Mihai pressed an ember of fire to the wick of a tallow candle. The brownish, sputtering flame was enough to show Vali a globe-like room apparently hollowed out beneath the roots of a mighty tree. The packed earth walls had been decorated with red clay handprints. A pile of sheepskins lay in a corner, and in another there reclined a deadly potpourri of blades.

  Mihai set the candle in a hollow beneath a soot-stained root and passed Vali a sheepskin jacket from which half of the hair had been worn away. “Take off your coat—it’s too rich for any man but a boyar’s son. Here—here’s a hat. Your diamonds are distinctive. And put this on.”

  “This” was a devil’s mask, such as was worn in the Easter dances, a great toothy hairy thing with horns and green tile circles around its beady eyes. Its sickle of a smile made everything click in Vali’s mind. The bolt-hole, the weapons, the respect with which Mihai had been treated in the village.

  “You’re a bandit.”

  “Hmm.” Mihai paused with his own mask in his hands and smiled down on Vali, amused. “It took you this long?”

  As he moved, the light of the candle caught in the backs of his eyes, and Vali, appalled, felt the whole world hitch to a stop. For he recognised those golden circles, the ursine shape of the man. Why hadn’t he thought? “You’re that bandit. You’re the one who attacked me and lamed my horse!” How could he not have realized?

  “I truly thought you knew that already.” Mihai’s grin spread to rival that of the devil in his hands. “So when you let me fuck you, you didn’t know?”

  Vali drew his sword. “Laugh and I’ll cut your tongue out.” He half wanted to anyway, feeling soiled and betrayed. It made him squeak again, this time with anger. “So that’s why I’m here? Why you wouldn’t let me give myself up. Because you wanted me as a hostage all along.”

  The grin disappeared. Mihai didn’t seem in the slightest bit tempted to laugh now. “A moment ago you were full of desperation to help the villagers. What happened to that? Do you really think this is the time? The longer we argue, the less there will be to go back to.”

  Vali tied his mask around his head and jammed a greasy astrakhan hat on behind it. “But we talk after. You owe me that.”

  Mihai scoffed, and tossed him a notched sabre to replace his own, wrapping up the rest of his armoury in a sack and strapping it to his back. “I owe you nothing at all. But I’ll give you that—for the kiss.”

  A second tunnel led out of the root room. They extinguished the candle and followed it, Vali losing all sense of direction as it curved. Longer than the first, it sloped down towards the village and then abruptly, swiftly up. Mihai’s guiding hands knocked against something hollow. He braced himself and pushed, and with a grating sound, a slab of stone over the tunnel mouth shifted. Moonlight and fresh air sifted down into the narrow, wood-lined pit in which they stood.

  “All clear.”

  Mihai scrambled out with the ease of a man leaving his own front door, but Vali choked a little when he looked back and found he had climbed out of a grave within the high defensive walls of the graveyard of Bucin’s fortress church.

  The priest met them as they hurried from the graveyard through the storerooms, heading for a way out. He was a small, stooped man, with the Saxon pale hair and eyes. A dusty sort of nervous man who would not stop twisting the ends of his white beard around his fingers. “Mihai, my son, I’m glad to see you alive and free. And is this him?”

  “I am Vali Florescu, Boyar Wadim’s son. I . . .” It seemed every bit as childish as Mihai had implied, when he said it out loud. “I was running away from him. I’m sorry to have brought this trouble upon you.”

  “Father Petru Lupu,” the priest replied automatically. He recalled himself to offer some absentminded comfort: “Yours is not the hand on the lance.” Then turned back to Mihai as the more important man. “Most of the people are inside the church walls, but Dimitrie’s boys and some of the other young bloods are fighting back.”

  “I’ll stop them.”

  They had reached the postern door and Father Petru was pulling back the bolts when a woman with no head scarf, her hair unbound like a maenad’s, threw herself at Mihai’s feet and clutched his knees. “Maria wasn’t in bed when I went to fetch her. I hoped she had come ahead here, but she’s not. I think she went to the hall. I think she must have been inside when . . . Mihai, please, if you can find her . . .”

  “I will.” Mihai looked down on her with concern, and Vali thought again that he acted more like a boyar than like a criminal. More like a man whose job it was to protect the simple folk, not to rob them. Certainly more like a chivalric knight than Vali’s father seemed at this moment.

  Father Petru opened the door. They slipped through and heard it rattle itself secure behind them, and Vali would have stopped dead if Mihai had not pulled him along again, for even from here he could see the hall was ablaze, its shingle roof roaring up in sheets of green-tinged flame.

  Bent double, they ran for the dancing square, where dark shadows were flitting out of cover, hurling something at the figures of men on horseback, dashing back to cover.

  “Idiots,” Mihai grunted as they hunkered down to observe from the shadow of the well, the bucket under its tilted roof snugged up tight for the night against its pulley. Vali could see what he meant—the village youths were behaving like drunken lads everywhere, throwing mud and stones, bellowing and reeling in self-righteous pride. The viteji—it was evident on their well-known faces—were unhappy about mowing down this disorganised, unthreatening mob of nobodies, but they were also beginning to feel that the villagers deserved a good lesson on how to treat their betters. They were gathering themselves, forming up.

  “They mean to charge.”

  “Yes,” Mihai agreed, and ran straight out into the pack of drunken boys. Swatting them with the flat of his sword, he roared, “Get your scythe. Adam, Danut, get your scythes. You can’t fight lances with mud!”

  The immediate effect of this order was that all the boys scattered, ran off in different directions. It left Mihai standing on his own in the centre of the square with five of Wadim’s best horsemen examining him as if to gauge exactly how much effort it would take to bring him down.

  “Mihai!” Vali forgot all his grudges and took a step towards him. But a movement inside the village hall caught his eye. The flame had eaten holes in the shutters through which he could see something moving strangely behind them, weaving from side to side, hurling itself against the bolted wooden frames as if frantically trying to escape.

  Dragomir was the name of the retainer who put the first lance in its rest and, galloping forwards, drove the steel point at Mihai’s heart. Mihai slapped it aside and cut the throat of Dragomir’s horse as he passed. But in doing so, he turned his back towards Eugen. Crafty Eugen. who was already at full tilt.

  The point caught Mihai under the shoulder blade, lifted him off his feet. The speed drove a foot and a half of ash shaft into his body before Eugen could not hold up the weight any longer and let go. Mihai fell so hard he broke the lance under him, and he did not get up.

  But Vali had seen something worse. The thing twisting in agony behind the windows of the hall was the missing child, Maria, altogether ablaze. He hammered the lock of the shutters with his sword hilt until it shattered and she tumbled out, screaming, o
ne great candle of a child.

  He yanked the sheepskin coat from his arms, wrapped it firm around her, picked her up, and—praying the shock wouldn’t kill her—dropped her straight down the well. Pausing only to grab the rope neatly coiled beside the bucket, he jumped after. And oh God. Oh, God it was so cold it was as though a lance had gone through his own heart, don’t think of that, but the little splashes and the whimpers said the child was alive and swimming.

  Fumbling, because his hands were numb already and this dark was the profoundest yet, he managed to get a loop of the rope around her chest beneath her arms. She clung to him, breathing like one who was afraid to cry out loud—so fast they learned these skills. He didn’t have to say, Shhh. Don’t say a word or the bad men will get us. She knew it already, better than he.

  Above, outlined by the rusty sky, a dot as small as the head of a pin peered over the lip of the well. Vali breathed quietly, the girl hardly at all, as they waited helplessly to find out if they had been seen. Beyond their sight, someone said, “I saw him jump. I know he’s down here.”

  “It wasn’t our Vali, though?” The pinhead belonged to Grigore. His voice gave Vali an indescribable twist of homesickness and betrayal, made him want to shout out for help, to demand that someone help Mihai, if it wasn’t already too late.

  I said don’t think about it!

  He held tight to the rope, and the child, and kept silent.

  “It wasn’t. A big, shaggy type—a shepherd maybe.”

  “Not worth going down for, then. A ducking may cool his hot head.”

  Grigore walked out of sight. Vali barely had time for a moment of relief before he felt the rope shudder and kick, trembling as the unseen viteji handled it.